Oona worried, ‘What is all that about a man on a bridge, Darcy? And that’s not a nice way to be carrying on with your hand, is it, playing about your rear end like that, and for why are you crying, Manticory honey?’
I could not unburden myself even to Oona’s tenderness or in the shelter of Enda’s arm that soon encircled me as we continued on our way back to Harristown. I did not want to tell anyone what had happened on Harristown Bridge, because I did not want it to have happened at all. I could not be going on breathing with the knowledge of it in the minds of all my sisters and the pity on their faces.
I nodded to Darcy and she smiled. I had betrayed myself twofold. For Darcy had my obedience now and also the means to secure it any time she wanted it. I had dared to crunch God’s Body in the chapel, but I had seen the grave in the clover field and I had no means, hungry as I was, to devour my fear of my sister.
I was too ashamed even to tell the truth to the Eileen O’Reilly when she asked me, ‘For why are you so sorry and heavy in yourself, Manticory Swiney? How is it, and you so clever in your brains, that Darcy keeps you so black afraid?’
Unlike the coins dropped in the chapel collection plate, the Ladysmildew Hall takings were all for us. They paid the arrears for the silk shawls. They also ran to an orange and a peppermint sugar-stick for each sister, eight pounds of candles for the seashell lamp, five jars of treacle and a grand settlement of Annora’s account at the general store in Kilcullen. There was even an extra shilling each and yet another new hat for Darcy – a preposterous funereal confection of raven feathers and tortured black straw. I quietly dedicated it to Phiala the goose at the earliest possible opportunity. With my shilling, I bought a true silver locket on a black velvet ribbon. I’d coveted it for years as the store window’s dust had slowly dimmed its brightness.
There was a favourable notice in the Wicklow News-Letter and County Advertiser:
Seven sisters of lustrous locks and charming voices – the oldest a bare nineteen – could not fail to entertain, and frequently gave delight. As did the hair, which you’d never ask to take your eyes from.
At the next show, there were as many husbands as wives in the audience, and twice the number of shuffling boys.
‘Dregs!’ sniffed Darcy. For the finest flower of Harristown’s young men – accepted only on the production of a good-conduct letter from Father Maglinn – had long since departed for the Pope’s Irish Brigade in Italy: the remnants were not well thought of.
‘I just pray that the Eileen O’Reilly is not out there.’ Oona plaited her long fingers. ‘There isn’t a girl in twenty parishes I’d less rather see.’
Enda kissed the top of her head and stroked mine. At the thought of the butcher’s runt in the audience, Ida took a hank of hair in her mouth to suck, as she always did in moments of difficulty. As she always did, Darcy twitched the hair out of Ida’s mouth, gave it a good yanking, and promised a mention of it in her black book, plus a dose of Gilsol Indigestion and Wind Pills, the latest free samples from Willis’s Medical Hall in Dublin to be had at the Kilcullen dispensary. The familiarity of the threat comforted us all for a moment.
And once more we found ourselves on stage, one at a time, severally and all seven together.
Within a week, we were booked through the autumn, winter and spring, all around County Kildare and even into west Wicklow. There was not a parish councillor who’d deny Darcy, got up in her new hat, whenever she offered us for his wooden stage. Hoteliers requested us for their lobbies, big shops for their windows. We did country fairs at Ballymore Eustace and Baltinglass, shocked the sweet-faced Quakers at Ballitore and convulsed the sturdy residents of Dunlavin. We performed a soirée at grand Russborough House at Blessington, attended by all the members of the Killing Kildares, our local hunt. I strained to see the man who had wanted to brush my hair on Harristown Bridge – and I saw Darcy’s eyes questing for him too, and her anger at his absence. She wanted to extract some more money from him, I guessed. Her eye met mine; she read the agony on my face, and smiled.
After our show at Russborough, the Pennefathers of Rathsallagh House invited us too. And then the Tyntes of Tynte Park. The foxy troll was not there either, but I never stopped looking for him, not when we sang at the stark stone Grand Canal Hotel at Robertstown, nor when the Crehelp Brass Band welcomed us into town for a concert in the square.
Our names were on everyone’s lips. And the word was that we could bring in the customers, and whet their thirst for paid-for refreshment. But when we were asked for at the public houses, Darcy decreed that such a setting was not suitable for the Swiney Godivas, whose morals were as pure as their voices.
Darcy lied. Pure is not what we were.
Oh yes, we were adequate little actresses and creditable warblers. There was charm in our highly commercial mixture of English and Irish, enunciated in clear girlish voices. On a good night, our voices played lightly with your feelings, but they did not line your heart’s memories. Our dancing was not the most graceful you ever saw, and our feet were far from the most delicate. There was no great unloosening of wild Celtic joy to our performance, informed not by art but by a fear of Darcy. Indeed, Ida would sometimes fall body-lilty off the stage, purely so as not to have to be upon it, a phenomenon that Darcy deftly incorporated into the act as a comedy turn, with Joe the seaweed boy, our driver, at the ready to receive Ida’s quivering body. Onstage, I myself devised a functional mental mechanism for pretending that I was in the midst of a recurring nightmare and that I would shortly wake up.
All the while we sang we were offering something much more alluring than songs. The flower of our show wasn’t what was advertised. We sang and danced the paid-for hour, but the people handed over their sixpences and shillings for the single silent thing that we did in the final moments of our act, when we sat with our backs to the audience, and let down our hair.
Then the people leaned forward in their seats or took to their feet without realising it. Their mouths fell slack and their eyes widened in an effort to take in the wall of hair in front of them as it rippled from one side of the stage to the other.
You might have thought simple human hair unworthy of such commotion. After all, the hair on a person’s head is not usually kept hidden like that which nestles in the private places of our bodies. Head hair is generally exposed to view and therefore generally unremarked on. The length of Swiney hair was no secret in County Kildare. You might have thought that the sight of seven bald girls would have excited much more interest. But by the cunning choreography of the hairfall ritual, Darcy conferred on each bare stage the breathless intimacy of a wedding night. She made everyone our bridegroom.
And so we made freedoms with men we did not know to speak to, and with a hundred men at a time, and with women and boys too. We collected them in a mass, and we teased them until Darcy smelled the hunger on them. And she would give them our hair, just before they pleaded for it, always by surprise, when they didn’t expect it. On the Zambezi, David Livingstone had discovered a thousand yards of water smashing over a precipice. A parish letter from Naas drew the inevitable comparison: the Victoria Falls – they were the Swineys too. The mighty power of the torrent, the clerk wrote excitedly, that is in the Swiney Godivas’ heroic hair, engulfing our imaginations in a tumbling fever.
In those early days, even young Ida had a fine growth well beyond the lower tips of her chicken-wing hips, though it was thinner than it might have been because of her constant plucking of it to make wristlets and anklets. The rest of us hadn’t seen our knees behind us in some time for the heavy rain of hair that covered them. But now success seemed to stimulate our hair’s growth – or perhaps the better dinners we were presently eating thanks to our earnings had something to do with the extraordinary spurt of extra follicular inches we experienced in those first months on the stage. We were able to do away with the chairs for the final curtain of curls. When our hair dropped down our backs, we had only to incline our knees so that the hair fell near t
he ground or touched it.
Even if they knew what was coming, the audience drew breath, made moans, threw flowers and money. Hats were waved, handkerchiefs thrown up in the air. Darcy had us pick up the flowers and tuck them in our hair as we bobbed and smiled with downcast eyes. The money, we collected only after the audience had departed.
On the last day of summer, we gave an outdoor concert, letting our hair cascade down the stone parapets of the bridge at the Poulaphouca Waterfall. A clap like thunder and a nightmare of white light broke our pose.
Ida screamed, ‘We are exploded! It is the Fenians come to murder us!’
Down in the crowd, a man lifted his head from under a shrouded box on stilts and waved at us. It was the first time we’d been photographed and it was without our permission.
Darcy was already mumbling that now anyone could have a good look at us in a newspaper without giving her a penny. But I was tormented by a notion of all the years that had gone into growing our hair suddenly severed and our living curls ceasing to live, dispatched into eternity in a puff of magnesium smoke. All the photographs I’d seen were lifeless and flat. And there was no undoing or owning a photograph of yourself, as I understood it. Your image was etched, irrevocable as a wrinkle, on a glass plate that belonged to someone else. Now the photographer had taken our likeness, he would take it away, and there would be something abroad that did not belong to us, yet was us.
In fact, as grainily printed in the following Thursday’s Freeman’s Journal, the photograph was hard to make out. The Eileen O’Reilly came to school with her basket of pig’s feet. Brandishing the newspaper like a shotgun, she declared, ‘Now you have it. That Darcy Swiney’s hairs is jest like the divil’s claws clutching that poor bridge to tear it up by the roots.’
The other children clustered around, nodding. ‘Claws,’ they murmured. ‘Roots.’ ‘Crubeen?’
Our hair projected from the highest points of our personal topography – it was the stage up to which any eye was drawn. By virtue of its volume, our hair staked a great claim in the space around us. Yet the Eileen O’Reilly could tell Darcy’s as Devil’s claws, and Devil’s claws it was. What of the rest of us? The clearest thing about us had become suddenly negotiable.
‘Still’ – Darcy gave the Eileen O’Reilly a poke in the face – ‘I noticed that you your great self bothered your hide to trudge three miles out of Brannockstown to see us there.’
‘Me and your da!’ shouted the Eileen O’Reilly. ‘Did you see all them men gawping at the sight of ye? Come to guess who was cursed enough to call Darcy Swiney his everlasting daughter.’
The butcher’s runt loved to make up stories about Darcy’s father. At different times, she put it about that Darcy’s da had been transported for seven years for goat-stealing and sheep-hurting, that he’d personally disseminated the fungus that had caused the potatoes and the population to rot and had then run away to America with their goods in a cart. She also said that Darcy’s father was no Phelan Swiney but a Dermody from Knockandort, or a Doody from Forristeen or a Rorke from Rostyduff or a Galbally from Crehelp or a Fahy from Corncrake’s Hollow. She had it that he was the local Fenian, Denis Downey, a mad, gun-running Catholic tailor from Baltinglass who’d fathered six on his own wife. ‘And ye’ve seen the man’s picture in the papers!’ she crowed, ‘wid a great tufty head and a wild black beard on him thick as thatch. Bound to be the Darcy Swiney da!’
I never asked her to stop, because I loved it that she dared. And her scorn was reserved for Darcy. She did not torment the rest of us. Our hedgerow lessons continued in fits and starts, depending on the Swiney Godivas’ engagements. Soon the Eileen O’Reilly and I spent less time learning, and more time talking. She told me how it was in her home, how it felt to be an only child, and yet still not much noticed except to be fed. I explained to her about my tribal allegiance to Enda and Oona, and the alliance of Berenice, Pertilly and Ida.
‘That would be explaining it,’ she nodded, ‘what I see and hear at yon window or yours. There’s no sense in all that niggling and gnashing, without. I allus thought Enda the pretty one of the twins. She knows what to do wid a ribbon anyhow.’
‘She does.’ I smiled, rose and stretched my legs. The sun’s rays hung at a guilty angle: I had to rehearse a new song.
‘And Ida?’ the Eileen O’Reilly asked. ‘I think she is no great things in many respects. But she’s a dear girl in herself all the same?’
‘A dear girl, yes.’ I smiled and waved her goodbye. ‘You would like her, if Darcy allowed it.’
‘If she could walk across a field wivout pickin’ a fight with a blade of grass,’ the Eileen O’Reilly agreed. ‘If she can’t be bashing, she jest doan feel herself, do she? She’d druther foight than breathe is what she’d druther.’
The Poulaphouca picture brought us new and bigger audiences. Darcy became a convert to photography when she saw what it could do. Now our shows were attended by policemen, priests, gombeen men, county councillors, governesses, clerks, members of working men’s clubs and prosperous farmers in their swallow-tailed coats, breeches and high-crowned hats. They paid without a murmur for what fell out of our heads; a terrible sight of money they paid for it.
Chapter 10
Hymns, old songs and hair were fine and good to open hearts and purses, but Darcy decreed that the Swiney Godivas needed special songs made to order if we were to become a ‘living sensation’, a much more profitable kind of enterprise. It fell to me to compose our ditties, with new words constructed around traditional Irish airs, snatches of dialogue, banter.
Darcy also insisted that Ida should learn to play the dusty fiddle that Phelan Swiney, Mariner, had left hanging by the back door on one of his invisible visits.
‘It takes Ida five mortal hours to memorise the words of a song,’ Darcy grumbled. ‘Let’s see if she can play dumb notes.’
Ida took to her instrument with joy, hugging it to her shoulder. The music flowed through her with a rude ease that words never managed. She drew from the violin a sound of something ancient that had poured out of the earth unfiltered by the normal decencies. The thin geese were hypnotised by her playing and I sometimes saw the Eileen O’Reilly, narrow-hipped as an Irish stoat, swaying to it outside the window, her eyes closed, and bliss on her face.
Annora allowed Ida and myself to stay home from school sometimes to work on our songs. When he could, Joe the seaweed boy took me in his cart to the library at Naas. I was fourteen now, and had exhausted Miss Finaughty’s lending shelf. To her sorrow, I had not been so avid an attender at school since I’d met with the troll on Harristown Bridge, and always made sure I walked home with a sister or two. I was happier as the mouse in the corner of the cottage, quietly nibbling on a pencil in a nest of paper.
Since what happened on Harristown Bridge, I’d withdrawn into myself. My hair was the noisiest thing about me. That hair, which had drawn the troll and danger and shame to me, felt like a betrayer that lived upon my body. Why had it fallen to me, of all the Swineys, to wear hair that looked like stabbing or a spilling of blood? A bolt of red velvet flung down? A colouring allegedly infused with melodrama and lust? I would have been more suited to the soft russet of a deer, trying to stipple herself to invisibility in the shadows of the grass. Indeed Annora often said of me that my ankles were so delicate that I trotted about on deer’s feet. And my arms in the summer would dapple with freckles like a fawn’s back.
Now I was silent as a deer – except when I conducted my secret hedge lessons with the Eileen O’Reilly. The rare times I went to school, I never raised my hand to answer a question. Miss Finaughty gazed at me with troubled eyes. I did not return her look.
My tongue was silent but my pencil was busy and bold. Darcy wanted our performances invigorated with a wild and sparkling malice now that the local press had begun to froth about the marvellous salty banter that poured out of the Swiney sisters between their songs.
Like forks of lightning, those pretty tongues. It is like bein
g caught in a storm. See the Swiney Godivas for that excitement alone, said one writer. And the hair of course. The inimitable hair.
Into my sisters’ mouths, Darcy ordered me to put words that raised passions that led to words they made up all by themselves. Fighting words. Words that flashed and glinted as the Swineys ate the heads off one another; Oona carping at Pertilly; myself shamefully teasing Ida for the romancing of her mind. Most of all, it seemed, Darcy wanted to hear Enda chant under her breath ‘Brown Bitch Heifer!’ to Berenice, and for her twin to reply, ‘I’ll choke you for a dog!’
A few heifers and dogs later, and I was imagining myself clever enough to deploy Darcy’s malfeasance against her own stormy self. I was wrong.
‘That Medusa is not me!’ shouted Darcy, for whom I had concocted the lines:
And should you meet my snaky eye
You’ll turn to stone and, sorry, die.
Pertilly replied, ‘But that is you to the bone, Darcy!’
‘It’s true, Pertilly honey,’ declared Oona.
Both earned a slap. And in revenge, Darcy selected Pertilly for the role of Medusa, reserving Lorelei for herself.
‘The Lorelei had yellow hair herself!’ protested Oona of the milk-blonde curls. ‘She sat on a rock in River Rhine there, luring German fishermen to their deaths. They are a fair race, those Germans. And look, Manticory’s written it that way so.’
In her bass voice, she chanted:
‘I sing and comb my golden locks
and lure men in boats onto the rocks.
Then as they perish in the water
I sing and comb and watch the slaughter.’
Darcy sneered, ‘And who is Manticory to decide the colour of the Lorelei’s hair?’
She poked my thigh with her hairbrush.
The audience loved pairings of our twins, who were indeed decorative as crystal bookends or twin kittens, though only if you didn’t know the sweet rottenness between them. As well as tensely perfect duets, Darcy had them perform riddles, a different one every night, to make it more interesting for the increasing number of regular customers. I was kept busy concocting them – always with the same answer, one that would make the audience call out, ‘Your hair!’
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 7