Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

  Of course, her father will just be terrified about his public image, the failure of his Christian parenthood – as if he hasn’t suffered enough blows to last a bloody lifetime.

  The sense of alienation and abandonment, that one may ‘never be able to go home’ (both literally and metaphorically), will plague one for many months.7

  And her mother will just do anything to make light of it; probably saw an episode of some reality TV show with a Jewish wedding, so wouldn’t Aisling be scared getting thrust around on those chairs in the air? And did that really mean no bacon rolls for breakfast?

  ‘Aisling?’

  It takes a moment for her to tell the voice apart from the one in her own head. She glances at the margin, as if it could somehow be…

  ‘Aisling, darling? Can I come in?’

  She looks at the door, the handle nodding. She shoves the book under her pillow and claws her fingers through her hair. Not that it will make a single difference, of course – the cut of her, she can only imagine.

  But when she pokes her head through the door, her mother looks anywhere except at her. ‘Sorry to disturb, darling. Only, if I ask very nicely, would you come down and give me a hand?’ She scans the room, as if searching for something. Evidence? An explanation? Or maybe just for her beloved daughter who has somehow managed to get lost along the way.

  ‘What?’ Aisling notices the pearls in her mother’s ears, so heavy the lobes sag low.

  ‘The trifle,’ she says. ‘The one we ate last night. I’m remaking it for Wednesday.’8 She smiles again, leaning forward on the off-chance it might be catching. ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time, but we can hardly go without for Christmas Day, now can we? Plus,’ she adds, staring at the suitcase on the floor, the zip undone and its innards splayed from either side, ‘probably no harm to get you out of here, honey; let in a bit of air.’

  Aisling’s feet tingle needles as she stands up, her legs quivering like a lip before tears. As she closes the door behind her she glances back at the pillow, bulging now with the stranger’s shape. And with her own possibility, hidden underneath.9

  Down in the kitchen the ingredients have been laid out, the utensils lined up like a surgical tray or a magician’s trick. They do the sponge first, the pores fat and open from the sherry. Her mother has a cooking show on in the background, helping by osmosis, or really just filling in the silence. Apparently her father and Séan have gone up to the driving range – their very own version of together.

  Aisling does most of the work while the older woman stands back, watching, trying to read her as she moves – maybe some hint in the way she forces her fingers into the give and bounce of the cake, pushing it tight for the bottom layer.

  ‘Fruit next?’

  But Aisling is still back upstairs, really, her mind picking like fingers over the words in the book.

  However, the process of becoming Jewish will not end with one’s conversion. One cannot force one’s identity to change completely according to a specific timetable. Thus, although the rituals of conversion will formally mark one’s acceptance of one’s new Jewish commitment, the act of shaping one’s Jewish self is a much longer-term task.10

  ‘Yes,’ her mother says. ‘Fruit next.’

  They used to bake together when she was younger. She had forgotten about that. Dad and Séan would be in the garden throwing any variety of a ball, while they would be in here amidst a sneeze of sugar and flour. She half-bristles at the cliché of it – the male/female divide – but still she cannot help how familiar the dynamic feels; cannot deny the therapy of it, another layer, the squeak of the gelatin squelching up into her nails, even after she thought she had bitten all ten of them to the quick.

  ‘You know Noah used to be a vegetarian?’

  She hears her mother now as she shifts her lean on the AGA, trying out a variety of frowns. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Aisling says. Another memory. ‘For most of his childhood, apparently, or so he likes to claim. He said he locked himself in his bedroom for weeks when he found out where meat really came from and lived on nothing but bread and water.’ She stirs the custard next, a nice resistance to the spoon; breaks the skin and picks it out, a flaccid thing. ‘Until it drove them demented, Robert and Linda; made them pass notes under his door.’

  You are not a murderer.

  We love you.

  Please, son, do not disappear.

  ‘Pleading with him, like.’ She begins to pour. ‘Begging him to come out until— ’

  ‘Aisling, you know we’ll support you whatever you decide.’

  She straightens the jug and replaces it on the counter.

  ‘Your father and I… it was just a bit of a surprise, that’s all. You know what he’s like…’

  She looks at her mother, the words dying out. And do you, Mum, she wants to ask, more than anything now. Do you still know what Dad is like?

  ‘And are— ’

  But it is too late, the doorbell suddenly ringing, so far away it sounds like it is the neighbours’. The women stare at one another; at themselves.

  Aisling smears her hands on a towel and scuttles up the hall.

  When she opens the front door the chorus of ‘Jingle Bells’ has already begun. There are four facefuls of freckles; four rounded mouths twanging out the age-old words, a symmetry of teeth and tongues.

  Aisling takes a step back, taking in their Santa hats, their tracksuit zips. The little girl holds a Starbucks cup, her fingernails chipped in red and green, and her top cropped short to reveal a bellybutton pierced with a gold ring and a single white feather, the fluff of it swaying back and forth with the rhythm all the way.

  Aisling heard someone mention it in the pub last night – the Travellers’ new halting site, down in Dún Laoghaire. The sea air rusting their caravans and the locals going mad.

  Aisling watches the feather. She wonders if it tickles.

  When they finish she doesn’t move, only meets the girl’s blue-eyed stare and has an urge to lick her fingers, the last of the trifle’s dregs.

  ‘Well now, that was only gorgeous.’ Her mother appears, leaning down to put a fiver in the cup. ‘A Happy Christmas to you all. God bless!’ Loud enough that the whole street might hear. Before she hurries the door shut, a wreath into their faces. ‘Always prefer giving to them than to the Romanians,’ she whispers, smoothing her crisp blouse down. ‘Helping our own, and all that.’

  The latch clicks shut. The chain too. Aisling stays standing, lonely for the cool of the outside. The melody. The sound of every December she has ever known. ‘I think… I think I’ll head back up.’

  ‘OK darling. Just— ’

  ‘I know, Mum,’ she says as she walks away. ‘It’s OK, I know.’ Even though there is so much these women will never say, more different than it is worth acknowledging.

  For most females, the key instance of this will occur with the arrival of one’s first child, solidifying all one’s teachings as one strives to pass them on to a brand new, Jewish being.11

  Along the landing, Aisling passes the spare room, the gilt of the handle and the unmade bed. It is three o’clock, the day starting to give up, yet she suddenly feels further from her answer than ever.12

  The strain in her wrist shifts sides as the bulk of the thing moves from one hand to the other. She wonders if the marginalia add any extra weight, though she is still avoiding them like a plague.

  Instead, she devotes herself to the information, another kind of research to keep her busy. She digs her iPad out of her suitcase to load up a couple of different websites, more modern versions of the things in the book. She tries JSTOR. The Dead Sea Scrolls. A list of Rabbi-run blogs – the sacred keeping up with the times. She flicks from tab to tab to compare and contrast. Ekosher.com. TotallyJewish. The endless resources of a Chosen People. Or as one site insists on phrasing it, the ‘Choosing Peo
ple’, since it is in fact they who decide to respond to God’s requests, they who take the leap.

  And Aisling can feel herself beginning to calm beneath the blanket of facts. Things she already knew from Noah, things she has read before. But so many new things as well, always more questions to be asked – a conversation that thrives on never being resolved, enquiry built into the fabric of the faith.

  Soon enough, though, the chapters before her start to run out, the ritual driving on and on until suddenly, there is only one more step to go.

  Male converts are required to undergo the Brit Milah, the ritual of circumcision in which the ‘orlah’ or ‘foreskin’ is removed.13

  She hears her father and brother downstairs, returning home, refilling the place full.

  Meanwhile, for female converts it is the same procedure as was once used for the freeing of slaves – the Mikveh, or ritual bath. The word itself means ‘hope’ or ‘living water’, and the act will mark the final transition from Gentile into Jew.14

  And she would kill for a bath now, she thinks; would fill it up with bubbles, or even a flock of paper swans. Not that ‘flock’ is the right word for it – it is something else, something she knows. Only, her brain has gone too blurred now to remember. A school of swans, maybe? A hive?

  Before entering this naturally sourced water (originally a river which flowed from Eden) all attire must be removed including any cosmetics, bandages or jewellery.15

  She checks out the window now, anything now to delay the final step. Across the road the neighbours’ boat sits in their driveway, an expense they can no longer afford. She imagines them sleeping out in it, when all else fails – a life raft for the whole family to gather in.

  Next, one must proceed to immerse oneself completely with one’s feet off the ground, one’s fingers and toes stretched wide and one’s body crouched into the foetal position.16

  And she remembers how Noah once suggested that they should buy a houseboat themselves; moor up on the canal, not far from their Sunday newspaper spot, and fold their lives into a tiny cabin. Shower next to where they read; make love next to where they ate breakfast, a fall of porridge oats along the inside of her thigh.

  For it is indeed like a return to the womb. A kind of rebirth, akin to the moment of revelation at Mount Sinai when Jews were given a brand new beginning.17

  Back in her Dublin house, she turns the final page, and suddenly there is no more room at all.

  Mazel Tov!

  Only two words she already knew to begin with.

  Aisling closes the cover, places her hands down flat and waits. Next she stands, her body stiff with complaint, stretching into the silence. In the distance she swears she can hear ‘Jingle Bells’, the carol singers travelling back. She wonders if they managed to make any more money.

  But the only other sounds are the same as before – all the worries and the issues – an echo like a chorus come again. Because just say she wanted to do it; say she had been won over by the ideas and trad­itions and never-ending debates; say there was something about it all that drew her in. She thinks of that night with his family, of the tension and the scepticism, but then of the opening up and the welcome that wrapped so tight and felt so good.

  Only, what would happen to her own family, she thinks now, as she stares around the room? What would happen to all of this? Her MA. Her Mandela. Her childhood memories; her brother she had forgotten how much she adored, and the pride she has always held so close.

  ‘Aisling? Dinner’s ready!’

  And now her heartbeat going crazy like footsteps up the stairs.

  ‘Aisling, for fuck’s sake.’

  And a body that fills the entire room.

  ‘Aisling?’ Séan’s cheeks are slapped red from the wind off the range. ‘Ash, what the hell are you doing, it’s time— ’

  ‘I’m finished.’

  He takes a moment, his eyes a little rough with her. But then he sees it, lying on the bed. He stops. ‘And?’

  The single word manages to prick her eyes, wet for the first time all day. The first time, even, since she came home.

  ‘I…’ Though her mouth is totally dry, the taste of salt on her throat like a gulpful of sea. Or like a canal with a houseboat and two lovers cosied together, no space for anything more.

  No need.

  ‘Séan… I don’t…’

  Her brother steps forward and puts his arms around her, gym-hard but sibling-soft. He holds her still. He says nothing. He doesn’t have to.

  They stand in silence, their breathing slowly matching up. She isn’t sure how they have lived their lives so far apart. And the thought suddenly occurs that maybe… maybe she could just ask Séan to do it for her. To choose. A bit arbitrary, yes, but it is an arbitrary deadline, so Jesus, why the hell not? Just to have the whole thing sorted – enough of this, already – to have it ended now once and for all.

  He lets go, as if he can feel what is coming.

  She looks at him, her eyes wide, a flash of begging in them both. ‘Séan, I was…’

  But before she can finish he has diverted for the bed. He sits down and picks up the book. He flicks through, quickly, like he is already searching for another way out.

  And then he finds one: ‘This writing?’ he says. ‘It’s not yours?’

  It takes a moment for the answer to come, a bit of a laugh on her lips. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, that’s some other eejit who obviously managed to get herself into the same mess as me, once upon a time.’ When she looks at her brother again, though, her smile has migrated, his own dimpled deep and dug into his face.

  ‘And out of interest,’ he asks, turning a page, ‘what did this eejit decide to do?’

  Outside the air is vicious, chasing her up into her mother’s 4 x 4. The stench of cigarette smoke makes it smell like the car is burning from the inside out.

  She stabs at her phone to rouse the satnav, an address she half-­remembers seeing buried in the margins.

  ‘In fifty metres, turn right.’

  Usually she cannot stand the thing – has always resented being told what to do – but for once she lets it take her, down the driveway and out the gates, her eyes struggling to focus on something that isn’t just words, inches from her face.

  The streetlight comes and washes over her like liquid, like grace, a spool of festive reds and golds along the High Street. She takes the Coast Road, even if she cannot see the sea, the blackness of it shrouded to her right like the dead. To her left the terraces lean into one another. Parks. Taxis, their Lego-yellow glows. Cranes climbing up, putting the city back together again. And in the darkness, the unfinished apartment blocks almost look normal; almost like the inhabitants are just out for the night – a festive piss-up, a Fairytale of New York, whatever you’re having yourself – whereas by day there can be no pretending, glass walls on either side so you can see right through the emptiness.

  But they do say the country has turned a corner; that things are finally looking up, just as she changes gear and indicates left, the contour of the wheel so alien in her grip, her fingers pining for the shape of something or maybe somebody else.

  It is Noah who drives them around London, Noah in his fancy car. But no, Noah will have to wait, because her mind can only focus now on that stranger and what she did or did not do; the ending that she did or did not write. A ridiculous whim but what else, quite literally, does Aisling have?

  She turns again, half-breaking a red. She passes the canal and takes a hill; feels the sense of speed as it builds and builds and builds. And she is so fixated she doesn’t even notice passing a construction site for a house that has been split in two, a crack down the middle and then a pane of glass, sealing it so.

  After another ten minutes the stranger speaks again: ‘In one hundred metres turn right onto Glenvar Road.’

  Aisling does as she is told.
>
  ‘Arrive at destination.’

  She arrives. She turns off the ignition. Number thirty-three. She unclicks her seatbelt, but her chest does not let out.

  The house is redbrick with a black door, the neighbours’ extension built so close you would swear they could listen in on every word. A slideshow of television colours illuminates the front room. Greens, purples, blues. The Northern Lights.

  Walking the path, Aisling checks for Christmas decorations, as if that will prove a thing. But she doesn’t let herself linger, only pokes at the doorbell and waits, back again on the Gellers’ front porch, clutching a bottle of kosher wine and hoping for what? For everything?

  For this?

  She thinks of the carol singers on the doorstep this afternoon, the girl carrying the melody an octave higher than the boys.

  ‘Can I help you?’ This girl, though, is a teenager. And unimpressed.

  Aisling scans the portrait. The rugby sweatpants. The oversized hoodie. The uniform of a life she used to know. ‘Hi.’ Next her eyes wander down the hallway. On the floor she sees a pile of shoes, the laces tangled together in a single family knot, or like a mess of hair the morning after love. ‘Hi,’ she says again. ‘I hope you don’t… My name is…’ And then because she has nothing else – nothing in the world left to give – she begins her little speech. ‘So, what I’m wondering…’ The thing as ridiculous as it sounds; a struggle to get the strand of it right. ‘Was there by any chance a Gerry who used to live here? Gerry Doyle?’ But the more she talks, the more she realises that maybe it isn’t so ridiculous. Because just the chance to speak to somebody who has been through this before – or at least, somebody who was related to somebody who has – God knows she will take whatever she can get. ‘Maybe he was your grandfather, I don’t know, but he had a sister named Máire who used to visit him and who… who was… I don’t know…’ As she reaches the end, her head starts to spin away. She realises she hasn’t slept in days. Hasn’t eaten either – nothing except for a lick of custard from her fingers; a handful of crisps from a sweltering pub. And more than anything now Aisling wishes the girl would just take her inside; let her slip into someone else’s unlaced shoes and worry about no other decision except the usual Christmas dilemmas like which film to put on next and which Quality Street to choose, the wrappers melting in the fire, a neon rainbow against the coals.