You would think, in such a get-up, that she would have a strong brash personality to match. But it is not so. On her plastic platforms, she glides in and out of the parlour as silently as a cat. Occasionally she smiles and says ‘Caidé mar atá tú?’ Lately – they have been here only four days – she smiles at Pauline, who has quickly emerged as the most important girl in the house; Pauline, because she acknowledges the recognition and acknowledges that Sava, by virtue of her position as permanent resident, has some status, smiles back. Today, when Sava carried the bacon and cabbage into the parlour, she even said, ‘How’s Sava?’ in her jokey, grown-up way. And Sava managed a rejoinder. Even under the gazes of Aisling, Orla and Jacqueline, all mildly disturbed by their consciousness of being left outside this communication, however insignificant it was, Sava managed to respond. Pauline has no gift at all for languages. But she has a gift for tones and moods. She can adjust her wavelength to anybody’s, if it suits her. She can sense a tone, or set one to match what is around her.
As soon as Sava leaves the room, Pauline gets up and mimicks her tottering walk. The others giggle, pleased to be pulled back into Pauline’s circle, and tackle their meal. The saltiest bacon, the steeliest cabbage, Orla has ever tasted.
Jacqueline screws up her small nose. ‘God it’s the pits,’ she says. ‘Really, isn’t it? I wish I was at home with me mammy, so I do.’
‘It’s not right. In Carrs’ they get the Irish flag every day for their dinner. Eggs peas and chips. It’s a fact. And the banatee Gerry has makes hamburgers.’
‘I’m not goin to eat this ––, pardon the language, girls!’ Jacqueline pushes away her plate. Aisling raises her eyebrows and Orla feels sick: Jacqueline has used a very bad word indeed.
‘I’m not going to eat it either. So I’m not.’ Pauline holds her nose. ‘It’s fit for pigs!’
She stands on the chair and honks. Then she sings:
‘They say that in the Gaeltacht
The food is very fine
You ask for Coca-Cola and
They give you turpentine
I don’t want no more of Gaeltacht life!
Gee ma, I wanna go!
Where do you wanna go?
Gee ma I wanna go
Home!’
The burn scene one
Sunday afternoon. Orla, Aisling, and Pauline and Jacqueline are away down the garden, washing their clothes in thon burn I ask ye! Banatee is away to the hawspital in Letterkenny. Connie Tinney was brought up there last Tuesday after the wheel of his new tractor fell on top of him. Four ribs cracked and a broken leg but wasn’t he the lucky man not to be killed? Man dear! Faratee drove Banatee to town, and who knows where that wee skitter Sava is. Or Micheál. Thon Micheál is no good.
Well the morning was very wet. But after the dinner the sun came out, it did aye. And it was then that Pauline came up with the bright idea that the whole lot of them, herself and the other one from Derry and the two weans from Dublin, would head out into the garden. And not alone that but into the burn. It’s naw that anyone had said to them that they shouldn’t go there, you understand, but they wouldn’t have bothered if the woman of the house was at home. Because when she’s at home she can see right out into that garden from the window of the kitchen. From where she’d be standin for the most of the day washin up after that lot of scholars. But she wasn’t there. She was away off to the hospital in Letterkenny to see poor Connie and the way was clear for them to do whatever the hell they liked. They’re not supervised on a Sunday afternoon for some reason and that was the root of the whole problem. Aye indeed it was.
The Dohertys’ garden used to be a wild lovely place when I was a wee lad. Aye. Do you mind the old woman there, she would have been Charlie’s granny? Well she was an unusual sort of an old woman. She was that. She had a sort of special interest in gardens and I’m tellin you that in those days that wasn’t very common around here at all, it was not. Except way down over the hill some of the bigger farmers would keep gardens. That would have been the other side, ye know. Them that dug with the other foot. They dug gardens. But over here very few had the time or the money or even the land to bother about them. Or the interest.
She was the exception, old Auntie Sheila. That’s what we all called her, everyone, even them that were no relation at all to her. Aye. She was Auntie to everyone. She was always out in that garden plantin lettuces and cabbages and carrots and parsley and scallions. And then the flowers she had. I don’t rightly recall the names of them all but she would have had nasturtiums and sweet peas and roses needless to say, all kinds of roses, and she had them snapdragons and sweet williams and a whole lot of other flowers that I don’t know the names of. I’m telling you thon garden was a wild nice place. It was beautiful. Pure beautiful.
It has the essential ingredients – stone, lichened wall, stream crossing diagonally through it, big old elm trees at one end. But it has not been developed as Orla would wish it to have been. Banatee has planted a row of red salvia beside the wall, and put a number of rose trees, flowering profusely in red and yellow, in the shelter of the kitchen window. They are the kind of roses that do not have a smell. Nasturtiums have taken over one bank of the stream, so that it looks almost entirely orange. Orla does not like their garish colour. She looks around and imagines how the garden would look if there were instead a profusion of tall, drooping flowers in dusty pinks and purples, creams and palest yellows. Flowers she has seen on the lids of chocolate boxes, or heard about in one of her favourite songs, ‘hskip-1.5ptAn English Country Ga-a-arden’. Flowers she does not know the names for: delphiniums, columbines, hollyhocks, lupins. She sighs, turning away from the nasturtiums (she does not know that name either, knows hardly any names for flowers apart from the most common), and scrubs her underpants with toilet soap, watching happily as the suds float off to the arch in the wall through which the stream passes out of the garden.
‘This was a great idea.’ Pauline stands on a rock, wringing a pink T-shirt. ‘I’m gonna always wash me clothes in the burn so I am!’
‘It’s better than that bathroom anyway,’ Jacqueline drawls, sighing. ‘I think the water is a wee bit hotter.’
Orla and Aisling giggle and look at one another. The Derry girls sound so knowing always, sophisticated and witty, with their tuneful accents and quick turns of phrase, with their sharp, northern vocabulary.
‘The burn is beautiful,’ says Orla. She and Aisling adapt to the Derry vocabulary, rather than the other way round. She does not know why this happens, unless it is that to her own ears the accent of Dublin, which Pauline to her astonishment calls a ‘brogue’, seems flat and lifeless, and its words consequently lacking in value. ‘It’s a pity there isn’t a bridge across it or something.’
‘Yeah, a little wooden curved bridge like in the Japanese gardens or something, that’d be lovely.’
Wouldn’t it?
Sandra is dying for a swim
The scholars’ day is divided into three parts: mornings are devoted to lessons, afternoons to outdoor activities, and evenings to dancing.
Lunch over, Aisling and Orla walk back to the schoolhouse where they will play rounders. Other children form a crocodile and sway off down the road, led by two teachers, to the beach. Boys play football.
Sandra wants to go swimming. ‘I’m dyin for a swim, it’s a gorgeous day!’ she says.
‘I can’t.’ Orla stares at her firmly. Aisling blushes.
‘Oh!’ Sandra understands.
‘What did you get for dinner?’ Aisling asks.
‘Peas, eggs and chips.’
‘We got corned beef and cabbage.’ Aisling sounds more rueful than she feels. The corned beef had tasted quite nice, if not the cabbage.
‘I told him I was supposed to be with youse,’ Sandra says with emphasis.
‘You’re probably better off where you are,’ Orla smiles.
‘That’s not fair. She’s supposed to be with us!’ Aisling moves closer to Sandra and turns her should
er indignantly on Orla. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said he’ll talk to me about it tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow!’ Aisling sighs and shakes her head. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow! My way of life is fallen into the sere the yellow leaf!’
‘They’ve started to walk to the beach.’ Orla tries to re-enter the circle, while watching the line begin to move. She gazes at the sea, a gleaming turquoise lake below them. She remembers the feel of its water lapping against her, smooth as gelatine, and its intriguing rock pools. Orla loves swimming as much as Sandra does, and gets to swim much less often, since her mother will not let her use the public swimming baths in Dublin – Tara Street or the Iveagh Baths. They’re common, them baths. Orla’s mother will not even let her go to Blackrock, to the red-and-white open-air swimming pool where all the children of the south suburbs dive and swim all summer long, splashing from the high diving board into the cold black water. Sandra goes there every second day in summer and to Tara Street every Saturday throughout the winter.
‘Why won’t yez come? It’s hot. I’m boiling!’ Sandra’s eye follows the line of children as it moves away from them.
‘I told you, didn’t I? I can’t. You go. Go yourself.’
‘Will you come, Ash?’
Aisling looks from one face to the other, Sandra’s pleading and Orla’s implacable. She is tired of Orla and her whims but too polite to abandon her. On the other hand she doesn’t want to hurt Sandra. Such dilemmas, the impossible dilemmas of the nice girl she frequently has to face.
Such dilemmas are usually decided by a stronger-willed third party.
‘She hasn’t got her togs with her,’ Orla says firmly, clinching it.
‘Ah Janey Mack!’ sighs Sandra.
‘Go on, Sandra, you’ll like it anyway.’ Aisling encourages her, relief her main sensation.
The crocodile is rounding the bend on the road. Only its tail end is visible.
‘I’ll do rounders too.’ Sandra flings her towel on the stone wall.
The fairy reel
The curtains are down, the large room glows in the evening sun. The children file into the schoolhouse and sit on the benches, now placed along the walls, under the cracked blue maps and posters of smiling families of outmoded appearance and unusual faded colours. Headmaster Joe takes up position beside the record-player and announces the dances.
All the formalities that have been dispensed with in the dance halls of Ireland are firmly enacted, even enforced, here – either because Headmaster Joe, who is aged about fifty-five, insists on clinging to the traditions of his youth, or because the male scholars are supposed to be educated to be courteous, gentlemanly, gallant, according to the high standards of the Gaels of yore. Girls on one side, boys on the other, no mixing between dances allowed. Every boy is required to dance every dance, no matter how disinclined he is to do so – since most of them are aged twelve, they are all very disinclined to do so, so it is important that they be given no choice in this matter. On the first night at the céilí the invitation formula was drummed into the scholars so thoroughly that even the dimmest and most linguistically clumsy of them can say it perfectly. ‘An ndéanfaidh tú an damhsa seo liom, más é do thoil é?’ And the response is, ‘Déanfaidh agus fáilte.’ Boys are obliged to ask every time, and girls are required to accept. Refusing is not permitted, on pain of expulsion from the céilí and, they believe, ultimately from the college.
As a system it works with great efficiency. The schoolhouse resounds to the thump of dancing feet and the creaky, silvery strains of three-time and four-time tunes from seven, when the céilí starts, until half past nine, when Headmaster Joe shouts, ‘Oíche mhaith anois, a phááistí agus codladh sámh!’ Or culaith shnámha. Nobody, not the shyest boy or the ugliest girl, sits out a single dance. They all pound away frantically. Headmaster Joe shouts out the instructions from his perch on the chair: Boy take his partner’s hand. Isteach! Amach! I said Amach! Girl take other girl’s hand. Swing around once. Go mall go mall go mall!
Slowly, awkward as elephants, they walk their way through the patterns, which to the uninitiated seem unbelievably complicated. It’s like having to do a Euclid theorem with your legs. Prove that the sum of three angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles. Droichead na nAsal. ‘Fallaí Luimnigh’. ‘Ionsaí na hInse’. The Walls of Limerick and The Siege of Ennis are what they manage on the first night, the two simplest céilí dances in the world. They walk their way through them, then walk their way through them again. Then Headmaster Joe decides that the time has come to let them hear some music: the creaky record-player fills the schoolhouse with crackling, golden rhythms. The feet begin to thump, the bodies sway to the tune: ‘Miss Martin’s Reel’. The legs move a bit faster and to anyone viewing them from above – only one person is, Headmaster Joe – the patterns begin to take a loose shape. They are like the patterns on the crochet tablecloths sold in the souvenir shops in Tubber, or – he wipes his forehead – the swirls cut into the stones at Newgrange. In and out, round and round and round, in and out. And on to the next couple: the couples move along the floor two by two, eventually meeting all the other couples. By the time the set is over, everyone has danced with everyone else on the floor. It’s a metaphor for the life of the parish.
The dances remind Orla of other things: the games she plays on the street at home: Red Rover and Pussy Four Corners and Kick the Can. Black shoe, black shoe, show me your other black shoe!
They dance almost without pause, awkwardness giving way to something like competence, nothing approaching grace, for two and a half hours, until their faces are red and their limbs exhausted. All they have to do now is walk a mile or two home to their banatees and stuff themselves with bread and jam and tea before flopping into bed.
Orla gets a boyfriend on the first night. Not a boyfriend exactly, not a golden penny exactly, but a boy who dances with her four or five times. He repeats this at every céilí for the rest of the holiday. It is a convenience for him more than anything else. It saves him the trouble of having to find a fresh partner every time. She knows this but she is pleased all the same, happy enough to appropriate him, or be appropriated. It is convenient for her, too, to know he is there, to have a boyfriend.
He and Orla do not exchange a single word, apart from the formulaic greeting and response, during all the time they dance together. And there is nothing sexual or sentimental in their relationship. Orla does not give him a second’s thought when she is not with him, or even when she is with him. She does not consider whether he is attractive or not, whether she likes him or not. It just doesn’t matter. She knows what his hand feels like – cool and dry – and how he dances: slowly. He is a slightly overweight boy, just about her own height, with a blond crew cut, large ears, and a pink-and-white face, smooth as an apple. He has an open, babyish countenance and she likes the colour of his jumper: wine. Alasdair is his name, and he is from Belfast. This means she would be unable to talk to him anyway, under the eye of the teachers, at the céilí: the boys from Belfast know even less Irish than the ones from Derry, in other words none at all. Their silence is therefore absolute when adults are around. They can only talk when they are sure of complete privacy.
Aisling establishes a similar partnership of convenience with a boy from Dublin called Seamas, who can speak Dublin boys’ Irish – which is different from Dublin girls’ Irish, as their English, too, tends to be. Sandra, in spite of her yellow and brown and gold hair, does not commit herself to anyone, and never knows who she is going to dance with. She doesn’t like fellas anyway, that’s what she says, tossing her mongrel hair, pouting.
‘Neither do we!’ laughs Aisling. ‘God!’
Orla knows she’s odd liking Alasdair, even in the way she does like him. If she were normal, like Aisling and Sandra, she’d think he was a weed. ‘What a weed!’ is what they say, referring to Seamas, or to any boy. ‘Yuck! That weed!’ Not talking to boys is not a question of language difficulties, for them,
but of principle. Yuck! Who’d want to talk to them!
Not so the Derry girls. ‘They’re older,’ Aisling says, blushing. Older, taller, thinner, prettier, with whiter bobby socks and shorter miniskirts. They pretend not to know Aisling and Orla once they walk in the door of the céilí. When the music starts their eyes light up, their bodies sway slightly, their long brown arms and legs flex and strengthen subtly, poised for action. Orla watches them from her bench, where she and Aisling and Sandra sit in their home-made cotton dresses and ankle socks, watching Jacqueline and Pauline metamorphose, girls becoming mermaids before their eyes. Before many eyes: all eyes are upon them; they are the tallest girls and the best-looking (nobody would say ‘sexiest’ but they know, happily or sadly or resentfully, that that is what they are).
Jacqueline and Pauline swagger to a corner and stand there, talking to one another, ignoring everybody. They have no make-up, and they are dressed in denim and striped T-shirts (they tend to dress more or less identically, Pauline calling the shots); only their footwear is adult: strappy sandals, such as Roman slaves in films wear. But they exude glamour. Magical perfume, magical glow, it seeps from them and surrounds them like a holy penumbra. Their corner of the room glows with charm, sexuality, fashion. In the chalky cheesy schoolroom, they create an oasis of girlish femininity. Headmaster Joe glances over at them and quickly turns away again, with an irascible twist of the mouth: he has to line up the records, run this céilí as efficiently as he runs everything else. It’s the end of the first week and exhaustion is catching up on him. Máistir Dunne gazes at the corner and pulls on his pipe, smiling. Killer Jack, another teacher, grins, while Bean Uí Luing smiles benignly at the boys and girls of her class, who are playing a clapping game down beside the blackboard.
The Dancers Dancing Page 5
