was better when I stepped outside and felt the prickling of the cold at the back of my nose and throat, the frost tightening the skin around my shins, my wrists, the air lifting me out of myself. Dad revved the car up the driveway. The engine stalled, the car rolled back a little, then jolted to a stop.
‘Is Mam okay?’ I asked.
‘She wasn’t feeling too hot last night, love, but she’ll be grand . . . Probably one too many egg sandwiches over the way.’
Mam was never ill, except when she’d been ill with me. But that was different. She couldn’t hold anything down for months. Then once she got me out of her I couldn’t hold anything down for months. I was a great spitter and dribbler. So she’d tell me – and of how she’d piled on the pounds, and had to spend the rest of her life weight-watching. Every pound and ounce she’d watch. She’d eat nothing but banana sandwiches for lunch until she couldn’t look at another banana, then nothing but baked potatoes and beans, then Ryvita and cottage cheese, and on it went. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays she’d speed-walk around the hospital grounds with Mary Reilly from over the road, or with one of the ladies from the office. There was a bit of a craze in town for speed-walking. You’d never see a jogger or a stroller – just groups of middle-aged women swinging their arms and waddling their arses round certain well-worn routes. You’d hear them coming before you’d see them, the swish of their shiny tracksuits. Then heading down to Weight Watchers in the town hall every week to be weighed in front of everyone, like the prize pikes you’d see in the local paper.
Anyway, she was fine, Dad said. I thought nothing more of it, is the truth. I’d other things to be thinking about. All those hours spent the night before trying to conjure up this boy. A boy I’d only ever seen far off and in the evening when the light was poor. He was from the school down the road: he wore the uniform of dark grey trousers, white shirt, navy tie, grey jumper. He was a boarder, for sure – not just because he was always in uniform, but because no one around our neck of the woods seemed to know who he was. I’d surely have heard one of the neighbours mention him, if only to say they’d offered young so-and-so a lift, or they’d seen young so-and-so on the road.
I was trying to put him together in my mind’s eye – tall, hair dark brown, skin pale – but I was at a loss as to the shape of his hands or the colour of his eyes. Or to what it was had changed about him or me that night that I could never be the same.
Dad dropped me at the bottom of the laneway up to school that morning. Usually he’d drop me right outside the front door but we were running late. I’d spent ages in the bathroom staring into my eyes, the size of my pupils: they were that dilated the blue of the iris was almost invisible.
There were dozens of girls pouring out of school buses, smoking inside the front gates, their shoes scuffed white, skirts rolled up round their thighs. There were boys on the buses too, which made the skin on my face and neck taut and hot, even though I knew for sure there were none of them I’d like. They were all smaller than me, for one thing. And they smelled, most of those boys. They smelled like they had dirty things on their minds.
I went round where the cars were meant to go, rather than the path at the side, and slipped crossing the cattle grid, grazing the palms of my hands on the pebbledash of the gate pillar. My whole body burned with embarrassment. I wanted to scramble through the ditch and run through as many icy fields as it would take for me to feel cold and in control again – dozens of icy fields, so that I could feel the wet soaking into my wool tights. But I just squeezed the strap of my school bag with both hands, digging my nails into my palms, and walked as fast as I could without looking, like I wanted to disappear. It wasn’t that I was worried what they thought of me, but that they would see me at all, look at me, watch me. That’s what I hated more than anything.
On up past the rhododendrons, covered in a mint frost, past the woods on the right, past the nuns’ plot of vegetables, the gardener spreading pot-ash. I could feel the cold trickling down my neck and down my spine. Past the statue of the Virgin Mary and child. The redness fading from my cheeks. Sister Rosario off in the distance. Only her legs, in their skin-coloured nylons, seemed to be moving. The rest of her covered in a dark grey habit the colour of her eyes. Her tiny hands folded under the heavy sleeves. She nodded and smiled at me, and I felt better for seeing her.
I said, ‘Hello, Sister,’ in a voice that wasn’t really my own.
First class that morning was pastoral care.
‘And Lani, would you like to draw around Josephine please?’ says Sister Anne, handing me a lump of blue chalk.
I went beetroot and nearly tripped over myself. Josephine was lying on a large sheet of paper in the middle of the floor, her scrawny body twitching with embarrassment. The desks and chairs were stacked up against the walls, and the rest of the girls standing around her. I crouched down on my hunkers first, then onto my knees, and drew a vague outline. I didn’t want to have to touch any part of her, not even her clothes – especially not in front of all those other girls. I didn’t even know what we were supposed to be doing, but I’d have looked stupid if I asked then.
‘You can get up now, Josephine,’ Sister Anne shrilled when I’d finished.
Josephine was given a hand up by one of the girls. Some of the others sniggered into their sleeves. She left a blurred white shadow on the ground behind her. It made it look like she was fat.
‘Now, we need a name for her. What will we call her?’
Betty, someone said, then Genevieve, Dolores – until finally Mar shouted ‘Ezmerelda!’ and everyone turned to look at her. She grinned at me. All heads nodded eagerly: Ezmerelda it was. Sister Anne was working us into a right frenzy. There was nothing we liked better than this sort of feckless exercise, a good forty-five minutes of light relief from the deathly boredom of maths or Irish.
I tried to ignore Josephine, but felt compelled to watch her all the same. I had that exact feeling I’d had in primary school when we were all paraded in our underwear in front of the district nurse. The boys had to show the nurse inside their pants, so that she could make sure everything was in order. I remember feeling my nipples stiff as little apple pips through my cotton vest. Then the prick of the booster injection on my forearm.
One girl was called up to draw Ezmerelda’s face. She did so with such avid attention to detail that it got on Sister Anne’s nerves.
‘Now, Claire, you needn’t worry too much. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just so we get an idea,’ she said.
Then she took the blue chalk herself and went on: ‘Now, where would I find the breasts?’
She scanned the room, and went back to Claire.
‘Claire?’
Claire pointed.
‘Yes, that’s right. Very good. Silly question, I know!’
And she drew two little eggs, sunny side up. Claire blushed right to the roots of her hair, and so did Josephine.
Sister Anne outlined the arms and legs.
‘And what do we find here?’ she asked, pointing somewhere roughly around the armpit.
‘Hair?’ someone croaked, just as the silence was getting
