She should have known better. But she’d loved the shoes when she’d seen them first. The pearl rosette had shimmered like the inside of an oyster shell, and the tangerine material – not leather, yet not plastic – glowed in the dark cave of Clover’s shop window, glowed like two summer oranges on a bottle-green tree. Clover’s was a wonderful name, one of Orla’s favourites, redolent of hills and holidays, fresh lake breezes. In fact the shop is a chaotic place, dim, and crammed with shoe boxes and shoes out of boxes, new shoes with clean soles and the reassuring tangy smell of leather, old shoes bent and creased like old age pensioners on the bus, smelling of dirty feet. Elizabeth and Orla love it all, its messiness and its plenitude, and especially its cheapness. Every time they pass that shop they are seduced inside. And often they buy.
Elizabeth had been delighted with the tangerine shoes’ price, although Orla could see that even at the beginning she had doubts about their style. (Why didn’t she voice them then, rather than later? Why don’t people?) Not until she got them home did Orla begin to understand why. Not until they were sitting under her bed, their dimpled orange toes peeping out, did the delusion fall from her eyes. Tangerine shoes. Nobody wears tangerine shoes.
Elizabeth has also given Orla a pair of sandals, plain sandals made from the same flabby, dark tan leather as schoolbags. They have a T-bar strap and three slits over the toes to let the air in and the pong out. ‘Ideal for Irish college!’ Elizabeth had said to the woman in the shop, name unknown, Mrs Clover perhaps. ‘Oh yes, they will be, maam,’ she had said and nodded her little picklehead. As if she’d ever left Camden Street in her whole life! As if she even knew what Irish college was!
The sandals look like boys’ sandals. Shoes that are worn by boys are worse than shoes that are tangerine. Orla has no intention of ever wearing those sandals, ever in her whole life.
‘What did youse bring?’ Sandra says youse. It damns her for all eternity as far as Orla is concerned. Orla has a special linguistic mission in life, and it is not the mission of every good citizen, which is, according to the teachers in her school, to speak Irish. It is rather to stamp out every trace of local English dialect from her surroundings, rather as Church and State in Ireland have recently been aiming to eliminate sex from the Irish way of life. Words like youse cannot be tolerated. Orla has her work cut out correcting the terrible English of her mother and her brother. She’d love to work on Sandra but can’t. All she can do is despise her. Youse.
‘Two Fanta and two bags of Tayto and a packet of chocolate goldgrain and a bar of Whole Nut and two apples.’
‘I brought a Coke and a shillingy box of fruit pastilles and five bags of crisps.’
‘Do you think they’ll let us out in the North for Mars Bars and Marathons?’
‘Oh yes they’re bound to.’ Thus Orla, speaking with confidence. ‘My mother said we’d stop in Omagh, we’d probably stop in Omagh for lunch and we could do some shopping there.’
Elizabeth has even given Orla sterling to buy something for her: three packets of Persil.
‘How am I supposed to carry three packets of Persil all the way to Donegal and back?’
‘They’ll give you a bag, sure, won’t they? None of your backchat. I can tell ye I never got a month’s holiday when I was your age or any holiday at all.’
Old times. How Orla hated them.
‘Maybe I can get them on the way back?’
‘It’s all the same to me. Just get them. They’re fifty pence cheaper on the large size.’
Elizabeth has given Orla something else as well: a present for her Auntie Annie, who lives in Tubber. It is a brown bag containing a pair of elastic stockings. Aunt Annie has varicose veins and will be glad of their support. When Orla remembers her suitcase, hidden deep in the bowels of the bus, a magic chest packed with ironed blouses and crisp cotton dresses, she can see under all the neatly balled socks and folded pants that soft, disgusting brown paper bag. It makes her stomach turn. She tries to push the picture away but it pops back at intervals, all through the long journey, like a dark shadow on the brightness of the day.
The bus is due to depart at ten but it is after eleven when it finally leaves. It takes a very long time indeed to check everyone’s name on the list. Sean O’Brien keeps glancing at it, askance, as if he doesn’t quite know what it is. Then he scratches his head and laughs a thin, hopeless laugh. He reads out all the names four times. The first time, two boys don’t answer even though everyone sees them on the bus, biffing one another and pulling long faces which are supposed to mimic Sean O’Brien’s. The second time, five people don’t answer. The third time, everyone says yes, because they are getting very bored. But then he checks one last time and half the children on the bus refuse to reply.
‘I think they’re all here!’ says Bean Uí Luing – Mrs Lang – another teacher for the Gaeltacht. Her voice is furry and cheerful, like sponge cake, with jam and cream and sugar – a cream sandwich. ‘I think we can leave, Sean!’
‘You better get started or yez won’t be there before dark!’
Orla closes her eyes. It’s Elizabeth.
‘Are you sure, Mrs Crilly?’
‘Sure of course I’m sure. We know them all don’t we?’
He scratches his head again. But you can tell, even Orla can tell, that he trusts her more than he trusts Bean Uí Luing. Anyone could tell that she is scatty, even after two minutes. Her blonde hair falls onto her cheeks in untidy wisps. She is wearing a pink suit and a silk scarf and a little pillbox hat. Her shoes are slingback, also pink. Mother of the bride, Aisling whispers. Where did she get that hat?
At last, at last, at last, when hope is thinning to an elastic band of desperation, the engine roars. At its cheering shudder, Orla and Aisling open their Coke, Fanta and crisps. By the time they are in Finglas, the goodies are gone. Orla has one of her stomachaches. Sandra still has crisps and two bars of chocolate.
‘I do like to make them last,’ she lisps. Sandra has a very minor speech impediment: apart from her dialect and accent, there is something – something you can’t get your ear around – wrong with the way she talks. That’s one of her terrible flaws. There are others: she lives in a flat, not a corporation flat but any flat is bad enough. Respectable people live in houses. ‘Never go in there!’ Elizabeth warns. Orla has ignored the warnings, and found the flat comforting and warm, cosy in a way her home never can be. She hasn’t let on. ‘She has nits in her hair, I’ve seen her scratching,’ Elizabeth says. Sandra’s eyes are odd colours, one blue and one brown. Her hair is long and thick, gold and brown and yellow mixed together. ‘I’ve never seen hair the like of that on any child before,’ Elizabeth says. ‘What does she put in it?’
They stop in Monaghan for chips.
Monaghan is all right as market towns in the middle of Ireland go. Better than most. But there is one problem: it is not the North.
‘Can’t we wait till we cross the border?’ Orla implores Sean O’Brien.
‘No, a stór. It’s past lunchtime already.’
And whose fault is that may I ask?
Everyone on the bus tries to make him wait for the North, where eminently desirable bars of chocolate and tubes of sweets, Opal Fruits and Mars Bars and Bountys, can be bought. (Everyone in the world must know this by now, what the North meant to the children of the Republic: it meant Mars Bars.) The children have been planning their shopping for weeks. Orla has saved money specially for the stop in the North, and so have most of those on the bus. But nothing they can do can convince him that any of that matters. One sweet is the same as another, perhaps, is his point of view, indicating how little he understands his charges. The little buggers don’t matter, perhaps, is his point of view, indicating how little he likes them. Or stopping in the North is too risky, perhaps, is his point of view, indicating that he’s a true-blue Dubliner.
They park on a hill and crocodile down the main street in Monaghan, where they eat eggs, beans and chips. The food is good – fat soft sweet chips,
sopped in vinegar, crispy eggs. But as soon as the children return to the bus they start to sulk. First they sulk to force Sean to tell the driver to stop, and then they sulk to punish him for not stopping. They sulk from one border to the other, all the way across the North of Ireland.
They only stop sulking once, when the bus has to stop. This happens at Aughnacloy, just over the Monaghan border. A soldier wearing fatigues and carrying a heavy gun boards the bus. He gives the children a sweeping cold glance: thrilling. They all gaze eagerly at his face, a round pink boyish face, fresh from the rain that now pings down outside. They stare happily at his helmet, his gun, his green-and-brown Action Man clothes. It is the first time they have ever seen a real soldier, on duty: it is as if an alien from outer space, or Fred Flintstone or Donald Duck, stepped onto the bus. ‘Come down the aisle,’ Orla prays. ‘Please!’ She sees him, prowling along, his pink face concentrated and intent, prodding duffel bags with the point of his gun.
‘Would you describe the contents of this bag for me, young lady?’
‘Three Coke tins and a pair of socks.’
‘And what is this object?’
‘A stuffed rabbit.’
She hears his happy laugh.
But he doesn’t come. He doesn’t move down the bus at all. Instead he looks at them once again, in a bored way, and grunts something to the driver, who grunts back. Then he just leaves.
They resume their sulking.
And they don’t stop again for an hour.
Even when they are momentarily distracted by the fascinating sight of more soldiers, crouching outside shops called Sheila’s Bakery and Dairy or patrolling petrol stations, they continue. They know if they slacken for a second, Sean or, more likely, Bean Uí Luing, will take advantage. She’ll see the opportunity and seize it, cheat them into relaxing. She knows how tired they are.
So they concentrate fiercely on Opal Fruits and Mars Bars. They exchange pithy descriptions of sweets they once ate and adored. Chewy tangy lemon and lime. Thick rich chocolate peanuts. Flavours denied to the children of the Republic, but available daily, like so many other advantages, to the children of the North.
Wall’s ice cream.
Which always reminds Orla of walnuts, her favourite nuts when combined with chocolate and cream, as in Walnut Whips.
The Wall’s pennants wave tantalisingly in the rain as they whiz past the little roadside shops. Her mind considers walnut ice creams: chocolatty, creamy, crunchy, walnutty.
‘You could’ve understood him not stopping in a town,’ Aisling says. ‘We might’ve got lost.’ As in Monaghan, where it had taken half an hour to locate Maurice Byrne and Damien Caulfield. Why they are going to the Gaeltacht nobody knows. It nearly takes the good out of it, people like them going. ‘You could’ve understood not stopping in a town. But a shop. A shop on the side of the road. Nobody could run away from there.’ A shop called Sheila’s Sweetery or Anna’s Bakery or Winnie’s Dairy. Nowhere to run from them except the country.
But he won’t give in. Not after Monaghan.
‘At least I don’t have to get the Persil,’ Orla breathes quietly to herself. But she does not bother mentioning this to Sandra or Aisling. Sandra would laugh and Aisling would give her one of those long incomprehending looks, darkened by pity, that make Orla want to curl up and drown. It’s her secret, the Persil, like the elastic stockings for Auntie Annie, like Auntie Annie herself – one of Orla’s many, many secrets.
By the time the bus passes the custom post at Lifford, crosses from Tyrone into Donegal, Sean O’Brien looks as if he’s been run over by a steamroller. Bean Uí Luing is knitting, a strawberry-coloured jumper, with fierce concentration. She does not talk to Sean or even look at him, but focuses on her stitching.
And then the children stop sulking. The air in the bus lightens and loosens, like an animal calmed after a shock. The tones of voices change. Someone laughs and it is a natural laugh of joy, not a sarcastic snarl.
Bean Uí Luing lets her knitting rest on her knubbly pink lap. She raises her pink bird face and beams at Sean O’Brien, who scratches his black hair and ponders the wonder of childhood.
He looks outside.
The navy-blue roads with their neat white stripes along the edges have given way to a narrow country lane. The tidy hawthorn hedgerows, clipped like crew cuts, have yielded to ragged brambles and bushy fuchsia, dipping and waving and scratching the bus. The sun is setting rosily in a featheration of blue and white, grey and peach, in the western sky (it is gone eight-thirty: thanks to all the messing, the journey has lasted more than nine hours).
The landscape in the delicate ether of twilight is beginning to look like all the places Irish people go to on their holidays. It has a windy, sandy, opalescent, carefree look, a happy-go-lucky few cows in a field it might rain any minute but who cares look, a bittersweet cry one minute laugh the next emotional hopeful poignant wistful delicate damp look. A newborn baby old as the mountains prayerful look.
The landscape has stopped being the east and the midlands and the North of Ireland and started being the West.
The children do not know why they had to stop sulking. They do not know why they are beginning to sing.
‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes
She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes ...’
Sean O’Brien scratches his head philosophically, takes three Aspros and a slug of Coke – he’s kept a bottle of Coke hidden beneath his seat for nine whole hours, which is what it means to be an adult.
Bean Uí Luing puts her knitting in her tapestry bag and starts to sing too. She sings an Irish song, ‘Beidh aonach amárach i gContae an Chláir’. All the children know it but only one or two join her. The others listen to Damien Caulfield’s robust rendering of ‘The Captain’s Wife Was Mabel’, until Sean O’Brien rushes from his seat with a convincing show of fine macho frenzy and clips him on the ear.
‘I’ll fucking sue you,’ Damien Caulfield snarls. He knows it is against the rules, hitting a child on a bus on the way to an Irish college, where they are supposed to be on fucking holidays.
Bean Uí Luing starts ‘Ten Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall’ by way of compromise. They sing it all the way from somewhere south of Letterkenny to the Gaeltacht.
Irish college
Not the kind you find in Paris or Louvain, homes from home for priesteens bravely defying the Penal Laws during the eighteenth century and being schooled for ordination in ancient Catholic cities far from the chilly Mass rocks and dark secret byres that await their heroic return, bearers of the sacred mysteries, the magic words, the holy chalice which encloses in its deep gleaming heart the identity of the nation. Our body, our blood. Our hope our redemption. Our paradise. Our link with Rome and Jerusalem, Spain and Paris. Everything that is exotic, different, warm, unreal and other. Other but not English.
It is an Irish college of the other kind, born in the heady days of the Celtic Revival, allowed to fade somewhat during the long dull struggle for self-assertion, the deprived harsh childhood of the new Ireland, and revived again now that the country has reached adolescence and is breaking away from its Roman fathers. An Irish college modelled loosely on American summer camps or the folk high schools of Scandinavia. But instead of counsellors you have schoolteachers, instead of staying in tents or cabins you lodge in the farmhouses and bungalows of the native population. Instead of learning weaving, canoeing or carpentry you learn one thing: Irish. At least that is what you are supposed to do, and that is the reason why the government, generous and benign now that the Common Market is there to protect it, and recognising that the children have grown up and have suddenly realised that having fun may not be wrong, that it may, in fact, be necessary, may even be their birthright, subsidises the students who attend the college. Fifty-fifty. They pay fifteen pounds and the Department of Education pays fifteen.
I’m speaking English so youse’ll all understand
The bus pulls up outside a square
cream block of a building with eight high narrow windows on one side and eight on the other, and a porch boasting two entrances, one marked Buachaillí and the other Cailíní. The children scramble down from the bus clutching their anoraks and plastic bags. The bus driver and Sean are already at the boot, lifting suitcases of all shapes and sizes and ages and social classes onto the road. ‘Take your own luggage and go into the school, take your own luggage and go into the school, take your own luggage and go into the school,’ Sean chants in a low, terse voice, over and over again, as he reaches into the dark underside of the bus with his long tweed arm and hauls out cases. His face is opaque as his hair now, thickly concentrated. There is threat in his voice but he does not look any child in the eye. The time for eye contact has come and gone, forever, as far as he is concerned. With surprising ease, the three girls retrieve their belongings, and, with difficulty since they are so heavy, drag them into the schoolhouse.
It is different from an ordinary school in the city, in that it has no rooms: the entire school consists of one large chamber. This is what they see when they walk in: a large hall, wood-floored, its green walls covered with the maps of the world, posters of black children with large pleading eyes, and posters of nursery rhyme figures drawn in thick black ink and coloured in vividly, red and blue and yellow, with which they are familiar. Perching on windowsills here and there are statues of the Virgin and the Sacred Heart – but they seem to be carelessly placed, as if someone had taken them and plonked them down anywhere at all, not giving them the careful consideration, the little blue lamps and vases of flowers, the lacy doilies, with which the teacher in Orla’s school in Dublin, or her mother, honoured such statues. One of the statues, the Sacred Heart, is back to front, looking out of the window instead of into the room. What does he see? From the vantage point of the children, the windows reveal nothing except patches of cloudy sky. Even though there are so many of them, they are so high in the wall as to grant no view whatsoever of what lies outside. These windows, the windows of every national school in Ireland, have been designed expressly to prevent children looking out of them.
The Dancers Dancing Page 2
