The Leaving

by Gabriella West

  “I brought a friend home for tea,” I announced.

  “That’s great,” he said vaguely. Into the bedroom he went; his door shut.

  I walked into my room. Jeanette was standing looking out my window.

  “What can you see?” I asked from the door.

  “I can’t see much. What’s out there?”

  We stood together at the window. My room was above the kitchen; I could hear Mum clattering about. Jeanette was looking at me now.

  “The walls are very thin in this house,” I said in a low tone. “That’s one reason I don’t like it.”

  “At least you have a garden,” she said, rather bitterly.

  “It’s not much. A patch of grass, lots of weeds, a shrub or two.”

  She shrugged. “You should see ours. The branches are about ten feet tall. It’s full of nettles and things like that— ”

  “Your father should do something about it.”

  She said nothing.

  I sat down on my bed. I didn’t want to talk about gardens. I felt sad, and I was not sure why.

  “Supper’s ready,” my mother trilled from below.

  Jeanette held out her hand. I grasped it; she pulled me up. Her hand, I noticed, was warmer. It tingled.

  “Will you give me a guided tour of the garden tomorrow morning?” she asked. I was relieved to see that a teasing tone had returned to her voice.

  “Are you sure you’re up to it? A full tour would take hours.”

  “OK, just the high points.”

  “Fine, that’ll last two minutes.”

  We smiled at each other. Back on familiar ground, I wondered for a moment at my feelings of a little while before. I would have to analyze them later. Now supper awaited. I wanted to see what Jeanette thought of Stevie, and vice versa.

  Chapter 9

  “Here’s my bus,” said Jeanette.

  She smiled at me. I smiled back.

  “See you on Monday.”

  “See you.”

  She got on. I waved at her. The bus drew away. I began walking home. My steps were light. I felt happy. It had begun to rain. I zipped up my anorak but didn’t put my hood up. I started to run up the alley that led to my house. I pushed open the black wrought-iron gate and swung it shut behind me. The front door was unlatched. In the dim hall I hung up my anorak, my heart thumping from the rain. I breathed deeply and slowly, my pulse returning to normal. I wandered into the sitting room. Stevie sat in Dad’s armchair with a book.

  “Studying?” I said.

  He looked up, closed the book. “More or less.”

  “Are your classes interesting?”

  “No.”

  He yawned. I sat down opposite him, in the smaller chair where my mother usually sat. The rain pattered down outside.

  “Do you like her?” I asked.

  He looked at me for a moment, blankly. “Your friend?”

  “Jeanette, yeah. Who else?”

  “She’s sweet.”

  That was fine, but I wanted more. It always interested me how other people saw Jeanette. They never seemed to sense how special she was.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?”

  He paused. “Do you?” he enquired.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Yes. I mean, maybe not pretty, but attractive.”

  “Attractive, eh?” he said curiously.

  We did not speak for a minute.

  “You don’t agree...?”

  Stevie opened his book again. Looking down, he said: “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  I felt embarrassed suddenly. “I just ... wanted to get your opinion.”

  “My opinion is, she’s nice. More like you than that O’Sullivan cow.”

  “What’s wrong with Susie?” I said, amused. I was glad to hear her called a cow; it seemed appropriate. “She used to think you were gorgeous, by the way.”

  He smiled. “What made her change her mind? I can’t say I admire her taste in men.”

  “Jeff, you mean.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, Jeff. But it’s behind me now, Fintan’s and all that. Thank God. I’ll probably never see any of those characters again.”

  “Except Ron.”

  He closed the book again and sighed.

  “Ron,” he repeated.

  I raised my eyebrows. I felt some revelation was on the way.

  “It’s hard, you know,” he said, suddenly. “I have classes every day. Ron has school. We can only see each other in the evenings. It works out to basically one evening a week. At the most two. I miss our old routine. But I suppose it had to end.”

  “Do you mean,” I said, hesitating, “that you’re getting less serious about him?”

  He swallowed. I thought perhaps I had gone too far. When he looked at me, though, it was not with wariness, but with a desperate sincerity.

  “No. On the contrary. I love him, Cathy. I know that now. I can’t see there being anyone else ... for a long time. Or ever. I realize that sounds stupid, and unrealistic, but I don’t want anyone else. I’ve had offers!”

  He blushed, and so did I. This did not surprise me, but I was amazed that he was telling me these things. And I was glad that I could listen without my customary conflicting feelings. For the first time in a long time, I felt supportive of my brother, even sympathetic. It was because I had someone too. Not in the same way, I told myself, not in the same way, of course.

  “My goal in life is to live with him. It seems so simple, so basic. Just to get a room together. Share a bed. But it’s not on, not in Dublin. Unless I could leave college, get a job, support myself. But I might as well do that in a more liberating environment.”

  “London’s also more expensive,” I said dully. I had no argument; I couldn’t defend Dublin. I didn’t like it myself. It was all I knew, but I could tell, just from reading English books and magazines and watching television, that English cities were more exciting, more diverse. Above all, more tolerant of gay people. When I thought of gay people I meant men, young men like Stevie.

  “Yes, it is. But just because Dublin’s cheap is no reason to stay!”

  “I know.”

  He nodded. “You do, don’t you?”

  And he smiled at me.

  * * *

  But Dublin, all the same, was opening itself up to me, under Jeanette’s guidance. She knew the city well: especially the bustling, crowded shopping streets north of the Liffey where raucous women sold fruit and vegetables, where adolescent girls bought cheap, fancy clothes and pale young mothers pushed crying babies in strollers.

  We walked together along these streets. I came to understand that Jeanette’s Dublin was different from my own: it was a living city. She knew where to go for coffee, where to get the best bargains, she knew the short cuts and the side streets.

  We usually met in town on Saturdays and she would always have a story or two for me when we saw each other. Her little mishaps fascinated me. I had the sense—and I did not analyze it much—that for these moments when we were together we were each other’s first priority, that events which occurred in her life outside of this were only grist for the mill of her stories, and not real problems which tormented her. She presented her life, indeed, as a comedy, and I never cared to pry beneath the surface. Nor did I talk about my own parents, or Stevie. She had seemed especially shy around him. I did say, casually, “He’s gay,” just to see her response, which was to look at me with very round eyes in silence.

  “He’s going out with someone in Fintan’s in our year,” I continued.

  “Do you know who?” she breathed.

  “Ron McConnell.”

  “Jesus. God, I’m sorry, Cathy, it’s just I wasn’t prepared to hear that.”

  “I didn’t think you knew Ron,” I said, suddenly apprehensive.

  “No, no, I haven’t. I know who you mean, that’s all.”

  I smiled. “It’s a secret, so don’t blab it about.”

  “I wo
n’t.” She looked at me earnestly. “Who would I blab it to, anyway?”

  “I dunno,” I said, gratified.

  * * *

  It was true she had an admirer. His name was Paul Donellan. He sent her letters, which ended with scribbles of ILY, ILY, which was what he would write instead of “I love you.” Jeanette seemed unimpressed by this and ridiculed his letters. The basic message I got from her was that Paul was a fool and she didn’t like him much. He was a fool, she implied, simply because he was daft about her.

  This did not strike me as foolish, however. I got a chance to meet Paul when she invited me to a Saturday matinee—Ghostbusters—that she was going to see with him. Supposedly Paul was bringing along a friend. It would be the Joe experience all over again, I thought a little sadly, but all the same, I turned up at the appointed place, outwardly calm. There was no sign of Paul. Jeanette was there, wearing a purple minidress that left her legs bare and freezing. She was hopping up and down to keep warm. She greeted me with a self-conscious smile.

  “Are they not coming?” I asked hopefully.

  “Only Paul is. His friend can’t make it.”

  “Oh,” I said. Now, of course, my presence would be superfluous. I should just turn right around and go home, I mused. But I didn’t want to.

  “Here’s Paul,” Jeanette said in an unenthusiastic tone. A thin dark-haired boy of medium height joined us. He seemed rather embarrassed at his friend’s absence. Jeanette refused to talk to him much, striding up and down the street to keep warm while Paul and I waited side by side in the long cinema queue, exchanging polite small talk. It was odd to stand beside a boy whom up to know I had not been sure whether to be jealous of, and feel suddenly that I was in a more powerful position than he. Jeanette was keeping their relationship determinedly casual, I saw, without any overt displays of affection. How differently Susie had behaved with Jeff. Well, I liked this better.

  We saw the film and I remember Jeanette ushering Paul onto his bus afterwards in the dark. I stood back to let them say their farewells, which were brief and perfunctory on her side, I thought. Then she stepped off the bus and joined me, holding a letter that he had just handed her. We stood there under the street lamp and looked at it together. “I want us to be more than friends,” the letter read, “because I long for your touch. I want you to hold me ... ”

  “Christ!” Jeanette said with violence. She crumpled the paper up. “If that’s what the bastard wants he’s going to have to find someone else.”

  I was silent, pleased and yet surprised, in some way, that Paul’s evidently sincere love was being treated so scornfully. Perhaps I understood Paul’s feelings for her only too well. But his words, which I found moving, seemed to offend Jeanette. She was too hard on him, I decided, but she had the right to say no, and I was rather relieved that she had.

  “Are you going to see him again?” I asked, finally.

  “Not if I can help it,” she answered.

  I don’t think she ever did see him again.

  * * *

  Fencing was one of the few extra-curricular activities offered at Fintan’s. I had fenced before, Jeanette had not, but before long she was just as good—or as bad—as I was. We fenced with enthusiasm, and Mrs. Smith, our teacher, suggested that we come one evening to her private fencing club, which was held at a sports center in a North side suburb that I had scarcely heard of, let alone been to. But Jeanette had, and she knew what bus to take.

  The fencers turned out to be far more professional than Jeanette and I. We felt hopelessly incompetent beside them, and ended up sparring not very seriously with each other. But it was fun to be out late at night alone together; it wasn’t that late really, but being pitch black it seemed it. We climbed back on the bus at the end of the session. We were the only two on the bus, a fact which I realized as we sat in the front seats of the top deck, staring out into the darkness. To me it felt almost as if we were in a foreign country. I had no idea where we were, how many miles away we still were from Dundrum. But it didn’t matter.

  Jeanette took a tin whistle out of her coat pocket and began to play slowly and very badly, laughing at herself occasionally. I listened in silence. It had suddenly come to me how alone we were. There was no one to see what we did. We could do anything, and no one would know.

  I gazed at her. Her face was close to mine. If only I could kiss her, I thought, if our mouths could meet ... We were so close, so intimate. Why not this? What was stopping me from leaning over right this minute and doing it? I wanted to.

  I sat there, my heart beating, digesting this knowledge. I was happy to hold the feeling of wanting her inside of me. Nor did I sense that it would shock or surprise her. I wondered if she could guess. Possibly. I knew that my feeling was not alien to what we were. But it might not be the right time, I thought dreamily. Not yet.

  From then on I was always acutely aware of Jeanette’s physical presence. I drank in her face; I registered every casual touch, every smile we shared. I even liked the way she smelt; it did not bother me that her clothes were sometimes musty, or that was sometimes a faint odor of sweat or blood. (Susie had been scrupulously clean, but everything about Jeanette was touchingly human and imperfect). Like me, she was plump, with big hips and breasts; she dismissively called her thighs “thunder thighs.” But despite this feminine figure there was something clumsy and boyish about her manner. My father picked up on this when he made the (to me incomprehensible) comment that she looked like a young Bill Wyman from the Rolling Stones. It puzzled me that he had said that; just because she had short hair and wore no makeup was no reason, I reflected, to put her down by comparing her to a man! But was it a put-down? Did it have to be?

  I now see that I was catching Jeanette at a pivotal moment in her transition from gawky, naive adolescent to attractive, seemingly confident young woman. We met at a point in her life when she had not yet taken up many of the habits that she would shortly begin to practice. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette. She had never really drunk alcohol. She hadn’t much experience with boys. She didn’t wear makeup. She saw herself as unconventional and seemed both aware and proud of her difference from other people. Yet there was a wistfulness about her; she needed love, affection, and a strong bond with another person.

  All these things were true of me too. But it was not clear to me that Jeanette and I would ever come to a point where I would no longer be able to supply all her needs. My complete ignorance of the way things would go between us led me to live—for the first year of our friendship—in a kind of blissful fool’s paradise. If there were warning signs, I ignored them. When she began to smoke, we smoked together, when she plastered makeup on her face, I approved of it. Even when she mentioned a boy she saw sometimes outside school I did not really pay much attention, particularly as her attitude to him was mildly sarcastic. And anyway she had been friends with his sisters for some years!

  I saw our friendship as something that would not be altered or diminished by time. In fact, I theorized, it could only get better, since every day I relied on her more and more. Nothing could shake my devotion or change our mutual attraction. I would always feel the same, I mused, and so, of course, would she.

  Convinced of this, I did not worry. Fifth year, with Jeanette by my side, was a happy time. I began to enjoy school for the first time in my life. Suddenly my classmates no longer seemed like enemies. They were OK, really, most of them, I said to myself one day, sitting beside Jeanette in English class. I looked around the room and felt, instead of the usual mild contempt or fear, surprising warmth for the familiar faces. They weren’t monsters, just ordinary rather harmless people. And then it passed, and I wondered at what I had briefly experienced. I knew only that it had happened because of Jeanette. It was due to her.

  * * *

  On a Thursday early in December my mother told Stevie and I that she would be going to County Meath for the weekend. She left on Friday morning, returning on a cold, wet Sunday evening. We were all sitting around
the fire that night, Dad, Stevie and I, bound together by a feeling of curiosity about how her visit to her family had gone.

  She came in slowly, looking pale, rubbing her hands. We made a place for her by the fire. She sat down in her chair and rested for a couple of minutes.

  “Well?” said my father impatiently, as the logs crackled.

  She shrugged. “Well, Patrick.” Pause. Then, in a low voice, “I’m glad I went; Mam looked very ill. She couldn’t talk much, but it was nice to see her.”

  “And your brother?” My father enquired.

  “John seemed ... welcoming.” My mother squirmed slightly. “His wife is a lovely girl. They’ve got a couple of fine young children. Strange to think he’s nearly fifty.”

  “Yeah, a late starter.” My father’s tone seemed unduly sour. “But it obviously runs in the family.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. My father was apt to burst out with unpleasant comments after little or no provocation. We had learnt to ignore them, in the main, but this one had interesting implications. One did not ask Dad to elaborate; it wasn’t a wise idea. (His reaction to Stevie’s hair and pierced ear had been a fierce stare and a muttered, “Well, if that’s what you want, good luck.”)

  “Glad you’re being so stoic about it,” Stevie remarked unwisely.

  My father had turned, spat into the fire, and uttered the contemptuous words, “I’m trying to take it as a fashion statement rather than as a sign you were misdiagnosed a male at birth.”

  “It’s not as if I’m developing breasts!” snapped Stevie, something he wouldn’t have dared to do a year before.

  “Well, if you decide to, I’m told they have hormones for it now.”

  Stevie had blushed a deep, furious red. What frightened me most about Dad was his unpredictability. I had assumed that he and Stevie were still on quite good terms. After this conversation I felt that this assumption was groundless. It bore up something I’d felt as a child: that there was no point in trying to get into Daddy’s “good books”; you were never allowed to inhabit a safe space around him. You had to always be prepared to be the target of his anger, especially if you tried to stand up for yourself. That was just the way it was.