Ballydubh Village, 1991
Jean had met Gavin Grimley when she was just fifteen years old. She vaguely knew who he was; he was one of them, the gang of lads that hung out on the wall outside the school. She and Louise had to walk past them every day on their way home. She knew their faces – they had been a couple of years ahead of her in school, but one by one they had all dropped out. They had never bothered to look for work, it was easier just to draw the dole. They now filled their days hanging around the town and would always be waiting on the school wall at the end of the day. They would shout down at the sisters from where they sat on top of the railings. Sometimes they would even throw things at them, but never anything that would hurt, just random objects like sweet wrappers or pieces of paper. They always singled Jean out because they knew they got the best reaction from her. They would make a comment about how she looked or what she was wearing, anything at all that they knew would embarrass her. She was painfully shy and her cheeks would go bright red until her whole face felt as though it was burning up to match her wine-coloured gabardine. Her reaction egged them on even more. She wished they would leave her alone, she didn’t want their attention. Louise would tell her to ignore them, that they were just looking for a reaction, but she couldn’t help it. She felt as though Louise thought it was her fault, that she was drawing it on herself. She began to dread their journey to and from school and, if for some reason Louise wasn’t able to walk with her, she would lower her head and quicken her pace almost into a run until she was past them.
When Louise went to university, Jean knew she would have to walk home alone every day so she began to heed Louise’s advice and tried to act cool as she walked past them, pretending not to hear them when they shouted at her. On the first day she tried it, they kept on shouting but on the second day, the shouts were fewer and by the end of the week they never shouted again. She was amazed when this had the desired effect. She slowly began to get used to them and, although they would watch her and take a drag on their cigarettes as she passed, for the most part they left her alone.
One day just after she had walked by them, she heard heavy footsteps running behind her. She felt her blood run cold; there had been no one else on the path but the boys. She swung around in panic and immediately saw it was one of them. He was dressed in baggy jeans with a hoody pulled up over his head. She tried to break into a run but found herself rooted to the pavement, her legs were frozen in fear.
“Hi, there.” He came up beside her and slowed down to walk on the path next to her. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” He pulled down his hood.
He was smiling and he didn’t seem like he was going to hurt her.
“You didn’t,” she lied. She felt a bit silly now.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Can I walk with you?”
“Why?”
“Because I like you.”
Jean was startled by his forthrightness. This was the same boy who had tormented her since the age of fifteen and now he was telling her he liked her!
“But you always tease me and shout!”
“Yeah, sorry about that. It was only a bit of fun. What’s your name?”
“Jean.”
“I’m Gavin.”
They walked the rest of the road in silence. Jean didn’t know what to make of him. She wondered if it was a dare from the lads and tomorrow she’d be the subject of more ridicule. When they reached the top of her road, she told him he had better go. She didn’t want her mother to see her with him. She knew she’d be in trouble.
The next day, the lads had stayed quiet as she approached and Jean inwardly said a prayer of thanks that she wasn’t going to be mocked for having fallen for one of their stupid pranks. When she walked through the convent gate, Gavin hopped off the wall and walked up beside her again. He continued doing the same thing each day, until it became a daily routine that he walked her home.
When it became clear he wasn’t trying to cause trouble for her, she began to lower her guard with him. She was surprised to find herself thinking that he was a nice guy; he was completely different to what she had thought. Plus, because she was so shy, she didn’t have too many friends in school, so she enjoyed their chats. As she talked to him and got to know him she learnt that he was from the town. He was very open with her and he told her that his mother was dead and he lived with his father who had hit the drink very hard after his mother had passed away. He wasn’t violent or anything but he was just buried under his grief. Jean was shocked by his story and felt so sorry for the childhood he’d had but he just shrugged his shoulders at her and said “That’s life!”
As he told her more about himself on their walks she couldn’t help but compare his upbringing to her own. While she had two loving parents, breakfast served before school every morning, a clean pressed uniform laid out, warm soup waiting on the cooker in the evenings, piano lessons, speech and drama and ballet and hopefully, if she did well enough in her Leaving Cert, university next. Gavin didn’t have any of that. He was only two years older than her but he had grown up years ago. However, he didn’t want pity. He accepted that this was his lot and just got on with it.
Soon she found she loved being around him. When she walked out of the school every evening she was so excited. Her heart would leap when she caught a glimpse of him waiting for her outside the gate.
She dared not tell her mother or Louise; she knew what they thought of the Grimleys. She had heard her father talking about how he had seen Gavin’s father falling out of O’Looney’s pub and her mother would tut and say that that he had “never got it together after his wife had died” so she knew they would never approve of their friendship.
Soon after, the daily walk from the school to her house became too short and she longed for more time with him so they began to take a detour and go down to the weir on their way home. They would sit and watch the rushing water until Jean would look at her watch and know her mother would be starting to wonder where she was.
One day out of the blue as they sat on the meadow grass, their voices drowned out by the rushing water, he had leaned over and kissed her. It was the first time she had ever kissed a boy and she could have sworn she had been lifted off the ground. She wanted more and they had kissed deeply for hours.
Pretty soon they started to climb over the old stone wall to the weir every day. When the summer came, she would fling off her gabardine and roll down her long wool socks. She would loosen the knot in her tie, undo the top button of her blouse and run through the grass until they reached their spot near a big ash tree. He would sit back against it and she would lean back into his arms. He would stroke her hair or plant delicate kisses along the skin of her neck, so light that they caused the hairs on her skin to stand up. They would pick blades of grass and split them down the centre. She felt so comfortable with him. He understood her and he was the only other person who she had ever opened up to outside of her family.
As the exams drew closer, she began telling her mother she was staying back after school to do supervised study just so she could have an extra two hours with Gavin. She knew she was way behind on the amount of revision that she needed to have done at this stage but she still couldn’t bring herself not to meet him every day. She cringed inwardly whenever she heard her proud parents telling friends and family how she “had the head down” and was “working very hard” and that they were “expecting great things from her” – it just made her want to run out and escape and to spend even more time with Gavin. It was a vicious circle. She had such a mountain of revision that she needed to do, she didn’t even know where to begin. She felt the pressure building inside her and the more she avoided it, the harder it became. She began to block it from her head and pretend it wasn’t happening.
The weeks went on and soon it was the night before the Leaving Certificate. The first exam was English Paper I and, as she opened her copy of Othello, she began to panic when she realised that she didn’t have the first idea what the play was even about. She had been in class but had been too busy daydreaming, as evidenced by the pencil scrawls that littered every page. She tried to remember what her teacher had said about the characters of Iago and Desdemona. She knew one of them was meant to be evil but for the life of her couldn’t remember which one. She knew there was no way she would even be able to blag her way through this. She slammed the text book shut. It was too late; the volume of work to be done at this stage was insurmountable.
* * *
Jean climbed out of her bedroom window and ran down the road into town. She knew which house belonged to Gavin because he had pointed it out to her before. She knocked on the door with the paint long since cracked and faded and prayed he was home. She was relieved when it was opened to see him standing there.
“Hey, what are you doing here? Are you okay?” He was surprised to see her. She had never been to his house before.
“No!” She began to cry. “I’ve left it too late to study, I can’t take anything in. My mam and dad are going to kill me.”
“Hey, it’s okay!” He wrapped his arms around her and brought her inside.
Jean stepped inside into the hallway and took in the gloominess of the room. She tried not to look shocked by the state of the house. The wallpaper was coming unstuck from the wall in parts and the ceiling was stained with black mildew spots. The brown swirly carpet on the floor was filthy and as Gavin led her upstairs to his room Jean noticed the stair rail was covered in a layer of dust. She quickly removed her hand. As she followed Gavin into his room, she was hit by the stale air. Even his room was grimy. She sat on the edge of his bed, amongst piles of CDs and clothes strewn about the floor.
“C’mon, you’re going to be fine.” He rubbed her shoulders “You’re really clever.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Some of things you tell me – like that time we were sitting out in the rain and remember there was thunder and lightning and you told me that you could calculate how far away it was from us?”
“But that’s not going to pass my Leaving Cert for me, is it?” she wailed. “Oh I’m in such deep shit. I’m not going in tomorrow.”
“You have to go!”
“I don’t!”
“At least give it a go – it might all start coming back to you again once you get in there.”
She looked at him doubtfully.
“Please, Jean, you have to – your parents will freak if you don’t go in. Then they’ll find out about us and they’ll stop us being together.”
The thought of not being able to see Gavin frightened her. She knew he was right; if she didn’t do her Leaving Cert, her parents would leave no stone unturned until they found out what was wrong. She could see it now; she would be wheeled into counsellors or brought to the best education advisers money could buy. It would just make everything a million times worse.
“C’mon, do it for me. Please?” he begged.
“Okay, only for you – I’ll give it a try.”
“That’s the girl!”
He walked her back down the stairs. As she passed the sitting-room door, she could hear loud snores, presumably coming from his father. At the top of her road he gave her a kiss on the forehead and told her he would be waiting for her after the exam finished.
* * *
While all her classmates had chattered nervously outside the exam hall saying that this year it had to be “Yeats because Clarke had come up for the last four years in a row” and that “the character sketch better be based on Iago”, Jean hadn’t joined in. She had kept to herself because she didn’t have a clue what they were even talking about. They had looked at her and assumed she was just quietly confident.
With trepidation she turned over English Paper I. All the words in black print looked jumbled together. Phrases like ‘Compare and Contrast’ and ‘Give an Account of’ jumped off the page in front of her. She told herself to calm down and to breathe deeply. She read the questions and read them again but she couldn’t think of anything to write. Whatever bit of knowledge she had retained from class, that she was hoping would get her through, was still locked inside her head. She looked around the exam hall at the heads buried in concentration. Hands were writing furiously trying to get hurried thoughts onto the paper in case they were forgotten again. She wrote her name and exam number on the top, hoping that that might quick-start her memory, but nothing was coming.
Someone coughed she could hear the heavy footsteps of the invigilator as he wore a path up and down the hall. He stood beside her breathing heavily and she could tell he was looking at her empty answer book. She kept her head down and pretended she was just reading the paper again. She looked up at the black and white clock on the wall and watched the hands moving around. Tick, tick, tick. She knew she was obliged to stay for the first half an hour and after that she could go. She watched the hands turning around until they read ten o’clock. She shoved back her chair, causing a screech along the floor tiles. A sea of heads turned to stare at her. She got up from her desk and walked up towards the invigilator and handed him her paper. She could see the looks of confusion on her classmates’ faces as they wondered where she was going: She’s only been here half an hour – she couldn’t be finished yet! She could see them looking at each other, amazed. Jean was one of the top pupils, she was one of the ones that should be there right until the last second frantically trying to scribble down every last bit of knowledge onto the paper before she was forced to stop.
As she walked towards the door Jean could feel ninety pairs of eyes boring holes in her back. When she got outside she cried. Her life was over, she had just ruined her life. She was forever being told that the Leaving Cert was the most important exam of her life and it would determine her whole future. She went outside into the yard and through tear-filled eyes could make out Gavin’s outline as he waited for her on top of the railings like he did every day. As he climbed his way down, she ran up to him and flung her arms around his neck. She was relieved to feel his strong arms around her, tight and reassuring.
They walked hand in hand and climbed over the stone style and walked down to the weir. She sobbed as he held her tight in his arms. She started to kiss him, hard and passionately. She wanted to feel his skin, she needed to be close to him, closer to him than she had ever felt before. She took off his T-shirt and lay on his bare chest in the heat of the June sun. They fumbled with each other’s clothes until they were both half-naked and he was lying on top of her. Then he entered her and she felt a sharp stabbing pain momentarily.
“Are you sure you’re ready?” he asked, feeling her body tense.
“Uh-huh,” she nodded.
He moved inside her, their bodies united. She had never felt closeness like this.
“I love you, you know?” he said.
“I love you too.”
* * *
They lay there together in the heat of the sun for hours until Jean checked her watch and knew her mother would be waiting for her at home to hear how the exam had gone.
Gavin helped her back over the wall and she jumped onto the path below. He walked her to the top of the road and they kissed goodbye. She loved Gavin Grimley and he loved her, that was all that mattered. She couldn’t believe she had just had sex. She tidied herself up and smoothed her hair so her mother wouldn’t become suspicious and walked on cloud nine back to her house.
As her mother fussed and fawned over her, serving up her favourite dinner of lasagne, followed by home-made chocolate brownies, Jean knew she couldn’t do it to her. She couldn’t shatter the high hopes that she held for her so she lied and told her that it had gone well, a bit tricky in parts but otherwise okay. She didn’t have the guts to tell her that actually she had handed the paper back to the invigilator as blank as it had been given to her in the first place. She was amazed at how easy the lies came. She knew the truth would come out eventually but she would get a plan together by then.
* * *
By the end of June, Jean’s period was overdue by a week or so. She tried not to think about it. She pushed it out of her head. She was irregular anyway. Now that school was finished, she had loads more time to spend with Gavin. They spent long endless days by the river in each other’s arms talking about what they would do in their future together, making up scenarios about where they would live and what they would work at.
By the middle of July, before Jean could even get out of bed in the mornings, she had to rush to be sick. She felt wretched; she was pale and drawn and was constantly exhausted. She couldn’t stomach the dinners her mother prepared for her; even the smell of her favourites were enough to send her running to the bathroom to throw up again. Her mother, worried that she had a vicious stomach bug, insisted on bringing her to Dr Thornton. Jean tried to tell her she was fine but she insisted they were going and that was the end of it.
Jean couldn’t make eye contact with Dr Thornton as her mother outlined her symptoms. When he asked Mrs McParland to step outside because he wanted to have a word alone with Jean, her mother began to protest but the doctor stayed firm and an annoyed Mrs McParland found herself sitting outside in the waiting room.
“Now, Jean, nothing to be frightened about, I just want to ask you a few questions alone if that’s okay?”
Jean nodded.
“So when did you have your last period?”
“May or June.”
He looked up from where he was scribbling his notes. “Can you remember which?”
“End of May maybe.”
He began to write again. “Now please don’t be offended but I have to ask the question – is there any possibility that you might be pregnant?”
Jean said nothing. She felt her eyes getting heavy as they filled with the weight of tears which overflowed and spilled down her face. She tried to wipe them away but they still kept coming.
“It’s okay, Jean, it’s going to be okay. I’m going to get you to do a pregnancy test just to confirm, okay?”
She nodded, incapable of speech.
“There’s a toilet in there and I want you to get a urine sample for me.” He handed her a brown plastic vial.
Jean sat on the toilet knowing what was going to happen. She knew she was pregnant; she had known it since she noticed her period hadn’t arrived in June. She knew she would come out and hand this jar of piss to the doctor and he was going to tell her that she was pregnant and her life would be changed forever. She knew her mother was going to hit the roof, that was a given. She didn’t know how Gavin would react, she hadn’t told him her period was late. Would he stick by her and tell her they would raise the baby together? Or would he do a runner like the nuns in school and her mother had always warned about when young girls got pregnant? She considered staying in the small toilet cubicle forever where she could be protected from all their reactions. There was a soft knocking on the door.
“Jean – are you okay in there?”
“Yes, I’m coming now, Dr Thornton.” She did up her jeans and went back out to the surgery and handed the vial to him.
She didn’t watch as he went about the test. Instead she prayed that maybe it was just a bad bug she had picked up after all, like her mother thought.
The minutes ticked by, then she became aware that he was checking the test.
“Jean . . .”
She looked up and met his eyes.
“It’s positive.”
She was pregnant. Her life was over.
Her mother had been called back into the room then and Jean felt as though she was watching all of this from above. As Jean was incapable of speaking, Dr Thornton had broken it to her mother that her seventeen-year-old daughter was actually not sick at all, just pregnant. Jean watched her mother’s face crumple as the shock took hold and she looked at her daughter for confirmation that it was true. But instead of shouting and screaming like Jean had thought she would, she remained silent which unnerved her. She almost wished she was angry.
“You couldn’t be – are you sure?” was all she could muster up.
They left the surgery and a stunned Mrs McParland drove home with her daughter in the passenger seat, clutching a bundle of leaflets all offering advice on how best to deal with a crisis pregnancy. Every so often her mother would ask a question. “But how? Who? Where?” but Jean stayed quiet.
Later that evening, when both had had time to digest the turn of events, Jean told her mother everything, from how she met Gavin, to her appalling Leaving Certificate. She watched as each confession broke another piece of her mother’s heart as she realised that her daughter’s future had been dramatically altered from the path she had hoped and dreamed for her. Even though she had been bright in school, Úna McParland had never gone to university herself; her parents could never have afforded it in a million years. She had a tough childhood, helping out on the farm early in the morning before school and afterwards every evening too. She had left school at the age of twelve to work in the local sewing factory. Most of the girls in her class had done the same thing; it was only the privileged few, the daughters of doctors or solicitors in the town that had gone on to secondary school. That was why she had wanted so much more for her daughters, she had made it her life’s work to make sure they had everything that she didn’t have and now her youngest daughter was about to go down a radically different path despite everything she had done for her. Úna had not seen it coming.
As expected, her father had hit the roof when he was told that evening, but Úna had begged him to stay calm and pointed out that his reacting like that wasn’t helping anybody.
Louise came in from college a while later, in her long skirt and granddad-style cardigan – she had recently become a convert to the grunge look. When her mother had told her about Jean, she had looked at her little sister with a mixture of disgust and pity. Later, when they were alone, she had cornered her. “How could you be so naïve – have you never heard of a condom? All teenagers have sex nowadays but they use protection for God’s sake!” she said angrily. It was Louise’s reaction that had hurt the most. She had always looked up to her older sister.
Over the next couple of days her family discussed what Jean was going to do, but she wasn’t included in the plans. She tried telling them that Gavin was a really good guy and that he loved her and it wasn’t his fault that his dad was an alcoholic. She told them that she and Gavin would raise the baby together and that she knew Gavin would stick by her even though she hadn’t even told him yet that she was pregnant, but her parents forbade her to go anywhere near him ever again. She listened as they planned her whole life out for her. She was going to take this year off and have her baby, then she would go back and repeat the Leaving Cert the following year and go on to university. Úna would take care of the baby. They never asked her if this was what she wanted.