The Fall Girl Page 4

‘OK.’ I open it and sit down again.

  ‘Oh, that’s much better,’ she says, taking a deep grateful breath and inspecting my left hand at the same time. ‘You’re not married, are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, touching Aunty Lily’s ring. Even to me, there’s no hint of a lie.

  ‘But, sure, you’re only a slip of a lassie.’ She leans towards me and whispers, ‘A shotgun wedding, was it?’

  I nod.

  ‘Same as me own,’ she says, giving me a wink. ‘Is it just the one babby you have?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘It’s her first birthday today.’

  ‘Ah, they’re little dotes at that age, aren’t they?’

  ‘Mmm,’ I say, imagining her podgy cheeks, big eyes, soft curls. ‘I’m going to Dublin to buy her birthday present.’

  ‘It’s a long way to go just to get a birthday present.’

  ‘I don’t care; I want to get her something special.’

  A couple of miles farther, the driver pulls in at a crossroads bus shelter.

  ‘This is me now,’ the woman says, holding on to the headrest in front of her and hoisting herself up off the seat. ‘Enjoy your shopping trip.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  As she totters down the aisle, I settle back down to my dreams.

  Once I step off the bus in Dublin, I can pretend to be whomever I want to be. And on this day, I want nothing more than to be the mother of my one-year-old daughter. So I am.

  I spend the day wandering from one department store to the next, picking up baby clothes and toys, checking sizes and prices. I’m in no hurry. I have all day to browse, to consider, to indulge the fantasy.

  ‘Have you this dress in pink?’ I ask one of the shop assistants, making sure she sees Aunty Lily’s ring.

  I stop for coffee; pay the waitress; flash the ring.

  They notice: young mother, young wife.

  I’m somebody. And somebody’s.

  In the end, I buy her a pink rabbit. It’s soft and floppy, beany on the inside, nice to hold.

  On my return home, I find my parents sitting watching TV. The Late Late Show is just starting, an owl flying across the screen.

  ‘You’re back,’ my father says.

  ‘I am.’

  He doesn’t ask me where I’ve been.

  My mother hasn’t turned her head. She’s busy clicking her knitting needles, one eye on her stitches, the other on Gay Byrne. She’s knitting a matinee coat for one of the village wives, who’s entitled to have a baby.

  Click click click.

  Upstairs, I put my baby’s bunny into a box in the bottom of my wardrobe and go to bed.

  4 October 1999 (after tea)

  I’ve started smoking again. I had to; my head is all over the place. Raking up the past does that to you. The cigarettes help me to focus. Besides, it gives me something to do, something to look forward to. There isn’t much else. I’d forgotten how satisfying cigarettes can be. I love the way they catch my chest. I’ve just stubbed one out, but I think I’ll have another one. They’re so addictive, so damaging. I’ve always been drawn to what’s bad for me. Like Lesley. I still say she was worth the trouble.

  Worth the trouble

  As I skip through the car park towards the dancing hall, I hear singing coming from somewhere behind.

  Aunty Mary had a canary

  Up the leg of her drawers.

  She pulled a string and made it sing

  Up the leg of her drawers.

  ‘Who’s that?’ a red-faced woman says, emerging from the open side doors of Brady’s pub, with a mop in her hand. ‘Was that you?’ she shouts across at me, giving me the evil eye.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Honest.’

  ‘Well, it better not have been, or I’ll stick this where the sun don’t shine,’ she says, threatening me with her mop, then disappearing back through the doors.

  As I look around me wondering where the singing had come from, it starts again. This time I recognize the voice.

  Aunty Mary had a canary

  Up the leg of her drawers.

  While she was sleeping, I was peeping

  Up the leg of her –

  Just as I catch sight of Lesley and Stephen Taylor crouched behind a couple of beer kegs, the mop woman comes charging across the car park holding her mop like a rifle and screeching at the top of her voice, ‘You’re in for it now, ya scut ya.’

  I bolt up the steps, screaming all the way.

  Miss Jackson meets me in the doorway with a ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what’s going on?’

  ‘Keep them brats out of my sight,’ the mop woman roars.

  ‘What are you on about, Mary?’ Miss Jackson says, taking me by the hand.

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’ the woman points at me.

  Before I have the chance to defend myself, Lesley appears, pushing a reluctant Stephen Taylor a step ahead of her.

  ‘Yis little bas —’

  ‘Now, hang on there a second, Mary,’ Miss Jackson says. ‘Keep the bad language out of it.’

  Lesley whispers something in Stephen’s ear.

  ‘They were singing a filthy song at me,’ the mop woman says. ‘Weren’t yis, yis scuts yis?’

  Miss Jackson looks at the culprits.

  ‘Go on, tell her,’ Lesley says, nudging Stephen.

  ‘It was me,’ he mumbles. ‘Lesley didn’t do nothing. I’m sorry.’

  I know he’s lying. It was Lesley’s voice I heard.

  ‘It’s Mary here you should be apologizing to,’ Miss Jackson says. ‘Not me.’

  Mary’s eyeballing him, one hand on her hip, the other holding the mop at a very intimidating angle.

  ‘Sorry,’ Stephen says, hanging his head and legging it up the steps.

  As Mary walks away grumbling to herself, I notice she has a limp.

  ‘One leg longer than the other,’ Miss Jackson says.

  Stephen is huffy with Lesley afterwards; sits in the corner and turns his back to her. She’s on her knees, walking her Cindy up and down the bench. She makes the doll pirouette, stand on one leg, even do the splits, all the time edging closer to Stephen, trying to get his attention.

  ‘Are you still friends with me?’ she asks when she catches him looking at her.

  ‘Feck off,’ he says and turns away.

  ‘Look,’ she says, pulling the blouse off the doll, ‘she’s got tits.’

  I can feel myself blushing. I can’t help it.

  ‘You can kiss them if you like,’ she says, offering Stephen the doll.

  ‘Do you dare me?’ he chuckles, taking the doll from her.

  ‘Yeah, go on,’ Lesley giggles, nudging me.

  He gives the doll a quick peck on her lips and looks at Lesley. She rolls her eyes and sighs. He kisses her again, a quick peck on each boob, and then throws her back to Lesley.

  ‘Is that it?’ she says.

  ‘Watch this,’ he says, snatching the doll back out of her hand and licking her boobs until Lesley and I are in stitches.

  5 October 1999 (afternoon)

  During my first three years in secondary school, all I could do was watch Lesley from a distance laughing with her friends, the way we used to laugh. I began to resent my mundane life, my mundane friend.

  Summer of 1979 (a summer of discontent)

  The days are long. There’s so much time to kill.

  ‘The devil finds work for idle hands, Frances,’ my mother says.

  I want to tell her that he’s welcome to. Digging my nails into something dirty is exactly what I need.

  Where’s it coming from, this madness? Why am I feeling this way?

  The piano – my fingers can no longer hack it. They’re too angry. They hate the discipline. They’re heavy and disgruntled, hammering out each note as if they are indeed hammers, and the keys nails.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ my mother asks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  My father seems baffled by my dourness. Althou
gh I don’t look at him, I sometimes sense him staring at me after I give him a snappy one-word reply to a question.

  ‘Did ye two have a row, Rita?’ he asks my mother one evening when he arrives home from work and I don’t bother responding to his greeting.

  ‘No, indeed we did not,’ she says. ‘But if she doesn’t buck up her ideas sharpish, we just might have one.’

  Oh, fuck off and leave me alone. Stop talking about me. Quit sizing me up. Drop dead.

  I wish I had a friend, a real one. Like Lesley was.

  I lie on my bed, stare at the ceiling, touch my body – the private bits. That’s the devil at work. Dirty pleasure. I feel guilty afterwards, but I do it again. Then I pray for myself. You can’t hide from God, my mother reckons. Fat chance of that, when I’m down on bended knee beseeching Him every night at seven. Another Joyful Mystery. I feel no joy, just misery.

  My father takes his summer leave, rents a house in Mullaghmore for a fortnight. Powerful weather.

  ‘Aren’t we fierce lucky?’ he says each morning as we walk down the steep hill towards the beach, rugs, towels and bathing suits tucked under our oxters. ‘Look at that – not a cloud in the sky.’

  We haven’t been to a beach for several years, so my mother has bought me a new bathing suit. It has the cups of a bra inside it and I don’t like it. We spread out the rugs, peel off our clothes underneath our towels, slip into our bathing suits and rub suncream on ourselves and on each other. It’s the most naked we’ve ever seen each other and I’m mortified by the fact that my father can see the shape of my breasts. As soon as my mother finishes suncreaming my back, I slip on my T-shirt over my bathing suit before doing hers. I hate the gritty texture of her skin and the folds of flesh that sag from underneath her armpits down to her waist, like two puckered hems. The thought of leaving a patch unprotected and exposed to the burning rays crosses my vicious mind. In the shape of a cross. Suffer, suffer.

  I hurry when I do my father’s back because it makes me uncomfortable to touch his bare flesh.

  My mother and I share one rug; my father stretches out on the other. He relaxes and sighs with pleasure, despite the moodiness of his wife and daughter. Sunhat on her head and wearing the sunglasses she’s borrowed from her friend Nancy, my mother flicks absent-mindedly through the newspaper, raising her head every so often to stare out at the sea. Gathering handfuls of sand and letting it slip through my slack fingers, I pass the time watching people. I feel sad, lost, disconnected. I don’t know how to be one of them.

  When my father suggests a stroll along the beach, my mother reluctantly agrees. I volunteer to stay and keep an eye on our stuff. I watch them wading through the shallow water, my mother always a deliberate step behind, chin up defiantly. I can’t understand why she doesn’t love him any more. Ever since Aunty Lily’s death, she’s been really mean to him. No matter how hard he tries, she won’t let him get close to her. He said once that the loss of her sister drove her to distraction. But I reckon there’s more to it than that. After Aunty Lily’s funeral, Xavier had a row with my parents, a row that seemed to suck the compassion out of my mother and leave her cold. Whatever the argument was about, you’d think after all these years she’d have got over it. Looking behind him, my father holds out his hand to her, but she refuses to take it and I wonder how he can still love her. I think to myself that she’s a bitch and I’d love to tell him that I’m on his side, but there’s no point, because he’s on hers.

  By noon, the beach is bustling with little ones tottering to the water’s edge with their buckets, parents calling them back when they wander too far, and teenagers chatting out loud to be heard over the blare of their radios. I envy them all looking so comfortable in their skin, while all I want is to crawl out from under mine.

  Towards the end of the week, Nancy arrives out of the blue.

  ‘I’m just up for the day,’ she says.

  But my mother insists she stay the night. Cornering me in the kitchen, she tells me to hurry down to the bedroom my father has been sleeping in and to move his belongings into her own room.

  That evening, my father insists on treating us all to dinner in the village hotel. Everyone’s in a better mood and my mother doesn’t bat an eyelid when my father orders a second brandy for himself after the meal. They talk about their home county and the coincidence it was that my parents ended up living in the same small village as Nancy, a whole two hundred miles from their home town in County Cork. They toast friendship, clinking two coffee cups and a brandy snifter. They don’t notice that I haven’t raised my glass and they don’t invite me to. I’m sipping my cola and thinking that the only one I would raise my glass and toast friendship with is Lesley. If only I could get close to her again.

  A few weeks into the school term, I’m on my way over to the toilets during French class when, at the other end of the corridor, I see Lesley standing outside her classroom door, pirouetting: skirt above her knees, blouse untucked, permed hair, black loafers.

  I don’t need to pass her by, so I just wave and carry on.

  ‘Frances,’ she calls in a loud whisper. She’s the only one at school, teachers aside, who calls me by my name. ‘Where ya going?’

  ‘Loo.’

  ‘Hang on,’ she says, catching up with me. ‘Flanagon, the stupid cunt, threw me out of class for yawning. What the fuck does she expect, yammering on about Stony Grey Soil? I mean, even the gobshite who wrote it couldn’t fucking stand it. Hated it so much, he left the fucking county to get away from it.’

  ‘And she threw you out for yawning?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t the first yawn. And I stretched too. You know the way a hungover man does when he wakes up in the morning?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. Anyway, want a fag?’

  ‘OK.’

  She follows me into the cubicle.

  ‘I need to pee,’ I say to her apologetically.

  ‘Fire away.’

  That’s what I love about Lesley: no barriers.

  She blathers on while I pee, saying it was just as well that it was me who came along and not PMT, the oul hoor.

  ‘Who’s PMT?’

  ‘Principal Marie-Therese,’ she says, ‘who’s in a permanent fucking state of PMT, crazy bitch, or haven’t you noticed? Jesus!’

  ‘Oh right,’ I say, pulling up my pants in a hurry, no clue at all as to what PMT stands for.

  ‘Here.’ She hands me a cigarette.

  ‘What if we’re caught?’

  ‘Just bung your fag into the bog. If they don’t see ya at it, they can’t prove anything.’ She pulls a packet of ten Carrolls from her pocket.

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t. I’ve never smoked before.’

  ‘Loosen up, will you, for fuck sake. It’s a fag, not a joint … more’s the bloody pity.’

  ‘Hah?’

  ‘Just shut up,’ she giggles, squeezing the fag up against my reluctant lips. ‘Hey, will you ever forget yon Feis?’ she asks, holding her flaming lighter between her face and mine.

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘You won the gold, you bitch. Beat me to it.’ She puts the flame on the end of my cigarette.

  I suck in, splutter and swallow smoke.

  Lesley taps my back and says, ‘Never mind; it just takes practice.’

  That was exactly what she’d said the first time I’d tried to pirouette.

  7 October 1999 (evening)

  What use is winning the gold when you’re beaten by your own glory?

  The Feis

  I’m eight and a half. It’s not long since Aunty Lily’s death, weeks rather than months. I miss her. My parents are sad; they seem tense too. Since that row with Xavier, there’s a lot of silence hanging about, but it’s not a calm silence. I don’t like it.

  I’ve been looking forward to the Feis. I haven’t stopped practising. Lesley’s been teaching me new steps; they’re complicated. I haven’t told my mother about the steps. She still doesn’t like Lesley. That’s why
I’ve been practising behind her back. In my bedroom, the bathroom, the back yard; anywhere out of her sight.

  I know I’m in with a chance. Even Miss Jackson says so. She says I’m flying.

  I love all the dances – reels, jigs, hornpipes, four-hand reels, ‘The Sweets of May’. That’s what I’m lilting in the kitchen as I tap on my knees and clap – one two three four clap clap …

  My mother shouts at me to stay quiet.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she squawks, mimicking me, I think. She’s staring at me with queer eyes.

  Careful not to make any more noise, I pull out a stool from underneath the kitchen table, sit down and pour some cornflakes into a bowl. My mother is sitting opposite me polishing my dancing pumps with short, swift swipes of the brush. I do my best to eat in silence, allowing the flakes to go soggy in the milk before spooning them into my mouth. All the while, I’m wondering where my father is.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ she says, putting the shoebrush and tin of polish back into the cupboard. ‘Shoulders back, chin up, toes out-turned and no raising the foot above the knee.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘Yes, OK, not yeah –’

  ‘Yes, OK.’

  ‘The traditional way is the best way. That’s why it’s called Traditional Irish Dancing. I don’t like that modern version of it that they’re at nowadays. All that kicking and leaping about like jinnets. It ill-becomes any young lassie to be throwing her legs in the air like … like … like a good-time girl. Without a modicum of modesty.’

  My father arrives back from wherever he’s been, whistling. It’s not a tuneful happy whistle.

  We drive to Moynehill, where the Feis is taking place, only my mother’s odd cutting remark perforating the brutal silence.

  ‘I told you we should have left earlier,’ she says when we arrive at the car park and find it full.

  I’m sitting directly behind her, staring at the back of her head, her lacquered mesh of mousy strands glistening and prickly. The tips of my fingers are tingling with vicious desire. The only thing stopping me from digging my nails into her brambly scalp is that damned Fourth Commandment and the serious consequences of breaking it.