Foreign Affairs (6 page)

There had been no mention during the holidays of the extra lessons her father had been talking about although she had heard her parents arguing about it one day. Her mother had been very cross
with her father, which was most unusual for her, and Rachel heard her say, ‘William, they’re not even in secondary school yet. They’re only children. Let them enjoy their
childhood.’ Her father muttered something about fun and games not helping anyone to get their Inter and Leaving Certs but Theresa had been uncharacteristically firm and Rachel heard her tell
her father, ‘William. No lessons. I’m putting my foot down for once in my life.’ Her father had gone off in a huff but it had worn off eventually when he realized that no-one was
taking any notice of him because they were having too much fun. And after that lessons hadn’t been mentioned again and William had even taken them out a few times in his shiny red Morris
Minor, of which he was very proud.

She only saw Patrick McKeown twice during the whole summer because he went to stay with his cousins in Tramore. She saw him once at Mass, and he stuck his tongue out at her after making sure her
mother and father were deep in prayer. But she didn’t really care. Her parents were with her and she felt protected. The second time she was on her own, skipping down the path towards the
Ball Alley, where she’d been sent to call Ronan for his tea. Patrick had been coming in the opposite direction and her heart started pounding as she saw her tormentor approaching her.

‘You’ve got a mad mother, ya stupid cow,’ he muttered as he came abreast of her and then, to her amazement, he walked past without pulling her hair, or kicking her on the
shins, or even digging her in the ribs or spitting on her, as was his wont if he came upon her alone. Relieved beyond measure at her easy escape, Rachel ran towards the Ball Alley without a
backward glance, in case he should change his mind and follow her. But he didn’t and she had her brother for company on the journey home.

Rachel lay in bed that night, and wished the summer could go on for ever and that she could always be as happy as she was right at that moment. The dusky rays of the setting sun bathed her
little bedroom in a golden light and up in Doyle’s wood, the wood-pigeons cooed and the unique song of the cuckoo could be heard for miles around.

Chapter Four

Rachel shivered and pulled up the collar of her coat as she stood outside St Angela’s trying to decide whether to go down the town and buy some Valentine cards or not.
Hordes of schoolgirls were erupting out of the majestic portals of St Angela’s, the secondary school she had been attending for the last five years.

Spots of rain blurred her glasses and she sighed in irritation. Glasses were such a blooming nuisance. She hated wearing them, they made her look like a right swot. If only she could look like
Michelle Butler, Rachel thought enviously as she watched her classmate emerge through the brown front doors of the school. Despite the fact that Michelle was wearing exactly the same uniform as
Rachel, the other girl looked like a model. On Michelle, the bottle-green skirt and jumper looked decidedly chic. Of course she wore the skirt a few inches shorter than it was supposed to be worn,
and it was immaculately pressed, unlike Rachel’s, which always got wrinkled and hung on her skinny hips like a sack. Michelle Butler was blessed with curves in all the right places. Her bosom
was the envy of 6S. Indeed Michelle herself was the envy of the entire class. She had more boyfriends than she knew what to do with. She was the captain of the basketball team, the best actress in
the drama society, and despite a hectic social life, managed to get good marks. Michelle was Rachel’s ideal. If she could have been born with Michelle Butler’s looks and personality she
would have been deliriously happy. Of that, she was certain. No doubt the postman would stagger up Michelle’s path weighed down under the load of Valentine cards.

‘Hi Rachel.’ Michelle smiled as she went past and Rachel smiled back. Michelle was a very nice person, she always said hello and made an effort to be friendly with Rachel. Most of
the others in the class didn’t bother. Of course it was her own fault for being so shy, but even after five years she could still feel awkward and tongue-tied during a class discussion or
debate.

She couldn’t say she had been unhappy exactly at her secondary school, she enjoyed the classes. Some of the teachers had been very stimulating. But she never clicked with a crowd. She
always found herself floating on the fringes with the other outcasts, as she privately termed them. Girls like Mary Kelly, whose father was an alcoholic and who caused such rows at night that poor
Mary never got a decent night’s sleep. She often nodded off in class, much to the amusement of the rest, who would nudge each other and whisper, ‘Dozy Dora’s off again.’ Or
Sandra Moran, who had terrible BO and bad breath and who looked as if she had slept in a haystack and who hadn’t much of a clue about her studies. They called her ‘Smelly
Nellie.’

Rachel knew her own nickname was Specky-Four-Eyes. She’d heard Eileen Dunphy call her that one day in third year, when she was playing basketball and missed a shot. Eileen turned to
Vivienne Riordan and said scathingly, ‘Why on earth does Michelle pick Specky-Four-Eyes Stapleton for her team? The moron hasn’t got a clue!’ This only served to make Rachel feel
even more awkward and clumsy and twice she fumbled the ball as she dribbled it, allowing the opposing team to take possession. After that humiliating débâcle she stopped playing
basketball, and retired instead to the library at lunch-time, or went for a solitary walk along the prom.

She had been full of hope when she started secondary school. Away from the stern eye of her father, Rachel decided that she was going to turn over a new leaf. After all, she was thirteen, a
teenager, and she had been eagerly devouring the pages of
Jackie.
She had learned all about how to be self-confident. She knew she had to make an effort to talk to other people and to
remember that they might be just as nervous as she was. She was to look people in the eye and be very interested in what they had to say and that way she would forget her own shyness and
she’d be fine. Her father didn’t know that she read
Jackie.
He certainly wouldn’t approve, he preferred for her to read
The Pioneer
and
The Messenger
.
The trouble was, her father was terribly old-fashioned. He wouldn’t even let her wear nail varnish. God knows how she was ever going to manage to go with a fella. That is if she was lucky
enough to be asked to go with a fella.

At the moment she was madly in love with Harry Armstrong. He was a friend of Ronan’s and he was just
gorgeous
. He had the most amazing brown eyes and jet-black hair and he was
always teasing her in a nice way. He’d make jokes about what a pest of a younger sister she was. Even worse than Becky, his own pest of a sister. Rachel loved it when he slagged her like
that. But what made Harry a god in her eyes was that he had given Patrick McKeown a black eye and a bloody nose on her behalf. No wonder she fell in love with him. For that alone she would love him
for ever.

She’d been walking home from school one winter’s evening when she was in fifth class. It was snowing heavily and she was slipping and sliding on the slushy ice-covered ground. She
was on her own, as usual, pretending that she was Laura in
Little House on the Prairie
in a howling blizzard that was getting worse by the second. She was jerked out of her reverie by the
hard cold smack of a snowball against her cheek. Then another and another. A barrage of white missiles assaulted her, blinding her, causing her to slip on the ice. As suddenly as it started, the
onslaught ceased and she heard shouting and roaring. Rubbing her eyes, she turned to see Ronan’s friend, Harry Armstrong, dragging Patrick McKeown out from behind a wall, as the rest of his
cronies ran away. Harry grabbed a handful of snow and shoved it down Patrick’s neck as the other boy yelled blue murder. Patrick swung out with his left hand, Harry ducked and the next
minute, with two neat blows, had bloodied Patrick’s nose and given him a black eye.

‘Now get out of here, you little toad, and don’t try that trick on a girl again or you’ll have me to deal with if I hear of it,’ Rachel heard her Sir Galahad say as he
gave her assailant a kick in the arse for good measure. Patrick staggered off down the road stunned and Harry crossed over to where Rachel was sitting. He held out his hand and pulled her upright.
‘Are you all right, Rachel?’ he asked kindly.

Mute, she nodded.

‘Come on, I’ll walk home with you, it’s very slippy out, and if ever that little rat annoys you again just tell Ronan or me and we’ll sort him out,’ her hero
assured her. Though her teeth were chattering and her coat was soaking, Rachel didn’t notice. All she knew was that Harry Armstrong had saved her in her hour of need and now he was walking
home with her.

That night as she lay in bed sniffling and coughing Rachel decided that it was worth getting snowball-attacked by Patrick McKeown to be rescued by Harry. It was rather romantic, she thought
happily, inhaling her Vick-covered handkerchief and giving a mighty sneeze. And he had assured her that if Patrick McKeown troubled her in the future, he would take care of him. To have a protector
like Harry Armstrong was any maiden’s dream.

Harry was the deputy chief altar boy and Rachel spent Sunday Mass when he was serving watching every move he made. She enjoyed the way his cassock flowed around him as he walked from one side of
the altar to the other, performing his duties with an air of solemn authority. Not one prayer did she say on the Sundays when Harry Armstrong was serving at Mass. It was a joy just to sit watching
her hero.

Harry remained her hero throughout her secondary schooling. Although he never had cause to rescue her from Patrick McKeown or anyone else for that matter, she still worshipped from afar. Harry
treated her like a younger sister, much to her dismay. How she would have loved to be a real girlfriend to him. How she would have loved to parade down the prom in Bray holding his hand as the rest
of her classmates did with their boyfriends. It was her greatest dream that he would suddenly take a second look at her and realize that she wasn’t just Ronan’s younger sister, but a
scintillating, athletic, confident young woman (just like Michelle) who would make a wonderful girlfriend. Each night Rachel said a special prayer to St Jude, the patron saint of hopeless cases,
beseeching him to open Harry’s eyes. Ever hopeful, she patiently waited for the moment when the scales would fall from his eyes and he would realize just what was missing from his life.

Then she heard that Harry had started going with Ciara Farrell. She lost all faith in St Jude and herself. Rachel was deeply depressed because she was sure that she would be manless for ever. It
caused her such trauma at school. At least half the class were dating boys. And the other half were made to feel complete failures because of their lack of success with the opposite sex.

There was one particular girl whom Rachel hated with a vengeance. Her name was Glenda Mower and she made Rachel’s life a misery. Glenda was a skinny gangly girl who seemed to have taken a
dislike to Rachel the first time she met her. She had big brown eyes and straight lank brown hair cut in a bob and she thought she was the greatest thing since fried bread. She had oodles of
self-confidence. Glenda took the lead in class debates and discussions and she loved the sound of her own voice. She wanted to be the most popular girl in the class. She was very sweet to
everybody, batting her eyelashes, her cocker spaniel eyes as innocent as could be.

‘Hi Rachel, you’ve got a hole in your tights,’ she’d say ever so helpfully in her loud penetrating voice. ‘You should rub soap on it to stop it running.’
Rachel would be highly embarrassed as all eyes turned to look. Once when the lunch-time discussions turned to talk of boyfriends, Glenda said sweetly, ‘Rachel, have you ever had a boyfriend?
Why don’t you bring him to the disco on Thursday nights?’ Rachel, of course, nearly died and turned scarlet as her classmates waited for her answer. She wanted to curl up in
mortification. Even if she had a boyfriend, her father would never allow her to go to a disco in Bray.

‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ she muttered, inwardly cringing.

‘Oh dear,’ Glenda sympathized with honeyed insincerity. ‘Well maybe there aren’t many eligibles in your little village but now that you’re here in school in Bray
you’ll have no problem finding one. Isn’t that right, girls?’ she addressed the others, grinning. Some of them tittered and then Michelle Butler said with a cold glare in
Glenda’s direction, ‘Let’s hope Rachel will have more luck than you had with Robert Tobin, he was going with Rita Clarke at the same time as he was going with you, wasn’t
he? And neither of you knew for ages he was two-timing.’

It was Glenda’s turn to redden.

‘Well I’m not going with him any more, Michelle. I’m going with Marty Campbell now and he’s real nice.’

‘Hmm,’ Michelle said sceptically, and as she turned to walk away she winked at Rachel. After that, Glenda never gave Rachel a minute’s peace and she would have faced Patrick
McKeown’s physical bullying a million times over rather than have to suffer her classmate’s sly barbs.

Even now, some three years after that episode, Rachel felt a total failure. She was still without a boyfriend, much to Glenda’s satisfaction. When she turned sixteen her mother insisted
that her father let her go to the disco in Bray, but he always ruined it by coming to collect her promptly at eleven, to her great embarrassment. Now she was in for an interrogation from Glenda as
to whether she’d got any Valentine cards or not. Rachel hated Valentine’s Day. It always emphasized her sense of failure and inadequacy. Watching the other girls passing around their
cards and giggling over the messages in them made her feel utterly lonely. Maybe this time next year it might be different, she would comfort herself. But now in her last year in secondary school
she was still on her own. Had never been the recipient of a much-longed-for Valentine card and still harboured an unrequited passion for Harry Armstrong. She could see herself at ninety, still
manless, she thought forlornly as she turned right and headed in the direction of the town centre.