Skin Deep

by Liz Nugent

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘It’s time. I’m ready.’

  Time was running out for me, though there was no way I could tell him that. He was delighted that I was so keen. But he was clearly more religious than I had thought.

  ‘Here? Jesus, Delia, we’re in a church.’

  ‘I know!’ The sheer scandal of it excited me.

  ‘You should have warned me, I’d have arranged something. There isn’t even a roof on this place!’

  ‘I feel it, Harry. It’s now or never!’

  He was nervous and I became impatient then. I just wanted to get this over and done with.

  He fumbled with his belt as I took off my tights and I could feel his eyes on me. The rise in my belly was still slight and he had not seen me fully naked before, so I didn’t care what he made of my body. I lay down on the coat and told him to lie on top of me.

  ‘Can I not look at you first?’ he said, rubbing himself.

  I laughed. ‘It’s cold. I need you to warm me up.’

  He climbed on top of me and it was awkward and uncomfortable and freezing cold and I could feel the damp seep through my coat. I took him in my hand as Peter had shown me, and then guided him inside me, but he softened immediately and withdrew.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t … I’m sorry … I just … it doesn’t feel right. It’s too cold. Look, you’re shaking!’

  I could feel his blushes.

  I tried coaxing him, using my hands again, but he pushed me roughly away.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘I thought you’d like it.’

  ‘Stop … just stop!’ He stood up awkwardly and pulled his trousers up from his ankles.

  ‘I thought you wanted to!’ I was furious now. ‘You’ve been at me for a year, pawing me every chance you get like a lecherous pervert, and now you’re suddenly too shy?’

  He spoke quietly. ‘I wanted it to be special; I wanted it to be romantic, not like two pigs rutting in the mud. This is not how I imagined it.’

  I was pulling my clothes back on and seething with anger. I walked out through the gate past him and towards town. He followed, scurrying after me, and then dashed back to get his bike. He cycled alongside me, apologizing all the way.

  ‘I’m sorry! Look, you took me by surprise, that’s all. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it, like. I played a match today. I’m a bit wrecked, that’s all. We can sort something out in the hotel next weekend, I promise.’

  Slightly mollified, I allowed him to give me a lift back into town on his crossbar. When I dismounted the bike, he called after me, ‘We won the match, by the way!’ I didn’t turn back. I told Aunt Moira and Uncle Alan I’d been splashed by a passing bus and went upstairs to shower and change into a jumper and a skirt that was getting a little too tight. Aunt Moira commented that it was nice to see that I was finally putting on a bit of weight, because I’d always been so thin. She said that hard work must have given me an appetite.

  Having sex with Harry was now urgent. The next day, on the way home from Mass, I told Harry that he should come to Ballina and visit me in the flat above the shoe shop during the week. He knew full well what I was implying. Theresa had told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t allowed to have ‘gentlemen callers’ to my flat, as if it were the 1950s.

  ‘It would be fine if you had a sitting room up there, but that bed is asking for trouble,’ she had said on my first night. Aunt Moira had told her about Harry and they had met once at Aunt Moira’s birthday tea. But after five o’clock every evening Theresa and Frankie went home, and I had the key to the front door.

  On the next Wednesday evening, Harry arrived at seven o’clock as instructed and parked his father’s car two streets away so as not to attract any attention to the shop. I hurried him along in the doorway, and nearly gagged at the intoxicating fumes of his aftershave. Any strong smell was making me nauseous these days. Harry was well prepared this time. He was clean-shaven and had had his hair cut. He had also brought a bunch of flowers and a picnic of sorts: four pint bottles of Guinness ‘to relax us’, he said, and six ham sandwiches.

  ‘I was worried, you know, that I’d ruined things between us, I mean you know that I’ve wanted to, it’s just that in that wet abbey, in the cold …’ I let him gabble on nervously as I led him up the back stairs, around the stacks of shoeboxes that covered every available surface, including the cistern of the toilet. He laughed when he saw my room with its narrow bed. ‘Well, it’s not much better than the abbey, but it’ll do surely.’ He snapped open two bottles of Guinness with a bottle opener from his pocket and handed one to me. I gulped it down, ignoring the bitter taste, anxiety prickling the back of my neck. I was starving all the time, but the eating of sandwiches would delay matters.

  ‘Are you not hungry?’

  Rather than answer, I kissed him. He put his own uneaten sandwich aside and lay back on the bed. I lay on top of him, kissing earnestly, trying to make myself small and appealing in his bear-like arms. He unbuttoned my blouse and pulled it back from my shoulders. My Playtex bra was relatively new. He stroked the line from my neck downwards and lifted my breasts free of the cups.

  ‘Oh God, we’re really going to do it,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered, and kissed behind his ear.

  There was a sudden frenzy then as he got naked and climbed on to the bed beside me. I took off my remaining clothes as best I could without his hands leaving my body. I let him take the lead this time. His breathing became shallower as he guided my hands downwards and I began to manipulate him. Within a few minutes, he stopped me and reached out of bed to lift a small package from the trousers he had dumped on the floor.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I went into Galway yesterday. There’s a barber there I’d heard about.’ He produced a slim, foil-wrapped condom. I had only seen one once before, in my second encounter with Peter.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘please don’t use that.’

  ‘What? Come on, we can’t take any chances.’ He was unrolling it as I spoke.

  ‘It won’t be the same.’

  ‘The same as what?’ he said, laughing.

  ‘The nuns told us we could catch cancer from them.’ They had said this, though nobody believed it.

  ‘Sure that’s only something they say, to scare girls and to force wives to have babies they don’t want.’

  I could not persuade Harry to dispense with the condom, and while our love-making was more gentle and considerate than I had experienced with Peter, all I felt was despair. As he exploded inside the condom, inside me, he buried his face into my hair.

  ‘I love you, you know!’ he said breathlessly.

  I could not stop a tear trickling down the side of my face and he felt the wetness on his skin.

  ‘Oh God, I didn’t hurt you, did I?’

  ‘No.’

  What could I say?

  He sat up and snapped the condom off, demonstrated to me how you could check to make sure it hadn’t split. ‘I had to have a bit of practice on my own, you know?’ He was sheepish. ‘The last thing we want is an accident, right?’ He brushed the tears from my face and kissed it. ‘I know it’s emotional for women, to lose their virginity. I’ve heard that before.’

  I wondered where he had heard this.

  He held my head to his broad chest. ‘You know that I want to marry you? In a few years, like. You know that, right? And what we’ve done … it doesn’t change anything for me. Like, I know a lot of lads don’t respect girls after … you know, but I love you more, if anything.’ Harry had never told me he loved me before, but now there was a creeping desperation to his declaration.

  ‘I love you too,’ I said, and I supposed it to be true. I certainly liked him better than anyone else.

  ‘You and me,’ he said, ‘we’re for ever.’ He circled his thumb and forefinger and mimed slipping a ring on my finger. ‘For ever, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said
. I took courage from the fact that he did want to marry me. My future was secure. I had to make him sleep with me without a condom or fabricate some kind of ‘accident’, and soon.

  He wolfed into the sandwiches then and I joined him. I let him have my second bottle of beer. Harry was in great form, talking about the future. He said that at some stage he would inherit the hotel and run it in his father’s place. Peter had told him that he was never coming back to live in Westport. Peter was interested in financial analysis and bonds, and there was no call for his skills in Westport. I began to feel more confident. I would be a hotelier’s wife, and Peter would only come back on occasional holidays with his wife. Their children and our children would be cousins, and nobody ever had to know the truth.

  After midnight, I crept down the stairs with Harry. We kissed passionately in the narrow hallway and agreed that we’d do it again in his parents’ house on Saturday, as they were going to a wedding in Castlebar. I would handle the condom next time, stick a pin in it and point out the leak.

  As I opened the street door, the shop manager, Frankie, passed with another man and stopped short when he saw Harry exiting and me standing behind the door in my slip. Harry, a little merry, ran off in the opposite direction, and never noticed Frankie standing stock-still, staring at me. I slammed the door in his face. I convinced myself that Frankie would never tell. Sure, he was uptight and religious, but he wouldn’t tell, would he? Someone like him?

  At work the next morning, Frankie asked Theresa to keep the closed sign on the door of the shop. There was something he needed to discuss with her, about me, he said. He was bright red in the face. Theresa asked him if he was feeling well.

  ‘I didn’t want to be the one to tell you, but if I know, you can be sure that there’ll be others –’

  I tried to stop him. ‘Please, Frankie, don’t …’

  Theresa sat up straighter in her chair. ‘What in the name of heaven is going on?’

  ‘She’s been having a man visiting her. At night,’ said Frankie, as if it were a regular occurrence.

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘I saw him leaving last night. I wouldn’t want a scandal.’

  Theresa clutched her hands to her head. ‘Oh Lord. It’s what I was afraid of! What were you thinking?’

  ‘My boyfriend visited yesterday evening –’

  ‘She said goodbye to him in her underwear, at the street door. Anybody could have seen.’ Frankie had turned out to be a treacherous little sneak.

  Theresa blanched white and grabbed the crucifix at her neck. She stood up unsteadily, in one white plimsoll and one school brogue. It was the first and only time I heard her raise her voice. ‘There will be no fornication under my roof! Do you have no regard for your position, for yourself? Defying God’s wishes like a savage? This is a decent premises!’

  ‘It is. Very respectable,’ Frankie agreed earnestly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, beginning to cry, though at the back of my mind, part of me thought that this exposure was good for my story. It was Harry that Frankie had seen. When my pregnancy was discovered, nobody would suspect anyone else. All I had to do was keep the news of my pregnancy to myself until after my next encounter with Harry.

  ‘Go to your room and pack your bags. I am going to St Muredach’s. I’ll have to talk to Father McDaid. Do not set foot downstairs until I return.’ She changed into her good shoes and left the shop, slamming the glass door behind her.

  ‘Why did you tell her?’

  ‘It’s my moral duty. Besides, I don’t want you here. I’ve been working here nearly twenty years and I don’t want some interloping relative taking over this place.’

  I didn’t see the point in telling him that I was not a relative at all.

  ‘What were you doing last night, Frankie, out on the town, after midnight? Who was the man you were with?’

  Frankie let his eyes glaze over. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about. Go upstairs, like Theresa said.’

  He knew exactly what I was talking about. By then, I had guessed that he was gay. Theresa and Aunt Moira talked fondly of Frankie’s ‘little ways’ and his bow ties. They found his manner amusing but they didn’t want to see it for what it was. No straight man in Mayo was as well groomed as Frankie.

  I went upstairs and packed my suitcase. I would be on the next bus back to Westport. I wasn’t going to miss this place. But I would have to face the music with Uncle Alan and Aunt Moira. I knew they would be disappointed initially, but everything would work out for the best. I put my hand on my stomach, as I felt it gurgling, and noted again the slight swell of my abdomen. I was nearly three months pregnant now. I thought about the baby for the first time. The thought of being responsible for a tiny human filled me with dread, but surely, once I’d had unprotected sex with Harry, everything would fall into place. After we got married, I’d probably move into his house, and no doubt the Russells’ housekeeper and Mrs Russell would look after the baby too.

  As I gathered my few things, I began to feel unwell. My head throbbed and my stomach lurched. My forehead was clammy and hot to touch.

  Theresa returned with a one-way bus ticket for me. In my presence, she stripped the bed linen and doused the room in holy water. I stood in the corner of the room, trying to keep the nausea at bay.

  ‘As a gesture of goodwill,’ she said, ‘I will leave you to explain to Alan and Moira why you have returned and I will not blacken your name in the town. I will even make sure that Frankie keeps his mouth shut. But may God have mercy on your soul and …’ Her words drifted further and further away as I tried to remain upright.

  I don’t remember what happened next. I have a vague recollection of Frankie carrying me down the stairs, and then I was lying on the back seat of a car, vomiting, while blood ran down my leg. Later, I knew I was in Castlebar hospital but I was too sick to care who found out what. A night passed. Theresa was sitting by my bed, sponging my forehead, and gradually I began to feel better. A doctor came and drew the curtains around my bed and stood behind Theresa. The news was not the news I’d hoped for.

  ‘The baby is safe,’ he said, embarrassed, as Theresa blessed herself and shook her head at me. The doctor continued: ‘It’s not uncommon, you know, to have a bleed towards the end of the first trimester, particularly when you have a urinary tract infection. Make sure to drink plenty of fluids to flush out the infection. Try to avoid any heavy lifting for a week or so and you will be right as rain.’

  I wondered whatever had happened to confidentiality and the Hippocratic oath. It turned out that Theresa had not known I’d turned eighteen in August, and presented herself to the doctor as my guardian as they thought I was legally a minor. It was all a mess now. The timing of everything was wrong. Theresa knew, because of what the doctor had said, that I was three months pregnant. If that news got out, Harry would know that he was not the father. It was already going to be quite a challenge to persuade him that his baby was twelve weeks premature, and then only if we had unprotected sex that week. I must have been crazy to think I could fool everyone. But I had to try.

  The next day, Theresa came to the hospital again. She had prepared a speech this time. ‘Moira and Alan are coming to collect you this afternoon. They will be so ashamed. I was against this whole fostering business in the first place. I told them too. “You don’t know what you’re getting, you need to know the seed and breed of them, islanders are oddballs,” I said, but then you came along with your pretty face and the two of them were enchanted. I could smell trouble though, when I heard you were turning down the job with me to become a doctor, and then I said nothing when that turned out to be some misguided fantasy. I should have guessed though, the rings under your eyes and the sluggishness. I should have spotted it. You are a disgrace to yourself and to my cousin, who was kind enough to take you in.’

  Even in my weakened state, I wasn’t going to be lectured by such a zealous old trout.

  ‘If you must know, I am engaged to Harry and
we are going to run Carrowbeg Manor together, when he inherits it.’ That had been Harry’s plan.

  ‘Do you think so? We’ll see about that. That is highly unlikely now, you stupid little fool. There are places for girls like you, and I am going to strongly suggest that Moira sends you to one of them until that poor unfortunate child is born. And then they can find it a home with good married parents. Your young man’s family aren’t going to want the shame either, and if I were you I wouldn’t tell him, or them. Go away until the child is born and keep your mouth shut.’

  It had never occurred to me that I could be sent away. Theresa left shortly afterwards and the doctor discharged me with a prescription for antibiotics. Theresa had finished packing my suitcase, and brought it with her to the hospital. I suppose I should be grateful that she paid the forty pounds that was owing to me and thanked me for my work. I sat in a corridor and waited. Theresa was wrong. Aunt Moira and Uncle Alan adored me. I could do no wrong in their eyes. No matter what happened, they would look after me.

  Before long, Aunt Moira and Uncle Alan’s ancient car rattled into the car park and a wave of relief and gratitude washed over me. I ran out to greet them, but instead of being welcomed into Aunt Moira’s open arms, neither of them would look at me. Uncle Alan’s eyes were red-rimmed. ‘You’ve led us a merry dance,’ he said. There was silence in the car most of the way home. They did not mention my pregnancy or Harry. I didn’t say much either. I ate some buttered bread with tea and, exhausted from the exertions and the emotions of the day, I went to bed. Aunt Moira said they’d talk to me in the morning. They were obviously furious, but I knew they would get over it.

  There was a sail-maker called Cormac. He lived in ancient times when there would have been at least a thousand people living on our island. Daddy said Cormac was a very popular fella, known for his entertaining gossip and wild stories about fairies pulling the hair out of his head, or a talking fish he’d caught.