Liam was angry enough to say what he thought of him, and somehow after that I couldn’t make him big enough in my mind to submit again to that life.
Instead I went running home to my mother in Derry. Did I say that? Here am I, sleepless with dread at the thought of the morning and what it will bring, when back then Derry was home and my mother and refuge of sorts.
A delusion that even then was short-lived. After a week of her I was so beside myself I walked into the town and had all my mass of flame-red hair cut short in some sort of crazed, inarticulate protest. I came home near bald and wild with dread that I’d driven Liam off from me for good. Which was what I wanted and what I couldn’t bear.
I looked in the mirror. This poky white face like a rat’s with tufts of red all around it looked straight back out at me. I got out the antidepressants and sedatives they’d given me in the hospital and shook a whole load of tablets into my hand. That felt good; it felt painful and dramatic. Then I caught myself on. There were neighbours of ours, RUC men, who’d been shot at their own front doors. I knew what death looked like—I didn’t want to be dead.
I picked up the nail scissors and eased the sharp points in under the flesh of my palm till the blood began to come. It hurt, but at first I liked that because it made me forget how I was hurting over Liam. Then I stopped liking it; I looked at myself and what I was doing and filled up with self-disgust. I set down the scissors and sat at the window reading the graffiti on the walls of the houses across the way. Ira Scum and Death to all Taigs. I felt sorry for myself and martyrish—Romeo-and-Julietish—as though by falling in love with a Catholic I’d gained some sort of special status. I wept till my eyes were swollen and red, and I felt much better. I knew I wanted to go on living, I just couldn’t work out how.
My mother gave out when she saw my hair, which got up my nose because she was never done telling me to tie it back and stop it from flying away out like a flag. I said there was no pleasing her. She said to keep a civil tongue or I wasn’t welcome in her home.
“It’s my home too,” I said.
“It is not,” she said. “You’ve a home of your own in Belfast, in case you’d forgotten. A husband as well, and it’s time you were thinking of going back to him.”
So there it was, out on the table. She wasn’t blind—no phone calls, no sign of Robbie, no talk of me going away.
I saw the stiff line of her shoulders, and my heart sank inside me, for I’d backed myself into a corner and I knew that I’d have to tell her the truth or go.
Not right away though. Instead I got the bus to the Waterside, tramped up the hill to Brian and Anne’s, and stood ringing their bell in the pouring rain, desperate for someone to talk to.
“Merciful God, Ellen,” Anne said when she opened the door, “whatever have you done to yourself? You look like a scalded fox with a dose of the flu.”
That was better than a rat, but only marginally. I decided there was no way I was going to tell her anything, not even the amended version I’d worked out on the way over. In this version I’d thought I might say I was maybe thinking of leaving Robbie, and Liam wasn’t going to appear at all. Anne was no fool though—I knew she might spot that there was someone else lurking—so I had a contingency plan prepared with Liam’s name changed to Fred. That way I’d only have to deal with the leaving-Robbie issue; I could leave the Southern Catholic bit till later or not at all.
But Anne knew more than I thought. She took me in to the fire and brought me a glass of wine and a towel to dry what was left of my hair.
“Brian’s away out at a meeting, and the weans are in their beds,” she said. “We’ll have a nice wee talk, so we will, you can tell me all about it.”
She was friendly and sister-in-lawish and fishing for information, but the harder she tried the more I shut tight as a clam. In the end she told me out straight that my mother had phoned while I was on my way over. It seemed Robbie had rung up looking for me. He’d asked her if we were back from Achill.
“I needed to get away from Robbie,” I said, “so I told him I’d gone with you and Brian and the weans to Achill. He knows you can’t stand him. I knew if I said I was going with you he wouldn’t want to come.”
That stopped her in her tracks. In Anne’s world the more you disliked someone related to you the more they weren’t supposed to know that was the way you felt.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that in a city the size of Derry there’d have been somebody I could have talked to, but there wasn’t. I was always too awkward and shy, could never join in the way I saw other girls do, couldn’t whisper and confide. So I’d kept myself to myself and spent my time waiting for when I might leave.
It was the same now. I sat there, saying less and less, getting lower as each minute passed. And the longer I sat on Anne’s good settee in her clean and tidy living room with her clean and tidy life all around me, the surer I was that I had to find the courage in me to walk through the door and out into the storm. And the surer I was that I had to, the surer I was that I couldn’t. Suddenly I understood that the life I had with Robbie was all about getting away from this. Then I knew that I hadn’t gone far enough, that I had to leave the life I was living and travel further and make another one over again. I saw the seal heading down into black water, and I knew I had to learn how to drown.
And fear of it stopped my throat, so I choked on the glass of wine Anne had poured for me, sending it flying all over her sofa, and me flying out of the door.
When I got home I apologised to my mother for giving her lip. She nodded her head without looking at me, but I saw her mouth tighten with satisfaction and I had to clamp my own shut or I’d have been out on my ear.
I lasted another three days with her then I took the deepest breath of my life, phoned the number Liam had given me, left a message for him, then got on a bus that was headed down South.
It was dark when the bus pulled into Kilkenny city. There were people waiting on the pavement, but I kept my eyes in front. I’d been worrying myself sick all the way down. Would Liam meet me when I got there? Would I still want to see him if he did? Could I even remember what he looked like? I closed my eyes tight and pictured as hard as I could, but all I got was Robbie. I stared out at the lights and the darkness because it was better than staring in at Robbie’s face, which wouldn’t go away. I tried again for Liam, but the harder I tried the more completely I’d forgotten. Kilkenny was coming up on every signpost, so I knew we were near. By the time we’d swung off the ring road, I was wound up tight as a scream.
The bus drove into the station yard and stopped. I reached up and took my things from the rack, then walked slowly, slowly down the centre aisle. I climbed down the steps, my eyes on my feet. I lifted my head and there he was, and I knew him right away.
He took my bag and pulled me to the side so the girl behind me could get past. Then he stood there, looking down at me, smiling like an idiot.
“You’ve no hair.”
“Not much. Anne says I look like a scalded fox with a dose of the flu.”
“Who’s Anne?”
“Brian’s
