The Dancers Dancing

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  At the back of the hall, clustering around a cosy nest of chairs, table, record-player, is a group of adults: the teachers. The children know this because Bean Uí Luing has already joined them, and is laughing heartily at some joke. She is the only woman. There are four men, Sean outside, and her. She’s going to have a good time, and you can see that this good time has already started.

  The oldest man in the group begins to shout at them, in a voice designed for leading battalions of idealistic young warriors to some terrible doom. He is a small penguin of a man, black and white in colour: a black suit with a white shirt stretched over his tummy; a black fringe of hair giddily circling his tender white scalp; black-rimmed spectacles forming a protective pallisade around his piercing black eyes. ‘Sit down!’ he roars. ‘I’ll be with yez in a minute!’ His voice booms through the room like a truck backfiring, and everyone sits down – there are benches along the walls, wooden benches with rough, splintery surfaces.

  After what seems a very long time all the children are in the hall and seated on these benches. Then the small dark man comes into the centre of the room and stares intimidatingly around until there is absolute silence and a thrill of danger flitting through the children.

  ‘Welcome!’ he says. ‘To Tubber College. I’m speaking English today so youse’ll understand what I’m saying. But this is the last word of English youse are going to hear from me or from anyone else for the rest of your stay here. Understand?’

  The question is rhetorical, of course.

  ‘Now. Youse’ll all be tired after the journey from Dublin. So I’ll tell you where you’re to stay. As soon as I call out your name go to the teacher I’ve assigned you to, bring your luggage, and wait there until you find out what to do next.’

  ‘God!’ Aisling sighs. ‘This is like the Jews.’

  He glares at her until all sound flees from the hall once again and the thin heartstopping silence, the proof of his absolute authority, has filled the vacuum. When he is satisfied that everyone has got the message, the calling of names begins. Children are assigned to different teachers, who will drive them in their cars, sometimes in relays which means more waiting for some, to the house where they are to stay. It goes smoothly enough.

  Until he gets to Sandra. Sandra has been given the wrong house. She was to be with Aisling and Orla.

  ‘I put it on the form!’ She is deeply distraught, although she does not cry. She does not cry because she can’t believe that this mistake is happening.

  ‘Tell him,’ says Aisling. ‘I will!’ She raises her hand. ‘Look, Sandra is supposed to be with us,’ she says to the round black man.

  He glances at her over his glasses.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Sandra Darcy. She’s our friend. She put on the form that she was to be with us.’

  He scratches his head.

  ‘OK. Sandra? You wait there until everyone else is gone. Then I’ll see to you.’

  Sandra smiles and sits back on her bench. Aisling and Orla punch her in the shoulder and go off to their teacher, who immediately makes them get into his car. They explain about Sandra and he nods and says, ‘Don’t worry’ as he ushers them out of the hall. Sandra gazes after them, feeling frightened again.

  The woman of the house and the daughter of the house meet the young visitors

  Orla and Aisling are driven to Sava and her mother, the Dohertys of Caroo, one mile and a quarter from the conglomeration of chapel, post office and schoolhouse that constitutes the nearest thing to a village the Gaeltacht parish of Tubber possesses.

  The teacher, whose name is Máistir Dunne, introduces them to Banatee (their Woman of the House), and Sava (her daughter). Everyone nods and says hello. Then Sava and Banatee scuttle off to the kitchen to make tea, leaving Máistir Dunne at a temporary loss. Taking out his pipe and tapping it for inspiration, he gazes at Aisling and Orla and they gaze back. He whistles a bar of ‘The Croppy Boy’, sighs deeply, and shows them to their bedroom.

  It is an old-fashioned dark room at the front of the house, chilly and forbidding. What is more surprising is that it contains only one bed.

  ‘Are we both going to sleep in that?’ Aisling asks.

  He looks at it hoping perhaps that the mattress will supply him with an answer, or the pillow. ‘Well ... would you mind?’

  ‘Oh no!’ they say in unison. They never mind anything. ‘Oh no!’ ‘Oh yes!’ ‘Whatever you say!’ Since babyhood they have been schooled to perfect acquiescence. ‘Oh no! No bottle for me today! Don’t go to any trouble! I’ll just lie here in my cot and scream my head off. It’s good for me!’

  ‘It’s a ... em ... double bed,’ he says thoughtfully and unnecessarily.

  They all stare at the em double bed for a minute, experiencing a variety of emotions, including amusement, repugnance, anger, disbelief and sorrow. Then, without another word, Máistir Dunne walks out of the room, bowing his head under the doorway. Sackfuls of tension and embarrassment go with him.

  Aisling and Orla do what girls do in such situations. They screw up their faces and giggle.

  ‘Gonny!’ Aisling plonks herself on the bed and tries to bounce. But it does not respond: it’s a mattress without a bounce, made of tangled balls of crinkly yellow straw packed too thick to yield to any pressure. They both spend a few minutes attempting to change its nature, then capitulate and fall to examining their surroundings.

  The quilt on their double bed is a candlewick counterpane, coffee-coloured. In between counterpane and sheet is a heap of blankets of all ages and materials: ancient thin hard wool, fluffy new synthetic. The sheets are purple nylon, with bits of straw from the mattress sticking up through them. The other furniture in the room is minimal and old-fashioned, which does not mean that it’s picturesque. Country furniture, but not the kind people in cities imagine as typical. A huge, dark walnut wardrobe, its door impregnated with a foxy mirror. A painted dressing table – painted brown. The floor is covered with brown linoleum, with a trellis pattern in red. It is new, probably bought especially for the Irish scholars, to comfort and impress them.

  Orla is used to rooms that look like this, rooms that create an overriding impression of brownness, even if technically some other colours are present, rooms that are sadly lit from one bleary cataracted bulb. For Aisling it is different. Her room at home is soft, pale green and pink, girlish and comfortable. She thinks this place is an absolute howl. At least that’s what she says.

  ‘It’s a howl, isn’t it? Did you ever see such a wardrobe?’

  ’No.’ Orla laughs, opening the black cavern for the first and the last time. Its door will never stay shut again. In fact she has seen such a wardrobe many times. She has one just like it at home, in the room she shares there with her mother and father. They all share the wardrobe too, hanging several garments, one on top of the other, on every wire hanger. Aisling has never seen Orla’s bedroom and never will if Orla has anything to do with it.

  Sava calls them down to supper. They meet two other girls who will share the house with them – big tall thin girls who look about sixteen and are called Pauline and Jacqueline.

  Aisling is polite. She says hello and when did you arrive? Pauline answers these questions monosyllabically. Jacqueline stares unashamedly at Aisling and Orla, saying absolutely nothing. Sava totters into the room in platform shoes to pour tea. She also is silent. When she has filled the cups and tottered away again, Jacqueline looks at Pauline and starts to giggle. After a while they are both in an uncontrollable, hysterical fit of laughter. Pauline glances at Aisling from time to time and says, ‘Oh I’m sorry!’ Then they giggle even more furiously. ‘Excuse us!’ she says. Jacqueline doubles over.

  Orla is alarmed at first. She smiles weakly, even tries to join the girls in a laugh. But it doesn’t work.

  When they have been giggling for about five minutes without pause, Orla gets cross. She grimaces at Aisling and begins to eat her tea, sausages and fried tomatoes. Aisling raises her eyebrows. They t
alk to one another in Irish.

  This sets Pauline and Jacqueline off even more.

  ‘Oh excuse us!’ Pauline says, tears streaming down her face, after about ten minutes. She gets up from the table, a lanky girl dressed in a short denim skirt. ‘Come on you.’ She digs Jacqueline in the ribs. Jacqueline looks blank, then follows her from the room.

  ‘Honestly!’ says Aisling.

  ‘They’re very slim, aren’t they?’ Orla dips a sausage into a small pool of brown sauce, Chef sauce, she has made at the side of her plate. ‘Is there any room here for Sandra, do you think?’

  ‘Oh gosh!’ Aisling exclaims. ‘I don’t know.’

  The casual betrayal of Sandra

  Sandra waits in the hall until every other child has left. A dim, dusty, ancient glow, supplied by one bulb, settles in a puddle on the floorboards: outside, the light is fading at last. The windows are black. It is almost ten o’clock

  The round man folds up his wad of papers neatly and places them in a slim black briefcase. He takes a packet of cigars from his pocket and lights one up.

  ‘Ahem,’ Sandra says.

  He looks over and sees her, a small figure in a pink anorak, her yellow and brown and white hair falling over her drooping shoulders, her large eyes red-rimmed.

  ‘Oh be the hokey!’ He draws on his cigar. ‘You’re the girl with the problem.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be in Aisling’s and Orla’s house. I put it on the form.’

  ‘What’s this your name is again? Sorry, love.’

  ‘Sandra Darcy.’

  The voices echo in the hall, which begins to seem vast to Sandra. The round man sits down on the bench beside Sandra and opens his briefcase again. ‘That’s a nice name,’ he says, looking at her hair. He sighs. ‘Yes yes. Sandra.’ He takes out the list and checks it. ‘You’re down for Carrs’ house.’

  ’I want to be with the others.’

  ‘And what’s their names?’

  They find the names and the house.

  ‘Ah yes.’ He puts away his notes again and draws on his cigar. Sandra waits for him to solve the difficulty. She likes the smell of the cigar, and likes looking at the wisps of blue smoke drifting across the room. They transform it from being schooly to something completely different.

  He looks at her again, takes off his glasses and wipes them on his sleeve. Without them his face is red and pudgy, a baby face. His eyes are smaller than you think when you see him in the glasses, and sunken.

  ‘I’ll bring you down to Carrs’ tonight. They’re waiting for you there. And tomorrow we’ll sort this out. Is it a deal?’

  Sandra feels her stomach drop. This is not the end she had foreseen when she smelt the comforting cigar smoke, savoured the air of competent masculinity that filled the room, softening its edges with its velvet-cushioned safety.

  ‘But ... ?’

  ‘You’re a great girl, I can see that, Sandra.’ His eyes fall on her hair again. ‘It’s late, love. You can go to bed and have a good sleep and tomorrow we’ll do something about it.’

  Sandra has to agree.

  Enid Blyton sings the blues

  It’s the first time Orla has ever been away from her parents: Irish college. She made herself believe it would be like a summer camp, like something she had read about in The Bobbsey Twins. When she saw the word ‘college’ – the word ‘Irish’ she had to disregard, obviously – she saw the Bobbsey twins by a campfire, roasting marshmallows; she saw the Chalet School, Jo and Mavis and all of them in the snow-capped mountains, going for hikes and being funny, wise, tasteful, English – what Orla would love to be. She’d like to be Jo at the Chalet, or the twins at St Clare’s, or, most of all, Darrell Rivers at Malory Towers, with whom Orla has always identified absolutely. Darrell was beautiful, in a low-key way – you knew this although it was never stated in the book, where the ostentatious beauties, like Alison at St Clare’s, the girls who had blonde hair and polished their nails (they didn’t even use nail varnish, which is what you get in Ireland, but polish), were always stupid, and bad. They got expelled usually. Darrell wasn’t like that. She thought nail polish was unspeakably vulgar; she was the kind of girl who would rather be martyred at the stake than give up her right not to wear make-up. A shirt and tie is what she liked to wear: when she left Malory Towers she was going to be a surgeon in Edinburgh, like her father. But above all she was noble, fair and kind, an excellent judge of character and situation. Darrell was always right, about everything.

  And Malory Towers! The castle on the Cornish coast, the midnight feasts, the dotty teachers and the stern, just headmistress (very like Darrell, although this did not occur to Orla). Above all, the swimming pool, a huge pool cut out of the rugged Cornish rocks. Darrell perhaps was an ace swimmer, diving fearlessly into the bracing blue water. (Only horrible people did not dive, Orla knew. Girls who didn’t dive were like soldiers too cowardly to rush from the trench into the rain of enemy fire. They were the scum of the earth. Orla herself was afraid to dive but believed she would be brave enough soon, given the right circumstances.) Orla had dreamt of the pool once, in the best and most memorable dream she had ever had. She had dreamt of the dark rocks jutting around the edges, and the huge blue expanse of pool, and the laughing girls in red swimsuits diving from the diving board. In the dream she had swum from one end of the warm salt water to the other, and white terns had dived in the background from a clear blue sky. Rocks, ripples, red swimsuits. Lovely perfect English accents singing through the clean air. English as she should be spoke. Girls as they should be taught. Life as it should be lived.

  But Orla knows the score

  Of course Irish college could not be like that. Of course not. Orla knows. She should: she’s been to Tubber before, three or four times at least. It’s where her father comes from, so she knows exactly what it’s like, who lives there, their names. Half of them know her as well: they are related to her in one way or another. Her aunt, Auntie Annie, lives down by the beach. (When Orla thinks of this her stomach turns over in fear and shame. She does not want to have an aunt here, at Irish college. Darrell did not have an aunt in Malory Towers, only a perfect absent father, as far away as he could be, in Edinburgh, at the other end of the country.)

  Orla, if not permitted by fate to be Darrell Rivers, which unfortunately is the case, would settle for being like Aisling, her friend; would be glad to be like any of the other children, free of connections apart from her schoolmates and the teachers. She would settle for being anybody but herself, Orla of the double allegiances, Orla of the city and the country, Orla who belongs in both places and belongs in neither.

  Why she was sent here is not something she questions: Elizabeth decided it was to be. Elizabeth encouraged Orla’s classmates to go with her, practically organising the trip from the Dublin side. Why did Elizabeth think it would be good for Orla to go to Tubber rather than any of the other dozens of Irish colleges in Ireland? Maybe to promote Tubber, to show it off to the people of Dublin? She is always doing that anyway, verbally. Tubber is all she has to show off in the little terrace of houses where she lives, the narrow streets where the sun barely shines. Tubber Tubber Tubber, they hear about it from morning to night, how great it is, how perfect, how beautiful. (Elizabeth does not really believe the credit for this perfection is mainly hers, but sometimes you would think she did, listening to her.)

  Or she could have wanted Orla to feel protected, away from home but not away as it were, away but among her own. In imagining Orla would like that, she showed how little she knew her. Or maybe she wanted to show off to the people of Tubber: this is Orla and her friends. They can afford to pay to go to Irish college. They can be Irish students with the best of them.

  Yes. Orla thought it sounded like a good idea, until she got here and realised she was two people: Orla the daughter of Elizabeth, the niece of Auntie Annie, the cousin of the people of Tubber, and Orla the schoolgirl from Dublin, the friend of Aisling, the Irish scholar. She has either to be two people at
the same time, which is a hard thing to be, especially when you are thirteen and a half. Or she has to choose to be just one of them. That also is very hard – not the choice, which is simple, but the consequences.

  The choice itself is all too quickly made: she will have to try to be Orla the schoolgirl from Dublin. All her old Tubber habits, her specialised Tubber knowledge, will have to be suppressed, her innumerable relations ignored. The mantle of innocence and anonymity worn by the other children Orla will drape over herself, and hide whatever is underneath. Plenty. Plenty is underneath. But she is so used to hiding things that the decision to do it is automatic. What other course of action is open to her? It has been clear to her for years that all her friends would hate her if they knew what she was really like, and especially if they knew what her family was like. The inferiority of Orla’s family to the families of Orla’s friends is immense. It is an ocean that no bridge or ship or airplane or seagull or albatross or anything could ever cross. Friends on one side, family on the other. If the friends got wind of it ... she’d be done for. It’s friends or family, and she is thirteen and a half. She needs friends.

  Still, it is odd pretending not to know things that she has known since the year dot. It is odd changing the way she looks at Tubber and the people in it, seeing them and talking about them with the eyes of Orla the schoolgirl, not the eyes of Orla the niece of Annie Crilly, the daughter of Tom who went to Dublin. It is odd how different the two sets of eyes have to be, and even odder how different the languages of the two Orlas are.