“You’re sure, Rhea? You’re sure the safety guard wasn’t on?”
Aunt Ruth is holding my shoulders then, her fingers gripping me hard.
I nod. The lie comes out like normal words. “I’m sure.”
We eat the biscuits between us and even though I don’t want them, I keep eating anyway. There are crumbs on the blanket, six little balls of rolled-up tinfoil on the tray. Aunt Ruth looks like she’s far away and, in my head, I can hear Lisa’s voice over and over, so loud I think she might be able to hear it too. Rhea, don’t. Rhea, leave it. Rhea, stop.
Later, I hear them fighting, Aunt Ruth and Dad. They’re shouting in the hall until someone remembers me and they go into the sitting room. I can still hear bits of the fight through the door but I don’t get up and listen. Instead I go to sleep, because I think the lie is working and that they’re fighting because she wants to take me with her. And I think she’s going to win.
The lie doesn’t work, Mum. Maybe lies never work. She goes anyway. She goes the next weekend and, by then, it’s way too late to take the lie back. And she never asks me again—ever—and Dad never does either. And now he’s dead and I’ll probably never see her again, so I wanted to tell you the truth. I wanted to tell someone.
Aunt Ruth cries at the airport when she’s going, but I don’t. It doesn’t make sense, her saying it breaks her heart to leave me, because she’s the one who’s going, she’s the one who won’t stay. None of it makes sense and even as she kisses me and hugs me hard and says she’ll phone all the time and come and visit, I’m deciding that I don’t care and that she’s never going to see me cry again.
She doesn’t come that summer, because of work, and then at Christmas she has to cancel her flight because Nana Davis is sick and she sends me a letter with American money to pay for tickets for us to come to see her, but Dad says we can’t go because Christmas is too busy in the shop. He says we’ll go another time, but we never do and I don’t know what happens to the money. The next time I see her is when she comes for my birthday, when I’m nine, and she brings me three books that are way too babyish and a Barbie, but I’ve never liked Barbies.
After that, she comes over three more times, between the birthday when I’m nine and when Dad dies. Three times in seven years and one of them is when she’s on her way to London for work and she only stays for the weekend. The phone calls go from every week, to every month, to Christmas and birthdays to check her presents have arrived. By then, her presents are American money, and even though I like the green twenty-dollar bills, like something from the telly, it’s a pain to get Dad to go to the bank to change them, and half the time he forgets.
I wish I had those twenty-dollar bills now.
I don’t know what the connection is between my lie about the machine and the lies she told after that. Maybe there’s no connection, maybe it’s just a coincidence, maybe everyone lies. Maybe growing up isn’t learning to spot the lies, maybe growing up is not expecting people to tell the truth.
I always knew Cooper was a liar, you could tell by his smarmy smile and his hair, but it turned out Laurie was a bigger liar than him—a better liar than him—because she’d hide the lie in part of the truth so it made it harder to spot.
But even though they were bad, Aunt Ruth was still the worst. I never heard a bigger lie than the one she told me the night I left. That was horrible, what she said about you that night. That was the absolute worst lie of all.
Don’t worry though, Mum, it’s not as if I believed her. I didn’t believe her then and sitting here, outside the apartment where you lived, I don’t believe her now.
I’ve never believed what she said, not even for one second.
Your loving daughter,
Rhea
Penn Station, New York
29th April 1999
2:32 a.m.
Dear Mum,
There’s something I have to tell you. I can’t keep writing all about truth and lies without telling you something. Something big. It’s not like I’ve been lying to you, everything I’ve told you is true. But like I said, lies can be the things you don’t say and there’s something I haven’t said to you: I’m gay.
I just thought of something that made me laugh. You know that song “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”? It was on one of Dad’s records, a Paul Simon one he didn’t listen to much but I always liked it. I’m making up a new song to the same tune: “Fifty Ways to Come Out to Your Mother.” It goes like this:
Send her a letter, Esther,
Give her a bell, Danielle,
Drop her an email, Gayle,
And set yourself free.
4:05 a.m.
I’m not in Penn Station anymore, Mum, I’m here now, at Michael’s! Can you believe it? I wasn’t even thinking about Sergei when he came over. I was trying to make up the next line of that song and I only half register that someone else has come into the café and it takes me a few seconds to see that the person is Sergei and that he’s crying. I’ve never seen him cry before, not like this, and before I decide I’m going to, I’m standing up and we’re hugging each other, really tight. He has a cut down the side of his face and he jerks away when I go to touch it, so I don’t ask what happened, just like I don’t ask where he got the money from when he takes out a fifty to pay for the cab to Michael’s.
The whole drive over, I’m afraid that Michael’s not going to answer the buzzer, just like he didn’t last night, but when we get here Sergei pulls out his keys and unlocks the door. It turns out that Sergei saw Michael earlier and they’d made up, and now Michael’s upstate for the weekend but he said we could stay, like before.
Sergei explains it all quickly but he won’t look at me, and I know that’s because Michael must have been the one to give him the cut on his face, even though I can’t imagine Michael doing something like that. Sergei’s asleep now, snoring, and even though I was so tired that I couldn’t stay awake in Penn Station, now that I have a place to sleep, I’m wide awake and I can’t stop my mind thinking and thinking and thinking, so I want to finish this letter.
Tell her out straight, Kate.
Maybe, if I write it again it will help …
I’m gay, Mum.
Mum, I’m gay.
What would you say now, if you could talk back? If you weren’t dead, I mean. Sometimes, when I was younger, I used to pretend that you weren’t dead. There was no body, no proof. And no one ever drowned in Rush. Everyone said you were a really good swimmer and that the sea was as flat as a pancake that day. It didn’t make any sense. Sometimes, I’d imagine that you swam away, up the coast as far as Drogheda or across the channel, even. Maybe you’d lost your memory and thought you were someone else? Or maybe you were still out there, still swimming? And one day you’d get tired, you wouldn’t be able to swim anymore, and you’d wash up on the beach, your body would, or just a sandy shape of you like the swirls of sand the lugworms leave behind.
Since I’m making all this up, I’m going to make up that you’re someone who would hug me straightaway and tell me that it’s okay and that you still love me. You don’t try and talk me out of it, you don’t say it’s a phase. You don’t tell me that I’m disgusting, a pervert.
Shit. I’m sorry. I don’t know how Cooper’s words ended up in your mouth, Mum. You are nothing like Cooper, I know you’re not. I don’t know much, but I know that.
Even now, it’s hard to write about this. Even after everything that has happened, I want to put the word “think” in there, to give myself a safety net, because thinking you’re gay has got to be better than being gay, right? Anything’s better than being absolutely sure.
I don’t know if this is making sense, but the thing is when you want to be something else—someone else—so badly, it’s easy to convince yourself that you are. It’s easy to hide—not like my arm, I could never hide that—but this gay stuff, you can hide even from yourself, you know? Like y
ou only see a sneak peek of it from the side of your eye and when you try and look at it head-on, it’s gone into hiding again.
I need a list, Mum, a list will help this make sense. Here are reasons that made me worry that I was gay:
When Dad bought the Sunday World I used to like looking at the pictures of the girls with no tops on and tassels on their boobs.
In second year, I got an art book that had loads of pictures in it. Some of the pictures were of women in the nude, paintings I mean. I could tell you every page number those paintings were on.
Once, I had a dream that I was kissing Dr. Lewis from ER and I tried to make myself have the dream loads of times after that but it didn’t work.
There was other evidence too, but it was what they’d call circumstantial evidence if it was an episode of Law & Order—I never liked dresses or high heels or makeup, but lots of girls were tomboys so maybe that didn’t mean anything. One time in Billie’s, when I was looking at the penny sweets, I heard Mrs. Mulcahy saying to Mrs. O’Loughlin that wasn’t it terrible that I looked more like a little boy than a little girl, and Mrs. O’Loughlin said that with no mother and Dermot Farrell for a father, sure, it wasn’t surprising. I walked out without buying anything that day, even though they’d just got a new batch of white chocolate fish and chips.
This is a list of reasons that made me think I wasn’t gay:
I got off with loads of boys, nearly all the ones my age, in the estate. “Getting off with” is what you’d call “making out.” Kissing. They were crap at it, most of them were, with tongues like washing machines or teeth that would take the mouth off you. I preferred playing football with them to getting off with them, but I did it anyway.
Here are the boys I got off with: Shane Kenny, Simon Gaffney, Richard O’Toole, Tony Donoghue, Alan Roche, Dominic Kelly, the McManus twins, and Tony Duggan. That’s way more boys than loads of girls got off with. Lisa only got off with John O’Sullivan, Raymond Roche, Pat Cronin, and Dominic Kelly (after me).
I went out with Alan Roche for two weeks at the beginning of second year and Alan McManus for a month in the summer between second and third year and when we were getting off with each other in the tunnel down near the harbour I let him feel me up and I didn’t mind it.
Once, when me and Lisa were watching Police Academy, there’s this scene with girls all with their tops off, dancing around a campfire. I liked that scene but I didn’t let on and Lisa was the one who rewound it so we could see it again, who paused it just at that part. I remember the look on her face as she did it, kind of mischievous and guilty at the same time. I remember the relief—I knew Lisa was normal, she wasn’t a lezzer, which meant I mustn’t be one either.
In primary school, it was the boys who called the girls lezzers and even though I didn’t know what it meant, I knew it was bad. One time, Tony Donoghue said it about me and Lisa, and I chased him and gave him a dead leg, and he never said it again. In secondary school, the girls started saying it too but in a different way—speculating, investigating. One in ten people were. One in six, no, five. Did you think she was? Or what about her? Looking at someone the wrong way, standing too close, saying the wrong thing would get you labelled a lezzer. You had to be careful. So, there was no way you’d choose to be one. Especially when the evidence was fifty-fifty. But then, halfway through second year, Nicole Gleeson joined our school.
I’m nearly afraid to write about her, Mum, Nicole Gleeson, to bring all that up again, but I want to tell you the truth, and she’s part of the truth. And I told Laurie before, so if I can tell her, I can tell you too.
Nicole’s mum and dad had split up over Christmas. She was the only girl in the class who had parents who’d split up and I don’t know how we all knew that about her from the start, but we did. We knew Nicole and her little brother and her mum had moved in with her granny, and that she had had to leave her posh school on the southside because it was too far away, although some people said it was because her dad wouldn’t pay for it anymore. Some of the girls took the piss out of her accent but they were only jealous because you could tell straightaway that she was cool. Everything about her was cool—the silver ring she wore on a chain around her neck, her blonde highlights, the way she flicked her head to get her hair out of her face. It didn’t take long for Nicole to find her place in Susan Mulligan’s cool gang, but none of them did art, so she sat next to me. I usually sat next to Áine Geraghty, but she was in hospital then, getting her appendix out, and by the time she came back, me and Nicole sat next to each other every class. Wednesday mornings were the best part of the week, because we had double art. I hated Wednesday afternoons, double maths, and a whole other week to wait until double art again.
It might look obvious now, writing it down, but it wasn’t then. Art was always my favourite class anyway and Nicole was just someone I thought was cool. A friend—only not really a friend because we were only friends in art, the rest of the time she hung around with her gang and I hung around with Lisa. But in art we talked about proper stuff. She told me about her mum and dad splitting up, about her little brother crying and wetting the bed every night, about how she hated Saturdays now, sitting in McDonald’s with her dad, about how she missed her old friends. I don’t remember telling her anything about me. I don’t remember her ever asking.
It was when the summer came that I started to know—to know and not know. Every morning, when I woke up, she was there in my head, even if I was only getting up to go to the loo in the middle of the night, she was there. They lived over in Lusk, and whenever I needed anything from the shop, I’d go to the one over there instead of Billie’s or even Leonard’s. I was in that shop so much that the woman behind the counter asked me my name. At night, I’d get Lisa to go for a walk that took us in that direction, and it’s on one of those walks that she tells me that Nicole’s gone to Spain with her Dad for a month. She says it all casual, like it’s any old thing she’s saying, and even though we keep walking, I feel the breath all gone, like someone has kicked me in the stomach.
And that’s when I start to know.
It’s a Thursday evening, a few weeks after that, when Nicole shows up in the shop right before we’re due to close. Dad’s in the back. I hear the little jingle of the bell and, when I look up, she’s there, with her face all tanned and her hair blonder than before. She buys a chicken and a pound of sausages and says she could have gone to a butcher nearer her granny’s but she wanted to see me. She misses me, that’s what she says, she misses our chats during art.
Dad says I can finish up early and we go and get Magnums that she pays for, and we sit on the wall by the harbour eating them. The stone is still hot from the sun. I ask her about Spain and she shrugs and says it was okay. She says she’s going to a disco in town on Saturday in a hotel along the quays, and asks if I want to go. There’s a square of chocolate from the Magnum stuck on her lip when she asks and when I say yes, she smiles and licks it away.
Lisa’s not allowed to stay out past eleven but she stays in my house and pretends that we’re watching a video. We’re meeting Nicole at the bus stop and Lisa keeps going on about how it’s a stupid place to meet because her mum could easily see her all dressed up, but I’m not really listening because I’m nervous too, because Nicole’s late and I think she might have forgotten and gone with someone else. And then I see her in white jeans and a denim jacket, hurrying towards us.
I think that journey on the 33 into town is the happiest forty-five minutes of my whole life up to then. It’s way better than art, sitting next to Nicole at the back of the bus, with her leg up against my leg and her hand on my arm every time she laughs at my jokes. Lisa’s sitting opposite and she hardly says a word, but Nicole laughs at everything I say. When she tells me I should be a stand-up comedian, Lisa folds her arms and looks out the window.
Would it sound crazy, Mum, if I told you that one of the things I miss most about I
reland is the smell of the bus fumes? The bus fumes smell different over here. Irish bus fumes and Nicole’s perfume all mixed together, that’s the smell I miss—the smell of a secret dream starting to come through. A dream so secret, I didn’t even know what it was.
Outside the disco, Nicole takes a naggin of vodka from her bag. Me and Lisa didn’t really drink vodka but that night I drink it back fast, even though it’s burny and horrible, and Lisa is looking at me funny. It feels right, the vodka, the summer evening. I can do anything now, I know I can. And inside when we meet some fifth years from school who are way cooler than me I don’t care, because I’m with Nicole and I’m the one she missed. In the beginning, no one’s dancing but then we’re all dancing in a group, even Lisa’s dancing, and it’s fun, all of us laughing at the fellas standing along the sides like gobshites except for the ones who are really drunk and falling around. I’m in the toilet when the slow set starts, Sinead O’Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
When I come out of the toilet, I see them straightaway—Nicole and Paul O’Riordan. I didn’t even know he was there, hadn’t seen him, but now I can’t stop looking at him—the way he knows how to hold her, his hands on her hips. I know him from the shop, sometimes he picks up his mum’s order on a Saturday: sausages, rashers, and a small housekeeper’s cut. He’s way older—he’s just done the Leaving—but he’s always friendly and that makes it worse somehow. It’d be better if it was some guy I didn’t know, if he was from anywhere else in Dublin except Rush.
They’re moving really slowly, kind of into each other, and he’s not grabbing at her the way boys our age do, he’s acting like he has all the time in the world. I can still picture them, as clearly as I can see Sergei sleeping next to me—the two of them, so close, the slow turns of the spots of light on the floor all around them, I can hear Sinead O’Connor counting out the days and the hours and the minutes. When he finally goes to kiss her, it takes forever. He touches her cheek and their kiss is in slow motion, gentle, like a kiss in a film, not anything like the fellas wearing the faces off the girls on either side of them.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 8
