In many ways I was relieved he was gone, not bothering me any more, lingering outside my window, calling me in the middle of the night. I collected butterflies and played with Megan and most of the time I was happy. Then something would happen, some unexpected emotion would jump on me as I rounded a new corner in life and the feelings would leak out, and sometimes it was difficult to dam them back in.
Seeing Katherine Padley’s father at my first Communion, that set me off. It was the way he took this photograph of her, like she was the most beautiful and the most clever girl in the class. I wanted that and I howled so much I went red and ugly to the point where even my mother became embarrassed, and she was never one to worry about causing a scene. She had to drag me out of the church I was howling so loudly, gulping and gasping with despair. I had no idea where the noises were coming from.
So I stood with my mother in the toilets with tears coursing down my face and her trying everything to hold them back. She tried to repair me, but these were tears from the pit, from that far below they were avalanching as they raced to the surface and burst forth in their own form. She was wiping my face, a red blotch of sadness. She wasn’t used to other people’s outbursts, just her own. She didn’t know how to act. She tried being nice, being reasonable, affectionate, understanding, manipulative, then at the end of her repertoire, when all else had failed, she did anger.
‘Stop it,’ she screeched so loudly from the toilet in the school hall, the entire congregation must have heard. ‘Just stop, Simone.’ She was trying to be strict with me as another puppy yelp escaped unexpectedly from my stomach. It was hurting, the tears were coming from so low down.
‘You’ve got to pull yourself together and go in there and hold your head high.’
She had no ability to deal with another person’s pain. Her own dramas were the most important thing, even when someone else needed to have one.
By the time I got back to the church my body was only sometimes shuddering from the centre. She looked at me sternly as if that would stop the involuntary movement, but I had no control over it. She pushed me off in the direction of the altar and I took up my seat beside Katherine Padley. She patted my arm, like she had the day I’d spent too long in the confessional. I sighed, knowing the whole congregation felt sorry for me, I hated that. I read their thoughts. Poor girl, no Dad.
I have no recollection of the ceremony, of what happens at a first Communion. I remember there were envelopes from all the old aunts with money in them, and from Uncle Jack. And that by some miracle the first communion dress Gladys had made for me was shredded in the storm by glass from a falling window. It seemed that fabric was never meant to marry, man or God, Gladys said.
I remember looking in a mirror at the great drops of water clinging to my face and my mother trying to hold them back and reconstruct me. And my mother then choosing a hymn from Dad’s funeral to cry to. It was as if she had to compete for the drama prize after my breakdown. It was her turn then to be led from the church.
We’d both recovered by the time the professional photographer arrived. He wasn’t anyone’s Dad. He was being paid to take our picture so he treated us all the same. I felt I looked a million dollars by then, dressed as one of God’s little angels. But the photograph stands testament to this day, in it I looked like I only half belonged. My mother was having a cigarette around the back of the vestry, she’d gone without one for a few hours and the trauma of having to deal with my raw emotions, then hers, was too much. My three brothers, as brothers should, couldn’t care less.
Then I went back to the way I remained for years, with no idea when or why the feelings would overtake me. That was because I was suspended in deep freeze, trapped in a gaseous fog in a glass beaker, like some experiment from my brother’s Chemistry class.