The Leaving

by Gabriella West

  “After your grandmother died, though, there was less reason to write...”

  My father’s voice trailed off. He began attacking the ground again. As I hung up underwear and socks I thought, simply: “Pity. I’d have liked to know them, to play with them, all these cousins I’ll never see. It’s strange. Families should care about each other. How can brothers and sisters just not care what happens to the others? How could they all separate like that, and never return, never come back?”

  It made me feel lonely, somehow. And when I thought of Stevie and me leaving I thought: “We’ll go together, if we do decide to go.” But I was sure that Dad was wrong. I couldn’t imagine us leaving the country. I liked school, I liked the neighborhood, I liked being 10 and feeling sort of grown up because Stevie, who’d reached the grand age of 12, treated me more or less as an equal. A protected equal. It seemed to me then that Stevie would never let anything bad happen to me. And he wouldn’t leave me either. Surely we would never go our separate ways.

  * * *

  Back to the present.

  “What’s that?” I asked. Stevie was sitting at the kitchen table grimacing, a pen in his hand. A long form was in front of him. He consulted a booklet and made a mark.

  He didn’t look up. “CAO form.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you know what the CAO form is?”

  “No,” I said wearily. I had just come back from school. My initial pleasure at seeing Stevie alone in the kitchen had gone now. I poured boiling water into the teapot. Glancing over, I saw he was drinking coffee, a new habit of his.

  “The CAO form,” said Stevie, yawning, “is the government’s attempt to computerize the university entrance system. In other words, I have to apply to Trinity, UCD or wherever the hell else through the CAO. I don’t even know what it stands for. You send it in by certified post and after your Leaving results come out you look in the Irish Times to see if you got a place.”

  “Sounds complicated,” I said, sitting down.

  “Oh, it is.” Stevie gave me a brief smile. “Only the intellectual elite have to deal with it. Anyway, I’ve made my first choice.”

  “Oh, what?” I asked eagerly.

  “Trinity. Philosophy and. . .” He studied the form, “Psychology.”

  “God,” I said faintly.

  “Oh, don’t worry.” He got up. “It’s purely arbitrary. I don’t see myself sticking the full four years.”

  “You don’t?”

  “You’re a bit dim-witted today, aren’t you?”

  I took a sip of the strong, scalding tea. “Yeah,” I said finally. “Long day.” I stared into the mug, cupping it with my hands.

  “No, I don’t see myself sticking the full four years,” Stevie repeated, folding up the CAO form into a neat little rectangular shape and putting it into an envelope. “I’m going off to post this. Can’t be bothered staring at the bloody thing any longer.”

  “So you see yourself leaving without a degree?”

  “Yeah. This is confidential, but Ron and I have a plan.”

  I looked up. The alarm and apprehension on my face must have surprised Stevie. He stared at me for a minute.

  “Why, did you have visions of us in Trinity together?”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t really have any ... visions. But I did think you’d be staying until you got your degree. I don’t know why I thought that.”

  “It all depends on Ron. He wants to get a job in London in a couple of years. He’s been there. He doesn’t want to go to college; he says it’s a waste of time. Anyway, when he goes over, I’m not staying here.”

  I cleared my throat, which had tightened in something akin to panic. “Oh,” I said foolishly.

  “It may sound a bit mad.” Stevie laughed. “Running over to London with him. But if I want to, I can go to University of London. I can get a grant and—well, it’ll all work out. In the meantime, so as not to ruffle any feathers, I’m applying for Trinity.”

  “Yes, they’ll be upset,” I mumbled. I didn’t need to explain whom I was talking about.

  “They’ll have you,” he said. “Won’t they? I imagine you’ll stick it out for the four years. They’ll have a daughter in Trinity. It won’t be quite the same as a son, but that’s just too bad.”

  I felt like flinging my head down onto the table and bursting into loud sobs. Stevie’s good humor seemed somehow vengeful. There was something frightening about the way he had decided what he would do. Ruthless. He had decided, and that was that. He wasn’t asking me for my opinion. And he didn’t seem too concerned about my reaction.

  I looked up. Perhaps there was something beseeching in my gaze, because in a gentler tone he said:

  “But you can come over and visit us. In the holidays.”

  * * *

  At that period in my life I was afraid of my father, I loved Stevie, and I would not have known what I felt about my mother. I was around her a lot, but in much of the time that we spent in the same room I would be thinking of something else, and I would get the sense that she was too. She seemed busy, both physically and mentally, but her concerns were oddly remote to me. I would not have known how to describe her, if asked to by a friend.

  My mother was a caterer. That is, she “did” teas for neighborhood groups and organizations, not least among them the parish priest, Father Doherty. He was a particular friend of hers, a plump man from the country with a tired face. She still went to Mass faithfully; none of the rest of us had for years. That caused her some disappointment, but it was her cross, and she bore it well.

  As I grew older I began to realize what a stoical woman my mother was. It was not that she was utterly insensitive, something which I had felt about her ever since I was small. No, she had feelings. But she did not usually consider it necessary to express them. Nor did they simmer under the surface, causing her to be bitter and twisted. She was ultimately a rather calm person, with a non-judgmental outlook on life.

  Yet at 15, I considered her pathetic, stupid and childish. I resented many things—that she put up with my father, that she was practical and hardheaded rather than emotional and artistic. She did not laugh much. We did not even talk much, both Stevie and I finding her an inadequate, unsupportive listener. Our complaints and resentments, whether to do with school, friends or the quality of our home life, did not seem to reach her at all. She dealt with everything the same way: she would ponder it in her mind, pray silently, then dismiss it. She was firmly convinced in the existence of the Good Lord, an entity she referred to often, non-ironically. That my father was sarcastic about this personage and liked to call himself an atheist and explain why he was one—after a few pints—she accepted with resignation.

  It was true that they argued. But when they argued it was more a matter of my father expressing his anger at something and my mother quietly and forcefully disagreeing, than it was of screaming matches and violence. All in all, their marriage was stable. She put up with a lot; he tried to restrain himself when possible. They were not suited, but they were used to each other. Divorce was a glamorous, foreign word that Stevie and I never thought about in the context of our parents.

  I would not say that my mother was happy. But she seemed to be the happiest one of us all. She had made peace with her life and she knew who she was. I don’t think she regretted having married my father. But there was one big difference between them.

  You could tell it in their accents. My father spoke in a hoarse voice, with a Dublin accent that had remained strong even after years of living around middle-class neighbors. My mother had a strong accent too, but this was because she was, as my father would say sometimes, a “culchie.” “Ah, you’re just a culchie, what would you know about it?” he would query, often, when Stevie and I were younger, and good-humored banter still passed between them.

  She was from a farm in County Meath. She never talked about her background willingly: something had obviously driven her to the city
as a young woman to find work, some scandal perhaps, for she was estranged from her parents. They had not come to the wedding. Was it the marriage to my father that had angered them? I’d asked her years before and she’d shaken her head with a smile. It had not been that. He was a single man, from a Catholic family, working-class yes, but working his way up, with a good steady job.

  Her parents were far from wealthy, she’d hinted once. “A few cows,” she said when pressed. “And an old house, falling to bits. God, the state of the place when I saw it last!”

  Alarmed at this picture of a shack collapsing around the ears of her aged parents and the cows, I suggested—I was about nine—“But Mummy, you could send them some money.”

  She had smiled, and said in a reassuring tone: “Oh, your Uncle John will look after them.”

  So we had an Uncle John. But my mother had refused to answer any more questions. By some action of hers, she had cut herself off from them, and she was evidently unwilling to either think about them or discuss them. This much I knew about my mother: she had been born Susan O’Donnell, in 1940, near Kells, County Meath.

  But nothing in her quietness, her thinning fair hair, weak blue eyes (hidden behind glasses) and short spare figure summoned up images of “the country” to us. Only in her natural, unreflective way of living, so different from Stevie’s and mine, did I catch glimpses of something alien, something that I did not yet appreciate or understand.

  The same evening that Stevie made clear his intention of leaving Ireland in the next couple of years, I sat at the kitchen table watching my mother assemble the dinner. She liked cooking, and did not usually ask for help. I enjoyed watching her. It was calming.

  The idea of telling her about Stevie’s plan—of shifting the burden—did occur to me then. Perhaps, I thought, watching her slice up tomatoes with a firm, rapid movement, she might accept it quietly, with resignation. Would she even care very much? The idea that I was the only one who would really care did not seem so ridiculous.

  Another thing was preying on my mind. The “date” (loathsome word) with Jeff’s friend (his name was Joe, Susie had said) on Saturday evening. This was something that I had to tell my mother. There was no way I could just slip out after tea and return at eleven o’ clock at night, although I had considered it.

  I felt curiously ashamed, as if I were about to confess to some perverse desire.

  “Mum?” I said, clearing my throat.

  “Yes?”

  “I was asked out this Saturday evening by a friend of Susie’s.”

  She did not answer for a moment. Staring at the table, I hoped she would say: “You can’t go.” That would be that; I could tell it to Susie with a clear conscience.

  “How late will you be?” she asked after a moment.

  “I think about eleven. We’re going to the pictures.”

  “Right so.” She continued her cutting.

  That was easy. It was too easy. Damn. She wasn’t even curious, or interested as to who the “friend of Susie” was. Not that I could have told her much.

  “I don’t really want to go, but Susie asked me,” I said stupidly. I hoped she would respond to that, since it was the truth, and I was worried about it.

  She looked around and gave me a quick, understanding smile. She liked Susie. That was the thing. She trusted Susie. And I didn’t. I knew Susie a lot better than she did, and there were things between us that I was sure my mother just would not understand. But she did understand my not really wanting to go. Perhaps all women understood that feeling. Maybe even Susie felt it, before she saw Jeff.

  Maybe. I wasn’t sure, and I couldn’t ask.

  Chapter 4

  I remember the summer when I was 13 vividly. It was very hot; picnic weather. Stevie and I had three months of school holiday, and we used it well. At 15 he knew his way around the city and the areas surrounding it; he knew, for example, which station you took the train to Bray from and how long the journey would take. That summer he became fascinated by journeys, by bus and train timetables, by places we could go where famous people had said or done such and such. That included death, being buried.

  Glasnevin cemetery meant a lot to Stevie because my father’s parents were buried there: the grandparents we had never seen. It was also the place where Patrick Pearse had made his famous, stirring oration over the grave of O’ Donovan Rossa, the old Fenian who had died in exile. “But the fools, the fools, the fools ... from the graves of our patriot men and women spring living nations,” Pearse had proclaimed, prophetically as it turned out.

  Stevie had learned the oration off by heart, and would declaim it when he felt in the mood. I remember my parents’ reactions: my mother listening bemused, my father laughing cynically. “They were the fools,” was one of his pithier comments.

  “Who?” asked Stevie.

  “The mugs of 1916. Look where we are now. We’ve the status of a third world country. The Brits are still laughing up their sleeves at us, and you believe this patriotic claptrap!”

  “Ah, come on, Dad,” Stevie protested, but my father shook his head, frowning, and refused to debate the matter. The only thing he would say was: “I grew up with the Christian Brothers beating that propaganda into me, along with the standard religious rubbish. It’s all a fairy story and it makes me sick. That nationalistic myth is still blowing people to bits in the North today. You don’t think about that, do you now?”

  My father was the type of man who listened to the RTE radio news in the morning at breakfast, and watched the RTE television news at night. Religiously. Biting his lip, frowning, full of bile at the politicians and the bureaucrats who were, he said, running the country into the ground.

  To us, the country seemed to be doing OK. It was chugging along, like the old, smelly, dirty trains we took to the seaside resorts on Dublin Bay. The trains were running, and there were timetables. The schools were open and the teachers functioned. We did not understand how the country could be crumbling around us. It didn’t look as if it were. It was all to do with grim words that my father threw out at Stevie whenever he made what Dad considered a naive or optimistic statement: the economy... unemployment... the dole queues... housing estates ... the black market... heroin ...VAT... PMPA... PRSI ... CIE.

  The last three acronyms stood for car insurance, income tax and the government-owned public transport system respectively.

  These abstractions were far from our minds as we knelt by the two marble headstones in Glasnevin. “In sacred memory of Dermot Quinn,” read one, “Who passed away August 16, 1958.” “In Loving Memory of Mary, his devoted wife,” read the other, “1910–1967. RIP.” There were plastic roses on the graves.

  “Very simple, aren’t they?” I said.

  “They were simple people,” said Stevie thoughtfully. “We should have brought something. I don’t like to see this fake stuff.”

  “Well, you don’t believe they can see us now, do you? I mean, you don’t believe they can tell their graves are neglected?”

  “Shut up, Cathy.”

  “Oh, go ahead and pray, then.” I lay down on the gravel path and closed my eyes. “I’ll rest here.”

  I could hardly believe that we had come. I didn’t like the thought of graveyards; they frightened me. Glasnevin was huge. There was something terrifying about the rows and rows of white and black marble headstones. I couldn’t tell what I didn’t like about it; I just wanted to ignore it. So lying on the path with the welcome sun in my face I imagined I was sunbathing on a rocky beach.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” I heard Stevie say. “Our background, I mean. Peasants on the one hand and working-class laborers on the other... Neither of whom we’ll ever see. We’ll never live in the inner City or on a farm in the country. Mum and Dad escaped that, but what have they given us instead?”

  “Their despair,” I remarked poetically, opening my eyes. I giggled. Stevie came over and sat beside me.

  “That’s right, Cathy. Don’t laugh. Don’t you see? Their
lives don’t have any meaning because they’ve ... denied their origins, I suppose you’d say. And so our lives don’t. That’s why we have to find a different way of living our lives.”

  I smiled, not taking much of this in, except that he was including me in the project.

  I watched seagulls wheeling and dipping overhead. They were a common sight; their repetitive cries only jarring if you thought about it, about what birds were supposed to sound like. As seabirds, they sensed they were close to the sea; we didn’t, not being able to see it. But it was there, waiting. Little things came to my mind. The flight of the Wild Geese. The famine ships, with their starving, diseased cargoes. Who else? So many, so many thousands—millions. Going away to find a life. Or just life.

  “I’ve never been in a graveyard before,” I said. “Have you?”

  He shook his head. “It’s actually one of the nicer places in Dublin.”

  “Especially on a day like this.” We smiled at each other.

  “We could find that farm,” I said.

  “What farm?”

  “Mum’s farm in Meath. I mean, they’re still alive. I bet they’d be glad to see us. We could go on our own. I know they wouldn’t take us.”

  Stevie shrugged. “We can’t go yet, we wouldn’t be allowed. But yeah. I want to see it. Even if it’s a grotty old dump.”

  I looked around at the graves. “Well, this is Dad’s family. Mum’s has to be a bit more alive.”

  “I thought it would be creepy,” said Stevie, “but I like it here. I like being alone here.”

  It was true. There were hardly any people about. A few elderly women wandered around in the distance. I spotted a nun. But it was the graves that caught the eye, there were so many of them. The few visitors prowling around spoke in low tones. There was privacy here.

  A pale freckled kid of about five—a girl—suddenly ran by close to us, calling “Mammy. Mammy.” A blowsy woman shouted hoarsely: “Come here Therese, and stop wanderin’ off!”

  I frowned. “Being surrounded by Dublin people—live ones, I mean—is like a kind of hell.”