He Is Mine and I Have No Other Page 12

  I am one of four children. Maisie and me, and the other two – a boy and a girl, if I remember rightly – who died before I was born. And then my mother died when I was five. I don’t remember her at all. I saw some pictures, but that was a long time ago. Sometimes when I catch sight of myself in a mirror I think I might look a bit like her. My father looked after the three of us. Maisie, the older one, did most of the cooking and cleaning, though Daddy used to like to make us boiled eggs and soldiers on Sundays.

  One of my favourite things was going down with him to the sucking calves, and them slobbering all over my fingers with their big pink tongues.

  Daddy got very sick with TB and couldn’t look after us properly anymore, and Maisie couldn’t cope. He died when I was fourteen and a half. I wasn’t allowed go to the funeral. They said I would be too upset. My sister Maisie went though. She was working as a cleaner up at St Colum’s College. She’s in one of them Magdalene homes now.

  There were primroses along the bank of the river at the back of the house, wood sorrel close to the school. It was Leon’s last few months before exams. After that he’d be gone from the place for good. I wouldn’t get to watch his lengthening shadow on the road. I thought about starving myself into oblivion, but I couldn’t as long as there was still a chance. I couldn’t leave. In bed early every night, I’d turn off the light and replay the same fantasy. It went like this: My darling Lani, I have made such a terrible mistake. We must be together, etcetera, etcetera. Cut to: meeting under big trees, green light filtering through the leaves: Lani, can you ever forgive me? Pan to my face, radiant with love and tenderness, and to his eyes, welling with tears of such gratitude. Then the kiss, better than anything ever in the world before this. And his arms around me for all eternity.

  Nothing beyond that point: though sometimes I could drag it out for a long time, I could never go beyond. I either rolled over and went to sleep with a smile on my face or broke down and wept. More and more frequently I’d get up and go to the kitchen late at night and eat. I was sick of Rich Tea biscuits. And I’d fainted in class from the hunger one day, which was mortifying. I didn’t want that happening again, though it was nice that Mar was the first one I saw crouching down beside me when I came to, looking all concerned.

  I’d melt cooking chocolate in a glass bowl over boiling water and dip bananas into it – not just one, but several at a time, and scoff them almost without taking a breath. Then I’d go outside and smoke two or three cigarettes. That was the time to eat – late at night when no one could see, no one could watch me, so it didn’t count, it wasn’t real.

  I was sneaking into Gran’s room whenever I could too, to stare at that picture of Celia when she was young, and that picture of Gran when she was the age I was then. Trying to imagine what it must have been like for her, never seeing Felim again.

  It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed that day, I cycled so fast. I didn’t even get off the bike for the hills, as I usually would. The sweat was pouring off me by the time I got out to Crogher. I felt dizzy, like I’d been swimming in cold water for too long. I knew where his house was. I’d seen the address in the phone book. It was at the end of a row of semi-detached houses painted in pinks and beiges and creams, with clashing primaries on the window shutters and the doors, all clean and neatly ordered, with privet hedges either side, and tiny, perfectly manicured lawns. Pansy beds in the garden to the right of his, roses in the other. No Child of Prague in the window. Only two garden gnomes on the lawn. Along the side of the garden was a path leading to an old derelict farmhouse behind. I put my bike in the ditch and walked down to the old house. I didn’t even try to hide myself. His father could kill me, for all I cared.

  The front door was broken off its hinges, hanging by a last nail from the door frame. A big sturdy wooden door, with double-bolted latches. The darkness inside smelled of lighter fuel and something else which I couldn’t quite make out. I think it must have been the damp horsehair spewing from the old mattresses upstairs. There were the remnants of a campfire in the middle of what would have been the kitchen floor. The floor was bare cement, with bits of dirty red lino in places, and old brown and green bottles of animal medicine, and ketchup and rat poison strewn about the place. There were layers of wallpaper on some sections of the wall, peeling back generations of roses, brocade; other bits of wall were bare plaster and had been daubed with paint, most of it indecipherable. ‘Fuck the world’ it said on one section in large red letters.

  Upstairs that smell got more potent. The old metal-framed bedsteads with their striped mattresses were damp, fetid. Rats’ nests. The windows were deeply set. From the biggest bedroom I could see right into Leon’s house. Scratched into the sill was my name, clear as anything.

  There was some movement on the stairs. I looked for somewhere to hide, then thought better of it. Leon appeared at the door.

  ‘Lani, what are you doing here?’ He didn’t even look surprised to see me. He looked upset, more than anything.

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ I said. ‘You’ve not been responding to my letters.’

  ‘I’m going away soon. I’ll be finished school and then I’ll be going away. To university, hopefully.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Well, there’s no point in us . . . Is there? I’ll be gone.’

  ‘But I could come with you.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t,’ he said, and that was that. He seemed certain. ‘Now you better go. I don’t want my father finding you here.’

  ‘But that was you in my garden the other night . . .’

  ‘I just wanted to see you before I went,’ he said.

  ‘Is it because of that girl?’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘That one I saw you in town with.’

  ‘There’s no one else,’ he said, and somehow I believed him.

  I thought if I could just get him to put his arms around me then everything would be okay. Maybe I could trick him, feign sickness . . .

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, but he didn’t come any nearer. He kept his eyes fixed on some point on the floor beyond me, as if he was afraid to look at me for shame. I could feel my insides collapse – first my heart, then my lungs, then my stomach. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to be sick. I put my hand out for something to touch.

  ‘Could you not come with me? Back home?’ I pleaded, knowing as I said it that it would sound stupid.

  He shifted from where he stood. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’ Like that. Very definite. That was all. Then he turned his back on me and walked out.

  ‘Please,’ I shouted, louder than I’d meant.

  It was like I’d been kicked in the guts. I bent over, my head swimming, then crumpled to the floor.

  He’d come back.

  I made circles in the dust with my hands as the tears recklessly flowed.

  He would come. He wouldn’t leave me like that.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there waiting. An hour maybe.

  I managed to get home, though I could barely see I was crying so much.

  ‘What in God’s name happened to you?’ Gran asked when she saw the state I was in.

  I tried to rub the dirt from my hands onto my jeans. ‘Nothing, Gran,’ I said, ‘I just had a fight with Mar.’

  Gran took a sherry bottle from behind her armchair and told me get two glasses. Sherry had always been her favourite tipple, she said, even as a youngster. That’s what she’d been drinking the night she met my grandfather, Lazy Bones. She was playing poker in an upstairs room in a bar. She was cleaning them out. He walked her home, told her a public house was no place for a lady like her, and they were married a year after. She thought she’d die an old spinster but there she was with a chance of making a go of things. And then a son joining the priesthood. And a daughter happily married . . .

  ‘But what about Felim, Gran? Weren’t you still in love with him?’

  ‘Of course I was. But what could I do? We couldn’t get
married. We were too young. And his family had nothing. As far as he was concerned I was that girl who’d left him waiting, night after night – for nigh on a year, someone told me he waited. It would have been better if it had stayed that way, but someone told him about Celia. I still don’t know who it was. He never would have forgiven me for that anyway. He went and got married, to some local girl, and that was that.’

  Patsy, 6

  My brother says I have to be good for the nuns. There isn’t enough food at home and I’m a good girl, my mammy said I was, she said I was a good girl and I was eating her out of house and home. I was crying but I promised her I wouldn’t but she promised me and she was crying. My brother took me on his bike. I can ride a bike. He taught me but he said it was too long. We went into the ditch because he said I was too heavy and I got stings on my legs I still have them they hurt. The nun gave me stings on my legs with her stick for not being a good girl even though I was. I don’t like my nuniform. It bites me under my arms. If I am a good girl for three days my brother will come and get me back I won’t eat everything only my fair share because I eat less than the baby here only old potato and water that doesn’t taste like anything and my mammy knows how to make it. I am a good girl and do the ABC at the big school that I learn at the little school at home. I do numbers as well and I can count 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Miss Dolan told me that I learn it with orange pieces but the oarfin girls weren’t allowed to eat it only the good girls from outside the school they go home to their mammies because they are good and they don’t wear nuniforms the same as me.

  It was around Easter time, I remember. I hated Easter. Ash Wednesday especially. All the girls at school walking around with big grey smudges on their foreheads. And having to kiss the feet of Jesus on the cross, and the priest wiping away your spit with a handkerchief before the next girl. It felt rude, kissing that naked man’s feet. Especially in front of everyone else. Even if it was only a statue.

  Mam was saying that she remembered all the little orphan girls getting a giant Easter egg delivered to the school.

  ‘D’you know, I used to be kind of envious of them,’ she said. ‘They’d get this big Easter egg every year, delivered to the school gates, and our eyes’d be popping out of our heads. All we got were boiled eggs at Easter. They weren’t allowed to have those Easter eggs though. The nuns confiscated them. But sure I didn’t realise that at the time. I remember Mammy giving me food to bring in to them – and me being embarrassed in front of the other girls, and the teacher giving me dirty looks. Sometimes I didn’t even give it to them. I gave it to my friends instead.’

  ‘You never told me that,’ Gran said. ‘It was rhubarb from our garden.’

  Mam had been a day girl at the convent school in town years after the fire. She remembered the little orphans in their calico dresses at the back of the class, always quiet and smelling of disinfectant. And their little hands red raw. She remembered one of them weeing herself in class one day and her being beaten black and blue for it. No one would talk to them. They weren’t allowed.

  ‘We thought it was normal,’ Mam said. ‘Sure we didn’t know any different.’

  Most of those girls were in England now. One had worked up at the boys’ school as a cleaner for years. She lived in the small house by the school gates. Maisie, they called her. I knew her to see about the town. She’d be wearing a wig sat on her head like a hat, and layers and layers of dirty clothes. The stink off her was so bad you’d have to cross the road if you saw her coming.

  Mam and I walked past the old convent school one Saturday afternoon when we were in getting some groceries. We stopped in front of the iron gates that lead into the courtyard.

  ‘Your grandmother walked past this place every day for two years after she was married.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No, I don’t think she ever told anyone before. Sure how could she, with Father . . . He was so good to her . . .’

  It turned out Gran had been there the morning after the fire. They’d said the girls did so much polishing it had gone up like a box of matches. She could remember the stench in the town afterwards. She still got that smell sometimes. It was hard to think that those little girls could smell so awful.

  She’d got herself a job as a cleaner at the surgical hospital in town, across the road from the orphanage, after she’d pleaded with her uncle to tell her where they’d taken Celia. On her lunch breaks she’d go across and peer into the yard, where the girls were out playing. You’d hardly know there were children in there, it was so quiet.

  People must have thought she was queer, always going over there. But no one ever said anything. And she never let on that she’d had a baby. Not even to her closest friend.

  How she was able to go there, day after day, and see the little girls from the convent, I don’t know. How she could bear to see the blacked-up, barred windows.

  After the fire, she was broken. But there was no way she could let on. She had to keep it all inside her. My grandfather was all she had left in the world.

  She watched the coffins being carried out – eight of them for thirty-five girls – thinking Celia was in one of them. There was a mass in the convent, but she didn’t go. It was for the official people of the town only. It would have looked strange for her to be there. She followed the cortege up to the graveyard though. She watched them lower the coffins into the ground. She heard the priest call them little angels.

  And later she went back to the convent and she walked up to the door. One of the nuns peered from behind a grille. She told her she would have to come back another time, but Gran went hysterical on her. The nun opened the door and stood facing away from her. She wasn’t allowed even to look outside. She wouldn’t even make eye contact with her, Gran said.

  Gran explained to her about Celia.

  She was told that no one under the age of two had been killed in the fire, and the likelihood was that that particular child had been adopted. She wouldn’t tell her any more than that.

  The hoops were still left up against the wall inside in the courtyard, where the little girls had been playing with them just the day before.

  Catherine, 10

  My mammy didn’t want me to come here. She didn’t have a pension but. That’s what you need when you’re old and your husband died and left you with seven children. My auntie and uncle took me. They used to be my favourites until they did that. I thought they were going to keep me for themselves. They probably would have, except I started to do things my auntie didn’t like. I didn’t like it either. Except when my uncle gave me a hula hoop, and a doll with a porcelain head.

  All the girls here sleep in beds very close together. Sometimes I try to get into bed with Sheila and she whispers very loud at me to ‘Get out, get out.’ She is more scared than me. I don’t care.

  We have hula hoops. We’re supposed to share. We play with them in the yard. I can do it around my neck and belly. No one else can. It’s because I got to practise before I came. My uncle counted how many times I could do it without stopping.

  We drink chestnut water in the summer. It’s our special treat. We make it out of leaves and sugar in the field at the back of the convent. You have to crush the leaves down until there is the chestnut juice, which is green, and then you add the sugar and some water. Sometimes I get the sugar. I am supposed to be putting it in my cocoa and I put it into my hand under the table instead. And then I keep it in my pocket until we go outside. My pocket gets sticky but I don’t care. Chestnut water is nicer than cocoa. Cocoa has things wriggling in it. And then they put the boiling water in on top of them and they’re dead.

  My auntie is nicer to me now. She brings me sweets sometimes. But when she brings them the nuns take them off me. I just want one. The nuns will get very fat if they eat all our sweets all the time. Mother Assumpta says if I’m a good girl she will get me some.

  My grandfather had been in with friends, in their kitchen playing penny poker, the night of the fire. The
re was some commotion outside on the street. A few of them went out to see what it was, and saw the smoke billowing from the convent, and its doors still firmly closed.

  He went over, shouting for someone to come and open the door. Finally, after several of the men had tried to break through with axes and pokers and whatever they could lay their hands on, they were let into the courtyard.

  There were men shouting, ‘Get them out!’ and car horns going off, and people running about in all directions, not knowing what to do. No one knew the layout of the place. And it was dark, and there was a lot of smoke.

  He ran up the fire escape, but the door at the top was locked. He tried to boot it open but he couldn’t. The next time he tried to go up with the keys the smoke was too thick. Some of the other men were trying to put the fire out in the laundry, but it was getting worse.

  Men were passing out.

  The children were screaming that they were burning.

  Ladders had been brought, but they weren’t long enough and the soldiers at the top of them were trying to encourage some of the girls to jump.

  My grandfather had seen those little girls at the windows. He’d heard them praying and crying, and the one girl with the soles of her shoes on fire . . . A friend who was there with him that night said one of the children that was persuaded to jump slipped through a man’s arms right in front of him, crushing her legs.

  He helped some of the older girls take the young ones to safety. The babies from the infirmary.

  The worst of it was that had the men not been there so soon after the fire started, the nuns might have let the little girls out. It was from their eyes they were protecting them. The girls were made to get down on their knees and say decades of the rosary rather than escape outdoors and run the risk of being seen in their nighties.