Skin Deep

by Liz Nugent

  Dr Miller told her to leave me. ‘The child is worn out, she walked five miles, the poor craythur, leave her be. You can pretty her up in the morning.’

  Later, I got out of bed and pulled the heavy curtains open, but I could only see tree shapes in the darkness. Fighting exhaustion, I listened to the strange noises in this cavernous house until all was quiet except the sound of the sea pounding the rocks below. I marvelled at the softness and comfort of the bed and the warmth of the room. I slept.

  The next morning, Mrs Miller woke me and handed me a glass of milk. ‘I’ve run a bath for you, love.’ She led me to a large steamy bathroom. We didn’t have a bath in our cottage, or a room for it. There was a pipe that ran cold water beside the outside toilet, and we’d wash our hands and faces before Mass. Every other Saturday night, my mother would boil kettles and half-fill a galvanized steel tub, and we would all take turns in it until the water ran mud brown. Whoever got to go first was always the cleanest. When Daddy was home, that was me.

  In this bathroom, there was a tap each for hot and cold water and a large mirror on the back of the door, and a towel thicker than any fabric I’d touched before. Mrs Miller helped to scrub me with a yellow sponge and washed and rinsed my hair using a jug full of clean water. Afterwards, she gave me a big bag of clothes, shoes and boots. ‘Clara won’t be needing them again. You might as well get the use of them.’ Out of the clothes I picked a pair of green tights and a full-length orange cotton smocked dress and red boots. ‘Good lord, that’s a party dress – over boots?’ said Mrs Miller, but I grinned at her in the long mirror on the back of the door.

  On the island, we had no mirror in the cottage. In school, there was an old speckled mirror above the washbasin beside the toilet, but I wasn’t tall enough to see anything more than the top of my head and my eyes. Occasionally, if the wind died down, I could catch my murky reflection in a rock pool, but then a breeze would skitter across it and my image would close up like an accordion. Mammy used to have a hand mirror, but that got smashed in a fight a good while ago. Daddy had always said I was beautiful, but now I saw what he saw. Mammy was right to be jealous of me. I was prettier than Mammy, even though I looked a bit like her. My hair was long and silky like hers. Everyone else on the island had rough, coarse hair. And my skin was dark and clear too. Mammy had thin lines around her eyes and her mouth, but she said that some famous man once said she was elegant. Daddy mocked her for that. ‘Elegant!’ he said. ‘There’s no room for “elegant” on Inishcrann.’

  I couldn’t wait for Daddy to see me in my new finery. My hair was shining, and my skin was rosy pink from the heat and the scrubbing, and I looked like a fairy maid from one of his old stories of the island.

  Downstairs, I sat at a big table and ate two bananas and two hunks of a fresh white loaf slathered in butter and jam. Dr Miller had gone down to the harbour to send word to the island that my daddy was to come and collect me, as they would not allow me to go back over by myself. I felt safe in this house. In another big room with sofas and cushions with flowers on them and overflowing ashtrays, Mrs Miller found beautiful dolls with which I could amuse myself in between running to the window to see all the people walking up and down, and cars and vans pulling up to the shop opposite, collecting and delivering newspapers and tinned goods and sides of beef. They had a television, but Mrs Miller said there were no programmes on until three o’clock. She let me turn it on and off though to watch it light up, and she showed me how I could turn a dial so that I could hear a fuzzy sound getting louder and quieter. I didn’t tell her that I already knew about dials because we had a radio at home on the island.

  I tried not to spill Mrs Miller’s never-ending supply of glasses of milk on my dress, but after she left me to do a jigsaw with Mickey Mouse in it, the milk resting on the arm of the chair, I moved suddenly and knocked the glass over. I felt the dampness on my lap as it soaked into my new underpants, and saw the fabric darken on the seat around me. I was immobilized in shock, because I knew punishment was coming. It surely did.

  Moments later, I heard the front door bang and I thought it must be Dr Miller with Daddy. He had been gone a long time. I ran out into the hall and looked behind Dr Miller to see if Daddy was hiding to surprise me, but he wasn’t there.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  Dr Miller coughed and told me to go back into the sitting room, and that he’d be in to me in a minute to explain things. Mrs Miller took a deep drag of her cigarette and then spotted the damp patch on my dress and was about to exclaim when the doctor half-pulled his wife into the kitchen. I knew something was wrong by the look on his face. I went to the bathroom for a towel and tried to mop up the wet mess on the armchair and on my dress, and then I sat waiting for ages.

  The doctor came in with Mrs Miller, whose eyes were red-rimmed from tears. She picked me up and put me on her lap, but I scrambled away and stood with my back to the door.

  ‘Oh, now, you poor girl. I have some bad news, I’m afraid. There was … an accident on the island last night –’

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  ‘That’s the thing, lovey, I’m afraid he … he died in an accident.’

  I looked down at my lap, furious with myself. He wouldn’t be dead if I hadn’t spilled the milk.

  ‘You had … have three brothers, yes?’

  I stared at him.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my dear, but none of them survived.’

  ‘Mammy?’

  He shook his head. ‘They say a fire got out of control. A loose ember perhaps … A thatched roof these days and oil lamps, well, it doesn’t make sense any more –’

  Mrs Miller glared at him and cut him off. ‘Look, lovey, I don’t … they won’t have felt anything. It happened last night apparently. They would have died in their sleep from the smoke. They wouldn’t have been in any pain.’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  Dr Miller approached and kneeled on the floor in front of me. He put his two hands on my shoulders.

  ‘Delia, there is no home. The house burned down. There’s nothing left. They’re still putting the fire out now.’

  ‘Who says? How do you know?’

  ‘Owen came over earlier with the news. The guards and the priest are waiting to go back with him to Inishcrann, but there’s a storm brewing, and it’s not safe to sail yet. We’re waiting for it to clear up.’

  I don’t know why Mrs Miller started to cry. She still had her cigarettes and her house and her doctor and her Clara in university in Dublin.

  Dr Miller went out again. He said he’d have to go over to the island in order to certify the deaths as soon as the wind died down. He wouldn’t let me come with him. His wife sat with me and plied me with chocolate and different dolls. The chocolate was delicious, but I couldn’t swallow it. Its sweetness clashed with the bitter taste in my mouth, and I spat it out on to a plate. At three o’clock, I asked if I could turn on the television and it fizzed to life, but there were just tiny men in suits talking to each other behind the glass, and I couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

  Within an hour, Father Devlin and Dr Miller had returned. The storm was rising and they couldn’t get to the island. The forecast was not good.

  Nobody on the island trusted Father Devlin. He came over to say Mass every week, weather permitting, and poked his nose in, wanting to know everyone’s business and making insinuations about people. ‘Tell him nothing’ was the mantra repeated by the islanders, who nevertheless flocked to the tumble-down church every Sunday at midday, like the faithful Catholic devotees they were. All except my mother. ‘Mumbo jumbo – a magic man in the sky is in charge?’ she would say sarcastically. And Daddy would bless himself and say, ‘God forgive me for marrying a heathen,’ and Mammy would laugh at him, but not in a nice way.

  Father Devlin said prayers over me now, while holding my hand in his sweaty one, a Hail Mary and an Our Father, but he wanted to know why I’d left the island and where I was going when Dr Miller found me. He wanted
to know why I thought my father would be joining me and why we hadn’t arranged a place to meet. He asked me if I was running away, and if so, what was I running from? I stared at him, at the dark mole under his eye, and said repeatedly ‘I don’t know’ until he became frustrated.

  ‘I think she’s a simpleton,’ he said to Mrs Miller. The stain on my dress had dried, but the smell of sour milk was nauseating.

  I clung to my father’s last words to me, and played them over in my head. He had given me a five-pound note and told me to keep it safe. His eyes were glassy, but his grip on my shoulders was firm. ‘There was never a girl as wonderful as you are. You are the queen of Inishcrann. Go now, I’ll catch up with you.’ And he pulled me towards him and buried his head in my shoulder and then shoved me roughly away. I had run to catch the ferry with the five-pound note in my pocket and the clothes I stood up in.

  Now, he was gone, and Mammy and Conor and Aidan and Brian were all gone. I was old enough to know that dead meant that I would never see them again. A pain in my stomach came and rippled through the top of my head. Daddy said I could be anything I wanted, but all I wanted to be was Daddy’s girl. How could I be that if I didn’t have a daddy? Who was I if I wasn’t Martin O’Flaherty’s daughter?

  4

  It was three days before Dr Miller and Father Devlin and the guards could get to the island. I was desperate for news, but when it came, it was only confirmation of what I’d been told. Various people called to the house to offer their condolences and to get a look at the poor orphan girl. ‘She’s so pretty,’ I’d hear them say, ‘such a tragedy!’ The pain in my belly was sorest at night when I was in bed on my own.

  I tried to think what life would be like without my family, but I just wanted to go home to Inishcrann. Even if there was no home there, the islanders knew me, and knew that I was their queen, despite the fact that, as Daddy said, they wouldn’t like to admit it.

  I snuck out of the house the day after, and went down to the harbour and waited a short time for the ferry to arrive. Perhaps there had been a mistake and it was another cottage that had burned down. We weren’t the only ones with a thatched roof. What if Mammy had done something to Daddy so that he couldn’t come after me? I just had to see for myself that the house was gone, as they said. I hung back behind the wall until the cargo was loaded on to the boat by Owen. I went over and called to him. Owen looked at me. ‘Go back to the doctor’s house. I can’t bring you home,’ he said, and there was no warmth in his voice and no sympathy.

  ‘Is it true, Owen? Are they all dead?’

  ‘They are,’ he said.

  ‘I have money. Please take me home?’ I held out the five-pound note to him.

  He turned away and began to wind up the gangway. I attempted to jump on to it, but he caught me and threw me back on to the harbour wall. I landed on my bottom, shocked at his rough treatment. Owen was an islander. He stayed in Cregannagh a lot, but he was one of us.

  ‘Why can’t I come home?’

  ‘There’s nobody there for you now,’ he said. He untied the ropes from their mooring posts and did not look at me.

  I could feel hot tears begin to fall, and a plume of diesel fumes engulfed me as the ferry took off again. I turned to walk back up the hill, but an overwhelming anxiety swept up within me and I began to scream in terror. People stepped out of doorways, and I knew I was making the wrong kind of fuss but I couldn’t help it. A neighbour of Mrs Miller’s came and held me and rubbed my head and hushed me until my screams turned hoarse. She led me back to the Millers’ house, stopping in the shop to buy me chocolate on the way. I had more chocolate in my room than I’d ever had in my life, but I could find no solace in it. ‘Of course you miss your mammy, it’s only natural, child.’

  I missed them all. But I didn’t need the others like I needed Daddy. I knew that if Daddy had survived, everything would be all right.

  That night, I heard Mrs Miller saying to her daughter, Clara, on the telephone, ‘They don’t want her at the funerals. She has nowhere to go, the poor pet. She can stay here until something is sorted out. She must have relatives on the island who’ll claim her. We’ll just wait and see.’

  I wondered why I wasn’t wanted at the funerals. I had been to funerals on the island before. When someone died, everyone went. Even with the entire population we couldn’t fill the church, so Mammy said it was important to show solidarity, though Daddy said she made a holy show of him by not knowing any of the prayers and refusing to learn. I knew that the people were put into coffins in the ground. I had seen Sean MacThomas’s body laid out in his front parlour just last year, and his grown-up children crying over him. I remember it especially because we got lemonade that day. Why would someone not want me at the funerals of my parents and brothers? Daddy had one sister who’d died when he was a boy, and his own parents were older when they had him, and had died before I was born. And Mammy was from America. I wondered why none of the islanders had come over to see me, and why they weren’t coming to take me home.

  On the Friday of that week, Mrs Miller said I had to move into the boxroom, as their daughter Clara was coming home for the weekend. I had forgotten about Clara, even though I was wearing her old clothes and playing with her toys. I knew before I met her that I wouldn’t like her. Her mother proudly said that she was going to be a doctor like her father. I was surprised. I didn’t know that girls could be doctors. She turned out to be a grown-up lady with a woman shape, but I was relieved that she wasn’t pretty like me. Her hair was dull and stringy, and big thick spectacles covered half her face.

  The next day was the day of the funerals. Dr Miller and Clara were dressed in black in the hallway.

  ‘Take me with you,’ I begged him. I felt that if I didn’t see my family go into the ground, I would never know for sure. What if Daddy was alive in the coffin? He had told me the old story of Timmy Mannion, whose broken coffin resurfaced after a savage winter storm. The skeleton was intact but there were scratch marks all along the inside of the lid. The custom now was that the corpse would be buried with a string attached to one finger that led to a bell on the outside of the coffin. The family would stay in the graveyard for a whole night before the grave was filled in. Daddy had no family to listen out for him in the graveyard.

  Mrs Miller tried to reason with me. ‘It’s not a good idea, Delia, you’re too young, even the islanders think so.’ I ignored her and wrapped myself around Dr Miller. He prised me away, and left the house without saying anything to me. Clara shrugged her shoulders at her mother, turning her eyes to the ceiling, and followed him. Mrs Miller asked me to come and have breakfast in the kitchen and expected me to follow her trail of cigarette ash.

  That night, when Clara and her dad came back, I expected they would have some messages for me from the island, but they were both quiet and not inclined to talk at all. When Dr Miller put me to bed that night in the boxroom, he asked me, ‘Delia, you had friends on the island, didn’t you?’

  I didn’t know what he meant. Everyone knew everyone; we were islanders together.

  ‘I saw your house, what’s left of it … Were you not lonely out there? Is that why you ran away? I tried to speak to some of your … the locals, you know, on Inishcrann, but I think maybe they don’t like us from the mainland. It’s an awful tragedy, what happened, but the most important thing now is that we make you as comfortable as possible and that you learn to trust us.’

  I did trust Dr Miller. As the days drifted into weeks, and the shock and horror began to sink in, there were still no visits from the islanders. Without Daddy to remind them, they had forgotten that I was to be their queen. Dr Miller did not sugar-coat things for me the way his wife did. I told him there was nobody on the island who was a blood relative. He asked me about my mother’s family, and I said she was from Minnesota. He took an atlas down from the shelf and showed me America, and that Minnesota was just one part of it and that it was more than twice the size of the whole of Ireland. He asked me if I knew the
name of the town in Minnesota. But all I knew was that Mammy was half Cheyenne and that her daddy was dead and her mom didn’t want to know us. I looked at the atlas. Daddy had been right all along. We definitely would have got lost there. I asked Dr Miller to show me Inishcrann and he laughed and said it was too small to show up in his atlas. He said that if they couldn’t track down my mother’s family, I would probably have to go and stay in an orphanage until some couple who wanted a beautiful girl like me could adopt me.

  I didn’t see why Dr Miller couldn’t be my new daddy. I could tell that Mrs Miller wanted to keep me, but she was always trying to pet me and comfort me, and talked to me like I was Aidan’s age. I was a lot older than she treated me. Dr Miller was kind, if a little gruff, and he was in charge. I would have to make him see that I was his favourite girl. When he came into the sitting room later that evening, I climbed into his lap and laced my arms around his neck, and I could feel the muscles in his shoulders harden and then he relaxed a little and accepted my embrace. I decided that this would be my new family.

  There were visits from social workers and nurses and other strangers, all asking me questions that I wouldn’t or couldn’t answer, about my reasons for leaving the island, and where my mother came from. I said little at all to Mrs Miller, but when Dr Miller was in the house I followed him around and made myself as appealing as possible, smoothing his hair where it curled up at the back and kissing his face. I did not eat unless he sat at the table with us. At night I begged him to read me a story, and even though he read stories from old books in a bored voice, I knew he liked the attention I was giving him. I told him the story Daddy told me about the chieftain hanging from the old tree that the island was named for. He said he didn’t think that was a nice story, and turned back to Alice in Wonderland.

  It was to be my tenth birthday on the 1st of August, and I wondered what would happen to the special penknife that Daddy had ordered for me. The one I’d been using on the nets was almost worn down to its wooden handle. I had told Mrs Miller about my birthday and she said we must have a party. I’d never had a party before. On the island, if it was your birthday in school, Spots McGrath would give you a box of Smarties, or at home, you’d get a present and lemonade with your dinner.