by Doreen Finn
‘If this was the South,’ Chris was saying, gesturing with his glass, ‘we wouldn’t be able to talk with all the noise from the yard. Crickets, mosquitoes, frogs. Cicadas. They make a noise at night that you wouldn’t believe.’ I thought of Daniel and how much he would love that.
Gemma murmured something I didn’t catch. Chris laughed, a hearty man-laugh, head thrown back, a slap to his thigh.
Where was Judith while her husband was sitting with my mother? Was she sleeping? Or reading one of her cookery books from the great pile stacked in the tiny kitchen?
Judith was nice. She was kind. She knew what a quetzal was. She knew all about food. Green chilli cheeseburgers, tortillas, beef jerky. None of these things had ever entered my lexicon before meeting Judith. I’d overheard her telling Sarah that she had asked her sister to send her a box of green chillies.
‘Isn’t Chile a country?’ I had asked.
‘Oh Megan, you’re just the cutest,’ Judith had said, her hand cupping my chin. ‘Chilli is also a vegetable. Well, technically it’s a fruit, but you know what I mean. Chilli is a dish. So, a chilli can become chilli, but chilli can never become a chilli. Get it?’ Judith laughed at her own joke. I didn’t get it and neither did Sarah, by the blank look on her face, but we both smiled and made pleasing sounds in agreement. Beth had rolled her eyes.
Judith had told me about New Mexico too. It was landlocked, but it had lots of white sand. White sand but no beaches. The capital was Santa Fe, which meant holy faith but sounded much nicer. The state flower was the yucca flower, white and bell-shaped. Best of all, New Mexico was where Georgia O’Keeffe did a lot of her painting and I loved Georgia O’Keeffe. So did Gemma. She had a book of her pictures in the attic, and sometimes I liked to leaf through it. The paintings were unlike most of the art that Gemma liked, all pale colours and skulls, barren landscapes and white skies. Judith brought newness and I liked her for it.
Chris shifted his deckchair again, angling it so that he was facing my mother slightly more. Gemma sat with one hand in her lap, the other holding her glass. Occasionally, her fingers played with the end of her braid.
‘You have beautiful hair,’ Chris said.
Gemma smiled, looked down.
‘You have. I mean it.’ He laughed. ‘You’re very different to what I’d expected Irish girls to look like.’
‘Hardly a girl,’ Gemma replied.
‘You know what I mean. Girl, young woman.’ He shrugged. How like him Beth was, with that one gesture.
‘I’m not far off thirty. Not exactly what you’d call a young one.’ Gemma laughed softly. ‘I also have a child.’
‘And she’s a lovely kid.’ Chris reached to fill Gemma’s wine glass, but the bottle was empty. ‘I’ll get another one of these.’
Gemma covered her glass with the palm of her hand. ‘No, not for me. I have to get up in the morning.’
‘You sure?’
‘Very.’
‘Okay, I won’t have any more either.’ A pause. ‘You’re very insistent about going to bed, aren’t you?’ But his tone was light and there was no meanness in the words.
Pink Floyd petered out and the night sounds rushed to fill the gap in the music’s wake. A distant dog barking. The snuffle of sleeping pigs over the back wall. A single car out on the main road, swishing through the darkness. A sleepy chirrup from a blackbird, hidden deep in a tree.
‘When I was a kid, back home, we used to go out at night in the summers. Too hot to sleep, mostly, so we’d meet, just my brothers and our neighbours, and we’d go swimming.’ Chris stretched his legs out, settled himself further into his chair. The creak of wood and canvas. ‘Nothing like it. Swimming in the cold creek on those nights when you think you’re going to just melt if you stay in bed.’
I knew all this. Night swimming. Just what Gemma and Chris were doing now, except there was no river to jump into, just the back garden, the darkness and their sleeping families who couldn’t disturb them.
My eyelids drooped from tiredness. Pins and needles jabbed my left foot. I moved it and the step I was sitting on squeaked. It wasn’t much, but in the hush of the night garden it was like a gunshot. I froze. Gemma put her glass down slowly.
‘Megan?’
Her voice was soft, but I was taking no chances. I eased myself onto my hands and feet, still hidden by the bougainvillea. Scrambling, I made it to the kitchen and bolted back to my room. Breathing hard, I leaned out of my window, the sash open far enough to allow me to hang out. Gemma hadn’t followed me up. She was still below, but I heard her say goodnight to Chris, heard the distant chink of her glass being put down on the patio. Chris’s voice was a rumble and then there was silence.
17
Beth laughed at something I said, sat up and shook her hair free of its band. The three-quarter moon was spectral that night and Beth’s hair was the colour of raw linen in the inky darkness. It was spread over her shoulders, like pale silk scarves. Her pyjamas were white and loose, embroidered with flowers on the small square pockets, and she looked impossibly sophisticated. Chris had brought her the pyjamas from Thailand. Some lecture he gave, she shrugged. Although who wants to listen to him talk about books in Thailand is beyond me, she added. He’s so boring at times. Even my mom says so. She relit the cigarette she was holding, inhaled, and blew the smoke from her nose.
Beth had thrown stones at my window an hour or so earlier, waking me with a start. Outside, she had stood in her white pyjamas, like a ghost or an angel. Come out, she’d whispered. Come on. It’s wonderful.
‘You look like a dragon,’ I said as she blew another stream of smoke through her nose.
She reached the lit cigarette towards me, but I shook my head.
‘Go on. How can you know if you won’t try it?’
‘I don’t want to. It’s horrible.’
I thought of the man who was caretaker in my school, his fingers permanently stained yellow. He walked around the school grounds, a cigarette clamped between his second and third fingers, an inch of ash wobbling at the end. My teacher in Infants smoked. She used to get us to put our heads down, then we could hear the flare of a match, the hiss of the first pull on the cigarette.
‘Suit yourself,’ Beth said as she lit another cigarette from the glowing stub of the one I had refused. It was a pinprick of light and it moved as Beth gestured.
We were night swimming. It wasn’t planned, because I hadn’t wanted to do it, to night swim. Beth said that she knew that if she’d asked me earlier I would have refused. ‘I don’t know why you’re so against going outside at night, Megan,’ she’d said. ‘It’s not like anything’s going to happen. It’s just fun to do something that the grown-ups know nothing about.’
Lying in bed earlier, I’d wondered about my reluctance to go outside at night. Ever mindful of not upsetting Sarah or Gemma, I preferred to do as I was told. And yet. They wouldn’t know. Even if they did, what really would they do? Stevie’s face had floated into view, his mocking smile, the taunt of his words. I wasn’t afraid of getting into trouble, but I didn’t want to be the cause of any worry. That was really what it amounted to. I needed to protect my mother, not cause her anguish. She only had me. How could I ease things for her if she knew I was out and about when everyone else was asleep?
And yet when the first of Beth’s pebbles clinked off my window, and the second one skittered across the floor, I sat up, clasped my hands around my knees. Shadows cloaked the room, the light falling through the open window just enough to highlight the shapes. Wardrobe. Beside table. Bookshelf. Beth’s voice whispering my name, barely audible.
What was I afraid of, really? The night was another world, unknown, but not unknowable. My curiosity, dormant until now, had been piqued. What could go wrong?
The floor had been cool under my bare feet. I took care on the stairs, the carpet absorbing my footfall. Outside, the night air was balmy, the fierce heat abated.
‘Tell me about your father,’ Beth said now. She lit a match
and let it burn to the end, then did the same with another. She avoided my face, made her voice sound casual, but I knew she was curious, madly curious.
I rolled over onto my stomach, the grass dry and itchy under my skin. The reservoirs were low, the water levels dropping further each day; they would be completely dry if it didn’t rain soon. Even the canal levels had plunged, I’d heard, though we hadn’t been down to the canal since that day we’d watched the boys diving in.
Beth nudged me. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing.’ I shifted position. Tiredness weighed my limbs down, but it was a pleasant, dreamy kind of tiredness, cushioned by the knowledge that my bed was within easy reach. ‘The canal. Sarah said it’s got low. Because of no rain.’
‘We need to go down there again. Go swimming.’ She sat up straight. ‘Hey! Why don’t we go some night? Wouldn’t that be cool? Wouldn’t it?’
Night swimming in the garden was one thing, but actual swimming at night, in the canal, far from home, would be impossible. But I didn’t want Beth to say I was a baby, so I said nothing.
Beth prodded me with her toe. ‘So anyway, tell me about your father.’ Her nails were painted red. ‘You never say anything about him.’
It was my job to protect Gemma. Discussing my father, discussing Felipe, was not something I did. Imagining him was one thing. In my head, I could do whatever I wanted, including compiling a list of things I knew about him. For example: his name was Felipe. He was twenty-one when he met my mother, who had only been eighteen at the time. He was born in Sucre, but moved to La Paz when he was fifteen because his father – my grandfather – got a job in the university, lecturing in politics. Felipe was political, but mostly he was artistic, and photography was what he wanted to do. After two years in an art school in La Paz, he came to Dublin for a year, and that’s when he’d met Gemma.
People say that the unrest over the tin mines was confined to a small number of people, disrupters, but it was more than that. My grandfather published an article criticising the military in a national newspaper, right after the Noche De San Juan , when miners and their families were shot by the president’s soldiers.
Felipe’s parents were dragged from their house during dinner one evening and never seen again. Felipe went back to Bolivia as soon as he could. He was alive for a while at least, because he took photos and somehow got them to the newspapers. But the photography stopped, and with it the correspondence.
Gemma never heard from him again.
Felipe was Bolivian and he was disappeared. And he was my father.
‘I don’t know anything.’
‘But how?’
I was growing tired of her questions. ‘I don’t know anything because I don’t know anything. All right? Now stop asking me. I don’t know him.’
‘So ask your mother,’ Beth demanded, challenging me.
I sat up. ‘Why? Why do you care?’
Beth dragged a clump of dry, faded grass from the ground. ‘I’m just interested.’
Too many mountains needed to be climbed in order to uncover everything about him and I didn’t have the words to approach Gemma, to ask her straight out. What about my father? It would never happen.
‘It’s easy for you,’ I told Beth, who had lain down beside me on the hard ground. Our shoulders touched, our faces tilted towards the carbon paper sky. ‘You have your father. He’s with you, in your house. You see him and you know him.’
Felipe, wherever he was, was a stranger. A mystery. His face was shrouded by secrets and time, his features visible only in the line drawings Gemma had done of him. I looked like Gemma, so I couldn’t say I resembled him. I had her eyes, her skin. Our mouths were the same. Only our hair differed.
‘My father’s cool,’ Beth said. ‘We thought at one point, my mom and I, that he’d leave for good, and that pretty much sucked. Then he stayed and it’s fine, but it’s different too.’
‘Why’s it different?’
‘Oh, you know. It’s like I suppose we think that he might leave anyway. My mom doesn’t want to talk about it. She just acts like nothing ever happened and everything’s fine. Then she drinks a lot of wine and I know it’s not all fine. But I don’t know what to say to her, so I just leave it.’ Beth reached for the pack of cigarettes again, took one out, but she didn’t light it. She just toyed with it, twirling it between her fingers.
Her eyes lifted and latched onto mine. ‘You’d never steal cigarettes, would you, Megan? You’re such a good girl and you do everything you’re told to do. Don’t you? Megan?’ She tugged at my pyjamas.
I pulled away from her and she flopped down on the grass again.
For a few moments, we were silent. Around us, the night was alive with muted garden sounds. A rustle in leaves. The whine of an insect. Somewhere nearby, a door swung on a rusty hinge, back and forth, back and forth.
‘I wish I had a sister. Don’t you?’
Sometimes I did. It would be nice to have someone else around, someone else to share things with, to talk to. But mostly I didn’t think about it. What you don’t have, you don’t miss, Sarah liked to say.
‘We can be sort-of sisters, can’t we?’ Beth turned to face me. The skin on her nose was beginning to peel. Her eyes were green, the same colour as Chris’s. They were alike, Beth and Chris. The hair, the eyes, the shrugs.
‘I suppose.’
‘We could do that blood brothers thing, except it’d be blood sisters. You know, you prick your fingers and rub your blood together. We could do that.’
I was flattered, to be honest, that this tall American girl wanted to be my blood sister. Taking my lack of a no for agreement, Beth disappeared indoors, then returned almost immediately. ‘Look!’ A pin, tiny and sharp, was pinched between her forefinger and thumb. ‘We can do it now.’
‘It’s too dark,’ I said, stalling for time because I really didn’t want anyone pricking my finger.
Beth retrieved the jam jar from the patio, lit the candle inside. It sputtered momentarily, then garnered strength. ‘Hold up your finger.’
Reluctantly, I did as I was told. The prick was infinitesimal, nothing, and the resulting molecule of blood was a tiny bead on my skin. Beth did her finger too, and we touched the pads of our forefingers together.
‘Blood sisters,’ Beth whispered.
‘Blood sisters,’ I repeated, then burst out laughing.
It seemed so ridiculous, pledging ourselves on the withered grass, on that hot night, the moon waxing above us. Maybe it was the heatwave that was making us crazy. Or maybe it was something more, a need for friendship, someone to talk to.
The white candle stub guttered in the jar between us. Our families slept behind the red-bricked walls of the house, encased in their own private slumbers, and we, blood sisters now, lay on our backs and contemplated the vastness of the black sky above us.
18
The canal water was murky, peaty. Pond weed floated on the surface. The levels had fallen, but not much. It was still deep enough to swim in, and there were boys jumping in, whooping like gibbons as they flew through the air. Their shouts carried along the still, silent canal as it snaked its way down towards the Grand Canal Dock. A wooden barge was moored further up, its red and green paint flaking. A man sat on deck on a fold-out chair, a book in his hand. He paid the boys no heed, seemed not to hear their shouts as they dived off the lock and into the brackish water.
‘I want to swim,’ said Beth, removing her sandals and slipping her feet into the water. ‘It’s so hot.’
Stevie pulled his T-shirt over his head and dived into the water.
‘Wait for me,’ Beth laughed, pushing her shorts down. We both wore our swimsuits under our clothes, to make things easier.
Daniel and I stood up to our shoulders in the water, watching as Beth and Stevie swam to the wooden lock and hauled themselves onto the chipped wood. Water ran off their skin and they glistened in the midday sunlight that pooled everywhere, near-blinding. I shaded my eyes wi
th my hand. Stevie hollered as he jumped into the water, sending glittering drops in every direction. Beth followed quickly and swam over to where Stevie was treading water.
‘Come on!’ he shouted to Daniel and me. ‘Or are you too scared?’
Beth laughed and it infuriated me. I touched the point on my forefinger that she had pricked with the pin. Blood sisters. Except when Stevie was around and then no one else mattered. Beth’s hair was fanned out on the water around her, long and streamer-like. She flipped onto her back and used her hands like paddles to keep herself afloat.
‘Will we go over to them?’ Daniel asked.
So it was back to Daniel and me again, with Daniel looking to me for guidance and allowing me to take the lead.
‘I don’t care.’
He frowned at me. ‘Sorry. I won’t bother asking you anything again.’ He turned away, his attention grabbed by an insect that had landed near us on the water’s surface.