Less Than Perfect

by Ber Carroll

  Always we stopped at the very brink, breathless and a little delirious, and it would take a while for my heart to slow down enough to fall asleep, my half-naked body entangled with his. Josh liked to leave the lamp on while he slept, to read my lips if I spoke during the night, and to enable him to see around the room and reassure himself that nothing strange or untoward was happening, because of course he wouldn’t be able to hear if anything moved or creaked. Initially, I found the light disconcerting and had difficulty sleeping, but I got used to it. Other things kept me awake then, mainly excitement drumming inside me. I felt like I was on the precipice of my life. In three years’ time I would graduate with first class honours – nothing less would do – and then I would leave. I didn’t know where I was going just yet, only that I was going. And though it was early days with Josh, I knew that he would go with me. I couldn’t imagine a future without him.

  My father, at his lectern preaching to his students, spoke about different kinds of ethics. There are descriptive ethics, prescriptive ethics and virtue ethics, but I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that ethics can be summed up quite conveniently with the following golden, over-arching rule: do unto others what you would have them do unto you. Unfortunately, that rule was far too simplistic for the social and political environment that we lived in. If there was ever a city to fuel debate on what was right or wrong, moral or immoral, justifiable or downright unjust, Belfast would have to be it. Neighbourhoods with separating walls, thick and high, topped with barbed wire. Buildings with graffiti and murals, hatred portrayed through art. Streets with kerbstones painted in blue-white-red or green-white-orange, Royal Ulster Constabulary officers with guns held across their bodies, and regular outbreaks of violence that were shown on the nightly news.

  Dad was the king of the castle, presiding over the intolerance and hatred and violence, writing academic papers on it all and having excerpts published in the Belfast Telegraph, the Independent and, once, the Times. Occasionally he was on TV, usually after some atrocity or other when journalists sought him out for a comment. They filmed him with the university in the background and he always looked solemn, thoughtful and mortifyingly righteous.

  At home Dad never missed an opportunity to instil his values in his children, even when we were small. Over and over again he’d test us.

  ‘What are our core values, Caitlin?’

  ‘Caring, honesty, accountability, respect for others, promise-keeping, fairness, and …’ the last one always eluded me, ‘and …’

  ‘Pursuit of excellence,’ he’d supply, looking deeply disappointed that I had forgotten.

  I was only five or six when he made me learn the list. I didn’t know what ‘pursuit of excellence’ meant, so it wasn’t surprising that I couldn’t commit it to memory.

  It wasn’t just the list, though. Dad would look for lessons in everything I did, everywhere I went, every single day.

  ‘Was that very caring, Caitlin? Shouldn’t you have helped your sister? Showed some compassion?’

  ‘Caitlin, you’re distorting the truth and being deceitful.’ ‘You did the wrong thing, Caitlin, and now you have to accept the consequences.’

  ‘You weren’t thinking, Caitlin. Think before you act.’

  Needless to say, I chose my university subjects carefully so that I wouldn’t have to attend my father’s lectures. Those I received at home were more than enough!

  Dad said I was the wild one, the one that needed watching, reining in. The truth was that I wasn’t all that wild. I pushed boundaries no more or less than most kids; I answered back, flouted a few curfews and was sometimes lured into trouble when I forgot his set of rules and values and lived for the moment instead.

  One incident stands out in my memory. I was eleven, and cycling with my friend Mandy. The sky was pale blue, the sun hidden behind one of many pillowy clouds, and the Sperrin Mountains spilled into the valleys alongside the curved, sloping road. We freewheeled side by side back towards town, our hair flowing behind us, the wind biting our faces.

  ‘How much longer are you allowed?’ asked Mandy when the road levelled out.

  I didn’t need to glance at my watch to know. ‘Another twenty minutes.’

  ‘What if I went in with you and asked?’

  I pursed my lips. ‘They’d still say no.’

  Mandy, with her open face and unruly hair, had tried to understand the many restrictions that bound me: mealtimes, study time, leisure time, all measured precisely, like spoonfuls of medicine. Mandy had five siblings, one of whom was a very recent addition, and her parents were too busy to worry about rules and formalities. Their disorderly house was generally a relaxed and happy place to be. If Mandy wanted to go to a friend’s house, all she had to do was ask; there was no need for a week’s notice – unlike me.

  ‘We’d better get going, so. God forbid you should be a minute late!’ Mandy was quite adept at sarcasm: she had learned it from her parents who, despite all their children and the thousands of things they had to do each day, had not lost their sense of humour. ‘Come on, I’ll race you.’

  Mandy darted ahead, laughing already at the unfair advantage she was taking. I lowered my head, tightened the muscles in my thighs, and drove my legs down on the pedals. It was only a matter of seconds before I sailed past her. ‘Gotcha,’ I called triumphantly over my shoulder.

  At that moment, I was doing a number of things that were ‘wrong’. I shouldn’t have been racing. I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off the road. I shouldn’t have been so competitive or gleeful. Pride comes before a fall, my father would say.

  My front wheel hit a pothole and the bike veered wildly. I tightened my grip on the handlebars, jerking them from side to side to keep my balance. I’d almost righted myself when Mandy, who hadn’t noticed the sudden drop in speed, or the uneven terrain, careered into me. Our bikes tangled and we fell in a whirl of wheels and metal and limbs and cries of shock and pain. For a few seconds, neither of us could move or speak. Then we both tried to sit up.

  ‘Are ya all right?’ asked Mandy.

  ‘Yes. Are you?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, blinking back tears. ‘I should have been looking …’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ she said quickly. We exchanged wry, teary smiles.

  A car stopped, mud splattered on its sides, a low trailer behind. The driver got out, a farmer with a cracked face and wiry hair. ‘What about youse girls? Were youse doing the Grand Prix or what?’

  The farmer put the bikes in the trailer and helped us into the car. It smelled of cow manure and there was loose dirt on the floor. Mandy sat in the front and gave directions.

  ‘This will do,’ I said when he pulled into my street.

  ‘Which house?’

  ‘We’ll just get out here,’ I told him.

  ‘Afraid of getting in trouble with your ma and da?’

  ‘Aye,’ Mandy replied on my behalf.

  We got out of the car and the farmer lifted down our bikes, with their bowed wheels and broken chains. ‘Go easy on the driving, girls – soon it’ll be cars and they’re a lot more deadly than bikes!’

  ‘We will. Thank you,’ replied Mandy.

  I added my thanks and watched the farmer drive away, the car’s exhaust leaving a cloud of diesel fumes that caught in the back of my throat. ‘My dad’s going to kill me.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Mandy protested.

  ‘He’ll say it was avoidable. He’ll say I was being reckless.’

  ‘Do you want me to come in?’

  ‘Nah. That’ll only make it worse.’

  Mandy put her hand gingerly against her side. ‘Ach, I’m sorer than what I thought at first. I’ll be black and blue tomorrow.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘You’ve torn your pants.’

  ‘Great – that’ll get me into even more trouble.’ I grimaced. ‘I’d better go – I’ll see you at school tomorrow.’

  ‘Bye. Good luck.’r />
  Mandy limped away, wheeling her bike on its only functioning wheel. Manoeuvring my written-off bike in the opposite direction, I stopped outside our house and stood on the footpath with my torn knees and guilty face. I didn’t want to go inside.

  Mandy was a dot in the distance. I wished I could run after her, go back to her crowded house where the incident would be discussed openly and non-judgmentally and eventually laughed about. I wished, with a ferocity that brought a rush of blood to my face, that my family was more like hers.

  Dad’s daily contact with students and exposure to their lifestyle meant that he was quite in touch with the world: he listened to whatever music was popular at the time, took notice of fashions and trends, and used relevant, modern examples in his lectures. He kept up to date in his own rather deliberate way, and his students appreciated and respected him for it. Dad was also savvy enough to guess that Josh and I were making the most of our privacy at the Elms. He would have been able to tell from our body language that we were physically intimate, and from our faces when we looked at each other that we were in love. ‘Be careful, Caitlin,’ he muttered once or twice, glancing in Josh’s direction to make his meaning clear. This was his way of telling me to use contraception.

  He always wore a slight frown when he greeted Josh; in fairness, though, I don’t think he was aware of this. His problem wasn’t with me having an adult relationship as such – he knew it was par for the course at my age – it was that he didn’t quite know what to make of Josh. Undoubtedly, there were a number of factors in Josh’s favour. He worked as a plasterer and earned a decent living, unlike Liam. He came from a respectable family, albeit Protestant. He dressed well, he was obliging (he always helped clear the table whenever he ate at our house) and he was polite, always letting Mum walk through the doorway before him and things like that.

  But the fact that Josh couldn’t hear – that missing sense, that blatant imperfection – must have grated on my father, diminishing Josh in his mind. Perfection meant everything to him. He aspired to it in every aspect of his life, and he expected it from everyone around him, not least his children.

  The fact that Liam, his eldest child, was unemployed was an acute embarrassment to Dad. Never mind that there were thousands of other young men and women unemployed at the time. Never mind that the Celtic Tiger, the boom occurring in the South of Ireland, seemed to have totally bypassed the North. Never mind that Liam’s diploma in sport was useless in the face of the continuing political friction and violence that stunted investment in the sports and leisure industry, and all other industries for that matter. Liam was young, male and Catholic, and unemployment in that particular demographic was as high as thirty per cent. Never mind all that: more should be expected, and was expected, of Professor Jonathan O’Reilly’s son.

  ‘Can you just stop, Liam,’ he would snap when he was no longer able to contain his irritation.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Stop kicking the chair. Stop moping around the house. For God’s sake, for all our sakes, find something to do.’

  ‘And what exactly do you suggest I do, Dad?’ Liam would snarl back.

  ‘Go down to the sports complex and volunteer your services, for instance.’

  ‘You mean work for free?’

  ‘Yes, if that’s what it takes!’

  ‘They won’t let me work without being on the payroll – insurance reasons. Any other ideas, Dad?’

  ‘Can’t you put on a suit and go into town? You never know what opportunities might happen if you get out there and meet some people face to face.’

  ‘You mean gatecrash their offices? They don’t want to see me, Dad. They have no jobs. It’s a waste of my time and theirs.’

  ‘Good Lord, Liam, you’ve some gall to call it a waste of your time! You’ve too much time on your hands, that’s the problem. Can’t you see that you won’t get a job stuck inside the four walls of this house? It’s laziness, sheer and utter laziness …’

  ‘Being unemployed does not mean I’m lazy! I’m not fucking lazy, okay?’

  The arguments exploded into raised voices, swearing and slammed doors at least once a week. In some ways I preferred the arguments to the strained, contemptuous atmosphere before and afterwards. At least the fights were honest.

  As if the situation with Liam wasn’t enough to contend with, now my father had Josh to deal with too. Josh, who couldn’t hear, whose speech was unclear at the best of times, who had to grapple with all sorts of everyday challenges and who was not the kind of boyfriend he had envisaged for his eldest daughter.

  ‘Don’t get too serious too quickly,’ Dad advised me more than once. ‘You’re only young.’

  And: ‘Are you sure that this is what you want, Caitlin? That Josh is what you want? Or, more appropriately, what you need?’

  My father’s wants and needs were different to mine. He wanted and needed me to be with someone strong, steady, mainstream, someone who had no obvious problems, because in his opinion I had enough problems of my own. Liam might have been the first of us to fail publicly at being perfect, but I had failed on an intrinsically private level many years before.

  Josh and I were serious – nothing my father could say would change that – and his hearing impairment, though testing at times, was at the very base of my attraction to him. I connected with Josh at the deepest level – I understood his frustrations and fears better than anyone else could because I too had a handicap, a defect, something fundamentally wrong with me.

  Like Josh, I was less than perfect.

  Chapter 3

  My fear of Belfast should have dissipated as I came to know the city better, but it didn’t. The university quarter was located on the south side of the city, an attractive and apparently safe part of town. Within walking distance were the Botanic Gardens, the Ulster Museum, the Grand Opera House and numerous shops, cafés and restaurants. The campus was situated within three designated conservation areas with lots of grass and plants and trees. The buildings, some of which were more than a hundred and fifty years old, were imposing and steadfast and promised to students like me both a serious education and a sense of security.

  The campus wasn’t free of politics, though; quite the opposite. The students had political views and no hesitation in airing them. There was always someone ranting and raving and having their say, but it was honest and open and for that same reason it wasn’t threatening. Politics aside, the students at Queen’s studied hard and socialised even harder, just like students at other universities around the world. I often wondered if I was the only one who felt anxious and afraid.

  I worried about accidentally walking into the wrong area, about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, about being attacked or getting blown up. Sometimes it was a relief to go back to Clonmegan on the weekends and holidays, to be in a small town that didn’t need high walls or armoured cars, a town that was unified rather than segregated. Even the townscape in Clonmegan went some way to demonstrating a sense of unity, the skyline distinguished by the gothic spires of the churches, Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, Methodist and Presbyterian harmoniously overlooking the town. And as you stood at Friars Bridge and observed where the Balowen and Glenrush rivers merged to form one, you could easily liken this confluence to that of the townspeople, separate outside the town but joined as one community inside it.

  Belfast felt more benign when I was with Josh, when my hand was in his. We took walks down Royal Avenue, along the River Lagan and through the Botanic Gardens. Sometimes we went as far as the docks where the two decommissioned ship-building cranes, Samson and Goliath, presided over the slate-coloured water, the long corrugated-iron warehouses and the lines of multicoloured containers waiting to be transported somewhere else, rather like us all. On these walks I came to appreciate that our gritty surroundings were interesting and beautiful in their own unique way, and that any attractive monuments and architecture were only accentuated by the tough, unapologetic backdrop. I realised that Belfast
was like a child who had been abused and neglected and misunderstood, but who wore its heart on its sleeve and had developed a resilient and lovable character. Still, though, Josh and I always stayed close to the city centre and I was thankful to have him by my side, his eyes on the lookout. He noticed things that I didn’t, and I only ever felt any way safe when I was with him.

  ‘Relax,’ Josh would tell me, trying to massage the tension from my hand.

  I tried to relax and came close sometimes, but never fully got there.

  It took some willpower on my part not to see Josh every day. To prevent my studies from suffering I restricted the times he came around; as much as I loved him, I never lost sight of my degree, the reason I was in Belfast in the first place. I daydreamed about my graduation day. In my head I had a snapshot of myself in a black gown and mortarboard, holding a scroll – my degree, my ticket out of Ireland. Josh represented a complication to my dream, one I hadn’t counted on. Because of his hearing impairment, he would find it harder than me to get a visa. And even if he did get a visa, he would then have to find a job wherever it was we decided to emigrate, a job as good as the one he had now.

  We talked about our plans for the future like any other couple. I had more than two years to go on my degree and we reassured ourselves that we had time to work things out, to plan our escape to a more prosperous country, a country comfortable in its own skin, a country that did not know or need to understand the kind of conflict that split the North of Ireland in two. A place where one’s name was simply what one was called, rather than a declaration of sides. Where religion and politics had their place but were not all-powerful.

  ‘I want to go somewhere I can relax,’ I’d say vehemently. ‘Where the streets are safe no matter what neighbourhood I’m in.’

  Josh wanted the same. ‘Somewhere warm,’ he’d add, his eyes faraway. ‘Not just the climate, but how people treat each other.’

  I would have enjoyed my first few months of university much more had I known that Belfast didn’t pose any danger – well, at least not personally to me. I would have taken walks at times when Josh wasn’t with me, when my eyes were tired or my head aching from stuffy classrooms and I needed some fresh, cold air and new scenery. I would have immersed myself wholeheartedly in student life, gone to pubs and house parties outside of what I perceived to be my ‘safety zone’.