Kate

by Siobhán Parkinson

  ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’ Polly said, and she pulled a cigarette out of her handbag. It was a bit battered looking, but it was intact. I loved Polly’s handbag. You never knew what might come out of it. This time, she brought out a Lemon’s toffee with the cigarette and handed it to me.

  ‘Give us a light there, Tom,’ she said to my da.

  He took a spill of paper and lifted the hot plate off the range to light it. Then he held it out to her, and she bent her head to catch the light.

  She closed her eyes with pleasure on the first puff, and then suddenly she looked around, found a saucer, and quenched the cigarette.

  ‘Are you saving it?’ I asked. I’d seen people do that, only smoke half a cigarette, so they’d have the other half for another time.

  Polly had gone quite pale.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I suddenly … just don’t feel like it any more.’

  ‘Polly?’ I said, after a minute or two. ‘Are you all right, Polly?’

  She looked a bit pale.

  ‘Right as rain,’ said Polly, smiling at me. ‘It’s passed. Make a drop of tea, Kate, love, and I’ll get on with this sewing.’

  CHAPTER 13

  Celtíc Knot

  The night before the feis, Polly sewed the last button in place on the costume.

  She sat back and admired her work.

  ‘I think I’ll have a celebratory cigarette,’ she said, but then she changed her mind. ‘No, maybe I won’t. Now, Kate, get yourself inside of that, quick march.’

  I gathered up the dress. The wool was thick and soft, and I could hear a quiet, crinkling sound as I smoothed down the skirt. Polly had inserted a piece of stiff lining at the waistband, ‘to give it a bit of body,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks, Polly,’ I said again, and I went into the bedroom to try it on.

  I came out again in a minute, to ask Polly to button it up for me. I couldn’t reach the top buttons at the back.

  ‘You’re lovely, Kate,’ she said, riffling my hair. ‘That’s your colour. You should always wear it.’

  Madge and Lily and Patsy all gathered around and patted me down, and I smiled, wriggling a bit inside the dress, getting used to the feel of it. Even Eddy pointed and said, ‘Kat-ie!’

  ‘It’s a lovely colour on you,’ Polly said again, ‘but it’s a pity it’s so plain. A little shamrock or something would have been nice, but sure, we can’t have everything.’

  ‘Thanks, Polly,’ I said. I didn’t mind not having a shamrock.

  Polly picked up the brat then, which she had lined with a piece of the saffron silk casing of my mother’s best wedding-present eiderdown. She had cut a large square out of the underside, and patched the hole with a piece of cotton sheeting, and Mam said you’d never know. I suppose you wouldn’t as long as you didn’t turn the eiderdown upside down, but it looked pretty peculiar underneath all the same.

  ‘I like this best,’ said Lily, stroking the slippery lining of the brat. Yellow was her favourite colour. ‘Could I have a brat, Polly?’

  ‘When you’re big,’ said Polly, ‘if you’re good.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said to Lily. ‘I have a tiny ragdoll that Nell gave me, and it has no clothes. If you asked very nicely, I’d say Polly could run up a little frock out of the scraps of that yellow material, and you could put it on the ragdoll, would you like that? Would you do it, Polly?’

  Polly nodded, and Lily did a little skip of excitement.

  I had the two Tara brooches that Mrs Maguire had given me, and we pinned the brat to the shoulders of the dress. Polly turned back a slip of the brat so that the glorious buttercup-yellow of the lining showed, and I did a little skip of excitement myself, just like Lily. I grabbed my youngest sister’s hands then, and the two of us jigged up and down the kitchen, me trying to get used to the way the dress fell against my knees.

  ‘AON, dó, trí, is a hAON, dó, trí,’ sang Patsy.

  ‘A touch of that Geranium lipstick, now, and you’d be the belle of the ball,’ said Polly. ‘Where did you put it at all?’

  ‘No!’ I yelped. ‘Irish dancers don’t wear lipstick, Polly! It’s not the cha-cha I’m doing. Do you want Mrs Maguire to have my guts for garters?’

  I went in to Mam, then, to show her. She was sitting up with her pillow tucked in behind her for support. I hadn’t seen her sitting up since the day she got sick.

  ‘Look at me, Mam!’ I said, and I did a little twirl for her.

  ‘You’re a vision, Kate,’ said Mam. ‘And your costume is lovely. Your Aunty Mary worked a miracle with those curtains and that bit of eiderdown. You’re a walking haberdashery department, and no one would ever guess!’

  Polly gave a grin. ‘You’re a lot better, all of a sudden,’ she said to Mam.

  ‘I am,’ said Mam. ‘I’ve turned a corner, Mary. I feel as if I could do heaps and kill dead things.’

  ‘Well, don’t try that, now,’ said Polly.

  ‘No,’ said Mam. ‘I’ll take it easy. But there’s one little job I have to do for this daughter of mine.’

  ‘What’s that, Mammy?’ I asked.

  ‘Bring me my workbasket,’ she said.

  Mystified, I went back into the kitchen and took the large wicker workbasket from under the dresser, where she always kept it.

  ‘While we were waiting for the blue material to become a remnant,’ Mam said, opening up the basket, ‘I was starting to gather some coloured embroidery threads. And I have a nice little Celtic knot pattern that I traced out of a library book. What do you think of that?’

  She pulled out a fistful of colours, like a rainbow, mauve and yellow and red and white, and spread them all out on the bedspread. Then she reached back into the workbasket and brought out a piece of greaseproof paper, on which was pencilled a simple but beautiful design of interlocking loops.

  ‘Now,’ said Mam. ‘My eyes are tired, and I can’t thread the needles, but if you and Mary will do that, I’ll have no trouble with the embroidery, sure I can do it in my sleep. I’ll need a few pins, Kate, and a little bit of French chalk, and get out of that dress, child, if you don’t want to be embroidered into it. Look sharp, now.’

  ‘As the fork said to the knife,’ said Da, automatically. He had just appeared in the doorway. ‘Alice, asthore, you are surely not going to sit up all night embroidering this child’s dress and you only back from death’s door.’

  ‘No, Tommy, I’m not. It’s going to take me an hour at the most. It will tire me, but it won’t kill me. Sure, why did God spare me, if it wasn’t to be of help to my children? Go down to the pump in the yard, like a good man, and haul us up some water, and then you can put on the kettle to keep us going. Make yourself useful.’

  It took more than an hour, even with me and Polly doing the threading and handing her the colours as she needed them, and Da pouring the tea.

  She looked drained by the time she’d finished, but the green dress was transformed from something quite nice but rather ordinary into what it was supposed to be – an Irish dancing costume. The Celtic knot on the bodice glowed with colour and brought the dull green of the fabric alive. It was a costume fit for a dancing champion.

  ‘She’ll dance a merry dance in that,’ said Da.

  I would, I knew I would.

  ‘She’ll do her best,’ said Mam, ‘as she always does.’

  I glowed with pleasure. Maybe God wasn’t cross with me after all. Mother Rosario always said our prayers are often answered in unexpected ways. There was no doubt about it, you couldn’t be up to God, you never knew what He was going to do next. That must be what Mother Rosario meant when she said, ‘God’s ways are not our ways.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Curtaíns

  Angela and Nell were on the very first form at the front of the Father Mathew Hall. They had strewn coats and scarves and bags all along the form, keeping places for people. I waved at them when I saw them, and I sent Lily and Madge and Patsy up to join them, so they would be ab
le to see. I was sorry Mam couldn’t be there, but Polly had promised to do her level best to come. She had important business to see to first, she’d said, but she’d try to make it.

  Mrs Maguire was having conniptions behind the stage. She was resplendent in gold and black, and on her heaving shoulder was a huge Tara brooch, like the ones she’d had made for her dancers, only about ten times as large. Her hair, which was usually combed back off her face and worn in a loose ribbon, was all piled up in magnificent curls and wisps. She really did look a bit like Queen Maeve, or maybe Queen Maeve’s mother, as Brigid Mullane whispered to me. She was pulling at all her pupils, criticising their dresses, their brats, their hair styles, their stockings, their dancing poms, even their mothers, in some cases. Nothing was right, in her view.

  One or two of the older ones had ‘the audacity,’ as Mrs Maguire said with a hiss, to put colour on their faces – not real rouge, but Messenger Red as we called it. Girls used to soak the cover of the Sacred Heart Messenger, which was a lovely strong red colour, till the ink ran, and use it to put colour on their cheeks and lips. Mrs Maguire threatened to send them home and never let them darken her door again, brazen, pagan straps that they were, letting down their dancing school, their families, their country, even. They might as well have burnt the Irish flag or joined the British Legion, as far as Mrs Maguire was concerned, as put rouge on their cheeks. I was glad I hadn’t let Polly talk me into wearing that lipstick of hers, but I bit my lips all the same, to put a bit of colour into them.

  Girls with short hair had parted it neatly and put green ribbons in it, and girls with long hair had done it up in ringlets. They looked very strange, as if they were carrying strings of sausages on their heads. I am sure they went through torture in the night with their scalps all stretched and sore and covered in knotted rags. I was lucky I had naturally curly hair, so all I had to do was twirl it around my fingers with the brush and it fell into soft, natural-looking ringlets, cascading down my shoulders. That was Polly’s word for it, ‘cascading’, and I loved the sound of it, though of course I wouldn’t say it out loud in case someone thought I was looking for notice.

  Tess O’Hara appeared with Annie. They had been allowed to enter at the last moment, mainly because Mrs Maguire didn’t want their mothers making a fuss. Tess was wearing a gorgeous soft sky-blue wool costume, with matching brat and a pretty little tam o’shanter perched on the side of her bunch of fat brown sausages. She had her sister Betty with her, who was got up in exactly the same rigout. So that’s what had happened to my lovely blue material! The O’Haras had nabbed it and had it made up into matching outfits for Tess and Betty. There’s no doubt it was a lovely colour, but now that I saw it made up, I could see that it wasn’t right for Irish dancing costumes. Polly had been spot on about that. Green was much better, and not so showy either.

  Tess took one look at me and said, mar dhea to Annie and Betty, but as loudly as she could, so everyone could hear, ‘I hear Kate Delaney’s costume is made out of a pair of curtains! I ask you!’ She did a little twirl around as she said it, pretending she was checking to see that her hem was even all the way around, but really showing off her soft blue dress.

  I just went on brushing my hair quietly and didn’t let on I heard what Tess was saying, but if I could have got hold of Patsy and Lily I would have given them a good quizzing. Madge was old enough to know better, but those little girls would hang you, sometimes, the things they would let out. Tess was laughing loudly now, a forced sort of a laugh, like a horse with a cold, and pointing in my direction, and Annie was too, but I made out I didn’t notice a thing, though my cheeks were burning. I swung my hair forward to hide my face and said nothing. I’d learnt long ago that the silent treatment was usually the best way to deal with Breda. She soon got tired of being ignored and went off to torment some other poor creature. Anyway, I had more important things to worry about than where my costume came from.

  What with Mam being so sick and all the fuss about the costume, I’d missed the last couple of dancing classes before the feis and I hadn’t danced for ages, bar skipping up the stairs at home and doing the odd slither around the bedroom floor. The more I tried to run through the steps in my head, the more terrified I became that I would go completely blank as soon as I stood up.

  When my name was called, I felt a rush of fear, my stomach seemed to sink onto the floor of my pelvis, my heart flew upwards and lodged somewhere in my throat, and for a moment, everything went black before my eyes and I wanted to get sick.

  ‘Kate Delaney!’ Mrs Maguire hissed and poked me in the back, and I stumbled out onto the stage, my legs suddenly feeling as if they were made of putty. I couldn’t imagine how they were going to hold me up, much less dance.

  ‘Right, Saint Bernadette,’ I whispered, with my eyes closed. ‘Don’t let me down now. Just get me through this. I don’t have to win, I don’t even have to dance well, I just have to get through it without falling over.’

  I opened my eyes then and stared down into the audience, but it was a big, moving, babbling, shifting blur. That was good. I think it would have finished me if I could make out people I knew.

  I put my weight on my left foot, and stood with my right foot poised, wondering what on earth I was going to do when the music started, because I couldn’t remember even the very first step of the dance. But as soon as I heard the accordion leading into my tune everything that had happened over the past few weeks flew out of my head, and the knowledge of the steps came flooding back.

  The split second the bar note sounded, I leapt into action. This was it. Either my legs were going to give way under me and I was going to end up in a heap on the floor with Polly’s green curtains all around me, or I was going to dance my heart out. I gave one big, joyful bound and gave myself up to the dance.

  I kicked and soared and pranced and whirled, stepped and twirled and spun and flew, tripped and skipped and skimmed and sailed, all over that stage. I hardly knew where I was, and I was completely oblivious to the audience, the strange hall, even the adjudicator, though I knew she must be out there somewhere in the blur of humanity beyond the stage, watching carefully and taking notes. I didn’t care about that. I was filled with the joy of the dance, and I didn’t give a rattling toss about Tess O’Hara and her sky-blue frock and her snooty ways. All I wanted was for the music never to stop, so that I could dance and twinkle and leap in its magic nets for ever.

  The music did stop, of course, and I did too; and as soon as I stopped, I knew it was just as well that the music had, because suddenly I was worn out, weak-kneed and panting, fit to collapse.

  A terrific noise started up out of nowhere. I thought maybe the roof was coming in. I breathed deeply, blinking and looking around me, still standing centre stage, with my toes pointed in front of me and my knee crooked, as I had been taught.

  Then I realised what the noise was, and I started to smile. It wasn’t a natural disaster or a storm. It was applause, thunderous clapping and stamping of feet and rocking of chairs. I beamed. I beamed and beamed until my face ached.

  I made a little curtsey, and then I tripped quickly and lightly off stage.

  ‘She’s so light on her feet,’ I could hear people say, as I flew down the steps at the side of the stage. ‘It’s like watching feathers floating on the breeze,’ some poetic type said. ‘She’s a champion, that’s for sure.’

  They were talking about me, but I’d lost interest now. I wanted to see if Polly was there. I needed to know that she’d seen me dancing. I wanted her to be able to tell my mam about it. Madge and the others wouldn’t have the words to describe it, I knew that, and I couldn’t describe it myself, but Polly would be able to tell it all with great panache.

  I stood near the top of the hall, by the stage, and I scanned the rows and rows of people. A figure was coming towards me, but I couldn’t make it out properly in the semi-dusk of the seething room.

  ‘Polly?’ I called uncertainly. It couldn’t be Polly, though, it was
too big and blustering. I was right. It was Mrs Maguire.

  ‘Maith thú!’ she was saying delightedly, pumping my hand. ‘Well done, Kate! That was a champion performance if ever I saw one. You’re my star pupil, you know that? I’m proud to be your teacher.’

  I smiled nervously at her. I wasn’t used to having my hand shaken, and I certainly wasn’t used to people being proud to be my teacher. I kept on smiling, and at the same time I was trying to look around Mrs Maguire’s bulk to see if I could catch a glimpse of Polly’s wide smile and flying figure.

  Mrs Maguire moved away, then, after giving my hand one last good yank, to talk to another pupil’s mother, and as she did so, I spotted Polly, hanging back, waiting for me to finish my conversation with my teacher.

  I waved at her and she came running forward and scooped me into a tight, tight hug, whirling me around and around the floor at the side of the rows of seats, till I could hardly breathe.

  ‘Did you see me?’ I asked when she finally let me go.

  ‘I only caught the end of it, love,’ she said, ‘but you were brilliant, absolutely brilliant. You weren’t dancing. You were flying!’

  ‘That’s what it feels like,’ I said. ‘Flying.’

  Polly and I found two chairs near the back. We had to sit through all the other competitors in my group. Some of them were good, I thought, but Polly kept whispering, ‘Not as good as Kate Delaney.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, ‘you’re biased.’

  When all the dancers were finished, there was a long delay, while the adjudicator scratched her head and wrote things down, and whispered to her assistant. At last she stood up on stage and started a big long speech about something called standards and the importance of Irish dancing to the soul of the nation – all Mrs Maguire sort of stuff that I wasn’t a bit interested in. Polly wasn’t either. I could see that she was shuffling uneasily on her chair.