Granny Doyle sighed. She needed a smoke or a lie-down; or an axe, perhaps. Well. She’d have to take the bags to the St Vincent de Paul before they closed. The clothes too. Not a bit of pity for that one. That was the mantra that would see her through. People made their beds; they lay in them, or they should if there was any justice in this wicked world.
16
Fallons French Regular and Irregular Verb Book (1992)
dire (to say)
‘…………………………………………… I had an abortion.’
Peg later learnt to recognize it, the catch before somebody sounded the words they rarely, if ever, shared. Though it was unusual that the words to follow were so stark; even in New York, ‘I had an abortion’ was a sentence that needed working up to. So it was too on the ferry to England, when she heard that pause before the unsayable sounded the first time, as Kay Gallagher looked down at her cold coffee and said,
avoir (to have)
‘You should know it’s something you’ll carry. I still carry it. Not every day, not all the time. But it’s a decision that sticks with you, just as deciding to have a baby is not something you can forget. I don’t regret it – don’t regret it at all – but it’s not something that is easy.’
voir (to see)
Mrs Gallagher kept her eyes fixed on the rim of her coffee cup: this was what she looked at, but Peg had the sense that they were seeing each other, bare.
vouloir (to want)
‘… It was a long time ago. I was older than you, older enough to know better. Back when I was in Trinity: Hilary term of my Senior Sophister year. I don’t doubt that I made the right decision. He wasn’t the right boy; it wasn’t the right time. I could never have had the two daughters I love now, I couldn’t have given them the lives they deserve if I’d gone through with that pregnancy …’
rire (to laugh)
Mrs Gallagher drank some cold coffee and spat it out.
‘God, this is enough to send you to the drink.’
The laugh caught on the Irish Sea.
se taire (to keep quiet)
Mrs Gallagher turned to Peg, her eyes watered with the wind or something else; who could say.
‘I’ve never spoken about it. Not to Cathal, not to my parents, not to anybody.’
savoir (to know)
Peg only knew a handful of facts about Celia Gallagher’s mother: she was a successful barrister; she had forced Celia to join the French Debating team; she had a closet full of shoes; she had once grounded Celia for getting a B; she successfully petitioned the Corporation for the removal of the street sign from her outside wall; her house boasted a dishwasher and modern art rather than framed pictures of the Beatitudes.
ouvrir (to open)
But Mrs Gallagher had done what Granny Doyle and Denise Donnelly had not.
dire (to say)
Aunty Mary, too, had been a disappointment, the sentence sharp down the phone after she’d heard the story: ‘Peg, you stupid, stupid girl.’
connaître (to know)
And if Peg hadn’t understood why Mrs Gallagher had insisted on accompanying a girl who was only barely an acquaintance of her daughter’s, she thought she did now.
se taire (to keep quiet)
‘I won’t say anything.’
Mrs Gallagher smiled and this time there was no doubting what was causing the water in her eyes.
‘Thank you.’
17
Megaphone (1992)
Aunty Mary joined the crowd of women outside Leinster House. Cardboard signs were held by arms quivering with fury: ‘No Eighth Amendment’ and ‘My Body, My Choice’ and ‘Get Your Rosaries off my Ovaries’. She might have been too old to have ovaries that the state wanted to interfere with, but Mary Nelligan wasn’t too old for this after all. She could make the train to Dublin and she could raise her voice to a shout, a necessity for the times.
Stella had the megaphone, a voice to break through iron.
‘It is an outrage that this government is denying a fourteen-year-old girl who was raped her right to travel to England to have an abortion.’
The crowd raged in assent, Mary’s voice among them.
‘It is an outrage that Miss X – or any woman – has to go to England to get an abortion in the first place.’
Stella caught her eye but she couldn’t be distracted now.
‘It is an outrage that this country exports its unwanted problems across the Irish Sea. It is an outrage that this country has the rights of foetuses enshrined in its constitution but denies us the right to make choices about our own bodies, denies us the right to talk about abortion, denies us even the right to get on a ferry!’
The crowd cheered.
‘It is an outrage that our constitution has an amendment that protects the rights of foetuses more than the rights of women: we cannot let the Eighth Amendment stand!’
The chants started, Stella leading the crowd confidently, her new partner beside her, no shame to the pair of them. Mary bellowed out her responses; if shouts could drown out past sentences, this might be her chance. She was the stupid one, of course, immediately regretting what she’d said to Peg. She’d called back, though the payphone kept ringing. Granny Doyle had been no help. It had been a bad day – bad year? Life? – and Mary hadn’t expected this, not from Peg, who had so many opportunities in front of her, who could go ahead and live the life that Aunty Mary hadn’t had the chance to, at least at the right age. And then, it was all so prosaic, so familiar; she couldn’t help the bitterness of her reaction, much as she regretted it. She hadn’t expected Peg to hang up the phone.
Well, she had. And Mary Nelligan had woken up; she wasn’t too old for this yet, she’d decided, catching Stella’s eye and finding strength there, and all around her, lots of women angry at the injustice of the world. She picked up a placard from one of the volunteers and held it towards the clouds. They would shout at government buildings until the stones cracked in solidarity and the country changed; it had to.
18
Fallons French Regular and Irregular Verb Book (1992–1993)
dire (to say)
Peg heard the same catch in the hospital when the girls told their stories, afterwards.
voir (to see)
They were all looking away – at the clock, the magazines, their feet – but they all saw each other, Peg knew that.
lire (to read)
To glimpse at any newspaper was to know they were not alone.
pouvoir (to be able to)
Somehow the closing of the ferry barriers to Miss X also opened up a space, conversations cracking open, possible to talk about the injustice of laws in the light of day.
gésir (to lie helplessly or dead)
Not that this was much help to Peg, knees curled to chest on a bed in Birmingham.
parvenir (to reach; to achieve)
Or that such perturbations did anything to stall the ascent of Ruadhan Kennedy-Carthy, the A1 secured in Higher Level French suggesting a paper unscratched by guilt.
se souvenir (to remember)
‘What’s the matter, Doyle?’
‘Stay still: I want to remember this for ever.’
Ruadhan obliged, posing heroically, until he dropped the pose, and there he was, naked in red light, a vulnerability to him, that rare moment when they were equals.
revenir (to return)
Some actions were impossible to imagine.
se souvenir (to remember)
‘It makes sense in French. Se souvenir.’
‘You’re not going to get all clever on me, Doyle, are you?’
‘I just like it. The idea that things can come back to you.’
Peg imagined memories coming through a crack in a window, the lost restored.
Ruadhan had the fortune not to have lost anything he wished to be returned, so he said:
‘Speaking of coming …’
défaire (to undo)
But who was Ruadhan Kennedy-Carthy? History had se
en his type; who was Ruadhan but Captain Wickham in a school uniform? He was nothing, a thing to be forgotten
aller (to go)
and there were many directions that didn’t involve ‘back’.
19
Green Card (1994)
Peg sucked in her stomach as the plane hopscotched over Ireland, terrified that the land might rear up and drag the plane down. Only clouds out the window, but Peg knew that the fields were down below, grass stretching hungrily upwards, the land itching to trap more souls in its soil. There were other Irish people on the British Airways flight from Birmingham to JFK – tricolours throbbing with World Cup fever – but they seemed to suffer no allergic reaction as the plane cruised over the homeland, no dip of the stomach, no tightening of muscles.
Peg looked at the rectangle that had liberated her from Birmingham and the friend’s pub that Mrs Gallagher had set her up in. It wasn’t even green: Peg’s first exposure to the gap between the talk and the thing in America. It was a beige blank slate, the rectangle that allowed her to reinvent herself, the photograph of Peg Doyle one that contained no traces of the past. When the customs officer asked her if she had anything to declare, it was easy for this Peg to say ‘nothing’.
*
Then, the statue wasn’t even green either. Or, it was green, but it was a green leached of colour, nothing like the headbands on sale in the shops, no trace of chlorophyll. It wasn’t even that big. Shadowed by the skyscrapers behind it, the statue seemed squat, could only be a disappointment.
Triona didn’t do disappointed. The other new barmaid at Mulligan’s, she was determined that her J1 visa would deliver the best summer of her life. She refused to be disappointed in Peg as a friend, even though Peg was sure that she was too shy, too bookish, too uninterested in Baileys diving into pints of Guinness. At least Peg was handy with a disposable camera, somebody required to document Triona’s variety of poses: pure glee, fingers pointing at her headband, hands holding an imaginary torch. Triona insisted on taking the Staten Island ferry in a loop as the boats to the island were a rip-off and Triona had no interest in visiting Ellis Island, the opportunities for posing limited in a museum. Besides, the view was better on the ferry and you couldn’t drink cans on the tourist boats.
A couple of years earlier, Peg might have objected or gone off on her own to Ellis Island, meandering in its halls for hours, absorbed in the history of immigrant America, the things people carried with them, the ballast they refused to drop. This Peg tried to ignore the familiar bobbing of the ferry, the feelings churned up by the motion of the boat across water and focused instead on the image she was capturing: Triona facing sideways with her mouth agape, the statue so small in the distance that it looked like she was gobbling it whole.
*
It was too green, a horrible colour for a pint, but that’s how St Paddy’s Day rolls here, the owner of Mulligan’s said, a shake of the head to say we know better. The green beer looked out of place in Woodside, a location that was technically part of New York City, although it was hard to imagine that a place where Barry’s tea could be bought in bulk and you could find a priest to give you a proper Confession could inhabit the city where skyscrapers could tickle clouds. Peg kept the green pints flowing as she looked around the bar with its picture of Mary Robinson on the wall and Tayto crisps in vending machines and lads who had GAA jerseys, cheese and onion breath, and smiles which turned to grins after a few more pints had been drained.
*
Peg held her head in her hands in the bathroom of Mulligan’s and stared at the stripe on the pregnancy test.
Triona struggled to find the right face. The owner told her that Mulligan’s wasn’t that kind of pub. Peg heard Granny Doyle’s voice: I always knew you were a dirty little hoor. I’m warning you, Peg Doyle, Hell is a cold place and you can’t be relying on me for a coat. She had fallen again, one of the many women falling out of history; it was too late for her.
20
Fallons French Regular and Irregular Verb Book (1994)
valoir (to be worth)
Except, fuck that, Peg thought, riding the subway across the Manhattan Bridge for the first time after she escaped Mulligan’s, skin prickling at the possibility that no! it wasn’t too late at all, there was no need to get trapped in a cycle of Guinness and Ireland playing Italy and whereabouts are you from?
voir (to see)
because this was a city with its problems placed in full view, steam rising off trash on the sidewalk, all sorts sitting on the subway, no need to hide anything. It wasn’t too late for Peg, eighteen and New York City unfurled in front of her,
pouvoir (to be able)
she would find support, because women were rising, not falling, rising out of history, out of the margins, into the air,
parvenir (to reach)
like the train pushing forwards, her first sight of the Brooklyn Bridge from a subway car an incredible thing, something that demanded the pressing of noses against glass, sun catching on water, steel suspended across air, a thing to stir the soul, a bridge that showed the smallness of each of the stories that shuttled past.
dire (to say)
This was a city where ‘I had two abortions’ was a sentence that could be sounded
cueillir (to gather)
as Peg imagined herself in the centre of a library, stories coming towards her, slotting into boxes, until a line of boxes streched along the length of a desk, paper bulging against lids
coudre (to sew)
or perhaps the stories could be stitched together, hung in a large room with a vaulted roof and big open windows, calling out: you are not alone
écrire (to write)
because fuck it, Peg thought, riding the subway across the Manhattan Bridge for the very first time, all sorts of histories could be written, subjunctive moods might be explored, the conditional tense could be reclaimed, anything – everything! – was possible.
21
Confession Box (1994)
‘… I had an abortion. And then I ripped up a picture of the Pope into pieces on national television.’
‘Child,’ the priest would say.
Peg would ignore him.
‘Fight the real enemy, I said. Fight the real enemy, I say.’
‘I don’t know what you’re—’ the priest would try to say.
‘My name is Sinéad and I have not sinned.’
‘This isn’t how—’ the priest would start but Peg would interrupt him.
‘I’m not sorry, Father, because I can’t remember how long it is since my last Confession. I had sex and tried to have my baby by the Grotto of the Virgin Mary, because nobody would talk to me about being pregnant, but the Virgin Mary didn’t do anything when I died. My name is Ann and I have not sinned.’
The priest would shuffle in the box, the priest would think about leaving.
‘Don’t move! You have to stay where you are, that’s the ceremony,’ Peg would say.
‘Child,’ the priest would say.
‘I’ve got fire and knives in my knickers,’ Peg would say. ‘Don’t you dare fucking move!’
The priest would stay still.
‘I tried to leave the country after I was raped but I wasn’t allowed and I had to wait for all the pain of a miscarriage. My name is X and I have not sinned.’
‘Child, you must have some sickness,’ the priest would say.
‘I had an abortion. My name is Mary and I have not sinned.’
The priest would shift in the box but he would not leave.
‘I had an abortion. My name is Nuala and I have not sinned.’
Peg’s voice would open the door and step into the aisle.
‘I had an abortion. My name is Fidelma and I have not sinned.’
Peg would have flaming torches enough to burn the box down.
‘I had an abortion. My name is Amanda and I have not sinned.’
But her voice would be enough to do that.
‘My name is Melanie and I hav
e not sinned.’
Her voice would be enough to shatter stained glass.
‘My name is Molly and I have not sinned my name is Annie and I have not sinned my name is Grainne and I have not sinned my name is Clare and I have not sinned my name is Ciara and I have not sinned my name is Clodagh and I have not sinned my name is Grace and I have not sinned my name is Peg and I have not sinned …’
She would have fire and knives in her knickers and the statues in the church would gasp at the blasphemy but she would not care, for she would leave it all in her wake, everything in splinters and cinders, while she would walk out towards the sky, smiling.
22
Blarney Stone (2007)
‘………… I had an abortion,’ Peg said, on the night that she and Rosie talked.
Peg focused on the whirr of the fan and the dark of the ceiling. Rosie didn’t say anything, but the turn of her head was a go on.
So Peg told her the story of the two abortions and Rosie held her and cried. Rosie was unusually quiet, so Peg wasn’t sure if she had understood, but then Rosie put her arm around Peg and that was enough.
Later, before Peg went to sleep, Rosie said, ‘I had an abortion.’
There was no catch before the words; she might have said, ‘I had an avocado, for lunch.’
Peg looked across. Rosie was staring at the ceiling.
‘When I was in Paris. There was a second, before I told him, when I thought maybe … but it definitely wasn’t the right time. There was no way he was leaving his wife. And he was such a dick about it. Asking me if I’d take a half-day to work his poetry reading. I guess he was a dick about everything, but that was the first time I let myself notice.’
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