‘Please, Miss O’Grady, can I go –’
‘As Gaeilge, Deirdre.’
‘An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas?’ And before I’d given permission off skipped Deirdre Summers to the bathroom, where she’d probably spend ten minutes at the mirror admiring her hives. Brona Tyrrel claimed to be ‘bursting’ too, but they were pals, so I made her sit still till Deirdre dawdled back. So this was what my four years of educational psychology had trained me for: the distribution of toilet privileges.
The clock hand seemed to stop moving round twenty to eleven. Several times I was convinced it had broken, but then it would make another minuscule shift, as if twitching in its sleep. My eyes refocused to find Deirdre Summers with her hand on the door. ‘Where, may I ask –’ (It was funny how primary teaching brought the Mrs Thatcher out in all of us.)
‘Cut myself, Miss, I’m bleeding, can I go and wash it,’ she gabbled, holding up a finger so deeply gashed with red that I thought she must have driven a compass right in. Then I beckoned her over.
‘Ah please, Miss, it hurts…’
My chair made a screech on the parquet as I pushed it back and walked over. Up close it was red biro, leaked all over Deirdre’s fingers twisting in mine. The girls nearest us were giggling nervously. I looked into Deirdre’s eyes, and opened my mouth.
‘Get to fuck out of my sight you stupid little bastard, if you ever do lose a finger it’ll be better than you deserve. How dare you waste my time with your amateur theatrics when the woman I love is rotting in Glasnevin?’
I hadn’t said it. My throat had knotted to throttle the words as they emerged. I hadn’t said a thing. Deirdre’s gaze had wandered to her mates; she was starting to snigger. I let her fingers slip out of my hand. My whole body ached for the satisfying sound of hand smacking cheek.
‘Go back to your seat, please,’ I told her.
The class seemed unnerved by my politeness. They stayed hushed as I sat back down behind the fortress of the teacher’s desk and told them to read the story of Fionn and his dog quietly to themselves.
‘Would you do something for me?’ Cara’s voice is almost lost in the pillow. We are making spoons on the bed in late winter, my body’s wool and denim shadowing hers as far as her calves, where my legs run out.
‘Sure. Probably.’
‘Would you slap me?’
I stare at the back of her neck. It is too close to focus on but with my nose I can feel each tiny hair at the nape. Cara turns her head, to check whether I heard her. ‘No way,’ I whisper.
‘Please.’
I shut my eyes and burrow my face into the cavern between her neck and the sheet.
‘Ah, go on. All I need is one sharp slap to knock me out of this low.’
I wish my ears had a way of shutting.
Cara twists like a flounder, until her nose is against my eye. ‘PenPal? Please? Bet you’ve wanted to, sometimes.’
‘Never. You’ve been watching too many old movies,’ I say lightly. ‘Slapping doesn’t bring anyone to their senses.’
‘It might. Ah, come on, just once, as a favour.’
‘No,’ I say into the pillow. ‘Go hit your head off a wall if you want to.’
An upheaval of wool, and she is sitting against the headboard. ‘Fine then, retreat to your high moral ground as per bloody usual.’
‘It’s not that.’ Cara’s back is curved like a boulder. ‘I just don’t want to hurt you,’ I plead, leaning up on one elbow.
‘Physically, you mean.’
I ignore that. ‘I’ll do anything else to cheer you up…’
‘But you won’t give me what I want.’
‘Ah pet, you can’t really want to be hit.’
‘I asked for one wee slap to break this mood, that’s all,’ her voice rising to a squeak, ‘we’re not talking major masochism here. But god forbid I should know what I want. God forbid you should have to treat me like an adult once in a while.’
‘Then act like one,’ I say, rolling upright.
‘You’re just afraid of doing anything that might sting your conscience.’ Cara spits the words over her shoulder.
‘Well, yes, if you mean I’m not going to behave like a shite just to keep you company.’ Then I falter. ‘Ah sweetheart, let’s not be like this.’
Her eyes turn on me, cold as gravel. ‘You know,’ she drawls, ‘we’d get on so much better if you had the guts to hate me a little.’
I lean my eyelids on my knees.
‘Your love is so relentless.’
I’m making stars.
‘I don’t have to work for it or earn it,’ Cara goes on. Her voice lifts as an idea strikes her: ‘I know what it’s like, it’s like the free milk cartons we used to get at school. Sometimes I want it and sometimes I don’t want it but it’s just sitting there every morning, so sometimes I stamp on it.’
What saves me is a tear, leaked from the corner of my eye. She sees it and bends to absorb it into her lips. ‘Ah, PenUmbra, don’t cry. The milk is the best thing for me. And when I get around to drinking it, it does taste lovely.’
I hope more tears will come but they don’t. Cara cradles me anyway, rocking my tight frame back and forward. I say nothing, for fear of provoking her. She kisses her way from my crow’s feet to the hollow of my ear. Then she disengages to sit upright and yawn. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘I walk around college and pretend I’m free.’
‘Free?’ I ask.
‘Of you.’
I press my wet face back into my knees before she can see it.
‘Ah would you stop wincing at everything I say. You know not to take me seriously when I’m in a low.’
‘Yes,’ I say hoarsely, ‘but telling me not to take you seriously might be just part of the low. Where does the mood end and the you begin? How do I know which Caras are real?’
‘None of us,’ she jokes, planting on my ear a kiss so loud it deafens me.
We lace up our shoes.
I lied when I told Cara I never wanted to slap her. Sometimes when I was making love to her I did. When her face was all distraught with pleasure, her throat bent back gaping for breath, I would occasionally be overtaken by rage. For a fraction of a second I would find myself wanting to slap her eyes shut, press a pillow over her face, throw her off the bed. But most of all I wanted to stop what I was doing, to simply withdraw my hand and see how Cara would react. Because what she was panting for was mine to refuse. What she needed I needn’t give.
I never did stop, of course; the tenderness always came back and kept me moving. But what if it was the thought that counted?
‘Miss O’Grady?’
I stared down at Saoirse Mullan, at the apple and buttered cracker held to her chest.
‘It’s breaktime now, Miss. The bell went ages ago.’
‘Thank you.’ I didn’t stir till she was gone.
I sat in the staff-room, as far as possible from the Geography teacher’s dangled cigarette. Finding Yourself on Your Own was poking out of my satchel. The British price was clearly printed below the sticker he had scraped off; what a dote Robbie was, shelling out well over a tenner for a guide-book to see me through this. I took it out for a quick flick, keeping it angled down so no one would read the cover. I decided I could not bear the sympathetic address of the preface, so I skipped straight on to a cross-cultural survey of funeral practices. Orthodox Jews, I learned, sit on low stools for seven days without washing, eating only boiled eggs and salt fish. It sounded like a recipe for depression, but I supposed it was surreal enough to be appropriate; what was really absurd was any attempt to carry on life as normal.
Stages of mourning, offered the next chapter; I’d heard about these. Numbness, anger, regret, loss, taking up to three years, it said. What, nine months each, a full swelling and birthing of each, or did they overlap? Or was numbness just the opener, before a three-year storm of the others? I didn’t see how on earth you could time such things. Maybe after three years the participants in the s
tudy just got sick of reporting the same old symptoms. Maybe they didn’t even notice them any more, having forgotten they ever felt other than numb, angry, regretful and lost.
Let’s see how far I’d got: was I a good girl, as bereaved people went? I seemed to have run through numbness rather quickly. You couldn’t spend many days not feeling the grief at all, unless you were skilled at living on another planet or had some very powerful plants in the garden. Maybe I had a partial numbness, a bandage to slow the bleeding. Then anger; well, my anger with the driver of the car that crashed into the taxi was limited by the fact that he was dead now. I supposed I was angry with Cara for having a rackety lifestyle so full of travel that the odds of getting killed in a road accident were high. But then again, I was often angry with her when she was alive, so that couldn’t be a symptom of mourning. How about regret, then? Perhaps I had leapt straight to stage three in my first week. No, regret was nothing new either. This was ludicrous, I was getting the stages all wrong. Loss, yes, that was a good simple word for it. If I was doing numbness and loss together, with a bit of denial (that was another one to fit in), that explained why I was still able to go about my daily life and get some pleasure from watching telly. And what about terror, which I felt every time I woke? Damn the experts and their stages and their emotional clocks; this thing was such a mess, no one could impose order on it.
Loyal to the bell, I heaved myself out of the armchair and walked back to my class. Line by stumbled, mispronounced line we read our way through an extract from a novel about a boy fleeing Cromwell. I amused myself by guessing the questions that would be asked at the end of the text on the next page: definites included ‘Where and when does this story take place?’ and ‘Which adjectives are used to show how evil the Lord Protector is?’ I moved quickly on from Lorna Mulcahy, who never had a word out of place, to Sinéad Green, who had to learn to stop taking a breath in the middle of a clause. I turned over the page, and there it was in faint pencil between two lines of print: I love you, big thing.
Panic grabbed me by the throat and squeezed tight. I was on my feet before I realized it. ‘Read the rest quietly to yourselves, girls, and then you can be looking at the questions, I’ll be back in two ticks.’ They must have thought I had wet my knickers.
I stood just outside the classroom door, leaning against the knobbled paintwork. The cool came right through my shirt, raising goose-bumps all down my arms. I ignored the swell of conversation from the other side of the door. My pulse was booming in my throat; I thought I was going to sick up my heart. She must have written those words in the book months ago, guessing that my class wouldn’t get to that exercise till September. She was not writing me notes from the other side. Ghosts couldn’t use pencils.
I knew I probably looked stark staring mad, so I walked down the corridor and slipped into the children’s toilet. I held my hands under the tap until they hurt, and held them to my cheeks. I met my eyes for a second, then shut them.
On the way back I passed the Senior Infants. Their mantric chant put the stress on every second syllable.
What makes the lamb love Mary so?
the eager children cry
Why Mary loves the lamb you know
and that’s the reason why
I turned the corner and stumbled over Sister Luke. Lurching backwards, I broke into ‘Sorry, Sister, I’m so sorry, so clumsy of me, are you all right?’
She adjusted her habit, which I was sure I had trodden on. ‘I’m not made of bone china, Pen; it’ll take more than a bump to finish me off.’
‘Yes, Sister,’ I said, grinning back at her.
‘I heard,’ she mentioned, ‘there was a death in your house.’
My face slipped. ‘There was,’ I said.
‘Is it your first, by any chance?’
I blinked at her.
‘Your first brush with the whole business?’
Strictly speaking, my father was my first, but I said, ‘It is, Sister.’
‘Ah,’ she said, her breath trailing away. After a second she said, ‘You’ll get better at it.’
‘What, does each one get easier?’
‘No, no,’ she said, tucking her hands under her habit, ‘but you’ll have more know-how next time.’
I walked on to my class. There was a loud hum rising from the room that fell to nothing as I opened the door. I didn’t bother lecturing them. I launched straight into question one: ‘What do the following words mean: Papist, Round-head, Puritan, plantation?’
Later, while we were working out how many jugs of milk a chef would need to make a pancake ten feet wide, I spotted Saoirse Mullan’s French-plaited head bent over her notebook, her shield-arm curved round it. I stepped down the aisle and held out my hand. She said nothing, simply handed it over with a look of injured guilt. The class went on with their sums as I looked at Saoirse’s drawing. It was not the rude or satiric sketch I might have expected. My outline took up two whole pages of her notebook.
My head was sagging over my book, there were curtains of dark hair which Saoirse had busily darkened with her pencil, and a long shaky curve of arm and breast. Is this what I looked like to them – a voluptuous giant? I noticed a little curve of smile pencilled in behind the hair.
I put it back on the girl’s desk without a word. I could hardly reproach her for finding a sketch more interesting than the ingredients of a giant pancake. Doodling was how I had distracted myself from the boredom of my own schooldays, before I had Cara to talk to. Only I never had the skill to sketch real people; instead, I drew ballerinas, or elephants, or blank faces to which I added false eyelashes and chignons. When I couldn’t think of anything new to doodle I used to put a penny under the paper and rub on it with my pencil till the delicate lines of the harp showed through. In science I used to make necklaces of staples and paperclips. Such restlessness, before my hands found out what they were for.
From my desk, I glanced down at Saoirse’s head, her mouth silently totting up figures now. She might make a good wee dyke one of these years. So might Eilish McGrath, or Joan Durcan, or any of them really; even the very femmy ones, you never knew. I never would get to know, myself; they would have long passed out of my orbit by the time they were sure of anything. This job gave me no chance to be a role model as anything but a confident fat spinster. I hoped one or two of these girls would look back, and guess, and not despise me for my compromises.
The bell for lunch went, then; I was pleased with myself for not having watched the clock. I was afraid Robbie might come and find me in the staff-room, so I walked down to the deli on the corner. They had three minuscule tables tucked between the glass counter and the dresser full of different jars of olives. I pushed a table out from the wall to make room for myself, ignoring the expression of the waitress, and ordered onion tart.
As I launched into Chapter Three of Robbie’s book, I realized that I was treating it as homework, almost as if, by working through a description of each aspect of bereavement, I was getting past the thing itself. I browsed through ‘Everybody has a Different Worst Time of Day’ and ‘Know Your Weak Points’. What a menu of delights this book was, whetting your appetite for each misery. I took a huge bite of onion tart.
I was beginning to feel guilty about not doing so much ‘sharing’ as the book recommended. I scored one point for the heart-to-heart with Robbie yesterday, surely? It just wasn’t in my nature to go round emoting at people. Whenever Cara had left me before, I had kept extremely quiet about it, partly for dignity, partly to keep the break from being official and therefore real. Whereas now was probably the time to start clutching at new straws. Come on, PenTimento, Cara seemed to whisper in my ear, it’d be such a waste of good flesh if you pined away. Better talk to anyone who’ll listen; make some connections that might keep you attached to the surface of this spinning planet.
‘Even if you do not feel like seeing your friends,’ the paragraph concluded in earnest italics, ‘it is best to make an effort.’ I kept chewing on the
mouthful of tart, but it didn’t seem to be reducing. I tried to visualize my friends, lined up like a choir. The benches looked almost empty. If I couldn’t see them in my head, how on earth was I supposed to see them socially? There was Robbie sitting at the back, passing the newspaper to Mr. Wall. Jo was leaning against the side of the benches, chatting to a cluster of passing women I only knew to see. Schoolfriends whose faces I half-remembered, college friends whose wedding receptions I had not much enjoyed, they drifted by in twos and threes, leaving the occasional Christmas card on the bottom bench. There had to be some more, surely? I remembered that lovely girl from primary school whose family had moved to Australia, but I could not visualize her beyond the age of nine; I put her on the bottom bench anyway, her plump calves dangling. And there was Cara crosslegged beside her, asking her something; she was always good with children, being more like them than I ever was. Cara, what the hell are you doing here?
I’m your friend, she said. Always have been, always will.
Ghosts don’t count, I told her. Shift that skinny ass out of there.
She stuck out her tongue. It was as pink as ever.
The waitress was staring at me. I must have looked as if I’d fallen into an onion tart-induced trance. I gathered up my accoutrements, giving her a grande dame smile and leaving an excessive tip on the saucer.
When I walked into my classroom, I found Fiona James and Mary O’Hanlon staging a kiss, with Mary lying back in a faint over Fiona’s knee, her head cradled in Fiona’s elbow, Fiona’s hand a safety barrier between their goldfish mouths. They leaped apart as soon as the general hiss alerted them to my presence. I had to repress my smile as I made my way to the desk. Take your hand away, Fiona, I would have liked to say if it wouldn’t have lost me my job. Go for it, a kiss won’t kill you.
They were always up to high do on a Friday afternoon. The weekend hovered like sun behind a cloud, promising them untold freedom and excitement, though by the time Monday came round again it might have granted them only a game of solo tennis against the wall of the garage and a Sunday afternoon black-and-white weepie.
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