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‘… it was on our fourth visit to the house that we finally succeeded in gaining access. Miss O’Connor, who struck us as being very nervous throughout the interview and seemed to be of a somewhat neurotic temperament, opened the door after we had been knocking for fifteen minutes. We had great difficulty in persuading her to allow us into the house.
Finally, having taken our identification cards and examined them for several minutes with the door closed, she opened it again to let us in.
The majority of the furniture and fittings therein seemed to date from the mid sixties and were very worn in appearance although in a clean condition. Miss O’Connor stated that she had lived alone since the death of her father sixteen years previously, and that she had one brother, two years older than her, whose present whereabouts were unknown but whom she believed to be working somewhere in England.
When we explained that the purpose of our visit was to investigate reports from several neighbours who suspected that a second person (whom admittedly, they had never seen) might also be living in the house and could possibly be in need of medical attention, Miss O’Connor again replied that she lived alone. She seemed to indicate, in her own mind at least, that there was some kind of conspiracy against her in the street, and cited some not very coherent examples of this which dated back to the death of her mother in childhood.
At our behest, Miss O’Connor showed us around the house which consisted of two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, and a small bathroom and two bedrooms upstairs. One of the latter was locked, because, as she explained, she had ceased using it several years previously. She tried a number of keys in the lock without success, and then insisted that we return to the kitchen, where a search of various presses yielded up a number of old keys. She asked to be excused while she tried them. A few moments later she returned to inform us that one of these fitted.
The room had thick curtains, was lit by a single naked light bulb and was permeated by a somewhat unpleasant and overpowering smell. It was bare except for a carefully made bed and a single straight-backed chair. There were no personal possessions or items of clothing therein to suggest that it was occupied, although the absence of dust would appear to indicate that Miss O’Connor had spent some time in it recently.
The room, and indeed the whole house, had a rather oppressive atmosphere, and while we found no evidence there of anyone other than Miss O’Connor, we do feel that she is under grave emotional pressure of some sort, possibly rooted in loneliness and/or schizophrenia. Thus, we would recommend some back-up from the Social Services. However, this is outside our jurisdiction and we would suggest that her case be passed on to the relevant section within the department …’
My mother was a good woman but she left me in a house of men. When I grew I grew inward in ignorance and fear. The nuns in school were kinder now, but how could you ask them advice or questions? We got a lay teacher the year after that who would take us out on walks.
I loved when she’d bring us through the church grounds and down the main street of the village to the foot of the road into the west. It was like a frontier leading up to new estates named after patriots where gangs of youths were said to roam. Once I was carried up there by the bus and ran down as if caught behind the iron curtain. Miss O’Flynn knocked to get the keys of the graveyard at one of the two old cottages there, and we watched the three Alsatians in the compound beside the steps snarling as they flung themselves against the wire with their teeth bared.
Inside the gates it was overgrown, unlike the cemetery outside our window, with the slabs over old crypts broken in two and faded tombstones lying smothered in weeds. Within the ruins of the ancient church the new shops in the village were framed through the ivy-covered slats where windows used to be. When Miss O’Flynn rang her little bell we all ran through the graveyard towards her, and she’d gather us into a circle around the cross and tell us the story again.
In my mind’s eye I could see it as she began to talk, the cross standing, a thousand years ago, at the top of Watery Lane, marking the boundary of the village and the monastery. And remaining there through centuries of nights and days until the curse of Cromwell blighted the land. Whorls of cloud are veiling the moon as the villagers carefully uproot it in the night. The stonemason slowly cuts it in two and the cart covered in straw creaks down the village street in the darkness. A man with a lantern keeps watch from the graveyard steps. I’d imagine myself as a small girl concealed at the back of the silent cluster of watchers as the two gravediggers wait beside the black mound of freshly dug earth. Reverently, as if burying the soul of their village, they lower the twin pieces of stone down into the grave.
Then the conspiracy of silence settles over the village to save the cross from desecration. It is never mentioned again in public as though its name had been erased from their vocabulary. Decades crumble into centuries and nothing is said. In the earth the cloth rots away, worms nose the final threads, the stone returns naked to its first love-bed. It no longer exists, except as a secret in the mind of the oldest man in the village, who received it in a whisper on his father’s deathbed.
Then I’d imagine myself again as a small girl just before the turn of the century. I’m laying flowers on a grave in the spring sunshine when the old man walking on two sticks enters with the rector. Matthew, Miss O’Flynn said his name was. He never hesitates for a moment. Slowly but steadily he shuffles over to a sward of grass in one corner, indistinguishable from any other, and bangs his stick down on the spot. Finally the words kept unuttered for centuries are spoken. Like a man yielding up his life’s purpose Matthew stares at the rector’s face and proclaims, ‘The Neather Cross is buried here.’
The rector doesn’t know whether the old man is doting or if he should believe him. Still he is afraid to move from the spot. He commands the verger, whom the old man has insisted must remain outside the gate, to fetch some men with shovels from the fields. I’m hidden behind an old tombstone watching the pair of them who never speak as they wait for the men. The rector rubs his hands nervously together while the old man rests on his sticks, confident and yet seeming to tire as though the life force was draining from him. His face is dark, strong-boned, his features the same as the man I always imagine two centuries before holding the lantern for the two gravediggers in the dark, the same as old Turlough down in Watery Lane whose cottage is the only one left standing in the hollow now.
A man called McEvoy brings a spade from the cottages nearby and another man joins him from the fields beside the wood. There is no sound in the graveyard except the soft incision of spades into the soil, until after half an hour the clank of steel striking stone rings out, sharp as a cry fresh from the womb. Carefully they scrape the clay from the top of the stone until the worn ancient carvings are revealed once more in the light. The rector and the two men examine them excitedly, only I notice old Matthew walking slowly away.
These days when I cross the huge metal bridge above the carriageway that roars down through where the wood used to be, I pause above the ruins to examine the cross. It’s forgotten now of course, nobody here is interested in those things. On Sundays I climb those steps and stare in through the railings, but when I gaze at it I never imagine I’m that little girl any more, watching the swinging lantern or the shovels glinting in the sunlight. I think that the pair of us are that cross buried somewhere in the earth and maybe only still alive in somebody’s mind. We’re waiting here in the darkness for him to find us, like a splintered stone that needs to be set together again.
The street riddled with porches and extensions. Hedges are gone now, front gardens cemented for cars. The top windows overlook the cemetery and the rivulet joining the Tolka beneath a new bridge. One house is grown derelict. Two women wait inside it in the hours before dawn, one huddled on the cold lino beneath the torn curtain, the other leaning forward on the single chair, her fingers constantly intertwining. One speaks in a low voice, urgent but indistinct, one stares back as if not listening and living only in her own thoughts.
Everyone was talking about him in school then. How he stayed there for three days buried alive in his coffin. There was a tube leading down into the earth through which he was able to breathe, and he had taken along books like Dracula to read. I couldn’t understand anyone wanting to stay down there. For three nights the pair of us stood at that window, thinking of him breathing out there alone among those ranks of crosses, surrounded by decomposing bodies. His picture was in the paper when he broke the world record, clutching a bottle of champagne with the cemetery railings behind him. But I could not get him out of my mind.
To frighten me one night Johnny told me stories, corpses dug up with splinters of wood crushed beneath their fingernails, and shattered teeth smeared with blood where they had tried to bite into the lid. I had a new dream now at night, the coffin is being screwed down and I am unable to move my head or cry out to them. I keep beseeching them to notice the terror in my eyes, but they talk on sorrowfully among themselves as they box me in.
I’d scream and scream awake and Daddy would come in. He’d put his arms around me and say, ‘Mammy is with the angels now.’ But my fear was so embedded that I was afraid to tell him, as if even to speak those words would make them come true.
At the end of the long gardens the hedgerows began, huge rucks of branches and leaves that one could crawl underneath, and there in a nest of dried leaves it was like a submerged cavern. Three or four bodies could climb inside and play their games in the secretive hedgelight. One boy always lay with his head outside, watching the row of kitchen doors for danger. Johnny would vanish there now and refuse to bring her. She’d watch him wiggle inside from an upstairs window. He’d grow silent when she questioned him, in the darkness of their room.
One summer morning she followed him down, creeping through a neighbour’s garden so as not to be seen. She lay on the far side of the hedge, stealthily pushing aside branches to peer through. Three boys squatted naked by the light of a small candle, their hairless bodies shockingly white in the light. Johnny’s face was turned towards her, his body excited as he watched his two companions begin to rub their buttocks together. The twigs snapped beneath her fingers, the naked boys anxiously grabbed their short trousers. As she turned to flee the look-out raced round the hedge to catch her and push her struggling down the leafy tunnel.
‘Spy,’ one of the boys shouted, ‘you were spying on us!’ Johnny dressed himself, white faced and ashamed. ‘What will we do with her?’ one of the others asked, and the boy paused and replied, ‘If she saw us, she must take her clothes off and take the oath to become part of our club.’
She started crying as she squatted here, surrounded by them, and it was Johnny who took her hand and said, ‘Leave her alone, we’re going home now.’ He led her out into the fresh air, beyond the gardens, and they walked down silently to where the rivulet glinted between trees. ‘What were you doing?’ she finally asked, and he threw a stone into the water and said, ‘It was a game.’
He sat on the bank beside her and went on: ‘It was a club. We swore loyalty to each other. We’d each make up tests of courage and have no secrets between us.’
The pair of them climb upstream over the rocks. By the green light of an overhung pool they kneel down and swear secret faith and loyalty to the Joh-dras. He carefully plucks the leaf of a wild nettle and they solemnly give each other a single sting on the white exposed skin of their buttocks, the badge of courage, of blood brother and sister against the world.
Daddy wore his mourning quietly, as if his grief was a stigma that could never be revealed in public. I always seemed to be sitting in the living-room with my homework, listening to his slow desperate pacing of the floor above. We more or less had the run of the house and he would never say a word, but his presence and his grief was always there as though accusing us. Everything I did was done to please him as if I carried guilt around on my shoulders. It seemed like he was balanced on an invisible window-ledge and one mistake or wrong word would push him off.
Three times a week he caught two buses to the scorched earth of Mount Jerome cemetery and every other evening went walking by himself. After tea he worked in rubber boots in the garden, manicuring the lawn as if he could only speak through its ordered shape. It was only when we went out that he’d grow stern, checking our clothes and nails to show the road that he could cope. Often when I played on the street I’d sense him watching from behind the curtains to make sure that I wouldn’t let him down, and afterwards, at supper, he’d quiz me slyly about things neighbours might have said to their children.
He never went back to the street where he was born, to the two rooms we had lived on in after his mother’s death until we moved here. The friends I remember calling to see him in the flat were never mentioned. His life before this place seemed something sordid to be locked away.
There was an election called then, and when I walked to school men were clambering up ladders to stick posters on every pole. Cars toured the street with loudspeakers. It was the first time I saw Daddy bring people into the house that used to be full when my mother was here. A poster was stuck in every window, and each night two men called for him with bundles of printed leaflets. He’d be cross if he found Johnny and me playing with them, he’d hoard them to his chest like money.
One day I found a torn Labour poster like a fallen leaf on the pavement. I loved its design of stars and red colour. When I brought it home he almost struck me, as if I had carried an ikon of the Antichrist into a cathedral. When the election was over the men never called, the energy of those few weeks seemed to drain from him. On Saturday when he took us shopping into town, he stood reverently aside to let the former schoolteacher, now a Dáil deputy, stride by without returning his respectful salute.
Every year it never seemed it would come until it was suddenly there. The buses throbbing outside the gates as the girls march up the steps in their Sunday clothes. At Tara or Clonmacnois they are lectured on the historical sites, and then the nun claps her hands for them to scamper down the gravel path towards the tiny shop where crisps and toffees and chocolate are drowned in a sea of hands. On the way home they travel, exhausted, through the alien green landscape. There is a fight for window seats and the girl beside her leans over to be sick. Spilt milk is souring in the heat. They sing in the queasy smell of the summer evening.
The morning before fifth class breaks up, with Miss O’Flynn at their head, they parade through the empty streets towards the countryside. The dark-skinned old man watches from his cottage wall beneath the roadway as they pass the red barn and start to move through the fields. Loose gravel sprays beneath their rubber soles, they point out the farms where there is work in the autumn. Some of the girls hold hands and sing, Now she won’t buy me – A rubber dolly! At Pass-If-You-Can they turn up the hill where the flooded quarry glistens blue in the light. A girl winks at friends and turns to Sandra.
‘My brother was swimming in there once and he saw two sharks.’
Her wide eyes gaze out at the water and back to their straight faces.
‘And there’s a hidden tunnel since the Penal Days from the castle to the old graveyard in the village.’
Girls whisper behind them, ‘Listen, they’re winding mad Brigid up.’ Cows graze in the castle grounds as they climb the curving stairs to the battlements. Her throat is parched from the walk, the blouse stuck to her with sweat. She stares out at the countryside divided up into squares of colour, the blue tar glinting between trees, the outskirts of the city three miles distant. The breeze is fresh against her face as her head starts to spin at that height like a hermit in the desert being tempted by a vision of the world.
I always promised myself afterwards that it would be the last time. I was so resolute that it seemed nothing he could do in the future would break my grip. I remember how the moonlight would slant into the room and I’d lie here occasionally hearing footsteps. I’d think anyone out at that time of night must be embarked on some sort of adventure. Johnny would be curled up back in his pyjamas beside me with his body so hot it was like a furnace to touch. He always fell asleep immediately afterwards, mumbling a few words as he untangled himself and turned to the wall. It wasn’t long after my eleventh birthday, and I’d think of our two guardian angels hovering, wounded and disappointed, on both sides of the bed.
Daddy thought nothing of us sharing the one bed, especially after the nightmares I used to have. It was as a badge of courage that I’d first undressed, like as in all the other games of dares. Johnny’d saved up his pocket money to buy a packet of birthday candles. He’d light one on the dressing-table to make it exciting. In the half light it was just like those old games of marriage. I’d imagine him as my husband coming home tired from work. In the darkness it was more sinister, his actions more frightening, more like a stranger. One step, two step, the bogeyman is coming, his hands pushing mine downwards towards that hard and slippery thing. I’d enjoy the excitement then, his breath coming fast against my ear, his hands never still.
It was afterwards that I’d lie awake, knowing that what I was doing was wrong, and terrified that there might be some way for people to guess my sin. I’d think of my father in the next room, how his face would crumble in if he ever knew. I knew that I had let him down, and grew more guarded now and withdrawn in school.
The single candle is stuck with wax on to the top of the chipped dresser. Its small flame lengthens and draws in the shadows along the walls of the room. They lie curled together against the cool sheet below and the rough warmth of blankets above, her feet drawn up into his stomach as she allows him to peel each nail of her toes, just the scratch of nail cutting through nail filling the silence. Then the light clicks in their father’s room and they pause for a few moments before they tentatively begin.
The blankets are tossed down below their knees, her nightdress slipped up above her head. His hand stroking across her thigh, he suppresses her giggles with his lips. Both close their eyes, retreat into their separate illicit fantasies – her husband coming home to her from work – he draws her hand down to the rigid penis – his own girl in a doorway down the dark side entrance of the Casino – where the first light hairs cluster around its base. Stiff with the thrill of fear and excitement they lie, afraid to creak the bed springs, until he grimaces in his cramped position, his mouth pushed into her hair to stifle the panting as his limbs overspill with pleasure.
She watches the white stains settle over her naked stomach, feels his body relax as he turns and drifts towards sleep. The cloth is tucked beneath the mattress, she shivers as she wipes herself, the husband’s knock, his bicycle ticking down towards the shed, the first kiss on her lips in the sparkling kitchen, all gone, all gone.
We were in a classroom in the cellars of the church, down a granite flight of steps. The windows had thick hammered panes of glass and so the light had to be left on all day. Every morning I was sent up to the big school with another girl to fetch the crate of Government milk. We’d feel so important that last year to be let out alone, walking through the scraps of bread after break in the concrete yard where the seagulls swooped and clawed at each other. In winter the milk would often freeze, and when you raised the half pint to your lips you’d suddenly swallow raw chunks of ice.
Miss O’Flynn frequently switched into Irish and the whole class would keep our heads down because we couldn’t understand what was being said. The times I loved best were the singing lessons, when she would unzip the small fur-lined bag and produce her green-and-cream Melodica with keys like a miniature piano. She’d blow the dust from it with a single shrill note and arrange us in rows against the back wall to accompany us through every hymn in our song book, Mother of Christ, Star of the sea, Pray for the wanderer, Pray for me. Those lovely and lonely words sung over and over to her methodic accompaniment till we had them perfect. I felt such joy and safety in being part of a group, a unified voice wafting up into the church where I imagined the women who had come to pray were listening to our singing coming faintly through the floor.
At three o’clock when the bell rang the class would burst out into the tiny passageway, fighting to be the first to crest the stone steps before scattering off in every direction. I would delay until I thought nobody was watching and then slip through the ornate wooden doors of the church. In the porch a stone staircase twisted upward like in a castle to the high balcony where the choir sat. Beside it a wire rack displayed small pamphlets on the lives of the saints and the dangers of marriage outside the fold. Just inside the inner doors there were two small altars with statues and a twisting metal candlestand. Old women always knelt there, whispering loud indistinguishable prayers.
I’d genuflect with my head covered and walk to the top of the church where the two side aisles were always empty. The left one would be drowned in deep shadows and the right transfixed by afternoon light igniting the coloured squares of stained glass.
All alone in that mesh of light I’d pray, trying to recapture the holiness and union with God that I once used to feel. But though I tried to prevent them, my eyes would always stray up towards those white marble limbs of the crucified Saviour on his cross that would remind me of Johnny’s ivory white body against mine in those sessions I had failed to end, and the shame and guilt would rush in.
Those blood-stained eyes stared mournfully down at me from beneath the crown of thorns as I knelt, tiny and insignificant, in the third row from the end, and I knew that unless I confessed my soul was damned. Yet every fortnight when I entered that black box with rows of impatient classmates waiting outside and Miss O’Flynn overseeing it all, how could I begin to tell the bored voice on the lit side of the grille the sins of touch from the night-time and the blasphemy of sight on those despairing afternoons? I’d emerge doubly condemned for the sin of false confession, cast out by fear from my second family until Johnny’s was the only company I could still fit within.
johnny johnny hung on the church wall. johnny johnny had a great fall. all the king’s horses turned bright red, when mammy loved johnny johnny in bed. always the same, story the same, school and job, and death and pain. we know every word by heart, but when she leaves our fun will start. frightened by that open door, let in the bogeyman from the stair. must stay quiet, must not speak, till mammy mammy is down the street.
I suppose Johnny was always just weak, although I never recognized it then. A few years later on I remember catching a glimpse of him one night in the National Ballroom in town. We had gone off to see the Clipper Carlton Showband but couldn’t get in, so we’d wound up there without him knowing it. I was standing up near the stage to gaze at the Mighty Avons when I saw him hovering in front of a girl with a stiff beehive, trying to work up the courage to ask her to dance.
He was so slow and obviously nervous that her friends began to giggle in the chairs beside her and she became embarrassed. Then he asked her in a rush and seemed almost relieved when she snubbed him and he could merge back into the crowd as if it had been the high point of his night.
But back when I was eleven or twelve he was a hero because, even though he was bigger, he never looked down on me and I felt important and wanted in his company. Besides, I was at an age to want to know and there was nobody else to tell me things. Poor Johnny, always laughing and joking when we were alone, and then quiet in company like you’d think he was in bad humour till you realized he lacked a single shred of confidence. Always tucked up in the centre of a crowd of lads as if living off their collective bravado. For all his air of knowledge I suppose he knew as little as I did in those days.
Stillness reigns when the key is turned in the lock. The woman’s footsteps turn to descend the stairs, pausing every morning to listen for sounds before the glass rattles in the panel of the front door as it is slammed shut. The noise reverberates through the floorboards up into the dark room where the girl lies, and all the glass there seems to take up the echo and quiver until the very air is vibrating with sound. She never moves from the mattress, but beneath her closed eyelids she can feel the roof descend. Walls advance and begin to spin as the bed springs undulate like a rippling tide. Breathless with excitement, she waits for her friend to visit her.
He calls her name through clanging coat-hangers, there is no danger – she can answer him. He is both older and younger than her. He has no age. He has lived forever. He tears apart all the colours that form black; dissolving reds and blues spin in glowing bands around the room. Nothing there is stationary any longer, he breathes his life into the woodwormed furniture. And nobody can reach her inside that cocoon, she is deaf to the shouts of children playing outside. She never has to warn him when to leave, johnny johnny knows when his time is done. He knows that he can never be forgiven, he knows he must remain her secret lover. Slowly he gathers himself up, softly the bed springs are reined in. Only darkness remains in the room when the girl’s eyes flicker open and the woman’s footsteps come.
After tea one evening I began to get cramps as I was washing up. It was like a dull sharp pain that would never end. I climbed up to this room and lay on the bed frightened to call for help. When I ran my hand gingerly up along the inside of my dress my fingers were smeared with blood. I was sure it was the consequence of the deeds I had committed with Johnny, our secret finally being made public.
The blood seeped out until I thought I was about to die. Johnny came into the room looking for something and stood staring at the stains of blood where my hand touched the coverlet. I wouldn’t let him touch me or tell him what was wrong, so he shouted down to my father who fidgeted awkwardly at the foot of the bed. Embarrassed, he pushed Johnny out of the room, told me to lie still and left me alone.
For ten minutes I waited, listening to the stillness of the house and then Mrs Whelan arrived, still in her nurse’s uniform, and took my hand. She cleaned me up and dried my tears, and sat beside my bed for two hours talking and teaching me the names of things.
‘I’m only around the corner from you, Sandra,’ she said, ‘you know if you are ever worried you can come to me.’ For a moment I almost told her everything and then I stopped, afraid to lose her esteem.
‘I’ll be okay, thank you,’ was all I said, and she smiled back as she left the room. Johnny came up when she was gone and began to take spare blankets from inside the wardrobe. He said Daddy had told him to sleep on the sitting-room sofa until he had time to buy a single bed for downstairs. He paused as he told me and stood at the door with the pile of bedclothes in his arms. I know he wanted to say something but for the first time in our lives there seemed nothing more to say. I turned on my side away from him and heard him click out the light and reluctantly close the door of this room on himself.
Without him the bed was empty and huge. Alone for the first time in its depths I listened to the footsteps on the pavement outside and this time I knew where they were all going as if the innocence of my childhood had been washed away now that I was a grown-up woman of thirteen.
Stately as an ancient courtier, the retarded man with the stick bids her enter the peeling gates. Every Sunday afternoon since she was a child he has stood sentry at the entrance to the lane between the church and the school. This is where she comes to be alone on the Sabbath when all the shops in the village are closed. Nobody lives on the main street any more, the car-park of the vast, guarded shopping centre covers the site of the last few cottages and the post office. Graffiti on the high walls of the lane proclaim Bob Marley’s immortality, lovers pledge themselves with aerospray cans and illicit armies canvass support. She turns to watch him run his stick against the bars of the gate and behind him sees the figure of Turlough approaching.
The gaunt old man stares at her like the guardian of her childhood. She feels safe when he watches her as if somehow Turlough knew every secret of her life and yet did not condemn. The weekends are the worst for loneliness, the deserted main street, the empty playground beyond the wall, all reinforce her isolation. Only the lonely, withered figure of Turlough, who never speaks, seems to recognize her, seems to tell her that she is not alone in her story, that she is part of something greater, that there are others as abandoned as her.
For some reason his eyes always bring her solace as they stare at each other, while the shambling retarded figure between them smiles as he twirls his stick against the bars, lost inside his private nightmare.
Won’t you even move a little closer to me? Rise up from the floor and get back into bed? I could make you cosy if you only tried. Remember I’m your mother, I want to look after you. Will I tell you the first joke I ever heard?
‘Will I tell you a joke – a bar of soap! Will I tell you another – a pound of sugar!’
I suppose they’re silly, but we used to laugh at them when we were small. Do you know what I’ll tell you? I’ll tell you my first job, you’ll like that.
We were the biggest class in school and that summer we had to sit our primary exam. We never raced around the playground like the smaller girls now, we huddled together in the open shed laughing at jokes we were afraid to show we didn’t understand. One girl kept watch to see who the boys, pressing themselves against the wire and wolf-whistling, were staring at, while the rest of us pretended to ignore them.
The McCormack twins always smelt offish because they were already helping their mother who worked an evening shift at the processing plant. We’d tell each other the jobs we all wanted to get and sympathize with the two girls whose parents had the money to put them into secondary school.
On the last day the Head Nun came down the steps into the cellar to make a speech. She called us a credit to the school and hoped that what we had learnt would always stand us in good stead. There was a wide world beyond this classroom and though we would not notice the years flying till we had children of our own, whether here or in England, we’d still always be her little girls.
We gave three cheers for the nun and three cheers for Miss O’Flynn, and presented her with a box of milk chocolates that she shared out amongst us. The nun led us in a final prayer and reminded us that faith was the most precious gift we would ever receive before opening the door for us to file out into the summer light.
For the last time I walked up those steps with Kitty Murphy, our arms entwined, and we imagined ourselves in just a few years standing at the gates of this very school, leading our own children down to enrol, and how we’d laugh about old times with the familiar figures smiling in their black hoods. We paused at the corner to embrace and moved off like blood sisters with the wetness of her tears mingling into my own as they rolled slowly down my cheeks.
The smell of lacquer always clung to her clothes and hands even though she scrubbed them for hours each night. In the hot stifled atmosphere of the salon she brushes up the piles of shorn hair from the floor to be packed into boxes and sold to wig manufacturers. She trains her hand to be steady as she pours the cheap lotions into expensive jars for resale, and her feet ache as she runs from chair to chair, setting out clean towels and combs while the customers gaze at magazines from beneath the whirling dryers.
Autumn sunlight flashes against the windows of the buses in the street below the cramped rooms where meekly she obeys the commands of every member of the staff who, on her one half-hour break in the day, introduce her to the alien taste of coffee and allow her to marvel at the colour pictures in the pile of English women’s magazines.
Of course, I gave my wages every week to Daddy and from it he’d give me pocket money. In the evenings after work I could go walking in the street because I was free from homework. The films in the Casino were now becoming over-sixteens and I loved to watch the couples queuing there for the evening show.
It was only a matter of time before a boy would come along and at first, I’d be coy but finally I’d agree. He’d pay us into the 2/6d seats where I would let him take my hand, and afterwards he’d offer to walk me home and we’d take the dark side of the main road, over beside the stream and the trees on the bank, and he’d hold me against a trunk to press his lips on to mine.
After a few minutes I’d protest and he would stand back to apologize. I would give him my hand as we’d step again on to the path and when he left me at the gate, I would rush into the dark sitting-room to watch him standing across the street maintaining a lonely vigil beneath the lamp-post.
I’d go to bed, and all those memories of Johnny would be banished as I’d fall asleep dreaming of that young man out there waiting for me. But no boy ever asked and I’d never have been allowed to be seen on the street in such company. The door would be locked on me at nine o’clock and no amount of pleading would get me back in.
Acne and bristles and cigarettes. Johnny rarely stays at home now. Each evening he merges into a gang of mates, shouting from the open platforms of dark green buses. In the Astor, they wolf-whistle Brigitte Bardot in A Very Private Affair. In the Bohemian, Rock Around the Clock is being revived. They spend hours sharpening the tips of steel combs to rip out the seats during the theme song.
In the twisting streets around Stonybatter, small pubs welcome the scrum of under-age boys. At weekends they spend most of their wages there and queue in the greasy fish and chip shops of Phibsborough before strutting the two miles out by the cemetery with catcalls at the couples walking home from dances. They piss in front gardens, ring doorbells and empty dustbins along the main road. She hears him come in at two o’clock in the morning and waits for the light switch to click off in her father’s room.
On Friday nights, voices are raised in the kitchen as he demands Johnny’s wage packet, and when Johnny has stormed out, slamming the front door, her father comes in to her with his face white in the first shock of defeat. They sit in the chairs on both sides of the fire with only the flames and the red lamp in the corner to light the room, and listen to the voices on Radio Eireann, the farming reports, and whine of accordions and asthmatic tin whistles in strict and monotonous three-four time filling up the silent room.
They let me go in the hairdressing salon after the six months when they had promised to make me permanent. I stayed at home for two days while Daddy made enquiries. On the third night, he told me to report the next morning to the drapery shop in the village.
I was six months there behind a counter piled with patterns and balls of wool, when a letter came in my name calling me for interview to the new shirt factory below the village. He had never told me he had even applied. I was taken on with a hundred and twenty others.
The plant was brand new, everything so spick and span, and there were loads of girls just turned fifteen like myself. They let us play the radio all day as we sat at the machines and the older women came round with baskets to collect the finished garments. The Beatles were coming to Dublin and there was such excitement in work you couldn’t imagine. Two of the girls had tickets and walked around like queens, while the rest of us arranged to meet up and stand outside the Adelphi to try and catch a glimpse of them.
There were thousands there, pushing and milling, and then as the first show came out, the fighting began. The girls behind me started pulling my hair to get up nearer and the police charged down Abbey Street after the gangs of boys. I fell in the crush and cut my knee open. A policeman pushed the people back and lifted me out as I put my arms around his neck and clung to him in terror. They brought me home in a squad car, crammed with other girls who’d been hurt.
All the way home I prayed Daddy would be out, but he came to the door when the car pulled up. He looked so slight and feeble there with shame in his eyes as if the world was slipping away from him. He grabbed me by the hair in the garden and pulled me inside until he was pressed right up against me in the hallway. I could feel his breath as he raised his hand and I cowered, waiting for the slap to come down across my face. Instead, he just lowered it again and shook his head.
‘I’ll lock you in that room upstairs,’ he said, ‘till you learn not to disgrace me.’ And he grabbed hold of my coat and pushed me ahead of him up the stairs. I was sobbing and tried to put my arms round him but he just shoved me on to the bed in this room and unscrewed the light bulb. He locked the door and left me sitting in the darkness. It was a Friday evening. From the window I could see the young people coming home from the pictures in groups, singing and enjoying the last drags of cigarettes before they reached their houses. And later on, the couples from the dances, on scooters or on foot, quiet now and anxious to avoid notice, standing against the dark leaves of the bushes fronting Mrs Finnegan’s house with their arms around each other and only their mouths moving.
Johnny came in and I waited, hearing him ask where I was. I could hear their voices raised in argument, followed by the sitting-room door slamming. Then my father’s feet came, one step, two step, like the old bogeyman. Was he coming to forgive me? Was he coming with his belt to beat me? The steps went into his bedroom and I heard the door close. There was complete silence in the house, yet I knew none of us were asleep. All night I kept waiting for Johnny to come. I’d say to myself, he’s waiting for Daddy to cool down, in another ten minutes he’ll climb the stairs. Or he’s searching in the kitchen for the spare key, any minute now he’ll come for me.
The darkness in the room was unbearable because I could not control it. I kept on imagining all kinds of things; my mother was sitting by the door in a chair, the furniture was swaying in the dark around me, floorboards were creaking on the landing. But nothing happened and nobody came, until finally towards dawn I fell asleep from exhaustion.
‘I’ll dream of them tonight,’ said the small, fat fifteen-year-old girl whose eyes were shining and forehead damp as she tottered out into O’Connell Street like somebody possessed.
There was a tiny man with a red nose and spectacles standing on a wooden box outside the Evening Press offices preaching about salvation. But he was talking to himself. Outside the cinema, a rowof stout policemen with their arms linked were heaving strenuously against a frantic sea of young people. Girls were screaming inside. They screamed at the pictures in the programmes or if somebody shouted ‘Beatles!’ The atmosphere was hot and sharp: full of power and perfume and a frightening excitement.
But when the curtain finally rose on THEM, the house erupted into one mad, thunderous noise, that continued right until the cries for more were drowned by the National Anthem.
This morning it was ‘B’-Day plus one as the city began to clean up the debris from the Beatles invasion. Motorists made their way through the shambles of Abbey Street, while workers replaced the plate glass windows which fell victim to teenage hysteria.
Trouble began after the first of the two shows when more than two thousand people leaving the cinema ‘mingled’ with those going in. Members of the St John Ambulance Brigade attended to injured people on the spot while crowds ran riot around them.
Said a Garda sergeant whose cap was knocked off by a flying object, ‘I have seen everything now. This is really mad. What can have got into them? You would imagine the country was in the middle of a revolution instead of welcoming four fugitives from a barber’s shop.’
On the Saturday morning I knocked, but Johnny had gone away to town. I could hear Daddy in the room below silently pacing. I kept crying out for food and water until he finally appeared. He left the tea and sandwiches on the dresser and never once spoke. I wished to God he would scream at me or beat me black and blue, but he punished me instead with his silence.
I had had to pee in an old vase of my mother’s that I was afraid to show him. By seven o’clock every muscle of my body was tense, my nails were bitten through, my head was drumming. I felt like the man in the paper who had been buried alive. I began to shriek like an animal and hurl myself against the door and that is where Johnny discovered me.
This is the bit the girl knows by heart. Where Johnny discovered me. These are the words she will say to herself in the long afternoons when the woman is working. Sitting in the chair watching over the bed where her nightdress is stretched on top of the sheets. She leans her head forward every time the story reaches here and gazes at the woman’s lips.
Johnny came home at nine o’clock and when my father wouldn’t give him the key, he went upstairs and kicked the door in. He found me lying in a pool of urine with blood crusted on my forehead. He carried me into the bathroom and locked the door, then filled the tub and sponged me down. I remember that his hands moved with a gentleness I had not thought him capable of. It was the first time he’d touched me in over two years.
He pulled a clean nightdress over my head and laid me back gently in my bed. Though I was groggy and only half-aware, I could feel a tremor in his hands as he drew the blankets over me and whispered, ‘Don’t worry, sis, I’ll look after you. I’ll never leave you alone with him again.’
