‘There’ll be no games today,’ Headmaster Joe announces after An Post. He feels as happy as if he had sent in an application for the good day himself, and was now pulling it out of his sack of letters to present to his charges. ‘We’ll all go to the beach and stay there until eight o’clock. We’re going to have a barbecue. First I’ll barbecue myself and then Máistir Gallagher!’
There is a loud cheer. (Which is a different thing from saying ‘everyone cheers’. Orla doesn’t, and neither do some others for reasons of their own.) By now, students know that although Headmaster Joe has to play gruff and threatening, it’s skin-deep: he’s not the expelling type. But still, he rules the roost. When she hears the announcement Orla’s stomach crumples up and she feels she would like to fall down, to wither up in a little heap on the floor. But she doesn’t. Sturdy body, sturdy mind. Later she thought she should have done it. Faked it. Faked a faint. She realises, all of a sudden, that probably many fainting fits, and other physical manifestations of psychological shock, are faked, and that the world is not filled with strictly sincere people as she has been taught by her schoolteachers, although not by her mother. And a faked faint at that point would be enough to get her off the hook, for then and perhaps for ever. But Orla cannot do it, she cannot put on an act – she has one of those stiff natures that cannot bend itself to another role. It is not a virtue: rather a mixture of gaucheness and slow-wittedness that has rendered her the way she is.
So she goes to the beach, a lamb to the slaughter, and for decades afterwards she will metaphorically go to the same beach. Do things she hates doing, see people she would rather not see, sacrifice herself. She will go on believing that she must do what she is asked to do, not what she wants to do herself. She will do this so often and so systematically that eventually she will not know what it is she wants, one way or the other – and that will become a problem too. That is how it is for girls, in 1972. Doing what you are told is ethics, philosophy, morality, religion, all rolled into one. It is the key to happiness and peace of mind, to every kind of success. This is what girls believe. What other people tell you to do is always right. Other people are adults, teachers, the Church, the government. Or anybody else really who has ideas to force on girls. Trust them all, they know what’s best for you.
It’s easy when you get the hang of it, easier than any other system of getting through life. Most of the time. Most girls will be reluctant to abandon it as a way of life. Many never will. How can they? They’ve been taught, from babyhood, not to think or ask questions, to turn their backs on their own souls.
The students walk in a straggling broken line from the schoolhouse to the beach, a curling meandering snake about half a mile long slowly moving through the valley. Some of them carry damp striped hand towels, in which their swimming togs are rolled up. Others have sports bags, or plastic bags, or string bags. Lucky students, like Pauline, chew gum or even lick chocolate, while most snatch fuchsias from the wayside bushes and suck from them, desperately and optimistically, the pinpricks of sweetness. Mostly the flowers taste of nothing, but once in ten sucks you could get the faintest suggestion of watery honey.
’Tá an bláthóigín ag fás i lár an fhraoigh
Goirtear di
Erika!
Bíonn na mílte beach ag dordán leo de shíor!
Goirtear di
Erika!’
Thus sings Headmaster Joe, in a sweet clear tenor. It is his favourite song from their songbook, Abair Amhrán – a rousing Nazi march, but nobody knows this, except maybe the people who compiled that songbook. It is a wonderful song, cheerful and rousing, about heather and bees and walking in the hills. The children sing along with him for a while, joining in the chorus with a shout that reverberates around the valley: ‘Goirtear di Erika!’
Aisling and Orla talk about their futures.
‘I’m going to have a cream dress.’ Aisling’s voice is serious. She is discussing her wedding, a matter to which she periodically turns her most concentrated attention. ‘A silk cream dress, with lilies of the valley in my hair. I want it to be really simple and natural. The bridesmaids will wear long pink dresses.’
‘I hate pink,’ Orla says, forgetting to be cautious, carried away by the fascination of the topic. ‘Mine are going to have green.’
‘I never heard of bridesmaids wearing green. I hope to God I’m not one of them. I don’t mean a kind of ordinary pink, I mean the very palest sort of pink, a sort of creamy peachy pink. And I want them to carry tiny pink roses and have white straw hats.’ Aisling changes her mind about the details of her wedding almost daily, but there are always a lot of details all the same.
‘That sounds nice enough.’ Orla is unconvinced. The wedding plan is not as preoccupying today as usual, because of the imminent danger.
‘I don’t know where I’ll go on my honeymoon, though,’ Aisling muses, moving along.
‘I think I’d like to go to somewhere really different.’
‘Like Siberia you mean. Like Outer Mongolia. I’m going to Paris. That’s where Mummy and Daddy went, actually. You know Daddy said to Mummy, which would you like a week in Paris or a house, and she said a week in Paris. Where did your parents go?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Orla lies. ‘I must ask them. I think Spain or something boring like that.’
‘Oh yeah. Well Marie Fitzgerald went to Spain. They went to Spain. She liked it. She brought us back this lovely tablecloth with a long yellow fringe and bullfighters on it.’
Actually Elizabeth and Tom went to Bundoran. They brought back a teapot, one of those teapots like a yellow house, with Present from Bundoran across the side.
‘What is your husband going to work at?’
‘I think he’ll be a journalist, like Daddy. Or a lawyer, maybe. Mummy says lawyers are richer than journalists and I’d like him to be rich. I want to have a huge house and a servant.’
‘Me too. Though nobody has servants really.’
‘Tell us another. Of course they do. Denise Murphy from Monaghan, they have two servants. She’s always talking about them. Showing off. Not showing off actually, I don’t think she means to show off but mentioning them, you know. Just mentioning them about a million times an hour. Haven’t you heard her?’
‘I don’t really talk to her all that much. I want my husband to be a teacher.’
‘A teacher?’
‘Yes. I think, you know, it would be nice with the holidays and everything.’
‘But men aren’t. I mean, it’s an ok job for a woman, being a teacher, but it’s not a good job for a man. Did you actually think being a teacher was a good job?’
Orla does. She thinks it is one of the best jobs in the world, because Elizabeth has told her teachers are very well paid. The life of Reilly they have, she said, huge salaries and long holidays, sure they have it all sewn up.
‘Well, maybe a doctor then.’ An image passes across the window of Orla’s brain: Micheal, in his green jumper, pushing the cows across the yard. She pushes it away without lingering on it for a moment.
Aisling is offering advice. ‘You should do medicine then, if you want to marry a doctor. You know what Sister Veronica says: on your honeymoon you have to be able to talk about what he’s interested in, otherwise he’ll get bored with you. And you know, not like you any more.’
‘I could do nursing. I don’t think I’ll be bored on my honeymoon anyway. I think we’ll be busy, swimming and looking at things, and going shopping. I’m going to leave lots of things for the house until I go on my honeymoon so I can buy exotic stuff in the bazaar. Silk cloths and little things made of copper and brass.’
Orla envisages her husband on his honeymoon, the husband who will accompany her on her swims and to the bazaar, and he always looks the same to her. Bridegroom Man. He has thick smooth black hair and a regular face, with a shy, honest, wide-awake look in his eyes. A quiet, observant, intelligent face, is what he has. And he is dressed in a dark jacket and white shirt. His skin is sallow and
he is so clean, so clever, so handsome that she defers to him all the time, treats him as if he were made of china, or as if he were a precious pedigree pet. Which he is, Bridegroom Man. Delicate and highly strung, refined, clean. She has never seen a man like this and she does not know where her picture comes from. When he touches her – brushes her arm, places his warm, dry hand on her cheek – he treats her as she treats him. They are both exquisitely sensitive, delicate people. There he is, waiting for her, waiting to love her and marry her and bring her to the bazaar.
’They say that in the Gaeltacht
The boys are very fine
You ask for Elvis Presely
And they give you Frankenstein ...
I
don’t want no more of Gaeltacht life ...’
It is Monica Murphy, chanting behind them. ‘Talkin about fellas, girls?’ she taunts.
‘Shut up, Monica.’ Aisling is prim, hot, embarrassed.
‘Ooh aah, ooh ah ah, I left my knickers in my boyfriend’s car!’ responds Monica. Sandra, who is linking her, joins in.
‘Ná bígí ag labhairt Béarla!’ warns Killer Jack, carelessly, patrolling the outside of the line.
Monica smirks at him and says, ‘Nílimid ag labhairt Béarla, a mháistir! An mbeidh tú ag an chéilí anocht?’
‘Och tusa,’ he says, and passes on. It’s too hot to care about Irish or English today.
Monica strikes up again.
’Aisling and Seamas sat under a bush
Says Seamas to Aisling ‘‘You’re my little thrush!
I’m only a boy but I’ll soon be a man
And I’ll make you Mrs Seamas as soon as I can!
Tooraloo! Tooralay!
I’ll make you Mrs Seamas O’Meara some day!’’’
The crocodile has reached the bend in the road where Auntie Annie lives. The house is concealed by trees, right on the corner where the main road is joined by the lane leading down to the sea. You can see the slated roof and, at the back, the window of the small bedroom where Orla usually sleeps when she stays there, a room lined with cream timber, a smell of mothballs pervading it. On the main road there is a gate to Aunt Annie’s yard and then, around the corner, another small entrance without a gate. Two ways in and two ways out. Orla fixes her eyes on the blue, sweating tar, considering the implications of this. Aisling’s voice continues, the buzz of the thousand bees, the singing of Headmaster Joe, the lower singing of Monica and Sandra and Noeleen. Alison from Terenure, who has a loud soprano, belongs to some special choir or other, has burst into an operatic aria. ‘I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,’ she sings, loud enough for the world to hear. She sounds like an angel, so good that they let her sing in English. The teachers, that is. The students, a lot of them, mock her, accuse her of showing off.
’With vassals and serfs at my side
And of all those who walked within those walls ...’
‘That I had the biggest backside!’ adds Monica.
Orla is giggling, choking on the giggles, the fear, as they round the bend. She knows that even if Aunt Annie is not at the first gate she could be waiting just around the next bend, at the back entrance.
She needn’t worry. Annie is at the first post. She has come up from the house to the top of the street, and she’s sitting on a big stone that stands near the gateway. Lying in wait. Her face is all smiles, festooned with them. She is wearing her navy-blue overall and her old white runners, unlaced, muddy from slapping around in the chicken shit. Her legs stick out from the stone like sticks, white and gnarled with varicose veins.
She smiles and waves at Orla.
Orla waves back. But it is a tiny wave, an excuse of a wave, meant to suggest to anybody watching that she is one of the crowd.
‘Who is that?’ Aisling has stopped giggling. She is a little shocked by Auntie Annie, who would shock anyone from Aisling’s background, just by her appearance.
‘Oh some local person,’ says Orla, her voice prim and low. She can hardly get the thin, mean lie out. Above all she does not want Monica to notice what is going on.
‘Well I gather that, Orla,’ says Aisling, not too kindly. ‘I mean I didn’t think she was a tourist from New York or something.’
‘Orla.’ Auntie Annie calls her name in a surprised tone. Orla and Aisling have passed her by. She is looking after them, at their backs, as they approach the corner where the road turns towards the shore.
Monica hears. ‘Somebody’s looking for you,’ she says to Orla. Orla’s stomach turns to water. Her legs weaken. Monica looks back and sees Auntie Annie, who is standing up on her wobbly feet, whose face is not smiling now, but stunned.
Orla looks at Monica looking at her Auntie Annie and waits for the insult, waits for her world to collapse.
But Monica says nothing at all. She looks at Orla, her cheeky face puzzled, and then at Sandra. ‘Race you to the beach!’ she says to the latter. ‘Last one there is a rotten tomato!’
Aisling is not so easily deflected. ‘That woman is calling you,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you talk to her?’
‘Why should I?’ says Orla.
‘Well, it’s normal to talk to people who say hello to you.’
‘I don’t feel like it,’ Orla says. ‘I don’t even know who she is. Some sort of village idiot. She knows me because we stay near here when we come on our holidays.’
‘Where do you stay? Which house?’
‘You can’t see it from the road. It’s over there, behind those trees.’
Alison is still singing. She has smooth creamy skin, sallow, as few Irish girls have, and a wide mouth, a shining, happy face. All this as well as her glorious angelic voice, a voice like the summer sun. Such girls must be happy.
’And best of all as I walked those halls
I knew that you loved me still.
I knew that you loved me still.’
The sun, the sun, the sun
The heatwave continues. Every morning when they wake up, the sun is pouring into the room, butterscotch hot. The sky is a clear plane of milky blue, unthreatened by any cloud. The lough twinkles at the bottom of the valley like a flashing turquoise star. Very soon you begin to feel that the place has always gleamed like this, that it has been this palette of fresh green and gold and heartbreaking blue for all eternity.
Walking down to the schoolhouse makes them sweat. The backs of their necks burn, their arms and legs bronze. Within days almost everyone looks healthier and more beautiful. It is as if nature ensures that their bodies blend in with the perfect landscape, the light of the brilliant summer. Most of the children look as elastically smooth as spring leaves. Even those whose skin turns red instead of tan give off a nutty electric glow.
Morning lessons are cut by an hour to allow the students to get the benefit of the fine weather. Every afternoon they go to the beach and spend three or four hours there. After the day when Orla denied her, Aunt Annie has not come out. Orla wonders vaguely if she is offended, and hopes, crazily, that she is not. But she does not care very much. The relief of not having to worry about her is greater than the burden of guilt. She would like, she realises, Aunt Annie to be dead. This is such an un-nice wish that as soon as it enters her head she pushes it back. Of course you don’t, she says to herself. Of course you do, she says to herself. Think how easy it would be if she simply did not exist at all. Then you would be free to go to the shore whenever you liked. You and Elizabeth and Tom and Roddy could come to Tubber for holidays and not have them spoiled by her. The house would really become a summer home, and not what it now is.
The heatwave is too hot for fat people and old people, but Orla loves it. The afternoons on the beach are perfect. For ever after, this will be her vision of paradise: a rocky cove, a silver beach, a crowd of children scattered across it like oystercatchers under the faithful blue sky. The diamond swords glinting in the waves, the terns diving.
She likes to change rapidly, to rush down and jump from a dark grey rock whose tiny pointed barnacles bi
te the soles of her feet into the softness of the water. The water is always cold, even though the air temperatures are high, but she doesn’t care about that. She succumbs to the silky softness of it, feels protected like a moth in amber. The clarity, the coolness enrapture her. She likes to swim with her face just under the surface, watching the rippling trellis of gold that the reflected waves cast against the sand. She likes to see the darting shoals of tiny fish, quick and nebulous as clouds of dust, shivering around under the water. She likes the hanks of yellow-brown kelp, and waving elf-green fronds of sea grass, the black jungle stiffness of sea rods. She does not often lift her eyes to the rounded hills, pale in the descending sun, at the other side of the lough, or to the boathouse, or to the silhouettes of noisy figures perched around the beach behind her. All her concentration is on the water. It pours over her, it redeems her.
Afterwards, she roasts on the sand, working on her tan. Nobody worries about ultraviolet rays, nobody realises that children should not get sunburn. Headmaster Joe encourages it! ‘Nothing does you as much good!’ he says. ‘It’ll set you up for the winter. Off with those clothes and let the sun get at you.’ Some of the children are red as lobsters, their skin peeling from their hot backs and chests in white flakes, like snow or dandruff. They show it off. They revel in it. Look at me! Nobody has cream, or protective lotion of any kind. Not even Nivea or Pond’s. The sun is perceived as the friend of children, not another enemy to be warded off and defeated.
The Dancers Dancing Page 16
