Before the Fall

by Orna Ross

  Whichever, don't be "chastened." Look deeply at what's happening and accept it, without letting it quash the spirit that makes you so venturesome.

  You are a big person, riding the big waves of a big life.

  Live on.

  * * *

  My postbag swells and Lauren is delighted. The publishers take note and, before long, the column is being syndicated to magazines in South Africa and Australia as well as the States, and in Britain, which also means Ireland. I even get occasional letters from there; their problems seem no different to anybody else's. Things are changing in Ireland, Maeve tells me over the phone, but when I ask how, she talks about jobs and money, bars and coffee-houses. Racing to jump aboard the globalisation express doesn't sound like much of a change to me –- still acquisitive, still conservative, still aping other, more "advanced" places –- but if life is easier for more people, I guess that's progress.

  A politician in Idaho denounces my column as filth. I wish Richard were here to help me enjoy the accolade.

  Then comes the day I'm standing in my hallway with the telephone in my hand, listening to Maeve tell me that Gran is dead. I stood at the end of the phone, the radio from the kitchen blaring through the open door into the hall, and asked all the right questions in a voice that didn't sound like mine. Maeve wanted me to go back for the funeral, tried hard to persuade me and a part of me very much wanted to be there, releasing the tides of my tears. But if I was going to go back for Gran, it would have been while she was still alive. We both would have preferred that.

  With her gone, I wasn't about to deliver myself up to Mrs D. — who hadn't even asked.

  Thirteen weeks later, another phone call. Auntie Norah this time. She couldn't live without Gran, Maeve says during this call. She willed herself to die.

  I hate, hate, hate the tone of Maeve's voice as she tells it. This time, I don't even think about going back.

  Sue Denim has all the answers, but she's no help to me. I don't even know what my question is.

  Richard would know how to make me believe in what I'm doing. I miss the way things were when he was here, when life was exuberant and I had flings and relationships and experiences that gave me pleasure. Pleasure.

  It doesn't sound like much — and I do remember sometimes feeling that I wanted more — but it seems like all a person needs, now it's gone.

  I used to have lovers; now I have pick-ups. I used to have fun; now I have alcohol. Everything I'm doing is bad for me, I know it. I've done it all before and I know where it leads, to where I swore I'd never go again, but I can't stop myself. I'm a vessel unmoored, with somebody else at the helm. The old me, perhaps? Or maybe somebody from further back, somebody who could have taught me how to navigate, but never did.

  1995

  "Donal drove me mad the whole time," says Maeve, recalling her visit to San Francisco. "I spent nearly every night after we'd gone to bed calming him down."

  "I knew he was a bit fazed by the scene, but I'd no idea he took it so bad."

  "Dreadful. He was even afraid to drink out of cups that Richard or Gary had used."

  I feel the skin on my face blaze up. I was right to never like him, I think.

  "I know, I know," she says. "But you have to remember the times. Afterwards, people came to understand a lot more about AIDS, but then...Well, he was hardly the only one, was he?"

  It is Richard's anniversary: six years ago today since he died. Six years. Where did they go? It's so hard not to think of them as wasted. All day, as I went about my business in Dublin, I've been dispirited, struggling against the suck of misery. None of the things that make this year different — writing, pregnancy, being in Ireland — were able to keep me buoyant today. The writing I have been so wedded to seems hollow and useless, a concoction of nothings. I'm getting fearful about the baby and about afterwards, of how we will be together. Together, alone.

  Rory still has not come or sent any word, and is unlikely to now.

  As for Ireland, the faction fighting goes on, the antagonism that seems more virulent here than anywhere else. Each day, the radio brings belligerent adversaries into Maeve's kitchen and, over breakfast, we listen to them slinging their tirades at each other over Northern Ireland. The IRA has declared a ceasefire, but the gesture is insufficient for the British government and Unionists. They are calling for all Republican guns and bombs to be destroyed before peace talks can begin.

  The IRA refuses. Irish Republicans have never handed over their armoury. Not in 1921, during The Truce with Britain. Not in 1923 after the Civil War, when weapons were dumped, not surrendered. And not now.

  The second talking point is the scandal of what has come to be called abuse, the slime under the rug of power. Beatings, humiliation, molestation and rape were, and are, endemic in Irish schools, seminaries and institutions — and in that other great Irish institution, the family, too. Every time I hear a priest or politician pontificating on the radio, I am reminded of why I fled this country. It is not that such things don't happen in other places, but the Irish version is too virulent for me.

  I have to tell Maeve so repeatedly. She keeps making suggestions about how good it would be for the baby to grow up with an aunt and cousin nearby; how raising a baby all alone is hard work; how, in a few years, Ria will be old enough to baby-sit...Tonight, such is my sense of frailty, that I almost feel I could be persuaded. Almost.

  It's her thoughts on Richard that have made me warm to her. I didn't realise until this evening how much she really liked him; she has so many memories of him from her visit to San Francisco, memories we never discussed before. Through dinner, we regaled Ria with some of the more repeatable stories and, since Ria went upstairs to bed, the two of us have been sitting together in front of the sitting-room fire, turning over memories. Maeve occupies the armchair, a whiskey and water in front of her; I recline on the sofa opposite, in the only position that is comfortable for me these days: half lying on a nestle of cushions, my belly protruding upwards like a hill.

  "You and Richard never had a thing?" she asks. "Or did you?"

  "God, no. You met him, didn't you?" Five minutes with Richard should be enough to locate him at the furthest, gayest end of the sexuality spectrum.

  "Mmmmm."

  "And what is that sceptical sound supposed to convey?"

  "I just find it hard to understand why his death flattened you so."

  "He was my friend, Maeve. Simple as that."

  "I mean, more than your own mother's! It's unusual, you have to admit."

  Oh, no...So long, soft, sisterly feelings. She shrugs her puzzlement and the gesture makes her neck and shoulder bones protrude. Her neck could be held in the grasp of one hand. I have pity for that neck. I also have the urge to choke it.

  So far, we have avoided conflict. In the morning, after she and Ria leave for school, I get up and go into the centre to write. I go to the Winding Stair, a rickety old bookshop café on the north bank of The Liffey. Each of its wide windows has its window box of valiant flowers fighting the traffic fumes gasped up from below. There I write, looking down at the floods of shoppers rising and falling over The Liffey's Ha'penny Bridge, under high, complicated Irish skies.

  It's a good view of Dublin — almost soothing. I write well there, which is why I take the trouble to travel in each morning, even though this house of Maeve's lies empty all day. I tried writing here, just once, up in the bedroom, but Maeve's years with Donal were in the air, and all those years when I was out of the country clustered in the silence.

  Sometimes I return to my hotel room. I like knowing it is there, available to me. I've managed to spend the occasional night there by inventing a friend, somebody I knew in college that I "meet" every so often and, when I do, I call Maeve to say that I am spending the night at her apartment. Then I go to my beige bolthole and breathe free for eight or ten or twelve hours, refreshed enough to return. Maeve suspects the truth, I think, but appreciates the lie.

  "Don't take this wrong,"
she says now, "but it strikes me that being so fixated on Richard allowed you to avoid something else."

  "Something else?"

  "A relationship of your own."

  "You've been seeing too much of that shrink of yours," I say, lightly.

  Maeve is attending a counsellor, to try to understand where she and Donal went wrong. Can she hear the menace under my airy tone? If she's not more careful, she will break our truce.

  I would like to say it straight to her, tell her that Richard gave me what I should have got from her and Mrs D.: unconditional love, as her therapist would no doubt call it.

  Richard's simple acceptance of me won him my undying devotion. Literally undying, staying with me even though he has gone. Maeve, who I suspect has never had a real friendship, still thinks romantic love is the best. That it has recently — and presumably for some years now — let her down, in no way diminishes her belief in it. Though Donal is now refusing to see her at all, asking her to drop Ria outside his apartment block for her custody visits without meeting him. Still, she nurtures hope that he will come back.

  And how can I despise this hope when I live with my own version of the same affliction? I want to be gentle with her, I really do, but she makes it so hard. If I can be careful of her, why can't she extend me the same favour? Why always this need of hers to make me face the hard questions? (Like: how small a thing was my devotion to Richard if I couldn't even be with him at his end?)

  I want to get up off the sofa and pace the room, but it would take a crane to lift me, so I confine myself to stretching out my swollen legs. The ankles are so puffy, an older, fatter woman's ankles, pooled with blood. New veins, like blue in a Stilton, have surfaced all over my legs. The skin of my abdomen is stretched to transparency: I never imagined skin could stretch so far.

  You are so big now that the discomfort is constant: heartburn arrives at regular intervals to sting my oesophagus. You ripple my belly with each movement you make. You too are cramped and uncomfortable. We both want out.

  But I am also dreading the labour. After years of suffering no worse physical pain than a small cut or bruise, I am scared.

  "It's time to get closure on it, I would have thought," Maeve says, still harping on Richard.

  When she starts on like this, I think that maybe I shouldn't be here, that we are not helping each other at all. We disagree on almost everything. Yesterday it was the North. All her patriotism is affixed to the Republic of Ireland. It stops at a border created by the British and she sees no irony in that.

  I take up that topic again because, though we differ on it, it will distract her from Richard. "I've been thinking about what you said yesterday, Maeve, about the North, and I wanted to ask you: do you not see what's going on in the North today as a continuation of Granny Peg's 'War of Independence'?"

  "Things were different then," she says. "The old IRA were men of honour."

  "All of them?" Has she not been reading the manuscript pages I've given her?

  "They killed and died for an ideal."

  "The ideal hasn't changed, has it? Isn't it the same struggle, the same methods? Just that a bomb kills more people than a gun?"

  "But..."

  "Don't get me wrong, it's not that I agree with that struggle. I personally think we'd have been better off growing up in an Ireland that had remained part of the UK."

  This statement swings things round. Maeve stops in the act of twisting her hair up into a clip, and stares at me with green eyes aghast, wearing the exact expression that Rory wore when I said the same to him. "You can't mean that?" she gasps.

  "Why not?"

  "You're being provocative. You don't mean it."

  "But I do. All the damage done by English colonisation was well done by the time of the so-called War of Independence. What the Irish did to themselves afterwards only made a bad thing worse."

  "I completely disagree with you. And why do you say 'so-called' War of Independence? That war did get us our independence."

  "Did it?" I ask, thinking of Granny Peg and Mrs D. And me and Rory. And think about those moments that I have felt more frequently this summer, when I found within myself a tranquillity below thought. When I realised that I am something more than a bundle of nationality, or gender, or sexuality, or any other kind of identity I want to throw into the basket called "me". Down in those depths, I am suddenly sure, is where true freedom resides.

  I am trying to formulate this insight into words that I can pass to my sister when the doorbell interrupts: Ding-dong, ding-dong.

  "Good God," Maeve says. "Who's that? At this hour of the night?"

  Ten fifteen. My stomach takes a small flip. The kind of time you'd arrive if you left Wexford at around seven thirty or eight o'clock. After coming home from work at six and having a conversation and packing a hasty suitcase...

  "Maybe I won't answer it," Maeve says. "You can't see the lights in here from the front."

  "I think you'd better," I say. "You never know."

  "I suppose." She gets slowly out of the big armchair, uncurling her legs from under her, giving a small grouchy stretch as she goes, leaving the door ajar. I hear her open the front door and the surprise in her greeting. She says a name, but I cannot catch it. I cannot hear her words, but her tone makes something in my stomach start to ferment.

  Then the other voice speaks, muffled, but a male voice. Definitely male.

  You give a strong kick. What do you know or sense?

  There's the door closing. More suppressed talk. A silence. Footsteps approaching across the tiled hallway. Two sets of footsteps. The door opening. I'm afraid to look up.

  "Jo?" Maeve's voice is tentative, a whisper.

  Her head is peeping round the door, her face flushed. "He's here, Jo."

  "He is?" I get up out of the chair. Blood swishes into my head, probably from standing up so fast. I forgive him, I realise as I wait for the black amoebas before my eyes to vanish. Whatever may lie ahead, I forgive him all. But why is Maeve keeping him out there? Is she afraid that I don't want to see him?

  "We'll be in the kitchen," she says.

  "Kitchen?"

  "Yeah. We need to talk. Obviously."

  I give my head a waggle. When I see her again I know what I should have known from the start. A memory rises: Mrs D. and Daddy, the day he came back home to us after leaving us for four years. Maeve is wearing the exact same expression on her face as our mother did back then. Hence, perhaps, the anger I feel, white and hard as bone.

  "Well, well," I say. "The prodigal returns." His words to me at Mrs D's funeral. "Why don't you bring him in here?" I manage to say, in a steady voice. "I was ready for bed anyway."

  She opens the door wider, flourishing him in.

  Ashamed of my pettiness, I jump on top of my anger, wrestle it down, and change the tone of my voice: "Welcome home, Donal."

  * * *

  Donal's return changes everything. Now, I am in the way. Maeve says this is nonsense, but I am. Neither of them want me here, knowing what I know, and I don't want to be here either, witnessing their travails. Things she has told me about him rankle.

  Also, I don't want to lose what she and I have so recently gained. Living together is straining our newly-won, tenuous bond.

  But she won't let me go. I was good enough to come when she needed me, now I must stay until the baby comes. It wouldn't be right for me to have to go into labour alone, in a hotel room. What about those pains I am having in the night?

  It is true that you have started to bear down inside me, that I am assailed by stabbing pains in strange new places, pains that sometimes stop me in my tracks. It is true that I am afraid to face into labour alone. It is close now, very close: a week to the due day. Even if I go over my time, it can be no further away than a fortnight.

  Can Maeve and I live in the same house for that long without a breach?

  Fingers crossed, I stay.

  1923

  Sergeant Brosnan gave Private O'Dwyer the nod to s
tart the car. A day and a half now they'd spent, questioning witnesses, and the only useful one so far was the bar girl from Ryan's of Rathmeelin, who, as far as he could make out, was the last person to see O'Donovan alive. He had taken a drink there around teatime and left, telling her that he had an appointment in Mucknamore at seven o'clock. At 7.14pm his watch stopped, presumably in the wet sands.

  Stuck in sinking sands waiting for the returning tide to take you: what a death. If he was lured, Kavanagh was right in saying it was one evil act.

  The car spluttered and coughed into its workaday rumble and they were pulling out onto the road when a man came lumbering up to them and started to wave his two arms like a windmill. He was poorly dressed, two strings of twine where the belt of his coat should be.

  "Stop the car!" he shouted and O'Dwyer did.

  "Yes?" Brosnan snapped.

  "I'm hearing that yez are investigating what went on here the night before last. Would that be so?"

  "If you mean the death of Lieutenant O'Donovan, then yes, that is so."

  "In that case, I've something of interest to yez."

  "Have you indeed?"

  "I have."

  He stood there, like a child waiting for a pat on the head.

  "Well? Go on."

  He looked around, over each shoulder. "I'm thinking it would be better if we went somewhere more private. I don't want to be handing it over in front of the entire village."

  "Handing what over?"

  The fellow tapped a finger to the side of his nose, looked about him again. The street was empty, the little windows appraising.

  "Sit into the car," Brosnan said. "If you must."

  "I don't know, sir. I don't think that would go down too well with some, to see me voluntarily climbing into this particular vehicle."

  Brosnan looked at O'Dwyer, who slid his eyes upwards. "Go on, so, be off with you."