The House that Jack Built

by Catherine Barry

  Mam came in with some tea and biscuits. She was being extraordinarily kind of late.

  ‘David’s annoying your father again,’ she told me. ‘He won’t rest until he lets him out to the pond.’

  Dad had built a beautiful goldfish pond at the end of the garden. David had only one thing in mind: to get the goldfish and kill it. We knew that, because Dad was on his fifth fish. It was when the fourth one went missing that we copped on. Dad quizzed David about the disappearing fish.

  ‘The cat got him,’ he said innocently. ‘I saw him with my own two eyes/ he reassured my dad. It was a very good explanation, except for the fact that they didn’t have a cat. He was snared good and proper.

  ‘There’s some tea, love. Taking a trip down Memory Lane, are you?’ she asked, peering over my shoulder.

  ‘Just following up on stuff from the course,’ I answered, ramming two biscuits in my mouth.

  ‘Pity they don’t teach you manners, dear.’ She left me alone in the attic. I opened the diary and started to read.

  I was eleven years old in 1974. I had made some new friends in Belgrove Secondary School. It was a year when all kinds of new and exciting opportunities were opening up to me — not least of all my emerging sexuality. I had begun to notice boys. My friends and I would peer over the wall that separated them from us at school. We often sent ‘aeroplane’ letters over it, hoping for a reply. One letter was returned — in a million tiny pieces. I could hear the laughter from the other side.

  Among my new friends was a girl called Michelle. She had big red cheeks and a very jolly disposition. One day, she invited me to visit her house, which was on a new estate not far from my own house. A lot of new families had begun to move to Clontarf. Buildings were being erected overnight. The population was growing rapidly. I was delighted to be invited to one of the big new houses. My father had admired them in passing. They were very grand and expensive. The people who bought them were very rich, or so we thought.

  I arrived at my new friend’s house and knocked on the door. She came out to me and took me off to meet her other friends. There were a group of about ten. They had a large playing field in the estate and they gathered there daily. It didn’t take long for me to notice there were plenty of boys around too. It was a bumbling eleven-year-old’s heaven. The girls were immaculately dressed. I was envious when they appeared in pretty floral smocks, that summer’s fashion rage. Some of them even had espadrilles that tied up to the knee. They looked smart and beautiful. I felt like a torn pocket. Still, it didn’t seem to bother them.

  Pretty soon, I was visiting the estate every day after school. It was a welcome break from the constant fighting at home. I was delighted with my new flock of friends. We shared a passion for Abba, who had recently burst on to the music scene, having won the Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Waterloo’. We had never heard anything like it. Even our parents were bopping to their lively dance beats. We congregated daily at the wall — a meeting-place for all us kids. If nobody was there you didn’t have to feel odd. You just sat there; eventually someone would come along. In the summer of that year there could have been up to twenty or thirty kids. Sometimes we spilled out on to the main road and walked into St Anne’s. We played great games of rounders.

  The boys were all members of the local Catholic Boy Scouts. To encourage the girls to have fun too, The Ventures were born. We would camp in Larch Hill. The girls would cook, the boys collected wood and did manly stuff. They were wonderful days filled with fun and excitement and the chance that someone might want you for their girlfriend. To make this possible, we realised we needed some privacy. Frequently parents would watch from their doors, wise to the sexual revolution taking place in our bodies. To escape them we constructed our very own ‘den’ in the back of an empty workers’ yard not too far from the estate.

  There we smoked cigarettes and swapped dirty jokes which none of us understood. Most of us would have had our first innocent brush with sexual contact then. I kissed a boy for the first time after losing in a game of ‘Truth or a Lie’. A piece of paper was folded up into a box-like construction and twisted backwards and forwards. When it stopped, you had to choose a particular flap and when that was lifted, you had to obey the instructions written underneath. Mine was to kiss a local boy. The kissing was not done in the den, of course. I walked down a lane and sat on an old water tank. The boy, Patrick, followed me down. He leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. Just a peck. It felt nice and warm. I was almost levitating from the thrill.

  In the group, we decided to go and see Jaws in the Savoy cinema. I had nobody to accompany me until the day before the show, I was walking home from school when Patrick came running up behind me.

  ‘Will you go with me?’ he yelled into my face.

  ‘OK,’ I answered.

  That was that. I was officially betrothed. We went to the cinema with the gang and he tried to put his hand up my skirt. I told him to get lost. The relationship ended two days and three hours later, when he ran up to me again in the same fashion after school.

  ‘It’s all off,’ he yelled at me.

  I was heartbroken for at least twenty minutes, until another fat little boy called Sean ran up behind me and shouted, ‘Eh, will you go with me?’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  I was going with him for three weeks, although I never actually had a conversation with him in all that time. But I was going with him! I had a boyfriend! That was all that mattered. One thing was for sure; these strange specimens called ‘boys’ behaved very oddly indeed. My confusion lasted for some time. Twenty-nine years to be exact.

  Around August of 1974, my mother called me into her bedroom and handed me a small booklet.

  ‘Read that,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, turning it over from back to front.

  ‘It’s about the birds and the bees,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I went and sat on the stairs. Girls’ Talk it was called. Published by the wonderful Catholic Association of Ireland.

  ‘Don’t read it there.’ My mother whooshed me into the bedroom.

  This must be interesting, I thought. I opened it up and began to read, but I couldn’t make head or tail of it. I remember it saying something like God would bring the man and woman together, and through God’s love and the Holy Spirit a child would be conceived. It would have been handy if it had explained exactly how the child was conceived. It omitted to tell me that. I went to ask my mam.

  ‘Mam, what does it mean…’

  ‘Read the book, love. All your questions are answered in there.’

  It seemed to me that she was as confused as I was. One thing was for sure; she didn’t want to enter into any long debate about it. I threw the book under the bed. That was the end of my sexual education. The rest of my knowledge was picked up under the clock-tower in St Anne’s Park and the double-seaters in dark cinemas like ‘The Green’.

  It was unfortunate because around this time I began to feel quite ‘strange’; an uncomfortable feeling had come with my changing body. Outwardly I looked like a kid but inwardly Mother Nature was a busy bee.

  One day, I was sitting in class when I felt a dull ache between my legs. I shuffled and twisted but the dull ache moved on to my back and around into my tummy. I asked if I could be excused to go to ‘An Leithris’. When I got there, I pulled down my pants to find a dark brown stain. I thought I had shat myself and I was embarrassed. Too embarrassed to tell my teacher. I bravely sat out the rest of the school day in my dirty pants. At home I went to the toilet again. The dark brown spot had turned into a bright red bloodstain. Christ! I thought I was dying. I was bleeding to death and didn’t know what to do. I grabbed some toilet tissue and rammed it into my knickers. I was very upset. Perhaps I had cancer or something?

  I decided I would have to confide in my new friend Michelle. I mounted my bike and headed for her house. The pain was still niggling me and I could feel with each movement of
the bike the trickling blood oozing out of me. Michelle’s mother eyed me up and down as I hobbled into their porchway. We climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

  ‘I think I have leukaemia,’ I started.

  ‘What?’ Her eyes were wide at the prospect of knowing someone who was fatally ill. ‘My cousin’s friend has leukaemia. She gets nosebleeds. My sister said she would bleed to death. That’s what happens.’ She only managed to increase my panic.

  ‘I’m bleeding!’ I burst into tears.

  ‘I don’t see any blood. Where is it?’ She peered up my nostrils.

  I was going to have to tell her. ‘I’m bleeding down there,’ I whispered, pointing between my legs.

  ‘Out your front or your bum?’ she asked.

  ‘My front!’ I blubbered.

  ‘Sounds like leprosy to me.’

  I howled even more.

  At that point Michelle decided to consult her mam. She didn’t want any ‘bits’ falling off on to the new Curragh carpet. She was gone for ages. I was sure I could hear the wail of an ambulance siren heading in this direction.

  I was glad I hadn’t told Mam. She would have had a heart attack. My dad would be beside himself with grief, and take his own life. Three deaths in one family were enough. I didn’t want to be responsible for his as well. I was wearing my shorts and the blood had begun to seep through. If they didn’t come quickly, I’d have to swim for it.

  Michelle’s mother burst through the door. ‘What’s your mother’s phone number, dear?’ she asked in a snotty voice.

  I gave her the number.

  ‘You have the the “monthlies”, dear. Here, put this in your pants.’ She dangled a Southalls Sanitary Pad in front of me, making sure not to cross the invisible line in case she got it herself.

  What was it I had? Was it like the mumps or something? I went to the bathroom and put the big wedge of cottonwool into my pants. Everything was destroyed. I wanted my mam.

  Ten minutes later I heard her knock at the door. I longed to run down the stairs and bury myself in her strong arms. Instead I wobbled down the staircase, unused to having something stuck between my legs. Mam was quiet. She smiled at me. I noticed she didn’t have much to say to Michelle’s mother. The latter didn’t seem to have anything to say to either of us. I didn’t care. Mam was here now and she was going to explain all of it. We walked a little down the road and then she bent down on her hunkers so she was eye-to-eye with me.

  ‘Well, Jacqueline. I understand you became a woman today.’ And she kissed me on the cheek. That was it. That was all she said. I bled for eleven days, nonstop. Mam went and bought a big packet of the nappy things. They had big loops at either end of them. I didn’t ask what they were for. I just shoved them in there every few hours. When they were used, Mam instructed me to wrap them up in toilet roll, and hide them in a plastic bag in the wardrobe. When the bleeding had finally stopped, she took me and the bag into the garden. She lit a fire at the end wall. I was certain I was going to be burned at the stake like St Joan of Arc. I was a witch. I was diseased. I had some terrible affliction that had to be kept a secret. Even Dad didn’t know I was sick. In reality, I was about to turn twelve years of age and I had just experienced my first period. Perhaps if Mam had taken the time to explain the facts of life to me, the whole ordeal might have been less traumatic. I needed to know the hardcore details. I needed to know I was normal. I had already accumulated enough strange feelings to isolate me from others.

  The last thing I needed was to feel even more different. Now I had a bleeding ‘front’. A right weirdo altogether. I never mentioned the incident to any of my friends, but from that day onwards things changed on the new estate. The girls began to treat me like an outsider. They were treating me appropriately, or so I thought. I was convinced it was because of the ‘leprosy’.

  I continued to call for Michelle, although her attitude was anything but friendly. I got the distinct impression it wasn’t an attitude of her own making. In school, she played with me constantly. In contrast, when I called at her house, she was cool with me, and always seemed to be doing her homework. Being the young idiot that I was, I simply did not cop on. The coolness soon extended around the estate. I was finding myself sitting on the wall alone, more and more. They gathered at the other end, chatting and playing. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. The only people who seemed to show any interest in me were the boys. I didn’t want the boys. I wanted to be with the girls. This went on for some weeks…

  I put the diary down for a moment and went to the attic window. In the back garden I could clearly see David standing close to the goldfish pond. My dad sat in supervision on the other side of the pond. I knew David’s tactics. They eyeballed each other like John Wayne in the westerns. Who would crack first? Mam came in again with some strawberries and left them beside the diary. I munched a few and went back to reading.

  One day, I decided to call for Michelle one last time. When I knocked at the door, I saw her mother peep from behind the curtains. Michelle came to the door, opening it only a little and jutting her nose out through the gap.

  ‘Are you coming out, Michelle?’ I asked, my voice filled with hope.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. My mam said I’m not allowed to play with you any more.’

  I stood there. ‘Oh,’ was all I could manage.

  She shut the door in my face.

  I cried all the way down Vernon Avenue. I let myself in the back way and sat at the kitchen table crying.

  ‘What’s up with her?’ Dad asked Mam. Why didn’t he ask me?

  My Mam had a silent conversation with him behind my back. You know the ones that are ‘mouthed’ with a few hand gestures. I distinctly saw her pointing ‘down there’.

  Dad cleared his throat. ‘I see,’ he said flatly. He opened his newspaper and started to read. I went upstairs and lay on my bed. I was extremely upset. I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. I knew Michelle liked me and I had always been polite around her mother.

  I desperately wanted Mam or Dad to ask me what was wrong. I needed their help more than ever, at that delicate age. I hadn’t got the sense to walk away. The rejection only spurred me on to try harder. I now sat daily at the end of the wall while the abandonment spread from family to family. Soon, I was not welcome at any of their houses, but I was not put off. I found out from the boys where they were all going each day.

  They frequently went to the CRC swimming pool. I followed them alone and jumped into the pool. They ignored me and left me at the shallow end to talk to myself while they dived and splashed and played. Even in the changing rooms they left me at the other end. I stubbornly persisted. I had to. I had no explanation. I had to find one.

  Through the grapevine I heard that Liz, one of the girls, was having a birthday party in her house. I was cute enough to know that if I just turned up they wouldn’t send me away. So that’s exactly what I did. I knocked at the door of the house that displayed balloons on its knocker. Her father answered. He greeted me coldly but invited me in. It had worked. My second real stab at defiance! It was even sweeter than the first!

  Inside the house, the other kids had all arrived. I handed Liz a small present that my mother had paid for. They all looked at it as if it contained something contagious. She put it with the others. The food on the table was a glorious spread of homemade goodies. Her mam had done a fine job, making a tortoise out of rolled-up tinfoil and its spikes held cocktail sausages on the end. I was afraid to help myself. Nobody was offering me a seat, let alone anything to eat. It only occurred to me a few minutes later that I did not want to stay. I had made my point. I took my coat and left.

  Thinking back on it, I was proud of myself at such a tender young age, for having the balls to do it. ‘Well done, Jack!’ I said to myself out loud.

  Some weeks later I also invited myself to another girl’s ‘home disco’. It was held in their garage. I arrived clad in my tartan gear, for I had jumped on the Bay Ci
ty Roller bandwagon. I wore my leather wristband that came all the way from London. It had Eric inscribed on it, for I was his number-one fan.

  The garage had been beautifully transformed with a flashing spotlight system. The girls gathered in one corner, the boys in the other. I stood awkwardly in between them both, a place as neutral as I could find. I was duly ignored at that gathering. I wondered now where I had got the confidence from to behave so boldly. It was my old friend defiance, I suppose. I spent most of my waking hours trying to figure out what I had done to cause this latest disaster. As with every other problem in my life, it never occurred to me that I had in actual fact done nothing wrong at all!

  I handled it the exact same way as I had handled all the other ‘situations’. I invented something bad about myself to justify others’ rotten behaviour. After all, it must have been me. It seemed I was cursed — I could do nothing right. I couldn’t even make a friend. This time I decided I was very little fun to be with. That was the problem. I would have to be funnier from now on. I was too quiet, too reserved, and too damn plain. With that decision made I went about redoubling my efforts. Alas, it was all in vain. I was on a collision course with myself and had set standards that I would find impossible to meet.

  Rereading this old diary, I realised with increasing alarm what I had done to myself. Once again, I had internalised others’ behaviour as being my fault. This thread of self-blame ran through my entire childhood. I felt so sorry for eleven-year-old Jack, and what she had suffered. I closed the diary — I couldn’t bear to read any more. I never had found out what had happened to cause such revulsion towards this young girl. Looking back at it now, I couldn’t accept that it had anything to do with having my first period. It seemed so ridiculous now, although at the time it appeared to be the logical explanation. It was a mystery that had never been solved. However, there was someone who might be able to throw some light on it…