One day in English class we were rehearsing a play. We were about twelve. By this time we had become a twosome, and we seemed well paired—I was the shy, passive one, Susie was the outgoing, dynamic, protective one.
The English teacher (whom Mr. Casey was eventually to replace) had chosen a play in which there were two minor characters, HI and LO. HI spoke in a shrill voice, LO in a deep voice. My voice was shrill, Susie’s was deep. We switched around for a bit, since I could make my voice deep too, but Susie finally settled on the deep voice.
It was an easy part.
“I’m HI,” I began in my shrill voice.
“And I’m LO,” boomed Susie.
There wasn’t much more dialogue, but the class found us entertaining.
We came offstage, “stage” being just a cleared area of the classroom, and stood together, joking about our parts. Suddenly Susie leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.
My first reaction was to look around. Had anybody spotted this? Yes, predictably, someone had. A curly-haired girl who was the class star athlete was looking at us with an amused, scandalized expression in her brown eyes.
I didn’t say anything. I wonder if Susie knew that it moved me. Susie was physical in a way I wasn’t, and on that one occasion she was able to carry out an impulse which I couldn’t really understand, since I had never had it, and if I had, would never, ever have dared to do it.
But Susie was physical on another level. Like two 12-year-old boys we often fought. She would kick me or scratch me with her long nails. We would hit each other over trifles. I must have had a high pain quotient because I don’t remember crying over these incidents. I was too controlled to break down, and too passive to stop Susie. I lived with this threat of violence for years. It was a part of our friendship, and that seemed to be that. She often hurt and humiliated me. Ten minutes later she would be sincerely, warmly sorry. Or we would stalk off, filled with hatred for each other, and the next morning she would take the seat beside me in class and nothing more was said.
Our behavior marked us out as childish and immature to the girls in our class. Fintan’s had only recently gone co-ed, and there were only a few boys in first year, who kept to themselves and didn’t pay much attention to the girls. But their presence made the girls more self-conscious about their femininity. There were two distinct choices: you either behaved like the rest of the girls or you didn’t. Susie and I didn’t, and I often wondered if she would be happier befriending some boy who wouldn’t mind being beaten up regularly—in fact, who would soon sort her out. I wasn’t up to it, and Susie saw that. As she began to sense that she was regarded with disdain by the others for being plain and overweight and unfeminine, she became unhappier, more frustrated and more vicious.
But I needed her. And though I resented her abuse, on a deeper level I found it better than nothing. How could I break with Susie when everyone else was so boring? So conformist? And when they had already turned against us?
By the time Stevie had met Ron Susie and I were on friendly, rather detached terms. She had other friends. She had started to go out with boys, and indeed had a group of friends outside school with whom she socialized. It was this gang of hers that her mother disliked. Susie would go out on Friday and Saturday night with her pack of friends and drink, and smoke, and make tentative approaches towards several of the boys in her group. On other nights, she would go dancing with the gang. She had just turned 15 and she was finally catching up.
I felt rather sad that Susie wasn’t including me in her group. It didn’t surprise me, of course. To bring me along to meet them would be to say, in effect, this is my former self, a self that she was desperately trying to escape from. The new Susie was quite feminine. She painted those long nails of hers a garish red, shaved her legs, got a good haircut and tried to slim down. She listened to the current hit records and was generally scornful of my musical taste, though she once said to me earnestly: “At least you’re honest about what you like, even though most of it’s crap.”
I was glad that Susie thought my brother was nice-looking, and I think it had become a plus in her eyes: that I had a good-looking brother whom she might be able to get off with one day.
But since there didn’t seem to be any indication of that day materializing, Susie was definitely on the lookout for any available boys her own age. I tended to ignore this side of her life and tried not to talk about it, because it wearied me to pretend that I understood or sympathized. It was a role I was playing now with Susie, the role of good, understanding, non-judgmental listener. I did it so as not to seem too “square.” The whole business made me angry, and confused. I felt rebellious, but I wasn’t up to the rebellious act: swearing, smoking, drinking, lying to parents, plastering on makeup and flirting with boys. Susie saw that, gave me a few chances, and then gave up on me.
As the Inter approached, she began to sit with another girl for lunch. I sat with them, although I sensed that Susie didn’t want me to. I had no one else to sit with. I felt rather desperate. What would I do when she dropped me? How could I get through two more years of school without Susie? It wasn’t, I thought to myself, that she really meant anything to me, just as I didn’t to her. But she was my mainstay. I still needed her.
Our final rupture would occur over the unlovely figure of Jeff Blake.
One day I noticed a ring on her finger.
“That’s nice,” I said, playing my part of admiring friend.
“Thank you,” she replied. “It’s a Claddagh ring.”
“Oh.”
I didn’t know what a Claddagh ring was, so I dropped the conversation. We were sitting in History class waiting for a teacher to come in.
“You don’t seem very impressed,” she said.
“Should I be?” I enquired. “I said it was nice.”
She frowned. “Don’t you know what this means?”
I shrugged. “It looks like some old Irish symbol . . .”
“Oh for God’s sake!” she said scornfully. “It means I’m going out with somebody.”
“You’re going out with somebody,” I repeated.
She nodded, smiling.
I was thrown into an odd sort of anxiety attack. “Is it anyone, er, here?” I gazed around wildly at the three or four boys in the class. I noticed that Jeff, sitting by the window, was staring at us, which was odd. His long hair looked less greasy than usual. Then he smiled. At us. I looked at Susie and she was smiling back. She gave a little wave. Then the teacher came into the room and I decided not to say anything more.
But Susie wrote something on a piece of paper and passed it to me.
The unbelievable words “Jeff gave me the ring. What do you think?” passed into my consciousness.
I gulped. I scratched my head. This was bizarre. Susie had hated Jeff up to about four months before. Then she had stopped bitching about him. But still... It was all so unreal, and I felt repelled by it. She had been right to hate Jeff, I brooded, because he was a fool, and he was crude and offensive whenever he could be. He had nearly been expelled a couple of times. And he was a rocker, whereas Susie liked pretty, soulful male pop stars like Boy George or Simon le Bon. Maybe she was having me on. But somehow, it fit. It fit with Susie’s character. Jeff was physical too. He had no brain to speak of, but he had an excess of unruly energy, which Susie seemed to share.
Congratulations, I wrote, and passed it back.
To my surprise she pushed the paper at me again.
A friend of his wants to go out with you. Could you make it Saturday night?
Oh no, I thought. How could she do this to me? It’s so mean!
For once I decided to surprise her. To say no would be too embarrassing. I would have no reason for saying no. This was supposed to cheer me up. It was supposed to be a golden opportunity. I ought to be grateful to Susie, I thought grimly.
OK, I wrote. She patted me on the back. I turned my attention to the invention of the printing press and the Gutenberg Bible. From the page
of my History book the sardonic face of Erasmus looked back at me. He was sitting at his writing desk, on which there perched a human skull. He was a Humanist, but that didn’t mean he was fond of other people. It meant that he spent a lot of time writing in Latin and translating the classics. One of the things we had to know for our Inter was that he wrote a satirical novel called In Praise of Folly, though we didn’t have to read it.
Jeff always sat over by the window. While the teacher was turned to the board, he and Susie threw balled-up notes back and forth. The spring sun shone in. The classroom had an unusually silent, dreamy quality that day. The best thing to do about Saturday night, I concluded, was to forget about it until it happened, and then go through with it. I knew I would be on my own. Susie would be there to observe how I did, not to be my friend.
It puzzled me that I had agreed to something that I knew in advance would be a failure. I was usually more cautious.
Chapter 3
The summer Stevie was 12 he had gone through a short but intense religious phase. Combined with the sense that a not altogether friendly and tolerant God was looking down on him was a feeling of curiosity about our family background—an interest that I found baffling.
It was the last time that I remember Stevie and my father having a long discussion. I was about 10. My father was digging the garden in the back of our whitewashed, pebble-dashed, semi-detached suburban house or “villa,” as the estate planners had chosen to call it. The name Lourdes Villa still hung on the gatepost. My mother liked it.
We had been living in Dundrum for five years or so; before that was a rented accommodation that I could hardly remember. I could recall the darkness of it, the musty smell. The sound of cars outside on the street. It had been in the Inner City, a place that my parents sometimes referred to with a strange expression on their faces, and we had moved out to Dundrum as soon as my father could afford it. In fact a little before. The main topic of conversation between my father and mother in the evenings for several years after we moved was the mortgage bill. When interest rates went up my father would go out and drink heavily at the pub with the lads, then come home and grouse about the government in a furious and bitter way. He would look at us with the same impotent fury, and I sometimes felt then as I drew close to Stevie and we edged out of the room he had come into straight from the pub, still reeking of beer and cigarette smoke, that it was us he wanted to get rid of, as well as the government.
As children we were encouraged in the view that we were a monstrous economic burden on our parents; we believed this for quite some time. Stevie and I remained in awe of our father for a number of years until we reached our teens. He was never physically violent, and could be playful in a heavy, lumbering type of way, which we liked. He could be gentle too. My mother lacked both the playful quality and the gentle quality.
So I remember the scene: my father digging the flowerbed, taking stones and bits of chipped china out and throwing them in piles, putting his foot on the big garden fork and pressing it deep into the soil. Stevie, a thin, blond, freckled 12-year-old, stood by him. Dad’s tanned, muscled arms were shining with sweat. He was a self-employed builder; he also did plastering and painting work. When Stevie and I played around the neighborhood we would see him sometimes, in paint-splattered white overalls, coming out from a neighboring house carrying a ladder or a bucket. He would wave to us; we would wave back. Sometimes we would go into the houses and watch him work. But he wouldn’t talk to us, intent on his job. He was well-known in the neighborhood. People liked him, or respected him at least. Perhaps they did like him; it was just hard for us—especially in later years—to imagine that anyone found my father a likable man.
He had a black beard and a rather frowning, formidable look. There was something stern and austere in his manner, something unflinchingly masculine too. That he worked hard and was working for his family without complaining or shirking did not seem to us as we grew older particularly remarkable or commendable. My mother was always flutteringly aware of his moods: whether he was tired, depressed, or—much more rarely—pleased about something. But Stevie and I were no longer childishly proud of our father. We never really appreciated what he did do: plastering, painting and building, paying the mortgage, electricity bills, working in the garden, maintaining the car so we could go on occasional trips.
“Would it surprise you,” my father asked Stevie, who was swinging his pale arms idly as he listened and watched the fork going down into the earth, “to know that my Da never had a garden, or owned a house? Do you know when I left school? At 14.”
The fork hit a stone. He reached down, grasped it, pulled it out and flung it on the pile. Stevie dodged it successfully.
“I’m telling you. I had to leave school to get a job, and I was lucky to get an apprenticeship with my uncle, me Ma’s brother. Thomas J. O’Flaherty, or T.J. as he was called. He died three years after he took me on. None of me Ma’s family lived very long. Her great regret was that she didn’t live to see you.” He looked at Stevie for a moment. My brother shifted awkwardly at this surprisingly personal reference. “Yeah ... she was always on at your mother about having a kid. But by the time you were born she’d died. A month before. Of a heart attack, it was. She was a big woman.” He sighed, resting his hand on the fork for a moment.
“Why don’t we have any photos of them?” Stevie asked.
“There was no call for that. We weren’t a family that took snapshots.
No one had a camera. I have their wedding photograph put away somewhere. And they’re in our wedding photograph. Get your mother to show you it. God knows why you’d want to look at it.”
“I’m just curious,” Stevie said calmly. My father snorted.
“There’s a damn sight better lot of things you could be doing on this beautiful day!”
Stevie glanced towards me. I was doing exercises on the lawn, trying to do a handstand. The ground was uneven and I kept falling over. “Ouch,” I said, and smiled at him. We were used to our father castigating us for aimlessly wandering around the neighborhood, or reading in our rooms. It was something he couldn’t understand; he had not had the inclination or time for any leisure himself in childhood, it seemed.
“What happened to our aunts and uncles?” asked Stevie out of the blue. Dad laughed shortly and didn’t answer for a few minutes. I continued doing handstands. It was a terrifying feeling, your legs up in the air, trying to balance, teetering on the edge, collapsing over with a painful thud. I was too heavy to do it properly, I thought to myself with a sigh. We would have competitions in school to see who could stay up the longest. I couldn’t stay up, like the others, for what seemed like minutes.
“They emigrated,” said my father at last.
“You had four brothers . . . and two sisters,” said Stevie wonderingly.
“That was the average family size on James’ Street.”
James’ Street was the street in the inner city on which my father had been born and raised. That much I knew, and one thing more: that the house his family had lived in had been demolished.
“It was the ’50s,” continued my father. “A bad time. There was no option for them. Charlie went to Australia. James, Francis and Sean are somewhere in England. Katie and Joyce went to the States. We were sure they’d all be back within 10 years. Da had been unemployed since the late ’40s. They kept trying for jobs. No luck. One by one they left.”
He planted the fork in the ground and stretched his stiff back. We heard it crack.
“One by one they left,” he repeated gloomily.
“Well, you stayed,” remarked Stevie. “And . . . look what you have now. I mean, weren’t you right?”
My father nodded without much conviction.
“But the fucking country’s still in a mess. And it always will be. I’ve seen my brothers and sisters leave. I wouldn’t be surprised to see you and Cathy leave when you’re old enough. And I wouldn’t blame you. What’s in it for you?”
“Don�
�t say that to them, Patrick,” My mother came down the garden path with a load of washing. “For God’s sake don’t give them ideas.”
“Ah, I might as well be the one to enlighten them about their . . .” my father paused, “dim futures.”
Stevie and I looked at each other in silence. We did not really understand. Our Dad’s sarcastic tone seemed to imply that we were useless, we’d never get jobs here, and he could already see that. The future, which we had not thought about, and the past, which we had not known about, seemed suddenly connected in a sinister way.
“I don’t even know what I want to be,” said Stevie after a while. Mum and Dad looked at him, but did not speak.
“I don’t know either,” I said. “I don’t want to be a teacher. People keep asking me that. I think I’d like to be a historian.”
“Why?” asked Stevie.
“I love history.”
“I’d like to be an engineer or something,” Stevie said vaguely. “In the desert.”
“But why don’t they come back on holiday?” I asked. Dad looked blankly at me. “Our aunts and uncles,” I went on. “Why don’t they write to us?”
My father shrugged. My mother was neatly pegging up a white wash on the line. Stevie and I sat together on the grass, awaiting his answer.
“I don’t know,” he said after a while. There was something defeated about the way he spoke. “We weren’t very close. Not like you and your brother. There were a lot of us kids . . . We went hungry too much of the time. I was the youngest. When I got the job with T.J. the others were pissed off. They thought it was favoritism. Well, all I can say is, I worked bloody hard for that man. Too hard, maybe. And I did hear from them all for a couple of years.”
“More than that, Patrick,” said my mother. “Cathy, would you mind helping me, please?” I got up to help.
The Leaving Page 3
