He Is Mine and I Have No Other

by Rebecca O'Connor

  The two main lights were on in the living room, the lamps, the strip lights under the kitchen cupboards. Mam was stooped over the phone. I saw Dad touch her arm and signal that I was outside, and that I was coming in. I thought they might barricade the door, splash it with holy water. They both looked up as they heard the creaking of the handle, watched Blue scamper to my feet, panting excitedly. I brushed past her, Mar behind me.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ my father asked.

  ‘Nowhere. At Mona’s, like we said.’

  I was trying to look directly at them, but I just couldn’t. So I looked at the wall behind their heads instead.

  Mam was near to tears.

  ‘No you haven’t. We phoned her mother to see if you wanted a lift home, and she said you weren’t there. That you were never there. We’ve been frantic with worry.’

  ‘But I told you they’d give me a lift home . . .’

  ‘What are you talking about? You weren’t there. Where the hell were you?’

  There was no way of getting around this.

  ‘We went to the disco.’

  Dad’s eyes went all bleary.

  ‘Down the road. We were only down the road.’

  ‘For Jesus’ sake, why didn’t you ask us if you could go? At least we would have known where you were. I was just about to call the guards.’

  ‘We thought you’d been killed,’ Mam croaked, and then she started to cry.

  I didn’t know what to say. I was the answer to their prayers, wasn’t I? What did they think could have happened to me? It was such a small place, such a quiet place . . .

  ‘Your mother’s on her way over, Mar,’ Mam said curtly. She could barely bring herself to look at her.

  Mar was close to tears herself. ‘Thanks, Mrs Devine,’ was all she said. ‘Sorry, Mrs Devine.’

  Margaret, 15

  My ma died when I was twelve. After, my sister found me trying to hang myself from a rafter in the cowshed. If that wouldn’t have worked I would have tried the pond, though I didn’t really fancy drowning in that muck.

  They didn’t know what to do with me. They thought the nuns would knock some sense into me, I suppose.

  Ma’d been ill for a long time. I begged her not to leave me, but towards the end she didn’t even know what I was saying to her. At least then I thought she’d have gone to heaven. I’m not even sure I believe in it anymore.

  The first thing I remember when I got here is being given a pair of boots that were about two sizes too small. I had to walk around in them for months. Josie warned me not to ask for other ones or I’d get a right comeuppance.

  It’s funny, I was so scared I couldn’t even kill myself. I’d rather have stayed alive than run into that Mother Andrew at night, with her cane strapped to her waist and her beady eyes boring holes in me. I’d end up having to get up at night anyway, because I’d wet the bed I was so scared. Then I’d have to sneak down to the laundry to wash the sheets and sneak back again and put them on the bed sopping. If I got caught I was whipped across the backside with a birch. One time I got hit with a bit of an orange box that had nails in it. I still have scars on my arm.

  I was lucky because I was good at school, so they didn’t take me out to work in the convent. I prefer being at school.

  I’m getting out of here next year. My father says he will come and get me. I don’t want to kill myself anymore. I’m going to go away to England and learn to be a nurse, so I can make people better, so other children aren’t left on their own like me.

  Thanks, Mrs Devine. Sorry, Mrs Devine. Why couldn’t Mar have opened her fat gob instead of just standing there. She could have tried to explain . . . When her mother came to pick her up she gave her that look, like she just wanted to be taken home and tucked up in bed. Like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Like I’d put her up to it.

  She was there at the gate on Monday morning. I walked straight past her.

  ‘You can eff right off,’ I said, as she tugged on the strap of my bag.

  ‘But Lani, I need to talk to you about something.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t need to talk to you. Ever.’

  That told her.

  School was unbearably dull. I didn’t want to have to think about anything else but Leon Brady. And not being able to talk about him with anybody was so frustrating. I felt like I would burst.

  The only tolerable classes were English and ‘free’. English was up in my favourite classroom on the second floor of the old building, overlooking the playing fields and the temporary lake from the flooding, which changed from pewter to a murky green to black in places. There were two swans on it, and it was quite pleasant to watch them while listening to Mr Breslin read from The Winter’s Tale.

  I was made to stand in a musty corner of the concert hall at ‘free’, for passing notes. I liked it there.

  By mid-afternoon maths I was worn out – stifled by the billowing hot dusty air from the radiators, the constant droning of the teachers’ voices and the insufferable feeling that I had somehow made a fool of myself, or Leon had made a fool of me and would never want to set eyes on me again. I hadn’t even let him touch me down there, and Mar had probably gone all the way, knowing her.

  I was frigid.

  And I hadn’t said anything funny or smart.

  And I wasn’t pretty like Mar.

  Mam and Dad didn’t stay cross for long. All was forgiven by the end of the week. Forgotten, anyway. Mam was too preoccupied with the pregnancy. And once Dad was over the trauma of thinking I was dead he was back to his usual self – out in the garden mostly, or in the shed, knocking together some shelves to go around the fireplace in the front room.

  Mam had taken to sewing again, which she hadn’t done since I was small.

  ‘I used make all your clothes,’ she told me more than once. I remembered well. Even my First Holy Communion dress she made – mostly because I was too big to fit into any of the bought ones. We even made a trip across the border to try and find one, but the best we came across there was an off-white two-piece Confirmation suit. Frilly skirt and blouse with pearl buttons. I wanted one of those meringue ones like the normal-size girls in my class.

  ‘There wasn’t a thing I couldn’t make. And now look at me. I can barely sew on a button.’

  But she soon got the hang of it, hammering away at the stiff old treadle of our Singer sewing machine. A cot-size duvet cover first, with zoo animals peeking from behind coloured squares. Then a large raggedy doll, about four feet tall. She spent hours stuffing that doll with old tights, hand-sewing her torso together, adding arms, legs, a head; drawing on and embroidering a face that had just the right blandness of expression so as not to frighten the poor baby. There was the wool hair, and the clothes. Even little socks and shoes.

  Friday afternoon art class, Mrs Smith announced we’d be going to the boys’ school the following week, to hear a local artist talk about her work. The thought of going back there filled me with a kind of joy I can’t rightly explain. Chances were I wouldn’t even see Leon, but just to be in the same building as him would be enough. It didn’t even bother me that other boys would be there.

  There I was in the library, a bright, high-vaulted white room. I’d never been in the likes of it. The library in our school was functional, beige, with chipboard shelving and orange plastic desks; with tatty old paperback copies of romance novels. The library in town wasn’t much better. This library was something else. All the volumes on the shelves were beautifully leather-bound. Whole sets of blue, dark brown, maroon volumes – of Dickens, Thackeray, Austen – sat on the mahogany shelves that stretched right up to the corniced ceiling. The windows, too, were from ceiling to floor, halved by orange blinds. There were dust motes swimming in the sunlight.

  We were seated at the front of the room, the boys filed in behind us. Mrs Smith hovered around us protectively. If we turned round, God forbid, we’d be turned to salt or stone.

  I really wished Mar was beside me then.
I was missing her terribly. I had to make do with Mona instead – the famous Mona we famously didn’t go visiting that night – who, as her name implied, enjoyed a good old whinge. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d gotten the hump while everyone else waited piously for the boys to be seated. She didn’t, though, she kept her mouth shut.

  The boys were much louder than us. Chair legs screeched across the wooden floor, knocked against one another, the rubber soles of shoes squeaked. They muttered among themselves as we wouldn’t dare. Their teachers were drawing them in in hushed tones, as if into a pen. I imagined they had sticks and were lightly whipping their flanks, as farmers did with their herds, grunting orders that weren’t words. Then I could feel their grunting at my neck, as they leaned forward to sit down. Mona glanced around contemptuously as one boy kneed her in the back. He didn’t apologise. We were on their turf. And we were girls. Fifteen-year-old boys were only barely human, as far as I was concerned.

  The artist was introduced and off she went, talking about her house out in the woods, near one of the lakes, and how the water inspired her work. And what a watery place we lived in, even though it was inland. And she liked to work in blue. And she sounded kind of blue – not blue sad but blue cold. I drifted off. I wanted to be alone in the library. Or hiding somewhere, like I could do at home, watching Leon earnestly searching through the books for a favourite poem he wanted to learn by heart. I wanted to drop a bowl of marbles on the wooden floorboards, for the sound it would make.

  The thought that Leon was there, in the same building, that he had been in this same room many times before – maybe even that day – filled me with the sort of happiness I’d felt when I was small, playing make-believe – that under this tree is my house, in this stone bowl of mud and elderberries a magic potion, in that hollow in the field a glistening pool, and all is blissful and exactly how I want it to be, and have made it be. I conjured up the kiss. And it was like there were tiny droplets of water trickling over my skin.

  Just then I felt a gentle prod in my back. I didn’t move. If some boy was trying to wind me up, get me into trouble, it wasn’t going to work. He prodded again – harder this time – between my ribs. I tried desperately to concentrate on what the woman was saying. Then there was a faint swishing noise below my chair and something against my foot. I looked down: there was a white envelope with what looked like ‘Lane’ or ‘Toni’ scrawled on it.

  It was ‘Lani’ all right. Definitely ‘Lani’. I leaned down, lifted the envelope, and slipped it under the sleeve of my jumper. It was small and slim. I didn’t dare turn round to see who it was had given it to me.

  I couldn’t wait to get home that afternoon. Our lift was late as usual: it was our neighbour, Karen’s father, who picked me up Mondays and Wednesdays, when Mam was working in Martin the vet’s in town. We were sat for ages on the wall in front of the Virgin Mary, kicking the gravel with the toes of our shoes and talking about exams, teachers, anything to do with school. We had little to say to each other besides. Not since we’d fallen out when we were five or six had we had a proper conversation. She’d hit me with a plastic spade, bang on the forehead, in the sandpit in her back garden. I can’t remember what for, now: I don’t think she liked me too much. Or maybe I’d stolen her bucket. I went home crying to my mother anyway. I had a big purple bruise over my right eye.

  I desperately wanted to open the letter but knew that I couldn’t with her beady little eyes stuck to me. She’d be telling her friends the next day: ‘You should have seen the state of her. Red as a beetroot. Her hands shaking like leaves . . .’ When I did finally get home I went straight to my room, shut the door and tore the envelope open. It was written on ruled A4 paper, the kind we used for science:

  My darling Lani,

  I dreamt last night that I was alone in a dark house. I walked upstairs to my room and you were lying there, naked, on my bed. I wanted desperately to touch you but couldn’t reach you, couldn’t walk through the doorway. You were like Ophelia, pale and beautiful.

  I can’t stop thinking about you. There were moments, the other night, when I felt so warm and comfortable with you, though it was cold out there. If I don’t see you soon I think I might lose my mind. I know it is only days since we met, and that we barely know each other, have barely spoken, but it feels right. I’m not used to feeling this way.

  L.B.

  p.t.o. ➜

  Farewell to last night!

  The memory will not fade.

  Though I were to die for it,

  I wish that it were beginning now.

  If you wish to respond to this please give letter to Geraldine McGovern (4th year), and it will reach me safely.

  I couldn’t believe it. I was afraid to believe it at first. It had to be some kind of joke. I could just see him sitting there in his dorm with some of the other boys, sniggering to themselves while they composed it. All of them thinking about touching me. Telling him what to write next. And to add that poem. I tried to dismiss it, but I couldn’t. I wanted it to be true more than anything. A whole rake of emotions followed. Finally, after I’d cried, danced round the room, paced around the house a couple of times, I quietened down, got a pen and paper and sat down to draft a reply.

  It wasn’t easy. The idea of meeting him scared the life out of me. I wouldn’t know what to say to him. And I didn’t know where we could meet. I didn’t want to suggest the cemetery, that would be weird, and I was going to write that I’d been grounded, but then I didn’t want him knowing that I’d had to sneak out that night and that I was some kind of child. I wanted to include some lines from a poem, as he had done. I found Kavanagh’s ‘There will be bluebells growing under the big trees / And you will be there and I will be there in May’ in an old book of poems on the shelf outside my room. I liked that line ‘We will be interested in the grass’, but then I realised it might have been the graveyard I was referring to, with the bluebells under the trees up there.

  I was going to say I’d dreamt of him, but if I had I couldn’t remember. I’d dreamt of a baby – a little plasticine baby the size of my palm that I had to look after. I kept losing it behind the couch, or it would melt and fall off my hand. And I dreamt about being late for an exam that was being held in the church in town; and of running but not moving.

  It took me hours to write that letter. I just couldn’t find the words. Finally, I wrote:

  Dearest Leon,

  I was both surprised and delighted to hear from you. I feel the same way: if I do not see you soon I shall go insane. I shall walk into your dreams every night until I see you again.

  Tell me when and where and I will be there.

  Love,

  Lani

  Next day I walked up to Mar. She was crouched at the side of the shed on the laneway down from school with some bitch I couldn’t stand. Sylvia, I think her name was.

  ‘I need you to give this to Geraldine McGovern.’ I held out the envelope.

  ‘I thought you weren’t talking to me,’ she said, flicking ash from her cigarette onto her shoe.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘So why should I?’

  ‘Because I’m asking.’

  ‘Hnph.’

  ‘All right then, don’t bother,’ I said, turning and walking away.

  ‘All right, all right,’ she called after me, ‘give us it.’

  I was afraid of what she’d do with it. She and Sylvia might just tear it open and have a right laugh at my expense. But I hadn’t much choice.

  She stuffed it into the top of her skirt, and the pair of them gave me the dirtiest look and burst out laughing.

  ‘Sicko,’ I heard one of them whisper, whatever that was supposed to mean.

  Dad picked me up at lunchtime on his way into town to collect Mam from work. I’d said I’d go with them for the first ultrasound. I suppose they thought I needed to see it with my own eyes to believe it. Anyway, I was glad to get away from school.

  Mam had on one of her best outfits: a l
emon and pink floral pleated skirt and V-neck short-sleeved blouse, with a pink cardigan draped over her shoulders. It was one of her summer outfits. The skirt had an elasticated waist – that would have been why she was wearing it in the middle of winter. She hadn’t bought any maternity gear at that stage – too early – so she was probably running out of clothes that fitted right. She looked kind of other-worldly in her unseasonal outfit.

  ‘Are you not cold?’ I said to her.

  ‘No, I’m grand,’ she said, pulling the cardigan tighter around her shoulders. I could see the goosebumps on her arms.

  Dad couldn’t hide his excitement. ‘Boy or girl, what do you think, eh girls?’

  I sighed and looked out the window.

  ‘We won’t be able to tell at this stage, love.’

  ‘Well, my money’s on a boy. What do you think, Lani?’

  Shut your fat mouth, is what I wanted to say.

  ‘Don’t know. I’d say a girl.’

  ‘Why do you say that, Lani?’ Mam turned to me on the back seat, surprised I’d said anything at all.

  ‘Just.’

  Just because I felt like it. Just as something to say to shut him up.

  ‘Just,’ he laughed.

  Mam brushed some stray hairs from Dad’s shoulder, leaving her elbow to rest on the back of his seat. From where I was sitting you’d have thought the two of them were off to Bundoran for the day.

  The last time I’d been to the hospital was to visit Gran after she’d had her stroke. I thought that was goodbye then. They were sunny days just like this one. She kept asking me to take her home – ‘Take me home, Lani. Please love, take me home’ – and I’d look at Mam and she’d shrug her shoulders.

  ‘You’ll be going home soon, Mammy,’ she’d say, loudly and slowly so that Gran could decipher the words.

  Gran’d say other things too that I couldn’t make out at all. It was like someone had stuffed her mouth with cotton wool. And those words I could make out were coming out all wrong.