‘Most of them went into the convent because they had the hots for some choir nun and thought it was platonic.’
I tapped my knee, and Grace leaped up, knocking his head on the table and pretending it hadn’t happened. He licked up a splinter of cracker. ‘Never knew a choir nun who’d lead anyone’s thoughts to God,’ I said lightly, scratching behind the cat’s toast-brown ears. ‘Remember Sister Luke? Tone-deaf but still loves music. She used to burst in through the swing-doors halfway through “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring”, shouting “Sing up, girls! Sing up!”’
Kate’s eyebrows contracted again. ‘How would I know your choir nun?’
‘She wasn’t the choir nun, she was just passing by,’ I said. ‘You were there. Immac.’
‘Immac? Oh, Immaculate Conception, I’m sorry, my brains are addled with jet-lag. What, did you go there too?’
Grace clung to my trousers as I stood up, then heaved himself away. I went over to the larder for some mustard to stimulate my disappearing appetite. ‘I was in your class, Cáit Máire Fionnuala Wall,’ I said over my shoulder.
‘You weren’t! God almighty, I had no idea.’ Kate’s voice was slipping into Irish intonation. ‘I’m not Cáit any more, though.’
‘I know.’
‘I never let them call me that, past the age of reason.’
‘I remember.’
‘That’s such a coincidence. Small world, Dublin.’
‘It’s not a coincidence.’ I nibbled on a hard rind of cheese. ‘It’s how I know Cara. Didn’t she tell you who I was?’
‘Look, all I got for the past few years were Christmas cards from my father, with a big C scrawled on the bottom.’
Well, there was me in my place. Hot-faced, I focused on the last corner of cracker. To be expected, really, I mean, Cara had no call to mention me.
Kate’s mahogany eyes were sizing me up. ‘You weren’t the hockey captain, were you?’
‘That was Penelope Pearse.’
‘So which one were you?’ she asked, combing her hair back with her fingers.
‘I wasn’t anyone in particular,’ I said. My cup was leaving a wet circle on the wood; I wiped it away with my hand. ‘I only came to Immac in fourth year, when my family moved to the southside. And then after I ballsed up the Inter I got moved down into Cara’s class to repeat it.’
‘Hang on, I think I’m getting there. Were you –’ Kate paused. I could tell she was straining for tact. ‘The girl I’m thinking of was much smaller. With hair held back in clips.’
‘That’s me,’ I said excitedly. ‘I was a real skinnymalinks in those days; it didn’t suit me. Nor did the clips.’
We grinned at each other. ‘We all looked such geeks in that uniform,’ she commented.
‘Except Cara. Her hair was the exact shade of the gaberdine.’ The words trailed off. I sipped the last of my coffee.
I left Kate yawning over her cup, and ran upstairs in search of clean bedclothes. Five ‘Our Fathers’, as I tucked the sheets under the mattress in the middle room. This bed hadn’t been slept in for years, not since Mr. Wall’s last visiting archivist. I left the window a little ajar. The heady smell of cut grass floated up from next door’s garden where the dentist with the sunburnt bald spot was mowing.
Coming through the hall, I paused outside the glass door. Kate and the cat were watching each other. She took a crumb of cheddar and held it at ankle level; Grace ignored it. His tail spiralled in the air as he walked away.
‘Don’t mind him, he has personality problems.’
Kate looked up, then put the cheese back on the edge of the chopping board. ‘I never know how to behave around animals.’
‘Ah, Grace is a particular bugger.’
‘Why is he called something so…’
‘Girlish?’ I slid the cheese plate back into the fridge. ‘Well, at the time Cara rescued him from a bankrupt wholefood coop, she was going through a liberal phase where she thought patriarchy could be gently dismantled by educating boys to be more like girls. He was the only young male she had to experiment on.’
Kate absorbed this. I could tell that the very vocabulary of her sister’s life was alien to her. ‘But why Grace?’
‘Look at his one white paw. Isn’t it just a little bit like a Grace Kelly above-the-elbow glove?’
The cat, always loth to comply, skulked in the pantry.
‘Come on out of there.’ I pulled him out by the scruff and sat him on my chest. ‘He liked to sleep in there among the onions when he was very small. He was always knocking containers over, and that’s another reason we called him Grace, because he hasn’t got any.’
Kate’s hand was covering a yawn. Why would she be interested in the details of our ménage, anyway? She was only passing through. Grace dug his claws into my cardiganed breast; I plucked him loose.
‘I do remember you, you know,’ she said as she followed me upstairs.
I made a non-committal grunt.
‘It’s starting to come back to me. We used to kid around in choir, right?’
‘The odd time.’
‘Funny how moving somewhere new can wipe the slate clean. I haven’t thought about Immac or this place for years. But as soon as the plane touched down at Dublin Airport it all started opening up in my head.’
‘Can of worms?’
‘More like a can of soup. Just tiny things, all blurred together.’
I held the door of the middle bedroom for Kate to go ahead of me. She glanced around as if something was missing.
‘I don’t think much has been changed, except the wallpaper.’
‘I never could stand that floral stuff anyway,’ she said, folding her jacket over the desk chair. She ran her finger along the inscription below a silver statuette of a javelin-thrower; it came away grey at the tip. I felt a stab of guilt. For god’s sake, she could hardly have expected me to stay up late dusting her school trophies.
‘So, were there any sports you didn’t win prizes for?’ I asked.
‘I wasn’t all that good. These are just kids’ stuff.’ Her voice closed like a box.
I offered to bring her an alarm clock; she didn’t need one. A glass of water? No, she was fine. An ashtray, if she was a smoker? Not any more. I backed out, wondering how someone could go from chatty to taciturn in half a minute.
‘Doing good, Pen,’ I chanted under my breath on the stairs. A highly creditable morning, clean windows and all. The next thing to do was to find something to fill the afternoon. Pity it wasn’t a home funeral, come to think of it, because then I would have to spend today and Tuesday making little savouries and ironing tablecloths. As it was, I could hardly start cooking dinner before half five. Two and a half hours, that wasn’t long at all; wash up the cups, see to the compost heap. I wouldn’t take the hammock down from the pear tree yet, it was still summery enough, Cara would want it. I meant, she always hated to see it taken down. Like the Christmas tree, which in the big house was always exquisite in white lights and snow webs, not like my mother’s gaudy edifice. Cara made me leave the tree up till the fourteenth of January once, and it shed needles all over the carpet.
Between the bottom stair and the kitchen door all my energy drained away. It seemed too great an effort to keep on taking breaths, one after another after another, let alone do a productive afternoon’s housework. I pulled a shiny magazine from the hall bookshelf, one so old that I would have forgotten the contents and it would seem new again. I shoved it into the pocket of my cardigan, found my house key, and set off for the woods.
The big house actually backed on to the bottom of the park, making Mr. Wall nervous of gangs of cider louts, but the wall was too high to get over. I had to walk up to the main gate, past a bungalow that had a vicious Jack Russell who always waited till you went daydreaming by his wooden door before shrieking at your feet and giving you heart failure. The little mutant wouldn’t stop me today; I’d kick him as soon as look at him.
A benediction of sun fell on my half-cl
osed eyes as I headed up the empty avenue. Past the bungalow, no sign of the beast. My steps slowed as sweat began to cool the backs of my knees. I went to the woods every day I had a spare hour, which was most days. It was one of the only places left in Dublin with a bit of wilderness about it, even if they did pare a couple more trees away every year.
Long before I knew the Walls I used to get the bus out here once a week. Mum would have liked me to stay on in the Girl Guides and win badges for Punctuality or Needle-craft, but I preferred to spend my Saturdays wandering. Then later on when Cara and I became sort-of-girlfriends, we used to come here all the time, to chase each other with handfuls of leaves and kiss in the chinks between the rocks. She hadn’t been coming with me so often the last few years; said it was a wee bit boring and would I mind if she read Spare Rib instead. Cara’s idea of a walk, I used to tease her, came complete with a torn map and wizened villagers and the thrilling possibility that fog might come down on the mountain-top. I didn’t mind, really. I liked leaving her folded up in the sagbag with her pint-glass of jasmine tea while I went walking. But I never understood what she meant by boring. How could trees be boring?
The gate was hanging open today, its varnish peeling in the heat. Not as many people here as I expected for this weather; maybe they were all attempting to go topless in their back patios, seizing their last chance for a September tan. All I could see as I made my way over to the rock pile was a cocker spaniel and her slow-moving nuclear family. They had gone by the time I reached the summit of the rocks and fitted my hips into a warm crevice.
Five minutes, Pen old chap, I told myself, then read your magazine or you’ll be blubbering, and that’s just too exhausting in this heat. But oddly enough I felt in no danger of tears. My skin was parched, that little dry spot on my right eyelid beginning to itch again. The trick seemed to be to remember only the irritating times. The good times were dangerous. Last night, for instance, that was a mistake, letting myself remember the sweetness of her on the convent roof. The hours after that particular memory had been bitches. But the endless discussions (as we used to call our rows), they were easier to remember unmoved, perhaps because every line of them was so hackneyed.
After the first year together, it occurred to me now, I could have left Cara at home in the sagbag every time and strolled into the woods to have our discussions on my own. You see, I was better at them. I was more concerned for the logic of each accusation, the assignment of points, whereas at a certain stage Cara just couldn’t give a shit and her grey eyes would wander towards the horizon. This arrangement could have saved a lot of time, I realized now, because on a half-hour’s walk between the trees I could have presented the week’s complaints with more brevity, reached the penultimate insults more rapidly, swung to a reconciliation and still been home in time for tea.
Jo had a theory – I had heard this at second-hand through Cara – Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the small discontents you had been filing away. And Jo, having survived twenty-odd years of serial and overlapping relationships, should know. It sounded a plausible enough theory, and quite comforting in the case of such a breakup, but not applicable to my situation. Since Cara came back to me after the last time, half a decade ago, we had never given a serious thought to breaking up. And never would now, it occurred to me. How odd; wedded for life, because one of us had died.
On that word I paused, watching for a seizure in the throat, an iron bolt behind the eyes. My hand reached for my magazine just in case. But no, I seemed perfectly numb this afternoon. Kate being so ordinary, in her smart way, so much less evocative than she might have been. Besides, I needed all my energy for coping with this weather which was growing heavier by the minute, the hot air thickening on my cheeks, my thighs, the backs of my fingers.
I could see all the way across the southside from this knob of rock. The books Cara brought back from England and America were mostly about urban dykes in trench-coats solving capitalist mysteries, or rural bare-breasted ones tending wounded deer. But most of the real ones I’d ever come across were quietly rebellious products of the suburbs, wearing waistcoats over ladylike shirts at dinner-parties. I grinned to think of them all going about their business down there, all the dykes I didn’t know. Nowadays ‘invisibility’ was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself. I didn’t watch telly to see anyone remotely like me, anyway. Though it was fun to catch sight of the odd out-and-proud lipstick leather lesbian on a Channel 4 documentary, it thrilled me far more to think of a mother-of-three reaching out to touch another woman’s breast for the first time. I looked down on the miles of grey roofs, now, imagining the spread of the quiet epidemic.
The towers on Sandymount Strand were belching idle smoke. What a messy structure a city was, each street echoing its neighbour before trailing off into a crescent or a cul-de-sac. Rather like our discussions, Cara’s and mine, which were variations on one basic pattern. Certain key phrases got repeated endlessly: mine were ‘Ah, come on, pet’ or ‘You know you’re exaggerating’, and hers were much more dramatic, ‘I make myself sick’ or ‘What’s the point?’ Sometimes, just for an experiment, I would sneak in one of her despairing phrases; for a moment she would look at me in puzzlement, and then rush to offer reassurance. If that’s my role, I used to think, watching the words flow out of her tender mouth, what a bore I must be.
But the trees were never boring, as I wound my way between them; tall as Rapunzel’s tower, wrapped in their own hair. I didn’t know all the right names, since my Biology class had finished trees by the time I got back from having mumps. But I was intimate with their skins. There was the peeling one with orange bark behind flaking grey; the gnarled, ever-pregnant one; and the tallest and smoothest, on which some thug had carved a swastika with their penknife. I liked to stroke that one with my fingertips; I imagined the scar pained it. They would look their best by October. Already the leaves were baking into lemon and caramel.
The very best thing about these woods was the suspension of time. Compared to these topless towers I was no taller now, in my long cardigan, than the teenaged Pen who had spent her Saturdays here. Apart from the distant thumps and calls of the tennis court, and the odd discarded condom, nothing had changed since the seventies. In the thickest part of the woods, where the trees were only ten feet apart, it could be any date I chose, and sometimes it seemed to me that all the years were one, a handful of seasons repeating themselves, the conversations like snakes swallowing their own tails.
‘That day in town in the summer,’ I begin, walking in the woods with Cara.
‘Which summer?’
‘Last summer. The day you ran. Why was it that you ran?’
‘Away.’
‘From what?’
‘Away.’ Cara’s skin is bone-white behind the freckles.
I try again, my voice as friendly as a talk-show host. ‘You must remember what you were feeling.’
‘Afraid.’
At last. ‘Afraid of what?’
‘The people.’
‘So it was a sort of an agoraphobic feeling?’
‘Oh, don’t ism and obia me,’ snaps Cara.
‘Well, was it a panic, then?’
‘And you.’
I speak slowly to make the words sound less defensive. ‘What had I done or said to make you afraid of me?’
‘Nothing.’ Cara’s voice is weary.
I must get to the bottom of it before she runs out of momentum. ‘Maybe it was basically the crowd that spooked you; it was a hot day and a terrible crush.’
Her gaze is cool. ‘No, it was mostly you.’ She winds a dark strand of hair around her finger.
‘I hadn’t done a thing.’ My voice cracks with annoyance. ‘You just upped and ran away from me like a madwoman.’
‘Forget it, so. Mom
ma knows best.’
Calm the tone again. ‘No, I’m not blaming you’ – (lies, lies) – ‘I’d just be interested to know why you did it.’
‘Don’t remember.’ She yawns.
‘You must. Think back; it was that really sunny day, we were on the top floor of that bookshop and I’d just knocked over a pile of –’
‘I know it was a sunny day, for fuck’s sake.’ Her eyes are gun-metal. ‘I’m telling you why and you’re not listening to me, you’re swallowing me up again. I didn’t want to be on the same street as you, that’s all.’
I glance down at my hands; they are folded in their Mother Superior position, bouncing slightly on my belly as we walk. ‘Why did you stop running, then? Just because you ran out of breath?’
She lets her eyes unfocus; the pupils are webbed with grey, like stagnant ponds.
The rock was crushing my hip, so I tugged myself up and headed for the gate. My legs were aching and my head was hammering. I lowered my eyelids but the sun still came through, diffracted into a spectrum on each lash. I rubbed at my right eye, then told myself to stop.
We used to go on arguing like that for hours, Cara and I. Solving nothing, changing nothing, simply exchanging words by role, by rote, until the day was filled up and we could run a hot bath and lie peaceful together, the water lapping all language away. And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing. There were few things more pointless, I told myself as I shut the gate with a clatter, than arguing with a dead person, and that, though I didn’t believe it myself, was what she officially was.
It was ten past five by the time I got back to the big house, but the day had got no cooler. Sweat had sewn an invisible scarf around my throat. I leaned against the kitchen counter, its tiles deliciously cold across my waist. I drank half a pint of raspberry cordial, then headed for the hammock, but it was full.
I was not half so angry to see Jo as I thought I would be. My outburst on the phone this morning seemed rather silly; she had been quite right in her facts. Besides, I liked Jo. Mostly, I had to admit, because she was fat like me. We were not exactly friends – I only knew her through Cara, and from bumping into her in bookshops and at women’s dances – but whenever she and I found ourselves sitting side by side, we grinned, and all the others looked so insubstantial.