The Shelter of Neighbours (20 page)

Then it is desirable to explore her old haunts. She goes for a long walk to the hill at the back of the cottage. A road winding up past other bungalows, a few with grey smoke trailing up from their chimneys and most seeming empty, closed up like her house had been. After the last bungalow, a gate and then heather, sheep, sky for a mile, until you come on something surprising: a cobbled hilltop in the middle of nowhere. It is not the usual place for a school, exposed and far from where anyone lived. A film set, that is what it is. Polly remembers suddenly, a chink opening like a trapdoor in her head. There it is, something she has not thought about in thirty years: the commotion when the film had been made in the valley, the trucks trundling up the hill, the star-spotting, the jobs for extras. Everyone had been an extra. Katherine and Eileen had been schoolgirls in the classroom scenes. All the other people had been villagers, or men drinking beer from funny tin mugs in the pub, or country folk at the market. Even the animals got parts: Eileen's mother had hired out her hens for a pound apiece per day. But Polly had not participated. Her mother would not allow it, disapproving as she did of the film, which, although the word was not used, focused on a passionate adulterous affair, conducted in a range of scenic Irish settings. How Polly's mother discovered this was a mystery. Nobody else knew what the film was about. It was impossible for the extras to follow its plot, such being the nature of filming. But Polly's mother had her sources. And unlike most of her neighbours, she did not need whatever extra money she could lay her hands on. She did not need to prostitute herself or her daughter to Hollywood. The film had been a disappointing experience, an experience of total exclusion for Polly. No wonder she had forgotten all about it.

Polly kicks the film-set cobbles with her walking boot, and continues to the crest of the hill. The sun is shining, low and strong, but the joy has gone out of the day. She can feel night falling already, the afternoon is sinking into the silvery grey dusk although it is only four o'clock. The sheep bleat on the bare hillside. Polly feels a huge yearning for her home in Copenhagen; she longs to be there. In her old house, with the bustle of the city ten minutes away on the electric train, the opera at a moment's notice, a glass of wine in a warm pub, with the lovely Danish Christmas decorations up, the sense of a simple tradition of paper hearts and straw goats and tiny flickering candles everywhere, in every window, on every table. Copenhagen celebrates light in the deep midwinter, glows with optimism and hope.

Back in the house, she pulls the tweedy curtains to shut out the bleakness and throws a few sods of turf on the fire, then phones Lia, one of her friends, and tells her how she is feeling.

Lia says, ‘Come home if you want to', which is what Polly knew she would say.

And Polly says, inevitably, ‘I don't really want to. Not yet.'

‘You don't have to do any of this if you don't feel like it, you know,' Lia goes on. ‘And you are allowed to change your mind.'

‘I know, I know. I will in a day or two if I decide that,' says Polly, laughing.

This is the sort of conversation she always has with Lia, long, meandering sentences full of pauses, and words like ‘feel' and ‘decide' and ‘maybe', phrases like ‘well, wait and see' or ‘it'll probably be
ok
'. They are so different from the conversations that Polly has with Karl, which are to the point, conducted in short, complete sentences, verging on the terse. He is practical and decisive, and it has taken him a long time to understand Polly's meandering, ever-changing mind.

Paddy Mullins sat with the rough element on the bus, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and slagging people. A lot of the time these boys were laughing as they pushed one another and exchanged insults. ‘Done your sums, Smelly?' ‘Yes, Fat-arse, but I'm not showing them to you.' ‘Surprised you had time. Seeing as how you were cleaning the pigsty again most of the night.' ‘Shut up, Fat-arse, don't pick on him 'cos his daddy's a farmer.' ‘Farmer? Tax dodger.' The language of the bus was English, although the language of home and of school was Irish, and some of the children, especially those from Polly's valley, did not know English very well. But they had to speak it, anyway; English was trendy, the language of pop singers and films, the universal language of teenagers. Only the most prim or the most childish, the most excluded, would persist with Irish in this context. The slags had a name for people like that. Ireeshians. Polly knew the rule of the bus and spoke English on it, but she was called an Ireeshian, anyway, because her father was a teacher and her mother was a snob and generally disliked.

She was also called ‘Lick'. All teachers' children were called ‘Lick-arse'; ‘Lick' was its derivative, used by the girls, who eschewed strong language. Farmers' children were given the epithet ‘Smelly'. Paddy was called ‘Mackerel' because his father was a fisherman. He answered to the name, and gave as good as he got in these bouts of slagging, most of the time. But there were occasions when for no discernible reason he would fall out of the teasing loop. He would fall silent, and stare into space, thoughtful, enigmatic. Most of the boys did that. They had quiet moments, moments when they seemed to withdraw from the hullabaloo of a schoolboy's life and think deeply about something for five whole minutes at a time. What were they thinking when they did this? Polly did not know. But she would have liked to have found out, although as yet she had no inkling of how she could do this. Inside a boy's head was as impenetrable as inside a boys' school, somewhere she assumed she could simply never go.

Paddy would sit on his bus seat, gazing ahead of him, not necessarily out the window. Gazing at nothing. Then anyone could get a look at him. Not that he was anything special. Indeed, until this week Polly had considered that, whereas the girls on the bus all looked different, the boys all looked alike. There were smaller ones and taller ones, of course, with one unfortunate individual at either extreme. And there were a few fair-haired ones, with pale complexions and gentle manners – they tended to be short-sighted and wore glasses – who were not rough boys but good boys, and who sat near the girls, consulting their books or more often chatting to girls. Their fair, feminine looks seemed to give them an advantage when it came to making friends with girls, as if they were less threatening in their less blatant masculinity. And of course they were not as aggressive as the bulk of the boys, that band of brown-haired barbarians, who exuded maleness like a herd of bullocks and could not sit still. Dark, large-boned, stubble-chinned, too big for almost all the spaces they were obliged to inhabit, too big for the bus or the school, for the houses they lived in, these were boys whose true element was not a classroom or a school bus, but the high seas, or a meadow or a bog on the side of the mountain. A battlefield. Most of them were good footballers. Their school won the All-Ireland schools championship nearly every year.

Paddy was on the team but was the keeper, a position regarded with mockery by the girls and the fair-haired boys, although his team mates appeared to respect it well enough. Polly was accumulating information about him, almost without knowing what she was doing. He was a keeper, he was good at maths and chemistry, he was planning to be a scientist. He had once danced with a girl from the next parish for a whole summer but the relationship had fizzled out. He had been to Dublin many times with the team but never went on holiday anywhere. His father was a fisherman; they did not own even a small farm, just a house and a field, and he lived about ten miles from Polly's home – he had not gone to her primary school, and she did not know his family. They did not speak Irish in his house. There was some anomaly about his mother. Like Polly's, she was not from the district. Some people said she was English.

School finished at three thirty and at four o'clock the bus collected pupils from both schools and ferried them home. So that meant almost half an hour in the town if you were very efficient about leaving your class. Usually this half-hour was spent looking in the shops, or getting chips if you were lucky enough to have a shilling. People with a boyfriend or girlfriend found other ways to use the time – walking hand in hand on the pier, or chatting in the town park.

Paddy and Polly bumped into each other at the corner of the main street, one day in May. This was about a month after she had begun to look at him. By now she knew the contours of his head, the line of his eyebrows, the set of his shoulders, better than she knew her own. But she did not know how he felt about her, although Eileen had said once, in her most serious tone, ‘I think Paddy Mullins likes you.' So now Polly muttered hello, and averted her eyes, preparing to move quickly on. Even as she let his face slide from her view, to be replaced with a view of the pavement, she felt angry and frustrated, because she knew he would not have the same
savoir faire
to initiate any sort of conversation; one of the svelte, fair boys could do that, but not Paddy, one of the bullocks, the goalkeeper. He would not be able to talk, even if he wanted to as much as she did. Also, she knew in that second that he did want to. His surprise, his pleasure, when they met like that, told her everything she needed to know.

She was wrong about his
savoir faire
.

‘Póilín,' he was saying. She stepped back and looked at him, astonished at her good luck, their good luck, that he was able to say the necessary words. ‘I'm going down to look at the boats. Do you want to come?'

It was as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life.

They got through the town as quickly as they could, and then strolled down the pier. The sea was choppy, but a choppy dark blue trimmed with snowy white, and the sun was shining on the fishing fleet, on the clustering red and blue and white boats: the
Star of the Sea
and the
Mary Elizabeth
, the
Ballyheigue Maiden
and the
Silver Mermaid
. The air was full of energy.

‘That's the one I go out on.' He pointed at the
Silver Mermaid
. It was a large white fishing smack with lobster pots on deck, and heaps of green seine nets piled on the pier in front of it.

‘Do you go out often?' She could not think of anything more original to say.

‘Weekends when they're out and I don't have a match.' He smiled. His smile was stunning; it lit up the day and gave his face a sweet expression that it didn't normally have. Usually he looked rather worried, as if he were carrying some burden.

‘Do you like it out there?' Polly realised that although she saw fishermen around every day, she hadn't a clue what they experienced, out in those boats in the middle of the night, hauling in fish, which disappeared into the new fish plant down the street. She could see it now, a grey block on the edge of the harbour and, in front, the bay with the low hills on the other side, and the blue bar in the middle distance, beyond the great ocean. ‘What's it like?' Out there, she meant, on the sea.

‘
ok
.' He looked out, then at the
Silver Mermaid
, then out again. He reflected and seemed to come to a decision to say more. Possibly he had never described the experience before. ‘It's dark, and usually cold, and usually wet as well. We let down the nets over the side, five or six of us. Then we wait. That's the best part, waiting, gripping the net, wondering what happens next. Sometimes we talk or someone sings or we all sing. But usually we're just quiet. Standing there, waiting, in the night.' He paused and Polly wondered if she should say something, contribute some question or comment. But she could not think of anything. ‘When we haul in the nets, there are all kinds of fishes in them. Lots we have to throw back. Catfish, dogfish, cuttlefish. The cuttlefish are interesting. They have big brains, for fish. Once, I kept one in a jar.'

‘For a pet?'

‘No. To dissect in the lab.'

‘Did you?'

‘I didn't use enough alcohol and it rotted. It exploded. Very smelly!' He held his nose and laughed. Polly laughed too, looking at the sea, trying to imagine the smell of exploded cuttlefish. In a minute Paddy said, ‘It's time to get the bus.'

It was a glorious May, as it often could be in that part of the world. Long, sunny days, some so warm you would feel like swimming, although the water would still be freezing. Swallows were flying high over the meadows, and larks twittered constantly, tiny dots so far away that they could have been daytime stars. Polly's mother was busy in her garden, one of the very few gardens in the valley. She raised bedding plants from seed in trays, which all through March and April had been placed under the windows of the house. Now she was raking beds, planting out nasturtiums and antirrhinums and sweet william, nicotiana, stocks. She was feeding her long rows of lettuce and onion, carrot and parsnip, her beds of herbs.

When Polly came home from school, at five o'clock, her mother would still be in the garden, her gardening apron over her summer dress, her red rubber gloves sticking out of the pocket. She would greet Polly with, ‘You could get an hour in before tea!' Meaning, an hour of study. Then she could get three or four hours in after tea. Polly was doing the Leaving Cert in a month's time, in June, and her mother expected her to do well. What she meant by ‘well' was quite specific. Polly would win a scholarship, a medal proclaiming her to be the best student in the county. At least that.

Polly had studied hard in secret for the last few months. To Eileen and Katherine she said, ‘I'm hopeless. I'm way behind!' But at home she realised she was way ahead, and it astonished her that progress was actually possible, even now, even after her years of calculated dawdling: that by concentrated attention, careful effort, an improvement was discernible even to her, even without the endorsement of good marks or teachers' comments. She had never felt so in control of her work before.