Skin Deep

by Liz Nugent

  On the day, some local girls my own age were brought to the Millers’ house to play with me while their mothers clucked in the kitchen with Mrs Miller. There were no girls my age or any younger on the island, and I realized quickly that I was prettier than any of them in this village. They brought me presents – plastic bracelets and comics and sweets – and they fought over who was going to be my best friend. I accepted their gifts, like a queen. They sang me a birthday song and there was a cake with tiny candles on it. I didn’t want to blow them out, but the girls said that I could make a wish come true if I did. I got a pain in my tummy having to wish only one wish. I wanted to live in this house, with shops close by, but on the island with Daddy and wearing my new clothes, but maybe Dr Miller could be there too. I had only one wish though, and I know people who are dead don’t come back, so I wished that Dr Miller would adopt me.

  Clara came back and forth at weekends, and I resented having to give up her bedroom for the small colourless boxroom which was used to store old tins of paint and a wooden stepladder. She tried to be nice to me, telling me the names of her old dolls, but I wouldn’t talk to her and when she and her father tried to have a conversation, I wrapped my arms around his waist and put my head into the curve of his lower back. I hated it when I was sent to bed in the boxroom, which faced on to the street and from where I could hardly hear the sea. I often crept out of my room afterwards and sat at the top of the carpeted stairs to try and hear what they were saying, because I knew they would be talking about me. But the walls were thick, nothing like the thin wooden panels in our house on the island, and I could barely make out a word except for when the door opened or closed.

  One night, I heard Clara say, ‘I think it’s unnatural, Dad, the way she clings on to you. You’ll have to let the social workers take over, and soon.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Clara, the girl has suffered a huge emotional trauma! You’re not going to go far as a doctor if you can’t tell that much.’

  ‘But, Dad, think about how it looks. You, and a strange child who is overly affectionate …’

  I felt pleased with myself. People were fighting over me, just like home. I went back into Clara’s room, threw her things off the bed and got into it, settling again to the sounds of the sea.

  I woke up in the boxroom. Somebody had moved me in the middle of the night. I hoped it was Dr Miller. I went down to the kitchen to find Clara and Mrs Miller chatting quietly. They stopped abruptly when they heard me.

  ‘There you are,’ said Mrs Miller in her fake-cheery way. ‘Somebody must have been sleepwalking last night!’ I ignored them and went into the sitting room to find Dr Miller in his pyjamas reading the newspaper. I tried to climb into his lap, but he pushed me gently away.

  ‘Now, Delia, I think you’re too old to be sitting on my lap, a big girl like you.’ So, Clara’s words had made an impression on him.

  I sat beside him on the sofa and wrapped my arms around his neck. ‘I love you, Daddy,’ I said. He removed my arms and placed my hands firmly on my lap.

  ‘Delia, I’m not your daddy. I can’t be. You have to understand … Angela and I’ – he was talking about Mrs Miller – ‘we’re too old to be parents to a young girl like you. You need a family like the one you had. Don’t you miss your little brothers? There’s a social worker trying to track down your extended family in America.’

  I was terrified. ‘Can’t I stay here? With you? I have five pounds. I can pay you?’

  He turned away from me and shook his head sadly.

  That night, I crept into Clara’s room and, again, I got into her bed. Daddy had said that I could be whoever I wanted to be, but it wasn’t working. Dr Miller didn’t want me, because he had Clara, and she was his best girl. A sense of injustice overtook me that didn’t allow sleep to touch it. The bedside light was on and I could see Clara’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe, her records stacked neatly beside the chest of drawers. Her poster of the Bay City Rollers was pinned to the wall, her collection of old magazines and comics piled high under the window. I’d show her. I started by pulling the poster down off the wall and ripping it to shreds. Then I got a pair of nail scissors from the dressing table and scored it across the grooves of each record. I tore the magazines apart with my teeth and cut holes in the clothes in the wardrobe. I pulled everything out of the chest of drawers and threw the contents all over the room. I pulled buckles off shoes and cut necklaces in half, and I enjoyed it all until the door opened and Clara stood there, her mouth open in disbelief at the scene of devastation before her. I smiled sweetly at her.

  She flew across the room at me and grabbed me by the hair. ‘You little freak! You weirdo! Why would you do this? We’ve been nothing but kind to you. Freak!’ She let me go and I walked calmly past her and went into the boxroom and closed the door behind me. I heard her shouting and sobbing, and I heard her parents trying to calm her in the corridor outside. They didn’t come into my room or check that I was all right. And then I was too furious to sleep.

  My mother’s family in America could not be contacted. She had cut ties with them eleven years earlier when she refused to come home and married my father. She never did write that letter to her mother, it seems. It is likely also that no big effort was made to contact them, because they were not Catholics, and it was Father Devlin in those days, in that place, who decided such things.

  Two months after the death of my family, I entered an orphanage for girls in Galway. I kicked the shins of Dr Miller and his wife as they tried to say goodbye. I couldn’t believe their betrayal. Mrs Miller sobbed and held on to her husband as they left the building.

  The clothes she had packed for me were confiscated and I was given a washed-out cotton smock, a woollen jumper and grey underwear. I don’t know what happened to Clara Miller’s clothes, because I never saw them again. My waist-length hair was cut to my neck. ‘We don’t want you getting lice,’ said the hair-cutting nun, ‘and you’re still like a picture so you are, without it.’

  I wondered for the millionth time why nobody from the island had come to take me home. The residents of Inishcrann had always been a family, despite the feuds and arguments that gave life to the place, but no one came. I heard the head nun say that a ten-year-old from an island known for its poverty and madness might be a hard sell to the childless couples of Ireland. The demand was all for babies, the younger the better.

  There were girls and women of all ages there. Some had never known anything but the institution and had nowhere to go when they reached the age of sixteen, and so they stayed on as unpaid servants in exchange for their bed and board. The nuns who ran the orphanage were not all bad, but there were harsh rules imposed by the girls and women left in charge of us. I shared a dormitory with five other girls, of a similar age to me. One of them was deformed in her back and another was deaf and dumb. After lights out, we were not allowed to get out of bed, and consequently there was a lot of bed-wetting, punishable by beatings.

  Some of the older girls would enlist us to help look after the babies, to clean up their sick and soak their disgusting nappies in buckets of bleach. Most of the nuns hated the babies as much as we did. My strongest memory of those months is the sound of children screaming and crying. Food was scarce, but as I was prettier than the rest they made a pet of me, and I made sure I didn’t starve. One of the nuns gave me a doll, and I was the envy of every other child because nobody else had a doll. I was commended for the fact that I did not cry or complain. But as poor as our lives were behind those tall iron gates, the conditions were better than they’d been on the island. Much as I loved Inishcrann, in this place I was warmer and the meals, though meagre, were regular. I was no longer the queen of the island, but I would be queen of this orphanage.

  We went to the primary school in the building adjoining ours, but apart from that we never went beyond the front gates. At recreation time during school, we were released into a stone yard, where we fell and cut our knees, or pulled the hair of younger girls and ran
away from the older ones who would try to do the same to us. Prayers punctuated every day. We thanked the Lord for the rags on our backs, for the food on our plates and for the thin blankets that covered us at night, but I had already stopped believing. If Jesus could raise Lazarus from the dead, he could have stopped that fire from killing my family. Jesus only did miracles for people he met nearly two thousand years ago. He didn’t care about those of us who lived on Inishcrann. I was in charge now. I told this to Sister Eileen, and she said it was a shame that a beautiful girl like me would mock the word of God. I thought it was God who was doing the mocking, but I knew better than to say it out loud. She assured me that I would be adopted, despite my age. ‘The pretty ones always go first, and you’re not illegitimate either, so you’ll have a better chance,’ she said. I didn’t know what illegitimate meant, but I assumed that it meant damaged or deformed in some way. And at that time, it did.

  After a few months, I was visited by a couple called Moira and Alan Walsh. They adopted me on the spot and I didn’t object. I would have walked into the sunset with Attila the Hun to get away from the crying babies. As I left the forbidding Victorian building, I pressed my doll into the hands of the girl who was the next prettiest after me. Her eyes shone with gratitude.

  Daddy told me there was a time long ago when no male child had been born on Inishcrann for ten years and every new girl baby was greeted with wailing and lamenting. One winter’s day, an old widow woman called Kathleen Rags found a newborn baby boy at the foot of the long stone, Dervaleen’s Bed. The baby was alive and squealing and nearly blue with the cold.

  The baby should have been cause for great celebrations, but no woman on the island would claim him as her own. Kathleen Rags took him to the chieftain, and all the women of childbearing age were herded into the old barn that stood there before Biddy Farrelly’s bar existed. The men waited outside while the old widow woman examined them. She eventually declared that three of them could be the mother of the baby but couldn’t be sure which one, so they were each made to suckle the child to see if the child could draw milk. All three women leaked milk from their breasts though they hadn’t a child between them, and the women protested that the child was a changeling and insisted that the old widow woman put the child to her own breast to see what happened. Sure enough, Kathleen Rags’ breast began to engorge until a black stream of blood poured forth from it. Then the baby began to sing in a voice the like of which they had never heard before. The women were startled out of their wits and ran screaming out of the barn.

  The men got involved then, but because it was a boy-child they were reluctant to blame the baby and instead had the three women and the widow stripped and beaten. The chieftain’s wife, who had recently given birth to a girl of her own, was instructed to take the baby and feed it herself as an example to the islanders, but the strange baby’s appetite was ferocious and left no milk. She protested that her baby girl would die without sustenance and begged her husband to take the foundling child away, but the chieftain and all the men were so enchanted by the little boy’s singing that he ignored his own wife. The boy-child suckled until he drew blood from the woman’s breast, and developed a thirst for that which couldn’t be quenched either.

  Even after the baby girl died and the chieftain’s wife was being lowered into the grave, the chieftain would not yield up the foundling. Other nursing mothers were rounded up, and though they screamed and protested, the child was latched to their breasts until four of them too were emptied to the marrow of their bones. Still the baby sang and thrived, and his voice cast a spell on the men which made this sturdy boy seem more important than their sisters and wives and daughters.

  It was Kathleen Rags herself who called the women together. At her great age, she had nothing to lose, she said, but they would all soon be dead if they did not cast out the evil that the boy had brought to the island. That night, she stole into the house of the woman that the boy was now devouring and took him away to her own cottage on the westernmost side of the island. There she threw the boy on to the sods of turf and flames and heard his last song. When he was naught but ashes and bones, she emerged from the cottage and returned to the village to find all the men gathered and weeping for the loss of their women. The spell was broken, but the remaining women took a long time to forgive.

  Daddy said it was five full years before any baby was born, and the first birth thereafter produced twins, a boy and a girl. This was a sign of great good fortune and the island was finally at peace once more.

  Never trust a foundling child, Daddy said.

  5

  I went to live in Westport, only about two hours’ drive away from Cregannagh. The Walshes’ house was smaller than the Millers’ and stood on the Upper Quay, overlooking the bay. There were multiple cushions on every chair, sofa and bed, and I wondered what my mother might have done with such things. I had a bedroom of my own from where I could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway below.

  In the beginning, the spaces between the seconds seemed like hours and there was this yawning chasm of time stretching out before me, with nothing to fill it. No boys fighting and yelling, no Daddy to sing me to sleep and tell me the long-lost stories of Inishcrann, not even a mother to call me ‘Daddy’s girl’ in her sarcastic drawl. Just Moira and Alan, who seemed so old compared to my mother. They wore matching cardigans in a house where the walls were so thin that even when they were whispering to each other about me, I could hear every word they said.

  ‘She’s as odd as two left feet.’

  ‘Leave her be, she’ll settle in. She’s a great beauty though, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh yah, bound to be a heartbreaker when she’s a bit older. I hope she’ll settle with us.’

  ‘Sure, who else would have her?’

  ‘The poor craythur, her family all burned up like that, how will she get over it?’

  ‘We have to give her time, and breathing space. Don’t be constantly asking her if she’s all right.’

  ‘But she never answers me.’

  ‘She’s an islander. They wouldn’t tell you anything unless it was forced out of them. And stop trying to hug her. She doesn’t like it.’

  They introduced me to their friends as their niece who had come to live with them. I asked them why. Alan suggested it would be best if I told everyone that they were my aunt and uncle, as there might be a stigma attached to being an adopted child. ‘Let’s just say that I’m your father’s cousin, all right? You can call us your aunt and uncle.’

  ‘But why?’ I asked.

  Alan said, ‘Because adopted children often come from parents who aren’t married, and we wouldn’t want that kind of shame attached to you.’

  Moira interrupted him: ‘Some people might think like that, and it’s unusual, you know, to not have a family to take you in, so let’s just say that we’re your family and then there won’t be so many questions.’ She beamed at me. My surname was changed officially from O’Flaherty to Walsh.

  Uncle Alan was a small and pale man, so unlike my father that the thought of sitting on his lap or being his favourite girl made my stomach flip. Aunt Moira was stout, taller and fair. They were an ugly kind of couple and I was surprised that they seemed to like each other so much. I didn’t think anyone would believe that I was related to them.

  I tried siding with one, and then the other, but they made all of their decisions together. Initially, I favoured Aunt Moira over Uncle Alan and stopped talking when he entered the room, clinging to Aunt Moira when he approached me, but they mostly ignored my efforts to divide and conquer. Nothing could shake this couple, or their devotion to me. However, I didn’t always get what I wanted and had to do chores to earn pocket money to buy the things I wanted. Later, I realized that Aunt Moira didn’t like the fact that Uncle Alan spent so much time in church, going to Mass daily. I began to ridicule him, repeating some of the things Mammy used to say about religion, but Aunt Moira came to his defence and docked my pocket mon
ey for being disrespectful. Eventually, I had to accept a life of boredom.

  Aunt Moira liked to talk a lot. She told me she had been an only child and had inherited money from maiden aunts, so they were reasonably well off despite their ordinary lifestyle. At Mass, though, we sat midway down the church, which told its own story as to our status in the town. Uncle Alan insisted we say the rosary on our knees every night and go to confession once a week. Aunt Moira wasn’t as obsessed about the prayers, but she said I was a blessing they should be thankful for. Aunt Moira had a gaggle of women friends who were loud and jovial. They came every Saturday afternoon with cakes and laughed for two hours and then went home. I got the impression that Uncle Alan didn’t approve of them, but he was a quieter soul.

  I went to the local school and tried to hide as much as possible. The school terrified me at first. In my school on the island, there had been five children in total and I was the only girl. In this school, there were equal numbers of girls and boys and the children were divided up by age. There were three different classrooms, each packed with twenty-five to thirty children. The noise was upsetting.

  I never warmed to my new parents. In the eight years I was in their home, I never let them get close to me. They did every single thing they could to please me, and I repaid them with silence and a blank expression. I did not smile. They had me in and out to doctors of course, but I was stronger than all of them. At ten years of age, I knew I could be anyone I wanted. I just hadn’t decided who that was yet.

  Eventually, I got used to the school. Some of the other children thought being an orphan was cool because they’d read The Secret Garden and The Little Princess. When I read these books for myself, I realized that their parentless heroines came from wealthy, aristocratic backgrounds and that made me feel better. When the girls questioned me about my parents, I shook my head because there was nothing I could say. Nothing I wanted to admit. But the girls grew even more curious. As the shock of my loss receded though, I began to enjoy the notoriety. They wanted me to tell stories of how my aunt and uncle were cruel to me, but I wouldn’t oblige.