In the senior yard the girls were languid on window-sills and bike racks. Nowadays they wore skirts that gave them the wide-hipped silhouette of bored office women, whereas the tunics we used to wear pretended we were pure and rectangular, like playing cards. I caught a bawdy snatch of ‘Summer Loving’ from one knot of girls, and was suddenly struck by the oddity of 1990s girls performing a 1970s pastiche of a 1950s song that was one of the few points of continuity between my own schooldays and theirs.
The tennis courts looked dry and dusty; the nets were sagging in the middle. Outside the junior school one small girl I didn’t know pointed me out to two others, who exchanged a giggle. I passed near a group of skippers whose feet landed heavily over and over just after the rope slapped the tarmac. Only a couple of breathless voices kept up the chant:
I’ll tell my ma when I go home
The boys won’t leave the girls alone
Oh, but you won’t, you know, I wanted to say to them. You won’t say a word to your ma, because what good would it do to tell her about the boys? Wouldn’t you rather protect her from knowing how little she can protect you from the boys, the weather, or anything else?
I set my class to tracing maps of Italy (‘Rivers in blue pencil, girls, and brown zigzags for the mountains’) while I corrected last week’s essays. I usually got through the mound of English copybooks on Sunday evening, but obviously this weekend I hadn’t got the chance. It would hardly have given me peace of mind, after the phone call from the hospital, to have read thirty-one descriptions of ‘Dawn in the Forest’, most of which ended ‘Now it will live forever in my memory’. None of these girls’ mothers would ever have let them get up at dawn to prance around a forest, so they had had to use their imaginations, meaning their stock of dew-beaded, furry-nosed clichés. Saoirse Mullan had got the exercise number wrong – on purpose? I wouldn’t put it past her – and written on ‘The Old Person I Admire Most’, which at least was a break from the phantom forests. He turned out to be dead, Saoirse’s admirable grandfather; she listed his virtuous eccentricities and described his grave. She seemed to miss him. I decided not to penalize her for being in temporary thrall to the word ‘bittersweet’ – I found it a couple of pages back, in ‘Jerusalem at Dusk on Good Friday’ as well as in ‘Autobiography of a Seed’ – and gave her a V.G.
After I’d handed them back for the girls to whisper over their Goods and Fairs, it was time for the reading. I had this down pat. Girl in top-left seat read first paragraph – ‘Thank you, Mary’ – girl beside her read the next – ‘Take your time, Eileen’ then a switch to the opposite corner of the class just to keep them on their toes. When the paragraphs ran out I would clear my throat and say, ‘Well now, line one, what do you think he means by that, Alison, in your own words?’ This was the blessing of work, that without asking much of my mind it kept it humming along till half past three.
I went to meet Robbie ten minutes after the bell. The Pâtisserie was far enough from the bus stops so we wouldn’t be pointed at by sun-paled children in drooping uniforms. He was late. I established myself in one of the white plastic chairs outside, so the afternoon sun could massage my shoulders. I dropped my worn satchel on the seat opposite, and pulled up a chair beside me for Robbie, its back to the light. That way he would not have to squint as he looked at me; his long rectangle of a face would not be fearful and naked in the light.
‘Hello, hen.’
I peered up, and patted the back of the spare chair. ‘Sit you down. Can I buy you a coffee?’
‘Don’t stir, I’ll get it.’
As I watched Robbie rush into the café, his faded paisley shirt catching on the handle of the door for a second, I realized that he was coddling me. I supposed it was a metaphor; he really wanted to give balm to my mind, not rest to my body. He carried back two brimming cups and a plate of raspberry tarts and pains-au-chocolat.
‘Now, you’re not to say you don’t want one,’ Robbie warned me. ‘Stress burns up calories, I read it in a Sunday supplement.’
‘I’m really not hungry.’
Robbie’s face was creased with concern. ‘Try a tart,’ he said, tucking his hair behind his ears with paint-stained fingers. ‘The jelly is perfect.’
‘In a minute maybe.’
His day had been, in a word, boggin. The carved potatoes had dried up and he had forgotten to bring in any more, so Senior Infants had had to learn the joys of fingerpainting. Big Dom was on Robbie’s back about cleaning again, because some six-year-old had left a trail of blue footprints down the top corridor, unaware that she had trodden in her paint saucer. The chat drifted to pay freezes and how long it would take before we’d have earned career breaks.
‘Listen, this probably isn’t a good time to ask,’ he said suddenly, ‘but without your housemate, will you be able to keep up your mortgage? Or were you renting? If you need to find someone else right away, Sheila’s got a cousin…’
‘No, it’s, it’s not like that.’ My heart started to thud, the familiar symptom that meant my subconscious had decided to come out to someone without informing HQ. In a curiously detached way I could feel the kite-ribbons of language jerking up to my hand. ‘We were living with Cara’s father, it’s his house.’
‘So were you like a family friend?’
‘I was like a lover. I mean,’ correcting myself a little hoarsely, ‘a lover, not just like.’
Robbie’s pale eyes bulged. ‘Jesus Christ. For long?’
‘Thirteen years last May. On and off.’
‘But that would have made you just a wee girl when you two…’
I nodded, with a hint of a grin. It seemed odd that age was the variable that shocked him.
‘And how did Cara feel about it?’
An odd question. How to summarize the emotional weather of so many years? ‘Happy, mostly,’ I hazarded. ‘When she wasn’t bored.’
‘So she knew all along?’
I paused, the cooling coffee at my lips, and stared at him. ‘What, that she was a lesbian?’
Robbie had flakes of puff pastry all around his mouth, which was jutting a little open. ‘Hang on a minute. You’re telling me you’ve been having a thirteen-year affair with your housemate’s father, and that she’s a lesbian? Was,’ he corrected herself automatically, then winced.
I lifted a raspberry tart, concentrating on biting it neatly to stop myself from laughing. ‘Let’s take it from the top,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m the one who’s gay.’ I didn’t stop to gauge his reaction, but took a mouthful of coffee and carried on. ‘Cara too, though she didn’t like the word. We got together when we were doing the Inter Cert, and for the past few years we’ve lived with her father, who’s not having an affair with anyone that I know of. He’s a librarian,’ I explained.
Robbie’s cheeks were resting on his fists. ‘And this year’s Moron Medal goes to Robbie Brown. Sorry. I hadn’t a clue.’
‘Really? You made some joke at the Christmas party last year, about marriage or something, and I thought you might have sussed me.’
‘Not at all. I don’t actually know any…at least I didn’t think I…ach, shut up, man, you’re digging yourself in deep.’
We studied our plates. I pressed my finger on to fragments of pastry and lifted them to my tongue. Robbie was the first to look up. ‘That’s wild. Even better than the story of you and the middle-aged librarian.’
‘There’s hope for that one yet,’ I told him. ‘He makes a great soufflé omelette.’
Robbie was blinking into the distance, as if trying to get things clear in his mind. ‘Well,’ he said into his coffee cup, ‘aren’t you the woman of mystery?’
‘I never lied about it,’ I told him. ‘You’ve often heard me mention my housemate, and I didn’t invent any men’s names or anything. The L-word just never seems to come up at staff meetings.’
‘Funny, that,’ he said with a great snort. And then, nibbling on his long guitar-playing nail, ‘I suppose we really don’t know the first thing about
each other, even though we all share a building.’
I nodded, reaching for another tart. ‘These are good stuff.’
‘When did you eat last?’ asked Robbie.
I was surprised by my calculations. ‘This time yesterday.’
‘Ach, Pen, you mustn’t do that.’
‘I didn’t mean to,’ I told him, ‘I just lost the knack of eating.’
‘I suppose,’ he said, staring at the passing traffic, ‘it must be like when a husband or wife dies. Only less…official.’
I nodded. My throat was full of angry words, but they weren’t for him.
‘Thirteen years, you said. I just can’t imagine what it would be like if I was with Sheila for ten more years and then she…’ Robbie ground to a halt. ‘I’d better zip my gob; I’m probably making it worse.’
‘No. It’s good when someone tries to understand.’ Even if it takes a death to reach parity, spat the back of my brain.
He was staring across the main road again. ‘Sometimes when I hear an ambulance, I wonder if it’s her. But that’s just paranoia. I never seriously think of it coming true.’
‘Yeah, I used to do that.’ How urbane I sounded.
‘I don’t even know anyone – not anyone our age –’
I nodded, intent on the crumbs. ‘I did meet another dyke once’ (as soon as it slipped out the word embarrassed me, but I carried on) ‘who’d lost her lover in a motorbike smash. Someone told me about it at a party; I hadn’t the nerve to talk to the woman myself.’
Robbie nodded.
‘I wish now I’d talked to her. It’d be good to know what was normal for someone in my situation.’
‘Would you want to be normal?’ he asked, fingering a raspberry off my plate.
My eyes widened. We both started laughing at the same time.
‘Honestly, I didn’t –’
I interrupted him. ‘No, you’re dead right, it’s a bit late for normality now.’
By the time we had finished the last pastry between us, I had to be heading into town to meet my mother. Robbie gave me a lift in his little red Datsun as far as the canal, where he was turning off. I was glad to stretch my legs, after their day wound together under the chalky desk. I thought the air would be refreshing, but it was getting hotter; the ducks seemed to crawl over the sticky surface of the canal. After a minute of walking, the satchel’s old leather handle slid about in my sweaty palm.
Normal or not, maybe I did need to talk to someone. That was what one did nowadays, wasn’t it? Though I seemed sane enough to myself, maybe underneath I was cracking up. No one would notice till the day I drove into Immac stark naked and taught Fifth Class how to cha-cha. Then the white van would come for me, they’d make me decent in a hospital nightie and ask me about my childhood. Cara thought therapy should be available free from your GP. She insisted that everything should be shared and talked out – everything except what she didn’t feel like talking about herself. She used to bring home over-photocopied flyers with headings like An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Co-Counselling. I was always willing to try anything once, if only to prove to her that it wouldn’t work.
On a long wall on Leeson Street was stamped, over and over, Dublins beautiful keep it clean. I thought of adding Language is beautiful; keep it punctuated, then sighed at my teacherly intolerance and looked away. Dublin was undeniably beautiful today, the sun bringing out the red of the brick terraces, catching the fan-lights over the Georgian doors. Even the odd burnt-out building looked rather decorative, as if left over from a film set.
I decided to cut through Stephen’s Green, something that, being a driver, I hadn’t done in years. I had forgotten that bronze of the Three Fates placed just inside the gates; I stopped short to look at it. A toddler bumped into the back of my knees, then stumbled on, its mother twitching the reins. The Fates sat holding the inch-thick rope of life, one behind another, their black eyes gloomy but by no means malevolent. Their hands were palms outermost, as if to ask, what do you people expect of us anyway? Water gushed from the rock they were sitting on. The youngest one had a drugged smile; scissors idle in her lap, she seemed to be absorbing memories from the frayed end of the rope which trailed against her skirt.
Jazz was booming from the bandstand as I walked farther into the Green. The tune was familiar to me, though I couldn’t put a name to it. The only jazz I knew was from those afternoons Major to Minor used to play in Sachs Hotel, and I mostly went to those to eye up the women in sensible shoes who surrounded the piano. Here in the Green no one was paying the trumpet solo much attention. Couples cuddled sleepily on the bumpy lawn between beds of late roses. I nodded to Con Markievicz as I passed; her bronze head was almost hidden in holly and purple leaves. I had always loved the story of her setting her citizen army to dig trenches here in 1916 without thinking how easily they would be gunned down from the windows of the hotels that overlooked the Green. Or no, maybe I was underestimating her. Maybe she knew what would happen, but wanted to keep her men busy, like the games I made up for my Immac girls on sleepy afternoons.
The generous fountain was spurting in three plumes, making me thirsty. My mouth was dry from the coffee and pastries that my stomach was struggling to reconcile. At the edge of the meandering pond, a toddler stood casting strips of bread at the ducks with such vigour that I thought he might topple. Keeping one eye on him, I looked at the island in the middle where two swans were digging at the weed. There was an overgrown path up around the pond, I remembered now. Cara had dragged me up here once to kiss on the bend in the path where just for a moment you were screened from view. I strolled up that way now, to see what nostalgia would do to me. When I turned at the bend there was a couple on the grass; I doubled back immediately.
I left the Green by the gate beside the toilets. On the wall in dripping white letters it said Abortion Information 6794700. Cara used to wear a badge with the illegal number on it; acquaintances of her father’s, meeting her at the supermarket, would bend their heads to read it, then straighten up sharply.
This walk seemed to be taking forever, partly because the heat switched the world into slow motion, and partly because my attention kept being grabbed by things. The clothes in Grafton Street windows, for instance. I was not usually a very sartorial person, comfort being my main requirement, which was just as well, since the shops only seemed to stock size 10s. But today I examined all the mannequins as I passed; a race of lean Martians come down to make us feel alien. It struck me as strange that Cara was the shape of these plastic glamour-girls, yet she was the one who had most trouble with clothes. We used to call it her Cinderella complex, because often when she had agreed to go out in the evening she would be seized by panic and announce that she had nothing to wear. Every outfit had too many associations for her: ‘too Woodstock’ or ‘too Dynasty’ or ‘boring, schoolgirly, borrrrring’. I played fairy godmother, my words enchanting each garment into wearability for a couple of seconds until the magic fell out and it was dowdy again. Sometimes the wardrobe would have disgorged its entire contents across the bed by the time I found Cara something she was willing to be bullied into, or else gave up and filled her a hot-water bottle.
Life seemed to be more of a battle for Cara than for anyone I knew. What was water to the rest of us might become thick mud or paralysing ice when Cara moved her arms. When she found out that agoraphobia meant fear of the market-place, she decided it was the right word after all, because what scared her on social occasions, during her lows, was feeling judged, priced, haggled over. I used to remind her that in your average crowd, nobody would be taking a blind bit of notice of her. ‘You just have to take the days one at a time,’ I’d tell her. Once she had an answer: ‘It’s them that take me.’
Uillean pipes were throbbing from a busker crouched against a wall. Why they made me so exquisitely sad I could not tell, since all I associated them with were TV documentaries on basket-weaving or turf-cutting, snapshots of an Ireland I never knew. I ignored the impulse to sta
nd at the mouth of the alley and listen to the pipes. I speeded up as I rounded Trinity College; at this rate I wouldn’t get to my mother’s shop by five and she’d be hanging round waiting.
Car roofs glittered along Dame Street. Sometimes they put a Big Dipper there for the carnival; Cara took me on it once to cheer me up as she was leaving me for…Ben, was it? The New Man of the old sort? Couldn’t remember. She’d left so often, for such a variety of reasons. Sometimes I could feel it coming: the slow puncture, our ship riding low in the water. Other times it was a complete shock. Other times still it never quite happened; she’d tell me down the eloquent phone-line, twice a week for a few weeks, how much she loved me, how that was why she had to go, because she thought she’d treat me better as a friend…and then she’d come over and put her tongue in my ear.
Anyway. On this particular occasion it was night, and it seemed a time for being brave, so I said yes to the Big Dipper, even though I knew they usually made me feel sick. I hadn’t worn my jacket all week since she’d told me we were over; I wanted to let the wind blow right through me. Poised above Dame Street, persuading my stomach to keep up, I started shivering. Cara squeezed my hand in a platonic way and said, ‘Look at the lights!’ I glanced down at the spangled trees but could think of nothing to say about them. Then the metal scoop we were sitting in gave a buck and began to slide backwards. I peered behind but couldn’t see a thing. That was the worst, not knowing what I was falling into.
But this was daytime and I was on level ground. Below the sign that said O’Connell Bridge sat a tiny girl wheezing into the tin whistle which dangled from her lips. I dumped a pocketful of small change on to her blanket and ran on before she could shame me with a blessing.
I got to the jewellery shop by ten past five, but my mother was long gone, said the smoothie young manager. I stood in the door, stiff with anger that she couldn’t have waited for me, that she hadn’t guessed somehow that today was more important than all the other days we had met for coffee. She just didn’t have a clue about my life, and it was too late to start; all the years of not-saying had layered like dust on a window.