by Finn Óg
“I’m disappointed with a lot of things,” Sinead said. “I just don’t know what to make of it.” She started to move again but Áine refused to let their dialogue re-enter the deep freeze.
“What you said was right, you know.”
“What?”
“What you wrote in response.”
“You read it?” Sinead turned to find her sister swivelled towards her.
“Of course I fucking read it. You haven’t spoken to me for four weeks. You may not realise it, Sinead, but I love you. You are all I have and maybe all I’ll ever have, and he needed to hear that from you.”
“No, that was just anger – it was over the top. I had a bad day and I was just getting it out.”
“You could have spoken to me. We had a deal after last time.”
“Don’t!” Sinead held up her hand. “I’m not going there, not now.”
“I thought you were going there over these past few weeks, sis. I have been worried out of my fucking mind that you were going there, and you wouldn’t talk to me. So enough’s enough.”
Sinead looked at the tears welling in her twin’s eyes and suddenly realised what she’d done.
“No!” she panted.
Áine stared hard at her.
“No, Áine. This is not the time for tough love. You didn’t – tell me you didn’t?”
Áine crossed her arms but her eyes showed how unsure of herself she was. Sinead knew she had not expected to be rumbled.
Sinead tore for the door, pushed the elevator button repeatedly and hopped gently waiting for it to arrive. She slipped in before the doors fully opened and slammed her palm against the -1 button. Áine arrived just as the doors were closing and stepped in, standing like a lamped hare in the corner of the mirrored box. There was nowhere to look where Sinead couldn’t see her sister wrangling with what to say by way of justification, so she stared at her bare feet.
The door opened and Sinead stepped out and ran past parked cars to the enclosure behind which the bins were stored. At the front of the bay Sinead lifted the lid of the one with their number melted onto the face of it. On the underside was a torn triangular remnant of parcel tape where something had been ripped from it.
She turned to Áine, who held up her hands. “He had to know. You’ve been too, like, permissive or something – too backwards!”
“You. Complete. Bitch,” was all Sinead could say. She walked slow and stunned to the lift, returned to the apartment, packed a case, and left.
11
Sinead gave no mercy. Her day couldn’t get any worse, so she watched as the dinner lady left the stone steps, crunched along the pebbled path and climbed into the taxi, glaring back at her as the car pulled off.
Her own case hammered and thumped as she dragged it up the steps, and Sinead decided to make good out of bad, seeking out the Mother Superior.
“I just want to let you know that with the place full, I’ll be staying here to keep a better eye on things. I understand that with the lockdown it was getting a bit out of hand, so I’ll be in the office at night, and any more issues just let me know. I’ll make sure they are dealt with immediately this time.”
The nun looked at her searchingly, almost with suspicion, then softened a little. “I’m sure there is no need to take you from your home, but if that is what you think is best, that’s up to you.”
The other women milled around and chatted, breaking for the door for smoke breaks on occasion. Sinead hid her case behind an old bookshelf, looked around the room and decided she would make the best of living in this dreary office for the next few weeks. Then she would find a place, somewhere, ignoring the fact that she paid herself next to nothing. Dublin’s rents had been shoved beyond the reach of ordinary humans thanks to Airbnb, but perhaps the lockdown absence of tourists would allow some space for negotiation, she thought.
Áine looked at the phone belonging to the woman who had run from the convent. She handled it cautiously, making a long-overdue decision to wipe it with alcohol sanitiser; bottles of which Sinead had deposited all round the place. Despite rarely leaving the apartment, the Covid warnings were at long last finding their way into her consciousness, and she had a sudden urge to clean the face of the handset, given the muck stored within.
A debate was raging in her head: second contact to clear the air, or let the hare sit and hope for the best? She knew she had gone way too far this time in Sinead’s eyes. She was as confident that what she had done had been for the right reasons as she was unsure that Sinead would forgive her within the calendar year. But there was more to it than that. Áine couldn’t sit back and watch the degradation of her other half indefinitely. She knew her sister’s damage was deep. Nobody knew the whole story, but nobody knew it better than Áine. It was Áine who had found her, and Áine who had the greatest investment in her repair – until Sam bloody Ireland had shown up with hope and promise and uncertainty and danger. Always with that man came ladles of danger.
She’d hated him initially, for the precarious position in which he’d placed her twin. That had lasted for a while, until Sinead had explained that their first contact had come about as a result of him helping her, and that he had, in fact, saved her from an attack. That made it hard for her to maintain her loathing, and Sinead had made it more difficult by repeatedly engaging his help. Áine knew that in the following months and years she and Sinead had become complicit in his reclusiveness, aiding and abetting it. It had happened again and again – with Sinead clinging to hope without expressing it, that her life might change to become a part of something that remained, somehow, always just out of reach.
Áine had always denied that she any regard for Sam; she found it easier to manage that way, but she knew it wasn’t true. Had he been different – had he the ability to let Sinead be a part of his life instead of using her as a babysitter and leading her to the point of expectation before evaporating into the air, Áine might have been content. Sinead’s happiness would bring her happiness, if loneliness. Maybe then Áine would get on with her own future, but not until she was sure that Sinead could manage, again, without her. Too much had happened, too much to allow herself to think about.
Áine took the phone and wandered aimlessly outside, making her way through the city’s southside. She passed The Irish Times building – all but empty. There was little traffic noise save for the odd reckless hurtle of a long-wheelbase Ford delivery van, no doubt ferrying an Amazon package the size of an envelope.
She went up Merrion Street, where art would normally be displayed on the wrought-iron railings, past the Dáil, where a government was yet to be formed. She was surprised to find the park open and wandered past the memorial where she stared for a while at Oscar Wilde. She read his quotes that people had written on the pillars opposite his lounging.
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
Áine stared at that for a long time and tried to take from it some kind of affirmation that she had been right to send the letter.
Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.
To which she found herself crying, silently, for a sister she was terrified of losing, for a relationship she desperately wanted her twin to obtain.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Áine closed her eyes and asked that she might be forgiven. She wanted – more than anything in that moment, for Sinead to annoy her through forgiveness, yet she would not ask for that. She lifted the phone, inputted the code she had cracked and changed the settings. She waited for a moment to allow it to find a wireless connection, then sent a message to Daniel Joseph. Plan complete, she dropped the phone into a rubbish bin and took out her own handset: I’ve done the only thing I can to make this right. I’ve explained that I sent your letter – that you didn’t intend to. I don’t know what else I can do.
She tapped the send circle and walked the slow, lonely road back to the apartment.
&nb
sp; 12
Sinead stared at the wall. It was easy to ignore the flutter of the notes she’d Blue-Tacked to it. Beneath them a little three-bar burner agitated the papers as it vainly attempted to heat the office. Her hideaway was a twentieth-century afterthought, bolted on but never connected to the clanking pipes of the convent.
She knew things were bad when the nuns showed signs of worry about her. There was no real way to define a nun. It had taken her a long time to get her head around the fact that they were just people, like anyone else, subject to the same proclivities and weaknesses of any woman or man. Their uniform gave them structure and even their names could offer superiority, but she imagined they harboured the same urges and thoughts, generous and wicked, as the next person. Perhaps they were better at suppressing their dreadful side – for everyone possessed that, in Sinead’s opinion; that willingness to imagine the demise of those who had done you harm, who had treated others poorly, or appallingly. Sinead had willed and even prayed to avoid such delicious thoughts of comeuppance and retribution, but had grown to accept them as part of the intricate weave of the mind – perhaps offering protection from the vile follow-through that such imaginings quenched. Unlike Sam. Sam did not leave those instincts in his head. He did not satisfy his discontent by simply dreaming of vengeance. And she admired that, wrong as she knew it surely must be.
Sinead’s had been an existence of arguing against many of the building blocks of Christian society – using its own logic against itself while still adhering to the faith. The black-lipped bar debates of her student days in which she had levered rudimentary knowledge of the scriptures against her adversaries; an eye was not to be removed – rather a plank. Ours was not not to judge – God had made that clear, surely? And where Sodom was destroyed because of baying mob hostility, not because of a wilful misinterpretation of the exact same mentality.
The paper notes on the wall were about as important as her degrees, now. Thinking of her university days, her bold years of conviction and surety made her realise how little Sam knew of her. They had never discussed her teenage years, her own education, the career she had abandoned – perhaps against her will, perhaps because it had been ordained. She wondered whether her suffering had had purpose, and if so, why was she being subjected again?
Sam had never asked about her past – did that mean he hadn’t cared, or was he content to know her as she was? A leopard cannot change its spots, she thought, but scars and burns can alter them.
“Is everything alright, Sinead?” the Mother Superior had inquired, having made an unusual journey to the office on the outskirts of the cold, austere complex. Sinead had been embarrassed to be discovered, fully clothed, in her sleeping bag on the camp bed. The nun could see she had been crying.
“Yes, thank you. Has something happened?” She’d rolled herself bolt upright, catching the zip in the thin fabric of her sleeping bag in her effort to manoeuvre. Snarled shut she was forced her to lie back down again and kick it off in the most ignominious fashion.
“Did you have a long night?” asked the nun, looking pointedly at the clock that read midday. Sinead knew the old women rose at five.
“I’ve been up and down. Sleep has rather been eluding me,” she muttered.
“Confession,” the old woman quipped. “Confession is what you require, young woman.”
Only one as old as her could call me a young woman, Sinead thought, or one who had long since abandoned hope of intimacy.
She fell back upon the cot when the door closed – may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, she reckoned. She prayed then, that he had moved on before the letter had arrived, that he had taken to sea. Then she prayed that they would avoid hurricanes, that her sadness had not sent them towards the storm. Darkness folded in upon her and she felt – for the first time – bereft of a family that had been offered to her and that she had refused, and she was angry only with herself.
Days passed without major event at the refuge. Clodagh’s absence had instilled a temporary equilibrium. Paperwork was filed and placements for the women slowly secured.
“Missus, missus.” Sinead was working at the computer when her door opened a crack. She recognised the voice of the youngest woman taken in since lockdown began; an inner-city kid from the Liberties who had – as yet – refused to explain how the marks down her back had been inflicted.
“Yes? Come in, Macy.”
Sinead lamented that girls who had been named after music acts of her youth were already adults.
“Missus, your sister’s here for ye,” she spluttered.
“Take a message!” Sinead called at the closing door, unsure whether Macy had heard the instruction.
She waited, still, at her desk, wondering what would happen next. Would Áine be shown up? Would she refuse to have a message ferried and instead march in causing a holy show in front of the women and the nuns?
Long minutes ticked by as Sinead tried to work out what she would prefer. Then, before she had decided, the door cracked again and Macy’s hand came in.
“Letter for ye, missus,” the hand waved.
“Just come in!” Sinead barked, and the door pushed open a little further, the grey roots of her bowed head leading to a sheepish peering as she waited for further direction. Sinead fleetingly wondered whether the greying at such a tender age betrayed stress and hard upbringing - her body if not her mind old before its time.
“Thank you,” Sinead said as Macy handed over an envelope.
“She’s went off,” Macy said, nodding without knowing what to do next. “Your sister, yeah. Went off.”
“Ok. Thank you, Macy,” Sinead said, willing her to leave now.
“I was wondering,” Macy whipped up some hidden courage. “I was wondering if, like, I might be allowed to try for me qualifications, you know?”
Sinead’s heart was hammering. The envelope was exactly as before – blank but for her name, handwritten. This time, though, heavier, thicker. She exhaled and drew her eyes reluctantly to the young woman.
“What qualifications are you thinking of?” she said distractedly.
“I dunno. Anything, really. Anything would be good seeing as I haven’t a one, like.”
“No Inter Cert?”
“Naw!” Macy said, her brows creasing as her head shook, accompanied by an incredulous laugh.
“Well, what might you like to do – as a job?”
“Ah, you’ll think I’m mad, like.”
“I won’t,” Sinead said, suddenly torn between interest in what her ambition might be, yet touching the envelope and trying to regulate her breathing.
“I was thinkin’, I might like to do a bit of what you do.”
“Oh,” said Sinead, with a surprise that earned her an immediate look of embarrassment in return.
“Stupid, I know,” Macy said and pulled the door closed in front of her. Sinead leapt up, compelled to explain herself. She opened the door and called down the hall to the escaping woman. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I’ve never had anyone want to do something I do before. I’m … really flattered, I think.”
Macy paused and almost turned. “Naw, it was a stupid idea.” She began to run.
“Come back this evening!” Sinead called. “We’ll get the ball rolling.” But she wasn’t sure Macy would listen.
I’m not good at this, I know that. I hadn’t meant to annoy you, really. It was stupid and I know that now, I can see that now. But when I wrote first, I didn’t understand all that was going on. All I really knew was that you didn’t want to come with us, and I totally got that, but I didn’t really think through why, or register that it was the suddenness of it all that had been the problem. Not that that was the only problem – I get that, I’ve always known that.
But I promise I will do my best. It might take a bit of getting out, and bloody hell I haven’t written a letter in so long, so long. I haven’t spoken to anybody, not properly – apart from you and a priest in Italy, believe it or not, in years.
So, please, bear with me. I’ll try to fill in some blanks, and although I’m happy enough that this way of getting word to you is as tight as it can be, nothing is infallible and so, again, please stick with me here. I’m still checking things but I get what you’re saying. I’m treading softly but thank you for looking at the dots and who may be joining them.
I don’t know where to start now. It might take a bit of prompting – maybe when I was a young fella? I had a great wee life, to be honest. I was reared by the sea, half on it at times. The shore was a play park, and although I’ll not go into locations just yet, it was in the north and family was strong and kind and fun. There were a few of us. I’ll not go into specifics but we had the craic and most of what I remember is being afloat and messing and building huts and roaming the beaches and building boats.
We worked from early doors, fish or at the boats, learning stuff, and we learned to drink our wages and – the hard way – not to bet them on a horse race at lunchtime with old boys who would take your envelope from you on payday. I got a pound an hour on my first job, and the kids next door couldn’t see the point. Forty quid for forty hours of stiff back on the seabed at low tide. The neighbours just messed and played, but we got a flavour of real life, all life, really – of working men and growing up fast. I loved it. Pints on a Thursday, wages gone by Saturday, taking second jobs teaching squaddies how to sail.
You’ll remember the place was full of soldiers back then, and there was a place where they came to do water sports, and I showed them how. The regulars were dead on – nice fellas out of their depth, not much older than me, but they were carrying guns when they worked and most of them couldn’t understand why the locals hated them. Then there were their bosses, and I’m telling you all this cos maybe it’ll make sense later, but they were a different breed altogether. “There’s nothing in there for you,” I remember one of them shouting at me, pompous prick, as I went into a shed to get his boat ready. He assumed I was some scally in to pinch stuff. He got some shock when I turned out to be his coach. He couldn’t take direction – more brains in a mackerel, yet he was in charge of a whole brigade.