Joe and me tried to talk about Gortnahook but both of us nearly passed out with embarrassment. He thought I was being cold because he hadn’t made it into the gardens. I couldn’t stand to talk about it because it made me feel like a bitch in heat who’d been locked in a shed and Joe couldn’t win because he was the useless randy dog who failed to dig himself under the tin.
Poor Joe, who even though I said no, no, no, thought I hated him because he’d been a dose over the poor dead soldier. He was showing off. He hadn’t meant to say that shitty thing about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Father Kevin had insisted he make a confession and he had, he had made a heartfelt confession right there and then in the retreat and he had been forgiven for his malicious words. He’d done a fucking ton of penance! Why couldn’t I forgive him?
I lied and swore that I did. When we tried to get the kissing back on track the taste of pineapple cubes on his tongue made me gag; it was too sweet. My tastes had changed. I craved bitter things and lied to myself about why I had a stash of them under the bed.
Lizzie Magee and the rest of the class were devastated when Jacques went back to France without so much as an au revoir a month before summer term ended. I wasn’t bothered; I had enough on my plate with my nine O levels and the growing numb terror that not all of him was going home.
The fear grew with the sickness as I dashed for the loo before anyone was up in the morning. Back under the covers, I hoped against hope that the low dull ache in my guts was the start of a period but I knew it was just the fear growing eyes and legs and arms. My stomach was still as flat as a pancake and I thought I should be able to hide it ’til ‘it’ came out and then I’d leave ‘it’ somewhere. ‘It’ would not last long at The Hill. ‘It’ would need somewhere safe, somewhere where ‘it’ would be cuddled and cared for and told that ‘it’ was something.
The newspapers had stories of girls who had done that and not many of them bled to death although one of them had and the poor little baby had died of cold in a graveyard somewhere in the Republic. I vaguely thought that Auntie Eileen would take ‘it’; she loved children but she couldn’t get any more because men who liked the look of her didn’t like the look of our poor Bernie. She could finally have a little girl who could talk! She would love that!
When I realised that I had allowed ‘it’ to turn into a girl I ran all the way out of The Hill and down the back lane, past Mrs Johns’s half-door and all the way to the big pool of deep water where the Cloon arced towards town. I knelt on the bank and stuck my whole head under the icy rush to see if I could clear it. I needed to be able to think even if it was only for five minutes.
I was blue-lipped and shivering when I finally ran out of time and had to sit up gulping and gulping for air. That’s when I saw John Johns standing on the high ditch of the river field but he didn’t move a muscle as I jumped up and nearly went arse over in the mud.
Should I say hello? Tell him not to worry? Tell him I’m not trying to do away with myself? Then I remember that he doesn’t give a bucky for me or my troubles. He’s known for being level-headed, a safe pair of hands. The man every other man calls on in an emergency. He’s only ever going to think that I’m a halfwit, a halfwit who doesn’t have enough sense to jump straight into the Cloon and float away as far as it flows before it’s too late. If only he would say one word – just a ‘hello’ would take the sting out – but he doesn’t.
My only option was to act as if nothing at all was strange. I stood a minute to squeeze the water from my hair, just a nice normal girl on a nice normal outing to cool herself down before slowly turning for home. Halfway up the field, the marsh marigolds all sunny in their butter yellow, I checked if he was still there and he was, his big dark silent shape picked out against the thin blue sky, unmoved. I took off like a hare, any hope of a dignified retreat down the pan as I stumbled and scrambled away. I should have known I’d not be able to dodge Mrs Johns twice in a day. She was at the half-door begging me to come in.
I was soaked through and she was all fuss and bother, trying to find out what in God’s name had happened to me at all! Had I been interfered with? Was there British Army about the place? RUC? God forbid, was it one of our own? The big brown teapot being slammed down on the range made me look up and meet her eye at last. I had no answers for her but when she stroked my face, I knew she knew but I knew she would never tell on me.
I studied and studied and studied; my head was crammed with words that outsang the whine of worry. I worked so hard that even Daddy noticed; he told Mammy he was going to take us to Bundoran the first Sunday after my last O level. A blast of sea air was just the ticket to put the roses back in my cheeks. He’d never taken in that I don’t have roses in my cheeks and never would. It was a particularly lovely June; every tree seemed to swoon under the weight of its green leaves, every branch housed a songbird at the top of its game. The beach would be beautiful.
I showed up for every exam prepared, strangely calm and put down every word I knew on paper. As the last O level approached a feeling of panic had space to move into my head. How would I soothe my nerves when I could no longer study? I was forming a plan to talk to Auntie Eileen so that she could help me. In the wild event she wouldn’t, I would get the bus to Derry and throw myself on Kathleen’s mercy. Maybe Kathleen could hide ‘it’ in the nurses’ home? Nurses loved babies, didn’t they?
I broke up from school on Friday. Thirty-five of us covered in talc and eggs and marker pens rampaged through the corridors spraying Crazy String at the teachers. We fixed our ties around our heads and roared along with cassettes played too loud in the common room. Mr Spears, the science master, took a few snaps of us draped over each other and promised he’d have copies in September. You only get to be sixteen once in every lifetime, he says.
The drill for ‘a nice day out at the seaside’ was rise early, get to the first Mass in St Bede’s, make enough ham sandwiches to withstand the next famine, half with mustard and half without, load the gas ring and gas tank into the boot where it slid dangerously around for the forty-mile trip because tea had to be freshly made if we ventured away from the range for a whole day. Mick agreed to come along but Matthew made noises about cows and feeding and slipped away without a word.
Mammy creaked into the front seat in her Sunday-best underpinnings and we got in the back and off we set over the back roads through Pettigo, crossed the border at Belleek and on through Ballyshannon to the coast. The guilt and gloom lifted a little as the blue of the ocean came into view.
It was fine and warm, the light soft over the water. The beach was packed and the sweet smell of ice cream, toffee apples and candyfloss was burnt into the air. Mick and me ran off to the wee-smelling huts on the front to get on our cossies, leaving Mammy and Da to walk around the noise and promise of the penny arcades before we could get at the sandwiches. In the heat, the butter would have melted into the cottage-loaf bread and they would be the most delicious things we’d ever tasted after an hour in the freezing Atlantic.
When we were blue with cold we ran up the beach; we ran straight past them once and when we doubled back neither of us knew where to put ourselves or our eyes. My mother was in a bright yellow swimsuit which she had ‘improved’ by inserting a large red modesty panel to cover the line between her breasts. She started handing out the sandwiches as if nothing was amiss. Sadie could never be described as fat because she was solid; her flesh, even uncontained, did not wobble but she was substantial, tall for a woman, broad at the hip and shoulder, buxom, bunioned, absolutely not built for bright yellow.
Some young girls laughed and pointed and we all heard the words ‘scary canary’. Slowly she covered her feet, then the terrible legs and finally her torso with a towel, which she tucked into the scarlet modesty panel to still it in the breeze. My father managed the word ‘dodgems’ and he and Mick showered us in sand as they legged it to the amusements. I sat burning beside her, letting my salty hair swing forward to cover my face so I could take her in.
Until that day her skin had been her arms from her elbows down and a small white V at the base of her throat. When I got to her face she was staring back just as hard. She held my eyes for an excruciating minute or two before they dropped to my chest and travelled on slowly, so, so slowly, to the chipped nail polish I had on my toes, a forgotten bit of fun at Lizzie Magee’s. We were new to each other.
I waited for the insults to fly, the cry of how I would have to look about myself, the warning that Lizzie Magee was a menace, but no, all was silence bar the seagulls. Why wasn’t she shouting?
That night I was putting my uniform away in a clothes bag to keep the moths off it ’til September when she stepped in and closed the door quietly behind her. I knew by the folding of her arms I’d been caught before she even opened her mouth.
– Well, Miss. Have you anything you want to tell me?
– No. Like what?
– Like what you’ve been up to? Have you been makin’ free with that mollycoddled Joe Loughrey?
– It’s nothing to do with Joe Loughrey!
That shut her up but she was calm, too calm. Maybe she didn’t hit pregnant girls? But maybe she was only gathering steam.
– What do you mean, ‘it’? So there is a baby on the way? You little T.R.A.M.P.! Can you imagine what your father will say?
Ah, the killer blow: wheel out the daddy and the terrible thought that this might be the thing that makes him speak. My face was on fire so I kept my head down and my hair over the whole sorry mess. I was exposed, I was a bad girl, I was going to break my father’s heart. I had forgotten to watch myself. I had become a T.R.A.M.P. like Auntie Eileen, the original bolt of weak material. It was nothing to do with Joe Loughrey, although in that minute I had never missed him so much.
– And what do you mean this has nothing to do with Joe Loughrey? I thought that was who you were steppin’ out with? Who HAS it to do with, Mary Rattigan?
I would never tell her. I knew that I would never own anything again so completely and I didn’t want to give it up.
– No one, it was no one!
– It had to be someone!? Did someone interfere with you? Mary, talk to me, did someone force you?
Mammy wasn’t shouting now, she was whispering. Who did she think was going to overhear her? Good Holy God or His Virgin Mother? And did she just suggest that I talk to her? Now was not the best moment to fall down in hysterical laughter but I couldn’t guarantee I’d be able to control myself.
– Mary! Did someone make you do something against your will?
I thought briefly of how I’d felt myself take off courtesy of Jacques Bernier. How far away she had seemed. How the stars shone into my eyes and into my heart and how much I wanted to feel like that again and again and again.
– No, I wasn’t forced. And it was nothing to do with Joe Loughrey.
My mother breathed out and the air whistled slowly through her still-pursed lips. She was trying hard not to lash out and it was costing her. She couldn’t believe how brazen I was, neither could I. I braced myself for the slap that would help her get her point across, but she was at the door before she turned.
– We’ll see about who owns it tomorrow when we take you to Doctor Brown.
He’d make no difference. He wouldn’t be able to help me. And Joe’s daddy worked in the same surgery; he would be bound to find out. I could feel the vomit rising to burn the back of my throat. Joe would kill me when the news got back to him. I should have kept him happy, should have kissed him again while I had the chance. And Lizzie Magee: she would definitely kill me for not telling her that I’d done it.
And Daddy? Oh Jesus, my daddy. Would he stick up for me? Would he be the man of the house at last? How could I explain to him that I had handed my mother another stick to beat him with? I hoped that he wouldn’t cry anywhere where I might see him; my heart wouldn’t take it.
I sobbed myself to sleep after that. I was glad for the first time ever that Kathleen was away in Derry so I didn’t have to waste any energy trying to hold it in. I let it all out. Knowing that I’d let myself down, knowing that Lizzie Magee might bin me, knowing that Joe Loughrey would have to forgive me, having to face the consequences of one stupid night, not even a whole night. Twenty minutes? Thirty minutes? I didn’t even know how long it took to make love – it couldn’t be less than baking a sponge cake, surely?