The Crowley Girl
‘I don’t know what to do, lads,’ Keelin said. She’d texted her two best friends that afternoon and asked them to meet her in Cupán Tae, the island’s oldest cafe. The owner had been one of the few who refused to sell to the Kinsellas when Misty Hill was set up, much to their frustration, so there was never any danger of running into Henry here. She hadn’t yet met another human being who could nurse a grudge quite like her husband. ‘What do ye think I should do?’ she asked them. Seán Crowley, with his weather-beaten face and unkempt blond beard, was as much of the island as Keelin was, his family had been here for generations, but Johanna Stein was the daughter of blow-ins, a pair of German artists who moved to west Cork in the early seventies, looking for the end of the world, and they had found it on Inisrún. As children, the three of them spent their days exploring the island; racing down narrow, winding roads with tufts of grass sprouting in the middle, shouting Seachain! when the odd car would pass, a shell of metal belching black clouds and half held together with twine, squeezing the children up against stone walls stuffed with moss and weeds. They would go down to An Siopa Beag and beg Keelin’s mother for salt-and-vinegar Taytos, sitting side by side on the stone ledge outside, licking crumbs from the foil crisp packets, their voices echoing in the cocoon of a beach surrounded by the high sea cliffs on the right and the pier to the left, watching as the boats arrived from the mainland to see if anyone new was coming to the island. Apart from Seán and Keelin’s brief attempt at romance as teenagers – This is a terrible idea, Keelin had said after a few months of dating. Can we go back to normal, please? and Seán had laughed, and said he thought she’d never ask – they had always been a gang of three, and utterly inseparable.
‘Henry will go mad if he sees these marks.’ She gave Seán the report that her son had brought home from school the day before. He took it from her, making a face as his eyes skimmed down the page.
‘Yeah,’ he said, passing it to Johanna. ‘Not great and that’s coming from me, like.’
‘Alex is more creative,’ Keelin said defensively, taking the letter from the other woman, folding it in two and putting it back in her handbag. ‘And you know how much I hated maths in school – I was pure useless. Alex takes after my side, unfortunately for him.’
‘He did brilliantly in french,’ Johanna tried to comfort her. ‘He’s obviously more inclined towards languages. There’s no harm in that.’ The café’s proprietor, wearing the same worn-out GAA jersey and acid-wash denim jeans he did every day, placed a slice of homemade coffee cake on the table for her, apple tart for Johanna. ‘Go raibh maith agat, Cormac,’ Keelin said, smiling at him. She waited until the older man had gone behind the counter again before continuing. ‘Henry won’t be happy about this,’ she admitted, frowning at Seán when he rolled his eyes. ‘Excuse me, Crowley. Don’t be like that about my husband. If Alex wants to go to university, he’ll need to get better marks than this, and that’s the reality of it. We agreed that he could sit his final exams on Inisrún, but only if he kept his grades up. If Henry hears he’s failing maths . . .’ She sighed, taking a bite of the cake. Her son had been miserable at the boarding school outside Dublin that a friend of Henry’s had recommended; he felt isolated, never quite fitting in with his rugby-obsessed classmates. I miss the island, he said every time he phoned; please let me come home, Mam. She had gone to Henry then, wheedling and cajoling, promising that Alex would be an exemplary student if he came back to Inisrún, he wouldn’t get lower than a B in any of his subjects and if he did, there’d be hell to pay. She didn’t want to admit that her efforts were as much for her own benefit as Alex’s; she’d missed her son terribly when he was away at school. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said again, slicing her fork into Johanna’s apple tart, ignoring her friend’s complaint.
‘Maybe it’s time . . .’ Jo paused, glancing at Keelin uncertainly.
‘Maybe it’s time to what?’
‘Alex is almost an adult,’ her friend said. ‘He’ll be off to college soon. You won’t always be there to rescue him, Keels.’
‘I’m not trying to “rescue” him; he’s my son. I just want him to be happy. I don’t think that’s a crime, is it? Especially after everything he’s been through.’
‘Of course.’ Johanna put her arm around Keelin’s waist and squeezed tightly. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re the most loyal, supportive person on Inisrún. That’s why we love you, isn’t it, Seán?’ Their friend snorted, and told them to leave him out of this. ‘And I don’t even have kids,’ Jo said. ‘What do I know?’
‘Wait,’ Seán interrupted, tapping the side of his head as if he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of this earlier. ‘I have the perfect solution.’ He paused for dramatic effect, pretending to do a drum roll on the wooden table. ‘Nessa!’
‘Nessa, your niece?’
‘Do you know another Nessa on Rún, d’ya?’ he asked, and Keelin stuck out her tongue in response; she always regressed to acting like a ten-year-old when she was around him. ‘I’ll have you know my goddaughter got an A1 in honours maths in the Leaving, and she’s in second year of Mathematical Science at UCC now, no less.’
‘Yeah, we’re well aware of that. You wouldn’t stop going on about it last year.’ Jo smirked. ‘You’d swear it was you who was doing your exams.’
‘Nessa is giving grinds to earn money.’ Seán ignored their friend. ‘She’s got the grant, but Cork is still an expensive city to live in.’
Nessa Crowley’s results seemed to be the only topic of conversation on the island for days after they were announced. Did you hear the eldest Crowley Girl got six hundred points in her Leaving, and all higher-level subjects? Keelin was asked at Mass and when she was picking up Evie from school and down by the pier waiting for the ferry, until she wanted to reply in exasperation, You do realise other people sat their exams too, don’t you?
‘But . . .’ Keelin hesitated. Wouldn’t Brendan Crowley mind if his daughter came to work in Hawthorn House? she wanted to ask. Her husband thought Brendan adored him, assuming the school principal was eternally grateful to the Kinsellas for the money they’d sunk into the island’s education system, but Keelin was from Inisrún and she knew how these things worked. The more money Henry spent trying to fit in, the less people here liked him. She could see them suppressing an eye-roll when her husband attempted to speak Irish, or when he mentioned, yet again, how his mother had been born here, his accent suddenly sounding more foreign, more English, than it ever had before.
‘Won’t Nessa be busy with her college work?’ Johanna said, a side-glance at Keelin telling her that her friend understood her reservations. ‘She’s hardly going to want to traipse home every weekend to give grinds to a teenage boy, is she?’
‘Ah, you know what those girls are like,’ Seán said. ‘They can’t survive without each other. Róisín and Sinéad were wailing the day Nessa left – you’d swear she was after getting on a coffin ship rather than the ferry to the mainland. She’ll be home every weekend anyway, mark my words. I’m telling you, she’d jump at the chance to work for you.’
‘Nessa Crowley,’ Keelin said, relenting. She stirred sugar into her coffee. ‘Well, well. You might be the solution to all my problems.’