Academy Street

by Mary Costello

  On the avenue they kick at the fallen leaves. A black car drives out of the yard towards them. It is Miss Tannian. She rolls down the window, smiles, asks about their day. She is wearing red lipstick. Tess can feel the eyes of her father and Mike Connolly from over the wall in the potato field, watching. Denis is bending over the pit in the corner of the field. He is as tall as her father now, but thinner.

  ‘That one is after Dadda,’ Evelyn says before the men come in to their dinner. ‘And Mother not cold in her grave.’ They are talking about Miss Tannian.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Claire says. ‘She only came to take the blood and check for reactors.’

  ‘Reactors, my eye! Did you see the get-up of her—in the costume and lipstick? And she’s no spring chicken either, let me tell you.’

  Once, last summer, they had to lock up the hens in the hen-house for testing. It was a big job. Her mother held up each hen and Miss Tannian drew out blood in a little syringe and squirted it into small bottles to take away. Then her mother opened the hatch at the bottom of the hen-house door and flung the hen out into the yard. Rhode Island Reds and Leghorns. Leghorns are the best for laying, her mother said.

  ‘Anyway, doesn’t she know well Dadda is only after burying his wife?’ Claire said.

  ‘Mark my words—that one is setting her cap at him. She’s after this place. Herself and her cocked nose.’

  After the dinner Tess goes out to the back hall, past the tap room and the apple room. She is searching again. She wants to leave down this secret weight, everything she is carrying in her heart. She thinks of the tinker girl inside her tent, and she knows, somehow, that the girl is thinking of her too at this moment. She goes to the dark space under the back stairs, where the incubator stands empty now. In spring the eggs hatched out there under a Tilley lamp. She loved the warmth and the glow of the red lamp. There, she was happy. Every day Evelyn or Claire or her mother turned the eggs over carefully. Then, one morning, a miracle—two yellow chicks had broken through during the night, and were staggering around on thin shaky legs. One day, she stood looking in at the eggs. She had a sudden longing to climb in, fold herself up, lie down under the lovely warm light. Then her mother appeared and leaned in and picked up an egg. She held it up to the window-light. ‘Tess,’ she whispered. ‘Come, look at the little birdie inside!’ Tess moved close against her mother’s body. For a moment she pressed her face against her mother’s stomach and closed her eyes and kissed it, and breathed in her smell and she could taste her mother in the smell. When she drew away, her mother was holding the egg up to the light and Tess saw a shadow, the shape of a tiny sleeping bird, inside the shell. She could not speak. Her mother smiled and stroked her head and her heart filled up. Together they stood in a stream of light watching the shadow and then her mother placed the egg back on the straw. She picked up another egg and held it up to the light and frowned, and sighed.

  ‘What’s wrong, Momma?’ Tess asked.

  ‘No birdie here, sweetheart, no birdie here,’ she said sadly. ‘This one’s a glugger.’ She threw it in a bucket for the pigs’ feed, and when it burst a terrible rotten smell filled the air.

  Two strange men come to the house and fumigate her mother’s and father’s room. They are all tested, even Mike Connolly. That night in bed she remembers Miss Tannian—they have forgotten to test Miss Tannian. She might be their new mother. She does not want a new mother. She misses Oliver. He has come only once since Aunt Maud took him away. Claire made a lovely currant cake for the visit. He had a frown, a new little wrinkle on his forehead. He had looked at Maeve’s face, then at Tess’s, and back at Maeve’s again. They kept smiling and flapping at him but he wasn’t sure who they were any more. Suddenly Tess misses her mother like never before. It is like a huge wave flowing over her. She misses her mother for herself, and for Oliver too. He does not remember, or understand, why everything is different now. It hurts her heart to think of his small head waking up in Aunt Maud’s house, in a room full of cousins and different walls, different voices. A different mother. She thinks of him waking, looking up at the ceiling, or out at the rain. His little heart jumping when a door bangs or a strange face appears, looking in at him through the bars of his cot. That evening of the visit she could not eat the currant cake. It would not go down her throat.

  In school she grows to love Mrs Snee, her teacher, and she knows Mrs Snee loves her too. Every day she gives her jobs to do. On cold days Mrs Snee lets the children leave their bottles of milk beside the fire to warm them. Tess doesn’t mind leaving home each morning. The house is too quiet now. It is worse when her father comes inside. The wireless has not been turned on since the funeral. Denis cycled to the town one day and got the batteries recharged, but that night when he went to turn it on her father said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ in a cold hard voice and Denis backed away without a word. She had always been afraid of her father but now it is worse. His face is dark and cross all the time. One night when the priest came to visit she heard her father say, ‘What’s gone is gone.’ At night he stares into the fire. He does not seem to like anyone—not Denis or Claire or her—except maybe Evelyn. She is the eldest. He gives her housekeeping money every Saturday. She keeps the ration book and sells eggs to the egg-man from Henaghan’s, and swaps some of the butter she churns for sugar and jam and other groceries that John Joe Donnellan sells in his travelling shop. She sends Denis to the post office, or to town to order chicken-feed. Denis is seventeen. He has blue eyes and thick black hair. When he was a baby he was blond like Oliver. They were all blond at the start, her mother said. Denis sits in the kitchen at night, his arms folded, his long legs thrown out in front of him, not saying anything. No one says much any more. A silence came on the house the day of the funeral and it has stayed. Tess thinks that they would all like the silence to end now, but no one knows how to put an end to it. She looks at their faces at night. She hears her own heart beating in her chest, in her head and ears too, thump, thump, thump, deafening her. She watches Denis’s chest rising and falling. He can hear his own heart too, she thinks. They can all hear their hearts—Claire and Evelyn and her father—making an awful racket, thumping inside them, like hers.

  In the cold, Maeve’s feet break out with chilblains and she cries at night. Claire rubs on Zam-Buk and she is kept home from school for two days. Tess goes alone and stays back after school to help Mrs Snee tidy up. The light is fading when she leaves and her boots begin to hurt. She hurries along the road, almost running, pulling her coat tight. Up ahead is the Black Bend and the tinkers’ camp under the trees. She sees the flames of a fire rising and people gathered around—more people than she has ever seen there before, all moving, slow and wavy, in front of the fire. There are men standing at the edge of the camp, smoking and drinking from brown bottles. As she draws nearer a strange quietness fills the air. Not even the dogs are barking. She stops and looks back the way she has come. The road is empty and she grows afraid. Her eyes meet the eyes of the tinker man who cleaned the school lavatories. He bows his head very slowly and Tess looks away. She walks on, faster, her head down. As she passes in front of the camp a woman lets out a terrible cry. Tess stands, frozen. There are women and teenage girls gathered in a circle in front of a tent. They look up and see Tess and a hush falls on them. The circle opens and Tess sees a wooden table and on it a child is lying, dressed in white. It is the tinker girl, her eyes clo
sed, her face snow-white, her hands crossed on her chest. She is dead. At the end of the table, a woman is combing the child’s hair. It is the tinker woman who came to Mrs Glynn’s door. When she sees Tess she stops and bows her head. The flames of the fire are dancing on her face. Tess cannot move or take a step. Then the girls and women close in around the table again and Tess looks at her feet and walks on, beating down the fear.

  At the tea they are all looking at her. ‘What’s wrong with you, why don’t you answer me?’ Evelyn asks her. ‘Why aren’t you eating? And you ate no dinner either. What’s wrong? Did you lose your tongue or something?’ I did answer you, she replies. I’m not hungry. But then, after a few more answers, she knows they have not heard her. Her words are not working, the sounds are not coming out of her mouth into the air.

  ‘Did something happen in school, Tess?’ Claire asks her softly, and she runs from the kitchen, out to the front hall and up the stairs. At the turn she stands under the stained-glass window. She thinks of the tinker girl’s white face. She remembers the day she stuck her tongue out at the tinker girl and now she is dead. She turns her face up to the window, longing for the sun to pour in and warm her. She joins her hands and says a Hail Mary. She listens for the words, to test her sound. But no sound comes. She prays louder, harder. She gives a little cough, and tries again. She starts to cry. She touches her face and the feel of the tears makes her cry more. She climbs to the top and runs along the landing to her mother’s and father’s room. On the dressing table she picks up the photograph of her mother in her nurse’s uniform and carries it back to her own room. She takes off her boots and gets into bed with the photograph in her hand.

  When she wakes it is dark. She knows from the silence of the house that it is the middle of the night. Across the room she can make out Maeve’s shape in the other bed. She moves a little and feels the mattress damp under her. She puts a hand down between her legs. She has wet her knickers. She gets out and takes them off and climbs back in, keeping away from the wet spot. She remembers the photograph and feels around until she finds it on the pillow.

  ∼

  Her talk does not come back. Her father and Evelyn bring her down to Dr O’Beirne and he sits her up on a high table and asks her questions. But she cannot answer them. One day Denis sits beside her on the low wall. ‘You’ll be all right—any day now you’ll be as right as rain,’ he says. ‘I bet you by Christmas when Santy comes you’ll be talkin’ away to him.’ She says her prayers, like Claire and Mike Connolly tell her to do, but her talk does not come back, not even for Christmas. At school, Mrs Snee brings her up to her desk and tries, in a kind way, to trick her into talking. On one of her visits Miss Tannian takes her aside, tells her to take deep breaths and say her own name. Tess, she keeps saying, Tess, as if Tess does not know her own name. Sometimes people get cross with her. She gives up trying to answer them. She looks into all their faces and their eyes and then they give up too. Little by little she gets used to it. She does not miss talking at all. She does everything they ask—all her chores—and they all get used to her silence.

  One day when Evelyn and Denis are gone to town her father wants help with the sheep. Tess is told to stand in a gap leading into the yard. Claire is standing at the avenue and Maeve is at the orchard gate which has fallen off its hinges. Her father and Mike Connolly go off into the fields to round up the flock. They are gone a long time. Tess hates when there are big jobs like this going on—when the cattle are being dosed, or the sheep are being dipped or shorn. She lies awake at night thinking of all the things that can go wrong, all the dangers.

  Then the sheep appear, running, bleating, Captain nipping at their heels, and behind, her father and Mike Connolly. She moves a little to the right, then to the left, trying to spread herself across the gap. She feels the ground shaking from the pounding of their hooves. The smell of them, their greasy wool, reminds her of mutton. Her father shouts, Keep back a bit. Mike Connolly is talking to Captain all the time, making little whistling sounds that Captain understands. And then something small and dark—a cat or a rat or a bird—darts across the track and startles Tess and she jumps and one of the sheep sees what Tess has seen and turns and breaks away and rushes towards the gap, towards Tess. The others break and follow and in an instant the whole flock is coming at her, diving past her, right and left, into the open field beyond. Her father and Mike Connolly and Claire are waving their arms, shouting at her. She stands, trapped, as the sheep shoot by, brushing off her arms, leaping past her head, their hooves like thunder so that she has to crouch down and cover her head to save herself.

  They are all shouting at her. The sheep are spreading out in the field behind her, Captain after them. They will go on and on through all the gaps into the far fields. Her father is coming, running, his face red. ‘Get into the house, you!’ he roars. ‘Get in, get in out of my sight!’ He has his hand raised and she thinks he will lash out and wallop her as he passes. But he runs on in his wellingtons. And then Mike Connolly comes through the gap, older, slower. Their eyes meet for a second. She longs for him to nod or say something but he looks away and keeps on going.

  She walks around to the far side of the house where the sun never shines and no one ever goes. There’s an old rag hanging on the barbed-wire fence. A bird is singing in a tree. She leans over the fence and vomits, her hair falling into the flow. She reaches out for the rag to wipe her mouth. It is her mother’s old blouse, faded and tattered, hung out to dry a long time ago, and forgotten.

  For a long time she cannot look at her father. She tries to stay out of his path. He has a way of looking at her, a long mean look, as if he is about to say something terrible that will shame her. He keeps his eyes on her when she moves around the kitchen. With each step she is afraid the ground will open and pull her in. She can hardly breathe. I have no mother, she thinks, I have no father. When he is going to a fair or a funeral she brings him his good coat and hat. Once, he said, ‘Good girl’, but he never says her name. Mike Connolly says her name. She has grown shy with Mike, and ashamed, since that day with the sheep. Claire is the nicest, always. She says there’s a doctor in Dublin who can help her to talk again but Tess shakes her head. Some nights when the moon shines in her window and shadows cross the wall she jumps out of bed and tiptoes across the landing into Claire’s and Evelyn’s room. Claire puts a finger to her lips and lifts the blankets and lets Tess in beside her. They make chaireens and Tess sleeps all night like that, against Claire’s lap, inside Claire’s arms.

  There are nights when she is afraid to sleep. She lies in her bed, remembering. Captain starts to cry below her window. She gets up and creeps down the stairs and opens the front door. The moonlight is on the steps. She does not say a word, just looks at Captain and he walks in and follows her up the stairs, into her room. He jumps on the bed and curls up against her. He understands something about her, maybe everything, and her heart begins to open. In the darkness, in the perfect silence, she hears the smallest sounds—Maeve’s breath from across the room, the flapping of an insect’s wings high up in the corner, the tap dripping far off in the bathroom and in her mind she sees each drop falling through the air into the white sink, landing and sliding down inside. They are all asleep in their rooms, their eyelids flickering as they dream, and the rooms are silent and sleeping too, and downstairs the coals in the fire are almost gone out but still glow a little in the dark, and a thin line of smoke d
isappears up the chimney, curling into little puffs along the way. And the table and chairs all stand there, and the dresser, watching, waiting—in her mind she can see them all. And outside the hens and ducks locked up for the night, and the birds asleep in the trees and the cows in the cow-house and everywhere, all over the farm, worms and insects and small animals are curled up under stones and hedges and bushes. She can see them all. She imagines herself small, so small that she can see everything, hear everything, hear the blades of grass whispering, the pebbles laughing in the dark. She strokes Captain and he sighs. She can feel the beat of his heart against her. She is amazed at how happy she is. In her bed, in this house. With the lawn and the barns and the fields around her. There is nowhere else she wants to be. In her most secret heart she knows there is nowhere she loves more.

  When morning breaks she walks outside and crosses the courtyard. It is Saturday and no one is up yet. The sky is blue and the sun has reached the orchard wall. The coach-house door is open and inside someone is moving in the shadowy darkness. She looks in and sees Mike Connolly reaching to hang the horse collar up on a hook. When he turns and sees her he gets a little fright. Then his eyes soften, but he says nothing. A time will come when no one will talk to her at all, or even look at her. She is a disappearing girl.