September clings to summer, sun-dappled days that chill into night, the pear trees by the tennis courts still heavy with their wares. There is still light, ephemeral and transient, and it’s easy to linger in its dying glow before October comes and cloaks everything in its drab reality. The Leaving Cert exam pressure, the scramble for college points, the everyday business of living, will take over soon and these in-between days will fade into memory.
I watch the last gasp of it from the 6A form room, the girls lying on the grass beside the tennis courts, barefoot, skirts and blouses hiked up for optimal tanning. Even from this distance, I can spot the glossy white of Shauna’s hair, the discarded purple sash on the grass beside her. I imagine the caress of the sun on her skin, the calming warmth of it. Aisling’s lying next to her and I’m gutted I’ve missed the chance to spend lunch with them, their senses softened and their guards down.
“Louise, are you paying attention?”
Sister Mullen clasps her hands together and rests them on the gray pinafore that covers her knees. She sits upright next to me, her feet crossed at the ankles and tucked under her chair. It’s a performance of calm, this controlled pose she adopts, even when she’s reprimanding insolence from the podium in front of the whole class.
“Sorry,” I say, trying to focus on the text in front of me.
“Lady Macbeth,” she says, jabbing her finger on my copy. “What do you think she means when she says, ‘Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty’?”
I’m getting English grinds from Sister Mullen at lunch every Tuesday and Thursday. In most subjects, I’m ahead of the pack as I’ve already done most of sixth year at Santa Maria, but the English syllabus changes each year so I’ve a new Shakespeare play and two novels to learn before June.
“She wants to be more like a man,” I say. “More violent so she’ll have the strength to kill Duncan and take the crown off him.”
“Take the crown from him, Louise, not off him. She’s not literally going to pick the crown off his head now, is she?”
She can do what she likes, I think, he’ll be dead. I shrug and she sighs like a disappointed parent.
“Did you study grammar at Santa Maria?”
“Em, not specifically.”
She nods her head as if she’d hardly expect any more from such a dump of a school.
“I think we need to do a class on grammar and deportment,” she says, “although I fear you may already be lost to solecism.”
She looks at me with such weary malaise I can’t work out why she’d give up her time to help me only to slag me off. The conceit of it stings, the assumption that my upbringing has failed me—I got an A in my Inter Cert English and she knows it. Maybe it’s simply her vocation, that inherent drive to help those less fortunate than herself.
“If you want people to take you seriously—and I presume that is why you came to Highfield—you need to be able to speak with authority,” she explains. “That means no mumbling, no slang and no lazy grammar. We have high standards here and we expect you to meet them when you’re representing the school.”
I fight the instinct to push back against her measure of worth because there’s a part of me that knows she is speaking the truth, that the only way I can get them to listen to me is if I sound like them.
“Actually, I would like that.”
THERE ARE TEN MINUTES OF lunch left after we’ve finished with Lady Macbeth and I run down the stone staircase to catch the girls on the lawn. I’m walking over to them, Shauna sun-splayed on her back, Aisling propped up on one elbow beside her, when I see Mr. McQueen waving from the entrance to the sports center. I look over my shoulder, but no, it’s me he wants. As I get closer, I see he’s holding something up between his thumb and forefinger. Something yellow, cylindrical. It’s a Bic lighter. My stomach clenches and I feel the fluster rising through my chest.
“I believe this belongs to you, Lou,” he says with a smile. “Come on in and we can chat about it.”
He leads me into the sports center and along a narrow corridor as I pull nervously at the sleeves of my jumper. His office is a small, windowless space, the walls lined with filing cabinets and framed photos. Mr. McQueen with the president, with the archbishop, with the Irish Olympic team. He closes the door, motions to a plastic seat on one side of an uncluttered desk while he takes the leather chair opposite. He opens a drawer, takes out the ten-pack of Silk Cut and puts it on the desk in front of him with the lighter.
“You don’t need me to tell you this is a serious offense.”
I open my mouth to say something, feign ignorance or make an excuse, but I get the feeling that’s not where this is going.
“However … I don’t think you deserve to be suspended, not in your first few weeks of school.”
I exhale heavily and he leans forward, arms folded on the desk.
“What you do with your body is your own business.” He pauses, his dark eyes locked on mine. “But I would like to see you put it to good use. Have you thought about trying out for one of the hockey teams? The seniors could do with some fresh blood.”
I wouldn’t mind having a go, but the matches are all over Dublin and beyond and, with no car at home, I don’t know how I’d manage it.
“It’s a bit tricky,” I say, shifting in my chair.
“It’s OK,” he says. “I understand you have … challenges.”
“What do you mean?”
“I spoke to your mum on the phone. Don’t worry”—he holds his hands up—“it’s all in complete confidence.”
I feel exposed and my cheeks flush with it.
“I know Rose doesn’t have a car so if you want to play—and I really hope you do—I can talk to the parents of your teammates and organize lifts. How does that sound?”
It’s her name that throws me, the familiarity with which he uses it, as if he knows us already.
“Yeah, OK,” I say. “Thanks.”
He stands up, hands me the cigarettes and the lighter, and I take them with the unsettling sense that this is our little secret. As he leads me out of his office, he lays his hand on the small of my back in a way that’s so fleeting I barely notice he’s done it.
MAM HAS ALREADY LEFT FOR work when I get home so I put all thoughts of homework aside and lie on the mottled brown carpet of the living room floor with the stereo up to eleven. It’s The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead, a record that came after Tina, one that doesn’t crack under the weight of unbearable sadness.
All music is divided into before and after. There are records that are so full of her I can no longer navigate them in this uncharted territory of grief. The synth pop songs of our first discos, full of hormones unleashed and intoxicated. Echo & the Bunnymen’s Songs to Learn & Sing and the gig in the SFX only last Christmas. It could have been a decade ago.
It was music that drew us together that first year at Santa Maria. Duran Duran’s Rio and a mutual appreciation for John Taylor. Later, we’d pool our babysitting money, buy Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cure albums and tape them for each other. This was the music that predicted how we’d move through the world, the one that was within our perception. We weren’t under any illusions; we’d both lost fathers—Tina to prostate cancer when she was only ten and me to the fact that Mam couldn’t go through with the abortion. We thought we understood the light and shade of it, that we could hold hands in the dark.
After, I submerged myself in Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration, the album we’d listened to on her last night. It was supposed to be a peace offering, my attempt to cross the unimaginable void her secret had opened between us. I’d brought it round and put it on the tape deck in her room and we sat on the floor smoking, her orange shag-pile rug melting under the ash that fell unheeded from her cigarette. I remember every song, the soundtrack to our final bloodshot moments together. “A Question of Lust” as she started to open up, her freckled beauty raw with her tears. “A Question of Time” while she told me of her pregnancy and begged me to help. “Stripped” when I walked out and left her, exposed and alone.
I want to rewind the tape, remember what it’s like to breathe without thinking. Before every song was filled with her absence. I can’t bring her back, I know that. All I can do is retrace her steps, find out what happened and make sure it never happens to anyone else again. If I can save a life, maybe I’ll have a chance to reclaim my own.