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.
We gave three cheers for the nun and three cheers for Miss O’Flynn, and presented her with a box of milk chocolates that she shared out amongst us. The nun led us in a final prayer and reminded us that faith was the most precious gift we would ever receive before opening the door for us to file out into the summer light.
For the last time I walked up those steps with Kitty Murphy, our arms entwined, and we imagined ourselves in just a few years standing at the gates of this very school, leading our own children down to enrol, and how we’d laugh about old times with the familiar figures smiling in their black hoods. We paused at the corner to embrace and moved off like blood sisters with the wetness of her tears mingling into my own as they rolled slowly down my cheeks.
The smell of lacquer always clung to her clothes and hands even though she scrubbed them for hours each night. In the hot stifled atmosphere of the salon she brushes up the piles of shorn hair from the floor to be packed into boxes and sold to wig manufacturers. She trains her hand to be steady as she pours the cheap lotions into expensive jars for resale, and her feet ache as she runs from chair to chair, setting out clean towels and combs while the customers gaze at magazines from beneath the whirling dryers.
Autumn sunlight flashes against the windows of the buses in the street below the cramped rooms where meekly she obeys the commands of every member of the staff who, on her one half-hour break in the day, introduce her to the alien taste of coffee and allow her to marvel at the colour pictures in the pile of English women’s magazines.
Of course, I gave my wages every week to Daddy and from it he’d give me pocket money. In the evenings after work I could go walking in the street because I was free from homework. The films in the Casino
