* * *
I enter Dublin on my own for the first time as a convicted criminal.
* * *
I find myself following a woman on her way to work. She is wearing a pair of runners with a pencil skirt and tights, takeaway coffee in one hand, briefcase in the other. She’s walking as if she’s trying to catch up with the rest of the day. I keep my distance a few paces behind her. We cross a wide bridge that vibrates under the weight of all our footsteps, bouncing under our feet as though it’s trying to cheer us up.
I get as far as O’Connell Street before I pluck up the courage to ask a guard to point me in the direction of Trinity. He laughs at me and I blush, hating myself. I set off in the direction he sends me with a new resolve to look like I know where I’m going.
I wait by the railings at the front gate for a while before entering. I watch people going in and out of the mouse-hole that leads into the college and wonder why they made the entrance so tiny. It reminds me of a disturbing episode of Oprah I eavesdropped on when I was six years old. When my grandad was alive, daytime TV was his kryptonite. After eating his dinner in the middle of the day, he’d sit down and watch either Oprah, Judge Judy, or Anne Robinson on The Weakest Link. On this particular episode of Oprah, a psychologist with floppy hair said that walking through doorways causes a brief lapse in memory. The audience of women gasped and nodded, remembering the times they left a room to do something only to stand there cluelessly scratching their heads.
I refused to leave the sitting room, convinced that now that I knew what the doorways were up to, they would wipe my memory clean. I clung to the armchair, burying my head in the crease of the cushions, kicking and biting Mam’s hands when she tried to pull me up. In the evening, I gave up the fight and she dragged me into the kitchen to eat my tea. I crossed the threshold wondering how long it would take for me to forget who I was.
This doorway feels like it has the power to do something similar. It doesn’t matter who I am. Once I walk through that door I will be changed. I’m not prepared for this. It feels like I should have a funeral for myself.
I make it look like I’m waiting for someone in case anyone is watching me. I look at my phone and my watch and scan the curious parade that passes by. Androgynous grunge, preppy blazers, cropped capri trousers, Abercrombie and Fitch jumpers, Ralph Lauren T-shirts, tote bags adorned with badges for obscure political campaigns.
A girl wearing a yellow raincoat gets off her bike. It’s one of those vintage bicycles with a wicker basket at the front. I have no idea how she is pulling off the raincoat. Black hair. Fringe. Freckles. Nose-piercing. She looks happy—excited, but not in an embarrassing way.
I am wearing my best pair of jeans and one of Billy’s check shirts with the cuffs rolled up. I look like I’m going out to dig potatoes. I watch the girl disappear through the hole to the entrance into the front square. I take a deep breath and follow her.
* * *
Standing under the banner that heralds Freshers’ Week, I am painfully aware of how fresh I am. I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe a designated corner for the purpose of making friends. I’m used to knowing a person’s name, their dog, and what their da is like drunk before I risk speaking to them. There are stalls and tents full of people who seem to know each other already. English accents clip the cobblestones. I wander around like a self-conscious ghost waiting for someone to notice me.
“Hello!”
“Jesus.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.” A bearded avocado is talking at me. “I’m with the Vegan Soc and we are playing a word association game to try and debunk the myths surrounding veganism. So, like, if I say vegan, what’s the first thing you think of?”
“Hitler.”
“Excuse me?”
“Hitler was a vegan. At least, people say he was. It was propaganda, probably. Or bullshit.”
“OK, interesting. You still associate the term with that factoid even though it was proven to be false.”
“Something about Hitler sticks in the mind.”
“Would you ever consider going vegan?”
“I don’t know. I live on a dairy farm.”
“Dairy farming takes babies away from their mothers,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s joking or serious. “Cows have been modified over centuries for human consumption. They are Frankenstein’s monsters, every single one of them.”
“But Frankenstein only had one monster,” I say.
He pauses to think about this for a moment until he comes to a conclusion in his head. “Exactly,” he says, pointing his finger at me as though he has crossed a finishing line and won the conversation.
“What’s your name?” I try.
“Ricky.”
“Ricky,” I repeat. “I’ll try to remember that.”
“You won’t.” Ricky looks like he is going to say something and then stops himself. “Go vegan,” he says instead, and fist-pumps the air.
* * *
I join the end of a queue to look like I’m doing something.
“Is this the queue for registration?” The girl in the yellow raincoat is talking to me.
“I think so,” I say.
“Great, I need to do that today. What course are you doing?” she asks.
“English,” I say.
“Oh great, me too. Are you in Halls?”
“Ha?”
“Halls. College accommodation?” she asks.
“No, I live at home. About an hour away.”
“Oh, you’re a commuter! How are you finding it?” She says it like she is genuinely interested in my well-being.
“Well, I’ve only done it once so far.”
“Oh right, yeah, that was a stupid question.” She pauses. “I’m Santy, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Santy. You’ve a cool name.”
“Thanks very much. My parents are big on Greek mythology.”
“Oh.” I’ve never heard of a Greek called Santy.
“What’s your name?” Santy has the type of green eyes I’ve only seen in music videos.
“Debbie.”
She laughs. “Sorry, it’s just—you just pointed to yourself.”
“Did I? Sorry, I’m not used to introducing myself.”
Santy is from Dublin, but she doesn’t speak like the Dublin kids in the Gaeltacht who sounded so posh they may as well have been foreign. She sounds normal. Grounded. Unspoiled. There has to be something wrong with her.
“Santy!” A girl wearing a beret walks toward us. She is short and stocky, wearing expensive glasses and carrying a brown leather satchel.
“Hiya! Debbie, this is my roomie, Orla. She’s from Clare.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say, giving the girl a firm handshake. Anyone else from the country is my competition. There’s only room for one gobshite from the back-arse of nowhere. I needn’t have worried though. Orla sounds like a member of the royal family.
“What are we doing today?” she asks Santy.
“I need to register,” Santy says.
“Great, me too.” Orla pulls a folder out of her satchel. “I think I have everything.”
“Are we meant to bring stuff with us?” I ask.
“You don’t have the forms?” Orla asks.
“What forms?”
“You’re supposed to register online. You got an email.”
“I haven’t seen it yet,” I say. “Our Internet at home is shite.”
“Oh dear.” Orla looks embarrassed for me. “There’s really no point in queueing if you don’t have the forms.”
Santy tilts her head to the side and looks at me like I’m a stray dog she’s found in her back garden. “It’s OK, you can do it any day this week,” she says. “All they’re going to do is give us condoms and a rape whistle.”
“Do the boys get rape whistles too?” Orla wonders.
“I suppose so,” Santy says. “It would be sexist not to give them to everyone.”
“Do you kno
w where I could find a computer?” I ask.
“Have you checked the library?” Orla clearly thinks I’m an idiot.
“Oh right yeah, sorry,” I say, and apologize my way out of the line.
“It’s that way,” Orla says, pointing in the opposite direction.
“Thanks.”
I pretend to walk toward the library. I open up my purse and count up coins to buy a ticket for the train home.
Not Maud Gonne
I dump my bag in the kitchen and go straight out to the yard. I find Billy in one of the pens about to bottle-feed a newborn calf. He clutches a big plastic carton with a tube hanging out of the hole where the lid should be. He sees me watching and takes exaggerated steps as he sneaks up on his victim. She scarpers as soon as he lays a hand on her.
“Come here ya little bollix,” he says, grabbing the calf by the tail and pulling her back to him.
“Bitch,” I correct him. “She’s a girl. It’s the same with the cows, you’re always calling them bastards but they’re women.”
“The day I have to worry about the gender identity of cows is the day I lie down on the flat of my back for a bit of euthanasia.” He shoves the plastic tube into her mouth and down her neck, then turns the bottle upside down and holds it above his head. The beestings trundles out of the bottle into the calf’s stomach. I wonder if she is able to taste it.
“You look shook,” Billy says.
“I am.”
“How’d it go today?”
I shake my head and feel myself go red.
“That bad?”
“Why did you never tell me there was a Greek called Santy?” I ask.
“Ha?”
“A girl I met. Her name was Santy.”
“Good for her,” he says.
“I thought you knew all of them.”
“The Greeks? A whole ancient civilization? I’m flattered.”
“You talk about them like you do.”
Billy shoves his cheek out with his tongue like he’s trying to work out a sum in his head. “Let me get this right. You’re thick with me for not telling you something I thought you already knew.”
“No, I’m thick with you because you talk like you own everything.”
“Wow-wee. That’s some accusation.”
I hop the gate and sit cross-legged in the straw. “And now I sound like a gobshite.”
“You do. This girl . . . Her name didn’t happen to be Xanthe, no? X-a-n-t-h-e. That’s a Greek name.”
“Oh fucking hell.” I collapse into the straw. Blood rushes to my head. “I kept calling her Santa Claus’s nickname.”
“Well, now you know.”
“How can I have lived this long without knowing anything?”
“‘I know that I know nothing.’ Socrates. By the way, other people know about him too. I’m not sitting on him.”
I pick up a strand of straw and twirl it in my fingers. It goes from being two blurry strands into one strand when I open and close my left eye. “I hate being stupid.”
“You’re not stupid. Just, maybe, naïve?”
“Well, that’s condescending.”
“There’s nothing condescending about it. Naïve is a great word. You should look it up.”
“Give it a rest.”
“Naïf, from nativus meaning natural or innate. It has the same roots as the French verb naître—to be born.” He pulls the tube out of the calf’s mouth. It trails across the straw like an umbilical cord. “We’re all naïve. There’s no other option.”
“It must be exhausting being so profound.”
“I’ve taught you everything I know,” he says, clanking the gate open.
“I think that’s the problem.”
“Are you making me my tea?”
“Do I have a choice?”
I hold out my hand and he pulls me up from the straw.
Outside the shed, we pass three dead calves piled on top of each other.
“Notice anything strange about that one?” Billy says, poking the one in the middle.
“It’s dead?”
He turns the calf over with his boot. “Its legs are in the middle of his belly.”
“It’s like Chernobyl out here,” I say. “What was wrong with the other two?”
“They were too big. The bull gives calves too big for the girls to push out. I did my best but those are the casualties.”
“Oh.” I nod, and try to be in control of how I feel about that piece of information, as though knowing something about the problem could lessen it somehow.
* * *
I take out ham, tomatoes, and butter from the fridge and toss them onto the table.
“When I say vegan, what’s the first word you think of?” I ask.
“Hitler,” Billy says.
“Same.”
“Although, he probably wasn’t.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I start chopping the cherry tomatoes in half. “I didn’t apply for my grant on time.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m allergic to reality.”
“You’re going to have to get over that. Is there a way I can pay your fees for this year?”
“You can’t afford to be doing that.”
He fills up the kettle by the snout. “You can’t afford not to go to college. You want out of here.”
“I’m not ready.”
“What do you mean you’re not ready? You should be itching to get out.”
“Well, I’m not,” I say. “We don’t even have proper Internet.”
“I can’t really get a signal from the roof of my yoke,” Billy says.
“I’ve no money to get a laptop.”
“Is that what this is about? You can’t go to college because our broadband is shite?”
“It’s not just that, it’s loads of things. Like, who’s going to look after Mam?”
“That’s not your job.”
“See you say that, but someone has to keep an eye on her. That someone is not you.”
“To be fair now, you’re not great at it either.” He sits down at the table. “Since when were you Mother Teresa? You’re looking for excuses to stay when you should be raring to get out of here.”
“Just for the year. I’ll take a year out. I can defer my course and go back next year. Do it properly.”
“There’s never a right time to start anything.”
“There is. I want to live in town.”
“Hang on.” He puts his hand up and swallows his gobful of sandwich. “Let me get this straight. You come home traumatized after spending a few hours in the place, and now you want to move there?”
“I’ll apply to stay in college accommodation.”
“In a city that just scared the shite clean out of you.”
“I’ll save up this year. You don’t have to pay me as much as James.”
“No fear of that. I don’t pay him enough for all the work he does in the yard, never mind the time he spends baby-sitting your mother. That’s all done pro bono.”
“Just give me enough to move out next year.”
“To throw away on paying rent to live in a box in town?”
“It’s what people do,” I say.
He licks his index fingers and picks up the crumbs of brown bread like a child. “I’ll see about getting you a caravan.”
“Is that a yes then?” I ask.
“It’s a fart in the wind is what it is.”
“Well, I’m not going back anyway. I can’t.”
“You can and you will.”
“You can’t make me.”
“Ah Jesus, Debs, listen to yourself. Do you realize how spoiled you sound? A day in Dublin has done this to you.”
I hold back my head, trying to force the tears back down. I’ve always cried easily. I hate myself for it, which makes me cry even more. I let out a few sniffles.
Billy sighs, embarrassed by my tears. “Come on now, less of that. Chin up, snowflake.”
“Do
n’t call me that.”
“Don’t call me that,” he mocks me.
“You’re such a child,” I say, but it’s done the trick. I’ve stopped crying. I wipe the tears away with the sleeves of my shirt.
“Debs.” He waits until I look at him. “The city frightens you. Don’t let that stop you. Get to know it.”
“Do you know that my only experience of town is hanging around Collins Barracks and the GPO with you?” I ask.
“My stint at trying to radicalize you. You’re no Maud Gonne.”
“Neither was she. An English-born Irish revolutionary muse. How’d she swing that one?” I dunk a fig roll into my tea.
“Her father was a Mayo man. It was hardly her fault she was born in England. Anyway, she broke free of her naïvety.”
I catch the wet biscuit in my mouth just as it’s about to fall into the tea. “She allowed herself to be mythologized.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“I think so.”
Billy stands up and slip-slides in his socks toward the back door. “You’re going to college this year,” he says. “If I have to foot the bill, so be it.” He bends down to put on his boots. “Learn how to drive and I’ll sort out the Internet,” he says, and slams the door behind him.
Saoirse
Our house is tucked into a bend at the foot of a hill. We call it Clock’s Hill because that’s the name of the man who lives in the bungalow at the top of it. I don’t know what his real name is, or why everyone calls him the Clock. The Clock cycles past our gate every day on his way to the shop to get the paper. He never says hello. He smells like turf from ages ago and is the only man I know who smokes a pipe. Sometimes, James enlists him to stand in a gap when we’re moving cattle and then I feel obliged to talk to him because he’s old and lonely. He doesn’t say much, but sometimes tries to guess my age. He always thinks I’m much younger than I am and looks at me skeptically if I bother to correct him.
Our cattle dot the fields on either side of the road that rolls down from the Clock’s house to the village. The steeple of the church peeks over the top of the trees. The hedges are trimmed to accommodate the view that is framed by the branches of two oak trees on either side of the road. A sign that reads FÁILTE is nestled on the inner bend of the hill opposite our house, welcoming people as they pass through our village on their way to somewhere else.
Snowflake Page 2
