by Susan Stairs
‘You said you were only messing when you asked me that before,’ I said.
‘Well, I wasn’t.’
The song filtered from the radiogram, each word clear and perfect and familiar. His face seemed to soak up all the light in the room. All around him was dark and distant and not part of now. He stared at me, hard and close and I knew he was going to tell me something bad. Tears rose in my eyes. I didn’t try and blink them away.
‘What?’ I whispered. ‘What is it that I need to forgive?’
‘He tried to kiss me ma.’
I shook my head and felt a tear spill down my cheek. My body was like a sponge in water: heavy and soaking and ready to sink. But I wasn’t shocked. How could that be? Was it that I knew from the very first day Liz Lawless knocked on our door something like this was going to happen? Had I pushed it to the furthest part of my brain, hoping that if I didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t really come about?
And was it that, in some terrible, roundabout way, I felt like I was partly to blame?
‘You’re lying,’ I said.
‘Swear to God. I wouldn’t make somethin’ like that up.’
‘When?’
‘Ages ago. When he was here paintin’.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I saw! That’s how.’
‘But maybe you’re making a mistake! Maybe it’s just what you think you saw?’
‘Look, don’t believe me if ye don’t want to. I don’t care.’
‘You said . . . you said he tried to kiss her. But did he actually . . . you know . . . do it?’
‘Just for a second. But only ’cos me ma said I was in the house. He must’ve been afraid I might see. He didn’t know I was on the stairs, watchin’ them.’
‘But how do you know it wasn’t all your mam’s idea? Maybe it was her who kissed him?’
‘It wasn’t. I saw what happened. Swear! Look, don’t be cryin’ over it. It’s OK.’
‘It’s not OK! How would you know? And why did you have to tell me anyway?’
‘Dunno. Just thought ye should know. Ye’d want to hear the truth, wouldn’t ye? Like ye wanted the truth about O’Dea. I was going to tell ye before, but . . .’
‘Does your mam know you saw? I mean, did you say anything to her about it?’
‘Nah. Sure, why would I do that?’
I felt heavy and sick. I thought about Mam in her Home Sweet Home apron, her hair in those silver clips and Dad’s slippers on her feet. What would she do if she knew? Her whole world would fall apart. And how many times had it happened? She couldn’t ever find out. I’d have to swallow it whole and keep it inside me for ever. If I let it out it would never go away. It would destroy everything we thought we were certain of. When things change, you can’t ever change them back. You have to live with them, no matter how good or how bad they are.
Right at that moment, I would’ve gladly stayed in Shayne’s room for ever. I knew that nothing would be the same for me once I climbed down the stairs. In a few short moments I felt like I’d grown older. Everything looked different. Even Shayne. There was a sharpness to the outline of his body, and every part of him – his hands, his mouth, his face – seemed crisp and super-real. And when I looked into his eyes, the whites of them almost dazzled me.
‘How far did he get?’ I wanted to know.
‘What?’
‘My dad. With the kiss.’
‘Ah, it was nothin’. I told ye.’
‘So they didn’t actually . . . you know . . . touch?’
‘Not really. Well, maybe kinda. Just a bit. I’ll show ye.’
He shifted closer to me, turned his face, and pressed his lips on mine, flicking his tongue against the front of my teeth. I breathed in hard, gulping down my tasteless lump of Wrigley’s in surprise. His hair brushed against my cheek, tangled and thick with the smell of tobacco, and his smoky, warm breath entered my mouth, following the gum straight down the back of my throat. He was swift, like he was scared of me. When he sat back he focused on the radiogram as it played the last few seconds of his favourite song.
Neither of us moved. I wanted to look at him but I kept my eyes on the turntable. Then, from behind the music came the faint but instantly recognizable screech of Liz’s voice calling out his name. We both knew we’d wait until the song was over; it wouldn’t have been right to stop it before the end. I wiped a tear from my cheek and felt his face against the side of my own.
‘So, would ye forgive yer da that?’ he whispered into my ear.
My hand touched his arm as I stood up to go. My head throbbed and I swayed a bit on my feet. I knew then and there that Hillcourt Rise wouldn’t be our home for ever. We were only passing through. Everything was different now.
THIRTEEN
I tried to tell myself that everything would calm down and get back to normal when school started again. That we’d all figure out we’d made far too big a deal of things over the summer simply because we’d had nothing better to do. But I soon realized that whatever had happened couldn’t be deadheaded like Bridie’s roses: chopped, discarded and left to rot into nothing.
Going back to school was hard. Not just because the others were starting in Grangemount and I had a whole year of the awful Mrs Lally as teacher to look forward to, but because everything had become far too real. I’d lain in bed for nights and nights, playing a game of ‘so what’, trying to convince myself that nothing really mattered.
I’d told David’s parents he’d thrown himself out of a tree on purpose. So what? It was the truth as far as I knew. I’d found out David was adopted. So what? Loads of kids are. Tracey had turned all the girls against Sandra and me. So what? Who’d want to be friends with them anyway? Dad had tried to kiss Liz Lawless. So what? Hundreds of men had probably done the same.
But it was no good; everything mattered.
Things got worse. Bridie began hiding her tin of coconut macaroons. Whenever I’d gone round before, she’d open the lid as soon as I let myself in, almost forcing me to help myself. Now, when she heard me calling at the back door, she’d tell me to ‘wait a moment’ and I’d hear her scuffing about while I stood with my hand on the door handle. And when finally she’d say I could come in, she’d be standing, all red-faced and breathless at the kitchen table, the biscuit tin suspiciously absent. And she rarely called me ‘dear’ any more. Whatever about the coconut macaroons, that was the thing I found hardest to accept. She didn’t stop me from calling in to her and we continued to have our chats about this and that, but it wasn’t the same. Sometimes I’d catch her staring at me when I was rearranging her knick-knacks along the mantelpiece or searching through some box of junk she’d allowed me to sort out. Her small eyes, ringed with short, powdery lashes, bore into me like pointed screws. It made me feel uncomfortable. Like she didn’t trust me any more.
Every day, as I walked to school on my own, Dad would drive past me on his way to his latest job. He’d wave or give a little toot on the horn and I’d give him a sort of smile but I couldn’t look at him without thinking about The Kiss. The idea of it was as heavy in my stomach as my schoolbag was on my back. And what made it worse was that I couldn’t think about it without remembering Shayne’s demonstration. While the picture of Dad’s attempt with Liz weighed me down, the memory of Shayne’s lips against my own seemed to lighten the load, but I wasn’t sure if I should be grateful for that or not.
I suspected Aidan Farrell and the twins had started to wait until I passed their houses before they left for school themselves. It was far too much of a coincidence that every day they happened to come out as soon as I got to the top of the hill. I’d hear Aidan slamming his front door, and if I looked back, I’d see him belting down to the O’Deas’ to call for Tina and Linda. Then I’d spy the twins, waving their mittoned hands at their mother as she stood at the door, pulling her quilted dressing gown tight around her chest.
For a while, with all the distractions of school, Sandra wasn’t too fussed about Tracey and Val
erie deliberately avoiding her. But when Tracey started trying to turn even Sandra’s new friends against her, it was me who got the blame.
‘I hate you, Ruth, you know that?’ she said one evening while we were doing the washing up.
‘Why’s that?’ I asked, squirting a long stream of Quix into the sink, not caring in the slightest what her excuse was this time.
‘Everything was fine here till you opened your big mouth about David. Tracey and Valerie are being so mean.’
I sighed. ‘They’ll get over it. And anyway, I thought you said you’d absolutely loads of new friends at Grangemount?’
‘I do. But Tracey keeps whispering to them when she knows I’m looking. I know she’s trying to turn them against me.’
‘Why do you care?’
‘’Cos she’s my friend! And so are they!’
‘How the hell could someone who does that be your friend? Grow up, Sandra.’
‘Me grow up? At least I have friends my own age. The only one you have is Bridie.’
I was going to say that at least she was a real friend but I thought better of it when I remembered the coconut macaroons. I could’ve told her that I kind of regarded Shayne as a friend, but did I really? I wasn’t sure. I’d never told her I’d been in his room – twice – and although I’d thought about it many times, especially when she was being mean to me, I was afraid The Kiss thing might slip out and that’d be disastrous. Whatever hope I had of keeping it from Mam and trying to act as if nothing was wrong every time I looked at Dad, Sandra would never be able to hold it in. She’d go absolutely mental if she heard I’d been up in Shayne’s room. And if she found out that he’d shown me what The Kiss had been like, well, I dreaded to think how she’d react.
Since we’d moved in, Mam had been so busy with Kev and getting the house the way she wanted it, she’d barely had time to take a breath, never mind truly get to know all our neighbours. Although she’d been the one most keen to move to Hillcourt Rise, it was as much about wanting a better life for us as it was about having a modern house. She’d hoped we’d make good friends and knit ourselves into a safe and trusting community. They need somewhere safe to play, Mick, she’d said. And some kids to play with . . .
But it wasn’t quite working out like she’d planned.
We didn’t get to celebrate Hallowe’en that year. It wasn’t our choosing; it turned out to be the day of Uncle Frank’s funeral. He’d fallen from the roof of a bungalow on the Howth Road one morning and lay in the back garden for ages until the owner came home from work and found him. He’d survived a similar fall before and escaped with only a couple of broken bones so everyone was hopeful at the start. But then the doctors said to prepare for the worst.
Dad went to the hospital every day around lunchtime to sit at his bedside with Cissy, and Mam usually followed later on. We liked being on our own at first, but then Kev got chicken pox. Mam said it never rains but it pours and there was nothing we could do but let it run its course. We dreaded being left to look after him. He moaned and whinged and wouldn’t sleep, even though he’d been awake all day. I think Mam was almost relieved when she handed him over and headed off to the hospital each afternoon.
Uncle Frank lasted a week. Cissy was on her own with him when he died and Dad said later that she made him feel really guilty because he hadn’t been there with her at the end. Mam told him not to worry about it, that Cissy didn’t know what she was saying.
We weren’t allowed go to the funeral. Mam said we’d have to stay and look after Kev. I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to go anyway. I was afraid the coffin might be open and we’d have to sit looking at a dead Uncle Frank. Bridie called in to ‘pay her respects’ when she heard, breezing past me when I opened the door like I was invisible. Mam asked if she’d mind keeping an eye on us when they went to the funeral, but when she saw Kev covered in calamine lotion she threw her hands in the air and started bustling out to the front door. ‘Oh God, no. Chicken pox! I’m sorry, Rose, I couldn’t. Sure I’ve never had them and I don’t want to be putting myself at any risk at my age. Hits adults far harder than children, you know.’ I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me she was almost happy to have found an excuse not to mind us.
Because of Uncle Frank’s accident, we hadn’t been that excited about Hallowe’en. And since the others were now in secondary school, they weren’t going to be dressing up anyway. It was an unwritten rule that once you finished primary, you didn’t bother with that sort of thing. So as Mam and Dad were leaving to go to the funeral, we didn’t mind too much that they told us to stay inside for the night. It was too dangerous to go out on our own, they said, what with the bonfire and all.
‘We’ll be going back to Cissy’s afterwards but we should be home by half-seven,’ Mam said at the door. ‘Say a prayer for your uncle Frank.’ She had tears in her eyes. ‘And remember, no going outside.’
It was only once it started to get dark that we realized we hadn’t asked if we were allowed to answer the door to callers. I said we shouldn’t, that we weren’t ever supposed to open the door to anyone when Mam and Dad went out at night. But the others felt the usual rules didn’t apply because it was Hallowe’en. Sandra said it would look a bit strange if we didn’t and Mel agreed, saying only complete weirdoes kept to themselves on Hallowe’en night. I said that since Mam had been preoccupied during the week and hadn’t gone shopping, there was hardly anything in the house to give out to callers anyway, so it might be better if we pretended we weren’t in. But I was overruled. Sandra said it was bad enough that Tracey and Valerie hardly talked to her now without giving them even more of an excuse to hate her. In the end it didn’t matter; we only had about four callers. And they were all kids we didn’t know, probably from Cherrywood and Churchview Park. Not one neighbour rang our bell.
At first, Mel and Sandra insisted that everyone must’ve been waiting until after the bonfire, even though the year before most of us had collected our goodies way before it had been lit. Then they suggested that maybe word had gone round Hillcourt Rise about Uncle Frank, and no one had called out of respect for the dead. I realized how stupid that sounded later on in the night.
We watched out the window for a while and saw the first sparks coming from the bonfire, then we pulled the curtains and flumped down to watch telly. It was the usual boring stuff: fiddle players in Aran jumpers in front of a fire on one channel, and a group of politicians in dark suits arguing about the state of the country on the other. Kev refused to settle in his cot but finally dozed off, stretched across Mel and Sandra’s laps. They entertained themselves by counting his spots, afraid to even flinch in case they woke him up. Then a quiz came on the telly and they sat glued, trying to outdo each other answering the questions.
After a while I got up to get a drink. Before I got to the kitchen, I heard a sort of whooshing noise and then a hard, flat thump against the front door. Dead silence followed. Then the faint sound of footsteps echoing away up the road. Opening the door carefully, I peeped out, then stepped onto the drive and, even in the darkness, I was certain it was Tracey I saw running swiftly up the cul-de-sac on her skinny legs. And from the green, loud laughter rose high in the chilly air.
Then I noticed the lumpy parcel sitting on the doorstep, loosely wrapped in newspaper and stained a dark, brownish red. I cautiously nudged the bulky shape with my toe, feeling a solid but sort of spongy mass inside. I leaned down for a closer look and as I peeled back a corner of the paper, what I saw was a dark, dead eye staring into nowhere from a pulpy, bloody mess of skin and hair.
It was a sheep’s head.
I staggered backwards in fright, the sickening, rotten smell flooding my nostrils and making me retch. My heart drummed hard and I covered my mouth with my hand as I half looked away and tried to toe the paper back around the ‘gift’ we’d been given. Then I ran inside and grabbed a plastic bag from a drawer in the kitchen.
‘I’m . . . I’m just going into Bridie’s,’ I called out to the others, hop
ing I wouldn’t be questioned on my sudden need to go next door. ‘Back in a few minutes.’ But all I got by way of response was a grunt from Mel and a loudly whispered ‘Shut up, you’ll wake Kev!’ from Sandra.
Back on the doorstep, I used one of the empty milk bottles left out for the milkman to try and push the sheep’s head into the bag. It wasn’t easy. The damp newspaper tore into useless shreds and without it, the head slid across the step, leaving a rusty trail in its wake. I held the bag open by the handles and tried to scoop it under the head, like filling a bucket full of water at the seaside. After several attempts, I finally managed to hook it under the sheep’s chin and pulled it up over the whole head. When I lifted it up, it slipped heavily down into the bag, its greasy weight straining against the thin film of plastic. I held it away from my body as I ran along the path up towards the green.
Paddy and Clem were walking round the bonfire with their hands in their pockets, kicking any stray bits of timber into the flames. Geraldine and Nora stood over by the trees in their woolly bobble-hats and quilted anoraks. Other parents huddled in small groups, chatting and laughing while their children chased each other around the green, their bags of goodies rustling in the wind as they ran.
‘Well, well, and what do we have here?’ David announced when he saw me approaching. He stood straight and tall in well-pressed jeans and a navy corduroy jacket, with a red polo neck jumper underneath. He’d had the cast off a good few weeks, but still held his left wrist in his right hand, massaging it slowly as he spoke. ‘Here to help the Hallowe’en party?’ he asked, nodding in the direction of the plastic bag swinging from my hand. Tracey, Valerie and the twins made their way over.
‘You’re a bit late, aren’t you?’ Valerie said with a snigger. ‘Why didn’t you come out earlier like the rest of us?’
‘Maybe Mother and Father Lamb wouldn’t allow their babies out, for fear of the big bad wolf?’ David said.
‘For your information, my uncle died,’ I said.