The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  I’d go to bed, and all those memories of Johnny would be banished as I’d fall asleep dreaming of that young man out there waiting for me. But no boy ever asked and I’d never have been allowed to be seen on the street in such company. The door would be locked on me at nine o’clock and no amount of pleading would get me back in.

  Acne and bristles and cigarettes. Johnny rarely stays at home now. Each evening he merges into a gang of mates, shouting from the open platforms of dark green buses. In the Astor, they wolf-whistle Brigitte Bardot in A Very Private Affair. In the Bohemian, Rock Around the Clock is being revived. They spend hours sharpening the tips of steel combs to rip out the seats during the theme song.

  In the twisting streets around Stonybatter, small pubs welcome the scrum of under-age boys. At weekends they spend most of their wages there and queue in the greasy fish and chip shops of Phibsborough before strutting the two miles out by the cemetery with catcalls at the couples walking home from dances. They piss in front gardens, ring doorbells and empty dustbins along the main road. She hears him come in at two o’clock in the morning and waits for the light switch to click off in her father’s room.

  On Friday nights, voices are raised in the kitchen as he demands Johnny’s wage packet, and when Johnny has stormed out, slamming the front door, her father comes in to her with his face white in the first shock of defeat. They sit in the chairs on both sides of the fire with only the flames and the red lamp in the corner to light the room, and listen to the voices on Radio Eireann, the farming reports, and whine of accordions and asthmatic tin whistles in strict and monotonous three-four time filling up the silent room.

  They let me go in the hairdressing salon after the six months when they had promised to make me permanent. I stayed at home for two days while Daddy made enquiries. On the third night, he told me to report the next morning to the drapery shop in the village.

  I was six months there behind a counter piled with patterns and balls of wool, when a letter came in my name calling me for interview to the new shirt factory below the village. He had never told me he had even applied. I was taken on with a hundred and twenty others.

  The plant was brand new, everything so spick and span, and there were loads of girls just turned fifteen like myself. They let us play the radio all day as we sat at the machines and the older women came round with baskets to collect the finished garments. The Beatles were coming to Dublin and there was such excitement in work you couldn’t imagine. Two of the girls had tickets and walked around like queens, while the rest of us arranged to meet up and stand outside the Adelphi to try and catch a glimpse of them.

  There were thousands there, pushing and milling, and then as the first show came out, the fighting began. The girls behind me started pulling my hair to get up nearer and the police charged down Abbey Street after the gangs of boys. I fell in the crush and cut my knee open. A policeman pushed the people back and lifted me out as I put my arms around his neck and clung to him in terror. They brought me home in a squad car, crammed with other girls who’d been hurt.

  All the way home I prayed Daddy would be out, but he came to the door when the car pulled up. He looked so slight and feeble there with shame in his eyes as if the world was slipping away from him. He grabbed me by the hair in the garden and pulled me inside until he was pressed right up against me in the hallway. I could feel his breath as he raised his hand and I cowered, waiting for the slap to come down across my face. Instead, he just lowered it again and shook his head.

  ‘I’ll lock you in that room upstairs,’ he said, ‘till you learn not to disgrace me.’ And he grabbed hold of my coat and pushed me ahead of him up the stairs. I was sobbing and tried to put my arms round him but he just shoved me on to the bed in this room and unscrewed the light bulb. He locked the door and left me sitting in the darkness. It was a Friday evening. From the window I could see the young people coming home from the pictures in groups, singing and enjoying the last drags of cigarettes before they reached their houses. And later on, the couples from the dances, on scooters or on foot, quiet now and anxious to avoid notice, standing against the dark leaves of the bushes fronting Mrs Finnegan’s house with their arms around each other and only their mouths moving.

  Johnny came in and I waited, hearing him ask where I was. I could hear their voices raised in argument, followed by the sitting-room door slamming. Then my father’s feet came, one step, two step, like the old bogeyman. Was he coming to forgive me? Was he coming with his belt to beat me? The steps went into his bedroom and I heard the door close. There was complete silence in the house, yet I knew none of us were asleep. All night I kept waiting for Johnny to come. I’d say to myself, he’s waiting for Daddy to cool down, in another ten minutes he’ll climb the stairs. Or he’s searching in the kitchen for the spare key, any minute now he’ll come for me.

  The darkness in the room was unbearable because I could not control it. I kept on imagining all kinds of things; my mother was sitting by the door in a chair, the furniture was swaying in the dark around me, floorboards were creaking on the landing. But nothing happened and nobody came, until finally towards dawn I fell asleep from exhaustion.

  ‘I’ll dream of them tonight,’ said the small, fat fifteen-year-old girl whose eyes were shining and forehead damp as she tottered out into O’Connell Street like somebody possessed.

  There was a tiny man with a red nose and spectacles standing on a wooden box outside the Evening Press offices preaching about salvation. But he was talking to himself. Outside the cinema, a row of stout policemen with their arms linked were heaving strenuously against a frantic sea of young people. Girls were screaming inside. They screamed at the pictures in the programmes or if somebody shouted ‘Beatles!’ The atmosphere was hot and sharp: full of power and perfume and a frightening excitement.

  But when the curtain finally rose on THEM, the house erupted into one mad, thunderous noise, that continued right until the cries for more were drowned by the National Anthem.

  This morning it was ‘B’-Day plus one as the city began to clean up the debris from the Beatles invasion. Motorists made their way through the shambles of Abbey Street, while workers replaced the plate glass windows which fell victim to teenage hysteria.

  Trouble began after the first of the two shows when more than two thousand people leaving the cinema ‘mingled’ with those going in. Members of the St John Ambulance Brigade attended to injured people on the spot while crowds ran riot around them.

  Said a Garda sergeant whose cap was knocked off by a flying object, ‘I have seen everything now. This is really mad. What can have got into them? You would imagine the country was in the middle of a revolution instead of welcoming four fugitives from a barber’s shop.’

  On the Saturday morning I knocked, but Johnny had gone away to town. I could hear Daddy in the room below silently pacing. I kept crying out for food and water until he finally appeared. He left the tea and sandwiches on the dresser and never once spoke. I wished to God he would scream at me or beat me black and blue, but he punished me instead with his silence.

  I had had to pee in an old vase of my mother’s that I was afraid to show him. By seven o’clock every muscle of my body was tense, my nails were bitten through, my head was drumming. I felt like the man in the paper who had been buried alive. I began to shriek like an animal and hurl myself against the door and that is where Johnny discovered me.

  This is the bit the girl knows by heart. Where Johnny discovered me. These are the words she will say to herself in the long afternoons when the woman is working. Sitting in the chair watching over the bed where her nightdress is stretched on top of the sheets. She leans her head forward every time the story reaches here and gazes at the woman’s lips.

  Johnny came home at nine o’clock and when my father wouldn’t give him the key, he went upstairs and kicked the door in. He found me lying in a pool of urine with blood crusted on my forehead. He carried me into the bathroom and locked the door, then filled the tub and
sponged me down. I remember that his hands moved with a gentleness I had not thought him capable of. It was the first time he’d touched me in over two years.

  He pulled a clean nightdress over my head and laid me back gently in my bed. Though I was groggy and only half-aware, I could feel a tremor in his hands as he drew the blankets over me and whispered, ‘Don’t worry, sis, I’ll look after you. I’ll never leave you alone with him again.’

  Then he closed the door and marched down to confront my father standing defeated in the kitchen.

  The girl lies back against the wall, her limbs stretched out, her breath coming quicker. But the woman stares at the floor as if by now only talking to herself.

  That night he came again to my room, but more hesitant and shy than when we were young. He drew the blankets back slowly and waited to see if I would complain. His body was stronger than before, so that in the darkness he felt like a grown man. And I clung to him and allowed his hands to wander wherever they wanted to over me. His fingers found me and I sucked in my breath as he rubbed them back and forth.

  I was nervous now and frightened but yet I didn’t want him to stop even though I knew that it was wrong. My hands performed all the old tricks that he had taught me when I was ten. But I was fifteen now and knew there were no guardian angels to be excluded or wronged. He panted beside me so loudly I had to cover his mouth and then he lay flat like a dead weight against my side. And all he said was ‘I’m sorry, sis,’ over and over again.

  The Casino cinema was taken over by the new supermarket and there was nothing left in the evening except the bus to town. Shoppers queuing at the meat counter could gaze up to the old balcony at trainee managers stacking cardboard boxes where suspicious ushers had once trained their torches.

  Workmen began to fell the wood to build a dual carriageway that would slice the village in half. She watched the trees fall, every one of which seemed to contain a memory. A picnic of children sharing gur-cake and water, autumn afternoons with Johnny searching for conkers, the trunk her lover would have held her against. Blue tar was spilt and rolled into shape and, like a token replacement, tiny shoots of trees planted that the local youths smashed in disgust. Only the rivulet survived, swirling unnoticed through its narrow gorge.

  The children of the estate were growing up and finding jobs or waiting at bus stops with two cases for the boat train. All the way to London, the train’s wheels chanting you’ll never go back, you’ll never go back. New estates were springing up in the fields where she used to walk. Lorries loaded down with furniture moved along the finished side of the carriageway.

  Two weeks after the Beatles came I arrived home to find Daddy in tears. There was no light on in the dining-room where he sat alone and I know that he had been there for hours, staring down at the wedding photograph in his hand as the features were gradually obliterated by the darkness. He turned to me in bafflement, and said, ‘President Kennedy has been shot. Has the whole world gone crazy or what?’

  I wanted to put my hand out to him as he passed but I was no longer able to. He leaned heavily on the banisters when he went slowly to his room. After that, he rarely spoke to us, as if all his pride and hope was gone.

  We had the house to ourselves and could do what we liked. Johnny and I bought a record-player between us and his friends called now to the sitting-room to play cards and listen to music. I’d come in with big pots of tea and toast for them and fall in love with each in turn, and they’d always shout down to me in the kitchen on their way out where I read romance magazines alone.

  I had new friends in the shirt factory and we laughed and chatted to each other among the clattering machines. At lunch-time we’d sit out on the steps and wave back at the lads unloading the vans. Every Friday night, we’d gather at the bus stop to go to the pictures or dancing. I’d soak for half an hour in the bath and use the Lady Manhattan talc I’d splashed out five bob for.

  The Friday evening bus to town. They occupy the back seat on top: eight of them squashed against the blue leather, five with beehive hairstyles, one looking like Priscilla Lane. Frames of evening sunlight flicker between the houses. One girl is laughing hysterically, inhaling noisy gulps of air as though she were choking. Whenever she falters, another begins and then another, each setting the other off, with the original joke long forgotten. The boys in the top seats cast slick glances back at them and shout down the aisle.

  O’Connell Street is packed, the crowds crossing from side to side oblivious to the hooting lines of cars. Long snakes form outside the cinemas, a busker plays ‘Love, Love Me Do’. Inside the darkness of the large picture palace they watch James Garner in his officer’s uniform confronting Julie Andrews and Joyce Grenfell. The cinema echoes with shouts and catcalls, the usher’s torch bobs across the rows. They agree it’s not as good as My Fair Lady or Goldfinger.

  The bouncers are unfriendly at the ballroom door, an off-duty Garda, uncomfortable in dicky-bow and suit, says, ‘Will you sleep with me tonight?’ and grins, trying to squeeze them as he allows each girl in. They sip lemonade on the balcony and watch the band below imitate the English hit parade note for note. The floor below fills up, one by one they are asked to dance.

  She dances with four or maybe five boys, their conversation always the same. In the embarrassed silence after each set she mumbles her thanks and backs away, wandering off to find a girlfriend and stand together surveying the floor. They try not to show their excitement as they whisper confidences in each other’s ears. Towards the end of the night they’re part of the crush around the stage, the lead singer’s hand reaching down to theirs as he sings Ave Maria.

  They gather forces when the lights come on, wait for two of their friends to finish kissing the boys they’ve met, and then begin the long walk home where a girl begins to laugh hysterically, inhaling noisy gulps of air down her throat as her friends join in.

  I had always thought of him waiting at the lamp-post opposite the house, gazing sadly up towards my window. Often I tried to imagine that it was him in the darkness when Johnny switched the light out. Everywhere I went in the house his eyes seemed to follow as though he were haunting me. And Daddy never said a word, about what hour we came in or what we did. He sat in the kitchen or went to bed with the radio, his only companion. Johnny would be there when I came in, listless after a night of disappointment in town.

  ‘Come on in, sis, just for a while. Nobody will know,’ he’d say, and try to take my hands in his. ‘Please sis, I need you,’ and though I’d struggle and try to push him away, we both knew that it would always end with the pair of us sprawled on the sitting-room floor.

  When we lay there, it seemed that nothing had changed, as if somehow we had turned back the clock and were children once again. His voice was the only constant in my world, lulling me as he whispered, ‘We’re free of him, sis, we only need each other,’ and I’d give way, desperate for the pleasure he offered.

  Then, on the stairs afterwards, I’d feel a stab of fear passing my father’s room with my clothes bundled up against my bare flesh. It was as if I was deliberately sinning against him, against all the years when he had dominated my every thought and action, against the guilt I had felt when I upset or appeared to shame him.

  Johnny seemed to be right that we were free, there was no longer anything to believe in, and yet the secret gnawed like a cancer inside me. I knew that it was wrong. I knew that it was dangerous and we could never step out into the future until it was finished. Even before the pleasure was fully over from his fingers I could feel the sense of let-down, of shame, and I knew that Johnny could feel it too, his ears alert for any noise, his eagerness to be up which he tried to hide.

  And every time I always said that it must end, and so it would until the next weekend night when I saw the light beckoning in the sitting-room window as the girls left me on the corner.

  johnny johnny lover boy, will come out when we’re alone, when the castle door is shut, and the wicked witch is gone. come to play, come
to shout, turn the bedroom inside out. bring the world in for me, whispering our secret story. johnny johnny waiting there, past the bogeyman on the stair. johnny johnny has to hide, before he comes to claim his bride.

  One Friday night we went to see the Capitol Showband, I danced with a boy with hair below his collar. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked, and when he replied ‘Daithi Lacha’ we both just stood there on the floor and laughed. Daithi Lacha, David Mouse. He lived up the west and asked to walk me home. The girls giggled when I told them I’d see them in work on Monday.

  It was the middle of summer, we could have walked for miles. He took my hand and I hoped he’d never let it go as we talked about everything that entered our heads. At the corner of my street, he lowered his head cautiously and I lifted my face to meet him. I could feel the soft leaves against my hair as I leaned back into the shadows and pressed my hand over his which hovered lightly on my breast. We promised to meet on the Wednesday night and he stood there watching me from the corner until I went in.

  Music was coming from the sitting-room and as the door handle turned, I felt like an animal in a trap. I only wanted to get away. I was exhilarated and strong. To be touched by someone else would seem like a desecration.

  ‘Johnny, I’m going to bed,’ I whispered, as he crept into the hall. He put a finger to his lips and began to draw me in. He was more nervous than usual, I think he had been drinking. I couldn’t resist him as he pulled my wrists, I just kept repeating, ‘Don’t, Johnny,’ again and again. Every touch seemed to be destroying the memory of the boy. I could feel tears on my cheeks when he persisted and I lay there, stiff and unresisting.

  Johnny grew angry then and must have raised his voice. The record had spun to a close and Daddy was standing at the door in his dressing-gown. My skirt was up above my waist and Johnny was stretched on top of me.

  ‘Get up,’ he shouted at Johnny, ‘you’ve taken my home away from me, but you won’t take my daughter.’