The Dancers Dancing

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  Sean is not here.

  She knew this one minute after she had entered the ballroom. Her instinct, her eager vision, sharpened by desire to spot him a mile off, even in a crowd of five hundred, tells her that. If he was here she would have seen him the minute she walked in the door. Her heart would have flipped and she would have felt perfect as a basin of cream, as a crystal well. This was the feeling she had anticipated all day, all yesterday and the day before that, since he had mentioned, in his offhand, meaningful, sexy way, that Big Tom was playing, did she like him? Like him. She was cutting his hair at the time, trimming small golden curls from the back of his big head and watching them float to the tiles. Yes she liked him all right, she had said, and took the huge step of adding that she intended to be there herself. That’s good, is what he had said, looking her in the eye as he shook off his black gown – they’d black for the men – and rubbed his shaven neck with his hand thoughtfully.

  It had not occurred to her, lying on the tartan divan while blackbirds and starlings sang, that he would not be there. She had imagined, in greatest detail, what would happen when they met, had imagined several possible variations of the meeting and its delightful consequences, but she had not imagined even one version of what would happen if the opposite occurred. The negative, the not seeing, is not so easy to invent, it is not the stuff of fantasy. But it is the stuff of reality, and now she feels it, a knife slicing through the skin of yellow cream.

  The music stops, she slips away from the red-haired fellow – gangly, bespectacled, he looks surprised, did not want her to go – but quickly someone else swoops to invite her. She is remarkable, both for her looks and for the bright outfit she has chosen for tonight, which draws attention to her. She submits to their dances, their clumsy caresses, their inane invitations for lemonades. Every man she meets is gauche, lacking in charm, warmth, wit, lacking in physical attractiveness. She tries to keep her spirits up and tells herself that this one or that one is all right, is nice. But the image of Sean pops into her head and informs her that by comparison with him, they are worthless.

  She is gloomily drinking a Coke with one of the thin, greasy-haired boys who are so numerous in this dance hall when he comes in, searching. Sava sees him immediately. She leaves the bottle half-drunk , abandons the boy from Rathmullan, and dances with Sean. The set is a fast one and they dance a few feet apart. She sways more provocatively than is her habit, swings her hips and thrusts out her breasts, which are small but well outlined by the empire line of the dress. He hardly moves at all. His feet shuffle back and forth on the floor, he keeps his arms bent, fractionally, from the elbow but they remain still while he dances. His eyes, blue, amused, observe her face, however, all the time. When the set is over he takes her hand quickly and rubs it against his cheek.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says, in a halting, choking voice, and walks away.

  Sava stands still for a minute, not believing this has happened. Her eyes follow him as he walks away from her towards one of the flocks of women. As the next dance is called she sees him approaching one of them and then somebody, the old man she refused first time, asks her up. She dances, a slow set, in his scarecrow arms, trying to keep some distance between her white satin dress and the grey, smelly gaberdine of his trousers. She feels that the space between her neck and stomach has been turned to stone, and that if she lets that stone move or change its consistency in the smallest way she will collapse.

  Where is Mary Friel?

  Sava had lost her, forgotten about her, but now, once she is released from the old faggot’s crazy and bitter embrace she goes in search of her. She is not in the ladies’ loo or in the bar, however, and Sava cannot spot her among the crowds that hover around the edge of the dance floor. While she is engaged in this search, Sean approaches her again. He takes both her hands and pulls her to him, for a slow dance. She puts her head on his shoulder and rests her lips on the thin cotton of his shirt. Underneath, his skin is warm and soft – he is well-built, has a layer of subcutaneous fat, and soft cushions on his chest. His penis nudges her stomach through layers of cloth as she gives herself up to the moment, blends into him.

  ‘Where were you last night?’ Banatee asks Sava.

  ‘Dancing.’ Sava yawns. It is eight o’clock, a rainy Monday. They are frying rashers for the girls. ‘One rasher or two?’ Sava asks.

  ‘One. They only eat half of them. You’re exhausted.’

  ‘Aye.’ Sava is in her dressing gown, a quilted nylon housecoat, purple.

  ‘Ye can’t serve them in that!’

  ‘Why not? You do it then, you’re dressed.’

  ‘So where were ye?’

  ‘Out. Dancing.’

  ‘Who brought ye home?’

  ‘I got a lift.’

  ‘Mary Friel?’

  Sava considers lying, and does. ‘Aye.’

  ‘Be careful!’ her mother says.

  ‘Och ma, don’t be embarrassin me.’

  ‘I’m just tellin you. Young ones have little sense.’

  Sava slaps rashers and mushed fried tomatoes on willow-pattern plates. ‘Are yon ladies outa the bed yet?’

  ‘I heard them half an hour ago. In the bathroom.’

  ‘In the bathroom!’ says Sava. ‘They must be nearly washed away.’

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk anyway,’ says her mother, as Sava picks up four plates and goes to the foot of the stairs, where she yells, ‘Tá an bricfeasta réidh, a chaíliní! Brostaígí nó beidh sé fuar!’

  ‘Fu-are, beidh sé fuare!’ says Pauline, sliding down the banister. It creaks under her weight.

  Orla sees Micheál more often now

  Orla sees him more often now than she did initially. Darting from the bedroom to the bathroom, slipping from the kitchen to the garden, crossing the farmyard back and forth, back and forth, carrying things, encouraging cattle to waddle from field to byre, she sees him. And she knows he sees her, watching him.

  He is six feet tall, or thereabouts – the height of all men Elizabeth refers to as ‘a fine cut of a fellow’hskip-1.5pt. His hair is not dark like Sava’s but reddish, and it curls. His skin is cream like hers, not red and spotty like that of most red-haired men.

  Cowboys boots are what he favours for his feet, pointy-toed, light brown in colour, spattered with mud. ‘Cool Hand Luke!’ says Pauline, when she catches a glimpse of him. ‘Hit the floor, dames. I don’t want any of you ladies to get hurt!’

  He has a dark green jumper the colour of fir trees, double-knit, cable stitch, its sleeves rolled to the elbow. His arms are a darker shade than his face, reddish-brown, broad, freckled.

  Orla knows all this, watching him whenever she can.

  Micheál works on the farm, doing the work his father Charlie cannot, which is all of the work. He fishes in the river and, when he can share a boat with other men, in the sea. At weekends he attends the dance in the Fairyland Ballroom. At this dance he does not speak to Sava or acknowledge that he is related to her. Nor does he dance, with anyone.

  Urban foxes

  Since the lodgers have taken over Orla’s house, clothes are not as big a problem as they used to be, but Elizabeth still dislikes spending much money on them. What she loves is a bargain: any spare time she has is spent, with Orla, hunting down obscure small shops, spotting closing-down and end-of-season sales. Orla, although she craves designer clothes that never go on sale (meaning, in 1972, one thing: Levi’s), shares Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for the bargain. The red notices announcing ‘Special Offers’ send a rush of adrenalin to her brain. Some atavistic predatory instinct is aroused within her by the huge writings spread across shop windows, proclaiming ‘Summer Sale’, ‘Spring Sale’ or, best of all, ‘January Sale’: open season. Few experiences are more exciting than the scramble through the counters filled with richly scented leather shoes, the racks of fragrant coats and dresses, the thrill of finding something that is lovely, cheap and the right size. On your bikes! Tally ho!

  Their love of sales explai
ns Orla’s possession of such a wide selection of mildly eccentric, off-key, occasionally beautiful clothes: a maroon anorak with a wide border of vaguely ethnic zigzag embroidery, when all normal anoraks are plain; green cord pants when the standard is blue bell-bottoms; blouses with wide Peter Pan collars or peculiar, heart-shaped buttons. Dimpled tangerine shoes. She does not lack clothes, but hardly any of them are the kind of clothes ordinary, less adventurous, children wear.

  Buying these clothes is one of the great joys of Orla’s life. Shopping with Elizabeth is the highlight of her week. Every Saturday they set off, Elizabeth carrying the big brown shopper, into which are stuffed three string bags and a folded canvas bag. They walk from home to the bottom of Camden Street, as far as Whitefriar Street church sometimes, if they are early enough, where they catch Mass. This daily Mass is different from the Sunday Mass. Maybe it’s in English, maybe Latin, but you can’t hear it properly anyway, so it doesn’t matter. One of the monks chants it in a low, sleepy murmur like the drone of a depressed bee, on a dark altar many yards away from the minute congregation. The congregation consists of the old, the maimed, the poor, the mad. They sit, one to a pew, in their ancient gaberdines, their tight, moth-eaten woolly caps, their long black coats, bent over long strings of worn-out rosary beads, murmuring or daydreaming. The church seems bigger and dimmer than ever; a greenish misty light shimmers across its vast emptiness. And it is given over to this soft mumbling, of people wrapped up in their own thoughts, lost in the caverns of their own souls. On days like this, Orla enjoys this church, a church full of strangeness and medieval superstition: relics of saints enclosed in silver boxes, notices advising of ceremonies, involving candles and oil, designed to ward off illnesses – sore eyes, sore throats. Novenas, retreats, special offers on absolutions – a hundred days off your stint in Purgatory, a right of appeal to your sentence to hell. It falls short of selling indulgences, but only just. The Middle Ages. Orla does not know much about the Middle Ages – in school they never did them, only history from 1800 to 1916. But she knows, kneeling in Whitefriar Street, that she is in a very odd, old world, a world full of a strangeness she has no name for.

  On days like this, Elizabeth does not go up to the front. Why bother? The ones that are in are half-blind or in their dotage; they wouldn’t notice if a lion walked up the aisle dressed in its Sunday suit. So she sits in the middle somewhere and mumbles along, a far-away look in her large eyes, or with eyes closed. She has no hat, just her old khaki gaberdine that she’s had from before she was married – a coat such as girls wear to school, belted at the waist. On her head is not a hat but a silk headscarf or, if she had forgotten to bring one, a handkerchief – one of the large-size men’s handkerchiefs, white with checked borders of brown or blue or red, which last longer than the small feminine kind, and which she prefers. You don’t have to cover your head in church any more, but many women still feel edgy and nervous about going hatless, mantillaless, scarfless, or handkerchiefless. It is hard to accept, in your deepest heart, that a year or two ago it was sinful to display your head naked to God, but that now it is perfectly virtuous to do so. Many feel safer with a handkerchief, not necessarily perfectly clean, in situ. Just in case there’s been some mistake.

  After Mass, Elizabeth and Orla emerge onto the street, which is Aungier Street, pronounced, at least by them, Aynjer Street. Like the church it has an air of dark, Gothic mystery. It is a street defined by the monastery, by second-hand clothes shops, a café advertising dinners of green cabbage, sausage and chips for a shilling, a shop that sells Mass cards and gobstoppers. It is a ghostly medieval stretch of no-man’s-land between George’s Street on the left and Camden Street on the right. One direction leads to clothes, furniture, cafés, a rich and bustling shopping street, almost fashionable. In the other direction is food: Farrell’s for eggs and poultry, Kattie for fish, many fruit and vegetable stalls.

  Under the vaulting arch of the church door, Elizabeth stands and makes a decision. Which way to go? Orla hopes against hope they will turn down George’s Street. That will mean a delicious hunt through the racks of dresses and coats in Cassidy’s, a complicated walk among the three-piece suites, the racks of wallpaper and paint in Dockrell’s, possibly milky coffee and a cherry bun in Bewley’s – her greatest pleasure. If Elizabeth wrinkles her nose and says ‘No! We won’t bother. Not today!’ it will not be too bad though. All that means is feeling eggs and switches of bacon in Farrell’s, where the eggs nest in baskets of yellow straw, as if laid there by hens, although the only hens are dead, hanging by their wrinkled long-nailed claws, three long rows of them, above the shopkeeper’s head, their beaks prodding his bald head. Right means Kattie who shoves fish into Elizabeth’s bag as Elizabeth protests, ‘No no no, they’ll all rot on me!’ ‘There ye are, maam, I’ll give ye two dozen mackerel for half a crown.’ And she stuffs in extra, wrapped in newspaper, stinking nevertheless all the way home. The vegetable sellers are not so pushy. Nor so red in the face, so scaly in the hands, so fat and old and wrapped in bloody, fishy aprons, as Kattie. A fishwife. The word does not link itself to Kattie in Orla’s mind. Kattie is just Kattie. She doesn’t have a surname or a place, only her table of fish and her pile of old newspapers, the first stall on Camden Street.

  There are better treats there. Many of them. The fresh Vienna rolls, the flaky jam tarts, of the Kylemore Bakery; the racks of old-fashioned clothes in O’Reilly’s the draper’s, where money is still passed from till to till in canisters shooting along wires on the ceiling, wires like telegraph wires only noisier and more fun. O’Reilly’s carries clothes you get nowhere else, for good reasons: it was there they got the red anorak with the little black squiggles and the gold chain at the front. The orange and brown jeans, in a leopardskin pattern. It’s the drapery equivalent of Clover’s, original home of Orla’s tangerine shoes.

  Urban delights. Shopping, church, coffee. Elizabeth.

  They carry home half a hundredweight of stuff between them, distributed in the bags, which swell with their burdens. And then, arms dragged out of themselves, feet sore from the path, they dump everything on the floor of the kitchen and Elizabeth says, ‘Why don’t you run down and get us some fish and chips.’

  They’ve the house to themselves – Tom is at work, of course, and so are all the boys. Orla runs down and gets the fish and chips in the café on the triangle and she, Elizabeth and Roddy, just out of bed, sit around the big table, enjoying the delectable smell of vinegar and oil, munching the crisp batter-coated cod and the soft mushy chip-shop chips.

  Elizabeth has to do it alone now. How will she carry home the weekly shop without Orla to help her? Roddy is around the house, he refused to come to the Gaeltacht. But he’s out playing football a lot of the time. He’s taken up pitch-and-putt. Elizabeth is alone for the summer, working herself to the bone, going to Mass and the shops all alone.

  The truce is over (but not to worry it’s 1972)

  They are eating salad because of the hot day. It’s Banatee’s version of an Irish salad: mountains of lettuce from the garden, scallions, a few slices of tomato. Sliced hard-boiled egg that has sometimes not been boiled through, so that one side is firm and good while the other, the side that did not hit the water, is runny. Even the albumen is runny, sliming out on the lettuce leaves like snail tracks.

  Pauline shrugs and says, ‘Everyone knew it wouldn’t last.’

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘The ira ceasefire. Don’t you Dubs know anything at all? Did ye not even know there was a ceasefire on?’

  ‘Well, we don’t exactly spend all day tuned in to the newsroom, do we?’

  ‘It started before we even came here,’ Jacqueline pouts. Orla tries to wrap a piece of tomato up in a lettuce leaf, the way she has seen Monica Sheridan wrap fried mince meat in boiled cabbage leaves on television.

  ‘So it’s over, anyway.’

  ‘William Craig said yesterday he could mobilise eighty thousand men in a minute if he wanted to.’ Pauline does n
ot know whether she should be pleased or upset about this. All it is is news, of the exciting kind, the kind they’ve been having for three years. What sort of news had they before that? The Queen is visiting Canada as part of a Commonwealth tour. Terence O’Neill has met the Prime Minister of the Republic for talks at Stormont. A woman was killed in a hit-and-run accident on Malvern Street. She was thirty-eight years of age, a mother of five. Now it’s bombs, shootings, hunger strikes. Threats of all-out war. None of this excitement actually happens on her road, in her suburb. It happens on the news. That’s what the girls from Dublin still don’t understand. For Pauline, as for them, all this stuff happens only on the news.

  But for Jacqueline the news is on her road, because she lives in a place on the news, the Bogside.

  ‘They always shoot to kill. Shoot to kill shoot to kill.’

  ‘Her da is in Long Kesh,’ says Pauline.

  ‘We know,’ says Aisling too quickly. ‘You told us that before.’

  ‘Do you ... does she hear from him at all?’

  ‘Her mother does, doesn’t she?’

  Jacqueline jumps up and runs out of the room, screaming at the top of her voice.

  ‘Oh my God! What did I say wrong?’ Orla looks guiltily at Aisling. Aisling looks at Pauline. They are all genuinely shocked but already beginning to enjoy the excitement and ready to analyse it. ‘I suppose I should have guessed she’d be upset, talking about her father and everything. Is she close to him?’

  ‘Och yes. Very close. She goes to Long Kesh to visit him in the prison and all. She misses him a lot.’

  ‘It must be difficult, living in Derry,’ Aisling says in her softest, politest voice. In fact she and Orla find it impossible to imagine what living in Derry or anywhere else in the North is like. Terrible, tragic, think of the stress. God help them. They hear people in Dublin making these comments all the time. But the words are remote and meaningless. Orla knows she hates them but she doesn’t know why. They are just one part of a whole layer of adult expression that irritates her unbelievably, ringing false as toy pennies in her ears.