by Doreen Finn
‘I’m sure she will,’ Beth said, and took the proffered match.
‘That’ll be another six pence, so, on top of the six for the lollies. Anything for yourself, Megan? The paper, a pint of milk?’
‘No, thank you.’ I preferred to avoid conversation with the shopkeeper. She liked to ask after Sarah, always with a tilt to her head, as though bad news were expected.
‘How’s your granny?’ There it was, the expectant pose, hand on hip, head tilted ever so slightly to one side. She ran her fingers over her Pioneer pin.
Sarah hated the word granny. ‘She’s fine, thanks.’
‘She’s a great woman, all the same. It’s not easy for her.’
Beth said thank you and moved towards the door. I followed.
‘Tell her I said hello, now, won’t you?’
I mumbled something inconsequential while biting the top off my ice pop. It was so cold it hurt my front teeth.
‘What was she talking about?’ asked Beth as soon as we were outside. ‘What isn’t easy for your grandma?’
I shrugged. Mrs Brennan was only one of many women who felt my mother had ruined her life by having me, and that we had both dragged Sarah into our fallen lives. For that reason, Gemma was a source of conversation, most of it not good. There were things I wasn’t meant to know, things my mother kept from me. Girls without husbands were sent to homes and their babies were taken away. Sometimes the babies were sold to rich Americans, and the priests and nuns kept all the money and bought new things with it, candles and chalices and things. The girls were then slaves in the homes and in laundries. No one really knew about the laundries and that’s why they were behind high walls, so that no one could see the slaves and their shame. That’s what happened if you had a baby too young. You got what you deserved. Bringing shame on your family. Getting your comeuppance.
It didn’t make sense to me.
A priest had visited our house once, when I was an infant. Gemma told me the story last year. He knew someone, he said. Someone who wanted a child. Who could give a baby a good home. Two parents. Good people. Catholics. Gemma shouted at him to get out of her house. The priest pointed out that it was her mother’s house, not Gemma’s. Gemma stood up, with me in her arms, and said to the priest that if he didn’t leave that very minute she would ring the police. He insulted her then, called her a name. Jezebel. The priest was like the women who gossiped about my mother. A holy person who wasn’t good. That was why I didn’t go to Mass on Sundays, why none of us did. Sarah stood up for us. Her girls, she called us. My girls.
My mother had wanted me. She could have given me up, sent me away, gifted me to strangers. But she kept me, kept me close, and I was glad she had. So even when she looked sad, or if she was annoyed with me for not finishing my dinner, or being too slow with my homework, or not practising the piano, I held on to that little fact. My mother kept me. She loved me and she kept me. And it never failed to lift me.
‘Is it because your dad isn’t around?’ Beth licked a trail of melted ice pop from her hand. A red stain inked her skin, transferred itself to her tongue. ‘Hey, is my tongue red?’
‘Yes.’
She stuck it out at me and I laughed.
‘Is mine?’
‘Definitely! Anyway, is that about your dad?’
I frowned. ‘I suppose.’
‘Why does anyone care?’ Beth dropped the uneaten part of her ice pop in the bin that was attached to the bus stop. She then placed the Players meant for Judith between her lips, scraped the match off the wall beside it and lit the cigarette. Her movement was fluid, almost graceful. This was not Beth’s first time to light up.
‘It’s to do with sin. That’s what my teacher said.’ It was never very clear what the sin actually was, but it was something big. Something unforgivable. Adam and Eve in the garden. And because of that we were all poor children of Eve and spent our lives wailing in the Vale of Tears, wherever that was.
‘Who cares? My dad says that sin is all stupid anyway. He doesn’t even believe in God, but I’m not meant to know that.’
I pointed at the cigarette. ‘Won’t your mum kill you?’
Beth considered the glowing tip of the cigarette. ‘What, this? My mom doesn’t smoke! I only said it was for her so that woman would let me buy it.’ She nudged me. ‘Come on, race you.’
She took two quick drags, then threw the cigarette on the ground and took off down the street. Laughing, she turned back to me. ‘Last one’s a chicken.’
Where we were going I had no idea, but I ran after Beth. She didn’t care that I was a fatherless child, the half-orphan other mothers didn’t want their children playing with. Beth pushed my fatherlessness to the side, laughed at my mother’s sins. It made me light inside, dizzy almost. In some small way, it freed me.
She remained stubbornly ahead of me, her hair like yellow streamers on the hot air. We stopped intermittently, gasping for breath, before taking off again. The shops were a blur: the butcher’s, with its display of blood-reddened meat and the smell of iron that tightened the hot air; the draper’s, with the window covered in yellow cellophane to prevent the clothes inside fading. Another newsagents, where comics curled at the edges in the heat of day and rolls of newspapers were wedged into a metal display outside the door. We ran past the small Protestant church with its meeting house, a tiny park hidden from view behind a high stone wall. Gardens awash with flowers, bedsits filled with students and poor people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. The old railway bridge that they’d never got around to tearing down, despite the fact that the last train had travelled the tracks of the Harcourt Line back when Gemma was my age.
When we finally stopped, at the canal, I leaned forward, my hands on my knees. Sweat glued my T-shirt to my back. My mouth was paper-dry and I craved a drink of water. Before us, the water of the canal was dark and peaty. Boys queued on the wooden lock and took turns flinging themselves into the murky gloom. They wrapped their arms around their knees and dive-bombed, vying with each other to send the most water splashing in every direction. Their shouts bounced off the flat surface of the canal and hovered momentarily on the hot air before bursting, like bubbles, into nothing.
Beth dropped down on the bank and plunged her bare feet into the water. Her sandals lay where she had dropped them, a tangle of white straps and shiny silver buckles. ‘This is great!’ She reached up, twitched the hem of my shorts. ‘Come on, Megan. Sit down. Cool off.’
Sliding my trainers off, I slipped my toes into the water. A rush of cold. My feet clouded in the murk. Around us, the boys’ shouts echoed. The grass, sun-yellowed and scratchy, left textured indents on the palms of my hands. Beth lay back, propped on her elbows. Her arms were brown, slim, her shoulders filled with tension. Her hair spread itself like a shawl on the ground behind her. She reminded me of a cat, watching the boys, most of them older than she. She seemed ready to spring.
‘Can you swim?’
I was a so-so swimmer. Lessons were torture for me, rows of children hanging onto the bar, kicking and splashing, chlorine making my throat hurt and my eyes smart. Gemma had ended up teaching me; it was easier with her. She had held her arms out and I splashed my way over to her.
‘Can you?’
I nodded.
Beth kicked up water with her feet. ‘I love swimming. My dad taught me.’
I had yet to meet Chris. He was busy, Beth had said; something about papers and getting ready for conferences. He had left the business of unpacking to Judith. Beth turned to me. ‘My dad grew up in Georgia, where it’s really, really hot in the summer. Much hotter than anywhere and it gets so dusty that people have to shake their clothes out the window when they take them off. When my dad was young, he used to sneak out of the house at night and meet his friends to go swimming. There was a creek near his house and that’s where they all used to go.’
‘Swimming at night?’
She nodded and swung her eyes back to the water.
‘Night swimming. That’s what it’s called. Night swimming, when everyone else is asleep and no one knows you’re gone. You don’t even have to swim. Just being out at night, in secret, is enough.’
There wasn’t any chance that I could so much as open a door at night without either Sarah or Gemma hearing me and coming to investigate. Leave the house to go swimming? Or just to go outside? Impossible.
There was a swimming pool a few doors away from our house. It was empty, had been for years. The house was rented and the owners lived abroad. They had moved when Gemma was still in school, and no one really knew where they were. Daniel and I had tried to find some way of filling the pool the previous summer, but we realised we had no way of running a hose from my garden, which was closer than his, over the walls in between and into the pool itself. There was also a lot of cleaning to be done, because the pool was clogged with old leaves, clay, the general debris of an unkempt garden.
Beth nudged me. ‘We could try it some night. Here.’
I shook my head. ‘I couldn’t. I wouldn’t be allowed.’
Her laugh was a loud burst. ‘No one’s allowed. You’re not meant to be allowed. That’s why it’s done. You have to do things you’re not allowed do.’ She tossed her head. ‘Otherwise, what’s the point?’
I was dismissed, silenced, like the child I was. Those boys jumping off the lock didn’t look as though they cared about what their mothers thought, or even whether they were supposed to be in the canal in the first place. They just did it. Acted first, reflected later – if, in fact, they reflected at all. The heatwave was affecting them too. Surviving in this burning city meant disobeying orders. Who could blame them?
‘I can’t stay here long,’ I said, swinging my feet onto the parched grass of the bank. I reached for my shoes. Already I missed the cool of the water.
Beth broke her gaze from the boys to glance at me. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not allowed down here. I’ll be killed if I’m seen.’
‘What’s wrong with being here?’ She returned to observing the diving boys.
‘It’s too far. Too dangerous.’ Aware of how young I sounded, I tried another tack. ‘Someone drowned here when my mother was a child. A girl from her class.’
I’d caught Beth’s attention again. ‘Drowned? How?’
Details were not within my reach. ‘I think she fell. Tripped. I don’t know. But she drowned.’
I recalled Gemma’s voice when she told me about the child. Sally, her name was. Sally, who ran away from her mother and somehow managed to slip and fall into the canal. Gemma’s class had been given the day off school for her funeral, and they’d never been allowed to mention Sally in school again. She lingered, Gemma said, like a ghost. Reminding everyone of what happened when you didn’t do what you were told. But her name wasn’t spoken again.
The thrill of the ice pop, the freedom of running all the way to the canal, the surge of energy that stemmed from disobeying Sarah and Gemma had dispersed, and I was left with a cold feeling of guilt. ‘We have to go home,’ I said. The light was too strong in my eyes. Squinting made my head throb. The dead heat of day, the sun a fireball in the platinum sky. ‘Please. I’ll be in awful trouble if I’m seen.’ Had Sarah noticed I was gone? Maybe she was out looking for me, asking neighbours if they’d seen me. Gemma wouldn’t notice. She’d be in the attic till evening, but Sarah would know I was gone.
Sighing, Beth picked up her sandals and stood up. ‘I do this sort of thing all the time back home. I ride the subway, go to the park, take the bus uptown.’
‘What’s a subway?’
‘It’s like this train that goes all over the city, mostly underground, and it’s all dark outside the windows, even when the sun is shining. It’s very cool. Everyone uses it.’
‘I don’t go off on my own around town. I’m not allowed.’
‘I’m not either. But I do it anyway.’
‘But what do you tell your mother?’ I thought of Judith, her arms claiming her daughter. A shadow of anxiety on her face.
Beth shook her head. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? But what if she sees you?’
She laughed, another sudden shout of sound. ‘Sees me where? It’s New York City. You don’t see people you know. Ever.’ She turned her gaze once more to the whooping boys. ‘That’s what I like best about it.’
New York was familiar in the way that famous cities are – from books, from photos of skyscrapers and snatches of song – but I had no means of imagining a city so huge, so unknowable that it was possible to travel all day by bus and train without meeting someone you knew. I wanted to ask Beth more, hear about solo trips on public transport, but I knew Sarah and if she thought I’d strayed further than the shop, there’d be trouble for sure. I touched her arm. ‘We should go now.’
Beth rolled her eyes, dragged on her sandals. I thought we’d race back home again, but her mood had changed, become quieter, and she resisted my efforts to hurry our journey along.
It seemed to take all afternoon, that walk home. The heat hindered our progress, slowed us. I needed a drink, badly. The ice-pop wrapper crinkled in the pocket of my shorts. My shoelace repeatedly came undone and turned grey from being trodden on. I pulled leaves from hedges, retied my ponytail as Beth stopped to stroke three dogs. The afternoon smelled of wilting flowers, dry leaves and the heat that came off the road. Tar melted visibly in the sunlight.
Sarah was in the front garden, talking over the hedge to Daniel’s mother. She smiled when we turned onto the drive.
‘There you are! I was wondering where you were.’
Beth spoke before I could fumble for something to say. ‘We just went for ice cream and then Megan showed me around a bit.’
‘Good girl,’ Sarah said to me.
That was it? I’d been gone ages, hours possibly, and she believed Beth’s lie? I cast around, looking to catch Beth’s eye, but she had sloped away and was ringing the bell to the garden flat. It shrilled in the sudden lull. I heard Judith greet her daughter, close the door softly.
‘Megan, your nana was telling me all about your new friend.’ Daniel’s mother beamed at me from across the hedge. Mrs Sullivan. She always referred to Sarah as my nana, even though I’d never called her anything but Sarah. Mrs Sullivan had her own name too. Bridget. Named after a saint from over a thousand years ago, who’d since become the patron saint of babies and children of parents who weren’t married. Maybe that was why Mrs Sullivan was so good and kind to me, and to Gemma. Mrs Sullivan was devoted to her religion, but even though her house was full of statues and holy pictures, and even though she wanted Daniel to be a priest, her kindness shone through it all. Mrs Sullivan wore headscarves and went to Mass every day. She subscribed to missionary magazines and sent money to a priest in Africa. Father Bob. She had never met him, but spoke of him as though he were a friend. Father Bob wrote letters of thanks, which were pinned to the wall near the statues Mrs Sullivan prayed to each day. I was very fond of her.
Gemma laughed at her, said how ridiculous her devotion was. As though God would give Mrs Sullivan preferential treatment. Gemma liked to say things like that sometimes. Sarah always shushed her, told her not to say anything unless it was something good. Gemma laughed at that too, but not in a good way. When she laughed at religious people, it was anger-tinged, broken, sad. Nuts, she called them. Religious nuts. Daniel’s father hadn’t been religious. After he forgot to come home, Mrs Sullivan didn’t allow anyone to mention him. Daniel said it was because she was too sad. I wasn’t supposed to know that Mrs Sullivan had inherited money from her parents, which is why she didn’t have to make curtains like Sarah, or paint cards like Gemma. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but Sarah said that Mrs Sullivan lived frugally, so she could survive very nicely. The house had belonged to her mother’s family, so there was no chance of himself coming back to take it. Whenever a man was referred to as himself, it wasn’t a good thing, I’d noticed. I see himself is out agai
n. Himself is drunk again. Himself thinks he’s above taking his children to the park. That sort of thing, the things women said to each other when little ears weren’t meant to be listening.
I tugged at a leaf in the hedge. ‘Is Daniel coming out?’ A dragon-fly darted between us, an iridescent flash of blue. I remembered how thirsty I was.
‘Later. He’s doing his reading.’
I couldn’t understand it. School had finished for the summer, but Daniel was kept indoors to practise reading every afternoon. He read from a book about the saints. Daniel didn’t want to be a priest, but his mother wanted it. She liked to push his long fringe off his forehead and kiss him. You’ll be a great priest, my love, she would say. They’ll be lucky to have you.
Daniel had no intention of being a priest. I knew that, but he didn’t want to upset his mother, so he played along. Daniel was going to be a pilot. Or an animal scientist. I was the only one who knew that. He told me in secret one day, as we filled a sticker book with pictures of planes. Daniel knew all the airlines, could recite them one by one. Alitalia, Lufthansa, Cathay Pacific. Iberia, Sabena, KLM, Delta. Pan Am, United, Qantas. There were so many of them, the names exciting and unknown. We found their countries on the map in my grandfather’s big atlas. Huge blue oceans, candy-coloured countries, vast stretches of land. Daniel was going to fly over all of them. He also kept insects in jars, wrote about them in his notebook and cried if any of them died. He read about the saints’ lives because it made his mother happy. He was her second boy, her youngest and favourite child. He had a brother who was thirteen, and twin sisters who were ten, but Daniel was the one his mother reached for first.
My head ached from the sun. ‘I need a drink of water,’ I said to Sarah. A few houses up, a dog barked, but it was a defeated sound, a protest more than anything aggressive. The dog sounded like I felt: hot, tired, parched.
‘You must be roasting out here,’ Mrs Sullivan said. A heavy silver crucifix sat on a chain around her neck. She zipped it from side to side. ‘It’s too hot.’