‘What is delicate as a cobweb but lives on after death?’
‘What is the material border between life and death?’
‘What is the only human thing that lasts longer than love?’
‘Your hair!’ the audiences cried. ‘The lovely lovely hair on you! Bless you for long-haired, darling angels!’
But given the twins’ spite for one another, even the brief exchanges of riddles frequently turned barbed. Whatever Berenice’s response, Enda would raise a cynical eyebrow and drawl, ‘If you say so, sister.’ Which threw a delicate but sorry doubt on whatever her twin had just uttered. Berenice could devise no adequate answer for such a subtle slur. Whenever she tried to banter back, it fell heavily.
It came to the point, one night in Kildare Town, that, when Enda supplied her, ‘If you say so, sister,’ Berenice supplied Enda with a black eye, in front of an audience stunned to silence. Enda then commenced to wail, and Oona rushed onstage and wiped the tears with her own hair, crying, ‘Oh, let’s not make great bones about it, shall we, Enda honey? Divil a taste you’re freckened of a little slap!’
Fortunately the audience took this speech as a punchline to the mystifying violence, and applauded. And that encouraged Pertilly to lumber onstage too with a rendition of, ‘I am sorry I made you cry, but at least your face is cleaner now,’ soothing away anyone’s niggling suspicion that what they had just seen was not choreographed comedy, but war.
The review in the Wicklow News-Letter and County Advertiser was admiring of our daring physical routines, before settling down to a long and excitable description of our hair.
The Eileen O’Reilly, who saw the show, was full of pity for Enda. She knew what a punched eye felt like, of course.
‘You make that Berry-Kneesie pay!’ she urged me, ‘next time you write her.’
We busied ourselves about our lesson. I was teaching her the use of the conditional, for which she had small aptitude. The Eileen O’Reilly had a contempt for nuance and, like Darcy herself, was generally more comfortable with what was black or white.
Nothing escaped her scrutiny and consideration. Those blue eyes on her were always watching me. Even in chapel, she watched me.
‘Why do ye not pray any more?’ she asked me now. ‘I watch your lips and ye say other words. Bad words. You take your clothes to chapel, Manticory Swiney, but not yourself.’
I was tempted to confide. The Eileen O’Reilly was black good at outrage, having rehearsed her tongue on Darcy many a time. She knew what it was to be knocked about by a man’s large hand. I could imagine her in the flower of a rant against the man on the bridge.
‘We shall have that troll trussed and flogged on Kilcullen Hill,’ she would surely shout. ‘Where is he at all for his punishing?’
But I could not bring myself to share my shame with her. I needed her to think me finer than that.
So I laughed. ‘ ’Tis true I’m not much in the way of thanking God. He has never looked in on us Swineys except that He’s laughed down His sleeve at us and sent new troubles to destroy us.’
‘True enough,’ she said. ‘Darcy being as she is, and that bold Berry-Kneesie winning the war with Enda and all.’
I nodded.
‘Should be fixed, that,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Ain’t I just after telling ye?’
Enda’s punched eye swelled and closed. The left side of her face took on the colours of putrefaction. She was for several days deaf in that ear, though not deaf enough to miss Berenice chanting ‘I’ll choke you for a dog’ at her every time she was allowed near. Enda was offstage a fortnight, causing Darcy to cancel bookings: without our much-vaunted full seven-ness, the Swiney Godivas were in danger of being nullities.
After that, the twins both had Darcy’s eye on them at all times. Now that she had seen how profitable it might be, she sought to deploy their bellicosity to best effect. Each of them was allowed one good slap in the course of the show, but strictly no improvisation. For once the extra slap, pinch or kick was inserted, no one could know where it would all end. Whenever that happened, things always got difficult, not least for the offender after the show.
‘A quiet pinch for Enda, was it?’ Darcy would tower over Berenice. ‘Would you be so condescending to my ignorance as to tell me why you felt so entitled to ruin our future profits and make an untidy spectacle of yourselves?’
The truthful answer would have been that each twin believed she owned the pain of the other, but they had no way of articulating that to Darcy.
‘We’re alike, so,’ was as much as Berenice could explain.
‘So doing unto others must be done alike too,’ ruled Darcy.
And Enda would then be permitted to administer two outright slaps for Berenice’s furtive pinch onstage. Thereafter the twins developed a cunning means of communicating insults by cracking their knuckles at one another so that no one beyond the first row could hear.
And my continuing part in all this? It was a negative role, like a depression in an acquiescent cushion. To placate Darcy, I invented and inserted the subtle slanders, and even those commas that could make a twin draw a breath that might be construed as a sneer. Of course, I belonged to Enda’s tribe in the great division of the sisters, and so my writing favoured her in subtle ways, just as the Eileen O’Reilly had suggested, which naturally led to more brute frustration on Berenice’s end, and so to Enda receiving the larger number of pinches and blows.
I cannot defend myself, except to say that I was afraid of Darcy and that I was conveniently not fully sensible to the pain of all those pinches and blows. Darcy also flattered me, feeding me odd specks of praise that turned my head. She saw that I was taken up by my new discoveries about the power of words, and the joy of how mightily a tiny phrase could shake the shabby village halls of Kildare with laughter; how a certain ordering of adjectives and a wily insertion of unexpected syllables could turn a sentence into a success. Although I was no great writer, Darcy had inoculated me, like a snake bite, with the writer’s disease of separating my stories from my conscience, disingenuously accepting no responsibility for any hurts to third parties. If there was blame to be had, I found it convenient to lay it at Darcy’s feet. It was easy to blame Darcy; she made it easy by being impervious to guilt. Berenice grumbled but dared not do more. Sweet-natured Enda forgave me every time, and told me it was not my fault. Shamefully, even this empowered me to do more damage.
I can no longer evade my share of blame for all the horror that was to happen between Enda and Berenice. I should have seen the way of things to come that memorable night in Kilcullen when Enda’s blow, scripted by me, fell harder than ever on Berenice’s ear. The hair lifted from Berenice’s scalp, disclosing a carefully concealed bald circle – caused by the incontinent feasting of a ringworm.
Winded, Berenice hovered for a moment on the ball of one foot and then crashed downwards. She landed on her back with her hair drizzling down the front of the stage, and the naked circle on her scalp exposed inches from the eyes of three girls from our school, including the Eileen O’Reilly herself.
Pertilly and Ida pulled her from the stage by her ankles. Berenice was not badly hurt, I was relieved to see, but the tears would not stop flowing out of her.
Perhaps she understood better than I did that the truth was we were all grievously hurt in that moment.
For wasn’t it the Brannockstown butcher’s runt, the Eileen O’Reilly, who rose to face the audience and called out in ecstasy, ‘Here’s Berry-Kneesie Swiney for ye, yer graces, ladies and jintlemen, the ganky great girl wid a brutal-looking case of the baldy-worm and the great big nits!’
Only the first few rows could possibly have seen the tiny eggs in their flight, but the runt’s words had been clear and loud as the bell on Carnalway Church. People rose hastily and backed away.
In the confusion, I slipped from the wings and down into the audience, hiding my hair under my black shawl. The hall was emptying rapidly, a great sea of dissatisfied murmurs flowing out
like a tide. The Eileen O’Reilly was standing alone staring at the closed curtain, her colour high.
‘Manticory!’ She showed me her crooked teeth in gladness.
I hissed, ‘How could you betray me after all our pleasant lessons?’
The light went out of her eyes. ‘Betray ye? But that was one against Berry-Kneesie, weren’t it? So it were for your Enda. Here’s me thinking ye’d be pleased. Don’t ye put the snout on . . .’ Her voice trailed away uncertainly.
Then I saw that she had misunderstood, and yet also understood the Swiney Godivas all too well. I knew not what to say, so I spun on my heels and walked away from her.
‘Don’t ye be turning your back on me, Manticory Swiney,’ the butcher’s runt shouted. ‘Not now, don’t be doing it. Is this the way you’re leaving me, ye brute?’
Chapter 11
I lay no claim that the Swiney sisters of Harristown were exceptional in the great battles waged on our heads between nit and comb, or in any of the attentions we paid to our hair.
The first duty of any decent morning is to devote oneself to amending the hair that so often looks as if it has gotten wrong-footed by fairies who have passed the night prancing their orgies in it. And so it continues from waking to sleeping: any moment of the day there will be a hundred thousand souls washing, greasing, dyeing, plucking, pinning, snipping and otherwise aggravating and interfering with the one piece of our anatomy we mortals have the power to alter. It must be tamed and punished with a hundred strokes. It must be inspected for vermin. And purged of the stubborn creatures who inhabit it.
So all the while that we were becoming the Swiney Godivas, the four youngest of us – Ida, Pertilly, Oona and myself – still presented ourselves from time to time at Brannockstown’s poor little school, and were so subject to the migrations and massings of head-lice that plagued every educational establishment in Ireland in those days. The beasts had a clear preference for young girls and a strange distaste for the boys once their blood was beating with manhood.
Our hair – which should have been private to ourselves alone – had become public as soon as the Swiney Godivas were born. And now we sisters also caught the imagination of our fellow pupils, who had simply given us the wooden eye for our poverty until celebrity painted us with gloss. Specifically, our burgeoning fame made our schoolmates look at our hair more closely, and with critical expressions. They considered it logical that our prodigious heads must nurture not just rampant follicles but wriggling camp-followers as numerous as cottoners in Corktown. Our new predicament was that Berenice had just proved it up on the stage.
It was at the schoolhouse in Brannockstown that the rupture between the butcher’s runt and myself was grievously enlarged.
The Eileen O’Reilly brought the tale of that dreadful night back to school. All the next day she cultivated a high popularity with increasingly exaggerated accounts of it. Everyone wanted to be big with the butcher’s runt, for this was the most wonderful outrage ever offered up to our schoolfellows – an explicit enactment of their own secret fears, for they were none of them innocent of vermin. And the Eileen O’Reilly spoke her story in the present tense so that it seemed to be still happening and our schoolfellows hung on her words like ragged sheets on a hedge.
‘So that Enda beats on yon Berry-Kneesie with her fist, so she does. Such a slap that her nose couldn’t help tumbling down. And if that Berry-Kneesie doesn’t scream the rafthers off the roof, leave it till again. And it is a great shame, so it is, for the beasties are flying off of Berry-Kneesie like bats out of a cave, and then the whole audience – thousands of them, I belave, hignorant gommochs the lot of them – are in uproar and they’re running for the doors when they realise that there’s a naked knob of skull big as your fist hidden under all that dirty Swiney hair.’ She snorted like a pig, for emphasis. ‘I mean, I’ve had a nit myself, so I have, bad luck to them, but nothing to compare wid that great dirty nest on Berry-Kneesie’s head.’
‘No, but did you?’ asked Mrs Godlin’s granddaughter. ‘And are they still there in among those Swineys, those nits and worms, the creatures?’
‘Would a duck swim?’ replied the Eileen O’Reilly with scorn. ‘Because auld Arsey Swiney’s too mean to allow her sisters the cost of a steel nitting comb.’
In the dew of a single evening, our reputations had been smashed.
Not one girl would sit next to us in the classroom after that, no matter that Annora went at us every Sunday with the lice comb and the petroleum under the malodorous light of the seashell lamp. No matter that we inspected one another daily with enquiring fingers and worried eyes. Still the lice loved us Swineys as a wasp loves children’s screams.
We younger ones wept and ran to hide in the long grass whenever Annora showed us the lice comb, until the evening that Darcy came out into the gloaming to read aloud from an article in The Nation about the life cycle of the human head-louse:
‘Unless evicted, the benighted creature spends its entire life on the human head, born in an egg attached to a hair shaft and dying not far away from it. And being born again.’
Darcy improvised, ‘And again. And again.’
When we stayed hidden in the grass, Darcy threw down the paper, bellowing, ‘Your silly, stubborn heads are currently supplying those greedy nits with all they could want by way of pleasant shelter and delicious blood. Do you want to stay out there, letting them grow fat and multiply upon you, is it? And getting yourself a fine burrowing tick or two for your pains? All the worse for you, then. Well, we’ll not bother bruising any potatoes for you tonight, seeing as you’re wedded to staying out there to starve and be feasted on by the nits. Enda! Will you give that mutton stew a stir? Fine and tender with little sweet carrots, is it? And the gravy rich and brown and shining like an officer’s boot? Ah, the smell would carry you to Heaven on its back!’
Hunger drove Ida, Oona, Pertilly and myself back into the cottage, our sore heads hanging low. We never hid again. But despite Annora’s tender, violent ministrations on the Swiney heads, the lice still would not be parted from us on a permanent basis, apparently well satisfied with our hospitality and recommending it to their friends.
We were at war on two fronts – not just with the lice but with the ringworm, Tinea capitis, which Annora, in her typical hardworking ignorance, constantly redistributed among us by the use of a single comb for the nits. In the library at Naas, I found Doctor Rowland’s treatise on The Human Hair and was amused, saddened and black angry in quick succession to read that the ringworm:
usually appears spontaneously on children of feeble habit, who are ill-fed and not sufficiently exercised; and originates, in great measure, from uncleanliness . . . a medical man should always be consulted.
But a visit from a medical man would have cost money and Darcy hated to open her purse, despite its swelling contours from our earnings on the stage. And so we continued, pomading our hair over the increasing bald patches, ever unable to comb out all the nits because of the burning inflammation of our scalps.
Two weeks after the disaster, Pertilly, Oona and myself arrived at school to find a sign posted on the door:
THEM BASTARD SWINEY SISTERS SHALL NOT BE LET IN UNTIL THEY IS PROVED FREE OF INFESTERATION. STREELING ABOUT CONCEITING THEMSELVES GREAT LADIES. BUT DO THEY KNOW WHO THEIR DA IS? A WASH WOULD DO THAT HOOR’S MELT DARCY SWINEY NO HARM NEITHER.
It was not just the spelling but the handwriting that gave away the Eileen O’Reilly as the perpetrator. I felt a rueful pride in my former pupil’s vocabulary and spelling.
‘Darcy would give her Ballyhooly if she saw that!’ whispered Oona.
‘Then we must go and get her so that she does,’ Pertilly declared, setting off for the dispensary in Kilcullen where Darcy now helped Mrs Godlin in the afternoons. ‘It will be a thing to see and hear.’
I hoped against hope there would be no violence in it for the Eileen O’Reilly, so thin and small that she was. In spite of our quarrel, I did not wish more hurting on he
r. I was too sad to be angry, and knew full well that it was my snubbing her at Ladysmildew Hall that had put the spine in her pencil. And after all, I had fed her with the information that made her denounce Berenice, out of misguided loyalty to me and my tribe. She had thought, because of our friendship, that she might prove herself part of Enda’s tribe. Now she was part of nothing, and naturally considered herself an enemy to everything Swiney. And she had just forcibly sealed our enmity: I could betray Darcy in secret with satisfaction, but I could not befriend a girl who mocked my beloved Enda’s paternity.
Of course, Darcy marched straight up to Brannockstown school with no apparent bending of her knee the whole way. She always walked like that whenever she had a crow to pluck with someone. She tore the paper off the door and balled it up in her hand. It was presently to be seen thrust into the bruised mouth of the Eileen O’Reilly, still mumbling indistinctly, ‘Ye doan frecken me, Darcy Swiney, great Divil that ye are, with the very feathers in your hat fightin’ with one another like bastes. Leastwise, the great nits on ye frecken me more, the creatures. You should be ashamed on yerself. Never givin’ yer poor sisters a chance to better themselves over the baldy-warm. And makin’ them sisters behave themselves discreditable wid the naked hairs down their backs.’
‘They’ll do all the behaving I want,’ snarled Darcy.
But after that she used two evenings’ takings to consult a medical man all the way from Dublin, the result of which was the precious knowledge that we sisters might no longer promiscuously snatch at whichever bonnet we found hanging on the peg. Nor might we share the hated wooden lice comb. Darcy had Annora embroider our names in red on seven new linen caps and seven separate pillowcases. And each of us was bought our own fearsome steel comb, tied with a ribbon of a different colour. Applications of Worm Water twice a day soon cured us of the ringworm, though the Eileen O’Reilly would not let us forget the shame.
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 8