The Dancers Dancing

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  Elizabeth is not good at writing letters though; this much Orla remembers. It is a cold comfort, a straw, the thought that she has never seen Elizabeth, or anyone, sit down and write a letter. Christmas cards yes, but that is all. Elizabeth has never written letters to anyone before and it is too late to start now. Sometimes she receives things in the post: bills, mostly, or letters from the health clinic. These she reads quickly and anxiously, then sticks them on the file, a straightened wire coat hanger which hangs under the stairs, dangling in the dark among ancient coats and jackets, musty hats: the Crilly family archive. Perhaps that is where Orla’s letters go?

  The girls discuss the North of Ireland question

  It is the end of the first week. Saturday. Sandra is still stuck in Carrs’. Every day she asks some teacher, a different teacher every day, if she can change to be with her friends. They say, ‘We’ll see what we can do tomorrow.’ They murmur, ‘It’s not so easy.’

  Sandra is getting used to Carrs’ and has made friends with a few of the girls there: Monica Murphy, Noeleen Talbot. But she doesn’t like it. Dohertys’ is where she should be. She filled in the names on the form. That’s what she tells the teachers but they look impatient when she says that. Gradually she understands that she should not refer to the form, the pale blue form which had looked so considered and important, which she and her mother had filled in so carefully and with such anxiety. Gradually she understands that the pale blue form has no power to do anything, not now, and perhaps never had. All she can do is say ‘It’s not fair.’ And Aisling agrees with her: ‘It’s not fair.’ Orla feels that too, but she is still pleased, secretly, that Sandra is not staying with her, that she has Aisling all to herself.

  In Dohertys’ the girls are eating their supper, which they have at ten o’clock every night. On the table, there are two plates piled with white soda bread and raisin bread, as well as dishes of butter, gooseberry jam and rhubarb jam. A large pot of tea. The girls have danced for two and a half hours and then walked home through the twilit valley. Their heads retain the smell of woodbine and bramble, acid tangs of redcurrants. Dance music perseverates their minds. ‘Miss Murphy’s Reel’. ‘Planxty Martin’. The parlour is not quite dark. The light has not been switched on. The room feels cool and clean after the hurly-burly of the céilí, and its uglinesses are cloaked by shadows. Hungry as horses, tired out by the relentless activities of the day, the girls devour thick slices of bread and jam, slug down dark, strong tea. They all feel very happy. With the exception of Jacqueline.

  ‘The jam is really scrumptious, Jacqueline.’

  Jacqueline has gone on hunger strike, a hunger strike that is not likely to be very effective since she has not told the Banatee what she wants: chips. Yesterday she vowed she would eat nothing until chips were served.

  ‘That’s all she eats at home,’ Pauline said. ‘Every night. Chips.’

  Cheps is what she says. Cheps. The burn. Bobby socks. Wee. Och. Turrible. Och that’s turrible.

  ‘Just chips? On their own?’

  ‘Chips on their own, chips with batter burgers, chips with fish.’

  ‘The jam is the best thing in this house, Jacqueline, you should try it.’

  ‘No, thanks all the same.’

  ‘She had a terrible letter,’ Pauline explains. Turrible.

  ‘I just want some decent food.’

  ‘Cheps,’ says Aisling, and her face reddens.

  ‘It’s no joke.’ Pauline glares, defending her friend.

  ‘Her folks were moving into a new house three days ago and the Brits stopped them.’

  ‘The Brits stopped them?’

  ‘The army. Tell them what happened, Jackie.’

  ‘Och, I can’t be bothered.’ Jacqueline is tall, thin, blonde, red-lipped, frail, translucent, beautiful, limpid, lazy. ‘I don’t know where to start...’Not very intelligent, probably. To Orla and Aisling she is an unknown quantity. They have not managed to size her up at all.

  ‘They got this house, a new house.’

  ‘They bought a new house and the Brits wouldn’t let them into it?’

  ‘They didn’t buy it. A Housing Executive house, you know; they used to live in a flat.’

  Aisling and Orla exchange startled glances. They do not mix with people who live in council houses, as a rule, and would never have believed that such people could look like Jacqueline, dress like her, come to an Irish college. In Dublin they would immediately recognise somebody from a corporation house, if not by their appearance or habits, then as soon as they opened their mouth. The northern accent conceals class. Astonished, they continue to listen, but nothing Pauline can tell them will shock them as much as this bit of information. So that explains it, is what Orla is thinking. The chips. People in council houses might live on chips. People who own their own houses eat potatoes, carrots, stew, and other healthy, unpleasant things. Jacqueline does not look as if she has lice in her hair, Orla thinks, but maybe she has. Thank goodness she is not in our room.

  ‘They used to live in a flat ... In a, well, a rundown block, really, wouldn’t you call it? And they got this brand new house from the Housing Executive.’

  ‘A corner house.’

  ‘They always have enormous gardens, don’t they?’ Aisling nods encouragingly. She is always polite. Orla is buttering her fifth slice of bread, spreading it with the thick sticky seedy gooseberry preserve.

  ‘Fucking Brits.’ Jacqueline’s saucer eyes darken.

  Aisling and Orla gasp. Fucking!

  ‘Why did it happen?’ Aisling feigns innocence, unusually for her – usually she doesn’t have to. Even she knows why, can guess why, but this knowledge embarrasses her.

  ‘Why do you think?’ Jacqueline snarls scornfully.

  ‘Because you are Catholic.’

  ‘Well ...’ Pauline begins.

  ‘Aye, you bet.’ Jacqueline butts in. ‘Catholics don’t get new houses in Derry, that’s the rule until now.’

  ‘But now they can – there’s a new law or something. Only the uda stopped them moving in last time. And this time the Brits did it,’ Pauline interjects. ‘There’s a new law, it’s all more equal now.’

  ‘More equal? uda, Brits, what’s the difference? They wouldn’t let us move into our new house!’

  ‘But how did they stop you? The, eh, Brits?’

  Orla smiles at Aisling because she has used this word. ‘Brits’. All these words, the Derry words, seem funny to them. Whenever she uses one, Orla can hardly refrain from laughing. The Derry situation, with its Catholics and Protestants and its rugged aggressiveness, its lack of shame about its problems, seems both funny and shameful. They are dying to talk about it and to find out about it, but at the same time they shy away from it.

  ‘How do you think? With machine guns and Panzer tanks. They blocked the road with them. That’s what it said in her letter.’

  ‘Gosh.’ Panzer is impressive, whatever it is.

  ‘You see, last time the uda wouldn’t let them move in. So this time they got a crowd together. Thousands of people.’

  ‘Moral support.’ Aisling always knows the mot juste. Her father is a journalist, the whole family is exceptionally articulate.

  ‘Aye. They got dustbin lids and sticks and hurleys and they all marched along behind the lorries.’

  ‘Lorries?’

  ’Of course there were lorries. With their furniture and stuff, dope.’

  Orla pictures it. Children banging dustbin lids. Men striking the pavement with hurley sticks. And the women? She can’t imagine them, can’t see what they might be doing. Shouting and carrying on in a vulgar, fishwife way, she supposes. Jacqueline’s mother, from what she has gathered so far, is old, fat, sagging. The kind of woman who wears an old jumper and slippers all the time, even out in the street. The word ‘march’ is not one she can connect with her image of this woman, or with anyone related to Jacqueline, who can barely drag herself, complaining all the time, up and down to the school.

  ‘I
t sounds awful.’

  ‘It was.’ Pauline reaches for the teapot. She is exhausted by the topic by now and doesn’t want to continue talking about it. Jacqueline’s father is in Long Kesh. She should tell the Dublin girls that, give them something to think about. Cage Four, nothing to eat but watery porridge and brown water masquerading as soup. She can’t go on. The sound of her own voice begins to bore her. And Jacqueline, of course, will tell nothing. Not because she is shy about these things – she is proud of them – but because she is too languid and too indifferent to these small, ordinary, Irish-speaking nonentities from Dublin to exert herself to talk. The subject, however, has its own momentum, like Jacqueline’s refusal to eat. Even when it is time to stop and change, it will go on, and on, beating in her ears like the banging of the dustbin lids. The raucous banging, the cacophony of sounds, the shouting, the chaos on the sun-drenched, untidy streets. All for a few pathetic houses, so small and ugly you wouldn’t want to think about them, much less live in them.

  ‘The North of Ireland has its problems,’ Aisling closes the subject piously.

  ‘Aye,’ sighs Pauline.

  ‘What would you know about it anyway?’ Jacqueline snarls. ‘Your father ...’

  ‘Shut up.’ Pauline wakes up.

  Orla and Aisling wait with bated breath.

  ‘Her da is a Prod.’ Jacqueline simpers at the girls.

  ‘Oh well, so what?’ Aisling tosses her head. ‘Our next-door neighbours are Protestant, the Andersons. They’re extremely nice people.’

  Pauline looks tired.

  ‘So why aren’t you a Protestant then?’

  ‘Her mother’s Catholic, that’s why.’ Jacqueline gets up and leaves the table. ‘If yer ma’s a Catholic you hafta be one as well. It’s the law.’

  Aisling looks as if she is going to contradict this but thinks better of it.

  ‘Oh yeah, I see.’ Orla nods. ‘Does it matter if it’s your father who’s a Catholic.’

  ‘Och no,’ says Jacqueline. ‘I don’t think so anyways.’

  Too bad, really, thinks Orla, who would have liked to meet a proper Protestant. But she looks at Pauline with increased respect.

  A thought occurs to her. ‘Why do you want to learn Irish? If your father is a Protestant?’

  ‘Why do you want to learn Irish?’ Pauline is scornful.

  ‘Well ... I am Irish,’ Orla declares.

  ‘So am I well. So is he. Ye don’t have to be Catholic to be Irish do you?’

  Orla wishes she hadn’t asked the question. She blunders on. ‘Well I mean ... you’re Northern Irish. It’s different isn’t it?’

  ’I’m sick of this conversation,’ says Pauline. ‘Time for beddy-byes! Yawn yawn yawn yawn. Who’d want to be Irish anyway? For crying out loud.’

  The burn scene two

  Headmaster Joe believes, has to believe, that the day is so packed with activities that the students have no time to get up to mischief of any kind. As far as he knows, they are always engaged in walking to and from the schoolhouse, in learning or playing or dancing, in singing or eating or sleeping. It is all mapped out and at all times a copy of the map is in his head, every pupil carefully spotted on it. But of course there are intervals, interstices, crevices in the edifice he has constructed that he can’t afford to know about. Creases of time, worn patches and tiny holes that in the beginning seem too insignificant to be worth thinking about, but which are gradually expanding as the summer wears on. Slowly his map is cracking, and through the cracks the insects start to creep.

  The gap between the end of swimming or ball and the beginning of the céilí is one crack. For the first few days, the afternoon sports ended at about five-thirty, giving barely enough time for Orla and Aisling to return to the house, get their tea, and get ready for the céilí at seven-thirty. By the beginning of the second week the enthusiasm of teachers for watching children play rounders and basketball is diminishing. And then it sometimes rains, or gets very cold in the late afternoon. The finishing time is pushed forward to five, then to four-thirty. On some days they pack it in before four o’clock. In addition to this development, the girls have speeded up their walking pace, so instead of spending an hour meandering up the road to Ceathrú (as the teachers call Caroo) they can get there in about twenty-five minutes. Headmaster Joe’s time contracts and their own expands accordingly. He is not noticing this, or he is turning a blind and weary eye to it. What will they do anyway, in the bright afternoon, in broad daylight? Wash their hair, probably, or their clothes. Lie on their crumpled beds and talk English. Go to the sweet shop.

  Orla is the first to go down to the burn.

  It is the Wednesday of the second week, the Wednesday after the washing of the clothes in the walled garden. She has been playing rounders, although most of the students went to the shore today, to go for a swim, since it is a very fine day. But Orla has her own reasons for not going swimming, and instead she batted ball with a few others too lazy or too stupid to want to swim. Or having their periods. It is because they are aware that periods keep some girls out of the water that Headmaster Joe always allows a game of rounders, even on the hottest day. Máistir Dunne took it, lounging against the stone wall smoking his pipe while Jacqueline, who doesn’t swim on principle, hating cold water as she hates anything uncomfortable, Orla and a few others ran lazily around the field. He let them off at three-thirty.

  So Orla finds herself in the unusual position of being alone in the house. She lies on the bed for a while, writing to Elizabeth, as she still does regularly, although Elizabeth still has not yet replied, or sent on the extra pocket money Orla needs. She looks in Aisling’s drawer then, touching Aisling’s lemon Crimplene top with the white inset, which she admires. But she knows Aisling’s clothes so well that there is no real thrill to be had from secretly examining them. It would be fun to go through Pauline’s things but she decides against doing this – Banatee is down in the kitchen clattering around, and Jacqueline may turn up. Orla last saw her sitting on the windowsill of the post office, licking a choc ice.

  She goes downstairs into the narrow hall and slips around the back of the house. The garden she avoids. She does not want Banatee to see her, not because she plans to do anything illicit, but because she dislikes being watched even while she is performing some perfectly legitimate act. Some people – most people, especially if they are adult – love to feel the eyes of others on them. Reality is being perceived, condoned or condemned. But privacy is what Orla craves. The reality she is looking for is inside herself, hidden from all eyes.

  The stone wall of the garden joins the house at the back of the east gable, and it is in that section of wall that the wooden gate is. The gate is standing open at the moment, as it usually is. Orla has a look. The garden is bathed in hot yellow light: the stream winks, a ribbon of glimmering mobile amber. She looks just for a second or two, then follows the wall around to the back. The sun beats strongly against the stones and she stands with her back against the wall, letting the sun-heat, which has penetrated the stone, seep back out again, through her shirt and into her skin. She listens to the babble of the stream, the other soothing sounds of the valley, highlighted by the background blanket of silence: larks twittering hysterically, blackbirds warbling, starlings mimicking one another in a symphony of whistles. Suddenly the harmony is shattered by a sound like a loud clock, or a raucous factory machine. The sound chops violently through the peace of the afternoon. It seems to Orla that it is coming from the lower end of the field, and she follows it across the grass, nimbly leaping over grass tussocks, clumps of thistle, yellow ragweed, until she is at the lower, eastern extreme of the large field. There is a stand of sycamores there, enormous trees mushrooming a canopy of lugubrious dark green over the grass. Their shade is so complete that she finds herself shivering. The clocking sound is louder than ever and is directly overhead. She is thinking. Bombs. A bomb-making factory for the ira. That is what this part of Donegal is renowned for, so says her father, laughing ha
rshly and proudly. Dunsalt. One of the Coyles of Dunsalt Head is already in Portlaoise prison on an arms conspiracy charge. This is the suspicion, the reputation, that gives a frisson of colour and mystery to life in this otherwise sleepy place, with its dying language, its dying culture, the decay people suspect is endemic to such an area. Famine, poverty, emigration. The language changing, the thatched roofs torn down. Nothing to replace them, they think. The myth of the last is strong here. The last monoglot, the last Irish speaker, the last horse-drawn plough, the last fisherman. While people mourn the last of everything and have not accustomed themselves to observing the new firsts, the myth of the ira, heroism, bravery, recklessness, lawlessness, sustains them. Bombs. Everywhere. In disused railway stations, in barns and byres, on the tops of mountains. They used to distil illicit whiskey, that was all the racket. Look. That’s where it is. The still. Now they hide gelignite, manufacture bottle bombs for their brothers across the border. Every old shabby building may house a terrible secret. Glamorous, if you don’t really know anyone who is directly involved. If you have not had to encounter in your own life the reality, the dull destructive time-consuming tragedy, of a death. You do not understand the futility of it, the uselessness of that kind of pain. You hear a strange sound and you imagine you have found something. Micheál, it would be, of course. An obvious candidate. Strong, sulky, not too bright. Stuck on this small isolated farm not fifty miles from Derry. He sits in a tree house here and makes bombs, of course he does.

  It is a magpie. Just one, screaming and roaring blue murder. You would not imagine that one bird in a tree could make such a terrible sound.

  Not a bomb-making factory. Micheál is perhaps just a boring country yokel after all, with nothing in his head but the latest prices at the mart and ambitions to drive a truck in England.