I didn’t think I made any noise, but I must have done, because Kate was behind the door, her soft knocks alternating with ‘Pen? Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said hoarsely.
There was a long pause. ‘Did you get anything to eat?’
‘I’m fine.’
Kate’s voice, when it returned, was muffled by the door.
‘What?’ I called.
‘Do you want me to come in?’
Such a small thing should have been easily answered. I could have said no, I could have said yes. I lay there wrestling with the decision so long, my mind slipping in and out of a doze, that eventually she must have gone away.
THURSDAY
When I woke up next morning I couldn’t remember Cara’s face. I lay still for several minutes, calling up my store of images, but they had been robbed in the night. I could visualize her shape curled up on the sofa, or plucking a saucepan from a high shelf, or running down a road, but the face was wavering as if digitized, like footage of criminals.
The first thing I did was to run downstairs, my pulse twanging in my shoulders. Grace was curled up on the third stair; I took a double step to avoid him, but he somehow inserted himself under my slipper, and yowled in complaint. The Greek photos weren’t on the sideboard, or on the mantelpiece in the living-room; where could the sister have put them? I finally found them in the top drawer with the scissors and string.
I didn’t spare a glance for the cliffs and sunsets, the action shots on motorbikes. What I was tracking was Cara, hidden in every third or fourth picture. I studied these centimetres of plastic, recognizing the familiar elements of winey hair, faint eyebrows and blanched skin, but somehow they did not add up to her face. None of them looked very human either; she seemed like a creature from another planet who was trying to blend into the crowd of tourists.
We certainly didn’t live on the same elements. Once, I remembered, she had buried her face in the front of my grey mohair jumper. After a minute I became alarmed, and asked, ‘Can you breathe down there?’
Whatever she said was muffled by the wool.
‘What?’
She turned her face a little sideways, leaning her eyelashes on my breast. I could hear the smile in her words: ‘There are better things to breathe than air.’
None of these photos looked quite like the woman I knew. I brought them upstairs and put them on top of the pile in my photo box. Then I slid my fingers underneath, and flicked through the sparse schooldays photos till I found what I was looking for. The sheer audacity of me, to nick it from the Wall family album the first day I visited the big house. Kate was in the bath, I remembered, and the little redhaired sister was pestering me to admire pictures of their late basset hound. She ran off for a minute, to check the starting time of Top of the Pops in the TV guide, and I turned the pages of the album. There were not many of Kate – clearly she resisted cameras – and in most of them she was smiling boredly to order. But when I turned the loaded page, one picture caught my eye. Kate, on rollerskates in a deserted car park, hunched forward, giving the photographer one of those stern looks that used to stop my breath. She was in blue denim dungarees, the legs a little too short for her, one of the shoulder straps undone. Behind her, the little sister in a gypsy shirt scrambled to keep up, laughing through a faceful of hair. Glancing up to make sure no one was about to come into the room, I tugged the photo out from under its clear cellophane. The tape left four square brown marks on the paper. I shoved the picture deep in the pocket of my school skirt. By the time I got it home, it had three big creases, but they didn’t touch Kate’s face.
And now here it was back in its own house where it belonged. And the strange thing was that over the years it had transformed itself into a photo of Cara, with her big sister scowling in the foreground. As if people were invisible ink until the warm iron of love ripened their lines into something we could see.
I shut the box. I could tell I was hungry now; my stomach was complaining to itself. In the kitchen I filled a big bowl with cereal and milk, then couldn’t begin to eat it. Not that it seemed repellent, not that I felt sick, just that I no longer had the hang of how to open my mouth and swallow. It was like forgetting how to ride a bike, having lost the thread that connects each movement of muscle to the next. I emptied the bowl into the sink tidy, then decanted that into the compost bin so that Mr. Wall wouldn’t see it and worry.
A frayed end of one of last night’s dreams came back to me. We were walking in the woods, Cara and I, and suddenly we heard Mr. Wall’s voice through a megaphone, ordering us to come out from behind those trees. He was saying how he had known about us two for twenty years now, how it was primitive, repulsive, and totally unacceptable. ‘I’m afraid I feel it incumbent upon me to inform the police,’ he kept repeating. I shook my head now, to break the dream’s hold.
His presentation letter-opener with the gold feather on it (thirty years of service to the scholars at the Wotherby library) lay on the kitchen counter beside several neatly slit envelopes and the first batch of mass cards. I counted two Blessed are They Who Mourns, two Deepest Sympathies, one whose sympathy was Sincere, and even one Heartfelt – the last a little over the top, I thought, considering that it was from an almost indecipherable relative never mentioned by Cara in all the years I knew her. The pictures were rudimentary: chalices in paper relief or outlined in silver, the occasional tastefully meagre spray of blossoms. The statements on the inside were rather official, with the names added in spidery writing. As an Expression of Sympathy from: scribble scribble, The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass will be Offered by: scrawl scrawl, For the Repose of the Soul of: Cara Wall. If they didn’t know how little repose mass ever gave to her soul, why were they bothering to send a card at all? Oh, PenItentiary, stop being so critical. Whatever made them feel a little better.
What would a non-religious lesbian sympathy card be like, I wondered? A postcard with a cartoon on it, no doubt. I tried to come up with a suitable slogan. ‘A woman without a body is like a kite without a string’? ‘Death = Life’?
Half past eight already, and no sign of Kate. I’d have to grab a cup of tea in the staff-room. I pulled off my dressing-gown as I pounded up the stairs to find some respectable clothes. Everything seemed to be crumpled or unwashed, except for a polka-dot blouse which was far too merry. I settled for a loose purple shirt over a grey skirt, the Victorian colours of light mourning.
Five long rattling coughs from the engine, then nothing. Ah, come on now, Min, of all days to go dead on me. Ah, be nice. Good wee car. I tried again, three times in a row, then realized I had flooded the engine. Damn you anyway, rotten little banger. I slammed the car door so hard I thought it might drop off its rust-gnawed hinges. Evidently my entire life was about to fall apart. I wanted to kick the wheel, but that would be just too Fawlty Towers. I considered getting Kate up to help me push Minnie down the hill, but I couldn’t haul her out of bed if she was convalescing.
I peered under the bonnet: everything looked all right. Machines and mechanics made me feel so powerless. Why hadn’t I ever listened when my father talked to himself as he fiddled around with our third-hand Fiat’s engine on Saturday afternoons? I should probably sign up at the community college this autumn to learn about car innards. There, that was a future plan, that was healthy. No lover, no life, but a possible course in car maintenance.
Giving up on Minnie, I went back inside and rang for a taxi, then made a shamed call to the school secretary to ask if someone could keep an eye on my class till I turned up. Leaning against the gate, peering up and down for anything that said SpeediCars, I could feel my stomach growl. The day was heating up already. What ludicrous weather, calling for garden parties and walks along Sandymount Strand, but who with? Somehow over the years I had slipped into being unsociable. Between the straight schoolfriends I had inched away from, and the dykes I met only through and with Cara, I found myself on a kind of island. As long as Cara was around it seemed full of voices; liv
ing with a Gemini, one was never short of company. But now I had no idea how to go about filling the evenings. Living in a couple made you so comfortably lazy. Of course I had spent many satisfying days alone while Cara was out or away, but they were framed by her presence; now they had nothing to contrast with, and stretched out like prison terms.
That eggs-in-one-basket cliché was inescapable. We all knew we should store our eggs one by one, tuck each in moss and hide it in the roots of a different tree. But was that what we did? No, of course not, that would be much too sensible. It was all very well to swing your laden basket through the woods if you knew there was someone waiting for you with the door open and the kettle whistling, but what if there wasn’t? Suddenly you found yourself alone in a circle of trees, with the branches snatching at a basket too heavy for your hand, and the flies buzzing at the tail-end of summer.
‘O’Grady?’
My eyes focused at last on the man leaning out of the taxi window. When I climbed in, I found that he was not only smoking, but also playing his radio. I thought if I complained about either, my voice might crack. We were passing the miniature Eiffel Tower of the television station when, to my horror, I found myself identifying with a pop song that rhymed ‘missing you’ with ‘kissing you’. Luckily the driver twiddled the knob at that point and settled for a discussion about Catholic majorities on school boards.
We wheeled in Immac’s double gates at a quarter past nine. I paid the man, then stood on the drive, watching the taxi disappear along the double row of slowly dying elms. The gravel shifted under my feet as I scrunched my way up to the main door. I was suddenly unconvinced of my ability to do this: the day, the job, the whole thing. Panic seized my hand as it reached to push the door handle, and it occurred to me to turn back, but that would be Cara’s kind of carry-on, not mine.
As I hurried along the corridor, an old nun nodded at me and a sixth-classer running in late gave me an apologetic smile. I must have looked normal. I was walking round with snake-bite in my veins, a bomb ticking in my skull, but evidently no one could tell. I took the stairs two at a time, swinging where the banisters turned and almost headbutting Sister Dominic in the stomach. I reeled backwards. Her veil hooded her glasses. ‘I’m so sorry, Sister. I know I’m horribly late, the car wouldn’t start, it’s most unlike it. I did ring and leave a message…’
‘Calm yourself, Penelope.’ Her hand perched on my shoulder for a moment, then returned to hang on the cross.
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘Since your class has PE first thing on Thursdays, they won’t be in till nine forty-five.’
My breath slithered out. ‘I forgot.’
‘Though of course you may wish to go to your classroom straight away and begin collecting your thoughts.’
‘Of course.’ How many years of my life was I going to spend hating this woman?
Big Dom’s eyes shone behind her thick glasses. ‘How was the funeral?’
‘Fine,’ I told her brightly, and carried on up the stairs.
‘I’ve been remembering your friend in my prayers, Penelope,’ she said without raising her voice.
‘I’m sure she’s grateful,’ I called back, and then, afraid that my sarcasm was audible, hurried on.
Everyone else in the world managed to get their tongue round ‘Pen’, even Mr. Wall; Sister Dominic used my full name simply to remind me that she set the terms. And why had my mother given me such a wifey name anyway? The original Penelope should have run off to an island with the wittiest suitor, or woven a fabulous tapestry that would spread her fame, or just taken the dog and run along the shore. Why sit home for years in one long nightmare house-party waiting for your true love, who is probably changed, grizzled, faded, and even if they are the same, how dare they expect you to have waited that long? And as soon as they come home, they’re off on their travels again. I’ve never woven anything, but if I did, I wouldn’t rip it up; I’d wrap it round me to keep warm.
By the time the girls had all straggled into class with their bagfuls of runners and damp T-shirts, it was ten o’clock. The hour before break slid by in a blur. I was relieved to find that I had lost none of my competence. Ruler in hand, I conducted all thirty-one mouths through the comhrá, pointing to each of fuzzy-felt Seán and Caitríona’s activities to elicit the set phrase.
As soon as the bell went, I trudged off to the staff-room. Always before my hand touched the door I felt a thrill of taboo, as if I were still a pupil, forbidden to enter. It was smoky and warm, except for a cool channel of air from the window that new nun who taught music was holding open. I found an armchair with its guts spilling through a lattice of threads, and sat back in it. I could not face food. I had nothing to read. I composed my features into a pleasant tired mask so that nobody would ask me what the matter was, or remember about the funeral. I did not want to disown Cara by diluting her into my ‘housemate’. Of course I had done that very thing over and over while she was alive, but it seemed wrong now that there was no longer any possibility of calling off the lie, now that there was no chance that I would ever bring her on my arm to a staff Christmas party and say, this is my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.
I tried listening to the lethargic argument taking place to my left between Mrs Bayle (Home Economics) and Mr O’Leary (Physics) about the length of school holidays. Soon the talk shifted to flight prices to the Canaries in the New Year which after all was a bare four months away. I did try to interest myself in the conversation; once or twice I thought of something to say and took a breath but it died away in my mouth, as I was struck by the complete pointlessness of all such chat. What did it matter how many pence, how many days, how many inches? Surely what mattered was whether we were living or dying, half-empty or half-full? Not that I was usually a particularly cosmic person, but this week it seemed to me that all our thinking was on too petty a scale. I shut my eyes and lay back in the armchair, hoping my body language would be read as ordinary first-fortnight burnout.
After break I filled the blackboard with long division; since maths was my weakest point, I liked to get it over with early. The girls moaned contentedly and started taking the figures down in their copybooks, the hum fading to an occasional whisper of ‘Is that a 5 or a 6?’. This won me fifteen minutes. I bent over a stack of homework, and let my eyes unfocus.
Immac was hardly the ideal environment for escaping from thoughts of Cara, since, just as much as the big house, every dusty corner reeked of her. Not that she had been back through the door since our maudlin sixth-year concert in 1981 – she said the place gave her the shivers, and that I was a perv to take a job there – but her younger self still haunted its corridors for me. Because I’d come late to the school, I never met her in the junior part of it, but now I was teaching here I could visualize her on a smaller scale in the years before I knew her, with dark red plaits caught in her collar, and the expression of a suspicious elf.
Not the best years of our lives, far from it. When Cara left me the first time it was for Lent. She said she was dirty but she was going to go to eight o’clock mass every morning and get clean. Couldn’t we still love each other even if we couldn’t do the holding and stuff, I pleaded, and she said just friends, all right, just friends. So I spent the mornings clearing my throat, and the breaks leaning against the cold wall of a toilet stall, letting tears stripe my face. They ran plentifully back then. Doing my homework at the kitchen table before tea, I used to reach under and press my knuckles between my legs to keep me still. That was 1980, the year Gay Byrne interviewed a lesbian on The Late Late Show, but I missed it because I was upstairs writing an essay on Great Expectations. At night I held on to the gold boat on a chain Cara had given me, and dreamed of a crack in the timbers, of water rising and washing across the deck, sucking at the sailors’ feet.
Next thing was, Cara stopped going to mass every morning. She slammed her way out of the confession box, and wouldn’t tell me what the priest said. She left a primrose on my desk, and because I
didn’t want anyone to see it, or it to fade or get crushed, I ate it. Then I had to rush to the school library to check that primroses weren’t poisonous. I only half fancied dying for love.
One lunchtime Cara found me lying on my back out in the long-jump sand-pit. My eyes had filled up with water that the sun was drying into fresh salt. The sun seemed to go out; I looked up and there was Cara’s face, ringed with fire. ‘Come back,’ she said. ‘I was such an eejit.’ That was one of the best days, the day she came back after the first time. If she hadn’t left, it occurred to me now, there would not have been the sweetness of her coming back.
My class were beginning to stir. Correcting the hard sums the substitute teacher had set them filled the time till the lunch bell. The smell of the nuns’ sausages had put me off the idea of food again, nor could I face the staff-room. Instead I stretched my legs by walking the whole circuit of the school grounds. At the corner of the hockey pitch I crossed paths with Sister Luke; she looked up from her tiny laced shoes and nodded, her smile bobbing. I didn’t say anything, in case she was busy praying. Did she not eat dinner these days? She was considered old as the dinosaurs when I first came to Immac, so god alone knew how old she was now. Whenever I bitched about the nuns, sooner or later the thought of Sister Luke occurred to me and shut me up. I was surprised to see her out here; the nuns generally avoided the back of the school, so they would not have to see the girls speed-smoking behind the hockey pavilion, and take official notice of the crime. Maybe Sister Luke would turn her white head to the clouds as she walked by, or smile beatifically at the girls and confound them. Or she might offer them one of her more gruesome anecdotes about the effects of smoking, from her days as a Biology teacher. I still remembered her hunched over a microscope, peering up in the occasional blaze of excitement to tell us what to look for in our pieces of onion skin.