Fragile Lies (10 page)

Virginia has already kissed six English boys. In the shelter of the sand dunes she explains “French kissing” to Lorraine who, remembering the hard nudging pressure of Adrian’s body, quivers. When he lies on a towel beside her, filtering grains of sand between his fingers and across her legs, she imagines opening her mouth, the way Virginia describes, so that his tongue can touch the sensitive spot that makes girls swoon. As the sand trickles between her thighs, she shrieks and feigns indignation. She pushes him away and yells at Virginia to come to her aid. They dash into the waves and are swallowed in another endless summer of sky and sea.

L
orraine is sixteen years old
, light of step, charged with energy yet languid when the breeze plays across her skin. The fuchsia blooming on the hedgerows cuts a crimson swathe through the countryside and the fiery orange of the montbretia, nodding and swaying along the roadside, drives her from the caravan early in the morning to try and capture such hues on paper. She paints the sun melting on the sea and the pulsing jellyfish, washed ashore and abandoned by the tide. Her mind is a dreaming space of half-formed truths. The swell of waves, rising and falling, has a new rhythm that beckons her forward into the long grass beyond the dunes where she kisses Adrian Strong until their lips ache.

In O’Callaghan’s pub she sips 7 Up and feels the persistent nudge of his knee. Surely people can feel the heat radiating between them. Virginia ignores them. She tosses her head and walks proudly through the beat of traditional music towards the ramshackle hall at the back of the pub which serves as a disco for the youth of the village. A disc jockey called Mad-Dog Mullarkey stands behind coloured lights. He wears black eye shadow and frizzes his hair. Virginia is allowed to share his platform and play her favourite Sex Pistols records. She is bored with school, bored with her parents who seek to destroy her with mediocrity, bored with the suburban estate where she lives, bored with everyone who walks outside her small closed circle. Her parents bicker constantly. Sonya is still a secret and her father is a coward, trapped in a loveless marriage, afraid to walk away. Lorraine thinks that a woman who keeps a canary and wears red stilettos must be an exotic change for a man whose wife’s vocabulary has been robbed from a phrase book. But is it an excuse for adultery? Her heart aches for Aunt Josephine who advises her to “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may – for tomorrow we lie down to die in green pastures,” when she discovers her in Adrian’s arms behind the caravans.

By the following year everything is different. Adrian is studying marketing and working with Edward for the summer in Boston. Josephine comes to Trabawn without her husband. She walks the beach late in the evenings with Donna, the two women falling silent when the girls draw near.

Virginia has become a punk. Her hair is orange, spiky as the Statue of Liberty. She has pierced her ears with rings and studs, encircled her arms in metal handcuffs. A tiny silver dagger has been inserted into her bottom lip. Her eyes, sea-stormy, reflect her disgust at having to spend time trapped in a caravan with her mother. When Lorraine’s father makes jokes about electric shocks every time she spikes her hair, she looks as if she is biting down on a freshly sliced lemon.

She explains the finer points of punk to Lorraine. It has galvanised her, given her anger a focus. The aggressive graffiti on her denim jacket shows her contempt for the world. She follows the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks. She threatens to vomit violently when Lorraine says she adores David Cassidy. At the disco in O’Callaghan’s she dances on her own. Her movements are graceless and spasmodic, her head jerking violently. There is a recklessness about her that demands attention. She is like a honey pot but without the sweetness, challenging yet attracting the young men who watch her from the side of the hall and no longer know how to talk to her.

In London she has a boyfriend. She hates every minute they are forced to spend apart. Her mother hates every minute they spend together.

“There’s plenty more sharks in the sea,” says Josephine but Virginia ignores this advice. Her boyfriend’s name is Ralph Blaide but he refuses to answer to anything other than Razor Blade. He belongs to a punk band called Sulphuric Acid. They have an explosive sex life, she informs Lorraine, describing torrid sessions which involve biting, screaming at each other, sometimes spitting, hissing, kissing until their lips bleed, then making love, only she calls it “fucking”.

The first time she uses the word Lorraine recoils. It sounds brutal, sickeningly different to the romantic ideal she still holds about passion and sand dunes – which she is unable to pass without her heart seizing up with longing for Adrian Strong in Boston. But Virginia throws it out with such indifference that it seems more like a manoeuvre undertaken in the front line of a battle field.

Mad-Dog Mullarkey grows cannabis in his mother’s herb garden. He rolls a joint and the girls smoke it in Mrs Mullarkey’s greenhouse, sheltered by enormous rubber plants and bulbous, thorny cacti. Lorraine inhales and is violently sick. Her face feels green. It is the colour of death, she tells Virginia, who says it is all in her imagination and floats the words above Lorraine’s whirling head.

Her self-confidence grows even as her friendship with Virginia disintegrates. She refuses to allow herself to be dragged along in the wake of her cousin’s angst. Her art teacher has encouraged her to study art when she completes her Leaving Certificate. She is anxious for the new school year to begin. Instead of seeking Virginia’s company, she borrows a bike from Celia and cycles around Trabawn, sketching and taking photographs of the countryside. As the evening tide retreats she walks barefoot over the sand, her eyes exploring the mysterious depths of shadow and light. On the rocks she sits, her hair loose, visualising herself as Adrian’s mermaid, maimed of heart.

Some months later her mother tells her they will not be returning to the caravans. Virginia’s parents are divorcing. Uncle Des is marrying his red-heeled Sonya. The Trabawn summers have come to an end. She does not see Virginia again until the summer of ’82.

F
erryman (an extract
from Michael Carmody’s memoir)

I
n the summer of ’82
, Jean Devine tied an orange bandanna over her long chestnut hair. She wore a tie-dyed t-shirt that revealed what it was supposed to hide and Doc Martens wide enough to walk on water. She was nineteen years of age and I, one year older and not any wiser, grabbed for around her waist and spun her into my arms. The Rolling Stones were in town and those of us who had not emigrated to shape the great Irish diaspora gathered in Slane to hear them play. In that grassy amphitheatre we danced to the beat of “Brown Sugar”, high on freedom and the amplification shuddering through our bodies, carelessly swaying towards a future where we would love and maim each other with equal fervour.

In my sagging two-man tent, we dined on pineapple chunks and cold beans. The closeness of our surroundings, the thin, flapping canvas straining against the guy-rope, the sense of people moving around us yet being separated from them within this flimsy space, added to the intensity of our time together. We drank cans of tepid beer, exchanged life stories, revealed secrets, admitted insecurities. When we could no longer contain our impatience we slipped into the padded warmth of my sleeping-bag. Her jeans were slashed across the backside. Three rips. I counted before I pulled them off. Afterwards, I would think of that small tent as a fantasy stage where we, without inhibitions and constraints, found the freedom to be different people for a short, searing time.

She’d gone to Slane with friends from university. Business students studying for Bachelor of Commerce degrees and secure positions within the money sector. Nowadays, they work in the heart of the Financial Centre or other similar spires of glass and steel. Occasionally, on the business pages of broadsheets, I notice their photographs – head and shoulder shots, their smiles growing in confidence as they climb another rung on the fiscal ladder. Monica, Gillian, Jennifer. Would I remember their names if something as incidental as a condom, torn in the force of passion, had not changed everything? Would I even remember Jean Devine?

When we returned to Dublin, the funny, passionate girl I knew in Slane seemed like a figment of my imagination. The striped bandanna had disappeared. Her hair was washed free of grass and mud, her dress patterned with sprigs of daisies. A pair of espadrilles had replaced the Doc Martens which she never wore again. Our awkwardness when we kissed belonged to the feinting and dodging of a sedate courtship. She came to my bed-sit with a plastic bag full of detergents to dust, polish, brush and bleach. New sheets were laid upon the mattress and I, whose only desire was to lay her flat upon the narrow bed and run my hands over the hidden curves of her body, felt trapped and angry as she cleaned up my act. I decided it was time to end our brief relationship but nature had other options in store for us.

Two months after the departure of the Rolling Stones we sat opposite each other in my bed-sit.

“I’m late,” she said. “I’m always on time … to-the-very-day, actually.” Her breath broke on the last word. She looked around my bed-sit and began to cry. I was an arts student with ambitions to become a playwright and a compulsion to write bad poetry. I had no parents, just an eccentric aunt who was walking her way around the world. My only secure employment was waiting tables part time in an Indian restaurant and shifting props for a drama company. It had sounded wonderfully eclectic when we discussed it at Slane but, without the liberating beat of rock music to enliven her imagination, the peeling wallpaper and empty beer cans beneath my bed told a tale of poverty, sloth and lack of ambition.

A pregnancy test confirmed our worst fears. We talked about abortion or, to be fully honest, I talked, Jean listened. My script was word perfect. We were too young, still students with our lives in front of us. We would scrape the money together somehow and go to London for the abortion, sharing the pain, the loss, then move on again.

Her voice cracked with fury. My argument was no match for her outrage and conviction. She was terrified of what was happening to her but abortion was a sin, unforgivable, unforgettable. I argued the line which I’d heard debated so often in university among my feminist friends. What about a woman’s right to choose, autonomy over her own body? Her eyes glazed me out.

Under duress, I agreed to meet her parents. They lived in a modest bungalow but it was in a respectable location, she told me. Such things, I was beginning to discover, were of importance to her. I took a bus to Monkstown, feeling the snare tightening around my neck. Noel Devine’s shoulders are stooped now but then he was tall and straight as an exclamation mark. Greta was as plump as she is today and her hair was only beginning to grey. When I stood before them, expecting Noel to brandish a shotgun and march us to the altar, he showed concern for our situation, rather than a desire to load and fire. They agreed that we were too young to marry but if that was what we wanted they would be happy to accept me as their son-in-law. Jean watched my face, judged my expression to be less than enthusiastic and shook her head defiantly. Marriage was out of the question, she stated. We hardly knew each other. I agreed, perhaps too whole-heartedly, but promised to support her and our child in every other way.

We battled our way towards Killian’s birth. Despite Jean’s brave words, the term “single mother” terrified her, conjuring up a one-bedroom flat in the inner city with drug addicts needling their arms on the stairwells and money-lenders crashing through doorways. The question of marriage kept cropping up in conversation. My future was being shaped by her vision of the perfect life; an incremental salary and a secure pension plan. I, too, was equally limited in vision, imagining myself joining an army of grey suits marching with one step from grey office blocks towards the grey uniformity of suburbia. Our child was also without identity or colour; its presence visible only in the growing bump on Jean’s stomach which she disguised with loose dresses and a refusal to go anywhere people might recognise her. Since this effectively ruled out the pub, cinema, rugby club or disco, our dates mainly consisted of sedate walks in the Phoenix Park where, one evening, in a hollow of fallen leaves, we spotted a deer standing perfectly still for an instant before bounding silently away. I envied the ease with which it moved into the trees, leaving nothing, not even a trembling leaf, as evidence of its swift escape.

Perhaps that was the reason I also ran, deserting her at a time when she needed me most. We’d had a row before I left. A family gathering had been planned. I was to meet her relations. They waited in vain for my arrival.

I hadn’t realised I was running away from everything until I reached Harriet’s cottage. She was home from exploring the snow caps of Chile and offered me her usual absent-minded welcome. I didn’t tell her she was about to become a great-aunt, knowing her scorn would send me slinking back to face my responsibilities. I told myself I was doing the right thing. Far better to end it at the beginning. What kind of father would I make when I’d never known a father’s hand on my shoulder? A ship that passed in the night, said Harriet when I questioned her about this nameless man. As an answer it lacked a certain clarity and so I gave him a personality; a buccaneer on a pirate ship, the commander of a submarine, a Viking on a longboat pillaging the Liffey.

I awoke one morning and sensed it, a shifting in the air, a quickening in the breeze. My head was clear for the first time in months. I needed to be with Jean. Whatever our future held, I wanted a share in it. I left a note for Harriet and hitch-hiked back to Dublin. Six hours later I rang her doorbell. Greta closed the door in my face. Killian had been born the previous day. Jean and her family never wanted to see me again.

In time Greta relented but Jean’s forgiveness was more difficult to obtain. I phoned her every day, sent her flowers and letters, besieged her with phone calls until she agreed to meet me. Killian was three weeks old when I saw him for the first time. I held him in my arms and wondered how his frail bird-like neck would ever support his head. As he struggled to make sense of shape, smell and sound, I watched his gaze lock with bemused concentration into mine. Can anyone describe happiness? It is elation, walking on air, music of the mind. It is a fleeting thing.

At first it seemed possible to make amends. I was free to visit the bungalow as often as I wished. A tentative friendship grew between myself and Greta, who looked after her grandson when Jean returned to university. She had a sweet voice, Joni Mitchell came to mind when I heard her sing, and she sang often to Killian, lullabies and folk songs. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird.”

I remember the afternoon he walked for the first time. We sat in her kitchen and watched him release his grip on the edge of a chair. He swayed forward with the uncertainty of a drunk who sees the floor rising and falling. He took one tottering step then another, his body wavering between disbelief and determination. I will never forget his startled smile when we applauded. The wonder with which he collapsed and stared at his feet. This ever-changing relationship between father and son was beginning to unfold in ways I’d never anticipated. I wanted to spend my life exploring it with him.

I proposed marriage. Magnanimous Sir Galahad, determined to do the right thing. As always, my script was out of date. Jean Devine had met a rugby player with wavy hair, a truncated neck and ambitions to take over his father’s wine import company. As she waved me from her house that evening, Killian balanced securely on her right hip, I felt as if the lid of an unexplored treasure chest had been slammed across my fingers.

Terence O’Malley adored her. As soon as I saw them together I knew I’d lost. On Sunday afternoons she strapped our son into the back of his Jaguar and they drove to the mountains, to the beach. I imagined Killian’s stomach heaving as the car mounted bridges or turned corners too sharply and how, on the way home, he would drift asleep to the strains of Terence singing “The Bog Down in the Valley O”
–
or drawing from his interminable store of Knock Knock jokes
.

Jean and I found it impossible to be in the same room without arguing. Greta refused to take sides and ordered us to sit down together and discuss our son’s future in a civilized manner. She was beginning to sound increasingly like a mother. At least, I assumed her scolding, exasperated tone was maternal. As far as I could remember, my mother had never raised her voice to me and Harriet had always treated me as a miniature adult disguised for a brief period in a boy’s body.

Our meeting took place in the Shelbourne Hotel. In six months’ time her father would escort her to the altar. An engagement ring gleamed on her tanned finger. A house had been purchased in the Dublin Mountains where Killian would begin his new life.
Her
son, she allowed the emphasis to settle between us, needed to acquire a strong sense of identity. If I persisted in believing I could come and go as I pleased she’d have to look at other options to protect him. My furious reminder that I had a natural right which could never be denied was met with indifference. That’s how I remember our conversation. No doubt Jean would take a different view.

“My son would have been an abortion statistic if you’d had your way,” she said. She’d checked out her rights and advised me to check out mine which, she added, almost as an afterthought, were non-existent. There was no father’s name on Killian’s birth certificate. How could there be when I’d abandoned her at a time when she had most need of my support? She closed her eyes, as if blanking out an indelible memory. Terence wanted them to be a family in the fullest sense. Total commitment.

The word “adoption” was cold and complete. It did not need an appendage or any further explanation. I veered between disbelief and outrage. What she was suggesting was inconceivable, obscene. Yet, she made it sound reasonable, even possible. Her hand was steady as she held a silver pot and poured coffee. She was deftly working my strings between her fingers and I had no option but to dance to her tune.

I met with a solicitor who warned of protracted court battles and partisan judges. I was a single father without any family structure, apart from an aunt whose life was an endless journey of discovery. The self-help group of lone fathers I joined reflected my own helplessness. Their stories of injustices terrified me. I contacted Eddie Wynn, a journalist who’d supplemented his income when he was studying by waiting tables in the Indian restaurant where I’d worked. Under the
nom de plume
of Patrick I told my story which was published in the
Dublin Echo
with the bold headline “SINGLE FATHER DEPRIVED OF RIGHTS”. It sparked off quite a debate, made Killian famous in an anonymous way. Letters on the issues of single fatherhood were published. I was asked to do a radio interview, then another for television. My face was shaded from public view but my hunched, defeated shoulders told their own story.

Jean never admitted she guessed the identity of “Patrick” but in the months that followed she stopped insisting on adoption. I could have five hours every Saturday afternoon, providing I agreed to Killian’s surname becoming Devine-O’Malley. My solicitor negotiated a full Saturday and an overnight visit once a month. I accepted these terms, having heard too many in-camera horror scenarios from the men in the group. They were an angry gathering. Many of them had good reasons for their anger but my own reality was becoming submerged under their experiences. I left the group when I realised I was beginning to feed off their collective outrage.

Do I sound bitter, jealous? Jealousy I will accept as an abiding emotion but bitterness was impossible to maintain when it came to Terence O’Malley. When he was not stamping the imprint of his boot into the head of his opponent on the rugby pitch, he was an affable, easy-going man without opinions. His love for Jean was uncomplicated. Killian was three years old when they married. He would not create an uneasy triangle within their union but form the complete circle.