by Laura Elliot
On Friday night there is music in O’Callaghan’s pub. Aunt Josephine calls it “our night out on the red hot tiles of sin”. She snaps her white handbag closed and herds them down the caravan steps. The seats in O’Callaghan’s remind Lorraine of church benches. Those who come late have to sit on beer barrels. They arrive early to avoid the beer barrels and Mr O’Callaghan shouts from behind the counter where he is pouring pints; “Begob! It can’t be that time of the year again. The Cheevers have arrived.” He wears a beige cardigan with leather patches on the elbows and calls Lorraine and Virginia “the lovely little girleens from the big smoke”.
Musicians with beards and peaked caps play endless tunes that all sound the same to Lorraine. Her father recites a funny version of “Galway Bay” and everyone laughs, no matter how often they hear it. Uncle Des puffs out his chest, raises his fist and sings “A Nation Once Again”. Someone always shouts, “Tiocfaidh ár lá,” which, Uncle Des explains in his loud bossy voice, is Irish for “Our day will come”.
Aunt Josephine’s face turns bright red. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Des Cheevers, or your boat may rock in mid-ocean.” She has a proverb for all occasions. If she can’t think of a suitable one she invents her own.
Virginia and Lorraine clap each other’s hands in the clapping game and chant, “My mummy told me if I was goody that she would buy me a rubber dolly. But when I told her I kissed a soldier she wouldn’t buy me a rubber dolly.”
As the night wears on Mr O’Callaghan’s cheeks turn puce and his eyes disappear into narrow slits. Lorraine thinks his face will explode and his skin shrivel like a burst balloon.
“Blood pressure, poor man,” says her mother.
“Drinking the profits, more likely,” insists her father.
“Drink and be merry for tomorrow we fall upon the sword of Damocles,” intones Aunt Josephine.
Uncle Des says nothing. He is gazing at Roisin O’Callaghan’s bosom. She is Mr O’Callaghan’s wife and whenever she leans over their table to place a glass of whiskey before him, his hand brushes against her knee.
Virginia swears Lorraine to secrecy. She must promise on her heart that she will never tell this secret to anyone, even under pain of torture and violent death. Uncle Des has a girlfriend in London. Her name is Sonya. She wears red stilettos and dyes her hair blonde.
“Peroxide,” says Virginia and her mouth puckers just like Aunt Josephine’s when she says, “Eyes to the front, Des Cheevers,” every time women in bikinis walk past him on the beach.
Sonya is being hunted by kidnappers who will kill her if they find her. Virginia’s father is her protector and Virginia must not tell anyone – even Aunt Josephine, who leaves Uncle Des in charge of Virginia when she has to bring Edward to the eye hospital. But as soon as she drives away Virginia’s father dresses in his happy shirt with the pineapples printed over the front. He holds her hand and they take the bus to Sonya’s hideaway house. Sonya giggles just like a little girl. There are ladders in her tights and her hands are hidden under the sleeves of her jumper. She owns a pet canary called Cassie who sings for Virginia when her father and Sonya are in the other room where she must not go. Sonya makes whimpering noises that sound like pups – whimper whimper. Virginia and Lorraine giggle, hands across their mouths in case the grown-ups hear. But when Virginia imitates her father – snort snort snort – they collapse against each other, helpless with laughter.
“Laughter is the best medicine,” says Aunt Josephine, coming in to kiss them goodnight.
“Castor oil,” shrieks Virginia.
“California Syrup of Figs.” Lorraine gathers her knees into her chest and splutters. She has absolutely no idea why she is laughing but it is the funniest thing in the world. Nor does she know if this is one of Virginia’s tall tales but in the pub she watches her uncle’s hand trailing across the curve of Mrs O’Callaghan’s dress and his mouth becoming moist when he chats to women at the bar and how he always stands too close to them, as if their words are precious pearls.
Sometimes they fight; they are, after all, small girls. Lorraine’s cheeks sting as she sulks behind the sand dunes, wondering why she is being punished. What words or deeds have triggered her cousin’s indifference? There are no clues. No rules to follow. Nothing she can do to prevent it happening again. She watches Virginia swimming with the boys and playing French cricket on the hard sand. The bat looks as light as a feather in her hands. She hits the ball every time and the boys groan loudly when it sails above their heads. The boys from the village join in. Those who manage to catch the ball fling themselves across the sand, hoping she will pay attention. When she is bored with their company she climbs the rocks, singing loudly, ignoring Lorraine but looking as happy as if her cousin is beside her, joining in.
Lorraine imagines a switch in her cousin’s head that clicks on and off. The “off” switch makes Lorraine disappear. She is breathless with resentment, knowing that Virginia does not care. On such nights she sleeps alone, watching Virginia’s caravan to see if her cousin will signal an apology. No torch flashes in the night and she vows never ever to forgive her. No matter how often she begs on her bended knees, even if she’s kneeling on broken glass or nails, she will never ever forgive her.
When morning comes Virginia knocks lightly on the window. She stands bare-foot in the damp grass. Cobwebs tremble on the bushes and Old Red Eye, no longer suicidal but quivering with excitement, tongue lolling, is waiting by her side. Lorraine leaves the caravan, moving quietly so as not to awaken her parents. They climb the stile. The faint pulse of the sea grows louder, beating time against the cry of seabirds flying low over the foam. The little girls lift their feet, dancing forward, toe prints etched on the sand ridges that wriggle like snakes away from the retreating tide. It is easy to believe they are the only children alive in this hazy white universe and, no matter how hard she tries, Lorraine is unable to remember why Virginia made her so cross.
Just when it seems as if time has sculpted the years into an unchanging blueprint, adolescence kicks aside the ramparts of childhood. Mood swings replace tree swings. The carnival they loved is, suddenly, too small, flaking paint, tarnished brass, commandeered by children who look so young. It’s impossible to stop giggling and chests are curving into breasts with a tendency to wobble violently when dashing from the sea. The village boys come to the beach at night and light bonfires. In the mornings Lorraine sees empty beer cans and a circle of black ash on the sand. The beach parties are strictly forbidden but the caravan campfires are beginning to lose their charm. The repetitiveness of adult songs that once sounded funny or sad, or simply seemed wonderful because they were always the same, hum like a saw through her head. Virginia sticks fingers into her mouth and pretends to retch each time her father clears his throat to sing “Ireland Boys Hurray”. The attractions of the beach parties are too much to resist. When the adults are sleeping off the effects of wine and gin, the young people escape to the dunes.
Across the driftwood flames, Lorraine watches Adrian Strong watching her. He has been her torment for years, dragging her under the waves or waylaying her in ambushes to pull her hair or war dance around her. Now he is sturdy and tanned. His hair is bleached even blonder from the sun and his eyes remind her of autumn, the deep gold of fallen leaves. They smoulder with something only she can see and the intoxication of first love sets her limbs shaking. On the beach he no longer drags her under the waves but lifts her high in his arms and shouts that he has captured a mermaid. She flails against him, unsure whether her screams are from fury or the sleek wet touch of his skin when he slowly lowers her back into the water.
Virginia has already kissed six English boys. In the shelter of the sand dunes she explains “French kissing” to Lorraine who, remembering the hard nudging pressure of Adrian’s body, quivers. When he lies on a towel beside her, filtering grains of sand between his fingers and across her legs, she imagines opening her mouth, the way Virginia describes, so that his tongue can touch the sensit
ive spot that makes girls swoon. As the sand trickles between her thighs, she shrieks and feigns indignation. She pushes him away and yells at Virginia to come to her aid. They dash into the waves and are swallowed in another endless summer of sky and sea.
Lorraine is sixteen years old, light of step, charged with energy yet languid when the breeze plays across her skin. The fuchsia blooming on the hedgerows cuts a crimson swathe through the countryside and the fiery orange of the montbretia, nodding and swaying along the roadside, drives her from the caravan early in the morning to try and capture such hues on paper. She paints the sun melting on the sea and the pulsing jellyfish, washed ashore and abandoned by the tide. Her mind is a dreaming space of half-formed truths. The swell of waves, rising and falling, has a new rhythm that beckons her forward into the long grass beyond the dunes where she kisses Adrian Strong until their lips ache.
In O’Callaghan’s pub she sips 7 Up and feels the persistent nudge of his knee. Surely people can feel the heat radiating between them. Virginia ignores them. She tosses her head and walks proudly through the beat of traditional music towards the ramshackle hall at the back of the pub which serves as a disco for the youth of the village. A disc jockey called Mad-Dog Mullarkey stands behind coloured lights. He wears black eye shadow and frizzes his hair. Virginia is allowed to share his platform and play her favourite Sex Pistols records. She is bored with school, bored with her parents who seek to destroy her with mediocrity, bored with the suburban estate where she lives, bored with everyone who walks outside her small closed circle. Her parents bicker constantly. Sonya is still a secret and her father is a coward, trapped in a loveless marriage, afraid to walk away. Lorraine thinks that a woman who keeps a canary and wears red stilettos must be an exotic change for a man whose wife’s vocabulary has been robbed from a phrase book. But is it an excuse for adultery? Her heart aches for Aunt Josephine who advises her to “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may – for tomorrow we lie down to die in green pastures,” when she discovers her in Adrian’s arms behind the caravans.
By the following year everything is different. Adrian is studying marketing and working with Edward for the summer in Boston. Josephine comes to Trabawn without her husband. She walks the beach late in the evenings with Donna, the two women falling silent when the girls draw near.
Virginia has become a punk. Her hair is orange, spiky as the Statue of Liberty. She has pierced her ears with rings and studs, encircled her arms in metal handcuffs. A tiny silver dagger has been inserted into her bottom lip. Her eyes, sea-stormy, reflect her disgust at having to spend time trapped in a caravan with her mother. When Lorraine’s father makes jokes about electric shocks every time she spikes her hair, she looks as if she is biting down on a freshly sliced lemon.
She explains the finer points of punk to Lorraine. It has galvanised her, given her anger a focus. The aggressive graffiti on her denim jacket shows her contempt for the world. She follows the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks. She threatens to vomit violently when Lorraine says she adores David Cassidy. At the disco in O’Callaghan’s she dances on her own. Her movements are graceless and spasmodic, her head jerking violently. There is a recklessness about her that demands attention. She is like a honey pot but without the sweetness, challenging yet attracting the young men who watch her from the side of the hall and no longer know how to talk to her.
In London she has a boyfriend. She hates every minute they are forced to spend apart. Her mother hates every minute they spend together.
“There’s plenty more sharks in the sea,” says Josephine but Virginia ignores this advice. Her boyfriend’s name is Ralph Blaide but he refuses to answer to anything other than Razor Blade. He belongs to a punk band called Sulphuric Acid. They have an explosive sex life, she informs Lorraine, describing torrid sessions which involve biting, screaming at each other, sometimes spitting, hissing, kissing until their lips bleed, then making love, only she calls it “fucking”.
The first time she uses the word Lorraine recoils. It sounds brutal, sickeningly different to the romantic ideal she still holds about passion and sand dunes – which she is unable to pass without her heart seizing up with longing for Adrian Strong in Boston. But Virginia throws it out with such indifference that it seems more like a manoeuvre undertaken in the front line of a battle field.
Mad-Dog Mullarkey grows cannabis in his mother’s herb garden. He rolls a joint and the girls smoke it in Mrs Mullarkey’s greenhouse, sheltered by enormous rubber plants and bulbous, thorny cacti. Lorraine inhales and is violently sick. Her face feels green. It is the colour of death, she tells Virginia, who says it is all in her imagination and floats the words above Lorraine’s whirling head.
Her self-confidence grows even as her friendship with Virginia disintegrates. She refuses to allow herself to be dragged along in the wake of her cousin’s angst. Her art teacher has encouraged her to study art when she completes her Leaving Certificate. She is anxious for the new school year to begin. Instead of seeking Virginia’s company, she borrows a bike from Celia and cycles around Trabawn, sketching and taking photographs of the countryside. As the evening tide retreats she walks barefoot over the sand, her eyes exploring the mysterious depths of shadow and light. On the rocks she sits, her hair loose, visualising herself as Adrian’s mermaid, maimed of heart.
Some months later her mother tells her they will not be returning to the caravans. Virginia’s parents are divorcing. Uncle Des is marrying his red-heeled Sonya. The Trabawn summers have come to an end. She does not see Virginia again until the summer of ’82.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ferryman
(an extract from Michael Carmody’s memoir)
In the summer of ’82, Jean Devine tied an orange bandanna over her long chestnut hair. She wore a tie-dyed t-shirt that revealed what it was supposed to hide and Doc Martens wide enough to walk on water. She was nineteen years of age and I, one year older and not any wiser, grabbed for around her waist and spun her into my arms. The Rolling Stones were in town and those of us who had not emigrated to shape the great Irish diaspora gathered in Slane to hear them play. In that grassy amphitheatre we danced to the beat of “Brown Sugar”, high on freedom and the amplification shuddering through our bodies, carelessly swaying towards a future where we would love and maim each other with equal fervour.
In my sagging two-man tent, we dined on pineapple chunks and cold beans. The closeness of our surroundings, the thin, flapping canvas straining against the guy-rope, the sense of people moving around us yet being separated from them within this flimsy space, added to the intensity of our time together. We drank cans of tepid beer, exchanged life stories, revealed secrets, admitted insecurities. When we could no longer contain our impatience we slipped into the padded warmth of my sleeping-bag. Her jeans were slashed across the backside. Three rips. I counted before I pulled them off. Afterwards, I would think of that small tent as a fantasy stage where we, without inhibitions and constraints, found the freedom to be different people for a short, searing time.
She’d gone to Slane with friends from university. Business students studying for Bachelor of Commerce degrees and secure positions within the money sector. Nowadays, they work in the heart of the Financial Centre or other similar spires of glass and steel. Occasionally, on the business pages of broadsheets, I notice their photographs – head and shoulder shots, their smiles growing in confidence as they climb another rung on the fiscal ladder. Monica, Gillian, Jennifer. Would I remember their names if something as incidental as a condom, torn in the force of passion, had not changed everything? Would I even remember Jean Devine?
When we returned to Dublin, the funny, passionate girl I knew in Slane seemed like a figment of my imagination. The striped bandanna had disappeared. Her hair was washed free of grass and mud, her dress patterned with sprigs of daisies. A pair of espadrilles had replaced the Doc Martens which she never wore again. Our awkwardness when we kissed belonged to the feinting and dodging of a sedate courtship. She came to my bed
-sit with a plastic bag full of detergents to dust, polish, brush and bleach. New sheets were laid upon the mattress and I, whose only desire was to lay her flat upon the narrow bed and run my hands over the hidden curves of her body, felt trapped and angry as she cleaned up my act. I decided it was time to end our brief relationship but nature had other options in store for us.
Two months after the departure of the Rolling Stones we sat opposite each other in my bed-sit.
“I’m late,” she said. “I’m always on time … to-the-very-day, actually.” Her breath broke on the last word. She looked around my bed-sit and began to cry. I was an arts student with ambitions to become a playwright and a compulsion to write bad poetry. I had no parents, just an eccentric aunt who was walking her way around the world. My only secure employment was waiting tables part time in an Indian restaurant and shifting props for a drama company. It had sounded wonderfully eclectic when we discussed it at Slane but, without the liberating beat of rock music to enliven her imagination, the peeling wallpaper and empty beer cans beneath my bed told a tale of poverty, sloth and lack of ambition.
A pregnancy test confirmed our worst fears. We talked about abortion or, to be fully honest, I talked, Jean listened. My script was word perfect. We were too young, still students with our lives in front of us. We would scrape the money together somehow and go to London for the abortion, sharing the pain, the loss, then move on again.
Her voice cracked with fury. My argument was no match for her outrage and conviction. She was terrified of what was happening to her but abortion was a sin, unforgivable, unforgettable. I argued the line which I’d heard debated so often in university among my feminist friends. What about a woman’s right to choose, autonomy over her own body? Her eyes glazed me out.