Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

  Ever since our trip to Gleann na nGealt the tale had been doing the rounds – the drama of my County Kerry failure. It was a joke, because it wasn’t as if anyone else had been cured that afternoon – the visit a resounding disaster, right across the board. But for some reason my grand finale had been singled out, an ugly anecdote recounted again and again for cheap, lazy smirks.

  ‘I heard he had a stiffy when he got out.’

  ‘Not that you’d have noticed, his thing is so minute!’

  I tried my best to ignore the cruelty; the smut that half-reminded me of all the nasty things Alf used to say, back when I was first admitted. But all of that felt so far away now, a very different time and two very different lads.

  August, to its credit, had finally offered the country a bit of respite, a pummel of thunderstorms like tanks rolling over the sky, murdering the heat dead.

  The sound of the downpour was everywhere, a stampede upon the roof, until actually, I thought the whole thing might collapse – a flood and maybe an Ark, but of course, no room for the likes of us.

  The crazies came in two by two, hurrah! Hurrah!

  And all the while, through the numbness, still another boat floated at the back of my mind.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what date they were off – Ima had said ‘August’, nothing more. By now their suitcases would at least be packed, all the life they could carry. Her dark, full-length clothes; her lipsticks; her silver necklace with the angel tucked down the side so that Abba wouldn’t find it. It had been a present from Gerry, the lad with the tightest grip and the rosiest cheeks – flushed, I had always presumed, from their love.

  Despite everything, Alf and I had carried on with our Night ­Lessons. Neither of our hearts was still in it, though I suppose we were hardly the first to follow rituals we didn’t believe. If nothing else I think our bodies just wouldn’t have known what to do with a full night’s sleep.

  His mind was still clinging on, some days bad but some days not bad, almost as if the heat really had been to blame. The only noticeable decline was that his shake had gone bonkers, so violent that he found it hard to even wheel his chair any more without doing a jerky slalom down the corridor left then right then left then right then left. If I hadn’t been so numb I would have laughed. Bumper cars. Bonus points if you hit a nun.

  He was at the part of the story where, with his legs gone in the War, he’d had to crawl his way back to Ireland, a tiny bit of him still holding on to the hope that when he returned he might somehow find a trace of her, lingering.

  ‘Only trouble was, I knew feck all where to look, you know? I had tried to ask her about her family – a million bloody questions – but every time she had gone all cagey on me.’ He paused then; raised a finger to pick his nose, though he only ended up juddering it all over his face. ‘I think… I think she said her Abba did plays or something. Or no, maybe that he was a… a… what do you call them lads that keep them buzzy yokes? You know, the furry ones that sting?’

  So he prattled away to his heart’s discontent, not even expecting an answer off me any more; not even caring if I was writing the thing down. I wasn’t. Because still I couldn’t think of anything else except my own family; my own sting.

  With every day that passed, the likelihood was that they had set sail. I supposed I was a bit surprised she hadn’t come to say goodbye; hadn’t popped in for a final visit. But I decided that that would’ve only made things harder, and that she had probably written me a letter which Sister Monica had probably confiscated, singeing fag holes in the paper until they came out the other side.

  I stared at the jotter. The Martello Tower was long-faded. Another building lost in the fight.

  And I wondered if she had gone to the Glenvar Road, to say goodbye to her Gerry. It was a strange thought, but it hovered all the same. I wondered if they had made love one more time, the last of their monthly bliss, her naked except for the wrap of his woolly jumper. And I wondered if she had dressed herself then in silence, tying her beautiful hair back into her headscarf, a regulation garb of her very own.

  ‘Shmendrick, I’m not feeling very well.’

  By now Alf had been rambling for almost an hour, questions and answers more for the Virgin than for me. And yet there was something about these words that made me hear.

  I kept my head down; pretended to be busy with the jotter.

  Because I was wondering now if maybe I should write to her myself. My mother. Even just a postcard, once she had settled over there – just a few words to let her know I was thinking of her; that I would spend my life now doing little else:

  Dear Ima, Wish I wasn’t here. Ever.

  I hoped Alf would still be well enough by then to swipe me a couple of stamps.

  ‘Shmendrick, I really… there’s something funny in me…’

  I pictured how Ima would take the postcard, fold it up, and put it into the Wailing Wall. It was an ancient thing, right in the heart of Jerusalem, where all the Jews came to pray and cry and slot their precious pieces of paper; to shove them between the stones, deep into the gaps. Because they said that the words would then go straight to God – our very own means of passing notes on High:

  Father, Why did I have to see what I saw?

  Dear God, I didn’t find her.

  A direct line, only for the most desperate requests.

  ‘Shem? Shem, please?’

  Except, I sometimes worried that the Jerusalem pigeons could just come down at night and peck the notes away; take them out of the cracks and fly them off; use them to build up their nests:

  Oh God, I ask you to aid my ailing friend.

  To let my hands be still for once.

  Though maybe it would only make their nests weaker not stronger, building homes out of other people’s doubts; other people’s pleas:

  What if my silence has been a terrible mistake?

  I wanted a legacy, but instead I got nothing. Not even legs.

  The early bird, catching the confession.

  ‘Shem!’

  The clash of skull on tile sounded like china. Like two mugs, clinked full of tea. His chair rolled backwards into the shadows as if it were running away.

  Alf lay collapsed at the foot of the plinth. Still. It almost looked like he was just praying, a supplicant to the Virgin.

  I waited, giving him a chance to pick himself up.

  But when he didn’t I reached across and I poked him, hard, shoving with the butt of my pen. Nothing. Next I reached a little further for his shoulder and gave it a shake, back and forth, as if he just needed waking up.

  Still he slept.

  I looked around.

  Help?

  Through the silence now, my heart began to dance a dance. I checked again, craning away towards the nuns’ quarters.

  Somebody help?

  Sister Frances?

  Hello?

  I supposed I could just run in and wake her up; turn on the lights and clap my hands until the nuns opened their eyes. And did they sleep with their habits on too? I wanted to know. And wouldn’t that get in the way of their dreams?

  But I couldn’t bring myself to move now; couldn’t bear to leave him here alone when already he looked like he was in trouble. As if, after all this time, my friend might be…

  I opened my mouth, my tongue twitching with the panic.

  Dead?

  The word mounted in my throat, the ragbags of my lungs suddenly all empty and tight. I wondered if this was how asthma felt, a chest wheezy without air. But there were other words too, getting in the way, as if I just needed some kind of language oxygen – one puff and I would be cured.

  ImreallysorrybutIsawmymotherhavinganaffair.

  I opened even wider, desperate for a sound. Not for my sake any more, but for his – life and death stuff, like – surely that changed everything?


  SomeonehurryIthinkmyfriendhashadaheartattack.

  And I thought then that maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea for the Jerusalem pigeons to steal the scraps from the Wailing Wall, because actually, maybe the bricks secretly needed them to stay up, so that when the birds took too many away the whole thing would collapse, a two-thousand-year-old heap of rubble and dust that would make the city wail and wail and wail and never stop.

  It took the full thrust of my weight to knock the statue off the plinth. The smash was massive, louder than all the words I couldn’t say, until everything, at last, was still.

  Hail Mary, full of Grace. The Virgin Mary, shattered to a million smithereens.

  ‘What in the Lord’s name?’ Sister Frances’s voice came shrill from the other end of the corridor. ‘Shem? Shem is that you?’ Next her body followed, bare feet across the spray of broken shards. ‘And who…’ Before she stopped. Dead. Seeing the sprawl of it. ‘Christ on a bike!’ Screaming the things I hadn’t been able to scream. ‘Somebody call an ambulance!’ The things that might have been enough to save my friend, if I had been a better kind of lad. When I looked again, though, I couldn’t even see him any more, clouds of porcelain dust coughing up to block the view, almost as if Alf’s body had just been vanished into thin air; whisked away somewhere far from me, somewhere he would be safe; somewhere the pigeons could never find him.

  For ‘Trespassing the Premises’ and ‘Desecration of Property’ the Sisters put me in Solitary Confinement. Two weeks. The cell was so tight I could reach my arms from one wall to the other; could smear them both with the food that was left on a tray outside the door.

  When I finally got back to our room Alf’s bed had been stripped, the shelf wiped clean. There was a bright patch on the wall where his books used to be, the paint less faded than the rest. Like the opposite of a shadow; a not-silhouette.

  While locked away I had prepared myself for the worst; had made a little rip in the sleeve of my regulation shirt, just as the custom said. I did it on the left side. Though the rag of a thing was already so riddled with holes you would’ve been hard pressed to notice the new addition.

  The day they let me out I saw Sister Frances around the House a couple of times, but I could tell she was avoiding me, probably feeling guilty for having had me locked up. But I understood – I knew how it must have looked. Like I had attacked Alf somehow; like I had gone crazy and murdered my friend, and to be honest, wasn’t that basically the truth? A chance to save him which I hadn’t even had the strength to take?

  I pictured him now, buried in the ground. I wondered if they had remembered to put him face down, the way he had always wanted.

  The rain had finally eased a bit, sick of the sight of itself, so that afternoon we were ordered back out to the yard. They had told us we were to pull up the nettles that had started to clog the flowerbeds – roses amidst thorns or some shite like that. I just held my palms against the yokes instead and let them do their worst; tried to get an even number of stings on either side, even if I didn’t actually bother to count.

  No more rain, I thought to myself. So it would be good weather for a sailing.

  The hours passed us by, the air fresh at least, but then I smelled something sweeter and realised the pretty nun had come up beside me. She spoke very quickly, though her lips barely moved as they whispered a different version of events.

  She told me that Alf was still alive, just, clinging on in St Imelda’s Hospital a few miles South of here.

  ‘But Shem, you know that notebook you had? The yellowy one with all that…’ She stopped to suck her finger. She must have grazed it off a sting. ‘Well Shem, Sister Monica took it. I think… Shem, it’s gone.’

  Through the numbness the sense of failure came throbbing in. I closed my eyes. It was the most I had felt in weeks.

  That night I lay staring into the blackness of our room. My room. I could hear a leak somewhere near, the drips slow and fat like a torture.

  And do you think they would bury us separately, Shmendrick, if we ever popped our clogs? A special Jewie cemetery, like?

  I froze, the silence playing tricks on my skull.

  I saw a lad hitchhiking with a coffin once, you know? Down the ­Killarney Road.

  But I would know his voice anywhere, even as it echoed above my head – almost as if the snippets of his mind he had started to lose still hovered, here on the pantry air.

  He had a big sign on him, like, begging for someone to pick them up; take them off to the graveyard or maybe just down to Bray for a pint in a local snug!

  As it had at the time, Alf’s joke now brought me a smile. And then a memory of the lads in school bullying my flashcards the very same way:

  ‘What are they, like, hitchhiking placards?’

  ‘Excuse me, Sir, but could you take me to a place called “Yes, please”?’

  ‘Pardon, but I’m headed for a town called “I’m Sorry”.’

  ‘A village over beyond called “I think loneliness feels a bit like hunger, and Ima, what if someone just ate all their friends? What would they feel then?”’

  I jumped out of bed. The noise was getting too much.

  The corridor was ice beneath my feet. After a fortnight in the cell the skin on my toes felt strangely sensitive, newborn baby stuff.

  I could have done the route blindfolded, but tonight I kept my eyes open, just to see what they had put up instead. To be honest, I half-expected it would still be the Virgin, glued back together again – no real damage, just some cracks across her face like she had aged thirty years instead of two weeks.

  Mary, the same name as my mother. Though of course, hers was technically the Irish version. Máire. The fada above the ‘a’ like a crack of its own.

  When I got there the figurine was gone. On the pedestal a candle sat instead, the fat, red memorial kind – a tribute to so much more than they could know.

  You see, Shmendrick, I have… I have a proposition for you.

  As I stood there, another bout of Alf’s phrases came looking for me, the sound and the shape of us still imprinted on the air. We had both sat at different heights, yet over time we had been levelled too.

  I can nick the stationery for you, on the sly, like.

  Sta-tion-A-ry, pet, is when you stand there in the one spot, and I run a-wAAAAAAy…

  My mother’s voice, though, made my legs begin to slacken. I crossed them over. I needed to sit.

  While in solitary, I had been counting down the last days of the month. I used my nail to make scratches in the concrete wall, notches on a bedpost. I sighed. All things considered, the phrase didn’t sound quite right.

  By now, August was certainly down to the dregs of itself. I wondered if the nuns knew about the deadline; if they had kept me locked up for the guts of the month on purpose. Or worse, if maybe Ima had come to say goodbye, but then Sister Monica had had to tell her that no, she couldn’t come in; that I wasn’t allowed visitors any more.

  I looked away. Behind the plinth I saw a glimmer of white, poking into the blackness – a spare shard of porcelain they must have forgotten to sweep up.

  I hoped at least that the crossing would be smooth for her. It was such a long journey – surely weeks at sea. I pictured the boat, an orange-rusted thing, a dot on the horizon going lower and lower until it disappeared out of sight.

  I looked up at the candle, burning in memory.

  For my mother.

  My friend.

  The jotter.

  For everything I had lost.

  And you know what the Irish word for ‘survivor’ is, Shmendrick? Did you do it in school? Well, I think, if I remember rightly, I think that it’s ‘fear inste scéal’. The man who tells the story. And sure, isn’t that all I am now, eh? The gobshite who’s left behind just to make sure the story gets told.

  As I crawled back to bed I thought
of Alf’s words, of his sadness as he had spoken them. But of course, I couldn’t even be that man; couldn’t tell a single thing. No, it seemed I couldn’t even manage to survive.

  Apparently, though, my name had lived on – the thing that woke me up the following day.

  ‘Shem? Shem, you need to get up. Sister Monica wants you in her office in ten minutes.’

  It took me a moment to hear, my dreams still clinging on, not quite finished with me yet. But when I arrived and registered Sister Frances’s words I didn’t feel any surprise.

  I had known it was only a matter of time now before the Matron called me in and told me she was moving me upstairs. A higher ward. There was no point in me having the double room to myself, and anyway, it made sense to clear a bit of space down here for someone who still held the chance of being ‘cured’. The delusion.

  I got dressed quickly, buttons and zips. My hair had started to grow back. I spat on my fingers and smoothed the curls slick behind my ears.

  When I arrived in the front hallway Sister Frances told me to wait outside while she fetched her superior from the office. I hovered in the hollow light of the morning, the day still shy of itself. Around the House’s front door, the glass panels had been stained red, so now the particles of dust on the air glowed a lovely pinky hue.

  I went to stand in the shaft of it, to feel the colour on my skin – the same shade as a blush – a bashful kind of radiance. But when I turned around and saw my mother standing there, framed in the office doorway, I noticed she was blushing a bit herself.

  ‘Shem?’

  The gush of pleasure that followed was stronger than any numbness could withstand.

  ‘Oh my love.’ Ima ran to catch my body before it fell to the ground. She pressed it deep into her own, stroking the length of my back. She was so small she could barely reach the top of my neck. ‘My pet. Oh my pet.’ Her words were whispered things, somewhere around the jut of my ribs, yet still I kept my hands by my sides, too afraid yet to touch. To believe.

  Slowly she led me to sit on the wooden bench which ran along the wall. It looked like a pew from a church, stiff and cold; a plaque on the arm with a stranger’s name.