by Orna Ross
It’s been bad in San Francisco, this imagining the worst. Now this evening, in Mrs D.’s house, with her letter, and its unanswerable questions and unspeakable schemes, burning in my hand, it’s unbearable. Outside, daylight is stretching itself into a long dusk. I’d forgotten how, at this time of year, an Irish evening doesn’t fade until well after ten.
Barely have I thought the thought but I’m up, out of bed and opening my suitcase, not the big blue one that still lies, looming, on the bed where Rory lobbed it, but my own, all-the-way-from-San Francisco suitcase that Maeve must have brought up here for me while I slept.
I pull on my jeans and walking shoes and sneak down the back stairs. From the front room, the sound of the party continues, muted now. Only the stragglers – those who cared most for Mrs D. and those who cared least, turned out only for the free drink — are left. I get out the back door without being seen. The cool, summer evening is like a gentle splash of water on my face. Once I’m down the path and across the long lawn, far enough away from the house, I stop to gulp in lungfuls of fresh air.
I’m outside the cowshed we used to call the byre, the place where I used to hide out from my family as a child. Grass has grown across the bottom receiver of its big sliding door. I pluck it away and push hard against the stiff, rusty wheels to get the door open. Inside, all is dust and neglect. Two broken bar stools sit on top of a rusted bottling machine. A punctured sofa spews yellow sponge filling. Still, it has the sweet smell of earthy straw that I remember and the same soft, pale light. For a moment, I am eight years old again, climbing the ladder that used to be in here, hiding my treasures up on the ledge under its tin roof.
Here was where I used to read, and write, and draw, and daydream. Here was where I kept my shells and stones and other treasures that would have drawn my family’s jeers on me. I had almost forgotten I ever did that, forgotten there was anything to forget.
I still feel it, whatever it was here that used to soothe me, and I linger, breathing in the silken, sodden air, its smell of soft times past. Resolving to come back, I pull the big iron door shut again. Right now, what I need after days of sitting in planes and trains and cars, is to walk. To get as much sea air as I can before dark.
I press on, down to the edge of the sandy, marly cliffside, down to the beach and on down to the water. I am here and Mrs D. is gone.
“She is dead,” I shout it to the empty sea. “Dead.”
The word skims across the water like a flat stone. It is over.
Over. Yes. But now there’s this command of hers to write about it and to live it all again. If I was to do it — and I’m not going to — I wouldn’t write the kind of book Mrs D. wants. The bits I’d be most interested in would be the last thing she’d want aired. And I wouldn’t start with our family’s glorious fight for freedom but here, at the end, with me and Rory and how we ended up. I’d probably start with that awful night in San Francisco, just before I heard she was dying. The night my own freedom ran out, chased by me.
And how could I write about how I felt walking along the solid city sidewalk that evening, through air thickening with the smell of spicy food, to meet up with Dee? How we sat at our usual table outside Benton’s, heads leaning into each other over bowls of pasta, while the sky faded from blue to purple, and lights sprang on across the city, their pretend promise making me ache, so that the night stretched into a second bottle of wine, which for me was the wrong, but at the same time, the only possible thing to do.
I don’t want to remember us, polishing it off, then going to that nightclub to gyrate around a dance-floor, pretending to have eyes only for each other and our own good time, pretending we were not on show, that we hadn’t already staked out our quarry: two guys we knew for a while, Steve and Paul, friends of friends of friends.
Paul. I so definitely do not want to remember him, asking me to dance and whether I was enjoying myself and what I worked at, and all in that bland and hopeless way that made me simultaneously pity and deplore him, so that on question three I had to pull out of the ritual and deliver, with a deadpan, straight face, the reply: “I’m in the sex business.”
It’s a line I’ve used before on men like him and I knew how he’d react: the simultaneous, contrary pulls of attraction and repulsion. “Really?”
“Yep. Really.”
His brain fizzed with options: Prostitute? Stripper? Lap-dancer? Telephone-sex operator? ‘Glamour’ model? Porn actress? Like me, he had had too much to drink. Unlike me, his thoughts slid across his face, clear to read.
“You don’t look like someone in the sex business,” he slurs.
“Why? Is there a look?”
He grins. “I thought so.”
“What? Big breasts, blonde hair, plastic face?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“That’s just a stereotype.”
“I guess it is. Still…”
“Still…I don’t look sexy enough?”
“Honey, not that…Definitely not that.”
“What, then?”
“It’s just…Oh hell…” We laughed at his tangle. “So go on then, what exactly is your business?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“Uh-uh,” he laughed again. “I’m not guessing. No way.”
I relented. My corner of the sex market, I told him, was advice. I am Sue Denim. Sue Denim Solves your Sex Problems. Read by millions of glossy-magazine readers all over the States and in Canada, Britain, South Africa and Australia too. Sue Denim: the Sexpert with Sizzle.
Dear Sue, Nobody has ever loved me…
Dear Sue, My genitals are so ugly I could never let any man see them…
Dear Sue, My boyfriend raped me last night…
Dear Sue, My penis is too small to satisfy a woman…
Dear Sue, I like to be whipped until my skin breaks…
Dear Sue, I’m crying as I write this letter…
I don’t flatter myself that I solve these people’s troubles. My value is simply in prodding them to sit down and write out their dilemma. In order to write, they have to put some order on their chaos, define it to themselves.
And when I question whether that small benefit justifies the easy and ample living I make from their distress, I console myself by asking, who does heal the troubles of the world? Psychologists? Psychiatrists? New-age therapists? At least I do not fool myself. I am a stranger, not an aunt; a hack, not a healer. I take pain and shape it into reading matter.
Sue Denim: Fraud.
He starts to kiss me during the third track when I lean back my head in invitation. There was a time when I used to prefer the preliminaries, the chit-chat and hold-off, the let’s-get-to-know-each-other-first, but somewhere along the line of my life, cutting direct to the physical came to seem more honest.
I try to settle into the soft small movements of lips learning about each other, the smell and taste of new mouth, leaning in so the kiss deepens, to the bone under the flesh, to the muscle of tongue. When the slow set fades, the lights come up and the thump of dance music resumes, we pull apart, our breath thick with the taste of each other.
I say, “Shall we get out of here?”
His eyes, heavy from our embrace, spring in surprise. It has been two, maybe three, minutes since we started kissing.
A sliver of hesitation, then he smiles.
“Yeah, OK,” he says. “Why not?”
No. I don’t want it, this memory. I shake my head to clear it, to return to where I am. I’ve arrived down at The Causeway, the high, compacted strip of sand dunes that joins Mucknamore beach to Coolanagh. A pathway, worn in its centre by feet, gets narrower and less defined the further out you go. Out here, the going gets tough, up and down the uneven surface of the dunes, and most turn back. I press on, allowing the physical effort to wipe my mind of thought.
The barbed-wire fencing and warning signs that mark off Coolanagh sands begin here: WARNING! they shout. DANGER! The Sands on this side of The Causeway are Unstable and U
nsafe. Do not Diverge from the Path.
The past opens out at my feet. I realise I am retracing the steps I took on my last night in Mucknamore, twenty years ago.
Disobeying the signs, I squeeze under the barbed fence, walk down to the edge of the dip in the sands they call Lovers’ Hollow and lie down for a time. I’m quite safe. I know Coolanagh of old and I know just where the dangers start, a little further out than here.
It was a mistake to stop. As soon as I lie down, I’m back in San Francisco, trapped in thought again. Seeing Dee wrapped around Steve in a slow lurch, as if the music hadn’t upped its tempo; giving me a thumbs-up behind his back, happy to be abandoned. Hearing him, Paul, asking me “Are you always so…decisive?” as we wait for a cab.
I knew then, if not before, just how it was going to go, that I really should quit and go home, but also that I couldn’t, just couldn’t, face my too-empty apartment and my too-full head. I climbed into the cab.
His apartment was a mess, strewn with clothes and dishes, so I refused his perfunctory offer of coffee and we moved straight to the bedroom. I let him take the lead and found myself jerked from arms around each other to bra-opening in seconds. Protest rose in me and I opened my eyes, expecting to see arrogance, a ‘we’ll-see-who’s-in charge-now’ expression on his face — but instead he floored me with a grin. Eager and excited, expectant, and in no doubt that I was equally enthusiastic. I smiled back, despite myself, let him slide me out of my clothes.
Sue Denim would not have approved. I shouldn’t be here unless it was what I wanted, she would say, and I should know why I wanted it. If, knowing that, I chose to remain, then proper physical attention was my due. Only I could guarantee my own pleasurable outcome. If he didn’t know how to give me what I wanted, then I should show him.
And Sue was right. I was wrong earlier when I called her a fraud. It’s the Jo who goes about her daily business who hides and evades. Sue is the better part of me who always rises with the right answer, the proper thing to do. She was right. What was I doing spreading myself naked on this stranger’s bed, pretending he was doing fine when he wasn’t? Why was I careful to lie on his pillow with one knee bent upwards, a position I know to be the most flattering to my ageing body, flattening the wad of fat that rings my abdomen?
Oh, we women deserve everything we (don’t) get.
In moments he was leaning over me, expecting entry, and again I was gripped by the urge to call a halt, to start again, but where? Back at the nightclub? When I refused coffee? When we started kissing in earnest? Instead, I opened to him.
Propping himself up on his elbows so that we touched only at the hips, he began. It wasn’t lovemaking, or even what I hoped for when we got together in the nightclub, sexual intercourse. No, he was the fucker and I was the fuckee. Slow at first, then faster and faster, ever more oblivious to the human being under him, until he came with a smothered groan and slumped down on top of me. As soon as consciousness returned, he rolled off.
Who would want to remember this? Or the next bit, even worse, when I met his eyes and found that look: distaste for his own need, now it was spent. A distaste that pointed in the same direction as mine: at me.
He lifted the duvet, half-heartedly inviting me into the hollow where he slept each night. Agreeing to that felt even more intimate than taking him into my body. He didn’t really want me there, but leaving would have meant engaging him in conversation, getting up and dressed, and arriving back at my empty apartment across the city in the middle of the night, opening the door on its hundred thousand questions.
I stayed. I slipped between his sheets, pulled his covers around me and, careful not to touch him, pretended to fall asleep until, eventually, I did.
He’s here with me still, in this sandy hollow six thousand miles away, making me groan aloud into the empty air. I get up and go further out, where the neck of The Causeway meets the chin of the island, then further on round to the far side where there are rocks and cliffs, where the sea birds swoop in and out of exploding spray each time a wave breaks.
On the west side of the island, there’s another sheltered cove where it’s safe to swim. I go down there, strip down to my underwear and run into the water, refusing to cower when the cold licks at my calves, my thighs, my groin. I push on until it’s waist height, then I throw myself forward into it. Ice thumps me in the heart and I gasp out loud.
I stretch my arms wide into a breaststroke and feel the salt water begin to warm to me, feel it buoy me up. After a while, I turn to float on my back and stare into the blue eyes of the sky. Small waves crest under me, rocking me gently, a comfort that confuses me, so I pull my knees into my chest, wrap my arms around them and will myself down to the bottom where I hold myself on my hunkers, breath trapped and swelling behind my nose. All of me clasped close and shut tight, except my ears, open to the muffled sounds of the sea.
I stay down until the last moment, until my lungs are fissured with pressure, until my heart is hammering. Up I rise, brain about to burst inside its skull, breaking the skin of the water, memory choked off by my body’s gulping need for air.
1966
Nine-year-old me lies underwater, holding my breath in the big old bath that is almost deep enough to swim in. Breaking the skin of the water, I surface, and feel for the stopwatch and the button to press. I wipe my eyes. Three minutes, twenty-two seconds this time. Fourteen seconds longer than the last try but forty-five seconds short of my personal best.
Now I have to get dressed and go downstairs. Drying off, I feel lighter as I always do after this underwater ritual, relieved of something. I have limits, but I can stretch myself.
Down at the kitchen table, I take my place across from my big sister, Maeve, in front of the bowl of soup that’s been poured for me. Mammy’s silence is packed full of the sounds of her work at the stove: sizzling meat, bubbling potatoes, clattering plates. Steam billows angry ghosts around Daddy’s vacant chair.
Maeve is bathed and scrubbed and in her Sunday best too, though it’s Monday. Easter Monday. And, even more special, the day Gran has been describing in capital letters, for months now, as The Golden Jubilee. Maeve tries to land a kick on my shin, her favourite mealtime occupation these days. I pull my legs to one side, afraid of the mark her shoe might leave on my white tights. That would give Mammy the out her anger is seeking.
This afternoon, our entire family, even Auntie Norah, is going to Enniscorthy, a town thirty miles away, to commemorate the jubilee. Fifty years ago today, Irishmen took part in a rising against British rule, starting the war that won Ireland her freedom. Gran was involved back then and, today, she is on the organising committee and has to get up on a stage in front of everyone to give the speech she’s been practising around the house for weeks.
The kitchen door opens and in she comes. I perk up. Maeve won’t have a free run at me now.
“Something smells good,” Gran says, her voice all happy. Then she sees Mammy’s face, which makes her look at the space where Daddy should be. “Ah no,: she says, “don’t tell me, not today…”
She moves across to the cooker. Mammy says nothing, just slaps six plates in a row along the counter. I send a mental message: Come over here, Gran, over here, but no. She lowers her voice, though not quiet enough: “Have you heard anything from him?”
“Not a thing.” Mammy divides the food among the plates. “I’m going to go in and collect him once we’ve eaten.”
“Yerra, let him rot there.”
“Don’t you think I want to? But how can I? If he isn’t with us today, we’ll be the talk of the place.”
I listen to this exchange, waiting for a pause. When it comes, I call across: “Hello, Gran!” and then notice, too late, the quiet lunge of my sister’s leg. A leather toe cracks against my shin.
“Yeow!” I screech out loud. The two adults turn.
“What’s the matter, pet?” Gran asks.
Maeve’s eyes burn a warning into the side of my face. “Nothing.”
“I hope you two aren’t fighting. What do I always tell you? Fighting…?”
“…solves nothing,” Maeve and I both answer in a sing-song voice together.
“That’s right,” says Granny Peg. “So,” she settles herself in between us, “how is little Miss Tickles today?” She curls her fingers at me in mock threat.
“Fine,” I say. And I am, now. My heart hums with love of her.
“And Little Miss Manners?”
Maeve wrinkles her nose at her, pretending to object to this name.
“Listen, girls, come here till I tell ye,” Granny Peg says, in that confidential voice of hers that we love. “Auntie Norah will be down in a minute and she’s after going to great trouble to get ready. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all told her how well she’s looking?”
Auntie Norah’s appearance is a great worry to Gran, who always has to coax her to wash her hair or have a bath or change her dirty clothes.
“So she’s definitely going?” Mammy calls over.
“Now Máirín, I told you, she has to go. There’s no question of her not going.”
“Even though you’ll be on the platform? Even though I’ll have the children to mind as well?”
“I’m sorry, a ghrá, but it can’t be helped. It would be all wrong to leave her at home on this day. You must see that.”
Mammy brings food over to us all, then takes her place at the table. We feel the temper swelling against her skin.
“I don’t know how I’ll manage,” she says. “You know what she’s like when she’s excited. She’s been like a hen on a hot griddle for weeks.”
Gran leaves the space where she should answer lie open.
Mammy tries again. “How will I ever manage the three of them, and probably on my own?”
“She has to be there, Máirín.” Gran’s quiet insistence is not like her. Usually she calms our mother, strokes her down from the heights of her anger with soft words and the right kind deeds. “Norah did her bit for Ireland as much as any of them who’ll be there today, more than most. You can’t expect her to sit home alone on the day that’s in it.”
