Toward the end of the meal, Kevin rises, clinking the tines of his fork against his flute, which has the adverse effect of making the entire clan talk louder.
“Speech!” Ciaran yells, smacking the table. “Speech, speech!” He grins at his father. Everyone adores Ciaran—with his gapped teeth and chirpy voice—in a way that makes Millie slightly cool toward him, her natural affinity bent always toward the historical underdogs of the world.
“Happy Christmas, everyone!” Kevin says. “Lovely to all be together and to have Gran here, and thrilled to have Gerard home.” He nods to his older son. “I for one should like to thank you all for your most thoughtful gifts, not least of all the pair of hairy navy slippers that have already kept me snug against the icy tundra of our bathroom tiles. And to you, darling.” He looks at Grace, but stops short of sharing the details of her present, which irks Millie.
“I feel very lucky—this is the eighteenth Christmas I believe in this house,” Kevin continues, when Millie suddenly lets loose a rogue, undeniable burp. In her dotage, she is prone to, and has no control over, eruptions of air escaping her from various orifices, precisely at the most disadvantageous moments. The belch—comically lengthy, almost like a teenage boy’s showing off in front of the lads—cuts a shocked silence in the room. Then all four children—yes, even Aideen—erupt into howls of laughter.
“Gran!” they shrill with delight. “How could you?”
Kevin, in the role of long-suffering father to this rowdy crew, lifts his glass even higher into the air and says, “Well Mum, you’ve stolen my thunder again. I think that about says it all. Cheers, everyone! Happy Christmas!”
“Sorry, love!” Millie says, pleased to be the cause, however inadvertent, of this moment of lightness. In point of fact, she feels positively buoyant. She is not thinking about her arrest or Jolly Jessica’s daughter’s apartment in Brooklyn, where she was supposed to be having her Christmas dinner, or the imminent arrival of a perfect stranger in Margate.
Now a second impressive belch rings out, longer, louder, ruder. The culprit, Ciaran, snickers and emits a series of miniburps.
“Ciaran!” says Nuala. “How rude!”
“Leave him alone,” says Aideen. “He’s only messing.”
“And who put you in charge?”
“Guys…” says Gerard. “Come on.”
“You are not cute,” fires off Aideen. “And your personality is a zero.”
“Aideen,” says Kevin. “Enough.”
“Dear Diary,” says Nuala, miming with an imaginary pen. “Today I am a sad, sad girl. Boo hoo!”
“Enough!” Kevin says.
“I’m not feeling well,” says Aideen and she’s up on those flipper feet, plate in hand, slapping toward the staircase.
“Please sit down, darling,” says Grace in a tone that makes Aideen acquiesce though she stomps back to her chair. “It’s Christmas. We’re eating together as a family.”
Aideen snorts. “This family’s shit.”
The shift in mood, with these words, feels dangerous, irreversible.
“Aideen!” says Kevin.
“When were you going to give me and the family my happy news?”
“Such a drama queen,” Nuala mutters.
“Acting like everything is fine,” says Aideen. “Well it’s not fine. And I’m not going.”
Kevin pales.
“Going where?” says Gerard.
“Aideen, why don’t we—” Kevin says.
“When were you going to tell me, Dad, like the night before? Like, sleep tight. Oh and by the way, this is your last night at home.”
“Tell you what?” says Nuala, gleefully reveling in this little slice of schadenfreude.
“This is not the time or the place,” Grace says. “Take a deep breath, and we’ll—”
“No!”
“We’ll discuss this with you, Aideen, we will,” says Kevin. “We just didn’t want to bring it up before Christmas, love. We don’t want to spoil Christmas.”
“Well done, Dad,” says Aideen, adopting her father’s deepest sarcasm and adding a hefty dose of undisguised teenaged wrath as she slams, finally, out of the room, “it’s not spoiled at all.”
9
Had her father not put a hockey stick atop her suitcase, Aideen may not have retaliated so aggressively. But the stick is a particularly maddening reveal of his vast disappointment in her very person, since he knows full well that she’ll never use it, and yet, with an undying hopefulness in all the potential she can’t seem to fulfill, he silently urges her to pack it, as if the school will change her.
Aideen removes a carton of eggs from the fridge and steals upstairs. She is done with the crying and the begging and the arguing that have marked an impressive meltdown which has, over the Christmas holiday and into the New Year, drained all emotional energy reserves from the Gogarty residence. She has seen its ineffectiveness; she has retreated to her usual and only base of power: silence. Her eyes, when she accidentally met them in the mirror after a splash of water on her face at dawn, are terrifically swollen. She spent the night awake, every minute of it, brooding and sending messages to Sharon, her best friend, who moved to Glasgow last year. She tweets to Clean-Cut, and his reply, Ur our best fan sending xoxoxos, has been read a mind-blowing number of times. It’s the closest thing to a love note she’s ever received. Last night, Mum and Dad had cruelly snored away, not a lick of compassion for her anguish, blissful in the knowledge that Aideen would soon be dumped off at boarding school.
During their countless arguments and Aideen’s attempts at negotiation in the days leading to this one, Mum had said, ad nauseam, that Millburn wasn’t just about recent strife in the house and Aideen’s choices, but that she might very well enjoy making her own way in a different school than her twin. More important, her Leaving Cert studies are upon her and it was time to get serious about school. Plus the boarding part was just Monday through Friday; she’d be home every weekend.
Aideen understands this explanation for what it is: parental bollocks.
Initially she had refused to pack—why should she assist in her own demise?—but envisioning the crap Mum and Dad would wrongly choose (hello, hockey stick), she eventually relented and unhappily gathered up her essentials beneath the pitying gaze of Ciaran and even Nuala. Upon Sharon’s advice, she’d headed to the liquor cabinet at two in the morning and lifted a bottle of spirits—vodka, she was advised, for its odorlessness—and six of Dad’s warm cans of lager. Aideen has no desire to drink alcohol—she dislikes the taste of it—but Sharon suggested it might help endear her to the girls at Millburn. She tucked the booze deep into the bowels of her duffel beneath a pile of shite-colored school uniforms.
Before she left for work, Mum had stood in the doorway to Aideen’s bedroom. This was the goodbye Aideen had imagined the most and, though she had resolved to remain wooden, she soon found herself sobbing.
“Oh my love,” Mum had said into her hair, which was crushing. “Don’t cry. You’ll be home on Friday.”
“Please Mum, don’t make me go. Please.”
“You’re going to be fine,” Mum had said. “Better than fine.” Mum had released her then, hands on Aideen’s shoulders, smiling. Smiling!
In Irish History class, Dr. Scanlon’s been teaching them about the dead Irish heroes, Patrick Pearse and Eamon de Valera and that whole lot, the leaders for independence and self-determination, the righteous warriors, the rebels. Like them, Aideen will transform her powerlessness into revolution. She enters her parents’ bedroom and, without pause, fires a single brown egg at their beloved painting, Gretel and Hansel, a mess of primary colors, neither Hansel nor Gretel remotely discernible unless you count two crusty faceless blobs in the upper corner, a present given to them by their art collector friend, and showcased, since their wedding day, above their bed.
The first egg splats between two streaks of teal paint with a satisfying crack. The second glops down slowly, the weight of the yolk draggin
g down the gummy egg-white, toppling on itself until it lands unceremoniously on the bed’s tufted gray headboard. She launches another and another and another and another—one for every Gogarty!—and then tosses the carton in the middle of the duvet.
Aideen stands back and takes measure of her destruction. It’s not exactly radical. It’s not exactly Michael Collins with guns blaring holding off the British soldiers at the GPO. More damage needs to be inflicted. Aideen removes the biggest, sharpest knife from the kitchen drawer and returns to the eggy painting and stabs it straight down the middle, from stem to stern, like a surgeon splitting open her patient’s insides. The gash is so long, there’s no chance the wound can heal. There now, she thinks, it’s totally fucked, like me.
10
The school’s image—and fee—is pure Dublin 4, which is to say posh and clubby, but the grounds themselves are dubious. Once you pass a grand set of ornate gates and tool up a theatrical, windy drive, Millburn School is a set of low and flat and square, beige, grim, rain-stained buildings strewn about in random clusters across a quilt of fields. It’s as if a blindfolded pilot had hovered in the sky dropping matchboxes across patchy lawns of dying grass and then, growing bored, gave up and headed on home. It’s artless and so, to Kevin’s mind, mildly offensive. If you’re going to make something, keep beauty in mind.
The relentless drizzle doesn’t help. Unbelievably, Aideen has only grunted perfunctory yeses and nos throughout the drive to Millburn where the school, along with a Spar convenience store, two churches, and the Cock a Doodle, an eighteenth-century farmers’ pub, constitute the area’s sole business establishments. Even when Clean-Cut’s remix of “I’m Not in Love” had come on the radio and Kevin had cranked up the volume for his daughter’s benefit, she didn’t flinch. Fair fucks, he concedes: when he was her age, he had nowhere near such self-possession.
All along, Kevin’s instinct has been to mitigate Aideen drama as just another stage, even if they’ve been stuck in it for some months now—narky attitude, sulky mien, self-isolation. When talking to Mick, he jokingly refers to it as The Troubles. Kevin, an only child, sympathizes with the twin thing—the competition, the compelled sharing, the inevitable comparisons drawn, especially with two such different girls.
He takes comfort in recalling the other children’s difficult periods, frustrating while you’re in them but always fleeting, and only recognized as such in hindsight: Gerard’s shit-kicking any kid who tried taking a toy off him, Nuala’s refusal to eat anything but yogurt, Ciaran sucking on his pacifier well beyond toddlerhood—it wasn’t so long ago that they’d be putting on the kettle to warm up the grubby yoke so it was squishy and wet, just as their son liked it.
As he steers toward visitor parking, Kevin tries to quell a building anticipation—absurd and meaningless and wrong, he knows—to once again feast his eyes upon the school administrator, Ms. Rose Byrd, whom he’d met when he’d come to register Aideen. Ms. Byrd is a young blond goddess, simultaneously athletic and voluptuous, in possession of perfect mini-globe breasts leveraged against an unlikely prim cream-colored button-up blouse, the juxtaposition of which had driven him wild and had made him behave in a quite possibly embarrassing manner. At that brief, initial meeting in her cramped office, Kevin thought he’d been rakish, blasé, cracking wise about his own youthful school days, namedropping a playwright he’d been only slightly chummy with, though her blank look made it clear she had no idea who he was talking about. Kevin later thought plenty about that blank stare and came to view his quippy flirting as obvious, lecherous, decidedly middle-aged.
Now he kills the motor and turns to his daughter.
“You know the boring tale of how Gran sent me to dairy farm camp in Tipperary two hundred years ago?”
He stops when she responds with a deliberately wounding sigh. He had hoped she might take comfort, for once, in one of his only boyhood tales appropriate for adolescent ears, especially since so many thematic parallels exist: banishment, homesickness, despair. The truth was he had hated every sodding minute of that camp: tugging on cows’ teats in the black dawn, cutting bog until egg-like blisters swelled up on his suburban hands, kipping on a cot in a barn with a smelly woolen army surplus blanket, two hours of mind-numbing Irish study a night, and the locals who blackballed the Dublin kids as city-slick gobshites. What’s his point? Exactly why is he subjecting his daughter to a similarly miserable fate? Has he crossed over to the dark side of adulthood, which, before becoming a father, he’d made a solemn vow never to do? Decades later, doesn’t his own somewhat rebellious youth remain the backbone of a freethinking nonconformist character? Hadn’t he, after all, led a school boycott of Coke because of its support of apartheid? Hadn’t he formed a band, The Right Wailing Willies, in his parents’ garage? True, they’d only rehearsed a handful of times since two of them had no instruments and one was tossed out on the grounds that he secretly owned several Bee Gees albums. Still, it had all been in the spirit of bucking the system.
Now look at him: at fifty-three, he’s driving his semi-problematic teenager to one of Dublin’s most elite girls schools, paid for with the dregs of their savings account, because she’s a bit… what? Unhappy? Frustrated? Challenging? Look at his mediocre, not even real, problems, these tiny bourgeois anguishes he’s accumulated. What is he doing?
“My point is,” says Kevin, “you’re exceedingly tough and outrageously capable.”
All morning, he’s been trying to thwart a panicky sense that he must seize this landmark moment, one she’ll always remember; he has only two years left to infuse her with character and love, redemption, affection, parenting. He reaches across through the artificial blast of heat to take his daughter’s hand, an act which his own father, or mother, for that matter, never could, or would, have done. Mum’s affection seems to have only come on with old age, and when he draws from his hazy impressions of his father before he’d taken ill, he thinks of the man as a distant, unknowable giant.
Kevin squeezes Aideen’s fingers and says, “I love you very much.”
Aideen slaps his hand away and opens the car door.
A bell rings and figures in mud-brown skirts and jumpers with scarlet ties appear from every corner of the campus, as if they’d been waiting all along to spring from hidden spots. They haul heavy knapsacks, zigzagging among buildings in tight clusters and Aideen, as if already resigned to the place, removes herself from the minivan and dutifully files in. Kevin drops her bags inside the residential building and rushes to catch up with her.
As they approach the main office, he clears his throat, wipes moist palms down the front of his shirt, which, he notes, has a crust of fuck-knows on it and thinks, Don’t be a tit. He is acting the maggot, he knows. He is a married man. But, as it turns out, Ms. Byrd’s office is empty. He feels briefly devastated and then appalled at the intensity of his disappointment. This was to be, he sees, the highlight of his day, his week. After driving back to Dalkey, he has job sites to navigate, dry-cleaning to collect, and then lunch and various rounds of pickups and drop-offs and snacks and homework and hockey and soon enough dinner and his cycle, this humdrum rut of his, this life, continues.
Kevin pokes his head into the office beyond Ms. Byrd’s, which is the headmistress’s giant chamber, with the idea to call out a cheery hello, but there is no sign of Ms. Murphy, the eccentric hunchback who’s led the school since the midcentury with a no-nonsense Church of Ireland ethos, a fearsome figure in black robes with legs a razor has surely never traversed. Apparently, she’s infamous for regaling her students with disturbing survival sagas, offering up bizarre survivalist tips, like using wax paper to wipe your bum if the bog roll’s finished, or turning your knickers inside out to get a second, sensible wear out of them. The thought of Ms. Murphy’s skivvies is too much to bear so early in the morning, so Kevin trudges on, his daughter still ahead of him, beaming out to all in her path fear and thinly disguised self-loathing in equal measure.
They quickly find the entire sch
ool gathered in the assembly hall listening, or not, to a heavy milkmaid of a woman reading off a string of dull announcements to a sea of brown. He spots Ms. Byrd, who is mostly obscured behind a row of matronly staffers. Bad luck. An organ starts up accompanied by a frail, anemic version of “How Great Thou Art.” Only the old and the very young actually sing; the others lip-synch or stand sullenly in their class queues, gazing dreamily about the room and thinking of what? Boys? Their periods? The meaning of life? Fuck all if Kevin knows. And what of his own daughter, who is probably terrified? He looks down each row but she’s already blended in, or skived off; she’s nowhere to be seen, and so, he realizes with a pang, he can’t even say good luck, goodbye.
11
Millie, beside a modest fire in her grubby hearth, four fingers wedged like birds’ wings beneath each armpit, gazes through the oversized picture window at her sopping garden. She can never regard the unlikely pair of palm trees that sway in the ceaseless Dublin winds without also imagining, farther down her beloved coast, the bustling harbor with its handsome sailboats and ships, the red-capped lighthouse, the craggy shoreline. Perhaps one of these days she’ll walk the East Pier and treat herself to a 99 from Teddy’s, the ancient ice-cream stand that still serves, as in her girlhood, its signature whipped ice-cream cone, a Flake bar stabbed into its side.
Now Kevin steps into the frame. When he sees Millie seeing him, he tugs an imaginary tie from above his head as if he’s being choked by it. Beside him a tall, striking blonde keeps stride despite towering knee-length leather boots. She is rolling a suitcase behind her, which pierces Millie with fear. Is the woman moving in?
Of all the scenarios that troubled her fitful sleep last night, the one that Millie’s home aide will be a prude come to hold her old-lady hand and tsk about the untidy kitchen and make Millie feel a guest in her own home worries her the most. Millie dislikes, in a Pavlovian way, goodie-goodies, busybodies, librarians, elementary schoolteachers of a certain age, social workers and nuns (though she can tolerate a not overly preachy priest, the type who mightn’t say no to a few fingers of whiskey now and again).
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