‘I’ll carry your things.’
He kissed her in a secluded, shaded, almost damp spot, under a eucalyptus tree, at the bottom of one of the lawns that sloped gracefully away from the cottage on all sides, a spreading grass gown. His brownish face was dappled by sun leaking through the leaves, and his hair on that day was very crispy, very blond. He had let it grow after the army, and had washed it the night before. It was alive, electric around his head like a lion’s mane, a halo. She liked that. Eddie had had ordinary brown hair, straight, not lively. She liked Tom’s blue, smallish, humorous eyes, his bulky hard body, well-knit, his flat, huge, dinnerplate, bricklayer’s hands. She kissed him back.
Thrushes, finches, starlings sang. The air was full of twittering. Leaves rustling, birds singing, grass creeping. The breaking sea murmured in her blood.
He gave her his address in Southampton, written on a cigarette packet, and he told her where he lived in Ireland. Tubber, Donegal. ‘I’ll write a note,’ he said. ‘I’ll come again next Sunday and meet you.’
He did not come the following Sunday, and he did not write. It was that – that he let her down – as much as his beautiful hair and his interest in Keats that inspired her love for him. Also that he was the first, not the first she had done it with, because Eddie had been that – it was your duty, almost, as a soldier’s girl – but the first she had loved it with. The first time she had felt birds whistling in her own body. She did not believe he had forgotten her, knowingly abandoned her; she guessed there was some good reason for it. But she did not know the reason and therefore she was not certain, not absolutely certain, that he had not left her, as men leave women who are not beautiful. So, for the first time, she felt insecure of a man’s love, and she began to yearn for him as other, less beautiful, women yearn for men who have grown tired of them.
She waited for a month and then she wrote to him at the address in Southampton. She got a reply, but not from him. ‘Not at this address’ was the reply, written on her own envelope. Then she went to the address in Donegal. Tubber. It was easier to get there than she had imagined. A long journey, of about twelve different legs, but once she started it was easy. One step after another. And when she arrived there, in Tubber, it was easy to find his home. He was there. Surprised to see her. But there. She found out why he had left England – to escape imprisonment, a long complicated story in which the criminality of Healy, from Mayo, played the major part – but she did not find out why he had not written to her to explain what had happened. She understood that much later, when she had been married to him for several years and began to understand his character – Irish, or masculine, or individual, or whatever it was.
Talking to a friend
On their walks, or at the meals, or in bed, Aisling and Orla hardly ever talk about problems, and this is one of the factors that distinguish them sharply from older girls, or women. To some extent they are like boys: they still use conversation for fun, or else to project whatever image of themselves they believe will make a favourable impression. Often these two objectives can be combined. Orla has decided, however, that she will best achieve her ends by remaining silent. There is too much in her life that she wants to keep hidden from Aisling, hidden from anyone that she calls a friend – she has not experienced enemies at all, does not understand that the line separating enemies from friends is blurred, or invisible, and constantly shifting.
Aisling has secrets, but they are not the same as Orla’s. Orla never tells anything about her family because everything about them is too shameful. Aisling, on the other hand, uses her family constantly as raw material, for an ongoing stream of jokes and anecdotes. Aisling believes she is critical of her family. Her stories are peppered with sarcastic comments on every member of it. But Orla knows that she admires them. In fact Orla believes, in her darker moments, that Aisling is showing them off, her amazing, funny family.
She has a true gift for dramatisation. Everything that happens is transformed into a story. ‘So at that moment Sean walked in with his plate of six cream crackers and cheese. ‘‘Where on earth have you been till this hour young man?’’ Daddy said. Daddy was really getting mad. ‘‘Oh,’’ said Sean. ‘‘Were you worried or something?’’ ‘‘Well, just a tiny bit,’’ Dad said in his most sarcastic voice. ‘‘I mean it is only two o’clock in the morning and we have been sitting up specially only for two hours and I do have to get up for a really important meeting at six-thirty today but no, no, of course we’re not really worried. Now where the hell were you?’’ ‘‘Gosh sorry, Dad,’’ said Sean, munching a cracker. ‘‘I was just down at the pub.’’ ‘‘Just down at the pub?’’ ‘‘Yes.’’ ‘‘But you don’t drink. You’ve taken the pledge.’’ ‘‘I wasn’t drinking. I was nursing Seamas Barry. His head got chopped off.’’
‘’’Whaah?’’ we all screamed. ‘‘His head got chopped off?’’ ‘‘Well, you know, not literally. But he fell off his bike in town after the debate and was all cut up. I had to call the ambulance and stay with him and so on.’’’ Every day in Aisling’s household is full of such events, such conversations, such battles of wit, usually between the two stars of the family, her brother Sean and her father Ciaran. To Orla, it sounds like the sort of life portrayed on The Donna Reed Show: eventful in a nice, always witty way, a way that reflects well on all concerned. Nobody in these stories behaves badly. Nobody has a serious row, or cries, or screams. Nobody is ever sad. A veritable comedy. That is what Orla finds herself saying to herself, as she listens, avidly, to the ongoing saga.
She feels she knows everything about Aisling’s household, all their habits, all their jokes. She knows what they eat for their breakfast (muesli and orange juice) and their supper (cream crackers). She knows the names of all their neighbours and what they do for a living and what they talk about, and she knows who has a swing in their garden and who goes to France on their holidays. Although she has only met Aisling’s family once or twice, she feels she knows them inside out. She wonders if they have so much information about her. Does Aisling go home and report on life outside, life in school, in the same way that she does the opposite? Orla can’t imagine this other side of the coin. She can’t imagine being a character in one of Aisling’s stories, a character with amusing habits and lines of hilarious dialogue, rather than a listener. She can’t imagine, doesn’t want to imagine, a fictional existence for herself, separate from her real self, the kind of wonderful but curtailed life that Sean and Ciaran and Nuala have in Aisling’s tales.
Aisling knows so little about Orla. (But maybe that wouldn’t stop her? Wouldn’t stop her inventing a character called Orla, based on lack of knowledge, or on what she sees that Orla does not see? Orla skips away from the terrifying and tantalising thought, scuttles into the privacy of her burrow when the suspicion crosses her mind.) Orla offers no stories in return for the wealth of gossip, of information and invention, that she gets from Aisling. How could she reciprocate? It is not that life in her house is uninteresting. In a way, even she can see that it offers as much in the way of fodder for chat as Aisling’s, more even. The lodgers, for instance, their looks and their histories and their habits, give her plenty to think about and could give her plenty to talk about too. And they have their own stories, ready-made, packaged, ready-to-shoot. Every day one or another has something to report, something big and dramatic from the adult world of work, of men, even of love. The lodgers come from all kinds of places; they have experienced marvels. One of them knew a murderer. His own brother killed his father with a hammer on the day before St Patrick’s Day four years ago. Mad. The brother was mad. He’d been let out of the asylum for St Patrick’s Day as a special treat and that was how he used the holiday. One lodger fell in love with a nurse in London but she did not fall in love with him. He followed her from London to Birmingham, and from Birmingham to Cavan, where she was from, where she had gone on a holiday, or to escape from her suitor. Elizabeth and Orla were party to this chase, to his desperate, terrible love. They were in on all of th
at, the only two women in his life that he could turn to for sympathy. They gave him his breakfast and brushed the shoulders of his sports coat the day he took a taxi the whole way from Dublin to Cavan to plead with this girl to marry him. And they were there the next day when he came back on the bus. She’d said no. That is all he told them. No. They could see the deflation in his eyes, his red skin, all the hope and fight gone out of him. They could taste the tragedy. Even Orla cried for him.
And nearly all the lodgers confide in Elizabeth readily, turn to her for advice and comfort. She is like their mother, as well as being Orla’s mother. More useful to them in a way than their own mothers, objective, more of a friend.
Other things go on too where Orla lives, on Orla’s street. It is close to Aisling’s place but it is another world. Another world. The long-haired good-looking woman in the wheelchair who lives in the biggest house on the street had got compensation because a sailor threw her off a ship in Dublin’s dockland. That is what Orla has heard from Elizabeth, but Elizabeth has not explained why. Why did a sailor throw her off a ship? What was she doing there? She bought her house with the money she got after the court case, the compensation. The like of her getting compensation! Elizabeth has set up a group on the street and the aim of this group is to get rid of that woman. Why? Orla does not know, she does not even know where to begin suspecting, she is that innocent. All she knows is that Elizabeth hates the woman in the wheelchair with a terrible vengeance.
Then there is Old Joe across the road, the road’s character. Nobody minds about him, or wants to get rid of him. On the contrary, they are rather proud of him. He is ninety years of age and never takes off his coat. He lived during 1916 and all, and his house is full to the roof with old, rotting newspapers. The front garden, and presumably the back, is piled high with brown beer bottles. Rats and mice run around his bed as he sleeps. They run across his face and he just raises his big old hand and brushes them aside as if they were flies. How do people know this? Who has seen it happening? His windows are so dirty, so thickly grey with dust and cobwebs, that no light gets into the house and you can’t see in from outside. He has not washed his windows, or washed anything else, in thirty or forty years. Once he was a rich man, a bookie. He had a bookie’s shop on Camden Street and another in Rathmines, and went to the races at Leopardstown and Fairyhouse and the Curragh. Even as far afield as Cheltenham. The road’s only once-rich man. The woman in the wheelchair is rich, but that is not enough to redeem her. Money from a claim. Not honest money, like Joe’s once was, from a betting office.
Later, when Orla grows up, she will remember some of this stuff and use it to spice up dinner conversations or to amuse lovers in the early stages of relationships, while they are still interested in her personal history. But now she can’t. It is unspeakable. Too raw, too shocking, it reveals much, much more than she is prepared to reveal. All Aisling’s neighbours are cute little families just like her own, or else widows with cats and genteel habits, or old men whose most outrageous adventure is a weekly trip to the public library. Orla’s life belongs to another genre, of dubious morality and questionable taste, a genre labelled adult. Aisling’s is a shiny paperback novel for children under the age of ten. Aisling is an open book, and no wonder.
A lot of the time their talk ranges over safe, easy, neutral ground. They talk about people they both know in school, or now in the Irish college. Who is beautiful and who is not is their main preoccupation.
‘Alison is gorgeous, isn’t she? She’s got that lovely smooth skin. She’s as brown as a berry already, I’d love to be like that.’
‘Some people are lucky suckers. Pauline looks nice too, doesn’t she?’
‘She’s a very attractive girl,’ Aisling says primly.
‘She’s a bit too tall,’ concedes Orla.
‘Yeah. I wouldn’t like to be that tall.’
‘It’s nice in a way’ – they always qualify every criticism with some comment of this kind, anxious to soften the blow they have inflicted on an absent person and anxious also to appear to be kind and nice. Their intense desire to be nice people, liked by the universe at large, is in constant tension with their equally driving need to criticise everybody in the world. They are always sticking a knife in somebody’s back ... and then pulling it out and caressing and bandaging the wound.
‘She’d be a good model,’ Aisling nods. ‘You have to be very tall to be a model.’
‘And she’s so slim!’
‘Yes, she’s really lucky in that way. She eats like a horse too, it’s not fair.’
‘Some people have all the luck. I’d love to be skinnyhskip-1.2pt. Most of the girls in this college are skinny actually.’ Orla glances at the jagged line of blue jeans, pastel T-shirts zigzagging between the hedges of lugubrious fuchsia, the wheeling barbs of bramble.
‘Apart from us.’ Aisling sighs, but not because she is bored. Discussions of the shape of girls’ bodies never bore her. This subject, in all its intricacies of hair and complexion and bones and features, colours and decorations and coverings, fatness and leanness interests her and Orla more than any other in the world. They seldom discuss boys’ bodies, or boys. Their sexual talk, if that is what it is, is all focused firmly on themselves. To be attractive, to learn how to present the perfect Orla or Aisling, with gleaming hair and glossy, slender limbs enclosed in the most alluring and correct garment, is such a huge preoccupation that it is as yet an end in itself. The goal of it all is as vague and distant as the dream husband. Orla and Aisling and all the girls know that all this effort is in no way connected to the boys who are even now thumping and biffing one another as they straggle or run or kick their way down to the shore. Those boys will not notice whether their hair is washed or greasy, whether they weigh ten stone or eight. They can spot star material like Pauline or Jacqueline all right. But the subtleties of feminine beauty to which Orla and Aisling devote so much thought and energy, so much amateur contrivance, are beyond them.
‘I think our problem is that we eat too much,’ Aisling laughs, then grimaces. This is not a joking matter.
‘They’re always eating too, as far as I can see.’
‘I bet they don’t really. I bet they just pretend. Well, I can’t do anything about it. I was born with a healthy appetite.’
‘Maybe it’s the best way to be.’
‘It’s not. I’d love to have no appetite at all. I’d love to be like Jacqueline, thin as a lamppost and eating nothing.’
‘She liked chips.’
‘Chips. I don’t believe it. I think she just used that as an excuse to get away from here.’
‘She was peculiar, wasn’t she?’
‘God. She was the most peculiar person I ever met. Thank goodness she’s left.’
‘She was really awful!’ Aisling pauses and reconsiders, as if aware that someone might be eavesdropping and finding out that she is not as nice a girl as she should be. ‘Of course she was nice in some ways.’
‘Oh yes, she was nice in some ways and she looked gorgeous, I thought. That fair hair!’
‘I’d love to have fair hair!’
All in English of course. You couldn’t, really, have this kind of completely enjoyable and intimate conversation in Irish. Irish was for quite other matters, mostly related to school.
The experience of time passing in the Gaeltacht is a microcosmic version of how time feels throughout life. The first week is interminable: the walks from the house to the school are arduous, the meals are slow and horrible, the lessons drag out. The second week is enjoyable; a routine has been established. Journeys that were painfully long during the first week are manageable now. Compromises have been reached regarding food; expectations on all sides have become realistic. Headmaster Joe knows that the scholars are not going to speak Irish all the time, and that many of them are going to learn none at all during their stay. The scholars understand that they’re not going to get delicious food for every meal, that dinners are not to their taste but the suppe
rs are excellent. The banatees realise that they’re not going to make a fortune and a lot of little friends from Dublin or Belfast or Derry. Everyone is more or less happy. It is that easy time, which occurs in every enterprise, when the end is comfortably far away, and so is the beginning.
Then the third week comes. Some students have fallen in love, some have made new best friends, one has gone home. Most are very happy. By now, students and teachers know one another quite well, and a teasing relationship exists between them. It is conceded that the college is a success. The students know that no one is going to be sent home for speaking English or for anything else, and the teachers know they won’t have to send anyone away. Time moves along at a steady, cheerful clip; it is hard for the children to imagine that there was another life before this, before the Gaeltacht. They don’t want to imagine it. School, the city, home become faint memories, shrouded in unreality. The norm is this: living communally, chanting sentences and songs in class, playing games, dancing every night. The norm is your friends and banatee and Headmaster Joe like the pin at the centre of a spinning top. The norm is the green valley, the smell of brambles, the shining lough.
By the third week, Sandra has settled in so happily to her house that she hardly even talks to Orla and Aisling any more. They see her hanging on the arms of Monica and Noeleen, those common, gawky girls, chewing gum and giggling. Monica, who makes up the songs or knows them, seems to keep everyone in stitches all day long. When Orla says ‘Caidé mar?’ to her and Sandra, Monica mutters something under her breath (‘Cuddy Marley broke her hurley sliding down a heap of shite’, actually). Then Sandra, Monica and Noeleen burst out laughing, and laugh until Orla goes away.
Orla feels hurt, and also something else, when this happens: she feels stupid. Sandra was fun, she was a good friend. Now that she’s gone – and she’s gone, something in her eyes, the blue eye and the brown, indicate that Sandra has had enough – Orla realises what a good person she is, and feels the loss. Elizabeth flits through her mind when she looks at Sandra, her strange hair floating down around her waist. Elizabeth and her ‘She’s nits!’ Elizabeth and her ‘They live in a tenement!’ What was wrong with Sandra really? She’s good enough for Monica, and everyone knows that Monica’s father is a doctor (unbelievable as it seems – Some doctor! Aisling says, suspiciously). Still. She’s loads of money and three pairs of Levi’s so it’s probably true, her foul mouth and mind notwithstanding.
The Dancers Dancing Page 14