The salmon leaps.
It had been lying under the bank, a long fat tapered roll of fish flesh, still as a rock until he moved, and then it darted deeper into the bank, out of the bank, out of his reach. He’d been stalking it for an hour, and it had eluded him, it had teased him. All the salmon like to tease him; it is as if, he feels, they know him at this stage, know what he is up to but maybe think it is some sort of game, cannot know what the outcome will be for them if he wins. They know about him, his long arms and hands, his long legs and feet. But they are not familiar with frying pans.
He catches it as it leaps. It is almost impossible to do this and he has not done it before, although he has taken fish from the murky water under the banks as they lurk in the mud. To take a fish leaping is a miracle, but he has done it. The silver slippery fish is in his arms and it will not escape now – fish do not escape from his hands, they are not like other people’s hands. He has to concentrate totally, grasping the big heavy silver thrash, and struggle, walk along the uneven but familiar riverbed to the bank, stone the fish until it understands what the end of the game is.
She stands and watches. A boy in a white shirt catching a salmon with his hands. She knows it is not a common sight but she has seen so many boys fishing in this burn that it does not seem as unusual then as it will later. She watches him catch it and she thinks he will look up and wave, look up to see if she is watching. And he wants to do that but can’t. Until the fish is stone dead he cannot take his eyes or his mind off it for a fraction of a second. When it is stretched, its body twisting in the last, insignificant death throes, he looks up.
She is there. She does not stare into his eyes, though, any more. She waves, a full wave aloft, and he waves back. Then she walks on.
Pauline in love
Pauline gets up at about noon. The room is full of hot sunshine, and she feels depraved as she stretches and glances at her watch. Depraved, because she had slept late. But an extraordinary sense of well-being also fills her. It takes a minute or two before she remembers why.
She dresses very quickly and dashes out of the house. Taking the road at a trot, she gets to the schoolhouse just as the last pupils are straggling out. She sees Orla and avoids her. Killer Jack spots her.
‘Pauline!’ he says, winking. She winces. ‘You’re looking well. Did you enjoy class this morning?’
‘I’m in a hurry.’ She says it as nonchalantly as she can, and keeps the chill she feels towards him under control. He seems to know too much. But could he?
‘Did you see Gerry anywhere?’ she asks, thinking honesty will baffle him.
‘Gerry, did you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s away down the road ten minutes ago.’ He looks at her quizzically, screwing up his eyes. What is this? Innocence?
‘Be seeing you!’ She runs off down the road in pursuit of Gerry.
He hasn’t gone far, exhausted as he is. About five hundred yards down, near the old well where children often stop to mess in the water, she finds him. He’s alone: the others are far ahead.
‘I wanted to say hello!’ says Pauline. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine. Why weren’t you in class?’
‘I slept in.’
He looks cross. ‘You’re ... they noticed. They wondered where you were.’
‘What odds? I was at home in my bed. I could have been sick or something.’
‘That’s what that girl ... the one from Dublin ...’
‘Orla.’
‘The fat one. She told Killer you were sick.’
Pauline nods. So he knew all right. ‘That’s good.’
Gerry sits down on the stone wall which surrounds the well. ‘I’m wrecked.’
‘Here, have a drop of water. It’ll freshen you up!’ Pauline bends to the well, a square of water set in slippery grey flags. She scoops up some of the cold water in her cupped hands and splashes it over Gerry’s head.
‘Ouch! That’s freezing!’
‘You need more of it!’ She douses him again.
ok. I feel wide awake now.’ He pats the wall beside him and she sits down. He takes her hand in his. ‘Can we do it again tonight? Like last night?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘We can surely.’
They stare at one another intensely, and Gerry kisses her, just for a second.
They have pulled apart and are walking along by the ditch when Killer’s car passes. He honks his horn and shakes his head ironically. Pauline waves at him. ‘Might as well act friendly,’ she says.
‘I wonder if he saw us?’ Gerry looks anxiously at the cloud of dust that the car has made.
‘None of his business, is it?’ Pauline tosses her head. ‘You’re still on for tonight?’
‘Oh yeah!’ Gerry’s voice is worried. ‘A few of the lads might come along.’
‘The lads?’ Pauline is taken aback.
‘Midnight feast sort of thing. They noticed me slipping out before. I think ... We’d better let them come along too. Maybe not tonight. But they want to come along, some night soon.’
‘Well ... all right.’ Pauline doesn’t care. She’s in love with the night, with the sea, with the risk, more than she is with Gerry. ‘Maybe I’ll round up some girls.’
‘The fat little ones from Dublin?’
‘You’d be surprised. There’s more to them than meets the eye.’
‘I hope so!’ laughs Gerry.
The burn scene five
Lunchtime. Sava is not at home, Pauline is not at home, Aisling is not at home.
‘Where is she?’ Banatee asks Orla. She is referring to Pauline. Aisling is accounted for; Sava has not been at home as far as Banatee knows since yesterday, but she guesses she is at work now, and she postpones worrying about her until this evening – Charlie has gone to the Crossroads to see if she is at Kathleen’s. But Pauline. Banatee does not know that Pauline has not been home during the night, she does not realise that she has hardly seen her in a week.
‘I don’t know,’ says Orla. ‘I think she is probably down at the school still. I think they stayed late today.’
She believes this. When she passed the schoolhouse on her way back home the scholars were still inside. She heard them singing. ‘Bheir Mí Ó’, everyone’s favourite. She’d sung it herself as she walked along.
‘I think they are having lunch at the school because it is the last Saturday,’ she says. As she says this it becomes true.
‘But they would have told us. You’d think they would have told us that, wouldn’t you?’
‘They probably forgot. I think we were supposed to tell you yesterday but we forgot.’
‘Oh?’ Banatee is not convinced. She frowns, worried, and hands Orla her plate of roast beef, which tastes as if it has been boiled for several hours, and soft boiled carrots. Orla eats them, wondering why Banatee does not ask what she is doing at home. But somehow Banatee does not think of this, because she has so much on her mind.
Orla savours the experience of being alone in the house. The space opens around her, the rooms, the corridor and the hall, and she feels more well-disposed towards them than at any other time. She changes her clothes since that is what the girls do, automatically, whenever they come home from anywhere, and walks around in the coolish interior, seeing it in a new light.
She decides not to go back to the schoolhouse this afternoon. The teachers think Orla is off with Aisling and her parents. If she returns to the school now, they will wonder what she has been doing all morning. Of course she could invent some excuse. She could say she got carsick, or that Aisling and her parents wanted to be alone for a while. She could say almost anything. Thinking about it fascinates her: an infinity of lies, of stories, opens in her mind. Anything she can imagine, she should be able to say. But she knows she wouldn’t. The kind of lies Orla is adept at are not stories, but silences. Evasion is her forte, not prevarication. Storytelling requires some quality that she is lacking – some courage, some acting talent, some bravura
she will never possess. She leaves the house and saunters down to the burn.
The water level in the burn is lower than before, since the weather has been dry. It is easier than ever to hop across the stones, and inside the tunnel rocks that before were not visible at all are suddenly apparent. Orla tries to walk down the burn without getting her feet wet at all, and for the first couple of hundred yards this is actually possible. The ceiling is as green and close, the air as dim and mysterious, as before. The weather can’t change that, since weather does not penetrate this cavern except by way of the water.
She goes down past the place where the raspberries were, past the waterfall and the pool she has never jumped into. She feels no desire to jump into it now, either. Indeed she laughs with relief that there is no pressure on her to do so.
‘I’m alone!’ she says aloud, in a low voice. Then she says it louder: ‘I’m alone!’ She hears her voice in the cavern, its loud tone and then a small green echo: ‘alone alone’.
‘I can do what I want to!’ she says.
‘want to want to.’
‘ I can do anything I want to!’
‘want to want to.’
‘Whatever the hell I want to.’
‘want to want to.’
‘Whatever the fuck I want to.’
‘want to want to.’
‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck.’
‘uch uch uch.’
She has never said fuck before. She did not know before that she could say it, or harboured any wish to do so.
‘Fucking hell fucking hell fucking hell,’ she says, walking down the burn. The echo answers. ‘Bleddy murderers bleddy murderers.’ She tries out all the taboo words she knows. ‘Fuck and bleddy and bloody and bastard.’ She does not know very many, as a matter of fact, since people didn’t at that time. There was a greater variety of curses and imprecations. Good heavens and Oh dear and drat at one end of the spectrum. Elizabeth said things like You have my heart scalded. And Mary Mother of God. And For two pins I’d give you such a hidin. And You little pup you. The very worst words, concerning the devil and sex, were left for the exclusive use of extremely angry or extremely uncivilised men. Still, there is a surprising store of words in Orla’s head that have never before emerged into the light of day, into the sound of day. Her own ears. She has hardly ever heard her own voice, listened to her own voice, and it gets louder and louder, clearer and clearer, as she gets used to it.
‘You little pup you!’ she shouts. ‘You have me heart scalded!’ Scalded scalded. ‘For two pins I’d redden your arse!’ Orla has never before said any of these things, but she has heard them often enough. What she says is Oh dear and Oh golly and Gosh. Oh glory. Good grief. She doesn’t bother shouting these now.
’They say that in the Gaeltacht
The food is quite all right,
You ask for bars of chocolate
They give you bars of shite’
Shite!
Shite!
Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
She begins to feel tired, and the damp greenness of the burn seems to be seeping into her stomach, pressing upon it. The shouting has exhausted her. It is as if something is dragging her whole body down to the water, as if all her blood were going to her feet instead of rushing around her arteries. She is in the middle of the burn, standing on a substantial moss-enslimed rock, but she begins to make her way to the bank. That tangle of briar and hazel and weed looks precarious, soft, insidious. Anything could lurk there but she knows that at some stage under all the mess she will find solid earth and just at this moment that is what she needs.
‘This darksome burn, horseback brown!’ she says as she moves towards the bank. But her voice is not loud any more. All the energy has been drained out of it and she feels sad at heart as well.
’His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.’
She is on the bank, her foot sinking into wet greenery and finding under it, soggy clay. She perseveres and takes a few steps in the mushy ground. It drags too, but she is relieved momentarily to escape from the water.
On the third step her foot strikes something very hard. It does not feel like rock, however. It is harder and smoother than that.
She shuffles her foot around and then moves on a step. On the next step her foot feels the same shiny hard thing under it. She begins to scrape with her feet, pushing away the grass and weeds. A white stone begins to emerge. White, smooth as a pearl.
She knows what it is. In fact she knew, really, when her feet felt the shine and the smoothness the first time. Horror does not overcome her at all, but curiosity, and she brings her hands to the job, pulling and scraping.
Skulls. Half a dozen, a dozen, small round white skulls. Tiny skeletons, with bones as delicate as the pieces of Airfix model airplanes.
Blood
A spot of blood marks her grey pants like a bright poppy.
She knows what it is. Elizabeth has had the sense to give her some advance warning. In response to a query from Orla when Orla was ten, sparked off by her curiosity about the visit of the Blessed Virgin to Saint Elizabeth and the babe in Saint Elizabeth’s womb leaping for joy, Elizabeth had supplied a chequered and not strictly accurate account of some of the facts of life. For instance, she reiterated a few times that the very worst thing that could happen to any family was that their unmarried daughter would get a baby, but she did not explain how exactly this phenomenon could occur. Orla didn’t know. ‘But I thought you had to be married to get children?’ she had asked, to which the answer was ‘Well...’ followed by a conclusive shrug. Elizabeth had also mentioned that every month the womb is cleaned out and then you bleed for a few days. More biological details were not offered, not because Elizabeth wanted to withhold information but more likely because she didn’t have any and, oddly enough, didn’t seem to feel any lack on that account. Elizabeth belongs to the class or generation that doesn’t ask questions, and Orla to another category of humankind, the category that does.
But there was a lot she didn’t query with regard to this matter of periods. At the time it had seemed like a remote, theoretical issue. Orla had assumed that she would never be visited by such a bizarre and outlandish experience. Practical advice was not sought, or offered. So now she has only the vaguest notion about how to deal with the substantive problem: that bright red spot.
Orla has nothing. No equipment, no money. If she had money she wouldn’t anyway be able to get sanitary towels. There are none for sale in Tubber. Actually there are none for sale between Tubber and the nearest chemist’s shop, which is twelve miles away. Whatever women in Tubber do, it probably does not involve sanitary towels.
She tears a T-shirt in half and uses that. It bundles up awkwardly and precariously but it is better than nothing. She could ask Aisling for advice. She knows Aisling has already got them, because Sandra told her: Aisling had told Sandra about it, confidentially, and Sandra told Orla, and half their class, more or less straightaway, a whispered secret, mildly scandalous, it had seemed to Orla at the time. Scandalous and embarrassing. But also triumphant. It was embarrassing to get them, but more embarrassing not to. The girls in the class, one by one, had let their secret leak out. She’s got them! She’s had them for ages! She got them when she was eleven! Shame and success inextricably mixed together, shrouded in a delicious mysteriousness. Open secrets, gleaming red, half-hidden.
There were many reasons for avoiding discussing them with Aisling. But Orla has noticed, occasionally, that Aisling gets quiet and preoccupied and smells slightly strongly of eau-de-Cologne, and of something else, warm and earthy.
Orla has no cologne and she doesn’t think she smells of anything. Yet. But she has got them. It’s an occasion for panic, but her delight is irrepressible. All last year she pretended not to hear the whispers in the classroom, which indicated to her that she was being left behind. Half the girls had them, including two or
three who are younger than Orla. Orla the freak. Orla who might never get them, be mysteriously overlooked by nature, forgotten about.
But it has happened. Nature has not abandoned her. She is not going to be left out of the circle of real girls and women. Like all the rest of them she has been given her badge. Unlikely as it seemed, she is going to be a normal woman.
Orla walks down to the céilí, a little late, with half a T-shirt rolled up between her legs. She is alone: Pauline and Aisling couldn’t wait for her. Orla had not told them what was wrong, but had managed to annoy them by acting oddly, hogging the bathroom for most of the evening.
As soon as Orla enters the classroom she catches sight of Bean Uí Luing standing near the record-player, talking to Killer Jack. Tonight Bean Uí Luing is wearing a white flowered dress, an embroidered shawl; her lipstick is bright crimson, and she is laughing heartily at some joke he has made. She looks, just now, kind and pretty and sensible. It crosses Orla’s mind that Bean Uí Luing would know about periods. She probably has them herself. Maybe she would be able to help Orla? Maybe she should go up to her and ask?
‘Fallaí Luimnigh!’ yells Killer Jack.
The boys scuttle across the room to the girls, She sees Gerry passing Pauline and asking another girl to dance. Pauline stares at him as if she had never seen him before in her life. Are they having some sort of quarrel?
There isn’t time to investigate. Alasdair bears down on Orla. Within minutes the ranks are formed, the record-player creaks into action, the feet are thumping the floorboards. Bean Uí Luing herself is out, dancing in the slow heavy style of older people, hand in hand with Headmaster Joe. Orla and Alasdair meet them when they are halfway through the steps. She dances towards the teacher, she dances back. Bean Uí Luing is walking the steps now, her feet in white patent shoes shuffling instead of hopping. Her eyelids are powdered with dark green eye shadow and she is wearing thick mascara, which makes her look unfriendly. Orla smiles at her as she and Alasdair pass on to the next couple. The smile is not returned. Maybe Bean Uí Luing didn’t notice Orla’s timid grin? Or maybe she dislikes Orla? Can’t stand her?
The Dancers Dancing Page 21
