Her Mother's Daughter

by Alice Fitzgerald

  I thank Joyce and tell her I’m not going to move my face all night.

  Maura says now they need to sort out my hair, which, they say, is beautiful but unkempt. Is it dyed? she asks me, and is very impressed when I tell her it’s not.

  In the bathroom, she gathers it up into a bun with wisps falling about my face. Then she closes the door and goes to the toilet to wee and laughs that we’ve been through it all now.

  I laugh and take a sip of my drink. ‘I need to go after you,’ I tell her, and I put my drink down and hover over the toilet, giddy and hot. ‘I can’t believe we’ve met again!’ I say, unable to wipe the smile off my face, I’m so happy.

  ‘I know! Crazy, isn’t it?’ She laughs and so do I, and it feels like we’ve been friends for years.

  Joyce knows your man on the door, so we get in for free. Inside, the place is alive. The band is going and the beat bounces through the air and the floor, through the men’s feet and the women’s hips. I stay close to Maura and Joyce and the others lead the way.

  ‘Jesus, this is wild, isn’t it?’ Maura whispers in my ear.

  ‘It is,’ I say.

  Her eyes are shining and I’m sure mine are, too.

  ‘Come on,’ says Joyce, ‘let’s go and get a drink.’ She goes through the crowds and we follow, inching through, turning sideways and being jabbed by shoulders and elbows. It’s like home, only more. I think of a night out with Bernadette, when we got the bus into town with all the lads and there was one smiling at me. I think of them, moving through the crowds where I know no one – only these girls I’ve just met. I think of the girl going home to get married and I am jealous of her having her whole life mapped out before her. I wonder if someone will ever tell me they want me for themselves for ever. A dirty little whore like me? I doubt it.

  I brush off the thought as I wipe some loose hairs away from my face and tell Joyce I’ll have what she’s having.

  ‘They’re called the Irish Tunes,’ Joyce shouts over the music, nodding in the direction of the band when we make our way back to the others with our drinks.

  ‘They’re great!’ I shout back. I tap my foot to the music and take a drink, then I get my cigarettes out, offer them round and light one for myself. I catch a glimpse of myself in a pane of glass as I take a puff and, feeling confident all of a sudden now that I’ve remembered how I look, I blow the smoke out in small clouds.

  We watch everyone dance. Someone Joyce knows comes and takes her out for a number, so I hold her drink while Maura and I watch. All the others are dancing with fellas too.

  When the set finishes, it’s my turn to get the drinks. I head to the bar on my own, brave now with the alcohol on me.

  ‘Hello,’ says a man’s voice from behind me.

  I pretend not to hear it and look busily ahead to get the bartender’s attention.

  ‘Hello,’ he says again. He taps my arm.

  I turn round and have to lift my head up, because the man speaking to me is more than a head over me. He has wide shoulders and is wearing a shirt open at the collar. He has a big, open kind of face, with blue-grey eyes and a dimple in only one of his cheeks, now that he is smiling.

  ‘Would you like to dance?’ he says in an Irish accent that is soft, like he’s been to college.

  ‘I’m just getting drinks,’ I manage.

  ‘When you’ve got your drinks.’ His dimple goes deeper.

  ‘Sure, all right,’ I say, conscious of sounding like a country girl. I turn back to the bar and the jitters in my chest put me on edge.

  He moves into a gap beside me and asks my name.

  ‘Josephine,’ I tell him.

  ‘I’m Michael,’ he says, holding out his hand in the cramped space to shake mine. ‘Lovely to meet you.’ He smiles and his dimple is back and his eyes sparkle.

  I remember fleetingly a little sister I had once who had a dimple. She died when she was very small, and we were prohibited from speaking about her ever again. There were so many things not spoken about in that house.

  ‘And you,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve seen you at the café,’ he says.

  My heart goes. I would have liked to say I worked in an office, or that I was looking for a job. I tell him it’s temporary and he tells me he is a navvy. What’s that? I ask, and he tells me it’s short for Navigational Engineer. Sounds posh, I tell him.

  I order the drinks and pay. The girls come to help me and I am both glad and regretful. I say goodbye and follow them.

  I don’t think he’ll seek me out, but he does, a few songs later. I don’t have the chance to ask how my lipstick is, or if my hair is in place. I flatten my navy skirt down with my free hand and he takes me by the other.

  It’s a quick song and he takes me round the dance floor, twisting me this way and that. It’s exhilarating and I let out a laugh. He spins me round. He gently tugs on my arm and I know to turn, he flicks his wrist and I know to go the other way. He is a puppet-master and I am his doll. He turns me round and round and, just when I think I’m going to lose my footing, he whips me back so I’m facing him. There is something about him that has my heart beating in my ears, and me picturing myself waiting for him to come home at the end of a long day, all tired and his hair and clothes scruffy from a day’s work. I would meet him at the door and throw my arms around his neck like it was the first time I saw him.

  We dance a second dance and every now and then I look up at him, until my shyness and his warm gaze force me to look away. Eventually I pluck up the courage to look him straight back in the eyes.

  You’re lovely, they say. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.

  I believe them, and my legs go heavy with the emotion of it all, as if I were dancing underwater.

  In bed, I relive it over and over. I am dancing with Michael, spinning round like a fairy, and the music is going and he is smiling away at me with his one dimple and his sparkling eyes.

  One second Michael is twirling me round, and the next I am across the water again, back home in Ireland. I’m lying in bed in my thin white nightie to my knees. It’s the night Sean was born. Mammy is in bed with the new baby and Daddy is in the front room celebrating with Bernadette’s father and Uncle Patrick.

  I am asleep and then I am awake. My eyes are open, but the room is black, there is just the sound of raspy breathing and the stink of whiskey and cigars. ‘Daddy?’ I whisper. He must have drunk too much and come into my room by mistake.

  Footsteps on the floor, coming towards me. A belt being unbuckled.

  ‘Daddy, is that you?’

  The pain sears through my right shoulder when he yanks me out of the bed by my arm. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. The cold floor cuts through my nightie. The sweet, sickly smell of whiskey makes me want to be sick, the quick short puffs from his round belly force the breath out of me. My mind flicks through the men in the front room. Bernadette’s daddy is skinny from illness; it’s Daddy and Uncle Patrick who have the bellies. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. The burning, like the poker straight from the fire, between my legs. The weight on top of me, so heavy it’s crushing me into the floor and all the way down to hell.

  I want to scream, the way Mammy did yesterday, when Sean and his dead little twin sister were coming and we weren’t allowed in the house but could hear it all through the window, but it’s as if Daddy is chiselling my teeth again. I can’t form the sounds with my tongue. I want to scream for Mammy, for her to fling open the door and let light into the room and put a stop to this pain. I want to see who is doing this to me. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for our sinners, now and at the hour of our death. My legs wide open, my nightie high, my eyes squeezed tight shut. God forgive me. Amen.

  JOSEPHINE

  9TH AUGUST 1980

  I look out for him every day, desperate to see him and dreading it at the same time. Each day that passes confirms it was nothing, and I am disgusted at how pathetic I am. What a preposterous idea that
a young, handsome, educated man like that would be interested in a girl like me.

  Joyce and Maura keep on at me, saying your man will be in any day now. I tell them to stop, but they think it’s gas altogether.

  I try to concentrate on work and making the flat homely. I clean it top to bottom and buy flowers to put in a vase and a picture of the London skyline for the sitting room. In desperate moments, I wonder if I shouldn’t just join a nunnery and be done with it. I could shut myself away from the world and repent for the rest of my life.

  ‘I’m going to join the nunnery,’ I tell the girls one night when we’re sitting in the kitchen, drinking. Joyce has cleared out the small room that was full of junk and Maura moved in a couple of weeks after me. Since then, we’ve been partying in the kitchen almost every night.

  They burst into fits of laughter like it’s the funniest thing they ever heard.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I say. ‘I’m considering it.’ There is something terrible about being tortured by the absence of someone you don’t know, but have fallen madly for, knowing full well they will never want you, I tell them.

  ‘Sure, Jesus, what are you on about, woman?’ Maura says, getting up and going to put on some music.

  ‘No one will ever want me.’ My body is so heavy it has me slouched over the table. I go swaying to the toilet and hit the wall with my shoulder.

  When I come back, Joyce points out that I’ve danced with several men every Friday and Saturday night for the last three weeks.

  ‘That’s because they want a dance.’ I top up our glasses with a splash of brandy and ice. ‘They don’t know me. Nobody knows me.’ And then it occurs to me that what they wanted was a leg-over, and they saw me coming.

  ‘You’re raving, woman,’ says Joyce, and they cackle loud the way they do after some drink. ‘They’re all after you.’

  ‘They’re after you.’ I point at her. ‘And you.’ I point at Maura with my finger. ‘Because ye are both beautiful, inside and out.’

  My head is going to split in two. It’s hot and my stomach clenches, pushing up cloudy yellow bile. The nuns would love this: me, self-purging. Sister Mary, with her habit and her rosary beads draped over her skinny knuckles. How she would dig them into my back if she saw me now.

  It’s Sunday and for the first time I’m on my own. I decide I’ll go to Mass; that it’ll be the best place for me. I get dressed into my good clothes and do my face to make myself look decent.

  The smell of incense hits me at the entrance. I dip my fingers into the font and bless myself; the holy water is cold and I shiver when it touches my forehead.

  I walk up the side of the church, slowly and carefully so as not to make a noise, but each step creates a loud tap that bounces off the walls. The two people kneeling up ahead turn to look at me and I quickly mock-kneel at the end of a pew and bless myself, before kneeling to say the ‘Our Father’ and nine ‘Hail Marys’. I shut my eyes tight and mutter the words under my breath, skipping over them, leaving their ends unfinished, I know them so well.

  My head is reeling with holy words and the guilt I suffer the day after a few drinks. I think of Granny and Bernadette and their letters I’ve saved under my bed, and I think of Mammy and Daddy, who haven’t said a word about my letters or the money I send. I try not to hope, but every time there’s an envelope on the mat and it’s not her writing on it, I hate them a little bit more.

  Father Francis comes out from the room behind the altar and walks down the steps to the confessional box. Myself and the other two people move nearer to the box; one of them goes inside, and myself and a haggard-looking man sit on a pew nearby.

  A good half-hour later it’s my turn; I go into the box and kneel facing the grille. ‘Hello, Father Francis,’ I say. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

  ‘Tell me, child,’ he says. It’s always the same rigmarole. The nuns prepared us for our first confession and told us all the lines and how they went. We had to think of our sins before we went into the room, where the priest was sitting on a chair and you had to sit down and face him. I told him the same thing we all agreed to say in class: that I had said bad words, I’d had bad thoughts about my brothers and sister, I had talked back to my mammy.

  ‘How long since your last confession?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he says.

  ‘I have bad thoughts, Father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dark thoughts.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I wish ill on people.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they deserve it, Father.’

  ‘That is not for you to decide, my child,’ he says.

  ‘No, Father,’ I say. ‘I have troubled thoughts.’

  ‘Lots of us do,’ he says. ‘What are your troubled thoughts, my dear?’

  Waiting outside has built it all up and I’m shaking with nerves and anger. I start to cry. ‘I worry that I’m not good enough.’ I want to join the nuns, Father. I will myself to say it.

  He waits quietly for me to say more.

  ‘And that I don’t deserve happiness.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Seven weeks.’

  ‘Give yourself time – it’s a big thing for a young girl like yourself to leave home and come to a new place where you know no one.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘You haven’t come to arrange the flowers. Maybe it would be good for you, Josephine.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Were you praying when I came in?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nine “Hail Marys” and an “Our Father”.’

  ‘That’ll be all for today, then.’

  ‘Okay, Father, thank you.’

  ‘God bless, my child.’

  I go out and sit back where I was, and say the Act of Contrition. The painted angels overhead have strange smiles that make them look old and evil. On my way out, I fill a small plastic lemonade bottle with holy water to take home.

  The girls come back in the afternoon from their mad antics with two lads from last night, and they’re raring to go all over again. We get dolled up and head down to O’Conner’s at the end of the road. There’s a band on and everyone is happy and drinking and smoking, and soon I’ve forgotten my desperation and I’m laughing and listening to them tell their stories, holding my cigarette high in the air with my arms crossed. Everyone’s eyes are glassy with drink and I know mine are, too.

  I’m watching the band through the crowd when I see him leaning on the bar. I swing round so he doesn’t see me, and when Joyce asks what’s wrong I tell her it’s nothing.

  ‘Why don’t we head back and put on a few records?’ I tell them, and they love the idea.

  On our way back to the flat, everyone is happy and singing, delighted to keep the party going.

  My heart is thumping with the relief. Thank God I didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of watching him with a girl, in front of everyone.

  *

  A few days later I am walking home, looking at the paving stones as I walk, careful not to stand on the cracks because that would mean bad luck. I stop at the lights and there he is, standing on the other side of the road. I go to turn round, but the lights change and he has already seen me, so I cross the road, focusing straight ahead as if I hadn’t seen him.

  He waits for me, so that when I reach the other side he is standing in front of me.

  ‘Hello, how are ya?’ I say in the way everyone does at home, which means you don’t have to stop or answer.

  ‘Hello, Josephine,’ he says. He is in a T-shirt and shorts speckled with splashes of white paint and black drops of tar. His hair is falling into his eyes, which are pink, with irritation or maybe tiredness. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Grand,’ I say.

  ‘You left the pub early the other night.’

  My face burns. I think I might cry.

  ‘I�
�m just on my way home,’ he says.

  I nod. He looks lovely, with his pink eyes and his messy blond hair. He smells of tarmac, when it’s been burning in the sun and, if you stepped on it, you’d leave a footprint. It stinks and the smell makes me high. If only I could say something, but the whole of me has gone numb.

  ‘Listen, would you like to meet later for some dinner?’ he says.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I tell him. ‘But there’s no need.’

  ‘Have you got plans?’

  I tell him I haven’t.

  ‘Well then, I’ll take you to my favourite spot.’

  ‘Really, there’s no need.’

  ‘Sure, we’ve all got to eat,’ he says, chuckling. And he says he’ll meet me at the same corner at seven o’clock.

  I nod and continue the walk home. I am sick with delight and anxiety.

  CLARE

  12TH JULY 1997

  ‘Clare! Wake up, Clare! Mummy! Mummy! Clare’s gone asleep!’ Thomas screams. He runs upstairs, on his hands and feet to go quicker, and I can hear his pitter-patter and I want to shout, ‘Thomas, don’t go; don’t go, Thomas, she’s dead’, but I can’t speak. I’m there but I’m not; I can see the round panel of coloured glass in the front door and the walls either side, but even though I know there are colours in the glass, they don’t have colour now. Maybe we’ve all gone to heaven. Maybe this is it. I can see the white hairs of Father Feathers shining in the sun, an angel come to take us away. I hope he doesn’t take Thomas. He’s so lovely and happy, he should get more time on earth. It’s okay to take Mummy because she’s not happy here, and I don’t mind going with her, because I don’t want her to be on her own, because I love her all the way from Australia to here and back. I’ll be able to watch Daddy and Thomas from the clouds anyway, won’t I?

  Thomas’s scream is loud, short and sharp, like the pain of a plaster being ripped off. I try to breathe properly – in and out, pause, in and out, pause – but it just makes me worse and my chest goes faster. I told you not to go, Thomas! I want to shout at him and slap him on the bottom, the way Mummy does. He comes down the stairs, past me, down the hallway and into the sitting room. He’s going to watch cartoons. I try to open my eyes, but I can’t tell if they’re open or not because everything is grey.