Kate

by Siobhán Parkinson

  CHAPTER 5

  Flyíng

  I asked Tess and her gang how much the dancing lessons cost. I was hoping they would be too dear, and then I wouldn’t have to go.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Tess said. ‘We pay nothing, do we, girls?’

  Brigid began, ‘Yes, it’s free all right …’

  Tess tossed her head impatiently and cut across Brigid. ‘You see, Kate?’ she said. ‘It’s free. We pay nothing.’

  I was going to have to tag along with them after school to Mrs Maguire’s Irish Dancing School, whether I liked it or not.

  ‘A new girl!’ said Mrs Maguire, sounding like the spider inviting the fly into his parlour.

  She was dumpy and stocky and wore an extraordinary dress made out of what looked like brown canvas down to her ankles.

  ‘She’s supposed to look like Queen Maeve in that,’ Brigid Mullane whispered to me. We knew about Queen Maeve, the warrior queen of Connacht who went to war over a bull, because we’d done her in third class.

  ‘She looks like a sack of potatoes,’ I whispered back, and Brigid got a fit of the giggles.

  Mrs Maguire didn’t look as if she could dance a step, and certainly not in that outfit. She probably couldn’t, for I never saw her so much as lift a foot. All the teaching was done by verbal instructions and we learnt by watching the other, more experienced dancers.

  Mrs Maguire battered out the tunes on a wood-wormy old upright piano. Some of the keys were dead, and when she hit one of those she would hum the note loudly to make up for the missing sound. Most of the time she played only two tunes: ‘The Rakes of Mallow’ for the reels and ‘The Irish Washerwoman’ for the jigs. She had a hornpipe tune too, ‘The King of the Fairies’, but we didn’t do the hornpipe much, though later, when I came to know a bit about dancing, the hornpipe was my favourite. I loved the leisurely pace and the rap of the hard shoes on the boards. It was nearly like tap dancing, and you could let your body go loose and let all the energy drain down into your feet, instead of having to keep the top half of yourself completely rigid, the way you had to in order to get the kicks and rocks right in the jigs.

  I started with the baby reel.

  ‘AON, dó, trí, ceathair, cúig, sé, seacht!’ Mrs Maguire would roar, over the sound of the piano. ‘AON, dó, trí, is a hAON, dó, trí.’ ONE, two, three, and a ONE, two, three.

  Over and over it went. ‘AON, dó, trí, is a hAON, dó, trí.’ I heard it in my sleep. ‘POINT those toes.’

  At first, I didn’t know what was going on, but I soon got the hang of it. On that first afternoon, I learnt to hold my right foot out precisely in front of my left, with the heel well up, the arch exaggerated and all my toes clenched so that I seemed to have only a big toe, and that one poised for action, while I counted the opening bars under my breath, and then with a skip, I was off, AON, dó, trí, ceathair, cúig, sé, seacht, AON, dó, trí, is a hAON, dó, trí!

  I could do it! After a few false starts, something suddenly clicked, and I was away, starting into action on the AON beat like a shot off a shovel, and tripping lightly up to seven. Then I danced the AON, dó, trí, is a hAON, dó, trí on the spot, one leg chasing the other as if I was skipping up an invisible staircase, and my skirt bouncing merrily around my thighs in rhythm with the music, till I came skimming down again in the opposite direction on the next AON, dó, trí, ceathair, cúig, sé, seacht.

  I loved it. It was like flying. It was better than swinging on the swingboats at the carnival, better than a donkey ride on the beach in Bray.

  I was all hot and sticky at the end of the class and out of breath, but I was thrilled with myself.

  ‘I suppose you think you’re great, Miss Twinkle-toes,’ said Tess O’Hara, pulling a face at me as we took off our dancing poms and put on our outdoor shoes again. (Mrs Maguire lent me a pair of dancing poms because I was new and didn’t have my own. They were a bit big, but she gave me cardboard insoles to stuff them out.)

  ‘No,’ I said, warily, but I knew my eyes were shining with the excitement of it. I couldn’t help it. ‘No, I don’t think I’m great at all, but I did enjoy it. Do you not enjoy it, Breda?’

  ‘It’s not supposed to be enjoyable,’ said Breda, spitefully. ‘It’s supposed to be a lesson. You are supposed to be learning.’

  ‘I am learning,’ I said humbly. I knew perfectly well that the only way to deal with her was to pretend to flatter her, so I laid it on with a trowel. ‘I have an awful lot to learn, I know that. It’ll be a long time before I’m up to your standard.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Breda, but she couldn’t very well argue with that.

  ‘That’ll be ninepence, please,’ said Mrs Maguire as I walked past the piano, where she was still sitting, on my way out.

  I blushed scarlet. I could feel the blood banging against my temples and my cheeks were radiating heat.

  ‘Ninepence? Oh, I’m sorry, I thought …’

  ‘You thought it was free, gratis and for nothing, did you?’ said Mrs Maguire huffily. Her face was as red as mine and she’d drawn in her chin and puffed out her cheeks so that her neck disappeared and she looked like a pigeon or a hen, something fussy with feathers anyway.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Huh! And how do you think I am supposed to make a living? It’s ninepence a lesson or seven-and-six a term, which is twelve lessons, that’s a discount of one-and-six if you pay by the lump.’

  ‘Seven-and-six?’ I’d never even seen seven-and-sixpence all together in one place in my life. My mother certainly wasn’t going to be able to fork out that kind of money.

  Tess and Annie were tittering away, listening in and pointing and whispering to each other. I blushed even harder, knowing that they were probably laughing at me for not being able to afford it. They were positively rich, compared to me. Ninepence would be nothing to them. They probably got pocket money every week, like children in books. The only pocket money we ever got was when we collected jamjars and took them back to the shop to redeem the deposit on them, a ha’penny a shot.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Maguire,’ I mumbled.

  ‘You can bring it next week,’ she said briskly, closing the lid on the piano and letting her chin jut out again so that her neck reappeared.

  ‘Eh, yes… well, no. I… don’t think I can come next week, I …’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mrs Maguire, starting to get all puffy looking again.

  I dropped my voice to a whisper. ‘Thank you for the lesson,’ I said, looking over my shoulder. ‘It was great, but … I’ll bring you the ninepence as soon as I can. But I can’t come again.’

  Mrs Maguire stared at me with her mouth open. Her bottom teeth wobbled. I thought they were going to fall out into her lap, but she closed her mouth just in time.

  I picked up my navy gabardine raincoat from the form by the door where all the coats were thrown, and I walked out the door and didn’t look back, though I could hear the stifled giggles of the others.

  I ran home through the darkening streets and pounded up the stairs to our rooms, raced through the kitchen and into the girls’ bedroom, where I flung myself on the bed and buried my humiliated, scorching face in the cool cotton of the pillowslip.

  After a while, my cheeks cooled down and I could bear to lift my head. I took a look in the cracked piece of mirror glass we had propped up on the chest of drawers. My face was bright pink. It didn’t go with red hair and freckles. There was a basin of water beside the glass, and I splashed my face with it, pulled the hairbrush through my hair, and went out to face my mother.

  ‘Ninepence!’ she said an outraged voice, as if I was looking for the money for myself. ‘Ninepence a lesson! Sure I could feed a family on that for a week.’

  ‘Ah, Mam,’ I said wearily. I knew that wasn’t true. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t much like it anyway, I hate that Tess and her pals, I’d just as soon not go again.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, I’m sure,’ said my mother, ‘but I wasn’t thinking about how you felt about
not going again. I’m still wondering where we’re going to get the ninepence.’

  ‘Can we not manage just one little ninepence?’ I asked in astonishment.

  ‘It might be a little thing to you, my girl, but with your da …’

  Just at that point, the door opened and Da came in.

  ‘Well,’ he said with a loud sigh, pulling out a chair and flopping into it. ‘That wasn’t so bad, I suppose, and I earned three-and-sixpence for myself, which is no fortune, but it’s not to be sneezed at either, and it’s an awful lot better than no three-and-sixpence.’

  He looked very pleased with himself, and he looked from me to my mother and back again, obviously expecting to be congratulated. He had just come from his first stint working in the convent gardens.

  ‘Hand it over,’ said my mother, stony-faced.

  ‘Huh!’ said Da. ‘Is that the thanks I get?’

  But he handed it over all the same.

  ‘Here’s ninepence, Kate,’ said my mother. ‘Run back to Mrs Maguire’s with that now. Never let it be said that the Delaneys don’t pay their debts. And here’s a shilling for yourself, Tommy. Put the rest in the tin box, would you?’

  The tin box was an old sweet tin that we kept on the mantelpiece. Mam saved up the rent money in it. It had horses and carriages on it, very swish.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ said Mam, ‘but you know we can’t afford that sort of money.’

  ‘I know,’ I practically shouted. ‘I don’t care about the old dancing. To blazes with Mrs Maguire and her flipping ninepences anyway. I hope it chokes her.’

  ‘Kate!’ said my mother reproachfully.

  But Da took another view. ‘That’s the spirit,’ he said. ‘Here’s a penny for yourself. Get yourself a fizz bag on the way home.’

  ‘Thanks, Da,’ I said, and I flew out the door and back down the stairs and over the streets to the house where Mrs Maguire had the long, dingy room that she used for her dancing school.

  But it was all my eye. I did care. I did want to dance. It was cruel, I thought, that I’d just discovered this lovely thing, only to have it snatched away from me as soon as I got a taste for it. To blazes with Tess O’Hara and her stuck-up pals too. To blazes with everything!

  CHAPTER 6

  The Letter

  Of course the story was all over the school by the next morning. Tess didn’t waste time when she saw a chance to make a fool of someone like me.

  ‘And the best part was,’ Tess announced (Angela told me this afterwards), ‘that she thought it was free. Free! I mean, what is poor Mrs Maguire supposed to live on, answer me that? The scratchings of the Delaneys’ pan? It’s free for us, of course, because my daddy works for Guinness’s, and the same with Annie and Brigid, we’re Guinness families, always have been. But it’s only free because Guinness’s pays for it. It’s not free to all comers. I mean, you can’t just let anyone come in off the street and learn for nothing.’

  Angela and Nell were full of sympathy. Nell gave me three aniseed balls and Angela gave me a tiny little ragdoll she’d made herself out of the leftovers when her mother made a shirt for her father. I was too big for playing with ragdolls, really, but I thought it was lovely of her to give it to me, so I made a great show of being delighted. She’d drawn in the face with blue ink. Angela said Nell and herself would hold the skipping rope for me all through sos as a special treat. I wouldn’t have to hold it for her or Nell at all.

  ‘AON, dó, trí, ceathair, cúig, sé, seacht!’ they yelled as they turned the rope, turned it and turned it, and I skipped and spun and danced over it, my plaits flying around my shoulders. I was glad I’d put my hair in plaits that day, as it was much easier to skip without my hair fluttering into my face, even though it meant it would be all crinkly the following day. ‘AON, dó, trí, is a hAON, dó, trí.’

  We all had a right laugh, taking off the dancing count. I’d say it annoyed Tess and her pals. Anyway, they made a great show of playing ball, shouting out the bouncing rhyme, ‘Plainy packet of Rins-o!’ as loudly as they could, to drown out the sound of us counting in Irish.

  I tried to pretend to myself that I didn’t mind, and it was true that I wasn’t too upset any more about Tess and the others setting me up like that – I couldn’t be bothered with them and their nonsense – but I did mind about having to miss the dancing lessons. I would love to have kept them up.

  Wednesday was Irish dancing day, and by the time the next Wednesday came, I had put it all behind me. I stayed back at school for a while to help with the tidying up. It was Nell’s turn to lift back the desk seats on their hinges and sweep the floor and empty the rubbish bins, but me and Angela and Nell always helped each other when it was our turn. I was just putting on my coat to go home, when Brigid Mullane came back into the classroom. She handed me a note.

  ‘It’s from Mrs Maguire,’ she said. ‘She wants you back.’

  I opened the note. It wasn’t in an envelope or anything, just folded over, so obviously Brigid had read it on the way back to the school from the dancing school. You couldn’t blame her. I’d have done the same myself.

  Dear Kate, I read. I am prepared to offer you one term’s free dancing lessons. You look promising, very light on your feet. If I give you a chance and you do well, maybe your family will be able to see their way to reaching an arrangement with my good self as regards the matter of fees in the future. Yours faithfully, Mrs Margaret Maguire.

  I couldn’t believe it. I stared at Brigid, my mouth hanging open.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, eventually.

  Brigid shrugged. ‘Mrs Mulherne’s dancing school won loads of medals at the feis last year, and the year before as well. Mrs Maguire is dying to win more than them this year, but a couple of her best dancers have left. Liz O’Brien was great, and she just sort of … disappeared. I’d say old Ma Maguire is looking out for new talent.’

  ‘New talent? Me! But I can only do the baby reel.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re very light on your feet. That’s the most important thing.’

  I didn’t know what that meant. As far as I knew, I was the same weight on my feet as I was sitting down. I kept staring at Brigid, amazed at what she’d said. She’d never have said anything as nice as that if Tess had been there to overhear.

  Nell gave me a thump on the back. ‘There now, you see, you’re great, we always knew it, didn’t we, Angie?’

  ‘Close your mouth or you’ll catch flies,’ said Angela – she was a hearty sort of a soul – but she gave me a big wink and a smile.

  ‘Are you coming so?’ asked Brigid, turning to leave the classroom and go back to Mrs Maguire’s place.

  ‘We’ll call in to your mam and tell her you’ll be late,’ Angela said, as I hesitated. ‘Go on, off with you!’

  ‘Thanks,’ I muttered and, still half dazed, I followed Brigid out of the classroom and down the stairs.

  Light on my feet. I was light on my feet. I kept thinking this all the way over to Mrs Maguire’s, puzzling about what it might mean, but when the music started up, and I counted the opening bars under my breath, waiting for the down beat for my dance to start, it came to me. I knew what it meant. The rough, distempered floorboards seemed to disappear from under me, my feet barely brushed them, and I flew. It was all airy and feathery, like walking on water, like skimming over clouds. I was kicking and twirling in a new, airy element, flying in time with the music into a different world, where weight didn’t matter, where gravity didn’t exist. I wasn’t Kate Delaney, the poor girl from the tenements with a hole in her stocking and chilblains between her toes, embarrassed by her family’s poverty, mocked by Tess O’Hara’s gang and belittled by Sister Eucharia. I was a Celtic princess, and I was going to dance my way to the stars on airy-fairy feet, light as air, free as a bird.

  It wasn’t always like that, of course. I never again felt quite as airy-footed as on that day when I had my first free dancing lesson. But my love for dancing grew and grew, even though it gradually became more difficult, t
he steps got more intricate, the order of steps harder to remember, and the music so boring you could scream, as Mrs Maguire endlessly ground out the same three basic tunes, lesson after lesson, until we got our steps foot-perfect and could skip and trip our way through our dances in our sleep.

  I danced around and around our bedroom, as I got dressed in the mornings, as I cleaned my teeth with soot, even as I wrestled with the tangles in my hair. My sisters used to throw pillows and shoes at me; shout, sing slow tunes like ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ to put me off the beat – anything to try to get me to stop dancing – but I was like the little girl in the story with the shoes that won’t let her be still. My feet were enchanted. I couldn’t climb the stairs, only dance up them; I couldn’t walk across a room, only dance across it, and even in bed at night, my feet would be twitching as I went over the steps in my head. When that happened, Patsy and Lily would grab my toes from the other end of the bed, and tickle the soles of my feet till I nearly choked, and I would promise to stop. But always, even when making my best effort to keep my feet still, I would be dancing in my head, listening to a tune only I could hear.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Plan

  By the middle of that term, I could do slipjigs, sailor’s hornpipes, hard reels – the lot. I learnt fast, because I loved it, and the more difficult the steps got, the greater the effort I put in to master them. Tess O’Hara went on teasing me and mocking me, every chance she got. I think she was jealous because I was doing so well, even though I was only new to it all. Every now and again Mrs Maguire would thump down on the piano keys with her arms, right up to the elbows, making a terrible crashing sound. The dancers would all stop, with their feet in the air, and she would yell out, as if in pain, ‘Tess O’HARA! Will you PLEASE leave Kate Delaney ALONE!’ But I would only give a little smile. I’d got used to Tess and her carry-on, so that in the end I didn’t even notice it any more, the way you get used to flies in the summertime or chilblains in the winter.