The Leaving

by Gabriella West

Patricia hadn’t liked her, I thought, as I glanced furtively at her bent face. Part of the strangeness of our friendship was that I had not found anything in Jeanette to dislike. Now I could see the part of her that made Patricia wary. But what did Patricia see in me that she liked? How could she judge one of us and not the other? Was it just because I was her niece?

  If Patricia had taught me anything, it was this: that I needed love, and affection and support. The two people in my life who had previously provided this, Stevie and Jeanette, had managed to strip me of my self-esteem at the same time. Patricia, though, had given without asking for anything in return. She had made me feel special, for a while, and I realized that I loved her for this, or just for being who she was. She was strong and secure enough in herself to show tenderness to me. If I had bloomed while I stayed in Meath it was partly due to her; that I had not crumbled completely was definitely due to her.

  Measured against Patricia, Jeanette’s feelings for me, whatever they had been, did not amount to much. Compared to Patricia, I knew she had not loved me. And one day, I thought, someone will. Someone will love me.

  * * *

  In the end I did not cry. I sat on my bed, gazing around at my room, the bookshelf full of paperbacks, the walls with their posters, Boy George wearing a hat, hair falling down beyond his shoulders, his face radiant, pretty. On another wall Patti Smith looked somber, posing in a man’s white shirt and jacket, slim, androgynous. They were proud to be different. But what gave them that courage?

  A key turned in the front door lock. I heard whistling, which meant that it was my brother. My father never whistled; he occasionally sang little snatches of Irish folk ballads in a low hoarse voice as he was working on something.

  Steps on the stairs, a knock on my door.

  “Are you back?”

  “I’m back,” I replied dryly. The door swung open and Stevie bounded in. I was glad to see him, and managed a hesitant smile. He flung himself into an armchair. He was obviously in a good mood, and was prepared to spend some time with me.

  “Well, I’m delighted you’re back. We missed you, or at least I did. Seemed a long time—how was it?”

  I had expected to be asked this question, but knew that my answer would not have to be very extensive.

  “Educational,” I replied after a moment, my eyes lowered.

  “You’ve lost weight,” he said approvingly.

  I shrugged. This meant nothing to me now. “Yeah, we worked hard.”

  “Looks like you got a lot of sun. Of course the weather here was foul, mostly. I was seriously tempted to come up and visit about a week ago. Just to see the place. But then I thought, nah, I’ll wait until she gets back and get the real lowdown on it. I mean, no point in going if it’s even more boring than it is here.”

  “I suppose it would be boring if you weren’t working. But Uncle John’s wife, Patricia, is really nice.”

  “And what’s Uncle John like?”

  “Oh ... a little brain dead.”

  We laughed. “Anyway, how’re you?” I said, to change the subject.

  “So-so.” He sighed. “I worked a bit with Dad. Otherwise, I messed around, saw Ron on average about once a week ...”

  “Why so seldom?”

  “Oh ... good question. Sometimes I think we’re doing really well, and then at other times I just feel ‘is this all there is’? You know? Well, perhaps you don’t. It’s not to say we’re breaking up or anything. It’s basically my fault. I’m restless.”

  I nodded.

  “And Ron’s in the same boat as you, he’s settling down to study for his Leaving. He won’t have much time for me in the next year.”

  “God, the Leaving.” I groaned. He had reminded me of the final exams. The thought of a year of studying was unendurable.

  “Oh, Ron’s ready for it. He’s psyching himself up already. Not like you. I felt exactly the same way about it as you feel now: it’s something you have to force yourself to do, all the while thinking, what am I doing this shit for? Not for me. For the parents, or the teachers. But it’s given me an idea. I don’t much want to do my second year exams in Trinity. I think I’m going to go to London in the Christmas holidays.”

  I stared at him. “You mean ... for good?”

  “Yes, for the next few years at any rate,” he said impatiently. “You knew that.”

  “I remember. You did tell me. A long time ago.”

  “A year ago, more or less. And now you’ve got used to the idea, haven’t you? I knew that when the time came it wouldn’t be so painful.”

  I laughed. A dull anger churned inside me. What did he know of my life, of how painful things really were? I had never felt more pain, but my stoical mask fooled even my closest friends and family. Jeanette felt no sympathy for me. Stevie thought I was calm and controlled. No one could see the chaos inside.

  He looked puzzled at my laugh.

  “Is everything OK with you?”

  “I’m all right,” I said stiffly. “Doesn’t ... doesn’t Ron mind that you’re leaving?”

  “I think he’s glad.” Stevie smiled. “He can concentrate on his bloody work!”

  I laughed again, this time in wonder and bafflement at Ron’s personality.

  “That’s how it is.” Stevie stood up. “Then he joins me after the Leaving—in June, I suppose.”

  He was about to go out the door, perhaps sorry that he had said so much. I sat slumped against the wall. My tired brain was not giving me much help. I said, weakly, “Stevie?”

  He turned around, waiting.

  “Couldn’t I come too?” I felt sick at the thought of another year at Fintan’s. The pressure, everything. I really couldn’t bear it. If I had something to look forward to...

  He sat on the bed.

  “Look,” he said, “The Leaving’s the one thing you have to do. It’s a qualification you need to get. And it’s not as if you can’t do it. You’ll find it easier than you think. It’s not impossible at all, OK? I know it’s a bore. But you want to go to college, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe not here. I mean, what’s Trinity like? Would I enjoy it?”

  He paused to think. Meanwhile, I was trying to fight the panic and anxiety that asking about college had provoked in me.

  “Well,” he said in a low tone, “I don’t know. I thought I’d enjoy it, but I haven’t much. I did want to give it a fair chance. Basically, there’s not a lot you can learn there, about yourself I mean, because the people who go there are just as ignorant as you and you don’t tend to meet people with different backgrounds from yours ... put it this way, it’s as provincial and insular as everything else here. Most students are Catholic and come from Dublin, like us. People are still pretty puritanical, although there’s this pretense that, you know, we’re all right-on and enlightened about sex. But nobody is, and very few people seem to be having sex. Beyond that, there isn’t much intellectual ferment either. You could probably do better almost anywhere else.”

  “But where?” I said desperately.

  He got up. “That’s your decision, Cathy. All I’m going to say is, after you’ve done the Leaving why don’t you take a year off? You deserve it. Come live with us if you like. Think about your options.”

  “Wouldn’t Ron mind?”

  He sighed. “That’s not the point. You’re my sister, and obviously, if I can help you, I will.”

  What a great exit line, I thought, as he left the room. I felt grateful, but not as uplifted by his offer as I would have done had this conversation taken place a year ago. Then, he’d said, “You can come and visit us, in the holidays.” Now he was saying “You can come and live with us—temporarily.”

  What more could he offer? He wanted to be with Ron; that was his first priority. Of course. Still, I wanted him to map out my future for me. I didn’t want to have to do it myself. I didn’t really know how. If it was a choice between dull and depressing routine in Ireland and facing an uncertain future somewhere e
lse—as it seemed to be—I was not sure that I could bear to hurl myself into the unknown.

  * * *

  About a week later, I returned to school.

  Jeanette and I were on curiously neutral terms. She now had other friends. This meant that I was hardly ever alone with her. Even when we were alone together, her manner was distant. I remember sitting at a table at lunch with her and about five or six others, including Carlotta and Susie. I wanted to ask her something, or just to make contact, yet felt slightly abashed by the presence of the others. The Cafeteria at Fintan’s was noisy. She was sitting across the table from me. The first time I ventured to say her name, there was no response. OK, I thought, she didn’t hear.

  “Jeanette,” I repeated, louder. She didn’t raise her head or turn her eyes to me. Then I understood. In the presence of Carlotta, her new pal, she did not even want to be seen talking to me.

  Her other friends meant more to her now. And yet, she knew, I think, that at bottom they didn’t particularly care about her. And I did. Even though it may have scared her to think of how deeply I cared, my friendship was still of some value. So I tagged along after her, and she let me, because it must have been reassuring. I was someone to fall back on.

  Meanwhile, I studied. Jeanette didn’t. She was frightened of the Leaving and had decided to make her last year as madly social as possible. She knew she would not go to college. When I’d first met her she’d wanted to do nursing. Now that aspiration had gone out the window. She said she wouldn’t get the points. What that really meant was, she didn’t want to bother. She’d resigned herself to failure in practical terms. She just wanted—for a brief time—to be popular, to have her fun. To be one of the “in” crowd. It was her last chance, and she seized it.

  To my surprise and horror, this meant that Carlotta virtually adopted her. Like a child in front of a fond mother, Jeanette would show off before Carlotta, relating tales of “getting off” with boys, i.e. smooching or messing around, and any other wild, foolish episodes that she thought might amuse her. Carlotta would listen with a malicious smile, eyes sparkling. She obviously thought it was all very funny, Jeanette’s transformation into teenage wastrel. One night, for example, Jeanette slept in a huge piece of concrete piping that workmen had left lying on Rathmines Road. Susie and her boyfriend lay in the other half of the pipe. It was open to the air, and of course, freezing. They had been kicked out of an all-night kebab place and had nowhere else to go.

  On another weekend, she went to Carlotta’s house for a party, and was given speed. What she did then was to run around and kiss all the men on the bus she was traveling home on. She recounted this at school with embarrassment, but some pride, while I stared at her. I was trying not to make judgments on her, yet I couldn’t really empathize either. There was nothing I could say. I played no part in this other life of hers. I wish I could have believed that her tales were fantasies, but to me they carried the sordid ring of truth. Her adventures didn’t amuse or titillate me; instead I felt jealous and resentful. She pretended not to notice this, and I said nothing.

  Yet another time, at a disco, she drunkenly exclaimed: “My mother’s run off to London with her fella!” Knowing what I knew of her mother, this seemed a sad, pathetic lie. I heard people at school talking about this under their breath. The consensus seemed to be that Jeanette was a naive fool, not to be taken seriously, but endearing enough to be tolerated.

  Jasper still wrote to her, and she made a pretense of being interested in him, but he seemed more like a fantasy now than ever. In reality, she went out with boys who got off with her and felt her up, but did not want to see her on a regular basis. She sensed this, and felt humiliated, I think, but could not stop herself from experimenting. It didn’t seem to matter that all the “experiments” turned out the same way—in rejection. Ironically enough, although I did not think of this at the time, the only person who would have been willing to enter into a long-term relationship with her was me.

  * * *

  I had another friend: Louise, whom I had forgotten for much of the past year. Louise was a strange girl, eccentric, likable, but somewhat reserved, somewhat distant. She lived near the school and people used to sometimes come around to her house in their free breaks just to hang out and drink coffee in a friendly, low-key atmosphere. Once Jeanette and I were there for ten or fifteen minutes. As we went out she kissed us both on the cheek. This moved me. I reflected as Jeanette and I walked back to Fintan’s that we, unlike many other friends in sixth year—when you were old enough to start behaving in a sophisticated manner and some actually did—had never kissed each other on the cheek in casual greeting or farewell. Nor would we ever. Jeanette did not like being touched, I saw, and I sometimes wondered if the boys she went out with sensed that, sensed the lack of desire in her and wondered what this frantic need to get physically close to them was.

  Louise read my English essays with approval, saw me reading 1984 and said, “Is that good?” and was willing to discuss, upon occasion, literature, philosophy, even psychology. She liked Jung, for example, whereas I preferred Freud, for I instinctively admired his rigidity, pessimism and fatalism. We both had a taste for provocative ideas, and neither had been brought up as a practicing Catholic, which helped us go past general stereotypes into more particular, more original ideas. But it also meant that we felt slightly lonely, out of place, at odds with the world we had been born into. Our worldview was different, better, we thought, but we saw what a minority we were in, and it inhibited us.

  I had fantasies of being Louise’s close friend, of sitting in her bedroom and smoking pot. I would have loved to take acid with her. Because I loved her mind, what I knew of it, I felt a craving for her company quite different from the humiliating need I had to be around Jeanette. Jeanette obsessed me, or possessed me, but I knew that a friendship with Louise would be liberating. Her poise and inner strength reminded me of Patricia a little. Yet we continued on parallel lines, meeting sometimes and exchanging friendly words, sitting together in class occasionally. Perhaps what stopped me from pursuing Louise, apart from shyness, was the fact that she did not seem to want or need an exclusive friend, and I did.

  * * *

  The Christmas holidays were a welcome respite from the strain of school. I helped my mother make the puddings and the cake. My father hung the lights on the tree and we decorated it. On Christmas Eve a mysterious package arrived from my uncle and aunt. When we opened it we found a bottle of poteen and an enormous, round, moist Christmas cake inside, twice as good as my mother’s rather dry concoction.

  In the days after Christmas, Stevie began to make his preparations to leave. “I want to be in Trafalgar Square for New Year’s Eve,” he told me, as he searched around his room for things to pack.

  “Be careful,” I said. I was standing inside the door of his room, watching him. “London can be dangerous.”

  He shrugged. “Well, I’ve got my A–Z guide and I’ll try not to act like a country cousin!”

  “Will you write to me?” I asked. “I’ll need your address.”

  He smiled. “Of course I will. What do you think I am?”

  I thought he was brave. He had allowed my father to pay two years of Trinity fees, approximately two thousand pounds, and now he was slipping off without so much as a word. Although he was not going to engineer a huge showdown between himself and my father, which would have occurred by the simple act of telling Dad he was leaving, I felt that there was something truly audacious about his plan. I also felt sure that he would do well there. The first few months would be rocky, of course. But he could even sign on for the dole if he needed to.

  Despite these rationalizations, the aftermath of his leaving was particularly grim.

  He left on the boat train from Dun Laoghaire one morning at eight. I had gone there to see him off. We’d slipped out of the house in the early morning, and something about the sea air and the prospect of a journey made Stevie full of laughter and kinder than he’d been
for a long time. I too felt excited. It was as if a part of me were setting sail. “Good luck,” I whispered, as we hugged at the bottom of the gangplank. “Write to me.”

  He nodded. “Play dumb at home. I let a note for them. All you know is that I’m off to London. You don’t know why, or for how long.”

  “That’s true!” I said, grinning, and he smiled at me and turned and walked up into the ship.

  After that I took the DART train back to town and had coffee and a sticky bun in Bewley’s. I bought myself a book at Hodges Figgis, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, and I took the bus home. I felt oddly happy, which was not at all what I expected to feel.

  * * *

  The moment I stepped back into the house I could sense the changed atmosphere: it was one of subdued hysteria. I went directly upstairs. The door to Stevie’s room was open. Was my father home yet? Then their bedroom door opened and he emerged, frowning. I was at the head of the stairs and gasped slightly at the sudden way he had appeared. I shrank back against the wall.

  “Where were you?” he demanded.

  “I was in town.”

  “Oh, you were, were you?” His tone was sneering. “And what do you know about this?” He whipped out a piece of paper from behind his back. Stevie’s note, obviously.

  “Nothing,” I said, truthfully. “I really haven’t read it.”

  “You know what I mean! Your brother’s run off to London without so much as a by-your-leave! Don’t tell me you weren’t involved in this! I want to know where he’s headed.”

  I licked my lips. “He didn’t say. He doesn’t know himself. He said he’d write to me, so maybe we’ll have to wait until then... “

  “I suppose he thinks I’m going to take this lying down!” Shooting a disgusted glance at me, he wheeled around and went back into his room, slamming the door. I could hear the sound of my mother’s voice asking a question and my father’s brief, angry reply.

  So far so good, I thought, going into my room. They didn’t really blame me. It had never occurred to me that they would until I’d glimpsed my father’s face.