else. Not even Aisling. Just me and her. She gives me sweets in the laundry, which I’m not allowed to show to anyone. I won’t tell anything. I’m a good girl.
Green and pink and yellow wrappers. I use them to make dresses. That’s my other favourite thing! Aisling asks where did you get those and I tell her to keep her gob shut. She says the convent is a bad place but she’s lying. I’ve already said three good things.
I must have had a father and a mother but no one seems to remember. It was like I was dropped from the sky by a stork, Mother says. But I wasn’t a baby. I was six. How do they know what age I was? And why is it I can’t remember anything?
Mar and I talked about little else besides the disco – how we’d get there, what we’d wear, whether our hair would be up or down. No detail was too small. I stashed a couple of cans from the drinks cabinet under my bed. And Mar was going to steal some of her mother’s fags. Buying cigarettes wasn’t the easiest thing to do, as there was always a danger we wouldn’t be served, or that somehow the news would get back to our parents. You couldn’t do anything in this town.
We decided it best not to ask our parents if we could go. That would blow our chances altogether.
I didn’t go near the graveyard. I didn’t want to see the boy until the night of the disco. I couldn’t bear to. And anyway I didn’t want him thinking I was spying on him.
Mam didn’t look so different then – maybe just as if she’d eaten a few too many custard creams, which she had, so most of the time I could convince myself that it was one of those phantom pregnancies, where women carry ghosts around in their bellies, or that really she was suffering from menopause, though I wasn’t sure what that was.
I started to put things away in my new room – very slowly and reverentially to fold things into themselves. Nothing was ever so neat in my old room. My new room was bigger. It was colder too. One of the radiators was broken and the other one only half worked. Dad said he’d see to them but I knew he’d never get around to it. The walls were white rather than pink. And suddenly I seemed to have fewer things than before. They were stacked neatly against one wall in boxes. I put the few books, trinkets and cassettes I had onto the shelves above my new bed, and left the walls bare. I had all these posters rolled up, but I didn’t know where to put them. Jim Morrison and Laura Palmer didn’t look right on the new walls. The wardrobe was big enough almost that you could walk into it, and my clothes hung in it like dolls’ clothes.
The long mirror opposite the bed frightened me: I could see things moving in it in the darkness. It didn’t matter that I knew it was only my eyes playing tricks. If you looked at your own reflection by candlelight you’d see the devil looking back at you – that’s what people used to say. It didn’t have to be candlelight for me to be frightened out of my wits. Especially reading Celia’s book. I turned the mirror against the wall some nights, but even then I imagined things crawling out of it.
Where before my only view had been of the sky and the tops of the laurel bushes through a skylight, now I had the whole of the back garden. The window was long and narrow. It was strange to be able to see the ground: it made the room feel like a greenhouse, like I could step outside if I wanted to. The birds weren’t as loud from here as they had been upstairs, but I could see more of them before it got dark. I could see the swing, too, and the light fading from the sky above the fields. I had my desk so that it was facing out onto all of this, and at first there were no curtains, only an old thin white sheet, so I was woken early every morning until I adjusted to the light, and my dreams adjusted with it. They became all bright and watery, like I was in a flotation tank or something, and I’d wake as easily as if I had just blinked, barely remembering what it was I had been dreaming about.
I watched out for him as often as I could, though I could hardly make out his shape in the dark. It was pitch-black most afternoons, arctic. And at night I’d lie awake, wondering why he went up there, who it was he went to see, feeling peculiarly out of kilter in my new bed. Disturbed in turn by the emptiness, the lack, and then by the overwhelming abundance of things: the baby, that boy, those little girls burning. Often I had to sleep with the light on to make sure a ghost of the boy wasn’t in the room, visiting me as he visited that grave. I’d get a tight pain in my chest and find it hard to breathe. Other times I was glad of the darkness: it allowed me to wallow in unfinished thoughts of him, the half-remembered features. And sometimes I felt, sinking my head into the pillow and burning a picture of him on the inside of my eyelids, that I could float off the bed if I put my mind to it.
Mar arrived over on the afternoon of the disco.
‘And how are you, Mar? We haven’t seen you in ages,’ Mam beamed, turning from the sink to look at her, her yellow Marigolds dripping muddy water onto the kitchen floor. It was like she was making a special effort to behave as if nothing had changed since Mar’s last visit.
‘Ah, not too bad, Mrs Devine, not too bad,’ Mar says, leaning on the counter in the kitchen all casual so as not to give Mam any idea we were up to anything.
‘Is your mother well? I don’t see her about much. Is she not working in Donoghue’s anymore?’
‘Oh, she’s in grand form. She is, yeah – just Saturday now, though.’
Mar blushed. She didn’t usually blush but she was in a right state that day, straining to hide her nerves.
I dragged her out of the room and into my new bedroom. Mam was smiling to herself as I turned to close the door behind me, and I could hear the slippery sound of the peeler on wet spud.
‘What’s happened to your old room?’
‘Had to move out. Mam’s having a baby and she wants to turn my room into a nursery.’
‘Jesus. Fuck.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Isn’t she a bit old? When’s she having it?’
‘Way too bloody old. May.’
‘Christ.’
‘That’s what I said.’
The rest of the day we spent between my room and the kitchen, gorging on yoghurts, chocolate bars, biscuits, crisps – anything we could find that took our fancy. I showed Mar The Little Ones, and told her Celia was my auntie and she told me to go away to fuck. We creeped ourselves out reading bits of it aloud. She gave Gran some funny looks later that evening when we were having supper and I kicked her under the table.
We were worried sick we’d be caught that night, or, even worse, we wouldn’t have the nerve to go through with it at all. I told Mar every move I was going to make. I was going to walk up to him after the first slow song but before the second started (a small enough window but long enough to get in there before someone else). There was no way I was going to wait for him to ask me. What if he didn’t? I mightn’t be out again for months. I’d put my arms around his neck, he his hands around my waist, dance slowly – Mar and I practised in front of the long mirror – and stroll out casually into the dark. Mar herself was going to be whisked off her feet by some dashing stranger, though only after she’d witnessed my special moment. It would probably be the second slow set for her so she wouldn’t have as much time to shift outside afterwards, but that was just the way of the world.
We’d told our parents we were going to Mona’s to watch videos – meeting her at the chippie in town first, going
