Orla laughs a bit, pleased anyway to have seen the source of the sound.
The burn is passing close to her feet.
Of course she was aware of this as she rushed down the field. It flows out of the garden under a low, nasturtium-draped arch in the wall and then down the field to the sycamores. There it passes through a barbed-wire fence into another, smaller field. Orla pushes down the wire and steps over the fence. This small field is overgrown with yellow ragweed and wears a bleak and sinister look, as if small, malevolent creatures were hiding under the umbrellas of the ragweed, spying. The yellow weeds gleam with a poisonous burnish. Orla steps onto a stone in the burn and leaping from stone to stone follows it further downstream.
The burn gathers momentum here as the gradient sharpens. It also gets deeper. The gaps between the stones widen and Orla suspects that soon she will not be able to keep up her game of leaping. The sun is hot but there is something about the harsh, glaring light here that affects her negatively. She thinks she should turn back, something tells her that the safe, good thing to do is to turn and go home. The others will be back now, it is time to start washing hair, thinking about tea. She should wash her yellow ankle socks.
Her feet keep going, however, as if they have a life of their own. They take longer and braver leaps, but they never miss. Even when she lands on a sharp pointed stone, or on a big round stone that wobbles terrifyingly, like a loose tooth, she remains upright. Her feet are sure and practised, they can cope much better than she would have given them credit for. They continue, leap by leap, to the boundary of this field. That is a thick hedge of brambles, dusty green and covered with white blossoms and with buzzing bees. Orla stoops, twists this way and that, under the brambles, because she is still in the burn, still following it. She thinks she will just cross this ditch and see what happens on the other side, and then turn back. The brambles fill her nostrils with the musky smell of blackberries, although only a few hard red berries are to be seen.
It is not easy to penetrate the thorny hedge but she gets through with just a few scratches. There is no field on the other side. Instead she finds herself in a verdant tunnel so green the air itself has a mossy green tincture, a delicate reflection of the thick solid green of the roof and the sides of the tunnel, which are made of hazels, brambles, willows, all tangled together. At first the roof is so low that she has to crouch, but soon it raises and forms a high green dome over her head. She stands on a rock and gasps. It is like being in a hidden green cathedral, deeply centred in a vast forest of shrub and bramble. The stream tumbles on through it but there is no patch of sky to be seen. It is completely enclosed, completely private. No fields, no cattle, no houses to be seen. Just green things: leaves, grass, weeds, thorns, moss. Water and stones and rocks.
Otters.
There will be otters here, Orla knows. This is the kind of place for them. And kingfishers. She thinks of otters, long and silky, slinking from the bank into the dark water, swimming silently through it. She pictures their swift silent progress, the furrow they leave in their wake, a line through the water as true and beautiful as themselves. She would love to see them. And she would hate it. Wild, graceful, sly, cunning. The thought of them thrills her and horrifies her. Now that she has allowed that thought into her head, the glaucous cavern seems not enchanted and protective but dangerous – or dangerous at the same time as it is more magically seductive than any place she has ever been.
She does not for one moment consider the real, superficial danger: that if she slipped, if something happened, nobody would think of checking this place for a long time. That does not concern her in the slightest, just as it has not crossed her mind that the burn may not be uniformly shallow and easy to traverse, that in its course it may include hidden depths into which a person could stumble. What worries her are fairies. Possible otters with possible vindictive purposes. Otters who, having never seen a human being before – and she believes that she is the only human ever to have come in here, the only tame creature, if not ever, at least in a very long time – will take fright and attack. The thought of otters is what turns her back.
As she turns, she catches sight of something glittering on the bank of the burn, gleaming red like rubies or garnets on a velvet cushion. In this case, green moss. She hops across the stream and takes a closer look. Crimson raspberries, tiny red berries on small delicate jagged leaves. That is what they are, she knows, although she has never seen wild raspberries before, child of the city, and she did not even know that they existed. Wild berries are so few in Ireland. Blackberries, fraughans, those she knows, but nothing else. She pulls a few of the berries and eats them. And of course they are as sweet and delicious as wild berries growing by a babbling stream that has not been visited by a human being or any domestic creature in hundreds of years can be. Sweet, tangy, cool, fresh, wild, tinged with an exotic flavour, like Turkish Delight, attar of roses, some flavour that is a perfume from a golden-covered volume of fantastic stories, a flavour that is a confirmation, for her, of the jewel-studded world that awaits exploration, that in all its richness is waiting for her to step into, to experience, sometime soon, when she grows up. That is what the berries seem to be: a taste of a wonderful future, not a residue of a wild world that is past, or passing. She picks and eats a handful and the red juice fills her mouth and trickles down onto her white T-shirt. Then she takes half a dozen and sticks them into the pocket of her shorts.
What does your father do?
After the visit to the burn, Orla is filled with courage. Something has happened to her, there in the chestnut water, in the green tunnel. She forgets about Elizabeth for a while. She stops worrying about the letters. She forgets about Auntie Annie, or forgets that she is a problem waiting to be solved.
Being down in the burn has made her happy.
In the burn, she was a part of whatever whole encompassed the water and the weeds and the raspberries and the drooping willows. Her heart beat in time with the babble of the burn down there, her feet gripped the stones as easily as a hare finds its burrow. Babble and rustle, bloodbeat and leaf, eye and water. Orla belonged with the river. She was nothing there, nothing more than a berry dipping to the water or a minnow floating under the surface of a pool. Nothing. And completely herself. Orla Herself. Not Orla the Daughter of Elizabeth, Orla the Pride of Rathmines, Orla the Betrayer of Tubber. Just Orla.
She feels it would be all right now to tell people who she really is – meaning who her relations are. What does it matter? They can tease her to her face or bite her when her back is turned. But who now has the power to harm her? Now that she has found her own place?
It should be all right to talk about her mother and her father, her house. Her auntie. Maybe she could tell them about her auntie now, and go and visit her?
But when teatime comes the opportunity arises and she doesn’t take it.
The topic of conversation is ‘What Does Your Father Do?’ It is a subject that raises itself constantly, among the girls themselves, in class, at school, on the street. What Does Your Father Do? Orla never wants to answer it, and usually she does not.
People choose their parents, so it is said. But would she have chosen hers? Maybe she would. Maybe she would. They are nice enough, Orla’s mother and father; unthreatening for the most part, more comfortable to be with than anyone else she knows although it is getting harder to talk to them. Still, confronted with a shop windowful of parents perhaps she would still pick them out as the most suitable for her. Yes. I’ll take those two, please.
But she would never have chosen their occupations. And somehow occupation is the defining feature as far as fathers are concerned. Nobody asks, ‘Is your father nice?’ (yes), What age is he? (don’t know), What colour are his eyes? (blue), Can he sing? (yes, and play the mouth organ), Can he tell jokes? (not really). Occasionally someone will ask, ‘Where does he come from?’ meaning what county in Ireland. The one question everyone asks is, What does your father do?
What y
our father does is what defines your father, as far as other people are concerned. More significant, it is what defines you, if you happen to be a child. So it seems to Orla.
Her father is a bricklayer. That is what he is.
But Orla says, ‘He is a building contractor.’ It is what Elizabeth has told her to answer. ‘What business is it of theirs, what your father does?’ Elizabeth says, with a toss of her voice, and hard stone in her eye. Let them mind their own business.
None of the children know what a building contractor is. That is the beauty of it, perhaps foreseen by Elizabeth. But the children suspect that it is something not quite respectable, not the best answer. The best answer is ‘teacher’ or ‘civil servant’, it seems to Orla. Nobody she knows answers ‘lawyer’ or ‘doctor’ or anything like that. Aisling says ‘journalist’ which is confusing, although not confusing like ‘building contractor’. ‘Journalist’ sounds glamorous: too glamorous. Having a father who is too unusual is almost, although not quite, as bad as having a father who is too poor. It marks you out.
All the very best girls, the girls with the whitest socks and freshest plaid skirts, the girls whose copybooks are neatly ruled with red margins and who always have the latest style of pencil case in their tidy zipped plastic schoolbags, are the daughters of civil servants or teachers. These are the girls who are cherished by the teachers, respected by the world in general. They get slapped less often than Orla, and much less often than the girls who live in the wrong parts of town, whose fathers have no jobs at all, or the girls – there are a few – whose fathers are dead, or reputed to be.
If Orla could choose her father’s occupation, she would pick ‘civil servant’. There is no dubiousness of any kind attached to those two solid, prim words. They are like an upright mahogany hall stand, Orla thinks, or a thick, painted hall door, opening, if it ever does open, onto a house full of polished and heavy silence. Elizabeth shares Orla’s regard for these words. She has already decided that Orla will appropriate the respectability attaching to them when the time is ripe. She is to become a civil servant when she grows up. A Junior Ex is what she will be: the best job anyone could have. When Elizabeth says ‘Junior Ex’ a dreamy look overcomes her face. The soft r rolls around her mouth, reaching for the snapping shock of x. What does Elizabeth see in the words?
Certainly not the inside of a civil servant’s office, something with which she is entirely unfamiliar, and which like all jobs people go to is obviously beside the point as far as Elizabeth, who has never had a job apart from a brief stint working for her own parents, is concerned.
What Elizabeth sees is the ship sailing from Dún Laoghaire on a sunny day. A new suitcase packed with clean knickers and nylons, crisp white-collared summer dresses. She sees Orla bringing her on holidays to Portsmouth where her two sisters, Agnes and Johanna, live. The two of them having a drink in the lounge on board, nodding and smiling in the honey morning light, as the sun strikes the blue waves and seagulls scream for sheer joy.
She sees Orla wearing a snow-white blouse and a smart tweed suit, purple or maroon, every day, not just on Sunday. She sees her installing new refrigerators, electric cookers, in the kitchen, and arranging to have a rich thick Donegal carpet laid in the hall which is now covered with slippery linoleum. Orla may even drive her own car: a gorgeous Mini, yellow or white or pale blue. She will be a lady driver.
Orla’s father has a car but Elizabeth would never dream of trying to drive that. She belongs to a generation that catagorises her as wife and mother, not lady driver. Ladies drive, all right, in Dublin, lots of them. Ladies swim. Ladies run. Ladies wear shorts on the beach when the weather gets hot, and ladies are just beginning to go to the pub and drink sweet mixtures like vodka and orange, lager and lime. Some ladies. But not ladies like Elizabeth, who have set rigid boundaries to the march of their personal experience, as they have guarded their rebellious bodies in unbreachable roll-ons, rigid nylon stockings that no breath of air could penetrate. No shorts and no swimsuits and no swimming. Buses. No taxis. Holidays in the West of Ireland and dimming dreams of England. No drinking and no driving.
Men drink, men drive, men go to football matches, men go to the dogs, men bet on horses. Have jobs, responsibilities, pay packets. Cars. And so do some other kinds of ladies: ladies who are younger, richer, commoner than Elizabeth. Different.
The idea of driving Tom’s car simply hasn’t crossed Elizabeth’s mind. Tom’s car is like a part of his body; he has had it for so long that it resembles him, as pets look and behave like their owners. It is not exactly battered, his funny-angled Anglia. But stars of rust pock its bumpers, and its paintwork has the dusty, faded look of ancient cars. Subdued is how it looks, and long-suffering, and patient as a sad-eyed donkey.
Poor Tom, he works so hard, from six to six often. He works so hard and he earns so little, according to Elizabeth, who believes everyone else earns a lot. He works so hard but he is a nobody, an absolute nobody.
He has built or helped build half of modern Dublin. Bus Aras. Belfield. The new flats at Ballymun. Stillorgan Shopping Centre. Every big new building Orla sees around her, her father has worked on. The buildings are new and exciting, worthy of comment by all and sundry. And yet the actual work of constructing them is, for some reason, ignoble. Builders – all of them – are considered a shabby, uncouth lot. They are paid buttons. They work in undignified conditions, they go home dirty and dishevelled, smelling of cement and muck, because there is nowhere to wash on the sites where they work. They eat their sandwiches and drink their tin mugs of tea outdoors, in the mud, or in cold open sheds.
All of which means that they must belong to a lower caste of people than those who lick envelopes. They are paid less than men who stand all day in storerooms in city offices counting boxes of paper and keeping tabs on tins of pencils. The city grows quickly, thanks to Orla’s father, but somehow no credit is given to him for any of this, for the roads or the churches or the schools or the universities. Instead he is derided by everyone, including his own family. Orla would respect him more if he were a licker of envelopes, a whey-faced man in a shiny suit with the tight, dead face some of her friends’ fathers have.
A bricklayer! That’s the answer Orla should give when the question is popped.
The same question is seldom asked about mothers. It is unnecessary. Most of them, almost all of them, ‘do nothing’, according to their children. And that is the correct thing. A working mother, no matter what she works at, is a bit of an abomination. ‘Once mammy did some substitute teaching for a friend of hers. I really didn’t like it when I came home from school and she wasn’t there,’ somebody – maybe it was Monica – had said in a classroom debate called ‘A Woman’s Place Is in the Home’. All the girls had nodded sagely, understanding Monica’s profound point. I really didn’t like it when she wasn’t there. Monica’s side, for the motion, won the debate hands down. A mother should be simply a mother, just as a child is a child.
But Elizabeth isn’t. Oh no, no such luck!
Elizabeth breaks rank even in this regard, and has found an occupation for herself. She is a landlady. That’s what she is. She keeps lodgers. That’s what she does. Orla should say, ‘My father’s a bricklayer and my mother is a landlady.’ But she doesn’t. Not now. Not ever.
A surprise for Orla
The position of building workers in society has had repercussions that are more practical and devastating than blows to her pride could be. Tom’s colleagues in the building trade staged a strike because their pay was so bad. The strike went on for months and months; the building contractors would not give in to the demands for twenty per cent extra pay, for pension rights, for overtime on Saturday, for holidays. The building workers, the scum of Ireland, were to be kept in their place. Poor and insecure and despised.
The Union of Saint Joseph the Worker, as far as Orla knew. Her father used to go to Mass on Saint Joseph’s feast day. That was his only union activity before this, before he went on strike.
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The union paid strike pay, but not much. There was no other pay either. The government was on the side of the bosses, not their workers. If the latter chose to strike, their families could starve.
They did not starve. But the year of the strike there were no clothes, no birthday presents, no sweets, no biscuits. The Crillys lived on potatoes and eggs and home-made bread. After five months, Elizabeth began to get cross for no reason at all. She screamed at Orla when she asked for a penny to buy a patsy-pop – this was summer. Luckily the strike happened mainly during the summer, the best time of the year for building. When Orla asked for money to go to the Blackrock Baths, Elizabeth hit her.
This is what happened next.
One day Orla came home from school, went upstairs and found that her bedroom was gone. The room was still there, of course, in its old place at the back of the house, overlooking the spreadeagling apple tree and the crisscross plaid of other back gardens, laid out like untidy beds full of mysterious growths and the debris of generations. The room was there, but changed completely. Instead of her iron bed the room held four divans covered with red and blue squishy army blankets instead of real quilts. Her clothes had been removed from her wardrobe. Her dressing table was still in its place next to the open fireplace, but it had been cleaned down and laid with a new lace runner. Her dolls and books and teddy bear were nowhere to be seen.
‘You’ll sleep downstairs,’ Elizabeth said, from the landing. She said it in a neutral tone, as if she were saying, ‘There’ll be a fried egg for dinner.’
‘Where’s my bed gone ta?’ Orla felt as if someone had scraped out her insides.
‘Don’t back answer me!’ This was one of the phrases Elizabeth, and lots of other mothers too, used when they didn’t feel like giving an answer to a child, which was frequently. But she sounded sad, rather than cross. ‘You’re sleeping downstairs.’
The Dancers Dancing Page 8
