She cannot take her eyes away. And neither can he.
They stare at one another for what seems like a long time.
‘Micheál!’ It’s his father, Charlie. He pokes his head around the side of the byre. ‘What’s keepin ye?’ He sees then, Charlie does, and he withdraws, redder than usual in the face.
‘I saw her the other day. Your Auntie Annie.’
‘Did you?’
‘Aye. She was in a bad way. She’d fell on the floor of the barn so she had and she couldn’t get up.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘Them bad legs of hers.’ He looks at her closely, but not unkindly.
‘Is she all right?’ Orla asks.
‘Aye. I helped her up and back into the kitchen. She’ll be fine.’
‘Good.’ Orla feels relieved that she was not dead. Relieved and disappointed at the same time.
‘Ye could go down to see her,’ he says. ‘So ye could.’
‘Yeah. I will.’
He turns to go, but before he disappears in a flash of smoke mumbles: ‘Um, are ye going to the céilí mór tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ says Orla quickly. She hasn’t any choice has she? The céilí mór or any other céilí is obligatory. She dances with Alasdair at céilí though. Not muintir na háite, the people of the place.
‘Yes.’ she looks into his eyes again. ‘Yes. Are you?’
‘Aye, maybe,’ he says. ‘Maybe I’ll be down at the burn later on ye know, fishin. I’d see ye there. Down near your auntie’s,’ he says, as he turns on his heel and follows his patient cattle home.
Auntie Annie has a crowd in
After tea Orla washes her hair and rubs it furiously with the towel. She puts on her green cords and asks Aisling if she may borrow her blue and white T-shirt.
‘ok.’ Aisling gives Orla a puzzled look. She has never made such a request before. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve nothing to wear,’ says Orla, who spoiled two of her T-shirts before she got the things from Sandra. ‘I’m in a mess. I’ve got my visitor, out of the blue.’
As if she’d been getting them all her life.
‘Oh glory!’ Aisling sighs. ‘Well if you need any, you know, I’ve mountains of them. Mummy gave me about ten packets.’
‘Thanks but I’ve loads too,’ says Orla. ‘I mean you never know when you’ll need them, do you?’
Aisling looks at her oddly but doesn’t pursue the matter.
Orla continues, ‘Actually, I’ve to go and visit my aunt, you know, the aunt who lives down by the shore, before the céilí.’
‘Oh yeah.’ Aisling only vaguely remembers the aunt. Orla and her funny relations.
‘You know, your mother gave me something for her, from my mother.’
‘Right. Can I come as well?’
‘Well ...’
‘My parents brought you to the café ...’
What can Orla say?
‘All right,’ she capitulates wearily. Aisling hands over the T-shirt. It’s tight on Orla, but in it, in Aisling’s T-shirt, she feels very well. The cotton is thicker, the colours purer, than any she has ever had herself.
‘Suits you.’ Aisling eyes her thoughtfully. ‘You should get one of them yourself when you go home.’
They walk together along the road to the shore, dawdling in the evening light. They pull fuchsia from bushes and suck the honey from the tiny pistils, and pink dog roses to put in their hair.
At the shop Aisling stops to buy a choc ice. Orla waits outside, sitting on the wooden windowledge, looking at the mixture of houses opposite: a thatched cottage side by side with a small bungalow roofed with red Spanish tiles. She likes the bungalow better. That’s where she’d love to live, in a little bungalow like that, with a cheerful red roof and big picture windows. It surprises her that the cottage has not been knocked down. Most of the old houses have been, and just as well too, in her opinion. ‘Sure people had no comfort,’ Elizabeth says, in her wise-old-owl voice. ‘No comfort. It’s all very well ...’ It’s all very well, oh yes, it’s all very well, it’s all very well.
Aisling buys two choc ices, one for Orla.
‘Gosh!’ Orla is flabbergasted. ‘Gosh, thanks.’
‘Seeing as you’ve no cash ...’
‘No. And I won’t have now either.’
‘Ah well, only a day to go, can you believe it?’
No.
Micheál is at the bridge around the bend at Auntie Annie’s.
‘Oh glory!’ says Aisling. She’s been saying that for a few days, oh glory. ‘What on earth is he doing here?’
Orla betrays nothing, she believes, although Aisling notices that a change of mood has occurred. Micheál is standing at the bridge, staring into the water as if at some spectacular sight, a drowning man perhaps. He is dressed in his white shirt, or a white shirt, again, and has also put on a waistcoat, not too fancy, and his cowboy boots.
‘Cool Hand Luke!’ whispers Aisling. It is at that point, as she says these words, that she realises.
‘Hello.’ Orla decides to be reckless and utter this brave speech.
‘Hi.’ Micheál takes his eyes off the burn and looks at her. She forces her eyes to meet his, although now she knows what effect this has on her. The burn babbles along under the bridge; it has a babyish sound here, a happy baby gurgle.
‘I’m calling around to em em Annie’s.’
‘Och aye yer Auntie Annie.’
‘So ... eh ...’
‘Och I’ll drop in meself. Say hello.’
Orla feels something break inside her head, like the shell of an egg. Her big secret is disintegrating. Micheál, Aisling and Orla troop across the yard and into the house.
It’s dark inside, as in all the old, small-windowed houses. And, despite the lack of sunshine, it’s hot in the kitchen, where the range is burning brightly. Auntie Annie is seated to one side of it, and on the other are Killer Jack and Bean Uí Luing.
Orla and Aisling exchange surprised glances, and Aisling mouths ‘Oh glory!’, her eyes and lips stretching into a suitable O of amazement.
‘Caidé mar atá sibh?’ asks Killer Jack, sounding like a normal person, not a teacher.
‘Táimid go brea,’ mutters Orla.
‘Isn’t this the lovely cosy house?’ Bean Uí Luing, in one of her brilliant red cardigans, has her feet stretched out to catch the heat from the flaming turf fire. ‘It’s the nicest house in the whole valley, I always think!’
‘Yes,’ says Aisling. ‘It’s a real country house, isn’t it?’
Orla looks at the ticking sunray clock, the uneven rocky floor, the painted dresser stocked with blue plates and an odd assortment of ornaments: a yellow and white shaggy dog, a brilliant blue woodpecker, a little girl in a Dutch bonnet sitting by a nut-coloured wooded stile. She looks at the bare bulb dangling from a twisted wire in the middle of the ceiling. Can Aisling and Bean Uí Luing be serious? Who could find a single thing to praise in this gloomy, old-fashioned, ridiculous house? A house that Orla has often wished would burn to the ground and be forgotten for all time.
Aunt Annie jumps up from her chair and gives Orla a hug. Orla’s first impulse is to pull away – this is certainly what she would do if she were alone with Auntie Annie. But all eyes are upon her. She must submit politely to the tortuous embrace. Auntie Annie’s funny face brushes her skin; her warm, work-hard hands caress her shoulders. For a second Orla shudders with revulsion. Then something inside her head relents. The warmth of her aunt sinks into her shoulders, the touch of her skin feels familiar and desirable. Orla closes her eyes and sees Elizabeth. Feels Elizabeth’s arms around her, feels her hands washing her face, brushing out her hair. Soon she will be home with her mother. She will sit in the kitchen with Elizabeth and tell her everything, everything good and everything bad that has happened during this holiday in the Gaeltacht. They will talk English and drink tea and have a laugh together.
When she opens her eyes Micheál and Aisling are staring at her. Killer Jack is fi
ddling with a tape recorder on the kitchen table. Bean Uí Luing is drinking tea.
Auntie Annie thanks Orla for the elastic stockings, and then starts to get more cups and plates for the new visitors. She clatters around the room, banging the cups and saucers down on the table, looking every minute as if she is about to drop something. Usually this clumsiness and lack of co-ordination nettle Orla so that she has to leave the room. But nobody else seems to notice.
‘So she is your aunt?’ Killer Jack leaves his tape recorder and, lighting a cigarette, looks at Orla as if she were a curious plant.
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t know that. I’ve never seen you here before.’
‘No.’ Orla isn’t sheepish. She just tells him the truth. ‘I didn’t have time to visit her before now.’
‘I see,’ he says, nodding sagely and puffing clouds of smoke across the table, where Auntie Annie is buttering brack. The smoke makes Orla want to cough but she does her best to prevent this happening. Allowing anything as noisy as a cough to emerge from her mouth when teachers are present would be anathema to her, even now when she feels more comfortable with them than she ever has before.
Micheál and Aisling are sitting at the back of the kitchen, one on each side of the wooden chest Annie uses for layers’ mash, with a gap of red wood between them. They gaze happily at the kitchen, of which they have a good view, but maintain absolute silence.
‘How is yer mammy?’ Auntie Annie asks, in her now low, now high voice. Bang-crash goes a cup and saucer.
‘She’s well,’ answers Orla.
‘What’s that?’ Aunt Annie is deaf. That is another one of her defects. Even when you find something to say to her, she can’t hear it.
‘She’s well,’ Orla shouts.
‘And yer daddy?’
‘He’s well too.’ Orla shouts on. Micheál and Aisling allow themselves a tiny smile, which Orla does not see.
‘And how’s Roddy?’
‘He’s well too.’
‘Is he at school?’
‘He’s on holidays.’
‘What?’
‘He’s on holidays.’ Orla yells. ‘He’s at home in Dublin.’
‘Why didn’t he come to the Irish college?’ Auntie Annie pours boiling water from a battered kettle into a teapot. Her hand shakes and the water splashes the buttered brack. But nothing more disastrous occurs.
‘Oh gosh!’ Orla looks desperately at Aisling, who grins encouragingly. ‘He just didn’t. I think he didn’t want to.’
She is tired of the conversation now, but so is Auntie Annie. No more seems to be required.
Aunt Annie pours out tea for everyone, Aisling jumps up and helps pass round the cups, and the buttered brack.
‘Yum!’ says Bean Uí Luing. ‘This is the nicest brack I ever tasted.’
Orla goes to sit between Aisling and Micheál on the red chest. They eat and drink, chatting softly. The warmth of the room increases and the clock ticks loudly on the mantelpiece. Orla finds her sense of well-being burgeoning. The room encloses her like a cradle, warm and old and dark and comfortable. Peace seeps into her soul from the mellow walls, the rocky bed of the floor. Flames flicker in the range, spoons clink against plates, voices rise and fall in meaningless chatter: it is a tune that has been played in this kitchen often before. For hundreds of years. Right here in this room.
Killer Jack changes the tune. ‘Time to do some work!’ he says, depositing his cup on the table and plugging the tape recorder into the socket high in the wall over the range.
‘All right!’ Auntie Annie plonks herself in a chair at the table and smiles at him happily.
‘What are you doing?’ asks Orla, spontaneous for once.
‘Annie is going to tell me some stories.’
Orla can’t believe her ears. ‘Oh?’ is all she can say.
‘And it’s fine with me if you stay and listen, isn’t it Annie?’
‘Wha?’ asks Annie.
‘You do not mind if they stay and listen?’
‘Wha?’ asks Annie. Orla rolls her eyes to the ceiling. This deafness!
‘They would like to listen to the stories. Do you mind?’ he shouts at the top of his voice.
‘Och no sure I don’t mind.’ She sounds like Orla’s father. That’s exactly what he would say.
‘Well, there’s the céilí,’ Orla murmurs. Nobody hears her. Nobody ever hears her. She waits for somebody else to say the same thing. Aisling.
‘Well I’m afraid we’d better be getting back to the céilí. It’s late,’ Aisling announces. Bean Uí Luing looks at her watch.
‘I didn’t notice the time passing!’ she says. ‘I’ll give you a lift, girls, if you like? I’ve got the loan of Headmaster Joe’s car.’
‘Oh yes!’ says Aisling, before Orla can stop her.
Micheál refuses the lift, somewhat to Orla’s disappointment. He stays sitting in the kitchen while the women say goodbye and tumble out under the low portal to the yard.
‘Bye-bye!’ yells Orla to Auntie Annie, who sees them to the door.
‘When will you call again?’ Aunt Annie asks, wringing her hands nervously.
‘I’m going home soon,’ Orla says. ‘But maybe ... I don’t know. Maybe sometime soon.’
Aunt Annie nods, confused. Orla gets into the car. Bean Uí Luing reverses out of the yard, and Aunt Annie waves at them until the car turns the corner and drives away.
‘You’re lucky, to have an aunt who lives in a house like that,’ says Bean Uí Luing.
‘Oh yes!’ Aisling smiles at Orla. ‘It’s really lovely.’
The car is moving quickly along the narrow road, between the dangling hedges of rose and fuchsia. Orla looks at the dark lilac hills, low and regular as hills drawn by a child’s hand. She looks at the little cottages sinking into the fields that spread from the foot of the hills like blankets. She wonders if Aisling and Bean Uí Luing are lying.
People tell so many lies to other people in order to protect them.
But she does not know if they are lying or not. And she realises, not for the first time, that it doesn’t matter one way or the other.
Aunt Annie’s house, her father’s house, has many flaws. It has a cobbled-together, home-made feel to it, as if it had been built haphazardly from whatever bits and pieces of stone and wood had been found lying around the valley. It is old and awkward, poor, simple and eccentric, like Aunt Annie herself. You could be ashamed of all that, or pleased with it.
This evening the house had felt warm and comfortable. Aunt Annie had stumbled and twitched, shouted and whispered, as always, in that strange, jerky, unpredictable way of hers, that frightened Orla and made her cringe. But her arms had been warm when she had held Orla in her embrace. Killer Jack was interested in what Aunt Annie had to say, and Aisling hadn’t, as yet at least, passed any critical remarks about her. Bean Uí Luing had praised her baking.
For once all the flaws of her aunt and her aunt’s house seem insignificant. Orla is content.
The field
The field is unkempt. Like most fields in Tubber, it has lain uncultivated, unspoiled by human hands, for twenty or thirty years. It teems with flowers and grasses, seeds, feral fertility. Golden fat-eared rye grass, fuzzy fennel grass. Button buttercups on coltish stems, foxgloves of deep shellfish purple, open to the sun. Prickly hedgehog clumps of clover, white and mauve, frothing meadowsweet, banks of the yolk-yellow flowers known to children as scrambled egg. Into this field Micheál leads Orla.
‘Let’s sit down,’ he says, indicating a patch of field. She sits down. The grass seems to grow around her, high, curtaining.
He sits beside her.
She listens to the air moving in the grass, to the grasshoppers singing. The air is full of the smell of seeds, of meadowsweet, of foxgloves. In the next field, flax sways, blue as waves.
Micheál puts his arm around her shoulder.
Her heart pounds. Her head, her body, her blood are filled with a sweetness like the raspbe
rries on the bank of the burn, like the salt water caressing her skin, like the sun in the high blue sky, the stars, the drooping dog roses, unimaginably pink, blossomy. Music from golden fiddles.
She puts her arm around his waist.
They say nothing.
They sit arm in arm, side to side, in the long grass. The grasshoppers sing their endless creaking summer song. The blackbirds call. The burn babbles on at the end of the field.
Orla hears none of this, sees none of it. And hears all of it, sees all of it.
The hedge circles around the field, hemming them in, a perfect O of hawthorn and bramble. For half an hour, for eternity, they sit at the centre of the world.
Teenage fun
‘Tonight!’ Pauline whispers in a moment of grandiloquent generosity, recklessness.
‘Humph?’ Orla is cocooned in soft, sweet thoughts. Micheál. The burn. The field full of buttercups. The water lapping against her skin. So locked in is Orla that she hardly hears people talking to her sometimes, most of the time. Knock knock wakey wakey, they say. ‘Um?’ she says, opening her eyes wide, shocked, unwilling to leave the happy hotbed of her daydreaming.
‘Tonight after supper.’ Pauline is regretting already. Too late. ‘In the yard, ok? Bring Alasdair?’
‘Alasdair?’
‘Oh never mind!’ With luck it won’t happen.
But it does. Even down to Alasdair, in his maroon jumper with his bat ears shining in the moonlight, a bottle of Coke and a packet of fags clutched carefully to his bosom, at the gatepost of his banatee’s.
Then the midnight ride through the silent valley and the boathouse rising like a ghost of itself from the beach.
Dreamy it is for Orla, who has never been on the shore at night, never dreamt such a thing possible. Such disobedience, such risks, such craziness. In the boathouse, the fire flickering, bottles everywhere, accumulating night by night; it’s a wonder nobody notices them by day but they don’t apparently.
The Dancers Dancing Page 23
