The Story of Before

by Susan Stairs

  A man.

  A stranger.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look into his face but I knew if I did he’d be looking straight at me. I thought I’d been all alone. Hidden away. But he must have been there the whole time. Watching. He’d seen me pulling down my pants. And now he had a full view of me pissing in the undergrowth. I shouldn’t have gone off on my own. I shouldn’t have followed the others out of the car in the first place. I had to get back to them. My wee had stopped but my pants were around my ankles; I’d have to pull them up before I could run. But if I stood to do that, I’d expose my thighs and maybe my bum and I didn’t want him to see any more than he already had. I’d have to be careful. And quick.

  Keeping my eyes down, I reached in under the folds of my dress. I hooked my fingers around one leg of my pants and deftly stepped out of them, leaving them behind, cherry pink against the dark earth. I was running before I even stood up. Galloping over tangled roots and kicking sprays of crispy leaves in the air, I didn’t look back. I leaped over the circle of black stones but one of my knees buckled when I landed and I stumbled and part crawled the last few feet. I dragged myself under the holly bush and back out onto the grass. My breath wheezed in and out of my throat and goosepimples raced up my legs and arms. I felt dizzy and my chest hurt. The sunlight was blinding and I squinted against it as I looked around.

  The park was deserted. There was no sign of Sandra or Mel.

  The red ball lay in the middle of the grass and I ran towards it, expecting them both to materialize. I tapped it with my foot, but it was burst and bumped only a couple of inches over the ground.

  I spun around. Selfish as Mel was, I didn’t think he’d have left without me. They had to be hiding. I didn’t know what frightened me more: the fact that I was all alone, or the fact that they might be watching me from some secret viewing point, like that man in the tree. I began looking around trunks, even thin ones they couldn’t possibly be behind, my feet clumping awkwardly across the grass as if they weren’t properly connected to my body.

  Then I remembered the reason we were there, and wondered if Mam and Dad were finished getting the keys. What if they’d all gone off to the new house without me? If, in their panic to get everything done on time, they hadn’t noticed I’d been left behind. I ran along the path, trying to remember the way we’d come in. Then I started to pray. I’d been lost before when I was five, on a Sunday trip to Brittas Bay. I still hate the feel of sand between my toes.

  When I eventually found the car, it was empty. I stood beside it for as long as it took me to say the Our Father, then ran back into the park. I thought how much I hated Mel and Sandra for leaving me on my own. Back again where I’d left them, I sank to the ground and started to cry. It was all their fault; if they hadn’t left the car, I’d never have followed.

  I lay down on the grass. The damp soaked up through my dress, and my bum felt really cold without my pants. Above me, a lone cloud hung in the blue sky, ragged and forlorn. The shape of it reminded me of the stain on the back of Mam’s smock and the horrible way Sandra had sneered at how I’d described it. Then I remembered something.

  I jumped to my feet.

  This was a park we’d come to before. When Mam was having her check-up at the baby hospital.

  I knew what had happened. I was sure of it. I began walking across the park, pretty certain where the entrance nearest the hospital was. And as I got closer to it, I saw them. Dad, Mel and Sandra. Holding hands. Swinging into the park with smiles across their faces. When there was no sign of Mam, I knew I’d been right.

  ‘Guess what?’ Sandra asked when I reached them. She was sort of breathless and her face was all flushed. And her feet danced about, as if she badly needed to go to the toilet. She was trying not to smile.

  ‘Mam’s had the baby,’ I said quietly.

  Her face crumpled into a frown and she stopped moving. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I just guessed,’ I said. ‘I knew the hospital was near here.’ My breath caught in my throat. ‘Why . . . why did you leave me in there on my own?’

  ‘It was only for a few minutes. We couldn’t find you anywhere.’ She squinted her eyes at me. ‘You weren’t crying, were you?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, why would I be?’

  ‘We haven’t seen it yet or anything,’ she said. ‘So don’t think you’ve been left out.’ She started walking. Then she looked back with a smirk. ‘We just found out first, that’s all.’ I stuck my tongue out and made a face but she just laughed and skipped off down the path.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ Mel announced blankly. I could tell he was put out; his authority was threatened.

  ‘It was all a bit sudden, love,’ Dad said, taking my hand. ‘But Mam’s fine, baby’s fine. The nurses’ll look after them. We’ve a lot more to get through today.’ He let out a big sigh, as if he’d had more than enough already.

  As I’d suspected, we didn’t get in trouble for leaving the car. On another day, our disobedience would’ve been the priority, and we’d have been punished. That day, it wasn’t even noticed. Dad’s eyes were fixed on the distance, in a sort of vacant, unseeing way, like he wasn’t sure who he was. He’d just witnessed his fourth child coming into the world, and was shortly to leave the place of his own birth for ever. That night, he’d be sleeping in a strange room.

  As we walked through the park back to the car, I was angry. Dad could’ve waited until he’d found me. He didn’t have to go and tell the others about the baby first. Was it any wonder I tried to predict things when everything seemed to happen without me? And the fact that I had a new brother didn’t make me feel any less alone; I knew there was far too much of an age gap for us to become an inseparable pair.

  ‘Where were you, anyway?’ Sandra asked as we got back into the car.

  ‘Nowhere. Just looking around.’ I couldn’t tell. I was too afraid. If I kept it to myself, I could pretend it hadn’t happened. The others would be sure to make a meal of it if I told them. They’d rub it in my face in front of Dad, seeing as I’d been the one supposed to be keeping an eye on them.

  The removal men were waiting for us when we got back and Dad made us stay in the car while he supervised the stacking of our belongings into the big green truck. It didn’t take long for trouble to start. Mel invented a game which involved each of them pinching the other’s arm and seeing who could last the longest without screaming. When Sandra got tired of it, she began waving out at the removal men and collapsing into giggles whenever they waved back. I wished Mam was with us. And part of me wished our baby brother hadn’t been born. Not yet. Not today. Not at the exact time I was being watched by that man in the park. What would Mam say if she knew? I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. And though I hadn’t seen the stranger’s face, I couldn’t help imagining what it might look like.

  The others grew even more giddy on the drive to our new house. They wondered out loud what lay in store for us in Hillcourt Rise and asked Dad questions he couldn’t possibly answer. How many families lived there? How many children? What were they like? What sort of games did they play? They jumped about in their seats, rolled the windows up and down and found the most ridiculous things amusing. Sandra thumped me on the shoulder each time she made what she thought was a funny joke, hoping to make me laugh. After a while, she succeeded. We forgot to dislike each other and I found myself caught up in the excitement. But when Dad said we were nearly there, I told her to leave me alone. I didn’t want to be distracted by her silly games. She might have thought moving was something to laugh about but I didn’t. I wasn’t as sure as she and Mel were about making friends and becoming part of a whole new neighbourhood. And I still felt more than a bit uneasy after the episode in the park. I thought about Mam. She’d been the one who’d wanted to move more than any of us and now she was missing our first day.

  We drove up a hill lined with low stone walls, topped with spiky black railings. On either side, thin, leafy trees supported by tall
stakes had been planted every few feet. At the top, a white metal sign attached to a wall said Hillcourt Rise in big, black curly letters. Dad turned left and slowed down. Mel and Sandra could barely contain themselves. A huge green opened out in front of us, dotted with bushes and cherry trees . . . and kids. A big gang of them. As we drove along, I could see some of them turning their heads to follow us while others lay on the grass or continued with their games of chasing and football.

  It was just then that Dad nearly knocked Shayne Lawless down. I don’t know if he ran out in front of us deliberately or not, but either way, he made sure he got our attention.

  Some of the houses in the estate faced directly onto the green, but others, like number forty-two, were set further away, in small cul-de-sacs. As soon as we’d pulled into the driveway, Mel and Sandra asked if they could go and play. They took the relief on Dad’s face as a ‘yes’ and didn’t wait for him to answer. I watched them trying to outrun each other, Sandra’s hair flying and Mel’s hands slapping against his thighs. When they got to the green, they ran across the grass like a pair of racehorses.

  ‘Off you go, Ruth,’ Dad said. ‘Grand big green space for you all to play on.’

  I stood and looked over at the gathering. Some boy stripped off his T-shirt and threw it in the air. I could tell he was showing off because of us. And I knew Sandra would get involved. I watched her pick up the T-shirt and run, disappearing into a small group of bushes. I turned away and left them to it, walking into our new house for the first time to try and find some underwear. I’d had enough of green spaces for one day.

  FOUR

  Hillcourt Rise sat on an incline just outside the village of Kilgessin, only five miles south west of Dublin city, but a world and a half away from South Circular Road. The estate was about ten years old when we moved in, so most of the families living there were already well established. Solidly built, red brick and pebbledash with three bedrooms and long back gardens, the houses were regarded as a home for life; most people who moved in never expected to leave. Number forty-two, we learned, was the first to come up for sale since the estate was built. The father of the family who lived there had been offered a too-good-to-turn-down job someplace in America called Conneddy Cut. I heard Dad complaining about them to our Auntie Cissy on the phone: ‘Took the carpets and curtains! Would you believe it! What would they be doing with the carpets and curtains from this place in shaggin’ Conneddy Cut?’

  We were all sorry they hadn’t taken the kitchen wallpaper to shaggin’ Conneddy Cut too. Apparently Mam had told Dad it was a dirt-catcher and had to go. It had a sort of dimply texture with a pattern of loops and triangles in dark purple, yellow and green. The kitchen cupboards were the colour of Fanta, and I don’t think even Dad could have lived with that level of mismatching. He said walking into the room gave him a shaggin’ headache. It was one job that couldn’t be avoided. So, after breakfast on the first morning, he handed us a bucket of warm water, two sponges and a scraper. He told Sandra and me to soak the walls, and Mel to scrape off the paper.

  ‘Shouldn’t he be doing this?’ Mel asked, exhausted after five minutes. ‘It’s not fair. I want to go out on the green.’

  ‘Me too,’ Sandra agreed. ‘I told Tracey and Valerie I’d be out after breakfast.’ She said their names as if they’d been best friends forever. Although she was my sister, I saw Sandra as more like a friend I might invite over from school, someone I connected with occasionally for a couple of hours, then happily forgot about for weeks. I think Mam and Dad were disappointed that she and I hadn’t formed a strong sisterly bond, especially as there was only a year between us, and it had been assumed we’d be close. But we were different in many ways. Sandra was more physical than I was. She preferred football and rounders to reading and drawing, and saw things like cycling and skipping as competitive sports, whereas I regarded them as enjoyable pastimes.

  For all her boyishness, though, Sandra was a bit of a girly-girl underneath. She often experimented with the bits and bobs the Avon lady persuaded Mam to buy. Once I’d caught her at the mirror in our bedroom, trying to glue a pair of false eyelashes to her lids with a tube of Bostik. She begged me not to tell – and I didn’t – but she still blamed me when Mam found out. I tried telling her it was fairly obvious she’d been up to something, as her eyes were all red and sticky, but she never believed me.

  And if Mel ever brought a friend home from school, Sandra would badger them for ages, sitting with them to watch telly and insisting on joining in whatever game they were playing. Then she’d get changed into a different outfit and parade around, flicking her hair over her shoulders.

  Mel picked a fight with Sandra about who should soak and who should scrape and ended up chasing her out to the back garden. While they screamed and shouted at each other, I carried on with the job of removing the wallpaper. Soon I found that if I picked carefully at a loose corner, a whole strip would come away in one piece, exposing a clean, light pink surface. I liked doodling, but my efforts were usually confined to copybook pages. The huge expanse I’d just revealed was calling out to be drawn on. So, while the others continued their fight in the garden, I ran upstairs to get the set of markers I’d hidden under my pillow as soon as we’d arrived. I’d had to keep them away from Sandra; she was always taking the red one to colour in her nails.

  When I came back down I could hear muffled screams from outside and guessed Mel was sitting on top of Sandra. I stared at the bare wall. I didn’t think about what to draw. I just found myself taking the brown marker and running it up then down, in two long, straight lines about six inches apart and filling the space between with whirls and spirals. I topped it off with shorter, criss-crossing brown lines and little green oval shapes dotted here and there. I’d drawn a tree. The trunk, the branches, the leaves.

  Then I climbed up on a chair and drew another branch, longer than the others, and on it I began to draw the man. I did the outline of his body, then his dark red shirt, his mucky brown trousers, his buckled shoes. After that, I drew the blackbird and I put little notes around him so you could tell he was singing. Then, before I even knew it, I was drawing the man’s face. I gave him dark, staring eyes, thick black eyebrows and a half-open, twisted mouth.

  I jumped down and looked up at what I’d done. I hadn’t wanted anyone to know about the man and yet here he was now, almost life-size on our kitchen wall. I hadn’t planned to draw him. It was like something had taken over me and made me do it. And now I wished I hadn’t.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ Mel asked as he and Sandra burst back into the kitchen.

  ‘Nothing. Just a picture,’ I told him.

  ‘I don’t like the look of him,’ Sandra said. ‘He’s sort of . . . weird.’

  ‘Good job he’s going to be papered over,’ Mel said with a laugh. He waved the scraper in the air out of Sandra’s reach and tried to smooth down the cow’s lick in his hair with the other. He was obsessed with flattening it. He spent ages every morning trying to beat it down, trying everything he could lay his hands on in the bathroom, even toothpaste. But nothing ever worked.

  ‘Maybe you should ask Dad for some of that paste when he mixes it,’ Sandra jeered at him. ‘It might work on your stupid cow’s lick.’

  ‘Take the bloody scraper if you want,’ he said, throwing it across the floor.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she sniffed, plunging her sponge into the bucket. ‘I think I prefer the soaking anyway.’

  Mel picked up the scraper again and raised it over her head, his face scrunched up like a walnut. I’d seen that look before.

  And it hadn’t ended well.

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘Or I’ll tell Dad you said “bloody”.’

  He gave me a glare and got back to the job without a word. But I ended up doing most of the work. I could feel the eyes of the man on me the whole time, so I worked extra fast to get away from his stare.

  Mam came home with Kevin three days later. Dad hadn’t allowed us to go in and see her in the
hospital. He said she didn’t need us lot on top of her so Auntie Cissy had come to mind us when he went in to visit. The first thing Mam said when she walked in the door was, ‘Would you look at the state of Ruth’s hair! It’s a disgrace!’

  It was true. The plaits she’d insisted on doing the morning we moved were still there – just about. Ribbonless, the straggly ends matted and stuck with stuff they’d dangled in throughout the last few days: butter, tomato sauce, wallpaper paste. ‘Did no one think to give it a brush?’ she asked. ‘Not even you, Cissy? What must the neighbours think?’

  Auntie Cissy looked at me with her shark eyes. ‘Sorry, Rose,’ she answered, in her robot voice. Cissy was Dad’s older sister. She wasn’t a very good minder. Of course, the others loved her; she let them do whatever they wanted, while she sat at the kitchen table repeatedly tucking her lank hair behind her ears, reading Sherlock Holmes books she borrowed from the library. Cissy was married to Uncle Frank, but they had no children. I used to think it was just as well, as she would’ve made a terrible mother. She hardly even looked at Kev.

  We, on the other hand, couldn’t contain our excitement, and pushed each other out of the way as we tried to get the best view of the latest addition to the family. He was tiny, with wrinkled fingers and puffy eyes, and thick black hair like Dad’s. We stroked his cheeks and held his hands and laughed when he yawned, showing off his tiny pink tongue. There was a fight about which one of us should be allowed to hold him first and Mam raised her eyes, saying she wondered when the novelty would wear off.

  ‘Probably when his nappy needs changing,’ Dad said.

  In the days and weeks that followed, I often awakened to the sound of screeching at six o’clock in the morning. Even though she was breastfeeding, Mam got up out of bed and brought Kev downstairs. She liked to sit in her bright, clean kitchen, surrounded by all her brand-new appliances. She’d pestered Dad for a pop-up toaster and a shiny electric kettle, the kind that turned itself off when the water was boiled. They took pride of place on the white worktop and she polished them every day. I often examined my reflection in the silver surface of the toaster. She said she loved the new wallpaper with its smooth, washable pattern of golden onions and copper pots. I’d been relieved when Dad had papered over the man in the tree. But I never forgot he was there. I felt his eyes on me whenever I sat at the table. It was like he’d followed me all the way from the park to Hillcourt Rise.