Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

  Others claimed they had somehow known the English word for pork, and thought that that was what the sailors were heckling – ‘Pork! Pork!’ – a barrage of un-kosher threats to run them off the ship.

  Other times it was just that the captain had told them this was the last stop, ‘only up the road’ from America; only a short, final shimmy in the wilderness – sure, they would be there in time for tea.

  But for Ruth and her family, there was only one story; one version of the heartache.

  After two weeks they sent Tateh off again, this time to the Housing Office on Lynch’s Quay, to try to find them somewhere to stay. Mame insisted it was just a temporary measure, just a matter of pride – anything to get them out of that shed. ‘We may be your family, Moshe, but we are not your rats.’

  So the paperwork shoved them off towards an abandoned redbrick terrace, the houses huddled together like a crowd trying for warmth. Hibernian Buildings, they were called. Celtic Crescent. Monarea Terrace. Down the road from the port, as if the family could still be called up for the second leg of their journey at any moment.

  They scalded the place with boiling water every day for a week, to annihilate the native germs. Mame refused to unpack a thing, insisting the bundles remain untouched. ‘Temporary, remember – what did I tell you?’ But soon Tateh put up a mezuzah outside the front door, another matter of pride. Then he coaxed the girls to unwrap a couple of items they had lugged halfway across the globe (or, as it turned out, only a quarter of the way). So now there was a tub of tealeaves in the kitchen, a snag of lace around the window, a copy of Shakespeare and the Talmud sitting on the shelf, the latter with the words of different Rabbis written side by side.

  And every Friday as Ruth sat side by side with her family for dinner, she could almost forget about everything else; could almost ignore the rage and the resentment that lay ahead that evening as soon as the girls had been banished to bed.

  Because they had become nightly by now, her parents’ arguments – rituals forming even in the worst of times. It went food then prayers then pleas and regrets; the high pitch of her father’s optimism and the lash of her mother’s anger reaching up the stairs to the landing where Ruth sat, crouched in her nightdress, a covert Jewish playwright in the highest stalls of a gilded Moscow theatre.

  She cracked her knuckles one by one. The fourth one wouldn’t give.

  ‘But Moshe, I have told you,’ she heard her mother cry now, the line almost on cue. ‘We do not belong in this place.’

  She spied the back of Mame’s head, the neck tensed into bones, before it thrust itself forward for the usual swerve – the same-old new line of attack. ‘And what about Dovid?’

  ‘Nu, what about Dovid?’

  ‘Moshe, he is over there all by himself.’

  ‘Austėja, why must I keep telling you it does not matter about my brother Dovid?’

  It was the only time Ruth heard her father raise his voice. It sounded like a stranger’s sound.

  She checked behind to the bedroom door, though she knew Esther wouldn’t stir. Even during the day her sister barely bothered to listen, unwavering in her allegiances: ‘How am I supposed to become a famous actress,’ she had sobbed, ‘in some country I’ve never even heard of?’

  ‘But Esther,’ Ruth had tried to console her, eager to please as ever, ‘I think they speak English here too.’ Because she had heard them out in the street, all right, the melody in their talk; the bounce and skip to their tone; the word ‘boy’ after every lovely line.

  ‘Look, my dear.’ Downstairs now, Tateh was panting like he had been running, the heat of it steaming the inside of his specs. They said he was practically blind and yet still he was able to see things that no one else could. ‘My darling Austėja, I will do it – I will write another play.’ As he spoke he took a step closer to his wife. He seemed calmer in her orbit. ‘Not the rats, but a new one. I am telling you, there is something… I can feel it already.’ He had even enquired already after one of those newfangled typewriter contraptions – just the thing to set him off. ‘Nu, can you imagine it,’ he had exclaimed. ‘Letters flying through the air! Only, they do say that sometimes the letters get stuck…’

  Lttrs flyingthrough thea ir!

  And Ruth smiled now as she thought of it, because it sounded a bit like her own words; how they sometimes congealed whenever she got nervous.

  Wehaveeachotheristhatnotenough?

  MamewhatistheIrishwordforhome?

  Doesthesecondchildalwaysgetlovedsecondbest?

  ‘Just… just let me do this,’ Tateh concluded now. ‘Let me do it for you?’ Until it came, the highlight of the ritual. ‘For my Princess of the Bees?’ The silly pet name and the only story in the world the playwright refused to tell.

  His daughters had pleaded with him over the years, begging for even the gist of the tale:

  ‘Tateh, why do you always call her that?’

  ‘What are the bees?’

  ‘Mame?’

  But even Esther had failed to prise the truth from their ­mother’s lips, so instead they could only wonder at the flicker in her stone-black eyes whenever it was mentioned – somewhere between a warning and a delight. Sometimes, recently, the only sign of life that was left.

  The Princess of the Bees.

  Through the silence below the footsteps clipped away. Ruth turned and sprinted back to bed before she was caught and smacked to sleep, a hot face on a cold pillow. Only, as she lay there, she realised that tonight had been different. Because this time, Mame hadn’t objected – hadn’t said no, in any language – the ritual evolved and witnessed by two different-coloured eyes.

  And Ruth remembered how Tateh once told her that bees sometimes communicated not by sound, but by sight; by watching each other dance. A ‘waggle’ they called it, making shapes with their flight that could be turned into maps for the others to follow. So then, no matter what, the rest of the hive would never get lost.

  April

  Date: 15th May 1958

  Name: Shem Sweeney

  Location: Lavatory

  Status: Diabolical

  I watched the words as they leaked from my pen, my whole body sinking with the relief of it – sweet release before my bloody eyes.

  To be honest, I must have been a sight to behold myself, the gangle of me sat there on the filthy toilet lid, feet hovering off the ground to try and avoid the sop off the lethal-looking puddles below.

  Some were so thick they had begun to form a skin. My gut did a churn over itself.

  Being brutal, I was an awful scrawn of a lad; much taller than I should have been, given Jews tend to be on the shorter, stockier side, though my Ima did once say that her Abba (may his name be blessed) had been a six-footer himself, bones so big they took the piss. Not that I ever got to meet the lad, mind you – he died before my time – and no photos either, apparently.

  It had been an early enough growth spurt, mine, which I supposed was kind of ironic given all my body’s failures in the years that followed, but that evening I was eighteen years of age as I sat on the jacks, scrawling away like a mad yoke. In my left hand I held a half-masticated biro, the tip going like the clappers, while in my right I clutched the old timetable I had managed to nick from outside the nuns’ dormitory when nobody was looking. It was the best thing about being silent, to be honest – I got fierce good at going unnoticed. Some might say, too bloody good.

  Day 14

  Items of note:

  1) I miss my Ima

  2) The food is diabolical

  3) I miss my Ima

  I read the points back to myself one at a time; saw where the pen had leaned that bit too hard. But I couldn’t help it, because it was an entire fortnight now since I had arrived in this Godforsaken place, and still I hadn’t written a thing – all my thoughts, my frustrations, clogged up with no release – I was go
ing out of my skull! Until that morning I had managed to smuggle the bic on the sly; had waited for a chance to sneak off to the first floor lavs and then finally indulged in my guilty pleasure. Sweet fucking release!

  But no, that sounded all wrong. Like I was some kind of pervert. Like I had nipped off with an under-the-counter for a you-know-what – same as all the lads in school who used to boast about the trajectory of their respective semen squirts. And com’ere, do Jewies have to hold theirs differently? No, I could only imagine what the nuns would have said if I was up to all of that. Though to be honest, they probably would’ve been just as furious if they had found me here now, given I was strictly forbidden to do any writing whatsoever while ‘undergoing my treatment’.

  They say masturbation makes you go blind. I was just mute. And what makes that go?

  Roommate Diagnosis: Abysmal.

  Utter wanker / masturbator extraordinaire.

  In fact, must be blind as a bat.

  I smiled at the feeble joke, these days few and far between, though up on the wall, Jesus didn’t seem to get it. Jesus on the cross. Because every room in that hellhole had a figurine just like it nailed, crooked, on high – even there in the jacks, hardly the most sacred of surroundings.

  The lid beneath me was cracked, ice-cold through the fabric of my arse. In front of me the stall door was riddled with splinters, the flakes of paint long shredded or maybe even picked away by those who sat here shitting. Hiding. Praying. And I noticed one punter had obviously enjoyed his little session so much that he had carved a satisfied ‘AH’ into the grain. Must have been a non-speaker like myself, I decided, capturing the relief of the moment the only way he knew how:

  Ahhhhhhhh.

  I picked up my page now to do the same – a sigh of contentment, scribbled down the timetable margin. But no, there had been enough writing for one day. Because God alone knew how long this scrap of paper was going to have to last me, so no need to use it up in one greedy go. Not when there was so much else still inside me, gagging to get out.

  I stood up, slowly, careful to avoid the worst of the flood. I clicked my neck left and right; patted my head for my kippah, still not used to the fact that it was gone.

  The nuns had confiscated it the minute I had been admitted, despite my Abba’s fury. He didn’t say a word when they took away my clothes. My insoles. My toothbrush. My beloved flashcards – the only means of communication I had left with the world. But as soon as they requested that circle of cotton from my skull he had gone nuts: ‘Now just a minute,’ he spat. ‘I was assured there would be absolutely no religious discrim— ’

  ‘We understand, Mr Sweeney. But we just feel— ’

  ‘May I remind you that I could have chucked the boy into one of the state facilities, but I specifically chose to go private on the basis that the standard— ’

  ‘Joseph,’ my Ima blurted, like she had just remembered something she’d forgotten.

  My father’s name echoed down the damp of the asylum hallway where we stood, three Jews and an Ursuline nun. It sounded like the opening line of a terrible joke.

  ‘Joseph,’ my mother repeated. ‘Come on now.’ Though her country lilt was barely audible over the din of the rain.

  It had been Pathetic Fallacy, the weather that afternoon.

  Murphy’s Law.

  Or more like Murphy’s Phallus, pissing on us all.

  ‘Sure, Joseph, it doesn’t really matter. Don’t— ’

  ‘Well, of course you would say that, Máire,’ my father snapped, spitting the strange remark at the side of my mother’s headscarf, the one that always hid her lovely blonde hair from view.

  The flecks of his saliva glistened beneath the institutional lights so white they were almost green.

  So slowly, I had unclipped my skullcap and handed it over to the Matron, Sister Monica, a flash of a smile across her beady eyes – a flicker of everything that was to come before—

  Dingaling!

  But now it was done; now the bell was ringing, the toll of it shrill across the toilet tiles.

  Dingaling!

  Time for bed. Time to sprint downstairs back to my ward and my room before the nuns found me missing. God only knew the bollocking they would line up for me if they noticed I was gone.

  Dingaling!

  I folded the paper as small as it would go. I reached for the lock, shuddering at the riddle of germs. But I had no choice, so I grabbed it with my left hand and then my right – always needing it to be equal, balanced out – before I scuttled away past the clogged-up sink, the tiny hole at the back filtering off what scummy drizzle it could. Sweet release.

  I paused to watch for a moment, savouring as best I could. And then, without a sound, I was gone.

  I hammered the stairs two at a time, bouncing my hands along the banisters as I went, left then right then left then right then left. I turned down the corridor, empty except for the corrugated jut of the radiators, the pipes inside them clicking like throats. The walls were lined with portraits of all the saints (go marching in), each one caged away in their frame as if they had been locked up here themselves, hundreds of years ago, and never released; never cured.

  In St Jude’s Ward the usual scrum was under way, nuns cattleherding stragglers towards their pokey-arsed beds. One lad had done a protest piss in the middle of the floor and was refusing to clean it up. Apparently Jude was the patron saint of lost causes, the poor fecker, and yet it was actually kind of ironic given that down here we were supposed to be the most ‘curable’ patients of the lot. ‘Rats in the attic’ the Irish saying went for the deranged, so at Montague House they seemed to have taken the phrase literally and stashed all the proper hystericals on the upstairs floors – crazier the higher you went – whereas down here, there was supposedly still a whiff of hope. Maybe.

  Soon the Common Room was empty, nothing left but the reek of itself; a pool of wet half-smeared.

  According to the rumours, this had been the living room, back when the House still belonged to a certain Lord and Lady Montague. The story went that their son had gone a whole clatter of sandwiches short of a picnic, so when the old pair popped their clogs they left their crumbling pile of bricks and mortar and bad memories to the nuns to be regurgitated as an institution for the ‘superior correction of seats of thought’.

  I always thought it sounded funny, that. ‘Seats of thought’. I’d never really heard of minds for sitting before – do a headstand ’til the blood rushes up.

  Speaking of chairs, the ones here were fecked across the floor, a couple of tatty newspapers strewn alongside. I heard a voice behind that made me jump, but it was only the radio in the corner, a boxy yoke that was always turned to shite-talk instead of the music channels. I would have killed for a bit of rock’n’roll; or even some Connie Francis, the hit of the moment – ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ – well, I’m afraid to say that I am, Connie, ’cause I can’t bloody hear your song! Instead the nuns kept the dial fixed on the news or the depressing talky programmes; voices grumbling all the usual sca – economic woe, unemployment, emigration – people fleeing the country like rats from a sinking ship. Though to be honest, Ireland probably wasn’t sinking a bit these days; was probably floating higher and higher what with all that weight off her shoulders.

  I checked round the corner for the other lads, the regular crowd, like. Enda Flaherty and Eoin Moore. Tourettes Tony – my favourite of the lot. And you would have known if Tony was still up, all right; would have heard him as he knocked about the place, blurting ‘ANUS’ at the top of his lungs.

  ‘NUN’S ANUS!’

  The sisters glaring at him every time as if it were the devil on his tongue, licked with a lovely Monaghan lilt. While the few of us who were still tuned into this world would giggle our nuts off, the attention only making him worse.

  ‘SHAVED ANUS BIBLE HUMPERS!’

  Yes, To
ny was my favourite. Not that I knew him or anything, just watched from the sidelines, making a few notes in my head. To be honest, a tiny bit of me always hoped that it was just a joke – that he was just putting it on to be funny. Now that, that really would’ve been something worth smiling for.

  I savoured the notion as I reached my bedroom, turning the corner with my left foot first – always the left – to stop a dose of the panics kicking in. But as soon as I arrived I felt a different kind of panic, because it seemed the old man had waited up. For me.

  ‘And so he deigns to join us. Where have you been – picking your hole?’

  My roommate, Alfred Huff. The wanker himself.

  I hovered on the threshold unable to move, a deer mangled in the headlights. Inside, our room was an absolute scut of a thing – it must have been one of the Montagues’ storage cupboards; a pantry at best. I could have sworn the reek of pickle still lingered. Mind you, there was barely any air for it to cling to now between the pair of jaded camp beds shoved together, the arses sagging in tandem, and the narrow wardrobe wedged into the corner like a coffin upright. Otherwise, there was nothing but the room’s single shelf crammed with an assortment of battered-looking books which Alf had warned me not to even think about touching. So instead I could only stare up at the terrace of spines, each one wrinkled like his ugly mug or like a teabag that had been squished to death for one last piss-weak brew.

  I cranked my neck to make it calm. Left then right then left then right then left.

  ‘Nu? What has you spazzing like that? You after getting the epilepsy on top of everything else?’

  His words made me still again, rigid with the anger. The blush. Though there was a hint of irony this time to ease the blow. Because out of anyone, your man wasn’t one to talk about spazzing – an awful bout of the tremors off him, his hands forever on the jitter like a pair of chattered teeth.

  But for the moment it was time to set my own hands to work. I stepped inside and unbuttoned my shirt; shoved the paper scrap under my pillow for safekeeping, the princess and the proverbial pea.