There are two great hours in the day. The first is the hour on the bus from Carncloon to school in Omagh when I watch the lush fields and the trees rolling past and I have the weight and warmth of Lizzie Magee slumped against me with her twin smells of greasy hair and too many sprays of Impulse. She is the dividing line between the strain of The Hill and a kind of giddy happiness that settles on me as soon as we click together. We are convent grammar girls and along with the Christian Brothers boys, the lucky ones, the 11+ passers. A good education is the sure door to the dream of living in England or America and no one ever misses a single long, hard day, despite how much we grizzle.
The other hour is the one at the end of the day when I have to wait for the workers’ bus to get back out to The Hill. This is the hour I get to spend with My Boyfriend. Lizzie says it’s enough to make her boke the way me and Joe Loughrey moon over each other. It’s not normal for sixteen-year-olds to behave like auld wans, holding hands and a ton of other soppy goings-on.
– Hi, yous two! Get a stable!
Joe and me were used to the stable joke. Being called Mary and Joseph is far from unusual in Tyrone, but it isn’t all that funny either when you’re an item. As usual it’s big Scrumptious Connolly who’s shouting, he never knows when to quit. But he’s like everyone else that goes to school with Joe and me, they know even at sixteen that we are really something. We go together, two halves of a biscuit sandwich. It makes my head swell and my heart sing to hear them all at us. We’re the centre of attention, Doctor Loughrey’s son and me.
He had picked me. ME! Every girl on legs fancied him but it was me he asked to go steady. It was the best minute I’d ever had, couldn’t believe my luck. Joe Loughrey? And ME? He has relatives in America, more doctors who could sponsor him until he got his Green Card. He’s just the ticket, Auntie Eileen winks, and I think my God, she’s right, he can get me out of here.
What’s wrong with us, the other wans want to know? Do we dream we won’t get bored soon? Didn’t Joe Loughrey ever think of going out with somebody else, somebody who didn’t look like a white witch? Somebody whose granny didn’t see dead people?
Joe only ever smiles and shakes his head as if they are all missing something but he’s no intention of telling them what. Lizzie tells all interested parties to fuck right off, all the way off, it saves time in the long run. It’s nobody’s business but Mary’s and she’s not in the business of explaining herself, she says as snotty as she can manage. I don’t know where she gets half the cheek she has. I’d love just a tiny slice of it. She’s a great friend, the best.
– What are you doing hanging around with that wan?
– She’s my friend, Mammy!
– Your friend? Your friend? Well! You’re easily pleased, I’ll give you that!
– She’s my best friend, she said so!
– Did you have to pick one of the Dirty Magee breed? Did you? Did you?
– I like Lizzie Magee.
– You like Lizzie Magee! You like Lizzie Magee! Well, you’ll live to regret liking Lizzie Magee, her mother’s nothing but a T.R.A.M.P and her mother before that wasn’t much better! And to cap it all she married into the Dirty Magee breed! But you carry on, carry on when the Virgin Mother Herself would look the other way!
That’s a lot to absorb when you’re only five and the first day of primary school’s been over for ten minutes. It didn’t sway me then and it doesn’t sway me now. Lizzie Magee and me would never be prised apart. From the very minute she’d reached for my hand, I felt like I’d grown a second skin, one that was harder to bruise.
She was coming out of Crawford’s with her two favourites – a Curly Wurly and a quarter of Fizzy Colas.
– See ye tomorrow, Lizzie, alright?
– See ye, Mary, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, given half a chance!
– Funny!
– I’m hilarious, didn’t ye ever notice? And fuckin’ gorgeous to boot!
I smiled as all the wans lining the front of Crawford’s cracked up. Even one of the young British Army soldiers was laughing along as he walked two by two, rifle across his chest. He wasn’t UDR – no green beret or gold harp pin. He’d likely learn soon enough not to think of us as just ordinary people.
I hope he understands that we aren’t fighting over religion. We only use the labels of Catholic and Protestant to indicate minority and majority rights. Did he know that the English government that had sent him here didn’t want the Six Counties, that the punchline to the big fat joke was that Dublin didn’t want it either? I hope he doesn’t take a bullet because he’s as caught between the two as we all are.
Him and the rest of the troop were spinning and turning every few yards, trying to get back inside the big barracks before anything kicked off. The barracks with its massive square cast-concrete watchtower is opposite St Patrick’s chapel spire, the two hives of activity like a set of tall-pillared gates to the Republic. What did the English boys make of ‘the situation’, stuck in all the little grey towns along the border? Carncloon looked grimy in the winter light: the main street missing a shop here and there where a bomb had gone off, grubby windows with drawn curtains or sheets of corrugated tin. Only the broken glass glittered where it had been swept into the gutters, blood diamonds.
The 11+ Protestants who went to the academy were hanging about outside Crawford’s too. They wore their uniforms with the same pride. We are put on separate buses to get to our separate schools even though both the schools are in Omagh, but when we get back to Carncloon we all have to get the same bus out to the hills. Nobody dies. We’re all friends anyway when the hay has to be got in.
We all have the same Christian God, hearts, lungs, spleens and animals to deal with. We just deal with them in separate churches, separate doctors’ surgeries and separate vets’. We’re told from the cradle that they’re land-robbing bastards; they’re told we are vermin who don’t know when to stop breeding. They like marching about after bands playing ‘The Sash My Father Wore’ battered out on drums; we don’t march about so much since Bloody Sunday. They drink in their own pubs on St Patrick’s Day; we drink in ours and we largely stay indoors for the Orange Parades on the Twelfth of July so they can burn their Pope dollies and enjoy the heat from the flames licking their white gloves and bowler hats. It was a brilliant system right up until it totally broke down.
Joe and me walked away from the laughing and giggling and the odd whoop and whistle to the back of the Long Lounge. It had been firebombed a year ago; some people said it was an insurance job, others said it was an Ulster Defence Association job. The UDA was set up to battle the disease of Republicanism and operated under the banner of the Ulster Freedom Fighters when they had to carry out any violent acts.
– We are not a disease, says Mammy, don’t you ever forget that, Mary Rattigan.
I just nod but I think to myself, you are a disease, a plague! It’s how I test if she can still read my mind. I’m getting better: no slaps now for nearly a month.
The owner of the Long Lounge, Gerard Hickey, had hidden some IRA men one night after they made a hit on the barracks in Strabane and getting his pub burnt down was the payback. I was sad I hadn’t got to see it in its heyday. Auntie Eileen says the craic was mighty when the band struck up and the tables were pushed back to give people space to shake a leg.
Mammy’s battle for us over them bangs around The Hill all day; her dream of a united Ireland has been with me for as long as I’ve had ears. Joe Loughrey can be like that when it comes to politics and I don’t like it one bit that he reminds me of her in any way. He knows all about our side, why we all had to be on it and why it mattered – boys always did. We’ve stopped talking about the ‘incidents’ because otherwise we could get huffy with each other. Without Mammy to scare me, I’d argue that one of the sides had to stop their nonsense first and he’d just say, aye, aye, as long as it’s the Loyalists. It always had to be them not us that got sense.
I smile and change the subject when Joe squares his Republican shoulders. I shut his mouth with kisses and don’t bite his lip even though I dearly want to. Talking things out wasn’t an option for either side; from the top to the bottom of both crews, some eejit would always rather plant a bomb or pull a trigger. It was the same for Joe and me: I held his tongue with mine to keep the peace.
I always got a packet of cherry drops as soon as we landed at Crawford’s. I ran the sweets around and around my mouth when no one was looking. Lizzie knew what I did and she thought I really needed to catch myself on. I sucked in my lips and bit and licked them to make sure the cherry juice stained them perfect confectionery pink. I thought it made me look nice and that maybe Joe would think I always tasted like cherries.
The Long Lounge, wrecked as it was, was a top-notch kissing place and Joe and me had been using it for months. It’s hidden from the main street and keeps the wind and the rain off us. Joe stands to one side to let me through the blackened frame like he’s opening a door to a ballroom and I smile and bow as I go through and he grabs and tickles me from behind. I squeal and shout at him to stop but we both know I don’t mean it for a second. It worries me how little I mean it.
I so loved being touched and held. My world and its bother fell away when I was locked against his chest. He was dark like me, but not so nearly black, and where my eyes were grey, his were blue. I’d never be able to give Joe Loughrey up. He would get me out of The Hill and away from Carncloon, away from the Troubles; him and a grammar-school education were the tickets I needed. It was like a winged dream I could hardly wait to fall dead asleep for.
We both knew he had a hard-on because it was held between us but we never let on it was there. I couldn’t stop thinking about it but I couldn’t imagine doing it. My face went on fire and I was convinced that everyone could see inside my head. Maybe even the nuns could see my unclean thoughts running about like Wile E. Coyote after Road Runner?
But more and more, even though I knew I was being bad, I wished Joe Loughrey would put his hands on me, anywhere, everywhere, all over me, inside me. If he ever pushed I would cave in. I was hollow from between my legs to my heart.
We knew what went where from the dismembered body parts in Girls Growing Up when Sister Dolores had braced herself to teach us about reproduction. The picture of the willy was just that: a side-view of a willy by itself on the page, not attached to a body. The outline was solid when it was hanging down but a series of dotted lines had been drawn to indicate how it would get up, so it looked for all the world like it was moving up and down like a pump handle. How do you get on it if it doesn’t stay still? I whispered to Lizzie Magee who’d snorted so loud she was sent out to the Mother Superior’s office to explain her ‘bestial proclivities’.
The wombs floated on the page, the fallopian tubes keeping them aloft. The opening sported one down arrow that said ‘vagina’. I just couldn’t imagine it. The whole act seemed impossible. Mammy avoided all things below-waist. She had tutted when I got my period. I wasn’t to complain as the Virgin Mother Herself would have had to tolerate ‘monthlies’ too. Oh, and I mustn’t use too many sanitary towels, they were very expensive. Don’t bleed on anything; a towel should be put down if I couldn’t be sure. Don’t tell another living soul: disgusting things are best kept to yourself.
Auntie Eileen had bought me a bra after she’d caught me squashing my new boobs down with my palms. The blinking things are going to grow anyway, she said, might as well enjoy them. Anyway it’s lovely being a woman!
Mammy didn’t think so. Women were not up to snuff, we were degenerate time bombs waiting to go off like Auntie Eileen had as soon as no one was watching. To lead Kathleen and me by example she kept herself braced. Monday to Saturday, she squeaked and creaked and strained at the sink, the cooker, the mangle as the very big bra, from shoulder to waist, and the very big girdle, from waist to mid-thigh, only allowed her to bend a certain painful amount in the middle. She was always rubbing her mid-section. She must have had welts as red as a bishop’s cape.
For Sunday she had an even tighter set of pristine white underpinnings. She would appear with sweat on her lip, trying not to look as if she was being pounded in the stomach. Every day called for nylons, her American Tans. The fact that long dark hairs cowered inside them never bothered her because she was ‘decent’.
Every month, one or other of the sets would be handwashed in Daz before anyone got up in the morning and pegged on the line inside a decent layer of tea towels and dishcloths in the summer. In the winter they were rolled in towels and coiled like a snake on the rack above the range.
Even kissing the most sought-after boy in town can’t keep her and her madness away for longer than five minutes. Everything about her – everything she does, her smells, everything she says– makes me want to take off at such a pace that one day she’ll go to hit me and all there will be is air.