Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

  L-M-N-O…

  But no, there was no good in the letters any more – already I could feel the solace from the upstairs lavs vanishing, just like that.

  I kicked off my shoes. They didn’t let us have laces.

  And I knew that it was pathetic; that I should have been immune to the old fogey by now. Sure, he had been a cretin to me from day one, the first person I was introduced to right after my parents had said their goodbyes.

  Ima’s face had been skiddy with tears as she glanced back over her shoulder. Though it was always over her right one – I didn’t like that – wanted to beg her to balance it up with the left one as well. Or even just to let me count her tears; to put a number on the chaos.

  But before the day was out, Alfred Huff had put down something else instead. ‘Quite the ride, your Ima,’ he sneered, wrinkled lips curled fat around the smut. ‘Shame you won’t be seeing her again, nu?’

  I stripped down to my regulation underpants and dressed up into my regulation PJs, the fabric flimsy over the jut of my bones. I lay down with the scratch of the blanket. I was half a shin too tall for the bed. I closed my eyes, but above me the lights were still going gaudy, so instead I just stared at the glare of the bulb. And waited.

  To be honest, the fact that he was such a prick was just a shame, really – one more to add to the list. Because in another life, Alf and I could have probably been… friends. Something. Sure, we were the only two Jews in the place! My Abba had been bloody delighted when he had heard who I would be rooming with, even if it was just some old cripple in a wheelchair with a pair of gammy hands. And I supposed I had been almost relieved myself, knowing I would only have to shack up with one other person – the rest of the St Jude’s lads were all fecked together in the master dormitory, row after endless row – a whole chorus of crazy through the night that would surely scupper your dreams.

  But most of all, I had thought to myself how, out of anyone, your man would understand my silence; would appreciate why I had stood there at the pulpit on the day of my Bar Mitzvah, five years ago now, and gone shtum – not a single word since.

  ‘Sweeney. Huff. Goodnight!’

  The pantry switch clicked off; the darkness collapsed in on us both. Already I could hear Alf’s snores – he was always the first asleep – liked to get out of there as quickly as he could.

  I rolled onto my side. Left then right then left then right then left. I curled my knees into my gut like a foetus. An unborn eejit.

  But no, despite the fact that Alf might have understood – that we might have even been… mates, something – it seemed he had decided to go the other way instead and use my religion, our religion, against me.

  When I first arrived he had been out in the yard playing checkers with Enda Flaherty. It was the only time I had seen Enda sitting down since – usually he was too busy shuffling around the House’s corridors, his slippers torn ragged with the mileage. It was probably why Alf was friends with him, to be honest, that perpetual wandering – the closest thing to a Jew he could find in Montague House.

  Until me.

  They were arranged around a ramshackle wicker table, the weft and warp of it still slick from the rain. Alf stooped forward from his dented wheelchair, his legs half-gone and his grey hand quivering over a pile of red counters.

  I flicked my eyes across the board. Two more moves and the game was his.

  ‘Alf, there is someone I’d like you to meet.’ It was Sister Frances who did the honours – from what I could tell, the youngest nun of the bunch. She was a pretty thing too – a touch of the Grace Kelly about her – enough at least that her presence attracted the attention of the other patients lolloping, gormless, nearby. ‘His name,’ she said gently, ‘is Shem.’

  Shem, eldest son of Noah; aged ninety-nine the year of the flood. Even if I had always been shite at swimming – too much limb to figure out how to float.

  ‘Looking lovely today, Franny,’ Alf replied, a gruff voice in a hotchpotch accent. ‘Is that a new lipstick you’re parading?’ He sucked his teeth to tut tut tut. ‘And you with your vow against vanity?’

  The pretty nun looked to the ground. I could have sworn I saw her blush. ‘Well, I’m introducing you specifically, Alf,’ she continued, ‘because Shem here will be sharing a room with you from now— ’

  ‘He’ll be what?’ Alf growled as he hefted a counter to the right, claiming three blacks for his trouble.

  I checked again. A decent position. One more turn to go.

  ‘I said, he’ll be sharing a room with you from— ’

  ‘Arra now, you remember it is fierce cruel to be pulling me leg, Fran, given me circumstances. Sure, I’ve had that room to meself since— ’

  ‘Yes, I understand that, Alf, but Sister Monica has decided it would be for the best since ye are both… brothers in faith so to speak.’

  At this, finally, he looked up; scanned my scrawny figure as if for proof.

  I felt the other yard-timers follow suit.

  Tourettes Tony proclaimed something about my anus.

  Alf’s eyes frisked me all the way down and up, shameless into every crack. Though to be honest, they weren’t the eyes I had expected, so much younger than the haggard rest, and a dimple scooped out of the middle of his chin that gave a strangely fetching touch. It reminded me of your man Kirk Douglas, and wasn’t he a Jew and all?

  Our stares met, just for a second. I looked away to the sky. Even with the rain gone, still there wasn’t a bird in sight.

  ‘Hmm,’ Alf finally pronounced as he returned to his game. I stood rigid, watching the shake of his hands. ‘Bit lanky for a Jewman, wouldn’t you say? Nu, did your Ima not force-feed you up like the rest of us?’

  At the mention of her, though, I flinched. What did you say about my Ima? But of course, I couldn’t ask him, or answer; could only pine for the flashcards that had just been taken off me, a longing like a phantom limb. I wondered if Alf ever got that for his legs.

  ‘I said,’ he repeated, his impatience beginning to mount, ‘you look like a bit of a shmendrick to me, no?’

  The other patients shuffled closer, nosy for the awkward scene – the old man and the shmendrick, the pipsqueak.

  ‘Can’t have had many kneidlach fecked your way of a Friday night.’ The Yiddish tests thrown my way now too, words that only my father ever used. ‘Nu?’

  No?

  Nu?

  Eh?

  And questions had always been the worst for me – an ask without an answer – the imbalance of it alone enough to get me riled. So the lads at school would all gather in a circle like kids looking for a story, but instead it was to batter me with questions, gobs like dogs asking hundreds and hundreds while I shuffled for a flashcard that would answer even some of them, even one of them, fingers fidgeting quicker and quicker until—

  Paper cut. Droplets of red upon the page. The same colour as a nun’s smutty lips.

  ‘I’m afraid, Alf,’ Sister Frances sighed, ‘I’m afraid Shem is actually… The boy’s a mute.’

  A ripple of whispers buffered against me as the strangers took in the news. Only it didn’t soften the blow. Because the laughter that came was a vicious thing, there on his throat somewhere phlegmy and sore. ‘Mute shmute!’ The dimple in his chin bouncing up and down like a babby on a lap. ‘Go away with you, Franny, sure, who ever heard of a Jew who can’t…’ Until his eyes saw that no, Sister Frances wasn’t joking. That no, Shem Sweeney wasn’t speaking.

  No nu never.

  ‘Sure, that’s unnatural.’ His laughter began to fade. ‘Like a duck who can’t swim. A… a Paddy allergic to spuds. Jaysus, without a voice sure, he’s not even really a Jew for fuck’s— ’

  ‘Now, Alf, there’s no need for that.’

  But by then I had stopped listening. Because I had heard it all before, for five whole years – five empty years
– and I was only an eejit for thinking this lad or this place would be any different.

  I turned and dragged myself back inside, walking away like my parents had done that very afternoon while I had just stood there in the hallway dripping, waving. Like a deaf person clapping – that’s what they do, you know – shove both hands in the air and move them from side to side, showing their appreciation silently instead.

  Back in the room now, Alf let off a groan in his sleep, hefting around so that his stumps knotted up with the sheets. While beside him, I buried my face into the pillow, trying to swallow the lump that had formed in my throat so that even if I could talk, figured out how to again, the words would have only got stuck.

  The yell of the bell had me up the following morning, lamenting another day. I made my bed and checked for my paper scrap. It was exactly where I had tucked it.

  Once dressed, the timetable kicked off as per usual, the Montague House routine. There was Wake Up at one end and Curfew at the other; Work Hour out in the yard, half-arsed with our pointless tasks. All three meals were set in stone, different shades of canteen slop, including dinner at an ungodly five o’clock so that by the time you actually made it to bed that night your stomach was already going insane, an accidental hunger strike that wouldn’t let you cave whether you wanted to or not.

  In better news, Games Hour fell once a week, a sixty-minute hurrah that saw me step out from the sidelines to trounce them all at Scrabble – the only mode of expression I had left. Although, it seemed these days I wasn’t the only one fixated on my words (or more precisely, my lack thereof), because as part of the never-­ending routine, Wednesday afternoons meant a visit from the local GP.

  Doctor Lally was a stubby chap who wore creased suits and a moustache that looked almost definitely stuck on. He gawped at each of us for half an hour a pop in the stuffy confines of the back office, the naked bulb over our heads definitely more interrogational than medicinal.

  It was an unfortunate name, ‘Lally’. Doctor for the ‘do lally’.

  ‘And how’s about you this week, Mr Sweeney?’

  I squatted before the splintered desk, an unnaturally high jut off my knees. I spotted another ‘AH’ carved into the wood, just like the one in the toilet stall. More relief? I wondered, settling myself. Or maybe, this time, a scream?

  ‘A deep breath, remember,’ Lally went on. ‘And then the words do be bouncing off the lips like a… well, like a bouncy ball.’

  Each week he led me through a variety of routines, the ones I had already tried with all the other stubby eejits before him.

  Exercises.

  Tongue stretches.

  Diagrams of the inner throat, Lally tentative as he held them up as if he half-expected me to lash out; as if I had some kind of phobia of gobs. When actually, an obsession would have been closer to the mark – the first thing I noticed about people these days – the plumpness of lips. The dinge of teeth. The sliver of tongue you got with certain syllables.

  Ls were my favourite.

  L-l-l-l-l-l-lovely.

  L-l-l-l-l-l-lally.

  One Wednesday he even made me fixate on my own mouth in the mirror while he explained how I should try and reacquaint myself with it ‘like… well, like a long lost pal’, even though I wanted to tell him I’d never really had any friends apart from my Ima so he would need to be a bit more specific.

  And then the following week he asked me would I mind if he touched it. ‘Now if you could just… just open up, boy.’

  Oh the irony, I thought, the spit sopping down my throat. Yes, if only I could.

  But I played along with his whims all the same, humouring him while it lasted. Because I knew it was only a matter of time before Lally, like all of the others, gave up on the whole attempt; resorted instead to finding some alternative means through which I could communicate with the world, as if anything came even remotely close.

  For some reason they always started with sign language, using fingers instead of tongues. I only knew what it was because we’d had a deaf lad at school who went at it with his brother all wrists and thumbs, a lifelong game of charades.

  One word.

  Sounds like ‘yelp’.

  Starts with H.

  But despite the doctors’ attempts I never went in for all of that, too worried my fingers might try and spell out the thing that had sent me silent in the first place. Then I would have no choice but to tighten my joints too. Early arthritis. Or as I always thought it should have been called, Early can’t-write-is.

  So in the end, I had decided to just scribble my conversations instead; had found some notelets in my father’s drawer and began to carry them around wherever I went, all piled up like a deck for a trick: Pick a card, any card!

  Or like notes for a speech: Ladies and gentlemen, unaccustomed as I am to public speaking…

  If only they knew.

  To be honest, it had worked well enough – a means to an end, like, for a while. I had even managed to devise a system whereby each phrase I wrote was intoned with a set of dots and dashes – a bit like Hebrew accent marks, or fadas in Irish – to try and capture at least some of the sound. Five years of:

  YES PLÊASE

  Half a decade of:

  THÁNKS A MÌLLION

  Literally millions of them. Of:

  I LOVE YOU TÓÒ

  The accents like eyebrows raised in surprise. Or maybe it was doubt? And then there was his lesser-used cousin:

  I LOVE YOU TWÒ

  The last word ripped away then stuck back on with a load of Sellotape, though it was always a lot flimsier than the rest, like it could fall off at any minute.

  And I had once tried to just write out the truth on a flashcard and swallow it. Whole. I’d decided it could be a way to purge myself, or more precisely, to ingest the bloody thing so then at least it would be in me, a part of me, in a way other than my speechlessness.

  But I choked – halfway down my gullet and the thing was up again, a lump of pulp upon the floor. So no, it seemed I couldn’t even manage that.

  ‘Right, well, I’m afraid time is up,’ Lally announced, a cheer in his voice that masked the relief surprisingly well. ‘But I do be feeling the progress coming, no bother. So I’ll be seeing you next Wednesday, all right?’

  I nodded vaguely as I left the office, ducking my head extra low under the doorframe.

  And later that afternoon I watched out the window as Lally lowered himself into his Morris Minor, a dent in the curve of the roof like a skull. And as he drove away I wondered where he was headed – where was his home? What was his mother like? And most of all, did he have a secret about her the way I did about mine?

  So April continued, the cruellest month I think some gobshite once said, though I’m not sure why he had such a vendetta against these thirty days in particular. To be honest, if nothing else I was starting to get used to the routine of the place – I had always needed that sort of regularity, that rigidity – so I was grand at least to sleepwalk through the motions.

  But for all the monotony, as the month drew to a close I began to feel it, low down in my gut.

  I had never been away from my mother for a prolonged period of time – not even close. There had been a three-day weekend in fourth year, a schoolboy camping trip off to Dalkey Island where Liam Mackey thought it would be gas altogether to hide a rasher under my pillow, the princess and the pig.

  But this was the longest period yet, and it had started to take its toll.

  I had scoured the place for a telephone; a chance to hear even a sneak of her voice – just a confused ‘Hello?’ would be more than enough – two ‘l’s from her pinky-red tongue. Or I saw some of the other patients scribbling letters – barely literate pen pals with the outside world – but obviously I was still banned from anything like that. So the only thing I had were my secret sessions up in the
first-floor jacks, the highlight of the weekly routine by a country bloody mile.

  The germs still gave me the skits – stiff as a plank as I sat there and wrote.

  Each night I would jot down everything I could remember about her, to be sure that I wouldn’t forget. I wrote about the shape of her lips, the bottom one so much fatter than the top as if trying to buoy it up; about the way I called her ‘Ima’, the Hebrew word for ‘Mum’, even though she had always been hopeless at the language herself. And I also wrote down everything I had to remember to tell her as soon as I got out of this place; as soon as my father realised that this was a pointless bloody exercise and we would just have to make do as was, the silence here to stay. Consider it another child, lads! The sibling I never had!

  So I wrote about the nuns and the rotten dinners; about Tourettes Tony and his anuses and fecks. And I wrote about my roommate Alf, the absolute cretin; about how relentless he was with his torture, the main whack of his days now spent shrivelled into his chair, complaining about my very existence:

  ‘Sister Monica, it’s a bleedin’ disgrace I’ve been shacked up with this little freak!’

  ‘They always say look out for the quiet ones – sure, what if he shtups me in me sleep?’

  Only, between his cruelty and my mother’s beauty, I realised that I had started to run out of space, the stolen page crammed full to burst. It wouldn’t be long before I would have to steal another one. Or maybe devise some kind of shorthand for my gommy woes.

  S-O-S

  Shitty old Shem

  Suffocator of stationery

  And then I remembered when I was younger I could never tell the difference between the two spellings of the word. ‘Stationery’ and ‘stationary’. So close, and yet… So my Ima had taught me that ­sta-tion-E-ry was for pEEEEEEns and stuff, whereas sta-tion-A-ry was when I stood still, in the one spot, and she ran a-wAAAAAAy, using the sounds of the matching letters to stick them together in my head. At the time, though, the second scenario had made me cry so loudly that she had had to come closer to me than ever; had pressed my head into the hollow of her chest until the panic of it all dried up.