The Dancers Dancing

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  As soon as a dance is called all the older boys rush to Jacqueline and Pauline. The fastest two walk off with them, holding their long thin hands, not sure what they are supposed to do now they have won the prize. Later Máistir Dunne and Killer Jack dance with them, and find Jacqueline the better partner: she is compliant, gives herself to the dance. Pauline remains stiff – if she is with someone she does not like, which is the case when teachers are involved – and makes them feel guilty and awkward. She is happier flying around with any of the older boys. Towards the end of the evening, the oldest boy scholar, Gerry, asks her to dance, and it soon becomes clear that she likes him.

  Gerry is going to be the star boyhskip-1pt, the overall star, of the college. Even after a week he has taken up his position. He is the kind of boy who knows everything, is clever and affable at the same time, the kind of boy who can chat amiably to the teachers and upon whom they feel they can rely, and who at the same time manages not to antagonise most of the boys. Inevitably he antagonises some, the rougher and more subversive, who despise every inch of his neat handsome body, who spit, metaphorically, on his carefully modulated tone of voice and his gentlemanly demeanour. Orla is surprised that Pauline likes this boy, the ultimate teacher’s pet, destined for success (he knows it, everyone expects it). She is so subversive herself, not caring a fig for authority, while Gerry, it seems, loves it. Does not kowtow, but actually appears genuinely to love authority, in the form of teachers or government or rules or traditions. But he is handsome, like Pauline, and aristocratic in a different way. Superior. Also he is from Derry. He is the best-looking, oldest, most presentable boy from Derry at this college, and she is the female equivalent. (Jacqueline doesn’t count. Already she is dismissed by Orla, by everyone, as a person who does not make the grade, no matter how limpid her eyes.) It is inevitable that they find one another.

  Gerry and Pauline do not talk much, but everyone can see that their eyes talk. Other girls who fancy him notice it soon enough, and abandon hope. He dances with Pauline only half the time, but that is because of his cautious and ambitious nature. He will do nothing to arouse the disapproval of the authorities, and nothing to compromise his own reputation as a star boy. Half the time is what he thinks he can get away with, enough to stake his claim to Pauline while keeping the ill will of others at bay. Gerry has an instinct for striking this kind of balance. He achieves it, but Headmaster Joe, sitting beside the record-player, sees through him. Still, he is not worried. As director of the Irish college his responsibilities are many. It is the hardest job he has ever done, much harder than being headmaster of a school, which he also is. This is full-time. Girls and boys, lessons and dancing, food and lodging. He has to deal with the local landladies, encourage them to feed the children with food they can eat, check that their standards of hygiene are reasonable, scrutinise them, correct them, at the same time mollify and encourage them. He has to keep the children occupied, happy if possible. But his most urgent task is to prevent any sexual disaster. Pregnancy. In a college like this where the average age is twelve or thirteen it is not a grave danger, but it still exists. Gerry seems safe. Too bent on self-advancement to step out of line. Too subservient to his sacerdotal teachers to put his reputation for purity at risk. But Pauline is fourteen, big for her age, and mad as a hatter. She is the sort of girl who needs watching. Anarchy personified. She is the sort of girl who could lead anyone astray.

  Gerry feels the little eye upon him, and so half the time he abandons Pauline and prances around with the likes of Orla or Aisling, leaving Pauline clear for Killer Jack and the younger male teachers.

  The dancers raid the shop

  When the céilí is over, all the students who have pocket money go to the shop. Orla, Aisling and Sandra, pink and hot, race with the throng through the cool night air to the general store and post office. On its floor are sacks of flour, meal, layers’ mash, and other dry floury substances with a strange, sharp smell. The shelves are packed with ordinary products: raspberry jam, Galtee cheese, packets of Omo.

  By the time the girls reach the shop, it is full of students. They cram together, trying to get to the counter. Behind the counter are the woman who owns the shop and is also a banatee, and three of her daughters. With harassed faces they hand out packets of crisps, bottles of minerals, and ice creams.

  Killer Jack comes to the door of the shop. A frisson of surprise runs through the children. They fall silent. He takes a look at the crowd and laughs sharply. ‘So long! See you tomorrow!’ he says, in Irish, to the woman of the shop.

  ‘No no, come around the back, a thaisce.’ The woman of the shop gets flustered, even more flustered than she already was. She, like the students, is red in the face. Her face looks as if it could be nice but at the moment it is crisscrossed by hurry and anxiety.

  Killer Jack goes around the back. Minutes later the children observe him appearing behind the counter. The woman of the shop abandons her young customers and serves him: he is buying sixty Silk Cut and two boxes of matches. There is trouble with the matches. They can’t be located. The woman of the shop’s three daughters too now abandon all the other customers and hunt for them. Killer Jack lights a cigarette with a match he already has and stands watching them. He blows a ring of smoke up towards the ceiling of the shop. The children watch the grey smoke circling. A few of them laugh. Orla feels annoyed, but does not know why.

  Finally the matches are found (behind some jars of raspberry jam). Killer Jack takes the little boxes and tosses them into the air before sticking them in the pocket of his tweed jacket. The woman of the house turns and scowls at the children.

  ‘Who’s next?’ she asks crossly, sighing.

  Not fair, think the children. But they are used to being pushed aside, all the time, if any adult demands prior attention. Impatiently they wait their turn, clutching their pound notes, their handfuls of silver coins.

  The post

  The curtains are taken off the ropes, the borders between the classes temporarily removed once again. This time it’s for An Post.

  Headmaster Joe pulls a grey sack to the top of the schoolhouse and stands beside the record-player. Like Santa Claus he dives into the bag and fishes out envelopes, cards, and brown-paper parcels.

  Maureen Dowling, Sheila Dempsey, Maurice Coleman, Pauline Gallagher, Aisling Brosnan, Peter Brown ... He reads the names in a bored monotone, hardly pausing between them, his ambition being to get through the post as fast as he can. The children wait, silent, holding their breath, fingers clenched. It’s a lottery. It’s a competition. It’s a thrill. It’s exciting. It’s heartwarming.

  It’s disappointment. It’s disbelief. It’s misery. It’s tears.

  It’s life. A foretaste of what’s in store, the ups and the downs, the thrills and the spills, the luck, the chanciness. The joy and the pain.

  Mary Trimble, John Walsh, Michael Duggan, Brian Merriman ... I mean Monagle. Ha ha ha!

  Orla writes to her mother every second day. She tells Elizabeth everything in great detail: the timetable for the day, the food they eat, the clothes the other girls wear. She makes humorous comments on Jacqueline’s attitude to the food, on the hairstyle of Banatee, on the way Sava dresses. She names every teacher and relays information about their habits, their appearances, their spouses, their origins, their families. Everything. Her shortest letters are ten pages long, her longest twenty-five. They all end with the same injunction: ‘Do not work too hard!’ Elizabeth has not replied to any of them, not yet. Aisling has received a letter every second day; her Friday letter included a five-pound note. Pauline gets a postcard from Italy, where her parents are on holiday – alone at last – every day. She doesn’t read the postcards, at least not in the hall, but stuffs them into her canvas bag. Even Jacqueline, with her chips and Brits and sagging old cardigan of a mother, got a letter and money on Friday. Everyone in the college has had at least one letter now, with the single exception of Orla.

  The first day she didn’t mind. The secon
d was all right. By the third most people had received something. Now she has been in Tubber for four days and still not a word from home. She can hardly refrain from crying. She doesn’t mention her lack of letters to anyone – there is more shame attached to it, at this stage, than disappointment. Aisling has noticed.

  ‘No letter?’ she says, not unkindly, although she is aware of Orla’s damaged pride. ‘Oh well!’ she says. ‘Maybe tomorrow!’

  The kindness makes Orla want even more desperately to cry. She bites her lip and forces her eyes to dry up. She pushes the rocking fear in her stomach down, as if it were a frisky dog. Down!

  Orla wants a letter because she wants to be like everyone else. She also wants a letter to reassure her. That everything is all right at home is not something she takes for granted. On the contrary. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, she assumes the opposite. Orla is afraid that Elizabeth will die.

  This is the era of the sick, as far as Orla is concerned. Never again in life will she come across so many illnesses, or experience so many herself. What causes it? Houses are chilly, food is monotonous and starchy, teachers are violent, school is terrifying, babies are stuffed to the gills with cow’s milk from packets and cans from the moment of their birth. (Women in Dublin don’t want to acknowledge the existence of breasts: they haven’t got them, and if they have, those protuberences certainly don’t contain anything as messy, as repulsive, as animal, as wet, as milk. I ask you! Milk comes from bottles and Cow and Gate cans, thank you very much indeed! Bosoms are dry pointy pincushions, tucked away in brassières. And there they stay.) All this is for the good. Like the mounds of floury potatoes with a fried egg, mounds of potatoes with streaky rashers, mounds of potatoes with a frizzled chop, that are the daily fare. Being slapped in school is good for you. Being blue with cold is healthy: that old central heating, which hardly anyone has, will kill the nation.

  But everyone is sick, regularly, four or five times a winter. Colds, bronchitis, asthma. Measles, whooping cough, mumps. Chickenpox, appendicitis. Orla has been in hospital three times getting things out: her tonsils, her appendix, her adenoids. Half her teeth have been removed, up to six at a time, in ghastly, bloody operations, performed while she was comatose, gassed to sleep by a strong, evil-smelling ether, in the dentist’s chair she hates more than anything in a world of strange, unpredictable tortures. Visits to the doctor and from the doctor punctuate daily existence – although nobody in Orla’s family has anything permanently the matter with them.

  Mothers are sick with other, motherly, ailments, many so revolting that there is no name for them, or not a name that you or they would care to utter aloud. ‘Headache’ is the word they use. Mothers have headaches even more often than children have the flu. Nearly every day in many cases.

  Elizabeth suffers from the headaches. She lies in bed in her brown room, with the brown curtains drawn, and a nylon stocking tied around her head. ‘Oh, my head!’ she says. ‘Would ye get me an Aspro, there’s a good child. Oh! Oh!’

  The words come slowly. She has to squeeze them out. And her voice is transformed from its normal buoyant stridency to a faint hoarse croak. Orla catches her breath, caught between terror and anger, pain and disbelief. What she hates most is the nylon stocking around her mother’s forehead. It is not decorative. Probably it is a clean stocking, but the look of it recalls the smell of grown-up women’s feet, which is not, in Orla’s estimation, an attractive scent. Elizabeth well looks lovely, in Orla’s estimation, but Elizabeth ill is another story. Jekyll and Hyde. She can transform herself from being a queen to being a witch, a washy green-eyed monster wrapped in skin-coloured nylon stockings.

  When the stocking appears on her mother’s head, Orla runs up and down stairs, fetching cups of tea, dry toast, aspirin. She is torn by her wish to escape from Elizabeth – to run out into the back garden where she can lose herself in a game of tennis, batting a ball against the wall of the house, or sit on the roof of the shed in the sunshine reading a library book – and her wish to stay with her, hovering around the sickroom, which really is sick, stinking of sweat and various unguents that Elizabeth applies to her head, or her back, or her shoulder, or her legs. Wintergreen cream, a heavy dark minty odour. Balsam for colds. Vick for the chest. Elizabeth gets everything. Today a headache, tomorrow her kidneys may be at her. Gallstones, cystitis, trouble with the bowel movements. She will be yellow and liverish, or green and wan. Almost every part of her anatomy lets her down from time to time, and whenever it does Elizabeth is at death’s door. Every night Orla prays that Elizabeth will live a little longer, that the sickroom odours will not be transmogrified to one homogenous odour, the perfume of death.

  Now that Orla is away, she forgets about Elizabeth a lot of the time. But after An Post the fear grabs her. Elizabeth can’t write because she has a headache. She has a headache because Orla has gone away, deserted her for the summer. She has a headache because of all the work she has to do, from dawn to dusk, day in day out, to support Orla and her brother, Roddy – who is at home but who is not much help around the house.

  Elizabeth is more than any ordinary mother. She is a dynamo, a powerhouse, the centre of Orla’s universe. Orla knows she could not live without her. That without her all order and sense would vanish from her life. Elizabeth arranges everything; everything revolves around her. The house is hers to order and command as she moves through it, on her good days, with the purpose and authority of a Napoleon. The kitchen is her command headquarters. A warm wonderful kitchen, dominated by a huge old range, even though the house is in the centre of Dublin. The range is like Elizabeth, a glowing powerhouse when on, which it is for much of the time, an ugly horrrifying deadly object when it goes out. Then it smells sour, with the dank ancient smell of burnt-out coke, and it requires hours of effort to get it started again, hours of riddling and shaking and scratching with long black evil-sounding pokers. But mostly it is hot and thriving and Elizabeth hovers close to it, drawing water from it in buckets, baking wheels of brown bread and white bread, scones and apple tarts, concocting soups, stirring mutton stews. Frying things. Elizabeth is a fast, efficient cook and everything she cooks tastes good. Her mother was a cook in some rich man’s house, and she taught Elizabeth how to boil a pudding, trim an apple pie. Mostly Elizabeth sticks to basics, but she is adventurous occasionally too. At weekends she experiments with novelties taken down from Brenda’s Kitchen in the Sunday Press, or ripped out of women’s magazines when she visits the hairdressers. (Elizabeth would not dream of wasting money on something as frivolous as a woman’s magazine, or any magazine or book for that matter. Money is for food, clothes, housing and, if absolutely necessary, education, which is a way to get more money. Good sense means getting all these things as cheaply as possible. That is her work in life, the goal that imbues her days with meaning. Illness is her release from work, her hobby merely.)

  But Elizabeth is gifted. When well, she has extraordinary, boundless energy, a complete contrast to her dramatic and terrifying illnesses. She moves around the house, around the neighbourhood, under full steam, issuing orders, requests, comments, pouring forth an endless stream of talk in a loud, humorous tone. She has the perfect housewife’s knack of being able to restore a messy room, a messy home, to complete order with great rapidity. Corners are never cut. When she washes dishes, the sink is left gleaming, with not a tea leaf lingering on its blue steel surface, no dishrag crumpled in a wet knot, like some frightened rained-out animal nestling in its corner, no pot or fork or frying pan procrastinating. She is a perfectionist. Orla is never happy in other people’s houses, because they almost always fall short of her standards. She is not happy in her own house if Elizabeth is not up making everything shipshape.

  Elizabeth’s range of command is not confined to the domestic. It is she who organises every aspect of school life, who supplies the uniform and the books, the pennies for copies and pencils, the subscriptions for trips. It is she who checks homework and attends meetings and helps at sa
les of work. Orla can go to school, sit there and listen, go home and do her homework. But she would be helpless without Elizabeth.

  It was Elizabeth who organised the transition from Primary to Secondary, who made sure, by hook and crook, that it took place, in spite of all the odds. Orla’s father Tom, who is a silent and kindly man, could never have managed it. He doesn’t manage anything in the Crilly household. All he does is go to work and hand over his little shiny brown pay packet to Elizabeth on Friday evenings. Tom would not even know how to spend his own money, the money he works for six days a week, from seven in the morning to six in the evening – later if he’s on summer overtime, which he usually is, in the summer. Tom can work, like a slave, or a horse, or a child. But you couldn’t expect him to manage anything. That’s what mothers do. And no mother more efficiently and absolutely than Elizabeth, a matriarch to strike wonder, if not more, into the heart of the most ardent feminist. Equality is not a concept known to women like Elizabeth, and she certainly would not wish to fight for it if she knew what it meant. Superiority is what she has always had, at least since the day she selected Tom as a suitable partner.

  Elizabeth rules the house and the lives of its inmates with despotic efficiency and authority. If Elizabeth should die – and the threat, seldom uttered but dangled silently in the Crilly air, a sword of Damocles hanging over all the Crilly heads, is that she might, at any minute – they might as well all die too. Commit some sort of family suttee. Without Elizabeth to run them, they’ll be as good as dead.

  That is why Orla has to write so often. She has to keep in touch, keep Elizabeth informed that she is here, alive, that she cares, that she needs her. She has to receive messages back from Elizabeth to assure her that she is not ill, that her kidneys and her back and her head and all the rest of her substantial but absurdly delicate body is all right.