* * *
I had always been aware of events in Britain and overseas; the Falklands war, for example, had added a little excitement to my life, as had the death of the Soviet leader Leonid Bresznev. I had certainly kept abreast of killings in the North. Stevie and I had mourned the deaths of the hunger strikers together. But what I knew little about was my own country. I had inherited from my father a snobbish attitude that people who lived in small rural towns were ignorant, and lead dull little lives to which it was not necessary to pay the slightest attention. You laughed at their accent. That was all they merited, really, a laugh.
Yet something was going on out there in those middle years of the eighties. Having nothing better to do, I pored over the newspaper every evening; my father would bring it home from his day’s work, crumpled and stained from his lunch break. I would take it up to my room, scanning first the TV section, then the front page. What surprised me was that behind disputes over fish licenses and milk quotas, strange little stories trickled through, stories which the country gossiped about and sighed over. Three stories in particular fascinated me.
Eileen Flynn, a young teacher, is fired from the convent school where she’s been working because she has been living with a married man and is going to have his child. What makes this case different from a thousand others is that Ms. Flynn is furious, indignant that her career has gone down the drain; she points out that her lover is separated from his wife but cannot legally divorce her. Otherwise, the inference is, they would indeed be married.
A dead baby is found on a beach in County Kerry. A local family called Hayes are questioned. The Hayes brothers break down under interrogation and confess that their unmarried sister, Joanne, gave birth to the baby and that they then drove it to a nearby cliff and threw it over. However, on routine testing, the baby on the rocks turns out not to be Joanne’s after all. Her baby is finally found buried in a field on the family farm. A tribunal is called to investigate the behavior of the police in extorting this false confession, but instead becomes an inquiry into the morals of Joanne Hayes, who had been seeing a married man and had already had another child by him a couple of years before. Her desperate wish to hide the latest pregnancy from family and friends and to surreptitiously get rid of the newborn child is obvious from the facts presented at the tribunal, but after the months have dragged on and the whole country is talking about the case, she is never charged.
A young girl of 15 is found lying dead under a shrine of the Virgin Mary in County Longford. She has gone there to give birth to a baby, also dead. Nobody will admit that they knew she was pregnant. The nuns describe Ann Lovett as a quiet, serious girl, whom they suspected of having a vocation, because she was praying so much. Her family is described by the neighbors as quiet, keeping to themselves, somewhat of an insult in rural Ireland. (But they are Protestants, which could explain some of it.) Six months later Ann’s younger sister Felicia takes an overdose of sleeping pills and dies.
These disturbing events all occurred within a short period of time and shocked the country; not, strangely enough, because of the immorality involved, but because the ordeals that the three women went through touched people’s hearts. I learned things through reading about these women that I had not known before. I had never realized, for example, that thousands of Irish women took the boat to England each year to get abortions. I had not wondered why there were so many pregnancies; it seemed that contraceptives weren’t widely available (and besides the Church told you not to use them) and sex education was non-existent. But there were women, like Eileen Flynn, who bravely chose to be single parents. And so she was dismissed from her job as a bad example to her female students. But it was Ann Lovett’s death that I cried over, for it had such moving elements, and I loved her for caring enough to go to that shrine, even though what she believed would help her was of no aid to her at all. Had she wanted to die? Of shame, perhaps. And her parents? I wondered about them, wondered whether in fact the father of her child might have been her own father. And whether he was abusing her younger sister also. There was something sinister in the description of the family as “quiet,” keeping to themselves. Why had Felicia done it? Was it too farfetched to imagine incest in that family? Such things did happen, I knew; and they were never spoken of. I didn’t see why the father should go unpunished! And the mother, too, oblivious to her daughter’s pain and loneliness.
Perhaps these events created a faint mood in the country for change. It would have been nice if some progressive change had actually occurred. There was a referendum on divorce, but like the abortion referendum a few years before, it failed to pass. The priests managed to convince the farmers that divorce would mean that they could lose their farms. So everybody lost out.
And I became convinced that things would never improve, especially for women. Because of the Church, mostly. I mentioned this to my mother and her response was discouraging: she treated my argument as the symptom of a generally rebellious phase I was going through. Look at Father Doherty, she said. He gives so much support and good advice to the women of this parish. He cares so much. He’s not anti-women, he’s pro-women and pro-life.
“That’s wonderful,” I said sarcastically.
I had hardly ever talked to her like this, hardly ever tried to have a serious discussion about anything controversial. This was important to me. Yet it was also outside my own life and could be argued intellectually. There was a tradition of dissent against the Catholic Church, I continued, which said that Catholicism was negative and soul-destroying.
“Those are just words,” said my mother, smiling. It was as if she were saying: While you’re mouthing fashionable words, I have the faith. If she had got angry I would have felt that what I said had had some effect, and tried to blunder on. Instead I realized that she was basically immune to criticism of the Church. She had dealt with it from my father for many years, and my reaction probably seemed a pale shadow of his bitterness.
But my father was no inspiration to me, no model of liberal thinking. He seemed as stuck in his mindset as she did in hers. He was gloomier and unhappier, disliked and distrusted people more. I shared his pessimism and his fatalism without really being aware of it.
* * *
Stevie was working for my father. Oddly enough, it was going OK. He was neat and methodical, and found the work easy. My father, who was always sighing about the difficulties of his job, seemed stunned by my brother’s willingness to work. For a few months Stevie was in Dad’s good books, and a relative peace descended on the household. But it was not a happy time for me.
I consciously avoided Stevie. I felt that he sensed that I had nothing to do, and I didn’t want to mope around restlessly hoping that he would spend some time with me. I told myself that he wasn’t as much fun to be with as he used to be; we were too different now. He was annoyingly practical, mapping out his future. It amused me to think that my father’s money was going into his bank account and would more than likely be used at some point to leave the country with Ron, but at the same time it angered me that he was deceiving my father and getting away with it.
I had been on his side for so long. But where had it got me? I cringed as I thought of what he had written about me in his diary. It was like a prophecy that had suddenly hit home to me. At the time I read it I had hardly understood what he meant. Susie’s desertion had left me with even less confidence in myself, and a terrible feeling that something was indeed wrong with me. And if Stevie saw me as a pathetic figure, it was hard not to defensively judge him back, as someone who was out for himself, who was only concerned for his own welfare. Little by little I began to think of Stevie as an ally whom I had trusted and who’d turned against me. Just like Susie had, although I’d been careful never really to put my trust in her.
My basic feeling, though, was that Stevie was being hypocritical, working with my father, building what all of a sudden seemed like a fairly good relationship with him, while behind his back he was seeing Ron. I would ha
ve thought he would have had too much pride to accept money from my father, whom he had never got on with, had always feared and practically hated. Yes, he had hated him and rightly so, I brooded. Now there was this pretense of forgiveness on Stevie’s side, and this sense I got that my father approved of him all of a sudden. How ironic it was. At meals they chatted away about what they’d done that day, while my mother listened, pleased and interested. I of course had nothing to say about my day, nor was I asked about what I’d done. It was cruel, I thought, because how could I get a job! I would have loved to work, but it just didn’t seem possible. I didn’t know where to start looking, even.
* * *
“When are the exam results coming out?” I asked Stevie one day in July as I sat snacking on an enormous sandwich. He was rinsing a paintbrush at the sink.
“Don’t you know? Around August 17th, I think. They’re sometimes late.”
“Are you anxious?”
He shrugged. “No, not really. It’s a bit late to bother, isn’t it?”
He turned off the tap. “Are you?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “Let’s go for a drink the day they come out.”
He wandered out of the kitchen.
That brief conversation heartened me. Although something rankled. It occurred to me that I was almost as curious about his results as I was about mine. Whereas he, of course, didn’t really give a damn what mine were. From his perspective, they just weren’t very important.
* * *
We had to go to Fintan’s to get the results. Stevie and I walked along the road, not saying much. I felt unexpectedly nervous about seeing people I knew, especially Susie and Jeff. Stevie seemed unconcerned. He was whistling.
“This is the last time you’ll be going into school,” I said, enviously.
“Yeah, it’s weird. The last year flew by.”
I bet it did, I thought. The last year had crawled for me. It had been awful, now that I thought about it, now that I forced myself to look back on it. And the prospect of going back in September made me utterly miserable. I wouldn’t even have Susie for company. Two more years. The Leaving. And then what?
That was the big question, wasn’t it? Oh, I could waste some time in college ... but what was I going to do?
I had no idea.
* * *
Stevie opened the envelope and gazed at the results expressionlessly. I watched, open-mouthed. He looked up.
“They’re fine,” he said. “About what I expected. I should just about scrape through. Trinity, here I come.” He laughed rather grimly.
But he looked pleased. Some of his friends came up to enquire about his results. One was shattered; he’d unaccountably got a C in Maths. He had been known as the class genius, had got A’s right up through the six years of secondary school.
“I’m going to have to repeat!” he wailed. He’d wanted to do physics in UCD.
They began discussing the paper and what he might have done wrong in technical terms. Not understanding a word, I drifted gloomily off to where the crowd of my class waited, talking among themselves with pale faces. Mrs. McHenry came out and began calling out names.
“O’ Sullivan,” she said. Susie stepped forward and Mrs. McHenry gave her a smile. I thought I heard her say “Well done” and a pang of jealousy passed through me. It struck me suddenly that Ron wasn’t here. I felt glad. Probably he was away on some luxury holiday in the South of France with his parents. They were the type of people who could afford to go camping in France for two or three weeks, weren’t they?
My name was called. I stumbled forward. Mrs. McHenry passed me a folded sheet of paper. “Very good, Cathy,” she said approvingly. I gazed at her matronly looking face for a moment and then found myself as if in a dream opening up the page.
“What did you get?” Susie’s triumphant grin was unmistakable.
“Two A’s, three B’s and three C’s,” I replied.
She gasped. “Same as me! Can you believe it? After all the messing around I did last year! Did you get your A in English?”
“Yeah,” I said weakly.
“Fantastic. Listen, I have to go over and talk to Jeff now; he’s going to be in a really bad mood. We’ll hardly be in any classes together next year, him and me. It’s a bitch, isn’t it? Are your parents going to give you a reward for doing so well? Mine are—I have it all picked out.”
She was gone. I looked around for Stevie. Suddenly all the tension of the last few minutes seemed absurd. It was only the Inter. I had done well, but so had some of the others. So had Susie. It had somehow been important to me that she wouldn’t. If she hadn’t, it would have proved that I was leading a better life. But in fact, I reflected, she had the best of both worlds.
Stevie tapped me on the shoulder. “So how’d you do?”
“Not bad,” I said with a grin.
He scanned my results. “Well done! I knew you’d pull it off.” Then, in a lower voice: “Let’s get away from here, shall we? Brian and Patrick are still conducting a grisly postmortem of the Maths exam. It’s getting a little tedious.”
“You said you’d take me out for a drink.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
* * *
The pub nearest Fintan’s was called the Droppin’ Well. A lot of students went there and got served with no hassle. This meant that it was always loud and heady with cigarette smoke, and there were too many boys hanging about for my liking. I sat down, feeling a bit intimidated, even in the dim light. Stevie returned to the table with two pints of cider and two bags of crisps.
It was the first time that I had ever gone to a pub to drink alcohol. I’d always liked sitting in pubs when I was younger with my father and Stevie. We’d get lemonade, served with ice and a slice of lemon. Or Cokes. My father would brood over his pint of dark-looking stout; we’d eat peanuts or crisps and annoy him by being too loud, or asking for another drink; it always took him at least twenty minutes to down his pint. We would come here, to the Droppin’ Well, when Dad was feeling antisocial and unwilling to put up with the banter of his cronies.
Stevie watched me, amused, as I sipped the cider. I’d had furtive tastes of alcohol before—at Christmas, for example—but for my age I was surprisingly ignorant about drinking.
The pint looked huge. “You could just have got me a glass,” I said.
“We’ll be here for a while.” He added: “We’re waiting for Ron.”
I bit my lip. The unwelcome words sunk in. “Oh God, how embarrassing,” was my first reaction. Then a feeling of anger. I looked at Stevie.
“You didn’t tell me that!”
He shrugged. “What’s the problem?”
I wasn’t quite sure what the problem was. I couldn’t say to Stevie: “I hate Ron.” I had no basis for hating him, really, but I knew I did, and I felt sure that he hated me.
“Does he know I’m going to be here?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, maybe I’ll leave before he comes!”
He looked annoyed, but said nothing. He began to eat his crisps slowly, one by one. I followed suit. Little groups of people from our classes had started trickling in. I wondered if Susie and Jeff would arrive. The idea of sitting at a table with my brother and Ron was bad enough, but to do so being watched by Susie and Jeff was nightmarish. They won’t come in, I told myself firmly, and Ron will be late, or he won’t turn up.
The cider was good, though. I discovered that I could drink it quite fast. And the more of it that went down my throat, the more I became convinced that Ron wasn’t going to come. Where was he, anyway? Why hadn’t he gone to pick up his results? It was typical of him not to, to be the only one not to. Absolutely typical.
I waved to Jeff, whom I saw standing against the bar looking bored and pissed off. Perhaps Susie had run home to tell her mother about her splendid results and had got caught up, or perhaps they were out buying the “reward,” whatever it was. Jeff gave me a
brief smile. Then, to my surprise, he detached himself from the bar and began to move in our direction.
“Oh, shit,” I muttered. I hadn’t thought he’d be that bored, that he’d actually want to come over and talk to me. Us. Maybe he wanted to annoy Stevie.
“How’d you do?” Jeff mumbled. He put a hand on the edge of our table; he looked like he was about to collapse.
“Jeff! How long have you been drinking?” I asked brightly, glancing over at Stevie. He was looking at Jeff without amusement. I saw him consult his watch.
“A few hours.” Jeff straightened himself and gazed at me mournfully. “God, my father’s going to kill me.”
“Did you do very badly?” I enquired.
He nodded. “I knew I would.”
We had all known that. Even so, it surprised me that I felt sorry for Jeff. He hadn’t worked, so it served him right—that would have been my reaction a few months before. But now ... well, maybe now that the uncertainty was over I could afford to be generous.
“And Susie did well,” muttered Jeff. He too would have liked Susie to do badly, to be on his level. He would never admit it, though. It was just obvious.
I looked at Stevie; his silence was a little odd. His head was turned towards the door. His eyes were shining. I had often wondered whether people’s eyes could actually shine, or look sympathetic or loving, or whether it was a trick of the light. I don’t know why this occurred to me then.
I felt my heart begin to beat, my cheeks to redden. Jeff flung himself into a chair beside me. He said something slurred. Ignoring him, I twisted around in my chair. Ron, looking deeply tanned, was making his way towards us, through what were now large, noisy crowds. He slid into a seat beside Stevie. Seeing me, he gave a brief nod. He glanced at Jeff in disdain. Again, I wondered why Stevie had arranged this. How could they possibly carry on a conversation with me present? Perhaps my cue was to be pleasant and polite for a few minutes, to demonstrate that I had no “hard feelings” about their affair, then to leave. Well, maybe I wouldn’t.
The Leaving Page 8
