My mother didn’t say a lot more about her family. She seemed a little depressed and sad as she stared into the flames, and it would be cruel, as well as useless, I felt, to try and draw her out. She did remark that we—Stevie and I—were welcome up there any time we wanted. “But I’m not!” said Dad with a short laugh. She looked at him ruefully and he murmured, “Ah well, “ and began to talk about the job he had just completed; how they might consider putting in a new hot water system with the money. Stevie and I slipped away to our separate bedrooms, he to listen to Erasure—as I say, the walls were thin in our house—I to listen to Bronski Beat.
You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case
Alone on the platform the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face
wailed Jimmy Somerville. The song always made me melancholy, especially the lines
The answers you seek will never be found at home
The love that you need will never be found at home
Run away Turn away Run away Turn away Run away...
I wanted to run, all right, but I needed a goal. I needed a clear idea of what I was pursuing. Stevie had that at least, and he would run, soon. But I felt the need of someone to point me in the right direction. I had Jeanette, true, and it seemed that we were on the same path, but sometimes I wished that she were more in control. I felt that neither of us knew what was ahead. We were living in the present, which was fine, but what would be our future? Would we have one together? I was sure that we would, but I couldn’t envisage it.
* * *
My blossoming friendship with Jeanette satisfied me on a deep level. I didn’t label our friendship and was shocked when other people did. Susie’s friend, Carlotta, said something to me one day that term which I never forgot.
The whole school was standing around listening to announcements, a ritual we went through every morning before class. Jeanette was not with me; she was either late or not “in.” I hoped it was only the former; on days when she didn’t come to school I moped around wondering what she was up to, tasting my old loneliness anew.
Carlotta stood next to me. While Mrs. McHenry was speaking she turned to me and in a low but conversational tone asked: “Did you get off with Jeanette?”
I stared at her, unable to believe my ears. I felt paralyzed as the words sunk in, not able to say anything. A rude glare was all I could summon up, but I was more amazed at her question than angry. What on earth did she think we were up to?
I tore my gaze away from her amused, inquisitive eyes. She saw too much. She knew too much, perhaps, about life and people’s desires. I did not want to know that much. I wanted to be innocent. But on a deeper level, my reaction was not innocent. I knew what she meant. Her question didn’t shock me. It had shocked me to be asked that in public by someone who I had assumed was hardly aware of my existence. But the concept—the thought of us kissing intimately—was not planted in my mind by Carlotta’s question. It had been there for a while.
I didn’t tell Jeanette. I imagined that she would react violently. She hated Carlotta, who picked on her unmercifully. She’d told me of a particularly bad incident. One day she had broken the heel of her shoe and had fixed it with sellotape. She saw Carlotta staring at her feet. “I know,” she said, embarrassed. “The heel came off.”
“No,” said Carlotta scornfully. “Your feet, Jeanette. Your feet are filthy!”
Carlotta and she had several classes together—the so-called “dossers’” classes. If I had been there when Carlotta insulted her I would have felt obliged to defend Jeanette. But whatever I said would have been absolutely useless. I knew it, yet felt surprisingly little bitterness towards Carlotta.
It was hard to feel bitter about anything. I felt strong, and I felt safe. It was a nice combination.
On the day term ended for the Christmas holidays, we made vague plans to see each other during the break. “I’ll ring you,” she promised. “You’d better!” I said. The thought of going three weeks without seeing her was quite terrifying.
Chapter 10
Jeanette didn’t have a phone. Now that we were good friends, this had begun to disturb me. I couldn’t get in touch with her; I had to wait for her to ring me. When a few days went by, I began to wonder what she was up to, long to see her. I knew her address. But she had never invited me to her house. I didn’t really know where Finglas was, and the idea of getting on a bus, finding her place and walking in unannounced scared me, particularly as she had this family who I knew so little of.
My mother commented one day that she found it strange that Jeanette’s mother had never phoned her. I didn’t know what to say to this. It hadn’t struck me as odd, exactly. But my lack of curiosity about Jeanette’s family was gradually changing to awareness that something was wrong in my friend’s life. My vague fantasies began to center around the figure of her mother, this strange woman who according to her daughter smoked like a chimney, never left the house, and expected to be waited on hand and foot.
And that was all Jeanette had ever said, really. She’d let drop this much, almost jokingly, over the couple of months that I’d known her. But the slowly developing picture of her mother as a cruel, domineering tyrant was still fuzzy and unclear. Jeanette never complained about her mother, never bitched about her in the way that Susie, for example, had whinged about hers. I got the feeling that she loved her mother very much, that what she felt, if anything, was a helpless concern. A devotion. It was quite a puzzle. I knew so little. I would wait, I promised myself, until Jeanette told me more. But what would that “more” be?
I just wasn’t inquisitive, and the fact that my mother, who seemed so stuck in her own little world, was made me uneasy. Should I perhaps take it on myself to visit Jeanette’s house, to meet the dreaded Mrs. Granger face to face? I really didn’t want to. But would I have to, would I be forced to one day?
Besides the mother, what little Jeanette had said of her father made him seem like a weak, peripheral character, very much offstage. And that was odd too. I saw him as the typical alcoholic, absentee father. A feckless man, no doubt, not a good breadwinner. But being highly critical of my own parents, I wasn’t about to righteously point the finger at Jeanette’s. I had told her the minimum about my father and mother; I had not made clear in what ways I found them lacking. So why should she have to tell me everything? Perhaps it was too painful!
In this way I got over the anger I may have felt, deep inside, that I wasn’t being given the full picture, that I wasn’t invited to share in large parts of her life. I made excuses for Jeanette to my mother (and myself), and promptly buried the matter. It would resurface, maybe. But at least when Jeanette was with me she was more present, more attentive to me, than any of my friends had ever been. And for that, I forgave her everything.
* * *
She rang me after the New Year. We arranged to meet in town to see a film at the Ambassador cinema, at the top of O’Connell Street. The film was called Monsignor. We both professed to like Christopher Reeve. I was particularly interested in him because when the family watched Superman II on telly my father had grunted, at the sight of the actor walking down a flight of stairs (mincing, to be perfectly honest), “He’s as queer as a coot.”
Stevie and I had exchanged ironic glances. I said, “Oh, rubbish, Dad,” because I had read in an article that he lived with a woman called Françoise in Paris. My father had given me a withering glance. How did I dare question his brilliant insight?
Anything to do with gay people—men, really, because there was so little available on the subject of lesbians—fascinated me: books, music, film. Now that I no longer had access to Stevie’s black and white TV I would sneak downstairs late at night to watch English Channel 4 (if my father had gone to bed) where quite often programs about gays in England were shown.
I got something out of it all that I couldn’t have explained, if challenged. And that was the way I felt about it: defensive. I still thought of myself as vaguely
heterosexual, despite many signs pointing the other way.
By mistake we were an hour early that Sunday afternoon. The film didn’t start until 3. And it was bitterly cold. The wind was sweeping through our skimpy clothing. I shivered.
Jeanette looked pale. I was horrified when she doubled up and collapsed on the low stone wall in front of the cinema, which was all blockaded up like a fortress.
“I’m so cold,” she gasped. “Christ, Cathy, I think I’m going to faint.”
I sat down beside her. “What can I do?” She was lying down now. What if she did black out? I felt resourceless, idea-less. Then she spoke:
“There’s a cafe across the street. That will help. I need sugar! If I don’t have sugar in my bloodstream I get like this. It’s OK. I’ll be fine, Cathy, once I get some sugar.”
Nodding rather dubiously, I grasped her arm, helped her up, and we marched across the road to the Parnell Cafe, a small Formica-tabled joint where a burly man sat consuming eggs and chips. He was the only other customer.
“They make good coffee here,” Jeanette said, sitting down and grabbing a packet of white sugar from the bowl in the middle of the table. She opened it, half-smiled at me, and poured it down her throat. Color began to return to her face. “I feel better!” she announced.
I was so relieved. The milky, frothy coffee was set down before us. I watched as she took packet after packet of sugar and shook it into her cup. She laughed. I did too. It was funny now. The tide had turned. Miraculously, she was animated, in high spirits, and showing off.
She slipped about 10 sugar packets into her pockets. We giggled about that. The paleness in her face had all gone. She was flushed. It was warm in the Cafe. I felt very happy, suddenly. What I thought then, watching her, was this: if she was an actress, it was all just for me, a private performance for my benefit. And I relished it. Her little eccentricities charmed me so much. She was what sustained my otherwise lackluster life, gave it energy, color, hope.
I think she could see then that she had me, she’d captured me. I was in her power, yes, but it gave me a feeling of triumph. We said nothing significant. Yet the shared moments were intimate. I felt grateful to her because she cared enough to make me laugh, to move me, to give me this innocent pleasure.
We left the Cafe eventually. We saw the film. It was still windy when we emerged; it was also dark. We walked down O’Connell Street towards our respective buses, bumping against each other, laughing.
* * *
Winters are long in Ireland. So many of my memories of Jeanette also involve the cold and/or the dark. We were often outside when alone; we had few places to go where we could be alone together inside. Mostly we met in coffee shops, of which there were a great many dotted around the city center.
It was the same for Stevie and Ron, I imagined. They would meet in public places and just hang around together. They had been barred from the warm sanctuary of Ron’s bedroom in a silent house. At weekends Ron’s parents were home; my mother too was always around the place. Jeanette liked my house, yet I could see she was always a little uncomfortable there. Or perhaps it was me that was uncomfortable. Our best times were spent wandering the streets, chilled yet invigorated.
Although Jeanette brought warmth and color into my life, providing a drama that I sorely needed, there were times when she failed me, when she didn’t ring me as planned or turn up after we’d made an arrangement to meet, for example. At other times her stories seemed curiously false, and I glanced at her almost with suspicion as she talked.
She was good at making excuses, being contrite. She wanted my approval and made sure she got it. Sometimes, though, being with her was draining, wearying; sometimes I felt impatient for a friend with a better mind, a mind to match mine. There was an aimlessness about her that I disliked and feared; she was restless, almost hyperactive; she would refuse to discuss anything important, trivialities were safer.
By glossing over the painful events in her life, I sensed, by dismissing them, she got by. Yet I treated life differently. If something pained me, I looked at it from all angles, analyzing and brooding about it. I would never simply ignore it, or pretend that it wasn’t happening. I just couldn’t. I allowed it to damage me, perhaps, but I also came to terms with it.
Pushing the darkness and the suffering away, Jeanette was able to burn with a brightness which certainly attracted me. I circled around her, getting closer and closer to the center. That was the exciting part. But what would I find when I reached the core, where the heat should radiate most intensely? All I knew when I was Jeanette’s friend was that I was on a journey, and that, like most journeys, it would end. I felt pretty confident that it would end well, which is a dry way of saying that I was sure sooner or later we would come together, merge in some way, as lovers perhaps, but even if not we would be forever inseparable. It was a romantic notion, yes; I simply could not imagine anything ever dividing us.
She had never been cold to me. Or cruel. I didn’t think she had that in her. Nothing she said to me had ever revealed that she did. But if I had carefully examined her behavior to one Paul Donnellan, I might indeed have discovered a coldness and a withdrawal of energy. Still, Paul was a boy, who’d been hassling her, as boys will, who’d been forcing his attentions on her (admittedly in a weak, groveling way). Her contempt for him had surely been justified, I would have concluded, if I had even bothered to think about it.
Perhaps I didn’t want to think about it. Because if she had rejected Paul, it was partly because of me. I knew that. Paul’s devotion, his worship, were not acceptable. Yet my devotion and my worship were. The favored suitor rarely mourns for the rejected one.
Had it been suggested to me that Jeanette could ever cause me a significant amount of pain, I would have laughed. But there was no one there to suggest it to me, and it never entered my mind.
* * *
Just before Easter 1985 Jeanette’s family moved again. She mentioned sadly that they’d had to get rid of their vast menagerie of cats. But as if to compensate for this a dog had strolled up—a large mongrel—and had been adopted into the household. That was basically all the information Jeanette gave me on the move.
But I noted down the new address on her scratchy-covered yellow homework notebook, which I saw every day lying on her desk beside mine: Fintan’s issued them to all students. I wondered what 13 Stannaway Avenue, Crumlin was like. It didn’t seem likely that I would be invited there. And with my middle-class insecurity, I felt a little intimidated at the thought of going into a working-class neighborhood. Perhaps, I theorized, Jeanette’s district was so bad she just didn’t want me to see it. Or something like that.
I could tell that Jeanette often felt shame. Embarrassment was one of her most frequently expressed emotions. I certainly would have done anything to keep her from being mortified or ashamed. Grilling her on her background would definitely have been a strategic error; it would have caused her to distrust me. I loved our intimacy. I felt asking questions might endanger it. So my mind was filled with vague speculations, which I was aware might be completely unfounded.
Around this time I wrote semi-seriously in my diary: “Jeanette is a pearl among the swine of Fintan’s.” How incredibly lucky I was, I often mused, to have found someone like her. Someone so unspoiled, so charming, so basically good... No wonder sluttish, pampered girls like Carlotta despised her, nouveaux-riches idiots who lived in Foxrock! Why was she even going to Fintan’s, anyway? Because she’d been expelled from about 10 other schools, no doubt. Fintan’s was her last resort, probably, and a bit downmarket, but she was a novelty there, being flamboyant and having wealthy parents, and Mrs. McHenry didn’t believe in kicking out unruly students (especially ones with well-to-do parents). Jeanette and I discussed Carlotta often; she was a symbol of everything we were against.
Susie’s social life had been transformed by meeting Carlotta. She had quietly dropped Jeff, whom I occasionally saw in the corridors, his head bent sheepishly as he passed me, r
eeking of cigarette smoke. From what I gathered at conversations I overheard, she had begun to go to parties at Carlotta’s place, heavy-duty gatherings where drugs were taken, drink was plentiful, and where—I felt sure—the boys who came expected the girls to sleep with them.
This did shock me, because I had known Susie so well. And now look at her! And yet there was nothing particularly shocking to see, unless you found the sight of her black fingernail polish (against the regulations) disturbing. She was bright, cheery and fairly popular; there were no overt signs that her extracurricular activities were taking a toll. She seemed, if anything, less cynical than she’d been a couple of years before, more childlike, full of enthusiasm for life. I watched her from across rooms, always aware of her presence. It was uncomfortable to be around her. Her good humor grated on me; I hated the fact that she occasionally greeted me casually, with a bright—false, I was sure—smile. I would have preferred her to slink past me guiltily. I felt that she had got away, she had succeeded in something that she desperately wanted to achieve, and I was not happy for her.
But if I had not had Jeanette to console me I would have been a hundred times more bitter.
* * *
If Christmas had been dull, the Easter holidays stretched out even more uninvitingly. Mum was away a lot, visiting her dying mother. This felt strange; it meant that my father had to cook for himself sometimes (a fact we were all very conscious of), it also meant that Stevie and I had to be around him without our mother’s calming, buffering presence. We sat with him during the evening, or rather I did, Stevie nearly always finding some excuse to go out. He told my father that he was studying in Trinity’s Lecky library, and in theory he was; what this meant in practice was one hour in the library and three in the pub. As students did, he tended to boast about the amount of time he spent drinking, as if I cared. Jeanette and I didn’t have the money to drink.
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