‘Maybe you’re right,’ Valerie conceded, ‘but it’s different for you, Lizzie. You know you can always come back home if anything goes wrong and you can’t afford the rent. Once I leave I’m gone for good. Da won’t ever let me come back unless I crawl, and I won’t be doin’ that! So I’ll be on my own.’
‘Sell the friggin’ car, pay off the loan and start saving again,’ Lizzie had urged.
‘No. It took me ages to save enough to secure a loan. I don’t want to go back to square one. And anyway, I’m letting Mam practise in it. We’re taking lessons. It gives me freedom. I couldn’t give it up. As soon as I pay off the loan I’ll apply for a transfer to Dublin or the County Councils, and come and live with you,’ she’d promised, wishing she had the nerve to up sticks like Lizzie had. She wanted to move to Dublin but she also wanted to have a little nest egg for emergencies. Life had taught Valerie to be as well prepared as she possibly could for any eventuality.
But this time Terence had gone too far and given her the kick in the ass she needed. Lizzie was right: what she paid her parents for her keep would be almost enough to pay rent. It was time to leave home and get out from under Terence’s thumb. She was only being a coward, she admonished herself angrily. But never the less, as much as a part of her longed to leave home, a small part of her felt daunted. Making the transition from schoolgirl to career girl was more overwhelming than she’d anticipated.
Those first weeks in her new job when she had felt like such a ‘new girl’ and everything had been so unfamiliar had been nerve-racking. People had been kind but everyone had their own little clique and she felt like an outsider going into the staff canteen, wondering where to sit. She had been working in the car tax department and the work was so mind-numbingly boring she had even longed to go on the public counter, despite the tales she heard about people losing their rag and hurling abuse at the counter staff.
As the first few weeks went by she had filed what seemed like a million green documents in their beige folders, and the hours had dragged on interminably. She had wondered despairingly if this was what her life was to be like. Should she have gone to college? One morning she had woken up feeling sick and shivery and had lain in bed wondering if it was too soon in her career to call in sick. When she was at school it wouldn’t have been an issue: she would have just turned over and gone back asleep, and her mother would have given her a note for her teachers the next day. But she wasn’t at school, she was at work – ‘real’ work – where notes from your parent didn’t count. The probationary period could be extended. She could lose an increment for taking too much sick leave or having too many lates. At the very least a higher-ranking officer in the Personnel Department would interview her. Sometimes being ‘grown up’ wasn’t as liberating as she’d imagined, Valerie thought miserably as she’d made her way into work on the bus, hoping she wouldn’t puke.
When she’d heard that she was only entitled to twenty-one days’ annual leave she’d been shocked. Memories of all those long lazy school holidays every summer came racing back. How she had taken for granted carefree days on the beach with Lizzie, reading and listening to their favourite pop programme, Solid Gold McNamara, playing brilliant music on her trusty little tranny. Then they would maybe knock a few balls around with tennis rackets on the hard sand near the sea’s edge, before going for a swim. Afterwards, there’d be a snack of crisps and a juicy Granny Smith washed down with Coke, before a delightful snooze in the dunes, the sun warming sea-cooled limbs. Or, on wet days, lazing in bed reading Mills & Boons, or her absolute favourite, Georgette Heyer, borrowed from the library, which she passed on to her mother when she was finished with them. If her period knocked her for six she could curl up on the sofa with a hot-water bottle on her tummy and watch afternoon TV while Carmel made a fuss of her and brought her hot chocolate and paracetamol. Only now did she appreciate all those things that she had taken so much for granted. From now on such luxuries would be hard-earned, she realized with a jolt one hot afternoon when the sun shone unrelentingly down on her head through the office window as she filed those detested forms and her stomach ached with cramps.
But then came the joy of her first pay cheque. Her own money at last! Much more than her meagre wages for working on Saturdays in the village hair salon. She had taken the bus up to Dublin the following weekend and met Lizzie outside Roches Stores. They’d gone on a mini clothes-shopping spree, as well as treating themselves to lunch in Arnotts’ restaurant. They had taken the five o’clock bus home and that night they had dolled themselves up in all their new finery and make-up, and headed off to the hotel.
Being able to stand at the bar and be served drink made them feel so hip. They saw some of the sixth-years from their old school giggling in one of the booths and felt utterly sophisticated in comparison. They were career women now, on the ladder to success, grown up at last. And Valerie had a boyfriend she was sleeping with, how cool was that? She had it all.
Parts of growing up were wonderfully emancipating, Valerie reflected, but sometimes she felt out of her depth and unsure. Once she moved to Dublin she would really be standing on her own two feet without the safety net of home and familiarity to cushion her. The prospect gave her flutters of apprehension as well as anticipation.
Terence tried to concentrate on Daisy Duke’s never-ending legs, as she sat atop a fence hollering at Bo and Luke as they tore around a muddy field in The General Lee. The Dukes of Hazzard was one of his favourite programmes and all he wanted was a bit of peace to look at it. But there was no peace to be had in this damn household with that crabby pair it was his misfortune to live with. Since Valerie had left school and started working she was growing increasingly defiant and disrespectful. And she was staying out until all hours at the weekends with that Egan fella. He didn’t like the Egans. You’d think by the way Tessa behaved they owned the Christina O, instead of a clunky, rusty little trawler. Tessa Egan had snubbed him once and he’d never forgotten it. He’d offered her a bag of coal at half price. Coal got with the fuel vouchers he helped himself to, and she’d looked at him as if he’d crawled out from under a stone and said snootily, she had a coalman who supplied her with coal, thank you. But other people in the village were eager to get the cheap coal and he was delighted with his profit. He hated these goody-goodies like Tessa, who thought they were superior to him.
Terence sighed deeply. People had looked at him as though he’d crawled out from under a stone all his life. His eyes darkened as the memory he could never erase danced around his brain. Brenda Ryan yelling, ‘Get away from me, get away from me, you horrible stinky boy. How dare you try and kiss me? I don’t kiss the hired help!’ And then her father, hearing her screeching, coming thundering around the side of the barn and nearly knocking him into kingdom come, roaring, ‘Get out of here, ye little cur, and get back to that slum ye crawled out of. You’re sacked. Don’t step foot on this farm again, and if I catch ye sniffing around my daughter again, I’ll break yer bloody neck!’
But it was Brenda’s sneer that stayed with him. Her blue eyes flashing with derision, her nostrils flared as though she were smelling something nasty, and the way she’d called him the ‘hired help’. He was fourteen, a farm boy on her father’s dairy farm. Brenda, six months younger, had spent the summer flirting with him, tossing her golden curls and fluttering her eyelashes as she sought him out every day to bum a smoke off him.
‘You’re very strong. I like strong boys,’ she’d told him with a smouldering sideways glance that particular day, as she’d held his hand steady while he lit a match for her. When he’d grabbed her and tried to kiss her, she’d started yelling blue murder.
His father had beaten him black and blue for losing his summer job, and Brenda had put out the rumour that he’d nearly raped her. A severe beating from three youths one night soon afterwards had convinced his mother to send him to live with her brother and his wife on the other side of the country, where he’d been treated like an unpaid slave for the rest of h
is school days.
Carmel and Valerie knew nothing of these dark days, and he’d never tell them. He wouldn’t shame himself, but it grieved him that Valerie wouldn’t go to university and study, to make something of herself. The professions were respected, and if he couldn’t engender respect for himself, he could make sure that Valerie’s position in society would be far higher than his ever was. It was so frustrating that she was being given the chance and was turning it down with a sneer that reminded him of the way Brenda Ryan had looked at him all those years ago. It was that sneer that had made him lose control and roar at her, ‘You got five As in your Leaving Cert. I’ve told you I’ll pay for you to go to college. You can study any subject you want – medicine, law, accountancy – and you’re telling me you’re going to take a job in the County Council! How stupid are you?’
‘I got a very high place on the panel. I can start immediately. I want to earn my own money. I can always go to college at night and pay for it myself,’ she’d said coldly.
‘But I’ve just told you I’ll pay for you to go to college. You’ve a chance to become a professional, a chance to make something of your life. Are you mad to turn down an offer like that? There are young people in Rockland’s who would give their eyeteeth for the opportunity I’m giving you.’ He had never envisaged that she wouldn’t go on to do her degree. She was a very bright girl. He had high hopes of her. But she wasn’t having any of it.
‘Thanks, but I don’t want anything from you,’ she’d replied scathingly. ‘I’m being offered a good job as a clerical officer with excellent prospects of promotion, and I can pay for my university education if I want to.’ She’d turned and walked away from him, and he knew she was exultant that she could throw his offer back in his face.
‘You talk to her,’ he’d ordered his wife. ‘Get her to see sense.’
‘Terence, Valerie can make her own decisions regarding her future, and whatever she decides is good enough for me,’ Carmel retorted.
Fury engulfed him. ‘You’re a pair of ungrateful bitches, that’s what you are. I’m sick of you,’ he’d raged, slamming the door behind him. He’d sprayed gravel as he’d gunned the car engine and driven off in high dudgeon. That daughter of his was an ungrateful biddy, he’d fumed, driving like a madman out of the village to get well away from them. He hadn’t spoken to Valerie for weeks.
Terence sighed, remembering how hurt he’d been that his magnanimous offer had been so ungraciously rejected.
Valerie had never forgiven him for taking the belt to her, he reflected. Maybe he had overreacted at the time, but catching her out in those blatant lies had maddened him and brought back one of his greatest fears. A fear that he hardly dared admit to himself and only did in his darkest moments. A fear that she would end up a lying thief. A person of no value. Someone just like him. Valerie was a disappointment to him and always had been, just as he’d been a disappointment to his father. He had hoped for a son, a son who would make him proud, and instead he had a wilful, defiant daughter who cared nothing for him, and a wife who had ceased to care for him many years ago, and who, by her own admission, had only married him to get away from being a skivvy at home.
The old dears he brought Meals on Wheels to and called out the bingo numbers to had more feeling for him than his own kith and kin, he thought sorrowfully as a strange mixture of sadness, loneliness and bitterness soured his stomach and made his ulcer ache. Not even Daisy Duke’s curves could comfort him. He closed his eyes, lay back in his chair and hoped he could regain his composure enough to wear his hail-fellow-well-met mask when he was calling out the bingo numbers later that evening.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Valerie lit a Dunhill and drew it deep into her lungs, exhaling a long thin stream of smoke as she sat in her little red Mini and put the key in the ignition. Normally she would have left the car at home and walked to the hotel but it was pissing rain and she didn’t want to meet Jeff looking like a drowned rat. She could leave it in the hotel car park and collect it in the morning. She glanced at herself in the rear-view mirror. How dare her father tell her she looked like a tart? She scowled as a pair of mutinous blue eyes outlined in blue eyeliner and shades of smoky grey eye shadow reflected back at her. She took her long-pronged Afro comb out of her bag and stabbed it angrily into her blond, recently permed curls, before spraying herself with Charlie.
Revving the engine, she pulled out from behind Terence’s Cortina and drove down the narrow street of railway cottages. She was so looking forward to seeing Jeff. He hadn’t been down the previous weekend. His team had been playing an away match in the midlands and he’d travelled there from Dublin. She wished he didn’t have to spend so much time training and playing football. It took him away from her and that she found hard to deal with. If he loved her as much as she loved him surely he’d want to spend more time with her, she reasoned.
She glanced onto the floor of the passenger seat and saw an empty crisp packet and Lion Bar wrapper, and made a mental note to shove them under the seat so Jeff wouldn’t think she was a slob. She reached the main street, the rain sluicing down, dancing into puddles that formed around the cobbles at the church gates. A couple of teenagers hurried into the warmth of the chipper, and then the street was deserted again. Rockland’s reminded her of a ghost town or film set. She waited for a black cat to dawdle its way in front of the car before she could move from the side road.
She was proud of herself, Valerie decided, still angry at her father’s words. She was eighteen, six months out of school, and she had been working full time since the end of September. Some of her classmates were dossing their way through commercial college but she had got a job as soon as she could. When Terence had heard that she wasn’t going to university he had gone ballistic. She’d taken immense pleasure at the sight of him, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, his eyes bulging in disbelief, when she’d told him she was turning down his offer and starting work at the County Council.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to go to college? Might it not be a good opportunity to grasp, even if you are stuck with him financially for another few years? You could live in Dublin and be far enough away from him. I’m asking you just to make sure you at least think about your future and what your father wants to do for you.’ Carmel had followed Valerie into the kitchen when Terence had stormed out the door.
‘Mam, I couldn’t bear to be beholden to him. I’d never hear the end of it. I just don’t want anything from him,’ Valerie reiterated.
‘Use him,’ Carmel said bluntly. ‘He’s your father, it’s his duty to provide for you.’
Valerie laughed. ‘I wish he could hear you saying that. No, Mam, my mind’s made up. I’m going to take the job and save for a car, and then I’m going to live in Dublin with Lizzie.’
‘Well, for what it’s worth, I think you’re right. But I just had to make sure you weren’t cutting off your nose to spite your face. I wouldn’t like you coming back in a few years’ time telling me I should have made you go to university.’
‘Don’t worry, Mam, that’s the last thing I’d do. I can always go to university at night. You’ve nothing to feel bad about.’ She had given her mother a reassuring hug.
She had been half expecting Terence to kick her out of the house but he had never spoken of her going to college again. When she got paid her first month’s salary and handed over the amount he decided she should pay for her keep, it dawned on her that the extra money she was bringing in was the reason he’d zipped his lips. Money was his god and always had been. He’d milk her for sure.
She saved hard, also working Saturdays in the hair salon, and got the loan for her car. She’d planned to pay it off in the next couple of months and then move to Dublin but tonight’s spat was the last straw. Enough was enough. She had her pride and her father would never get the chance to speak to her like that again, she vowed. She wanted to ring Lizzie from the hotel to tell her that she was coming up to live in Dublin as soon as she could get a t
ransfer. Her best friend would squeal with delight. Lizzie hadn’t come down for the weekend; there had been some overtime going and she’d taken it.
Pools of light from the orange sodium streetlamps cast eerie shadows through the slanting rain. Suddenly Valerie wanted to be in one of the warm snugs in the hotel, sipping a Guinness and blackcurrant, with Jeff’s arm around her. When the black cat was safely on The Triangle, she made a right turn and drove past the public tennis court, a regimented row of red-brick two-storey houses, and a couple of fishermen’s cottages, until she came to the road that sloped down to the harbour. She indicated left but didn’t turn, gazing through the blurry windscreen stroked by the swishing wipers, towards the cluster of houses up on The Headland where Jeff lived, wondering if he had left for the hotel yet.
She supposed she could drive up and check but she didn’t particularly want to see Tessa. Valerie couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she had the feeling that Jeff’s mother didn’t like her that much. Even though she had been dating Jeff since January, almost a year now, she had never warmed to her boyfriend’s mother either.
‘Don’t distract Jeff from his studies, now,’ Tessa would say, pretending it was a joke, with a smile that never quite reached her eyes. Or her last little snide remark: ‘You remind me of someone out of Dallas. You’re too sophisticated for the likes of us country folk now, isn’t she, Jeff?’ This when she’d worn a royal-blue double-breasted jacket with padded shoulders and nipped-in waist, over a pair of white trousers. She’d bought the outfit in A|Wear on Henry Street when her probationary period had ended and she’d been made permanent. She’d felt as stylish and sophisticated as Sue Ellen or Pamela Ewing as she’d left the boutique, jauntily swinging her carrier bags, although she couldn’t imagine either of those glamorous ladies tucking into chips and big fat sausages in Woolworths’ cafeteria after a shopping spree, the way she had. It was the second time she had driven to the capital in her new Mini. She’d felt as if she had the world at her feet as she’d parked behind Penny’s and walked up to Henry Street, the bustling thoroughfare full of Saturday shoppers like herself.
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