by Orna Ross
It was clear to Barney that this was what Ernie O’Malley admired, the same sort of never-say-die courage for which he was himself renowned.
Around the corner, they laid Denis Heffernan’s body on the path. Sullivan had notified first aid and said they were on their way with stretchers. Paddy Fleming came up to them on the street outside with Dick Sullivan. “The post office wasn’t occupied at all,” he said. “We were set up.”
“Fuckers,” said Sullivan. “That’s not war.”
Michael Kirwan lay half-upright, against a wall, a hand supporting his wounded side, face bunched with pain. O’Brien was bleeding badly from the chest. O’Malley went over to him. “Paddy, are you all right?”
He got no reply.
“I think he’s been shot in the lung,” Fleming whispered. “Best not to talk to him.”
The lull in the shooting brought spectators onto the street, already carrying the rumour that there had been a fatality.
“Oh my God, it’s true.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Who is it?”
“It’s Denis Heffernan.”
In seconds, it seemed, the crowd grew. Even the children were out, staring round their mothers’ legs. There was a ring around the body, a circle people didn’t dare to cross. They stood, awkward with shock, all their looks fixed on the same spot, as if there was nothing else in this world to look at but poor Denis, lying there on the pavement, his face open and pale as water, turned up to the sky. Barney took off his own jacket, put it over the dead face, wanting to shield him from the probing eyes. This isn’t a show, he thought, wondering whether to let a crack of his rifle into the air to scatter them all.
Then he heard the sound of a bell, its determined ring drawing closer. The ambulance came flying around the corner and the doctor and the Cumann na mBan girls with their medical armbands were jumping down, bristling with duty, organising stretchers and bandages and other first aid. But what was that other noise, that other, more terrible wailing? The crowd parted to allow a woman of late middle age – hair half put up, clothes half put on – come running through, shrieking. She fell to the ground beside Denis, threw Barney’s jacket off his face. The crowd stood still, very still as Mrs Heffernan lifted her son’s head onto her lap. Her words were indistinct but the sounds she made were unmistakable as she rocked him back and forwards, just as she once used to rock his little, baby self.
1972
It is evening, recreation time, the half-hour between study and bedtime that is one of the few unstructured times in the convent day. Tonight is November 1st, All Souls night. Dee, Monica and I are slumped over a radiator, thrilling each other with ghost stories. Monica is in the middle of a complicated tale about a ghost ship that can sail on land when the rec. room door opens and Sister Martha, the parlour nun, comes in. Sister Martha is the height of most first-year girls but many times wider and rounder. She looks around and starts towards us.
“What’s this about?” Monica says. “Who’s been doing something they shouldn’t?” If a nun is looking for you, it generally means trouble.
“Jo Devereux, you’re to come to the parlour.”
“What’s wrong, Sister?”
“You have a phone call from home. Come quick now and don’t be wasting your father’s money.”
The last time somebody got called to the telephone, it was for news of a dead relative. Granny Peg? Dear God, please God, no.
I follow Sister Martha through the clumps of brown-uniformed girls scattered around the hall. In one corner, a record player spins out Elvis Presley and eight pairs of girls jive through ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. At the games table, the Doyle sisters are once again beating all challengers at chess. Usually Dee and I are among those fighting around the record player, queuing to take off the show-band music favoured by the culchies, and replace it with the latest 45 by Marc Bolan or David Bowie, or LP by Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones. We deride their dum-de-dum country music – Bogman Shite, Dee calls it – and their foxtrots, waltzes and jives. When we dance, we dance alone, letting our bodies go with the beat of the music. Head-bangers, they call us, but the insult has no sting. We feel superior: a new experience for me.
Music is a seal on friendship. Under my pillow, I keep a small radio so I can listen to the pirate station Radio Luxembourg after lights out. Dee, her bed just three cells down from mine, listens to the same programme and we communicate by sneezing when we like a song, coughing when we don’t. Sometimes I cough even when I like something, if I think Dee might jeer. Singers like David Cassidy and Donny Osmond and David Essex – fancied by most of the other girls – are dismissed by Dee and Monica and me. Too clean, too nice, more like girls than boys.
We look for something else in our pin-ups and I find it in Marc Bolan. He is beautiful, with his slush-brown eyes and long curling dark hair, but it is not just his beauty that makes me shiver. Something else swims in the liquid brown of his eyes, something I acknowledge but cannot name. In the posters it is under my control; I can use him as I want. In real life, I know it would be the other way around.
I haven’t told Dee or Monica about Rory. I could never gossip about him, giggle over him, drop him into our talk. Instead, I concoct crushes on good-looking boys from St Peter’s College. One in particular I swoon over, a boy called John Foley. It is true that the set of this boy’s jaw sends my heart fluttering down into the pit of my body. That before we go out walking, I belt myself into my gabardine coat and adjust my beret with the thought that we might see him on the way and he might look at me. That at night I do deals with God: Get John Foley to talk to me and I will give up the bedtime probing of my body that I have recently embarked on, the secret fingering that had me looking forward guiltily to lights-out.
I have become a cauldron of sensation and John Foley and his jutting jawline is part of that. But neither he, nor Marc Bolan, nor the churning explosions I barter with God, have anything to do with Rory O’Donovan.
The corridor is dark and cold after the activity of the rec room and my loafer shoes sound loud on the linoleum. In the parlour, Maeve is already on the phone, called down from choir practice. She pops her eyes wide at me as the phone spills a long string of squeaks into her ear. Nobody is dead, anyway; I can tell that much from her face.
“OK, Mammy,” she says, after a little while. “Jo’s here now. I’ll put her on.”
She pulls another unreadable face, hands me the receiver.
“Hello,” I say.
“Siobhán.” It is Mrs D., clipped and businesslike. “I’m ringing because we’ve a bit of news here. Eileen is getting married.”
“Oh.”
“The thing is, she wants you to be bridesmaid.”
“Me?”
“Yes. The wedding is in three weeks’ time. I’ve told Mother Superior and she’s given permission for you both to come out for it. And I’ll be in next Saturday afternoon to take you off for a few hours, so we can go down town and buy you a dress.”
“All right.”
“So I’ll pick the two of you up on Saturday around twelve o’clock.”
“All right.”
“I’ll see you then, so. Bye now.”
“Wait…Who is Eileen marrying?”
As I ask the question, Maeve’s head sinks into her shoulders, like she’s ducking something that’s been thrown.
“Séamus Power,” Mrs D. says, after a pause.
“Séamus Power?” Does she mean the same Séamus Power who is first cousin to the O’Donovans?
“That’s what I said,” she snaps.
“Gosh.”
“I know…I know. What can we do only make the best of it?” The words sound weary, like she has used them before on herself and others. “I don’t know what she was thinking of…After all we’ve done for her.”
“It’s happening very fast, isn’t it? A wedding in three weeks?”
A yell punctures my ear. “What are you saying, you foolish girl? Did anybody hear you say that? Did
any of the nuns hear that?”
I look at Sister Martha. “No.”
“Keep your mouth closed about this, for God’s sake. Say nothing, do you hear me? Nothing to anybody, especially Geraldine Kehoe.” Geraldine Kehoe is a girl in the year above me, from Rathmeelin. “There’ll be talk enough without us advertising the thing.”
“All right. ’Bye.”
I replace the receiver and Sister Martha dismisses us back to our routine.
“God Almighty,” Maeve hisses, as we walk back along the corridor. “What made you say that? Do you do it on purpose or are you just plain thick?”
“You shut up.”
“Of all the men in County Wexford, Eileen had to pick Séamus Power,” Maeve says. “What a wedding it’s going to be, us on one side of the room, dozens of O’Donovans on the other and the bride’s family stuck in the middle.”
“Do you think they’ll go?”
“Of course. You know the Powers and the O’Donovans: they’re like that.” She holds up her middle and index fingers, fixed together. “Mammy said they’re definitely going.”
“What about Auntie Norah? Will she go?”
“Oh my God! That never struck me.”
“She’ll have to be invited,” I say. “She’s connected both ways.”
“Why don’t you ask Mammy about it on Saturday? That should make for a jolly afternoon.”
I make a face at her and we part. As I am walking back to the hall, the bell rings and the corridor suddenly swarms with faces heading towards the refectory for bedtime orange and biscuits. I decide to slip away to the dormitory for a few precious minutes alone. The loose knot of fright brought on by the ghost stories has gone, unravelled by a fiercer feeling. A feeling I want to have and hold, to take with me to bed, where I can hug it close.
Hope. A delicious, finger-crossing, heart-piercing hope.
* * *
He is there. As soon as I walk into the church, I know. I know even before I see him, on the aisle-end of a pew, almost halfway up. He faces the back door through which we, the bridal procession, have just entered. Turned round in his seat by the pounding organ announcing the coming of the bride.
So many times I have sat, rooted to one of these seats, a spectator. Now it is his turn to watch. I smile as I step up the aisle behind the bride, not at him but at everyone, like an actress beaming for the press. Eileen is the chief exhibit in this spectacle, but I too am on display, and I look good in my long blue dress, my face scrubbed and polished and made up, my hair scooped into a floral headdress; as good as I have ever looked. As we approach his seat, I slide him a look and let it rest on him for a second before sweeping past.
Up on the altar, I perform my bridesmaid duties as required: prettily. With my hair up, cool air teases the back of my neck. I imagine his eyes resting on the pale skin there and I shiver. The awareness that he is behind me is branded into my every move.
Afterwards, in the hotel, most of the men ignore the sherry reception and line up at the bar instead, three-deep, shouting for pints of stout and large whiskies. The women take the sherry and sit in sets around the reception area, little stemmed glasses pinched between their fingers. Between swallows, their lips twist sideways to one another with comments on the ceremony, on the cracks in Séamus’s whispered vows, or the finery of Eileen’s dress.
It is the women who are keeping the closest eye for any clash between the two families. We are in the corner nearest the door, the O’Donovans occupy the furthest end of the room and between us lies a gulf of hotel carpet that nobody intends to cross. I sit in Mrs D.’s female circle, with Maeve and Granny Peg and Mrs Redmond, who played the organ and sang in church. Auntie Norah, to everybody’s relief, has stayed at home. Also in our group are Mrs O’Neill, Eileen’s mother, and her sister, Mrs Maher.
I drink Coca-Cola, bottle after bottle of it put down in front of me by one person or another, while the hotel delays the meal to increase the profit at the bar. The sweet fizz adds to the excitement already popping inside me. From where I sit, I can I watch him without seeming to. He is at the far end of the room, in a circle of men that mirrors ours: with his older brothers and his uncles. I see him trying to join in when they burst into laughter, or slap his back, or spout asides into his ear.
On our table the glasses of sherry sit, barely sipped. Mrs D., as she tells everyone, would prefer a cup of tea any day. She feels awkward here, with all these people she half-knows. At home, in the house and the shop, she is the boss. Here she is exposed: a woman without a husband, a deserted wife.
Her friend, Mrs Redmond, admires my dress, addressing her remarks to Mrs D. “That’s a gorgeous shade of blue she’s wearing, Máirín. You have her lovely.”
“Ah, now,” says Mrs D.
“And what about Eileen’s dress?” says Gran, mindful of Mrs O’Neill beside her. “I never saw any dress as nice.”
Mrs Redmond slants a look across at Eileen, who is talking to the priest. “It’s very fancy all right. Was it made or bought?” she asks, knowing well that the rushed wedding left no time to have a dress made.
“Bought,” says Mrs O’Neill.
“In town, I suppose?”
“Some place in Dublin, I believe.”
“Dublin?” Mrs Redmond’s eyebrows disappear up under her perm. “Is that right? Imagine that.”
“I knew as soon as I saw it that it hadn’t been got around here,” says Mrs D. “No local dressmaker ever produced that likes of that.”
Mrs D. and Mrs Redmond are scandalized by the dress. Excessively expensive for Eileen, they think, and in the face of her shame, nothing short of brazen. This is what they said in our house last night. Now, in front of Eileen’s mother and aunt, they let the set of their faces speak.
Mrs O’Neill’s cheeks are pink. “I felt myself there was no need for it,” she says. “But…”
“Girls like to go all out for their weddings these days,” says kindly Gran. “And why not? Aren’t you only married the once?”
“Thank God for small mercies.” Mrs Maher takes the bite out of the talk by making everybody laugh but above her half-smile a pair of narrowed eyes have hooked into Mrs D.
“Ah, now, Mrs Maher,” says Gran. “Don’t go putting off the young ones.”
“That’s right, don’t.” Mrs Redmond touches Maeve on the leg. “This girl has probably got her eye on the bouquet later. Have you, Maeve? Will you be jumping for the bouquet?”
Maeve smiles at her. “I haven’t thought about it.”
“She’s way too young for any of that, Mary,” says Mrs D. “She has her studies to finish first.”
“Of course she has. I’m only joking with her. And how is the study going, Maeve?”
“All right, thanks.”
“Maeve is hoping to get into Carysfort College,” Mrs D. explains to Mrs O’Neill and Mrs Maher. “To be a national schoolteacher.”
“Oh. Like her grandmother was, once upon a time,” returns Mrs Maher, and the words are drenched with significance. The shot, obscure to me, finds its target. Mrs D. shrinks back in her chair, away from her pride in Maeve.
“Oh, yes,” says Mrs Maher, thumping her glass down on the table. “I was one of your mammy’s pupils, many moons ago.”
“You’re going a long way back there, Margaret,” Gran doesn’t seem bothered and Mrs Maher’s smile shows her argument is not with her.
“You never forget a good teacher,” she says. “And at my age,” she swivels her eyes back round to Mrs D., “You remember things that went on years ago better than what happened yesterday.”
A prickly quiet settles around this pronouncement.
Protected by the audience, I dare to play innocent. “You never told us you used to be a teacher, Gran.”
“It was a long time ago, lovey. Before I was married.”
“Maybe Maeve will be lucky,” says Mrs Redmond, twisting the conversation back to the present. “Maybe she’ll get a job back in Mucknamore when she qualifies.”
“Wouldn’t that be great?” says Mrs D. “That would be just too good to be true.”
“Give Father Pat a dance later on, Maeve,” says Mrs Redmond, “and he might look after you when the time comes.”
Again Maeve smiles, as if Mrs Redmond’s blather and the possibility of coming back here is pleasing to her, as if the snarls in the conversation are not happening. Is it possible that her smile is real? Or is her face like my own, a lid that seals off pickled thoughts? I imagine their faces if I were to do what I long to do: walk away from their cryptic baiting of each other, grab Rory O’Donovan by the hand and run out the door with him.
The day draws on. I buy cigarettes and sneak up to the ladies’ room to smoke. Dee has taught me how to inhale, drawing a fraction of smoke back through my nose. It’s a neat technique that we both consider to be sophisticated, but I need practice. The ladies’ room is empty, with a partition in front of the door that allows me plenty of time to drop the evidence down the plughole if someone comes in.
I like smoking in front of the mirror. “Let’s face it,” I drawl to my reflection, “I need a cigarette, the day I’m having.” Everybody has a way of smoking: it is a stamp, like your signature or your way of walking. It can look sophisticated or sad, cool or anxious. I practise Dee’s new method, feeling the nicotine jolt my brain. Inside me, a vein of frustration throbs.
I go back downstairs, endure the day bleeding on. I dance with Séamus, with each of Eileen’s brothers and with every other male who feels he has a duty to take out the bridesmaid. When not dancing, I sit quiet in Mrs D.’s corner, peeping across. How can anything happen here under the drilling eyes of our families? I feel my hopes for the day splinter and die.
Towards the end of the night, on my final visit upstairs to the ladies’, I let down my hair. My scalp is aching from having it pulled so tight, for so long. I take my comb from my little bridesmaid’s bag and run through it through the spring of red fuzz, unsnarling the knots. When I am finished, I lean across the basin, rest my scorching cheek against the glass. Tears swell behind my lids but I push them back. Later, in bed, I will cry. Not here.
