Echoes (2 page)

“I didn't think it would answer really, I only tried it as a joke,” she said.

“I know. I tried it once as a joke too,” he confessed.

“What did you ask it as a joke?” she inquired.

“I forget now,” he said.

“That's not fair—you heard mine.”

“I didn't, I only heard eyes eyes eyes.” He shouted it and it called back the three words to him over and over.

Clare was satisfied. “Well I'd best be off now, I have homework. I don't suppose you've had homework for weeks.” She was envious and inquiring.

“I do. Miss O'Hara comes every day to give me lessons. She's coming . . . oh soon now.” They walked out onto the wet hard sand.

“Lessons all by yourself with Miss O'Hara—isn't that great?”

“It is. She's great at explaining things, isn't she? For a woman teacher I mean.”

“Yes, well we only have women teachers and nuns,” Clare explained.

“I forgot,” David said sympathetically. “Still she's terrific, and she's very easy to talk to, like a real person.”

Clare agreed. They walked companionably along to the main steps up from the beach. It would have been quicker for David to climb the path with Danger written on it, it led almost into his own garden, but he said he wanted to buy some sweets at Clare's shop anyway. They talked about things the other had never heard of. David told her about the sanitorium being fumigated after two pupils got scarlet fever; but all the time she thought that he was talking about the big hospital on the hill where people went when they had TB. She didn't know it was a room in his school. She told him a long and complicated tale about Mother Immaculata asking one of the girls to leave the exercise books in one place and she thought that it was somewhere else and the girl went by accident into the nuns' side of the convent. This was all lost on David, who didn't know that you never under pain of
terrible
things went to the nuns' side of the convent. It didn't really matter to either of them, they were no strain on each other, and life in Castlebay could be full of strains so this was a nice change. He came into the shop and, as there was nobody serving, she took off her coat, hung it up and found the jar of Clove Rock. She counted out the six for a penny that he was buying and before she put the lid on the jar she offered him one courteously and took one herself.

He looked at her enviously. It was great power to be able to stand up on a chair in a sweetshop, take down a jar and be free to offer one to a customer. David sighed as he went home. He'd have loved to live in a shop like Clare O'Brien, he'd have loved brothers and sisters, and to be allowed to go up to the yard and collect milk in a can when the cows were being milked, or gather seaweed to sell to the hot sea baths in bundles. It was very dull going back to his own house now, to his mother saying he should really have some sense of what was what. It was the most irritating thing he had ever heard, especially since it seemed to mean anything and everything and never the same thing twice. Still, Miss O'Hara was coming tonight, and Miss O'Hara made lessons much more interesting than at school, he had once been unwise enough to explain to his mother. He thought she would be pleased but she said that Miss O'Hara was fine for a country primary school but did not compare with the Jesuits who were on a different level entirely.

 

Clare was sighing too, she thought it must be great altogether to go back to a house like David Power's where there were bookcases of books in the house, and a fire on in that front room whether there was anyone sitting in it or not. And there was no wireless on, and nobody making noise. You could do your homework there for hours without anyone coming in and telling you to move. She remembered the inside of the house from when she had been up to Dr. Power for the stitches the time she had caught her leg on the rusty bit of machinery. To distract her Dr. Power had asked her to count the volumes of the encyclopedia up on the shelf and Clare had been so startled to see all those books in one house for one family that she had forgotten about the stitches and Dr. Power had told her mother she was as brave as a lion. They had walked home after the stitches with Clare leaning on her mother. They stopped at the church to thank St. Anne that there hadn't been any infection in the leg and as Clare saw her mother bent in prayer and gratitude in front of the St. Anne grotto she let her mind wander on how great it would be to have a big peaceful house full of books like that instead of being on top of each other and no room for anything—no time for anything either. She thought about it again tonight as David Power went up the street home to that house where the carpet went right into the window, not stopping in a square like ordinary carpets. There would be a fire and there'd be peace. His mother might be in the kitchen and Dr. Power would be curing people and later Miss O'Hara would be coming to give him lessons all on his own without the rest of a class to distract her. What could be better than that? She wished for a moment that she had been his sister, but then she felt guilty. To wish that would be to want to lose Mammy and Daddy and Tommy and Ned and Ben and Jimmy. Oh and Chrissie. But she didn't care how wrong it was, she wouldn't mind losing Chrissie any day of the week.

 

The calm of the shop was only temporary. Daddy had been painting out in the back and he came in holding his hands up in front of him and asking someone to reach out a bottle of white spirit and open it up this minute. There was an awful lot of painting going on in the wintertime in Castlebay. The sea air just ripped the coats off again and the place looked very shabby unless it was touched up all the time. Mammy came in at the same moment; she had been up to the post office and she had discovered terrible things. Chrissie and her two tinkers of friends had climbed on the roof of Miss O'Flaherty's shop and poked a long wet piece of seaweed through to frighten Miss O'Flaherty. They could have given the unfortunate woman a heart attack; she could, God save us all, have dropped stone dead on the floor of her own shop and then Chrissie O'Brien and her two fine friends would have the sin of murder on their souls until the Last Day and after. Chrissie had been dragged home by the shoulder, the plait and the ear. She was red-faced and annoyed. Clare thought that it was a good thing to have frightened Miss O'Flaherty who was horrible, and sold copy books and school supplies but hated school-children. Clare thought it was real bad luck that Mammy happened to be passing. She smiled sympathetically at Chrissie but it was not well received.

“Stop looking so superior,” Chrissie cried out. “Look at Clare gloating at it all. Goody-goody Clare, stupid boring Clare.”

She got a cuff on the side of her head for this performance and it made her madder still.

“Look, she's delighted,” Chrissie went on, “delighted to see anyone in trouble. That's all that ever makes Clare happy, to see others brought down.”

“There'll be no tea for you, Chrissie O'Brien, and that's not the end of it either. Get up to your room this minute—do you hear? This
minute.
” Agnes O'Brien's thin voice was like a whistle with anger, as she banished the bold Chrissie, wiped the worst paint off her husband's hands with a rag that she had wet with white spirit, and managed at the same time to point to Clare's coat on the hook.

“This isn't a hand-me-down shop,” she said. “Take that coat and put it where it's meant to be.”

The unfairness of this stung Clare deeply. “We always leave our coats there. That
is
where it's meant to be.”

“Do you hear her?” Agnes looked in appeal to her husband, did not wait for an answer but headed for the stairs. Chrissie up there was for it.

“Can't you stop tormenting your mother and move your coat?” he asked. “Is it too much to ask for a bit of peace?”

Clare took her coat down from the hook. She couldn't go up to the bedroom she shared with Chrissie because that would be like stepping straight into the battlefield. She stayed idling in the shop.

Her father's face was weary. It was so
wrong
of him to say she was tormenting Mammy, she wasn't, but you couldn't explain that to him. He was bent over in a kind of a stoop and he looked very old, like someone's grandfather, not a father. Daddy was all gray, his face and his hair and his cardigan. Only his hands were white from the paint. Daddy had grown more stooped since her First Communion three years ago, Clare thought; then he had seemed very tall. His face had grown hairy too—there were bits of hair in his nose and his ears. He always looked a bit harassed as if there wasn't enough time or space or money. And, indeed, there usually wasn't enough of any of these things. The O'Brien household lived on the profits of the summer season which was short and unpredictable. It could be killed by rain, by the popularity of some new resort, by people overcharging for houses along the cliff road. There was no steady living to be gained over the winter months, it was merely a matter of keeping afloat.

The shop was oddly shaped when you came in: there were corners and nooks in it which should have been shelved or walled off but nobody had ever got round to it, the ceiling was low and even with three customers the place looked crowded. Nobody could see any order on the shelves but the O'Briens knew where everything was. They didn't change it for fear they wouldn't find things, even though there were many more logical ways of stocking the small grocery-confectioner's. It all looked cramped and awkward and though the customers couldn't see behind the door into the living quarters it was exactly the same in there. The kitchen had a range, with a clothesline over it, and the table took up most of the space in the room. A small scullery at the back was so poky and dark that it was almost impossible to see the dishes you washed. There was one light in the middle of the room with a yellow light shade which had a crack in it. Recently Tom O'Brien had been holding his paper up nearer to the light in order to read it.

Agnes came downstairs with the air of someone who has just finished an unpleasant task satisfactorily. “That girl will end on the gallows,” she said.

She was a thin small woman, who used to smile a lot once; but now she seemed set in the face of the cold Castlebay wind, and even when she was indoors she seemed to be grimacing against the icy blast, eyes narrow and mouth in a hard line. In the shop she wore a yellow overall to protect her clothes, she said, but in fact there were hardly any clothes to protect. She had four outfits for going to Mass, and otherwise it had been the same old cardigans and frocks and skirts for years. There were always medals and relics pinned inside the cardigan; they had to be taken off before it was washed. Once she had forgotten, and a relic of the Little Flower which had been in a red satin covering had become all pink and the pale blue cardigan was tinged pink too. Agnes O'Brien had her hair in a bun which was made by pulling it through a thing that looked like a doughnut, a squashy round device, and then the hair was clipped in. They never saw her doing this, but once they had seen the bun by itself and it had alarmed Clare greatly because she hadn't known what it was.

The dark and very angry eyes of her mother landed on her. “Have you decided that you would like to belong to this family and do what's required of you? Would it be too much to ask you to take that coat out of my way before I open the range and burn it down to its buttons?”

She would never do that, Clare knew. She had hoped her mother might have forgotten it during the sojourn upstairs. But the coat was still going to be a cause of war.

“I told her, Agnes—my God, I told her—but children nowadays . . .” Tom sounded defeated and apologetic.

Clare stuffed her school coat into a crowded cupboard under the stairs and took a few potatoes out of the big sack on the floor. Each evening she and Chrissie had to get the potatoes ready for tea, and tonight, thanks to Chrissie's disgrace, it looked as if Clare was going to have to do it on her own. In the kitchen sat her younger brothers Ben and Jim; they were reading a comic. The older boys Tommy and Ned would be in from the Brothers shortly, but none of this would be any help. Boys didn't help with the food or the washing up. Everyone knew that.

 

Clare had a lot to do after tea. She wanted to iron her yellow ribbons for tomorrow. Just in case she won the history essay she'd better be looking smart. She would polish her indoor shoes, she had brought them home specially, and she would make another attempt to get the two stains off her tunic. Mother Immaculata might make a comment about smartening yourself up for the good name of the school. She must be sure not to let them down. Miss O'Hara had said that she had never been so pleased in all her years teaching as when she read Clare's essay, it gave her the strength to go on. Those were her very words. She would never have stopped Clare in the corridor and said that, if she hadn't won the prize. Imagine beating all the ones of fifteen. All those Bernie Conways and Anna Murphys. They'd look at Clare with new interest from now on. And indeed they'd have to think a bit differently at home too. She longed to tell them tonight, but decided it was better to wait. Tonight they were all like weasels and anyway it might look worse for Chrissie; after all she was two and a half years older. Chrissie would murder her too if she chose to reveal it tonight. She took upstairs a big thick sandwich of cheese, a bit of cold cooked bacon and a cup of cocoa.

Chrissie was sitting on her bed, examining her face in a mirror. She had two very thick plaits in her hair; the bits at the ends after the rubber bands were bushy and didn't just hang there like other people's; they looked as if they were trying to escape. She had a fringe which she cut herself so badly that she had to be taken to the hairdresser to get a proper job done on it, and at night she put pipe cleaners into the fringe so that it would curl properly.