I thought of them lying in those sheets. Perhaps the girl saying, ‘Lovely sheets you have,’ and he’d say he bought them in a shop, or something. Or maybe he’d say, ‘Oh I had a girlfriend once, she did them, but she walked out on me.’ The girl would feel very sorry for him then. Put her head on his shoulder. ‘Once I had a girlfriend and now she’s gone. Buddy won’t you spare a dime?’ — that song.
I felt I was screaming. I stood at the end of the bed. My hands nailed round the brass railings.
I thought of Colin making love to her: his china hands, his body like wire. Would she be writhing and moaning out little cries? I thought, I’ll never let anyone make love to me like that again. I’ll never moan like that again, like an animal; they get you like an animal and then they laugh at you.
I grabbed my bag, keys (I still had one to his flat), money, cigarettes. I went down the stairs. Creeping. Please dear Jesus don’t let Mr Maloney hear me. What would he think if he came out? I opened the big door; a swathe of cold air came in: the smell of the river. I’d forgotten my coat. If I go up, I thought, I’ll surely disturb Mr Maloney and his friend. I could see their startled faces looking round the kitchen door at a figure dressed in black satin with a rose in her hair leaping down the stairs at three in the morning.
The air was sharp. A wet, sharp blackness.
The taxi man’s face hung in yellow folds from his receding hairline. ‘Merciful Jesus,’ he said, ‘is it an apparition or what?’ I smiled at him and he opened the door and the smell of the car came out—a cigarette smell.
I gave him the address. A stab of pain. Such a familiar address. Now his, and hers.
I shivered in the back seat. The taxi man threw back a plaid rug. It smelt of dogs and children; picnics at Dollymount probably and the kids sick from sunburn on the way home. I offered him a cigarette. He took it. He didn’t ask questions. Didn’t talk, just whistled ‘The Ballad of James Connolly’ through his teeth.
My mind was blank and yet full. Both. I couldn’t think, in the sense that thoughts weren’t going round my head one by one, orderly and shaped. I just felt this fullness that came out to the edges of my skull.
The town was so quiet. The trees—even the trees were still. The roads were quiet carpets to carry you through, the houses blank-faced—all those people in their beds, lying flat up on their little platforms, floor on top of floor of them, and all dressed up in their nightclothes, their day clothes silent in cupboards and on chairs. The houses gave nothing away. The houses said, ‘Go by quickly; there is nothing for you here.’
The town smell was replaced by the sea smell. We drove on. The iodine of the seaweed banked in heaps under the seawall. During the day the seagulls strutted up and down: haughty, ugly creatures on the ground. In the air white whistles of light and movement, streaking through the sky. The sea that thrashed about with joy during the day was moving surreptitiously now, its secret concourse with the moon’s power taking up all its energy.
The taxi pulled up. The taxi man leaned back his arm to open the door. I took out a pound. He gave me five shillings change. I gave him back his rug and said, ‘Thanks a lot,’ and he drove off, his winking red lights frivolous in the darkness.
I walked down the path. I had the key. The lights were all off. I let myself in, quietly, quietly …
The living room was the same; had I expected it different? A record was out of its cover. I put it back thinking, No point in having a good stereo if your records are scratched and clogged with dust. Businesslike thoughts like that. There was a plate on the table by the sofa, streaks of egg and bacon rinds: Colin’s breakfast? He used to say breakfast was his favourite meal. An innocent meal.
I sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette. The moon came slanting in. A girl’s clothes lay on the floor; the moonlight lit them coldly. I went over. Tights and pants still together—she must have been in a hurry—a pretty dress, of course I remembered the dress; I’d seen it earlier that night in the restaurant. (Hours ago it seemed, hours.) It was black crepe with white broderie anglaise daisies sewn onto the shoulder straps. Very pretty on a thin girl. This one was thin all right. Colin wouldn’t be seen dead with a fat girl, would he?
So. They were upstairs. They were in bed. I wondered which side of the bed she was on. Colin used to like to lie on the lamp side. Perhaps she was like that. Perhaps they had argued over it.
Mary said, ‘Why always blame the girl?’ I wasn’t blaming the girl was I? How was the girl to know anyway? To know that Colin and I had been together for a year. That we had loved. Stupid things. Held each other’s hands under the table at my father’s house. Made love once in a cupboard at somebody’s party; we couldn’t wait. Bought things together, the bed for instance. She couldn’t be expected to know all these things. Unless he told her. Did he tell her? Maybe she didn’t care; why should she?
Anyway, if Colin wanted another girlfriend, then that was his business. I’d walked out, hadn’t I?
Couldn’t he have waited a bit?—for what?—till I got someone else? I didn’t want anyone else. Mary said, ‘Don’t be daft, you will.’
But no, there is a person and for some reason you want that person to love you. You’re a woman and he makes you more of one. That’s love and you’re told it over and over and all your life you’ve been waiting for it, watching for it. The more you’re with him the more different you become. The more his, I suppose. But if he doesn’t want you? If he only wants a bit of you? If he only wants you as he wants you and not as you think you might become—what then? If he says, ‘Don’t do this, or that; do this,’ and says it over and over again until you can’t remember when you last said, ‘Right, this is what I’m going to do’ and did it, then what?
I stood up. I walked up the stairs, quietly, quietly.
The bedroom door was open. The cupboards were open. Drawers open. Colin’s clothes fallen round the room.
The bed. The bodies. His sprawled legs apart, on his back, his hair thick on the pillow. The smell. Woman’s smell, man’s smell. The smell of sex. Her body. Turned away from him, curled on her side, her face white in the moonlight.
I stood in the doorway. Time passed.
I turned and crept into the bathroom. Closed the door. Started—my face in the mirror, a mad painted face with staring eyes. I took the plastic bucket that I’d bought to soak our pants in. Filled it with water, slowly, quietly, shhing the water in.
I walked back to the bedroom. Opened the door. Looked. I thought. Every detail in this bedroom will stay in my mind for ever and always. Then I lifted the bucket waist high and flung the water over the two of them, over the bed, a soft transparent curtain of silk water curving through the air—
‘Jeeesus Christ.’ Colin jumped up.
‘Oh, oh what’s happening,’ said the girl.
My heart jolted, turned over. I thought, Run, run, you stupid fool. My hand went up and flipped on the light. They were struggling, the girl’s eyes squinting against the light, pulling the sheet around her, water dripping from her hair. Colin was leaning, straining up, on his elbows, kicking the bedclothes back: ‘What the hell is going on?’ he was shouting.
I said (my voice?), ‘I just came back to tell you you’re a bastard.’ He was getting up to come over. I said, ‘Don’t come near me or I’ll tear your eyes out.’ I was faltering. What would I say? What could I say? They both looked white and scared, the girl particularly. I thought, Well what’s the point? Suddenly I felt flat, winded, completely exhausted.
I turned out the light and started to run. Down the stairs out of the door and down the road. My footsteps were jolting in my head, thrunk, thrunk, the pavement hitting my face, running away. I thought, If he follows he’ll kill me, and I ran and ran and my heart felt like a huge bellows pumping and straining. I started slowing down, turning my head, one hand holding up my dress. … turning … but no one was following. No one.
Y
ou’re on your own now. Completely. The houses, blank, pass by quickly; nobody wants you here …
Or here …
Or here …
I sat in a shop doorway. The stone felt very cold. I’d no cigarettes. No key. I’d left my bag in the living room. Well, I thought, Well I’m very calm now, it’s all over; I’m ready now, tomorrow I’ll go and see Mary … I’ll ask Mary about it … I’ll start again. That’s the thing—it’s hard and complicated but you’ve got to start again, every time, never say dying.
Look at their damn faces lying there … the water curving and curling and their shouts … I began to laugh, my shoulders giggling with me, then to laugh out loud, the houses bending now, solicitous.
I thought: For God’s sake, their damn faces streaming with water … and laughing and laughing … and I must stop this laughing soon and get going. But each time I thought of it …
My dear Colin, my dear love, and you, dear lady … well that can be your baptism.
And mine too … and mine.
Afterword
Writing is a peculiar business.
There I was, aged twenty-four, newly married and sitting in a whitewashed room in Africa, swags of bougainvillea tapping against the mosquito screens, writing about nuns, boys, boarding school and Ireland.
It was 1973, and I told no one, not even my brand new husband, what I was up to. I’d done enough time in McDaids, The Bailey, Davy Byrne’s, seen enough novels-in-the-making talked into oblivion over hot whiskies, to be wise to that one. Oh yeah.
In ‘silence, exile and cunning’ I tapped away on my little aquamarine Olivetti and, manuscript completed, tied it up in a brown paper and string parcel in the post office in Dar Es Salaam, and sent it off to (impossibly faraway) London. A few weeks later a contract arrived from Michael Joseph. My tale of nuns and Ireland, boys and broken hearts, was going to be published.
Wow.
In Africa I was learning feminism backwards, frequently with rage attached. My brand new husband’s recounting of sexual adventures, did not mean sauce for the goose being equally okay for the gander. Definitively not.
Outwardly I did all the things the ‘Sisters’ would have approved of – I had my own job, I didn’t do his laundry, I talked the equality talk. Inwardly I was confused, angry, hurt. How could Prince Charming turn out to be such a bastard?
Unintentionally, I was living the reality of my heroine in
Fathers Come First.
Looking back now, forty-two years later (forty-two!), it seems unbelievable that we convent-educated ‘Nice Girls’ were sent out into the world in such a state of naivety.
And, while Feminism had arrived in Ireland in the 1970s, it seemed few people actually believed in it. Feminism was a bit like bidets – all fine and good for a few ‘poshies’ in Dublin, but nothing to do with us ordinary people.
In real life it felt as if all of the rules favoured men. If a girl let a man (in truth usually a spotty boy) ‘have his wicked way’ on the first date i.e. touch her breasts, she was a whore. If a girl didn’t let a guy touch her she was a ‘frigid Brigid’. If a girl rang a guy after a date, she was ‘fast’. If the guy didn’t ring the girl back after a date, she was suicidal.
All the power in the world seemed vested in men, with the only access route to that power via men.
The men had the jobs, the money, the cars, the bank accounts.
We had sensationally short mini skirts (Is that a pelmet you’re wearing? my darling Dad asked one sunny morning), and lots of feminist attitude, but in terms of worldly wisdom we were largely clueless.
What fun it would be to go back and tell my heroine Lizzie in Fathers that all will be well.
Oh Yes indeedy.
Published in 2014 by
The Lilliput Press,
62–63 Sitric Road,
Dublin 7, Ireland
www.lilliputpress.ie
Copyright © Rosita Sweetman, 1974, 2014
PRINT ISBN: 978 1 84351 6347
EPUB ISBN: 978 1 84351 6484
A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior, written permission of the publisher.
Fathers Come First Page 18