Suddenly, without any noticeable shift in his expression, he looked directly at me. He stood and came up to me. He stunk of cigarettes. He held his head back, aloft, demanding that I speak up. Please sir, I mumbled, I don’t know what to do. For the briefest of seconds there was a noticeable relaxation in his expression, a suggestion even that he might smile, but then he turned abruptly away and marched back to his desk, shouting that there was an exercise book inside the desk and sums on the board which, to underline the point, he struck with the ruler. When he resumed his seat he glared at me, then Grace, and demanded that we get on with it. He didn’t say anything to Abby, presumably having already decided that she was no mathematician.
From the very first break the bullying began, in the main instigated by the flat faced kid with the avid expression. The school-yard was on two levels, surrounded by a wall surmounted by painted, decorative metal-work. The other kids ran all around it, making as much noise as they could. We stood together as if we didn’t have any idea how to play, as if play were alien. Maybe they thought we were rejecting it and took exception. Maybe the sisters drew attention to their distinctness, and that wasn’t to be tolerated. Anyway, it didn’t take long for the imp face kid to approach, followed by three other boys, all bigger. We didn’t know any names then. We hadn’t been told, hadn’t heard a register. They were just boys with different faces, but like expressions. He started grinning and called Abby dummy. He sang it, elongating the two syllables, producing questionable music. The other boys joined in, chanting the two syllables, in the same crude sing-song, dum-my, dum-my.
So, they called Abby names, and funnily enough they hurt. I don’t think she read any meaning in their mouths, on their lips, but she recognised displeasure: after all, she had seen Harold look at her, and the matriarch, had seen what expression displeasure took. Grace was about to respond – I could see it welling in her, her inability to stand by; it was unmistakable, she always was a wonderful signer – but before she said anything, the boys burst out laughing and ran away. I sensed it was fortunate that Abby had been hurt, her expression clearly registering the fact, otherwise they would have had to go on, on and on, until they had found a way through, a weakness, a victory.
I guess the real anxiety for Abby was the wall and the metal decoration. All of her places had been taken away, banished to the other side of that barrier. She sidled into the shadow close to the porch steps, and leaned against the school building, but she knew she wasn’t hidden. There was no magic like that, at all. Shortly after, Mr Miller came onto the steps. He looked down at us for a moment without any alteration in his expression and then put a whistle to his lips and blew. Very quickly two straight lines of children, one of boys and one of girls, formed in front of him. Once they had settled down into orderly formation he stepped aside and nodded for them to march in. When they had all gone he again turned to us. He pursed his lips, gently shook his head and then signed for us to follow. I doubt whether his silence was for our benefit.
At lunch the sing-song began again, but this time they came closer, bringing their faces right up to Abby’s. She twisted, hunching herself awkwardly against their insult. It was too much for Grace who stepped up to them and started to shout, demanding that they leave her alone. The little boy grinned, but was at a loss, cautious of Grace’s temper. He simply nudged the other boys, getting them to laugh at her foolhardy bravery. I stepped beside Grace and signed for them to clear off, refusing to speak, to use their language. I was taller than any of the boys. At that point Mr Miller appeared on the steps. Grace fell silent, but no one moved. He marched down to us and demanded to know why Grace had been shouting. No one responded. He grabbed hold of Abby just above the elbows and, firmly but not violently, began to shake her, insisting she tell him why Grace was shouting. Although he didn’t shake her as I had seen Harold shake her still he managed to shake some wee right out of her. It dribbled down her legs and soaked into her small white socks. As soon as he realised it he pushed her away as if she had urinated over his hands, then pointed her towards the toilets which were at the far end of the yard away from the school. When she didn’t move he turned to Grace and me and ordered us to see to her. As we walked her, hand in hand to the toilets, he marched back inside, leaving a refrain of dummy singing behind him.
At the end of the day they were waiting at the school gates. Abby wet herself again as we walked towards them. They formed a line barring our exit. We came up to them and stopped. They started singing pissy pants, pissy pants, over and over, using the same elongated syllables as they had earlier. For a while we simply gazed at each other, the boys singing, the sisters more or less silent – except for a faint hum from Abby, a faint meaningless hum, neither name, enthusiasm, nor vision, a sound signifying so little – no one knowing quite what to do next. I believe they were pleased when one of the girls, our age, similar in stature to Grace, not as pretty but almost, a girl we had heard called Maria, came up and told them to leave us alone. They laughed at her and called her pissy pants too, but they went, alternatively singing dummy and pissy pants as they did.
I don’t know whether we failed Maria at that point, sisters closing ranks, sisters not having the words to allow for friendship, even though we knew the sign for love. If we had taught Maria the sign for love would she have been receptive, signalled it as we sometimes did, behind the lids of our desks, when Mr Miller’s back was turned, love and don’t worry, love and laughter. I think she was capable of learning the sign and could have loved Abby just the same as we did: I saw something of it in the way she looked at her over the next few weeks, trying to work something out, make sense of something, though, whether in Abby or in herself I never really fathomed. All she had to do was accept it, accept what everyone else by their actions told her was impossible but, of course, to agree to a sign as powerful as love means standing up to things that are not at all predictable. Love is never predictable. We knew that and we were only kids trying it out, trying it out in a preliminary yet perfect way. As far as Maria was concerned, even though she couldn’t begin to calculate how savage the fight might be, I guess she decided she couldn’t take the risk, even if risk, like everything, is relative, which in the end is sequestered and ridiculed by time, which only time reveals.
She looked at Abby’s wet legs, screwed up her face and ran off without another word.
Over the next few weeks, at first by accident, but then, I am sure, by design, Abby discovered a place of concealment. Funnily enough it was thanks to Jimmy, the flat faced, imp-like boy. It was within days of our arrival when he produced a peashooter and from behind the cover of his desk pelted Abby with tiny missiles. At first she hunched against them and simply moaned her name, but then one struck her hard on the temple and she leapt to her feet and slammed the desk lid down across his arms. Jimmy cried out loud, but she did it again and again. Within seconds of her retaliation Mr Miller dragged her away, pulled her through the classroom door, threw her into a stationary cupboard and locked the door behind her. Grace lifted her desk lid and signed relief. When Mr Miller returned he appeared genuinely shaken. He glared at Grace and me and told us that the school-board would be informed, his expression implying that we were at fault.
After that, much to the increasing pleasure of the class, Abby was regularly consigned to the stationary cupboard. Sometimes she wet herself in there, but that was only because of the amount of time she was left. Grace and I both knew her game, could see the twinkle of success in her eyes. Of course it wasn’t good for her learning, but her natural look returned, the one she had when she scanned the horizon or pored over the pages of the Book of Wonders. The stationary cupboard was her new place, completely her own, debarred even to her sisters.
It was during these weeks at school that she started her rituals. Neither Grace nor I had ever been a party to that aspect of her and were at a loss to comprehend it. It began simply enough at first with her tapping her left shoulder with her right palm three times on entering the classr
oom, whilst at the same time pronouncing her name. As the weeks progressed though, her rituals became ever more complex, small bows and hand movements before sitting, and again when she was told to stand. Grace and I were bemused and troubled. She was using signs, but they were beyond our scope.
Eventually it was Grace who fathomed them, always being the most expert on signs. At the same time as she had started in the village school Seamus had allowed Grace to return to mass, which she hadn’t done since before her illness, an experience she only vaguely remembered. She said that there was a great deal of excitement in the family, particularly from her mother who dressed up for the occasion as if she were attending a wedding or christening. As she watched Abby conduct her rituals she was struck by the fact that there was a similarity between Abby’s signs and the signs she made in church: signing the cross, bowing to the tabernacle and clasping her hands in prayer. She was sure Abby was going through a religious period. To prove the point she brought a picture of the Madonna for her, which she had been given during one of her lessons of instruction – Seamus had ordained that Grace complete her first Holy Communion – tapping herself on the shoulder three times as she handed it over. Abby eyed it carefully, and then turned to the small, unadorned cross on the wall behind Mr Miller, which evinced a smile of satisfaction from Grace, certain that her suspicion had been proven right. Abby then secreted it away inside her desk. After that she regularly lifted the lid to view her acquisition, eyeing it secretly, guarding it jealously.
Of course, Abby’s behaviour never went unnoticed. Mr Miller shook his head and screwed up his face in a quizzical, put upon look he reserved for us – though uncharacteristically he opted not to investigate whatever was inside the desk to which Abby was so infatuated. The usual punishment for being caught lifting a desk lid uninvited was at the very least a slap across the head, sometimes the ruler across the knuckles. Grace and I were regularly slapped, our need to sign being so great.
More disturbingly Jimmy recognised that Abby had a treasure. Grace warned Abby to keep her picture with her, but for some reason she wouldn’t hear of it: she had decided that the Madonna had her own place of concealment, perhaps needed it, as she needed it, so that their two imaginations could be free, her faith preserved.
At first I didn’t believe it. I told myself that Abby had never shown any tendency towards things holy. Looking back, of course, that was absurd. She lay down beneath the angel, she loved the book of angels, and she turned so many things into acts of worship, even the incompleteness of silence, which she hosted like a crowd. There was always evidence of that need in her to perform ritual, repetition, step and mime. The absurdity was that it took me so long to see. It was glaringly obvious that she was mimicking something, some convoluted prayer that sang through her silence, an adoration and affirmation, even under the terrible gaze of Mr Miller and Jimmy. In the classroom she needed her inner sacred world more than ever. She was possessed of such spirit that thrived on it. Her hum was endurance, its sound, unbeknownst to her, salvation.
Jimmy stole her hidden image, though, scribbled all over it, and then bandied it in her face, mocking her with it. By the time Mr Miller came into the yard she had seized so tightly onto Jimmy’s hair that Mr Miller had to strike her repeatedly across the knuckles to get her to release him, and even then two clumps came away in her hands. Mr Miller pulled her away, striking her as he dragged her, and flung her in the stationary cupboard where she remained grieving for the rest of the day. I fully expected to find Jimmy and the others waiting for us at the gates, though when they weren’t felt more disturbed than if they had.
Jimmy’s mother complained and even started a petition against having us in the school, which even the matriarch, who remained convinced school was the wrong place for Abby, signed. Mr Miller defended himself on the grounds that he had been forced to have us by a misguided inspector. Jimmy’s mother assured him she wouldn’t let the matter drop. She was the only parent we ever saw cross the threshold into Mr Miller’s classroom. He was obviously uncomfortable with his authority being breached in that way and afterwards eyed us with evident contempt.
Abby’s rituals became even more fixed after that, an exact dance performed on entering the classroom and before sitting, a dance of hands, arms and expression.
I saw her look up at the recessed windows and smile one day as she took her seat. I signed to Grace that she was wrong. Abby had not devoted herself to a single God, she worshipped sky, and all the natural elements that contained her. Then Abby began to sing and willingly accepted banishment to the cupboard where she increasingly passed the whole day.
She was never exempt, though, from cross-country or the ensuing game Mr Miller called bull-charge. The girls weren’t expected to run the course but had to be there to cheer or curse the boys home. The boys ran with sticks that they had to pretend were guns. In Mr Miller’s cross-country winning was everything, for which cheating, however rough, was allowed. He said we had entered the war ill prepared, which was unforgivable, but it would be different next time if teachers like him did their jobs properly. It was a regular theme of his that the Russians, being brain-washed fanatics, would prove a much rougher opponent than the Germans, and that it had been a mistake to have ever been allied with them. On the back wall of the classroom he had a pre-war map, made of thick canvas, threading at the edges, on which the British Empire was coloured in red. He never once admitted that the world was not as depicted on that map, but would regularly have us recite the names of the countries of the empire, the countries in red, after him.
There were sixteen boys in the class, and nineteen girls, including us sisters. The first eight boys home were applauded as they finished the last stretch, crossing the yard from the gate to the toilets, but the last eight had to do the bull-charge, which meant crossing the yard where the girls and any of the first eight boys who were quick enough were waiting determined to stop them. The boys had to duck and weave their way through the waiting mob, our job to tackle them to a halt.
We were all guilty of the most terrible enthusiasm imaginable, and that is certainly guilt. Grace and I grabbed those losing boys as if they had personally and purposely let us down, laughing as we caught their neck and arms and dragged them down. At the end of it the boys sometimes had tears in their eyes, though no one openly cried: it was common knowledge, the way such things always are in a classroom, that Mr Miller caned any boy who cried. Of course, sometimes the boys sent us flying, Abby always ending up on her backside, her expression bewildered but generally amused. I can’t help but think that she was also enthusiastic for the game, despite her inevitable tumbles, she wet herself regularly enough.
Our time in Mr Miller’s classroom didn’t last long, just a few months. I don’t know what the final straw was, but it was obvious when Abby smashed up the medical head and torso that Mr Miller was beside himself with rage. He thrashed her mercilessly before throwing her into the cupboard, and was still banging on the door hours later threatening her with more if she didn’t keep quiet. – It was strange for her to cry once she was concealed, but her buttocks and the backs of her legs were marked for weeks after that beating, and of course Harold added to it later that night certain from that evidence alone that she must have been particularly bad.
Certainly Mr Miller had seemed pretty pleased with himself as he stripped the anatomical layers from one side of the model, taking out the eyeball, jaw, tongue, ear, part of the brain, trachea, lung, heart, liver, spleen and intestine, getting us to say the words after him, then draw them as neatly as we could, fully labelled, in our exercise books. Abby refused the lesson, drawing criss-crossing lines all over her paper, which perhaps was her interpretation of soul. How she sneaked back into the classroom and managed to wreck the reassembled model I can’t say. Her sisters were obviously at fault, but she could be sly when the fancy took her. The human parts were scattered all around and she had obviously stamped on most of them, the dirt from her boots clearly visible on any numb
er of organs. When Mr Miller caught her she was actually jumping on the head.
He said it was positive proof that she was crazy and though I would obviously disagree with that, and hold that she must have had adequate reason for her attack, she never did explain it, other than to moan her name in the stationary cupboard for the rest of the day.
I suppose everyone realised our time would shortly be up at Mr Miller’s, certainly Maria must have guessed.
It was only a few days after the incident with the model when we discovered the boys and some of the girls waiting for us, barring the school gate. We must have recognised straight away that there was something different about this group because we didn’t hesitate but ran back through the yard, Grace and I dragging Abby, having taken a hand each, then through a gate in the back wall beside the toilets which let onto a play-field used for rugby and football matches, which after a few days of heavy rain was saturated. We ran across the waterlogged ground making for a wood on the other side. By the time we reached it we were covered in mud. The smell of sodden and dead vegetation was all around, choking our nostrils with the stink of decay.
The gang wasn’t far behind us, and gaining all of the time, after all they participated in regular cross-country, Jimmy, certainly, always in the first eight. We made our way as quickly as we could through the wood, the trees thickening around us, the canopy growing more dense. By this time we were running out of stamina. I signed to Grace that we had no choice but to hide. The trouble was Abby was exhilarated, the brisk dash having stirred her sense of adventure. We went someway farther, the woodland breaking into thickets of shrub and brush where pools of light flooded through gaps in the leaf cover. In one particularly wide break made up of gorse scrub and rhododendron bushes we decided we couldn’t go any further. Grace signed for Abby to crawl into a thicket of bushes, which she was only too pleased to do. Grace crawled after her. I pushed my way through a cluster of rhododendron and azalea, and then stood awkwardly in the centre, the branches spread all around me like numerous arms holding me captive.
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