by Susan Stairs
Mam would let me hold Kev while she made tea and toast. I’d try and shush him, rocking him in my arms and sliding my stockinged feet across the lino. Then she’d sit down at the formica table, using her free hand to eat and drink while her other arm held Kev as he hungrily sucked away. I’d sit on the chair opposite, with my chin in my hands, watching the new addition to our family and trying to remember what it had been like without him. I couldn’t. It was if he’d always been there.
The hot weather continued, and for our first few weeks in Hillcourt Rise, the days ran together, sticky and sweet, like a stream of warm custard poured from a jug. The others each fell in love with someone different almost every day. I’d sit on the edge of the green, able to watch them both from a distance for the very first time. Mel showing off in front of the girls and Sandra flirting with Shayne Lawless. When we’d lived on the South Circular, we’d always been on top of one another. If they were playing on the path outside our house, I was only ever a few feet away, sitting on the front step or spying on them with my nose squashed up against the window of the front room. On the green of Hillcourt Rise, however, I found I could see things in new and altogether more interesting ways.
FIVE
The first person I got to know in Hillcourt Rise was Bridie Goggin. She lived next door in number forty-three. Her husband, Dick, had died suddenly from a ‘clot in the brain’ about a year before we arrived. They had three teenagers when they made the move to Dublin from Naas, in County Kildare, so they weren’t the typical Hillcourt Rise family. And by the time we came, their children had left home.
Bridie made it her business to welcome us to the neighbourhood, bringing a homemade Victoria sponge, oozing jam and cream, to our door the day we moved in. And when Mam came home with Kev, she left a wicker basket of fruit, with a real pineapple and big, furry peaches. It only took a day or two before I’d wormed my way into Bridie’s house. I knew she’d like me; I was quiet and wouldn’t interrupt the flow of her chatter. When things got too noisy in our house (as they often did) I’d slip in to Bridie’s, knowing there’d be a cushion under my bum and a coconut macaroon in my mouth almost as soon as I walked in the door.
Dick Goggin had been a bank manager in the nearby village of Westgorman. From the crystal-framed photographs on Bridie’s glass-topped telephone table, I saw that he’d been a big rhino of a man with a purple face and a halo of snow-white hair. Bridie was always re-arranging the photographs, glancing at herself in the hall mirror as she did so, patting her lacquered nest of spun-gold hair and applying yet another coat of tangerine lipstick.
Her house was full of knick-knacks and boxes of stuff that she never used like china tea sets, fancy tablecloths and embroidered pillowcases. But for all their contents, the rooms seemed kind of cold and empty. We often saw her at night through her windows, wandering about in her dressing gown, drawing the heavy curtains like some sort of sad old ghost. Arriving into mass on Sundays, I’d scan the crowded church for her big fur hat and lead Mam to the pew behind her. While Father Feely’s bumblebee voice thrummed up through the dusty, dead air, I’d spend a happy hour fiddling with the clawed paws and tail of Bridie’s fox fur stole.
One sluggish afternoon, not much more than a week after we’d moved in, Bridie asked me to help deadhead the roses in her front garden. The air that day was thick with a kind of gluey heat that made me feel like I was wrapped in cling film. From the beginning, Bridie had made good use of me, securing my help with jobs around the house, in return for tasty delights from her well-stocked kitchen cupboards. As she set about showing me how to snip off the withered roses and gather them into a pile, someone began rattling the gate to get our attention. I looked up and saw Shayne Lawless, swinging something around that made a whupp-whupp noise as it slashed through the warm, hazy air. The neck of his pea green T-shirt was torn at the seam, as if he’d wrenched himself away from someone’s tight grasp, and through the rip I could see the tanned skin of his chest and the flash of a silver St Christopher medal. His skin, hair and eyes were a light, toffee brown colour and this, along with his jerking, puppet-like movements, made him look like a life-sized wooden Pinocchio.
Bridie walked over to the gate, pulling off her gardening gloves, finger by finger. ‘Stop that at once!’ she said. ‘You’ll have someone’s eye out!’
Shayne continued, right in front of her face, creating a sort of current that lifted the curls off his grimy forehead every few seconds.‘Yer brother around?’ he asked me, his gaze unconnected with mine. His right hand hung lazily over the top of Bridie’s gate and I noticed lines of black dirt under his fingernails. He was about average size for a twelve-year-old, but could’ve passed for any age between ten and fourteen. It was as if various parts of him were growing at different speeds: his nose was still snub and babyish, while his eyes were sunken and grey-rimmed, like they belonged to an old man.
‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s gone to get the messages for my mam. But my sister’ll be out when she’s finished the ironing.’ I immediately regretted the amount of detail I gave him.
‘Wooo-oooh,’ he sang. ‘Where’d ye live before? Walnut Grove?’
Little House on the Prairie was one of my favourite programmes and I fancied myself as something of a Laura Ingalls: kind of thoughtful and smart, with my hair in plaits and a closer relationship with my father than my brother and sister. So I didn’t take kindly to his scorn. I moved closer, planning to say something sarcastic, but all I could do was stare. He tilted back his head and smiled knowingly at me, showing surprisingly even white teeth, and an inch-long raised scar, like a glistening worm, on the underside of his chin. My nose picked up his scent: a mix of wet earth, cigarette smoke and strawberry bubble gum.
‘Off you go,’ Bridie said, shooing him away. ‘Go on. Away with you! And give that here, whatever it is.’
Shayne smiled and let his plaything slip out of his fingers. Then he laughed as it sailed over the gate and through the air, landing with a thump on Bridie’s huge, batch-loaf bosoms. Terror spread across her face when she looked down. Lying between her bosoms was a snake. She was hysterical.
‘Ruth! Help me!’ she screamed, fluffing at the snake with her raw-sausage fingers. But her actions only made it slither underneath the front of her peacock-patterned dress. Shayne made a run for it. ‘Come back you!’ she called, her eyes filling with tears.
But he was already belting up towards the green. Bridie pulled out the front of her dress like a tent and did a little dance on the driveway, causing the snake to slip down past her stomach and thighs before bouncing out from between her mottled legs onto the warm, sticky tarmac. Holding a hand to her chest, she bent to have a look. ‘Oh dear God!’ she whispered breathily. ‘Is it dead? Ruth! Tell me! Is it dead?’
I bent down to inspect it. The snake was over a foot long, yellowish-green, with a white criss-cross pattern all down its back. Its head and tail curled in opposite directions and out of its mouth lolled a blood red, forked tongue. It was clearly a rubber reptile, and not a very realistic one when I looked at it closely. But Bridie didn’t have her glasses on and she found it difficult to see details without them. I tipped it with my toe, making it spring forward half an inch. Bridie jumped.
‘Get rid of it! We have to get rid of it!’
‘It’s OK,’ I said flatly. ‘It’s just rubber.’
If Bridie had been a shade more clever, she might’ve detected my disappointment. Not because the snake was rubber, but because I’d told her. If I’d let on it was real, I could have been the hero and had the run of the biscuit tin for weeks. All those coconut macaroons . . .
‘Rubber? You mean it’s not real?’ She shook a shiver out of her body. ‘Well of all the . . .’
I picked up the snake and tossed it onto the soft heap of dead roses, where it sank into the ragged petals like a corpse in a satin-lined coffin.
‘I need to go in for a sit-down, dear. I feel a bit faint,’ said Bridie with a whimper. ‘Let run wild, he is. Mother
takes no notice. No notice whatsoever. And her clicking around in her high-heeled boots.’
Shayne Lawless was such a pig. How could Sandra like him? And I didn’t care for the sound of his mother either. Mothers weren’t supposed to wear high-heeled boots. They were for teenagers, or Elton John, or the girls who danced on Top of the Pops every Thursday night – people who wanted to be noticed. Sandra would probably wear high-heeled boots when she was older. For the moment, she had to content herself with doing cartwheels in front of Shayne Lawless every day on the green. Even when she was wearing a dress.
Bridie went inside. I got down on my hunkers and lifted the snake up by its tail. Laying it out on the grass, I pinched its silly-looking tongue between my thumb and forefinger and carefully snipped it off with the sharpened blades of the clippers Bridie called her ‘secateurs’.
Later on, I slipped both tongue and body into the space beneath the loose bottom of my red satin-lined musical jewellery box.
In the days that followed, I lingered longer on the edge of the green and soon learned the names and faces of all the kids. There was Valerie Vaughan. She was twelve and lived in number twenty-one with her parents and two younger brothers. Their house had leaded windows, a brass number on a grey marble plaque beside the door, and a white carriage lantern hanging from a big fancy pole in the front garden. Mrs Vaughan made you take your shoes off at the front door if you were ever asked inside and there was a ‘don’t touch!’ sort of feeling in all the rooms. Mr Vaughan – Paddy – worked for a big builders’ suppliers, and was always away, ‘sourcing timber products in eastern Europe’ according to Valerie.
She was tall for her age and annoyingly mature. Her full face was spattered with fat freckles like grains of brown sugar, and she wore braces on her teeth. She wasn’t allowed to eat sticky things like Kalypso bars or Lucky Lumps, insisting, ‘I prefer fruit anyway’, and chomping noisily on apples like a horse, even eating the core. Her thick, auburn hair was always scraped back off her face into a ponytail that swished from side to side as she walked. Tiny emerald studs sparkled in her ears and she wore her name in swirly gold letters on a chain around her neck, as if to remind us all who she was. As a rule, Valerie ignored her two brothers out on the green, but she sprang to their defence if anyone upset them. Mrs Vaughan – Nora – paid for her daughter to take tennis lessons at a local club. Valerie had the most expensive Slazenger racquet you could buy, one with a zipped, navy leather cover, and she practised on the road outside her house, in full tennis whites, with Tracey Farrell.
There were six children in the Farrell family, Tracey being the eldest, and Mrs Farrell – Geraldine – was pregnant with number seven when we arrived. Tracey was rarely seen without a younger brother or sister clinging on to some part of her body, leaving her clothes permanently blotched with hardened patches of saliva and snot. Often she was left in charge of the whole litter on the green for hours, screaming at them crazily for the slightest offence.
She was the bossiest person in Hillcourt Rise. Even more so than Sandra or Mel. Small for her age, and what would be described as ‘painfully thin’, she had limp black hair that was never allowed to grow past her chin. Her skin bruised easily and pale blue veins ran close to its surface. I couldn’t look at her limbs without thinking about the bones that lay under their scant covering of flesh. There was something about her that made me imagine Mr and Mrs Farrell in bed, touching each other, and Tracey falling out into the world from between her mother’s short legs. I could never regard her as being totally clean.
The twins, Tina and Linda O’Dea, lived in number ten. They hated each other, and their older brother David, and it was clear both of them wished they’d been born an only child. They were identical and very pretty in a Disney sort of way, with large grey-blue eyes that dominated their heart-shaped faces, flushed pink cheeks and rippling, strawberry-blonde hair. They both fought to be the supreme O’Dea daughter, a battle neither of them was ever going to win. Mel routinely tried to make an impression on them and blamed his cow’s lick for their lack of interest. He accused Sandra of doing the same thing with Shayne Lawless.
‘You’re such an embarrassment,’ he said to her. ‘Can you not see you’re making a show of yourself? Ask Ruth what you look like.’
It was another blue-sky day. Sandra sat on our garden wall, kicking her heels against the pebbledash, shielding her eyes from the sun. We were waiting for Mam to bring Kev out, so we could wheel him around the estate while she got some work done. Mel was bent to the ground, carefully lacing up his new sand-coloured desert boots, convinced his choice of footwear would melt one or other of the twin’s frozen hearts.
‘How would Ruth know? She’s never even properly on the green,’ Sandra said, flicking her hair over her shoulder. I was hoping not to be drawn in, but Mel persisted.
‘You’ve seen her, haven’t you?’ he asked me.
I chewed at the inside of my cheek, peering down at the teeny red spiders we called ‘bloodsuckers’ racing about on the top of the wall. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘’Course you have! You notice stuff. And you’re always spying on us!’
Sandra slid off the wall, rubbing invisible dust from the bum of her denim skirt. ‘Yeah, you are always spying on us.’ Her eyes narrowed, ready for interrogation. But Mam interrupted, bumping the pram down the front step. ‘I’m wheeling,’ Sandra announced.
‘Didn’t you wheel the last time?’ Mam said. ‘I think it’s Ruth’s turn.’
Sandra shrugged, giving me her best ‘I-don’t-care look’. ‘Yeah, well,’ she sniffed, ‘but you have to bring him onto the green.’
Mam stood in the garden, arms folded and looking tired with blue-ish half-moons under her pale eyes. The frilly apron she’d made and embroidered the words ‘Home Sweet Home’ on was tied loosely around her waist, and she wore Dad’s tan suede slippers. On top of her head, as always, three carefully wound circles of hair were held in place with silver, spring-loaded hair clips. Every evening, before Dad came home, she’d release the clips and run her fingers through the curls they’d created. Then she’d pat some powder on her nose and colour in her lips with Desert Dawn.
‘He should sleep for a while,’ she said. ‘Bring him back when he wakes.’
If it wasn’t for Kev, I don’t think I’d have ventured onto the battlefield of the green so soon. Perhaps not at all. But that afternoon, I trundled his pram over the daisies and buttercups like a chariot, screened from the eyes of the assembled gang by its shield of navy and chrome. Some of the kids sat cross-legged on the grass, others sprawled out on their backs, and it was obvious they’d all just been to the shop – everyone was sucking on a Kool Pop. Tracey Farrell was the first to approach.
‘He’s not supposed to be lying on his back,’ she announced, poking her head in under the hood of the pram. ‘My mam says they can choke and die if they do.’
I turned my back on her and busied myself making a daisy chain, tying it around my wrist. Kev let out a whimper, so I got up to check on him. He looked like a troll version of Dad, with his jet-black hair and sticky-out ears.
‘What’s his name?’ I heard someone ask from behind.
It was David O’Dea, arriving out of nowhere as if he’d been beamed up, Star Trek-style. He tried to smile and ran his fingers through his fringe. At fourteen, David was the oldest of the green gang. He was always perfectly dressed. He looked like he’d been born to wear a uniform, with his shoes unscuffed and his clothes crisp and spotless, as if they’d been specially made to fit. He wore his casual check shirts with the top button closed and his Levi’s with creases ironed into the legs. His clear skin was slightly tanned all year round, with an even covering of fine, bleach-blond hair and chocolate moles of varying sizes dotted across his face and arms. On his right wrist he wore a plaited, red leather strap, fastened with a brass stud that he kept snapping open and shut when he spoke. David had the best poker face of anyone I’ve ever known. I never really knew what he was thinkin
g. Most of the time, I just had to guess.
‘Hmm . . . Stairway to Kevin,’ he said, when I answered him. I knew he was expecting me to ask him what he meant but I said nothing. I soon learned David often said strange things.
‘How old is he?’ he asked.
‘He was born the day we moved in,’ I blurted.
‘So he’s lived here his whole life?’
‘I . . . I suppose so . . . but it’s only been about three weeks.’
‘Still his whole life, though.’
I wasn’t sure if I should disagree, but before I could say anything, he turned and walked towards the gang. I followed, fixing my eyes on the buttoned back pocket of his jeans. Shayne Lawless spat out the bit of plastic Kool Pop wrapper he’d been chewing when he saw me approach.
‘Hope it’s not goin’ to start screamin’,’ he said, tipping his head in the direction of the pram. ‘Ye can bring it home if it does.’
Sandra laughed and shoved Shayne’s shoulder. Any excuse to touch him. Tracey ran over, two or three little ones dragging out of her skirt. She shook them off and put her hands on her hips, tossing her hair as if it was long enough to flick over her shoulders.
‘We’re playing chasing,’ she announced, pointing at me. ‘She’s on!’
The gang scattered across the grass and in behind the small trees, shrieking and whooping, then falling quiet. Shayne hung back. Facing me, he held his arms out from his sides, shaking his hands, palm sides up. ‘Well? What’s the matter?’ he taunted. ‘Afraid ye won’t be able to catch me?’