The Woman’s Daughter

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.