Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

  My spare woollen jumper, moth-devoured.

  Two pairs of regulation slacks, slashed short at the knees – the same as all my trousers ever were. Because apparently my Abba’s Abba had had a rule that men were only allowed to wear full-length trousers once their Bar Mitzvah ceremony was complete – yet another tradition to mark that special day. So ever since mine, Abba had made sure my shins remained permanently exposed, hail, rain or snow.

  Hail Mary, full of gr(eat trousers).

  Once I had placed the clothes in a pile on my bed I wondered what else I should take with me – a souvenir from this life to the next. I thought about the tumour of soap from the shower room, the pubic pattern indenting the skin. Or my first scrap of paper – the one Alf had, somehow, discovered – the one he had used to haggle for this. For everything. And then I thought of the jotter itself and whether I should try and take that instead.

  I had already started to wonder what exactly Alf wanted to do with the story, now that we had got it down – all the different versions, crammed into the margins. He had mentioned something about ‘legacy’ all right, about the roots we leave behind, so I supposed that maybe once I was home again I could try and take it off to a publishers? Split the royalties and buy his ransom from this place? Or better yet, maybe buy him a gaff not far from me where I could go and visit for a cuppa; bring my cards along and have a proper chat – real friends at last! Only, I did wonder if we would miss the Virgin Mary, the stare of her looking down; the orange crown and the wry smile at the unlikeliest exchange.

  ‘Shmendrick, are you off?’

  At the sound of him, my wondering went stiff.

  I waited, frozen in the darkness. A guilty air, even if there was no reason for it really.

  ‘Your Ima,’ Alf continued, asking questions though he stated them like facts. ‘She’s coming tomorrow, isn’t she. To get you out.’

  Slowly I began to turn, trying to angle myself towards his face, even if I could barely make him out in the black. I thought I heard a noise. The rats, probably, listening in on the final words.

  ‘Well, I’m glad that… I promise I did try and find a… it was just…’ But there was something in his voice now that made my limbs fall soft. ‘And just promise me, Shmendrick, you won’t let… It’s yours now, Shem, OK? You’re my…’

  And for everything Alf said, and everything he didn’t – an apology or a request, I wasn’t sure which – but in the midst of his gibberish there was only one word I heard. Not ‘Shmendrick’ like it usually was; not ‘lad’ or ‘freak’ or ‘wanker’, just Shem. My name, my real name, uttered at last.

  I felt my pulse go in my neck and then down into my gut, butter­flies on the move. Though actually, I’d always suspected they were moths instead, nibbling holes into your innards; singeing their wings against the bulb of your heart.

  And for the first time in our entire friendship I wished that I could answer Alf, properly like – to reply to his garbled speech; to tell him how much I… And that I would of course… Just a few lines – sure, it would hardly even count.

  But of course I couldn’t. Not now and not ever. Not me.

  And I remembered then how when I was a kid I went through a phase of talking in ‘nots’. It had just been another tick – another habit to add to the list – but this time everything had to be a nega­tive not a positive. So hungry was ‘not satiated’; exhausted was ‘not alert’; happy, ‘not melancholy’, as if there was nothing on the spectrum between the two.

  My Ima, as with most things I did as a boy, was instantly smitten with the fad, eager to play along: ‘You are not average’, ‘I do not…’ but love was one of the hardest to translate. Because ‘not hating’ someone wasn’t the same. ‘Not caring’ maybe? ‘Not knowing your own reflection unless they are the ones holding up the mirror’?

  Of course, Abba had despised the whole thing – had gone totally nuts. Which was ironic really, given how minor it was compared to everything to come. But he demanded to know who was to blame for such a preposterous routine.

  My mother tried so hard to stifle a smile as she answered him. ‘I don’t know, pet. Not me!’

  We had laughed for hours, beyond giddy, while between breaths she told me it was a bit like having the outline of a son cut out of a giant piece of paper – the gap left behind, instead of the solid shape itself. And at the time I found the image hilarious, but in the years after it kept returning, just below my ribcage – an empty space of air where I should have been. My darling mother and her eccentric ‘not son’.

  I thought of it now, here in the smallest hours of the night. I listened to the silence, to the sigh of my ‘not enemy’. And I realised, despite everything that lay ahead, the holes we would leave in one another’s lives.

  ‘Well, isn’t this only grand now?’ Ima asked. ‘Gorgeous altogether?’

  I looked at her and then around her, assuming it was a joke. But in fairness, she wasn’t entirely wrong. The nuns must have been up through the night with the preparations, hefty falls of bleach-white lace starched out along the canteen tables. Seat cushions. Doilies. Ugly little vases rammed with weeds from the yard – all props for the staging of this grand, gorgeous farce.

  16th June. The Montague House Visitors’ Day.

  According to Sister Monica’s spiel that morning it was a chance for us to see our families again. But also – and more importantly – a chance for our families to take a fresh glimpse at the charming surroundings which were so instrumental in aiding us on the road to recovery, day by flower-filled day.

  Needless to say the annual invoice would be sent out next week. The annual increase. The nuns thanked each visitor in advance of their generosity – no doubt their place in Heaven would be secure, doilies and all.

  For me, though, the pomp and circumshite didn’t matter a hill of beans – they could keep their bleach and their spray; the sniff that would send your head to the sky – because for me this was it, sitting there on the other side of the table. Heaven.

  I smiled at her for the millionth time. I felt the blush all the way to my freshly shaved skull.

  It was two and a half months now since I had seen my mother. Almost the life cycle of a drone bee, which we once learned in Geography class – ten weeks of nothing but fertilising the Queen. The other lads had all gone wild at the prospect: ‘What? Ten weeks of pure riding?’

  Ten fucking weeks.

  She wore a purple hat I didn’t recognise, the swirl of a Celtic brooch snagged in on the side, and a matching pout of colour on her lips, the big one and the small.

  I wondered if she had been to see her fancy man, or if she would go later after dropping me home.

  The thought made me blush again. We waited in silence, breathing other people’s conversations. Out of nowhere, I thought of Alf.

  ‘So, do you know who’s after dying?’ Ima finally trilled, the ultim­ate Irish opener.

  The victim in question was Archie Rose, may his name be blessed, the Baggot Street dentist with the missing eye who dropped dead last Thursday night. I couldn’t remember much about him, only that he never wore his glass eye so the hole would just be there, hovering over your face while he prodded your teeth. To be honest, it always felt like such an intrusion staring into another man’s skull.

  ‘There was a big enough turnout at the cemetery,’ Ima reported, relaxing now with the information. ‘His mother’s people down from Belfast. Only they did say they had to be careful with their accents. Trouble brewing and all that.’ Her hands were placed one on top of the other at the edge of the table like a pair of polite lovers.

  I flicked one of mine up to fix my ‘not hair’, then wedged it back safe beneath my arse.

  ‘And Mr Jackson was asking after you. And Mrs Feeney from the library, do you remember her? Says she still thinks of when you used to come in, the best-behaved garcún. How you would just sit the
re and soak up the quiet.’

  It was strange to hear another voice that wasn’t Alf’s as it spooled away, ticking off subjects she pretended were spontaneous but that had probably been prepared for weeks.

  ‘And do you know who’s after getting married? You’ll never believe. God I’ve missed these little chats!’

  We had always been close, my Ima and me, right from the very start. Even when I was a child she would climb into my bed every morning and ask what I had seen in my dreams, then swear she had seen the very same – even our fantasies, knitted into one.

  But despite our bond, our intimacy, there had always been the sense she was keeping something from me. A perpetual niggle. And I swear I wasn’t just saying that now I knew the truth! But the problem is that adults tend to underestimate just how much a child can notice; how much they can sense all the things that aren’t being said. Like the twitch in her whenever I asked about her childhood down on the farm – no siblings, her parents both six feet under – not a single photo of them anywhere and do you miss them, Ima, do you?

  ‘Leave it, boy,’ my father would hiss – he caught me every time. ‘I’m warning you.’ Until I decided it was such a sensitive subject it must’ve been something to do with the Shoah, even though I thought the Nazis hadn’t really made it to Ireland – a bomb over Clanbrassil Street but nothing much else.

  Then one time I remembered I had even tried to read my Ima’s diary; had carried a chair in from the kitchen and climbed up to the top shelf, there where I had seen her stash it away. It was a leathery thing, with metally letters on the front, always kept off limits which is how I knew what it was. But I had managed to convince myself that she wouldn’t mind me having a gander – we were so close, surely there was nothing I couldn’t know? Surely our bond meant only honesty?

  But Abba was on me again, just in time, his wallop so hard I flew from the chair and split my lip on the corner of the bed. The flesh exploded, a deluge of blood as he grabbed the book and raged out of the gaff, driving like a man possessed.

  The silences a family is made up of, to try and protect one another; the silences which shove us apart.

  So to be honest, when I finally discovered the truth about Ima’s affair it was almost a relief. An answer. Because despite the initial shock, there was something about it that just made sense and explained away the gaps. Like how she would go to Mikveh every month, even though none of the other boys’ mothers ever bothered. I had thought she was just weirdly devout, but now I understood – the perfect cover-up! Or like that little silver angel necklace she kept down the back of her jewellery box – it must have been a present from her lover – see, at last the clues meant something!

  ‘And how about yourself, love? Any… any improvement?’

  I looked at her now. Her smile. Her pale eyebrows raised high.

  Of course, I knew it was odd that I hadn’t been more upset by the infidelity. A singe of betrayal all right, maybe even a bit of jealousy. But after a while the relief of it had just overwhelmed, the truth found out at last, and the knowledge that she had at least discovered some way to be happy – some solace that even my father couldn’t reach.

  Meanwhile, in the weeks after my Bar Mitzvah, Abba himself just tried to pretend everything was grand – just another stupid phase I was going through.

  ‘Shabbat shalom,’ he would say to me on a Friday night, the spasm of the candles between us. ‘Shabbat shalom.’ A little louder – a demand for a reply. ‘SHABBAT SHALOM!’ Until he smashed the candlesticks to the floor and the flames puffed out, a burnt stench that poisoned the air and didn’t pass.

  After that, Friday night dinners just sort of… dried up. Abba and Ima were barely able to look at one another, let alone share a meal. And then it wasn’t long before we stopped being invited to other families’ dinners too. It seemed the whole community had taken a united stance on my condition. Shem Sweeney, the Little Jerusalem scapegoat. Because not only had my Bar Mitzvah ceremony been a complete and utter disaster but, apparently, a personal slight against each and every female in the neighbourhood, now one mensch more likely to have to emigrate to find a suitable husband.

  At least it would be an effective way to get us all to Israel, I thought – make one sex keep shtum and then the other will have no choice. They should try it at those Aliyah meetings, Zionism simply for want of a conversational partner.

  No, no improvement, I wanted to tell Ima now. But I like your hat. And are you wearing your angel necklace underneath your frock?

  Then a few months after my not-Bar Mitzvah I had had the funniest thought. Because actually, I realised that I had seen your man before. Ima’s lover. And I didn’t just mean that afternoon on the Glenvar Road when I had caught them, but also, once I looked back on it, another time too.

  The pair of us had been strolling down Grafton Street one December Sunday heading to Bewley’s Café for tea and a sticky bun (only we had renamed it a ‘Bicky Stun’ given I was going through my strictest alphabetarian phase). The buskers were wailing their usual wail. The wind was pissed off. The Switzer’s Stores windows were all gauded up in festive tack. But then we bumped into this man with a big face and two ruddy cheeks; a woolly jumper and a look of utter shock.

  I thought he was just some crazy lad, trying to start a fight, or maybe a homeless guy having a beg. But he and Ima just stood there, staring at each other, locked on either side of a borderline I couldn’t see. Until she gasped: ‘Gerry, I’m sorry’; practically yanked my wrist out of its socket, hauling me down the cobblestones towards Molly Malone and away while he just stood there, calling after: ‘Máire, wait! Máire, please!’

  ‘And Abba sends his love, of course.’ We were back to my own father now. Her husband. ‘Told me to wish you Shalom Aleichem.’

  I rolled my eyes at the Hebrew words. ‘Good health’. As if I just had a dose of the flu; as if my sinuses were just too congested to speak.

  But that was Abba all right – only ever interested in his religion. Or more importantly, in all the damage I had apparently managed to do to it. ‘The pair of you de-Jewing us entirely!’ he would say, a venom I didn’t understand. Because for feck’s sake, why couldn’t he see? Why didn’t he realise that the very act of me sealing my lips about what I had witnessed was precisely a Jewish bloody gesture – no Lashon Ha-ra! Even the Talmud tells of some poor lad who lets the cat out of the bag after twenty-two years and is still expelled from his house of study. So no, this was going to be a long-term commitment, whether I liked it or not.

  ‘He’s been taking me to a lot of those Aliyah meetings at Shul.’ Still my mother kept going, oblivious to my rant. ‘You know… it really does sound so beautiful out there, pet. The orange groves. The Eastern sunshine.’

  But I couldn’t listen. Because actually, the more I thought about it the more I realised that God Himself had kept fairly mute on a load of stuff through the ages. Wouldn’t answer our questions; wouldn’t reveal His face ’til Judgment Day, while we waited, and believed, in the silence. So then who better than us, a Jewish family, to shape ourselves around an absence?

  An unseen God.

  A destroyed temple.

  A son who cannot speak.

  I leaned forward in my chair; caught a waft of Ima’s lemony perfume.

  An old man who lives for a woman who was blown to dust seventeen years ago.

  A boy who has given up everything for his mother because he loves her so bloody much.

  ‘Shem, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  This time, it was my name that brought me back. No sign of ‘pet’ or ‘darling’. Not even a sign of ‘love’.

  I had wondered how long she would spend building up to the big announcement, the real reason we were here. But I supposed she was just nervous – sure, it was massive news – a drumroll please and a cough cough cough that she was finally taking me home. Or better yet, that
she was taking me away somewhere where it could just be me and her and nobody else. How about a County Offaly bog, I thought now? Or a scutty little bedsit on Clanbrassil Street where we could just tell stories and eat cheese sandwiches all day long?

  ‘Shem, it’s your father.’

  Instantly, though, I knew something was off.

  ‘He… he has booked. Our tickets,’ she said. ‘For August.’

  She gave the truth piece by piece, like it was all she could manage.

  ‘To Israel.’

  The words alphabetical and everything, as if that would somehow soften the blow.

  ‘Shem, can you hear me?’

  August.

  Israel.

  Shem?

  As I listened I tapped my fingers against the air; felt the void as it closed in either side, left then right then left then right then left.

  ‘Shem, he says… he says if you’re not… if you don’t…’

  My eyes defaulted to the window where Father Dwyer was out in the yard, his jowls stuffed into his dog collar and his arms linked with a pair of men. They looked so alike they had to be brothers, though one was dressed in regulation attire and the other was not.

  ‘But just… just say you’re getting better, love?’

  The lives we lead, the lives we might have led.

  ‘Because if you do then it’s fine, pet, you can come along. But if you don’t speak up…’

  The secrets we might have made.

  ‘Shem, he wants us to go without you.’

  Finally my eyes jolted back. To her. A smudge of purple had migrated to her tooth. It looked like a fleck of beetroot, as if she had been eating borscht – my father’s favourite, as well as mine. Sometimes he ate so much his lips turned lipstick-pink, like he was having an affair of his own.