The Dancers Dancing

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  ‘Yuck!’ Orla doesn’t care. She has no fealty to anyone. ‘One of the girls actually left because she couldn’t stand the food!’ She is anxious to make some contribution to the conversation as a thank-you gesture for the meal, which she has enjoyed enormously. Her stomach feels as if it would burst, and she can feel that her face is flushed from overeating. She gazes happily, drunk with food, at the terns and at the boys plunging into the water.

  ‘Really,’ says Nuala. ‘How strange.’

  ‘Well, she was a bit odd actually,’ says Aisling. ‘Wasn’t she, Orla?’

  ‘She had problems at home, in Derry.’

  ‘Was she one of those kids they send out to get them away from the Troubles? Poor thing. They probably can’t cope, after all they go through.’ Nuala sighs and sips some tea.

  ‘She lived in a corporation house,’ Aisling adds, glancing round. The room is full of northerners: the clipped crispy twang of Belfast and the dry drawl of Derry are the sounds, as fry is the smell. The restaurant has an intensely Ulster feel to it, Aisling thinks, feeling that she is in another country. It is a feeling she savours.

  ‘Really? What’s wrong with that?’ Ciaran asks.

  ‘She had loads of money. She bought sweets all the time and her clothes were quite nice too actually. She didn’t look poor to me.’

  ‘No, well ...’

  ‘The Brits wouldn’t let her family move into their new house.’

  ‘What?’ Ciaran seems interested, although why is not clear.

  ‘They were moving into a new house and the Brits came along and kept them out. She was upset about that.’

  Nuala shrugs. ‘Oh yes. Gosh, yes, I read about it in the Irish Times. Well she is just unfortunate. The two communities, you know Aisling what I mean by that, the Catholics and the Protestants, seem to be trying to keep their own areas completely to themselves now. All the Protestants are forced out of Catholic areas and all the Catholics out of Protestant areas. It’s amazing. I can’t really understand it.’ Nuala shrugs again, and turns her gaze to the window. In the little harbour two men in striped jumpers are clambering down the side of a boat into a rubber dinghy.

  ‘The ira should be all hanged. They’ve started all this. I don’t know why it has taken the government so long to see that it’s all a terrorist plot.’ This is Ciaran’s contribution. Orla looks sharply at him. He has such modulated, educated tones and he looks so squeaky clean, but this view sounds just like her father’s. Let them all bleddy blow themselves to bleddy hell. Crowd of bleddy bastards!

  ‘Jacqueline thought ... it was different. She said they couldn’t get a house because they were Catholic. She said Protestant bachelors got houses more easily than Catholic families of ten. Like hers.’

  ‘Ah, she sounds like a bit of a moan to me,’ says Nuala. ‘Look, that man nearly fell into the water!’

  They all look out of the window at the man in the stripey jumper, who is being pulled back up to the deck of the boat.

  ‘Who forced them to have ten children anyway?’ Ciaran says in a low furious whisper to Nuala. Orla’s ears prick up, but she pretends not to hear.

  ‘Ciaran!’

  ‘Well honestly, that sort of thing ... You’d think there was someone standing at the end of the bed pointing a gun at them!’

  Orla thinks of the Pope’s blessing at the end of her parents’ bed. Framed and smiling Pius. He hasn’t had much effect on her parent’s productivity, there’s just the two of them. But he does try.

  ‘Would you like more ice cream, girls?’ Nuala makes a face and seems to kick Ciaran.

  ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

  More ice cream! Ripple, banana and neapolitan, a scoop of each, again.

  Aisling’s parents drop Orla off at Banatee’s, but they are taking Aisling with them to have a look at the guesthouse where they are staying. Nuala has a key: Aisling can get into Dohertys’ later. Just before Orla gets out of the car Nuala hands her a parcel.

  ‘Your mother sent you this. I forgot about it earlier.’

  ‘Oh!’ Orla takes the parcel and begins to get out of the car.

  ‘She’s very well,’ Nuala continues. ‘She misses you a lot, though. She said to tell you.’

  ‘Gosh.’ Orla wonders if she should say ‘I miss her too.’ But she can’t bring herself to. It sounds so show-offy. ‘Thanks for the tea,’ is what she manages instead, adding, ‘See you later, Ash.’ Then she goes into the house and upstairs. She rushes into her room and pulls the paper off the package. Surely it contains chocolate and biscuits, like everyone else’s packages? And something to wear, since it feels soft. Money as well, probably.

  The brown paper falls onto the bed, followed by two packets of chocolate goldgrain and a hank of wool. No money. Orla roots through the wool, wondering if it could be secreted there. She examines the wrapping paper carefully. Nothing. But there is a note from Elizabeth:

  Dear Orla,

  Thanks for all you letters. I hardly get time to read them, you write so often Still its nice to know you are well we are fine here Daddy working away and me busy as usual with the boys Tommy Byrne left last week found a flat I put an add in the Press for a new boy but so far no luck its the wrong time of the year i suppose please God someone will turn up soon. How are you hope you are well and Aisling it will be nice for her to have a visit from her mam and dad and maybe theyll bring you out somewhere too you neer know. how is Annie did you give her the stockings she’ll need them with her bad leg here is something else you can give her when you call in next its wool for socks she will knit some for tom and send them in the post theyre much better than the ones you can buy in the shops and much better value too well thats all for now be a good girl looking forward to seeing you next week dv say a prayer for me and daddy love Mam.

  That’s it.

  Orla gazes helplessly at the white wool and brown wrapping paper littering up the bed. She gazes hopelessly at the beige walls, at the broken wardrobe. Never has the place seemed so cheerless and menacing. The tree outside the window shakes mournfully in the night.

  Orla takes a packet of chocolate biscuits, and goes down the landing to Pauline’s room. A chat would be nice. A chat in exchange for a few biscuits.

  There is no reply. She opens the door and looks inside. The light is on, but Pauline is lying in bed fast asleep. ‘Pauline!’ Orla calls in a loud whisper. ‘Pauline!’ She goes over and looks at Pauline, who is lying flat on her back, her hair blending in with the brown nylon pillow. Orla nudges her shoulder gently. But even that doesn’t arouse her. She appears to be in a very deep sleep.

  Orla goes back to her room and digs in her case for an illicit English book she has secreted there for dire emergencies: there is a rule against reading English books in the Irish college; you are allowed to read Irish books, of course, but Orla possesses none of these. There are a few in the library in the school back in Dublin, but she has never read one of them, although she reads voraciously in English. The book tucked into the bottom of her suitcase is a copy of Heidi. She had this copy from Elizabeth when she was six years of age, and couldn’t even read properly. Elizabeth read it aloud to her and Roddy over what seemed to be about a year, a couple of pages every night. When the book was finished, Orla took it to her bedroom (she had a bedroom then) and tried to read it herself. Tried, and soon succeeded, since she remembered so much of the story anyway. Since then she has read it about a hundred times. It’s an old, battered red volume, with a black magician or chimney sweep embossed on the spine over the inscription ‘Blackie’s Children’s Classics’. The spine is breaking, and the yellowed endpapers are covered with silly illustrations she made herself when she was eight, thinking that blank pages were left between the cover and the title page so that readers could provide their own pictures (there were none in the book, and the dust jacket, which had shown a very tiny, sweet girl sitting on a rock beside two goats, disappeared a long time ago). Now there are Heidi and Alm Uncle and Peter and Clara and Fraulein Rottenmeier scrawl
ed all over the book in red biro. She didn’t try to do the goats, or the old blind granny. Oh gonny!

  She decides to start at the beginning of the book and read it right through. By page 3 she is feeling very happy.

  Sava and Sean have it off again

  Margo and the Country Folk. Paddy McDevitt and the Northern Lights. Roly Daniels. Jerry Bland and the Seasons.

  Sean and Sava have picked the Northern Lights, playing at the Texas Saloon, as their aperitif tonight. They are still in the ballroom, turning each other on in the hot sweaty embrace of the dance. The warm night wraps the hall, and waits for them.

  The stones, the trees, the water

  Orla and Aisling are asleep in their lumpy bed. Outside the window of Pauline’s room the sycamore is shivering in the dry summer night. Pauline looks at the moon, a thin sliver, a silver canoe in a navy-blue sky so crowded with stars that it looks like a dark bowl full of blue sparks. The dog barks in the barn. Pauline glances behind, at the room. Her bed is hot, the blankets tossed into a sticky sweaty twist that will allow no sleep. A statue of the Virgin stares down from the top of the wardrobe, upside down – someone, Sava, stuck it up there out of the way.

  Pauline slips downstairs and out into the yard.

  ‘Have some.’ Gerry hands her a can of beer. They are sitting on the slip outside the boathouse. The black water laps against the stones, squelch squelch squelch.

  ‘I thought you didn’t drink.’ Pauline takes the can and pulls it open.

  ‘I found these in the yard of our house. Thought you’d like one.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’ She takes a slug of beer and looks up. The dark blue sky is still crammed with stars. ‘Have you any fags?’

  He shakes his head and puts an arm around her shoulder. ‘No. I didn’t think you’d like them.’

  Pauline considers making a glib remark, but restrains herself. She feels sorry for Gerry tonight, for some reason that has more to do with the surroundings than anything rational. The landscape is so intense at this time of night. The plash of the waves against the slip, the occasional murmur of the trees on the cliff behind them, the continuous winking of the stars, a winking that has no beginning and no end, make her feel that everything is alive. The stones, the trees, the water. The dark solid purple black mountains on the opposite shore. The canoe of yellow moon, floating above them. Everything that is simple and familiar during the day has been transformed.

  ‘It feels weird here, doesn’t it?’ is how she expresses this feeling to Gerry.

  ‘Weird, but lovely but,’ he agrees. Of course he agrees. He feels it more than her, but he’d agree anyway.

  ‘Are you looking forward to going home?’ she asks, wondering more or less for the first time what ‘home’ means for him. Out here you know nothing about anyone.

  ‘No,’ he says simply.

  ‘Me neither.’

  They stare at the sea. He tightens his grip on her shoulder and she snuggles closer to him.

  ‘Your mam and dad ... they’re away?’

  ‘They’re away in Italy. But they’ll be back next weekend. They’ll be there when I get home so they will.’

  ‘That’s nice, isn’t it?’

  Pauline doesn’t reply. How could she tell him everything? About her mother and her father, the way they fight.

  Gerry is trying to find some way of keeping the conversation alive. It’s not easy. He can hardly believe that this is him, sitting at the boathouse in the middle of the night with a girl.

  ‘My parents split up last year,’ he says. It’s the first time he has told anyone, any young person, this.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Pauline throws off his arm and faces him. ‘That’s ... too bad. That’s terrible.’

  ‘Och. You get used to it.’

  ‘Which one do you live with?’

  ‘I live with me granny actually,’ he says. ‘For the minute. For the minute I’m with her.’

  Pauline puts her arms around him. They tumble down onto the uneven slippery surface of the pier, and kiss for about an hour.

  A sack in the darkness

  Saturday is not different from weekdays here, as it is in the rest of the ordinary world. The round of classes, singing, games, swimming and céilí is played out on Saturdays as on all other days. But this last Saturday is an exception. A few people, like Aisling, are absent (her parents have taken her away on a long long drive; others are tired or sick or pretending to be sick), and there is a general relaxation of discipline. This means that nobody notices that Pauline has not turned up for classes. She came home sometime very late last night and did not get up at the usual time. Sava, serving breakfast, was too exhausted, after the Texas Saloon and its aftermath, to notice or care. She stumbled bleary-eyed in and out of the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s Pauline?’ she asked at one point.

  ‘Asleep,’ Aisling answered. ‘She’s not feeling well today.’

  ‘The poor wee thing, I’ll bring her up some tea,’ Sava said. But she didn’t bother. Pauline stayed asleep till midday.

  After breakfast Aisling leaves with her parents and Orla goes down to the schoolhouse alone.

  The wool and the stockings.

  She knows she will have to do something about them now, at last, since Elizabeth will find out eventually if she fails to deliver the wool. No wool no socks. How would Elizabeth find out? She’ll write, she’ll write to Annie herself or to somebody else, when the socks fail to arrive.

  It is harder now to visit Annie than it would have been at the beginning. On the other hand, even if she had visited her earlier she’d have to go again now anyway, with the wool. So ... maybe. Maybe she should just skip off alone this afternoon and do it. Alone, without telling anyone, would be easier than with Aisling or Pauline. It would be more terrifying, and Aunt Annie, with her jerks and her winces and her erratic voice, was terrifying, as everything that is different can be. But it would not be shameful.

  She thinks she has made a decision although a nagging voice suggests to her that perhaps she has not, that maybe this so-called decision is temporary and, until the action is over, it can be postponed at any time. Orla is radically different from Pauline in this way, a way that determines character. With Pauline, word and even thought are action. With Orla words are words are words and the link with reality is always in question.

  Still, she walks with a lighter step along the little road, which by now is familiar to her in every detail. The two little council cottages at the corner of the Dohertys’ lane, where the women wore wellington boots and blue overalls all the time, and the children either wellies or bare feet as they scamper around the road. There is a pump, painted blue, on the road outside those houses and that’s where the children always are, messing around in the puddle of water at its base. Then the donkeys in the rushy field, their huge penises sticking out obscenely and fascinatingly, among the spikey rushes and the orange montbretia. The Scallan, the old Mass rock where they said Mass in Tubber in the penal days and where there is now an elaborate grotto, modelled on Lourdes or somewhere: grey stones in a sort of mound shape with a plaster statue ofOur Lady in a little niche in the middle of it. It is close to the burn, actually, to the place where the burn breaks out of its cover and meanders for a while in a flat pastoral style. That is where Alasdair and his friends stand and fish all the time. They are there even now, as she passes, getting in a little fishing before school. Alasdair stands, fat and fair, squarely in the middle of the burn, his eyes glued to the riverbed, a model of intense, fishermanly concentration. He hasn’t got a rod any more but a gaffe his faratee has given him as a special present, an acknowledgement of his status as an obsessive fisherman. He holds it with both hands, poised, ready to trap anything that moves. In the house he stays in they don’t eat bacon and cabbage any more – most days they have young salmon, or a couple of fried trout for their tea, courtesy of Alasdair.

  ‘You’ll be late!’ she calls. She’d never spoken to him off the dancefloor before.

&
nbsp; ‘Shut your mouth you wee whore,’ is what he says. ‘You’ll scare off the fish on me.’

  She does not take offence, recognising enthusiasm when she sees it.

  Orla walks on down the blue road, through the straggling village. It is called Tír an Laidin, which she thinks means, appropriately, the Land of Latin. She has already found out that names often do not mean what they first seem to, however. Bun na Toinne, where her aunt lives, does not mean the Bottom of the Wave, but something about the family at Ton. Nobody knows what Ton means. Names, Máistir Dunne has explained, are often more ancient than any other part of the language. They are so ancient that in some cases they are not even Irish, not even Celtic, and nobody knows what they mean. There are layers in language, as there are layers in the earth. Rock and clay and bog and growth and then more clay and bog and growth. You dig and dig and sometimes you don’t recognise what you find.

  The Land of Latin is asleep in the lemon morning sun. Some doors stand open. Chickens scratch in the dirt on the roadside, cats sunbathe on the little windowledges. But no human beings are in sight. The schoolhouse is closed and empty, classes will not start for an hour yet. Orla feels a wrench of the heart as she passes it: it is such a nasty building, like all those country national schools, with its unfriendly high windows. It looks as it was when it was built: a mean bossy terrifying place, where children learned to be silent and frightened along with anything else they learned. Where they learned that life was hard and horrible and that you got beaten if you didn’t conform to the demands of whoever held power over you. The schoolhouse was domineering in every line of its architecture. When Orla learns later, not much later, of such buildings being bought for a song by Dubliners and converted to holiday homes she can’t believe her ears. All schools are the reverse of holidays but these are the sternest in their design. And empty, the schoolhouse is left with nothing but its stern tall structure. It is so dead and so boring, the building that has been for the past few weeks the repository of so much life and fun and feeling. She is sad, momentarily aware of the transience of everything, sad enough to forget momentarily the task in hand.