Before the Fall

by Orna Ross

  What do you think, Molly?

  I'm glad to hear conditions are not too bad for you there in Kilmainham. It must be hard to be locked up, even with the company of the other girls. It's very quiet around here without yourself and Norah. I'm in danger of going loo-lah, I sometimes think, from being too much on my own.

  Not that I should complain, Molly. I do know, of course, that it's much worse for you, locked away without trial, indefinitely. I'm not really comparing. Don't mind me.

  The children in school are a great comfort. When I have doubts, I look to their little faces, and think about their future, and know we work so they may grow up in a new Ireland. An Ireland no longer enslaved.

  God bless their innocence. It has saved me more than once in these dark days.

  And God bless you, my friend, and may He soon bring about your release.

  Yours truly,

  Peg

  * * *

  Dear Norah,

  This is the letter I wish I was sending, instead of the one I just wrote to Molly that's sitting there on the table before me, all stamped and ready for the post.

  I am so tired, Norah, and I'm so lonely.

  There. I've said it. I needed to say it. I miss Molly, yes, and all the others imprisoned. And Lama I can't think of without a hole opening in my heart. But it's nothing to how much I miss Barney and you and — yes, let me write this also, for I can, as I'll not be sending this anywhere but the back of my diary — I miss your brother too.

  More than anything, how things used to be between us all.

  If you were here, Norah, I could talk to you about all this, instead of the half-truths and platitudes I have to feed Molly and Mammy and everyone else. I would tell you how a decade has settled on my father's poor shoulders and bewilderment taken over his eyes.

  We could discuss how Mammy squashes any scruples and won't hear of any uncertainty or doubt, and how that can't be good for her, not with her facing her Maker any one of these days.

  I'd tell you how each of us in this house lives with the fragility in the other two, making us over-careful of one another — and so separate in our sorrow.

  If you were here, Norah, I wouldn't constantly be thrown back on — of all people — Tipsy Delaney, the only one, besides myself, left alive and not imprisoned. He comes down to the shop most evenings now and we always end up talking about the old days, before the split, when we were all together, fighting the English. How simple it seemed then, how happy we were. It was only months ago, yet so far from us, it might as well be decades.

  Tipsy and I sound ancient when we get going, harking back, back, back, like exiles in America, lamenting all the fine things we've lost, things we took for granted when we had them.

  If you were here, I'd tell you how sometimes I am sickened by our own side's attitudinising. How I'm tormented by all the opposing opinions I carry inside me, fighting against each other.

  The latest I heard is that four Stater officers are to be shot dead as a reprisal for the executions in Wexford Jail. Is this right or wrong? Or is there some other category for an event like this?

  There was a time you could take a question like that to Mass or to your priest, but the church is a disgrace now, the way it has turned against us to side with the "Free State".

  Tipsy says I should stop looking for answers, get used to living inside a question-mark. It was a strange thing to say, but the things he says sometimes make a strange kind of sense. It's funny, we all think Tipsy such a fool, yet he's the only one of us to have come out of this business intact.

  He was on the run with the boys in the best days, when the people were still with us and, somehow, without letting anyone down, he seemed to miss out on the most troubling actions, like the Donore raid that still has me waking up in sweats.

  Oh, Norah, I'll never forget that bomb dropping in a big, slow arc off Donore Bridge, landing in that lorry and blasting those four soldiers out of this life. Over and again it plays out in my mind, especially when I'm in bed. The sight of it falling from Barney's hands, dropping down and bursting into blast on contact. Then that soldier, who was somehow thrown clear, getting up and trying to run, and Barney and the boys finishing him off from the bridge.

  I find myself sometimes with my eyes squeezed closed and my hands over my ears. How stupid, when it's inside myself that the sight and the sounds are sealed.

  Tipsy has no such guilt on his conscience. And somehow he's escaped jail too. He just wandered back home when the going got rough and took back up the work on the little farm where he lives with his mother. The soldiers don't ever bother them, while we're persecuted, not able to turn around without them bursting in and pulling the place apart, with no regard for the illness in this house, or our bereavement. Worse than savages, all humanity absent.

  Here's something else I'd have to tell you, Norah. Two nights ago, in reprisal for Dan's involvement with the executions, our boys went up to your house, and ordered out your parents and the children, and sprinkled your house with petrol, setting it alight. When I heard of the planned action, I didn't know what side I was on.

  Of course, I was right glad when prompt action by a neighbour saved the house, with only slight damage to the front parlour. And nobody was hurt. Nobody was ever going to be hurt; that wasn't the intention. They were ordered out. The intention was to send a message, loud and clear, to your brother.

  What side would you have been on, Norah? It was your house, your people, but you'd grown so far from them in the freedom fright, or you'd seemed to. Only Dan said otherwise. Did you really tell him you wanted nothing more to do with our family? I could understand, Norah, given all that happened, if you did — but did you? Did you?

  If you were here, I'd get some answers to these questions that plague me night and day. We would sort it, I know, complicated as it is, if we were only one in front of the other. You wouldn't blunder in on top of me, trying to flatten my opinions with yours. We might differ but you'd be reasonable. We'd fathom it out.

  I thank you now, as I should have before, for all the times we were able to do that together, Norah. I never knew what a precious thing it was until it was taken from me.

  I miss you for it. And I thank you for it. That is what I'd so like to say to you, if I only knew where you were.

  1981

  I'm told there are those whose lives exceed their expectations. Is this really true? For me, imagining and anticipation are always the high point of any experience. So it was here, now. London life had not turned out as I imagined at the age of eighteen.

  In my early days here, I used to wander about the city on my days off, looking at the pigeons strutting about on their wine-coloured legs, wondering where they'd flown in from, admiring their sense of ownership. Two years on I seldom go into the centre where the pigeons gather and, if I do, I almost always find myself staring into the river, twelve times the width of the Liffey, but the same murky colour. The same as all city rivers, carrying so many centuries of human debris that they become unable to reflect the sky.

  My home in London is near Brent Cross, in a dark and dank basement flat in a dark, dank and indefinable suburb. Its single opaque window faces the garden above, tinging the light -— such as it is — green. Mrs Fairbairn, my landlady, resents her dependence on paying tenants and, aside from visiting us once a week for her money, does her best to pretend we're not here.

  I cannot ignore her in return as her dog, Bruno, thumps his tail on my ceiling all through the hours that I am here.

  But I am not often here. By day, I work in Montgomery's of Hillingdon, a huge paper products distributor. I am the voice at the end of a phone-line, the person the customers get to shout at when their serviettes, kitchen towels or toilet rolls don't arrive on time, or are the wrong size, or the wrong colour. I take the insults that spill into my ear, the accusations of our company's incompetence, and hand the customers polite apologies in return.

  If you cared about the bad and hoped for the best, you couldn't
do my job, but it's easy for me. I expect the planning department or distribution to bungle, although I always pretend to be surprised. I despise them for caring so much. It's only toilet rolls, I want to say.

  They'll be with you tomorrow, I think, as I'm offering the formulaic words that muffle true thoughts: "I'm so sorry. Yes, I understand. Let me see what I can do for you." Or the next day. Or next week. Who cares?

  I'm dead to everything in that office, except the clock circling its hands, slowly, slowly, round the minutes. Morning break, then lunch, then afternoon break and, finally, half-past five when I can cover my typewriter, lock my desk drawer and walk out of the office, out of the building, out though the gate, to a few hours of life.

  Evening life. Real life. It usually begins in the Rose and Crown, with some of my new friends, Mark and Sandra or Joe and Frank, Sadie and Melo or Anita, Kim and Natalie, snuggling into soft seats where we'll light up our insides with alcohol, as darkness begins to press in against the windows. All you need to join the group is a willingness to laugh, to tease each other and belittle our bosses.

  Or at least that's where we begin. By end of the night, the mood has usually shifted, changed by some secret that's come surfing out on the alcohol. Sandra crying about how she always wanted children and now it's too late. Frank confessing to a bullying father. Natalie talking about the stresses of a Down's syndrome brother.

  I share too, but nothing too heavy. When I'm asked why I came here, I talk about unemployment in Ireland, the need for work. I can no more say the A word after doing the deed than I could before. No, I tell them about the convent and the village and other things that are ordinary in Ireland but exotic to them. Nobody realises I'm only handing over the bits that don't matter.

  On weekend nights, we follow our drinking bouts with a nightclub, an Eden of wet kisses and grinding hips. I meet men there, lots of them. No one like Rory, but I know now that Rory was not what I thought. He hasn't come, he hasn't even written. And now I know he won't.

  So I go with others, expecting nothing of the encounter but desire. Their desire, not mine. Admiration is what I am after, and I collect it from any source, even from those who are too eager. That's the way I prefer to keep them, keen and slightly beneath me, taking what they offer, flitting on to the next.

  The key to it all is vodka, clicking me open and surprising me with what pops out. I wait for the moment of intoxication when the sober world gets shrugged off like a dull outfit and resplendent me emerges, arrayed in flashes and sparkles. It usually comes halfway through my fourth drink, sometimes earlier. For a while, then, the whole world seems contained in whatever warm and noisy place we are in and I am suffused with love — there is no other word — for my drinking friends and myself.

  It never lasts. Soon it slides into confusion and dejection and sometimes, if I've had too much to drink too many nights in a row, I can miss it altogether, go directly from self-consciousness to self-pity without any exuberance in between. Yet that perfect interval is the promise that alcohol always seems to hold out. That's what I drink for.

  That, and the licence it gives me to be bad. Whenever I start to sing or shout or flirt or laugh too loud, Natalie teases me: "So you are Irish, after all." As if they ever thought of me as anything else. One of the guys in the office even calls me that. "Hey Oirish!" he says, by way of hello.

  Even my own name is different here. Jo Deveroh, I am called now, the "x" that Wexford people always sound made silent. "Dever-ex?" my friends hooted, when I first introduced myself. "Dever-ex! Ha-ha-ha."

  I have learned to say it their way.

  I am the outsider in London, so my ways are not just different, they are wrong, and in nothing more than this: my way of speaking. I have never been talkative but now, when sober, I speak only when I must. I slow my sentences, enunciate more clearly, skip around the snare of the English "th", a sound that unsettles the swing of my own words in my own mouth. I swallow Irish jokes, though I know they arise from the very ignorance they mock.

  Every immigrant is awkward as they grapple with new ways, but the English don't think of us as immigrants, or Ireland as another country. They label our lack of fluency, our way with their language, as stupidity. Few of them know, or care, about the history that rammed their language into our ancestors, a language so foreign to us that — two whole centuries on — the rhythm of a sentence on an Irish tongue still makes an English "th" impossible.

  To them, we're not different enough to be alien; we're just inferior versions of them. And of course there's part of me that agrees.

  Most, but not all. Kathleen in marketing, who also happens to be the best looking girl in Montgomery's, chooses to have an Irish passport. Not just because it's cheaper, she tells me. Though born and bred in Bolton, she spent every childhood summer with her grandparents in Donegal. "I feel Irish," she says, her hand to her chest, her eyes shiny, almost damp. And I smile, disarmed.

  Sometimes, on the tube or the bus or walking down the street, my ear will pick up on soft, hissy 't's at the end of words, or the thudding 'th's at the start and I'll turn and talk to these strangers, about what part of Ireland each of us is from, and how long we've each been over, and whether we'd like to go back. There seem to be only two variations — either they yearn to return or, like me, they'd never even consider it.

  Exiles or escapees.

  Coincidences crop up often with these strangers — shared times or places or acquaintances. I laugh at Londoners who expect me to know everyone from home, but now I find myself doing the same. Ireland seems very small from here.

  * * *

  Dear Jo,

  I got your address and telephone number from Deirdre Mernagh. Don't be cross — I bullied it out of her by telling her there was a crisis at home (there isn't). I was going to ring, but I thought it might be better to write first.

  I hope you're keeping well. Deirdre tells me things have worked out for you over there. That's good anyway, although it's a pity about your degree. I heard a bit about what went on the night you left, but I don't really understand. Mammy is very upset about it all, but I suppose you know that. Don't worry, I'm not taking sides.

  It's just that she'd love to hear from you. We all would. Maybe you might think about coming home at Christmas? Whatever happened, it shouldn't be allowed to drag on.

  Granny Peg is not that well. She took a bit of a turn a few weeks ago and has been told she has a heart condition. She's on tablets now and is supposed to give up the fags, but you know yourself.

  Mammy is well and Auntie Norah is the same, no change.

  I am still working at the school in Terenure where I did my teacher training. I teach fifth class this year, they're a nice bunch so I'm having a fairly easy time of it. Also, I have met a nice fella. He's called Donal and he's an accountant. I've been going with him for six months and I suppose you could say it's getting serious. He goes to England a lot on business so you never know, I might go with him sometime and meet up with you.

  Well, that's it for now, Jo. Don't lose touch altogether, you hear?

  I'll give you a ring in a while.

  Mind yourself.

  Love,

  Maeve

  * * *

  One late November evening, I return to our table in the Rose and Crown and know, from the unnatural way my friends are talking as I sit down, that the subject has been changed. They'd been discussing me.

  Natalie tells me it wasn't me they were talking about but "the bombs."

  The IRA explosions that have been going off all over England, the most recent — the third this year — killing twenty-one people and injuring hundreds in Birmingham.

  London and Guildford have also suffered. The Guildford bomb went off in a pub too, and that's what my friends had been considering while I was in the Ladies. Imagining what it must have been like for those people. Wondering how we'd react, if one exploded there and then in our pub.

  A conversation they felt they couldn't have in front of me.

/>   Northern Ireland. The residue of England's centuries-old "Irish problem", the quandary that leaves the everyday English person squinting, helplessly, into inexplicable darkness. The Fighting Irish. Irrational, truculent, violent, doomed by fanatical sectarianism, who could be expected to understand them?

  Who can make them see reason?

  This is how my English friends play it, but they're not truly convinced. They know their country is not blameless, but they feel defensive. What has it to do with them? Ancient history. Can we please let bygones be and move on?

  I don't explain to Natalie how it is not as bygone as we all wish it was. Instead, I spell out how I'm from Wexford, which is the other end of the country. How I have no sympathy with the IRA and no longer care whether Ireland unites or not. How I am glad to be here in London, even when I feel awkward and different, how it keeps me attentive, stretches me. How I'm not the same as the people of the huddling communities in Kilburn and Cricklewood, who came over in the 1950s and immediately set up their own mini-Irelands over here.

  She's not listening. They have put me in the Irish camp. Irish is what I am, whether I claim it or not.

  It's been months. Still nothing from Rory. I know now I have to drop the possibility that there ever will be.

  I am promoted in work. Customer Service Manager. Mr Green, my boss, tells me my prospects are excellent, if I play my cards right. Work hard, but more important, be seen to be keen. Take a class by night: the subject doesn't matter, the piece of paper is the thing. The higher-ups are on the lookout for career girls. "We have to improve our 'gender quota'," he says, holding the words out and away from him.