The Past (16 page)

YOU HAD GROWN alongside your mother since that breakfast of butter and sausages in the Killiney hotel when the Republican waiter
served you so willingly. You still remember your father's shoulder pistol and his clipped ‘Home, Jack' as he lifted you into the open car on the Bray prom. Your life together since he died seemed a process of melting. There are healing graces in human affairs and you have more than your share of them. Through loving you she is reinventing him in a form she can love, expiating her former indifference. Which is perhaps why, when greeted by those who knew all three of you, in the old days, ex-lord mayors of major towns, ex-commanders of guerrilla battalions now heads of government departments, friends of his only, Free-Staters now, friends of hers only, Republicans now, all of those who knew the three of you say, ‘How like him she is'. And Una can take this without any rancour. She is even glad of the comparison, she resurrects him in you in a finer form. The part of him that lives through you is after all the mythical part, one simple image of the head framed by the ridiculously large cap and the shoulder pistol. One simple attribute, that of the man of action, distracted, regretful, uneasy with his role. His memory after all has become the embodiment of how different it could have been if only . . . And so when you appear with Una at public functions or at any functions at all and people say how like him you are, they see in you this wonderful, mythical alternative, this possibility of how different it could have been . . . For you are already developing this propensity, this unconscious talent for being seen from any angle and seen differently.

AT THIRTEEN YOU are fattish and your hair has the same blonde look with the texture of cream that it had when you were six. Your
hair and your walk distinguish you, since there's not much that's beautiful in your figure or your face. You smile a lot. There's a lot to smile about for a girl of thirteen with no school to go to. You've adapted yourself to the company of adults since your father died, which could be why your walk is so relaxed. It gives a grace to your figure that shouldn't have been there, belying all the canons of schoolgirl beauty; as if there's a moving centre to you which your figure just follows. You always walk, even in the most high-heeled, the heaviest boots, as if you are barefoot. And all this gives you ease in adult company. You only lose it in the company of your peers, of girls of your age. They are made shy by your habits which, far from seeming adult to them, seem old-fashioned. And the too-adult child always does seem old-fashioned. You have picked up habits of speech and gesture which they associate with their more ardent teachers and the comparison leaves a distance between you and them. You are always polite, for instance, you address a remark to each member of whichever company you are in. You have no sense of exclusiveness, of secrets. You rarely whisper. Your hands are smallish—practical hands that move when you talk using gestures that are never hurried but always startling.

RATHER UNGAINLY ADULT clothes, blouses, skirts and dresses of your mother's, which she has taken in. Her sumptuous, evening sense reflected in every garment so you could wear a velvet dress on a spring day, a strange mixture of ill-fitting and style. Your clothes make you suspect to the mothers of those who might possibly be your friends.
So you learn to keep to yourself, you walk down by the stretch of marsh where the birds nest, over the railway line, over the granite ramp to the beach. You are the girl of thirteen with the large eyes and face, the halo of blonde hair, who walks along the railway tracks, stepping on the sleepers. On the beach, among the men in long coats who prod the flotsam with sticks, the young children playing truant from school. There is a woman who holds her belongings in a tied bundle, who sometimes sits by the granite wall. The wall slopes towards the beach, at an angle, to keep the tracks free of spring tides. The children and the lost elders sit there and the occasional sexual predator, generally male. You are the only adolescent girl to grace the granite. The flecks of silver and the mottles of white on the large fawn blocks reflect your hair and your eyes. It is an empty place, though never empty of people. The ramp stretches down the length of the track and yards separate those who sit on it, as if some rule of place keeps them apart; the two children looking through the sea-green bottle at the sun, the man with seven coats asleep in the spring heat, the youth with the ashplant, the high trousers and the slow eyes, following the children and the green bottle. Then there is you. The woman with the bundle intrigues you. She is wearing a grey shawl, like sackcloth. She unties the bundle slowly, unwraps yards of brown paper. You are looking directly at her, something one doesn't do on the ramp and the weekday beach. She takes from the paper an evening dress and a pair of high-heeled shoes and a hat. The hat has mock fruit on top and the sprigs are twisted. The dress is crumpled, though still glittering with sequins. She takes off her shawl, then the garment under that, indistinguishable from her shawl, and lastly a stiff, coarse vest. You can see her withered breasts exposed to the
sun as she holds the sequined dress to herself. She has a dowager's hump and the ridges of her spine seem to push through her white skin. She struggles into the sequined dress and pulls it down around waist and thighs, pulling off the cloth she used as a skirt as she does so. Then she puts on the high-heels, dons the hat, turns to you with an unearthly, blissful smile.

‘How do they suit me?'

You smile back in answer. You watch her stagger down the ramp, across the sand, towards the sea's edge. She stands there like a thin, twisted bird, the sequins flashing in the sunlight, more sharply than the sea. She is staring at the thread of the horizon, motionless for several minutes, then suddenly she turns and walks back.

‘A bit loud, don't you think?'

You are about to reply that you don't think so at all, but you see that she has made up her mind, she's already struggling out of the dress, exposing her thin breasts again. So you smile in affirmation.

YOU GIVE THAT sea front your occasional hours round your thirteenth year. The woman with the bundle returns with a different set of garments. Dapper old men wink at you, striding towards Blackrock. You look as odd, perhaps, as most of that ramp's inhabitants, with your handed-down clothes and your air of abstraction, though the thought would never occur to you. Dreaming is a precious thing, at thirteen, on a near-empty beach. Never, I would say, does your mind form one abstract, separated thought. You souse yourself in the mechanics of dreaming, where one thought fades and
leads to another and everything turns into everything else. The same breath blows through them, blowing deep, rising to the surface, then deep again. The wind raises a thread of sand and lets it fall. You get up and walk when the mood takes you, following the sand. A man accosts you one morning, a young man, so small and perfect that he could be called dwarf. He smiles at you from the granite. He is impeccably clean, his nails are long and perfectly groomed, his hair runs back from his forehead in thin waves. His small-boned, perfect face has the delicacy of an egg. His lips are tiny, somewhat sad, but his smile breaks his face into tiny creases, exposing even white teeth. He must be amazed when you smile back for he stutters when he calls you to the ramp.

Wait with me, he tells you, for the train. His knees are drawn up and one hand rests on each. It carries an opera singer, he tells you, who will throw roses at anyone who stands and waves. Will you stand and wave? he asks. You walk a little up the ramp so that you can see the tracks. His hands flutter on his knees. Why, you ask him, will she throw out roses? Because she is famous, he tells you, she is famous, most beautiful and has a wonderful voice. If you are quick enough you can catch an armful of them. Red roses, white ones, all colours. Where will I stand? you ask. Here, he says, where she can see you. He stretches up, his small hand touches your thigh. Still, he says. His hand seems to shiver on the velvet. You obey it, don't move. Will you show me your rose, he asks? I have no rose, you tell him, I will have to wait until the train comes. But you have, he insists, flashing his sad lips into a smile. You hear footsteps behind you on the granite and his hand trembles against you. You must watch for the train, he says softly, hastily, a little girl like you. He returns the hand to his
knee. When will it come? you ask him, climbing the ramp to the top. Soon, he says, catch me some roses. You see him running backwards across the sand, his neat dwarf's prints before him. Flashing his distant smile. Patience, he cries.

T
HAT IS NOT, however, to be read as your first sexual experience. Nothing but your curiosity was excited, which was perhaps fortunate, and your memory of the miniature man remains with you only because of the whiteness of his teeth and the neatness of his cuticles. You thought of nothing more significant than the train and the roses when he'd left you. The machine of adolescence had to wait to come, and the train with it.

It needed Lili to meet you on the straw-coloured ramp, to cross the sand to the sea and back again. Lili comes in the more normal hours, the afternoon hours, when the place has lost its emptiness. There are comparative crowds then, schoolgirls, like Lili, in uniform. You walk down the tracks, you clamber over the sleepers, she holds your hand with one hand, presses down her blowing skirt with the other. She hints at that machine of the age beyond reason. You feel the world of intimacies, whispers and fluttering eyes. You are surprised and embarrassed since your world of adults has kept you a child, strangely innocent, innocently mature. You have stayed blissfully unaware of these long secrets of girlhood, which Lili seems to want to share. A blush, deep and rose-coloured, a sense of shame that she should be shamed, rises on your cheek, which makes Lili giggle and makes you blush more. The blush seeps inside, it becomes a positive warmth. ‘Scarlet,
like a rose,' says Lili, alluding to your cheeks and perhaps your hands do go to cover your face since her air of classroom banter increases your discomfort. You feel that this sensation welling inside you as you cover the tracks, manifesting itself in your cheeks in this glorious red, is one that deserves to be talked of in more than whispers. It should be discussed, you feel, with more elaborate manners than those of the diplomatic banquet your mother once brought you to. Or it should be shouted from high places, from the windows of trains, bringing roses to places you have never heard of. You cross from the tracks and climb up on the ramp and begin to tell Lili of your miniature man. But Lili tugs your palm, whispers that you should keep your voice down. A nun is passing, and the ramp is too narrow for three. You stand with your back to the sea to allow her walk by, tall, boxed and birdlike. You recognise the face beneath the bonnet, the greying hair. You call her name, though Lili's hand goes out to stop you. And Sister Paul turns, her face changing from puzzlement to recognition to the quick smile that you remember so well, creasing the translucent skin. As she talks above the railway tracks in a voice hardly different from the one in which she introduced you to the age of reason you wonder what her name would be for this new age, the one Lili seems to hold between her lips now, like a mouthful of shamed peach. It is an age, you sense, containing truths so immense that only a discipline like hers could do it justice. Behind you the tide seeps from the creases of sand.