by Orna Ross
The door creaks open and I jump back, as if I have been doing something wrong. I turn on the tap to pretend to be washing my hands. Mrs D.’s face appears around the partition. “There you are,” she says. “We were thinking of sending out a search party.”
The soap revolves around my clean palms.
“You’ve been gone so long Eileen’s gone up to her room without you. It’s one of the bridesmaid’s duties, you know, to help the bride change into her going-away outfit.”
“I didn’t know it was that time. I’ll go up to her now.”
“Forget it, it’s too late now. I sent Maeve instead. What were you doing up here for so long?”
“Nothing, really.”
“You took your hair down.”
“It was giving me a headache.”
“It’s not half as smart down.”
“It doesn’t matter now, though, does it? It’s nearly all over.”
“Thank God. As soon as the going-away bit is done, we can get on home.” She sinks down onto the red-velvet chair in the corner, unstraps one of her shoes, kicks it off. “My feet are killing me,” she says. “On fire, so they are.”
She crosses her knees, brings her ankle up and takes her foot in her hands. It’s misshapen, rutted with bumps and blemishes that are visible even through the sheath of skin-coloured nylon. I loathe that foot, I realize, loathe the cracked skin, the protruding bunion, the slug-like toes, the moist feel and the stale smell that doesn’t reach me here, on the far side of the room, but that I know surrounds it. And I detest the other foot too, sitting there still encased in its shoe, its flesh bulging beyond the straps. And the ankles above the feet, so puffed up with their pain, and the two shins, snaked by jutting varicose veins, and the knees like a pair of angry knots in an ancient tree and… and…and…? All of it. Yes, all. Every piece and part of her fills me with distaste.
Swinging my revulsion away before it shows, I carry my wet hands towards the towel machine in the corner. The exposed section of towel is soiled, already used. I tug at the loop, trying to pull down a clean piece, but the machine grunts and cranks tighter, refusing to dispense. As I yank, I feel something rip underneath my skin. Why do I care if she finds out about my smoking? About Rory? About anything? Why should I care about her disapproval? She disapproves anyway. Always has, always will.
“I’m going on down,” I say, my hands still damp.
She looks up, surprised by something in my voice, squints hard at me through her glasses.
Outside in the corridor, as I am approaching the stairs, I see Mrs O’Donovan and her daughter May heading up. His mother, his sister. As soon as they notice me, they avert their eyes, turn in towards each other so they can pass without acknowledging me. I want to stop them, explain that I am different, that I don’t care about the family row, but we pass in the usual way. They will walk into the toilet just as Mrs D. is washing her hands or walking out. I imagine them stopping a moment, before swinging away from each other. Let them at it: I am going to find him.
And then I look down to the bottom of the stairs and find that it’s going to be easy, so easy. Because he has come looking for me. There he is, standing just inside the front entrance, waving up at me. The lobby is empty, apart from the receptionist with her head bent, behind the reception desk. Something quivers inside my chest and I begin to hurry down the stairs. He takes a second to smile, then he walks out the door. I slither out after him.
Night has fallen and a dark breeze is deliciously cool on my cheeks. My ears are pounding with the echo of the band’s bass drum. He leads the way: down the road, around the corner to the back of the hotel, where we stop, between two cars. The boom-te-boom of the music reaches us, muffled, playing ‘Little Arrows’.
We are shy with one another. He asks me whether I smoke, offers me a cigarette, lights a match for us, making a cup of his hand against the breeze. I dip my face into the flame, shake back my hair on the way up. I inhale nicotine deep, feel my light-headedness. He begins a conversation: about his uncles, how they had started drinking before the wedding Mass that morning, how many pints each had, who’s holding up the best. He has had a few himself, he says.
“What’s it like?”
“Fairly disgusting, to tell you the truth. But you get used to it.”
He calls me Dev, short for Devereux, but also a nod at my family’s political preferences and at our disdain for such things. He has no more time for Fine Gael than I have for Fianna Fáil.
“Is that why they don’t talk?” he asks, meaning our families. “Politics?”
“I think there’s a bit more to it than that. Something that happened in the old days, some dirty deed your family did on us,” I say, smiling.
“I heard it was the other way around.” He is smiling too. For the first time, I look fully at him. My eyes are wholly open to him but it’s OK. I don’t feel unsafe. When he speaks again, his voice is husky. “I had to fight to come here today.”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t want me to come, said Séamus would understand with me being away in school. I had to feed them a story about not wanting to miss the family occasion and really wanting the day out.”
“So what was your real reason?” I want to hear him say it.
“I heard you were going to be here.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and, with it, the small, deep-down fear that I had not acknowledged to myself, that our connection might exist only in my mind, might only be a yearning of my own. A reasonable fear — but I had been right not to admit it.
I lean across and kiss the lips I have touched so often with my eyes. I find them gentle, softer than they look. It is a light kiss I give him, our mouths barely touching, and when I pull my head back, we are both smiling still. He takes the cigarette from my fingers, drops it onto the ground with his own, and grinds both under his shiny black toe. The long, unsmoked tubes split, spilling their tobacco guts over the ground.
He pulls me close and this time our kiss is firmer. As our mouths tighten on each other, our bodies follow, burying deeper, until we are pressed full length against each other.
We kiss for a long time. Afterwards, we keep our heads close, our breaths mingling. He whispers, “If our mammies could see us now,” and we laugh, both of us, together. For that moment, our foolish families – like the rest of the world – are nothing.
We talk then, our first real talk. I tell him about the convent, what the nuns are like, DeeDee and the trouble she sometimes leads me into. He tells me all about a vicious priest who has it in for him. Then we kiss again. This time his hands move across my tight blue dress bought with him in mind. I knot my legs against his and through our clothes I feel it, hard and unmistakable, delightful and alarming. I pull my mouth away.
“I better go back,” I gasp. “They’ll be wondering where I am.”
“Never mind them.”
We kiss some more but anxiety bears down on me now. If anyone was to see us…If Maeve came looking for me…
“Really. I’d better go.”
“All right.”
I step away from him. Night air cuts in between us, cold as metal.
“Aren’t you coming back in?” I say to him.
“Better let you go ahead. In case anyone sees.”
“Oh…Yes. Of course.”
I walk away, backwards, still looking. I know I will rerun the moment a thousand times in my convent bed. As I reach the door of the hotel, he bows, pretends to lift a hat from his head in a flourish, smiling, smiling. A smile as wide and deep as the sea.
I go back in to my relatives, wondering what I will hope for now. For so long, all I have dreamt about is being with him, talking to him, kissing him. Now my dream has come true, I’ll have to change it.
1995
I wake in my shed, to the knowledge that it is Sunday: no building noise, all is quiet. Up at the house, the machines lie silent, abandoned since tools-down yesterday. Summer weekends
are busy in Mucknamore, when visitors arrive from early morning. I hated running through the crowds last Sunday, weaving my way between watching faces, then arriving down at the far end of the beach, beyond the curving cliff and finding other people there, walking or swimming, enjoying the solitude that is usually all mine.
It will be good, I tell myself as I unzip my sleeping bag, to be out in the earliest hours, while the sand and sea are empty and morning-clean. The best part of the day, Granny Peg always said. So that’s what I do. I jog out slowly at first, through the churning, soft sand to the harder surface down near the water. After a few minutes, I pick up my pace.
It feels good to be fit again. Five daily miles is my average distance now, as it was when Richard was alive. It was tough at the beginning, struggling with breathlessness and sore muscles, but it didn’t take me long to build back up; those earlier years were there, waiting for me to return.
The sun drops a dappled path across the water. This ongoing heat wave makes me feel like I’m not in Mucknamore at all. Oh, we had days like these when I was a child, I know we did, when Mrs D. or Gran hung plastic buckets and beach-balls outside the shop and day-trippers came to visit, but so seldom. This part of Ireland might be dubbed “the sunny south-east” because it is warmer and drier than the rest but, to me, rain was always the spirit of this place, rain that could bear down on us at any time, in drops or sprays or showers or mists or slanting, angry strings; its absence always marvelled over (“Glory be to God, another lovely day!”), its inevitable return hovering behind every clear horizon.
Whenever I go to Murray’s Supermarket for food these days, the talk is of the weather. Fanning their faces with newspapers, they look skywards. The temperatures are perfect, rarely reaching the eighties and almost always accompanied by a seashore breeze, but I heard the heat described by a woman the other day as “pure persecution”.
I run until I come to the rock that tells me I’ve done my distance, then turn to retrace my steps. My footprints are the only ones in the fresh sand. In this direction, the offshore breeze fans my face and I inhale it deep, lengthening my stride as I draw it down into my lungs. I’m going to have a baby, I catch myself thinking again. A baby. Day after day, the idea reverberates round my head, like my mind needs to catch up with what my body already knows. My feet beat the word into the sand as I run: bay-bee, bay-bee, bay-bee…
I have left the early stages of pregnancy behind, the breasts that hurt as I turned over in bed, the churning sickness that made mornings a misery. Food still doesn’t taste as good as it should – I am told it won’t until after the birth – but physically, I feel better than I have in years, even better than the last time I was alcohol-free and training daily. I don’t remember this surging energy running all the way through me: into my face, my fingers; into the feet that whip my legs along through strong focused strides. Maybe it’s second-trimester hormones or maybe the contrast with the first, gruesome three months.
By the time I’m back at my shed, visitors are starting to arrive to Mucknamore. Some have come equipped as if for battle, with cool-boxes of food and drink, stripy windbreakers and sun umbrellas, sunscreen lotions and games for the children. Others bring only their swimsuited selves and a towel. Back in my shed, I watch them, but once I settle to writing, they fade away as the past rises up through the page to claim me. When I glance up, I am surprised to find them still there, sprawled across the sand or bobbing about in the sea, calling to each other.
In the afternoon, with the best of the day’s work done, I am more distractible. A family walking by the edge of the water draws my eye from the page. A good-looking family: dark father, fair mother, matching son and daughter. The little girl wears a pink-striped swimsuit. Her hair, longer and blonder than her mother’s, streams behind her as she and her brother trot ahead. She carries two buckets and spades and can hardly see over them, running so determinedly that she looks as if she might tumble headfirst. The boy wears a baseball cap the exact blue of his swimming trunks. His fat little legs pump him along as quick as they can, but not quick enough to keep up.
Ahead, the girl suddenly stops and bends to look at something. A pretty shell? A stranded sea creature? Buckets and spades slip from her fingers. She calls over her brother and the two small heads come together, crouching all their attention on it.
Father and mother are dressed alike, in blue jeans and white T-shirts. His hands scrunch in the pocket of his jeans, as if fisted; hers are folded under her breasts. Both bodies are bent to their walk, two question marks gliding across the sand towards The Causeway, a small but constant gap between them.
When they realise the children are not following, the father turns and calls, his hand a cup around his mouth. The wind carries his shout up to me in my shed: “Ella! Dara! Come on!”
No response. He begins to walk back towards them, his calls growing louder and testier, until at last the children look up and acknowledge him. “Come on,” he says. They pick up a bucket and spade each, rush to follow him. Behind him, his wife waits, arms still folded, smiling indulgence.
They catch up. The man takes their daughter’s hand, the woman, their son’s, and the four turn onto The Causeway. Out towards the island they walk, breaking in and out of their foursome like a dance. I watch until they are specks too small to see and, when I can no longer see them, I watch and wait for their return.
And that night, Rory comes to see me and tells me that he was thinking of me as he walked on the beach, past my shed, with his family. “I knew you’d be at your desk,” he says.
I let him tell me this, though I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. For a while, we sit marooned in one of our silences. To break it, I talk to him about what I was writing about today, a picture that I’ve carried in my head, all my life: Daddy stepping off the boat in Fishguard, his suitcase in one hand and Mrs Larkin in the other, all a-quiver at what they have done.
From that small image, a whole gallery of pictures unfold. The pair of them on the train to Birmingham, sitting side by side, holding hands maybe, gazing out at the new sights churning past: rows of back windows of back-street houses in backward towns, all bigger than Ireland’s capital. Nuclear-power stacks. Factory pipes pumping arrogant smoke into the sky. My father, taking it all in, gusty with confidence about what he has done, what he and his new woman are going to do.
Then the actuality of finding themselves in 1960s England. I tell Rory: “It would have come as such a shock to him to be looked upon as just another Paddy. At home, he was the big fellow who didn’t mind coming down a level.”
Rory moves in the dark, takes another bottle of beer from the sand where he has burrowed them to keep cool. Usually we use my oil lantern for light but, tonight, he has brought along one of those big scented garden candles that keep stinging and biting creatures at bay. It tinges the night with the tang of lemon.
He takes a long draught from his fresh beer and waits. “They only lasted a year. After that, he lived alone in some Birmingham bedsit. I picture that too, though I never saw it: one room high over a busy road, traffic snarling below.”
I pull some grass out of the ground I sit on, make a little pile and pull some more. I don’t tell him how I see my father sitting in a sleeveless vest, smoking and drinking tea at a formica table, one toe peeping through a hole in his sock. A black bin-liner full of fish-and-chip wrappings. An aluminium sink and a two-ring counter-top cooker. Copies of the Wexford Weekly and other Irish newspapers growing in a pile beside his armchair. Sometimes, the amount of details in my imaginings frightens me. I’m afraid of sinking into a place where I mix up what is real and what I have made happen in my head.
“What became of her, the woman he went with?” Rory asks.
“We never heard another word about her. Maybe she got tired of him when he wasn’t Mr Devereux of the National Bank any more.”
“What was he over there?”
“He never got himself a proper job, as far as I can make out.”
/>
“I only have a vague memory of him,” Rory says. “He was nothing more than a face to me.”
“I know so much more now than I knew then, especially about being Irish in England. There is so much I’d ask him now, if I could.”
“But would you, actually?”
I sigh, knowing the truth. “Maybe not.”
“When my Dad was dying, I wanted more than anything to tell him I loved him. One evening, near the end, I was left alone with him in the hospital. He was on a breathing apparatus and I sat in silence beside him, thinking: I’m going to say it, I’ll say it on the way out, so that I’ll be gone before either of us had time to get embarrassed. But I couldn’t. When the moment came, all I got out of me was, ‘Take care.’ ‘Take care’, for Christ’s sake!”
I laugh. “And my English friends think the Irish are so unbuttoned.”
He lies back down, hands behind his head, his elbows two arrows facing away from each other into the dark. “We are, though. Compared to the English.”
“Are we?”
He turns his head at the challenge in my voice.
“You know I don’t believe in generalisations like that,” I say.
“But there is a difference between the Irish and the English,” he replies. “You said so yourself, that you felt it, living in England. That your father felt it.”
That is true. I have felt the difference, and so have countless others, but that’s only one story. There is another: all the people I met in England who are more like me than many of the people I met here.
“And what about this child you’re expecting?” he asks. “How will you feel about it growing up American?”
“I’ll feel fine,” I say, surprised. This is the first time since the night in the pub that he has referred to afterwards. I don’t see why that should bother me at all but perhaps he – being a parent already – knows something I don’t. Generally in these night-time talks of ours, I have the advantage — he can’t reach into the places I have been the way I can unreel his life in my head — but parenthood is where he has gone ahead.
