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  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, like I’m going to ask her the time.

  ‘Tee-hee,’ she says, looking down at me. Her eyeballs are cracked like the teapot on our dresser.

  ‘I want to dance with Daddy.’

  At the word ‘Daddy,’ her face changes and she loosens her grip of my father. I take over. The man on the stage is blowing his trumpet now. My father holds my hand tight, he hurts me. I can see my mother on the bench, reaching into her bag for a hanky. Then she goes to the Ladies. There’s a feeling like hatred all around Da. I get the feeling he’s helpless but I don’t care. For the first time in my life, I have some power. I can butt in and take over, rescue and be rescued.

  There’s a general hullabaloo towards midnight. Everybody’s out on the floor, knees buckling, handbags swinging. The Nerves Moran counts down the seconds to the new year and then there’s kissing and hugging. Strange men squeeze me, kiss me like they’re thirsty and I’m water.

  My parents do not kiss. In all my life, back as far as I remember, I have never seen them touch. Once I took a friend upstairs to show her the house.

  ‘This is Mammy’s room,’ I said, ‘and this is Daddy’s room,’ I said.

  ‘Your parents don’t sleep in the same room?’ she said in a voice of pure amazement.

  The band picks up the pace. ‘Oh hokey, hokey, pokey!’

  ‘Work off them turkey dinners, shake off them plum puddings!’ shouts the Nerves Moran and even the ballroom show-offs give up on their figures of eight and do the twist and jive around and I knock my backside against the mart fella’s backside and wind up swinging with a stranger.

  Everybody stands for the national anthem. Da is wiping his forehead with a handkerchief and Seamus is panting because he’s not used to exercise. The lights come up and nothing is the same. People are red-faced and sweaty, everything’s back to normal. The auctioneer takes over the microphone and thanks a whole lot of different people and then they auction off a Charolais calf and a goat and batches of tea and sugar and buns and jam, plum puddings and mince pies. There’s shite where the goat stood and I wonder who’ll clean it up. Not until the very last does the raffle take place. The auctioneer holds out the cardboard box of stubs to the blonde.

  ‘Dig deep,’ he says. ‘No peeping. First prize a bottle of whiskey.’

  She takes her time, lapping up the attention.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘good girl, it’s not the sweepstakes.’

  She hands him the ticket.

  ‘It’s a, what colour would ya say that is, Jimmy? It’s a, a salmon coloured ticket, number seven hundred and twenty-five. Seven two five. Serial number 3X429H. I’ll give ye that again.’

  It’s not mine, but I’m close. I don’t want the whiskey anyhow, it’d be kept for the pet lambs. I’d rather the box of Afternoon Tea biscuits that’s coming up next. There’s a general shuffle, a search in handbags, arse pockets. The auctioneer calls out the numbers again and it looks like he’ll have to draw another ticket when Mammy rises from her seat. Head held high, she walks in a straight line across the floor. A space opens in the crowd, people step aside to let her pass. Her new, high-heeled shoes say clippety-clippety on the slippy floor and her red skirt is flaring. I have never seen her do this. Usually, she’s too shy, gives me the tickets and I run up and collect the prize.

  ‘Do ya like a drop of the booze, do ya Missus?’ the Nerves Moran asks, reading her ticket. ‘Sure wouldn’t it keep ya warm on a night like tonight? No woman needs a man if she has a drop of Powers. Isn’t that right? Seven twenty-five, that’s the one.’

  My mother is standing there in her elegant clothes and it’s all wrong. She doesn’t belong up there.

  ‘Let’s check the serial numbers now,’ he says, drawing it out. ‘I’m sorry, Missus, wrong serial number. The hubby may keep you warm again tonight. Back to the old reliable.’

  My mother turns and walks clippety-clippety back down the slippy floor, with everybody knowing she thought she’d won when she didn’t win. And suddenly she is no longer walking, but running, running down in the bright white light, past the cloakroom, towards the door, her hair flailing out like a horse’s tail behind her.

  Out in the car park, snow has accumulated on the frozen grass, the evergreen shelter beds, but the tarmac is wet and shiny in the headlights of cars leaving. Thick, unwavering moonlight shines steadily down on the earth. Ma, Seamus and me sit in the car, shivering, waiting for Da. We can’t turn on the engine to heat the car because Da has the keys. My feet are like stones. A cloud of greasy steam rises from the open hatch of the chip van, a fat brown sausage painted on the chrome. All around us people are leaving, waving, calling out ‘Goodnight!’ and ‘Happy new year!’ They’re collecting their chips and driving off.

  The chip van has closed its hatch and the car park is empty when Da comes out. He gets into the driver’s seat, the ignition catches, a splutter, and then we’re off, climbing the hill outside the village, winding around the narrow roads towards home.

  ‘That wasn’t a bad band,’ Da says.

  Mammy says nothing.

  ‘I said, there was a bit of life in that band.’ Louder this time.

  Still Mammy says nothing.

  My father begins to sing. He always sings when he’s angry, pretends he’s in a good humour when he’s raging. The lights of the town are behind us now. These roads are dark. We pass houses with lighted candles in the windows, bulbs blinking on Christmas trees, sheets of newspaper held down on the windscreens of parked cars. Da stops singing before the end of the song.

  ‘Did you see aer a nice little thing in the hall, Seamus?’

  ‘Nothing I’d be mad about.’

  ‘That blonde was a nice bit of stuff.’

  I think about the mart, all the men at the rails bidding for heifers and ewes. I think about Sarah Combs and how she always smells of grassy perfume when we go to her house.

  The chestnut tree’s boughs at the end of our lane are caked in snow. Da stops the car and we roll back a bit until he puts his foot on the brake. He is waiting for Mammy to get out and open the gates.

  Mammy doesn’t move.

  ‘Have you got a pain?’ he says to her.

  She looks straight ahead.

  ‘Is that door stuck or what?’ he says.

  ‘Open it yourself.’

  He reaches across her and opens her door but she slams it shut.

  ‘Get out there and open the gate!’ he barks at me.

  Something tells me I should not move.

  ‘Seamus!’ he shouts. ‘Seamus!’

  There’s not a budge out of any of us.

  ‘By Jeeesus!’ he says.

  I am afraid. Outside, one corner of my THIS WAY SANTA sign has come loose, the soggy cardboard flapping in the wind. Da turns to my mother, his voice filled with venom.

  ‘And you walking up in your finery in front of all the neighbours, thinking you’d won first prize in the raffle.’ He laughs and opens his door. ‘Running like a tinker out of the hall.’

  He gets out and there’s rage in his walk, as if he’s walking on hot coals. He sings: Far Away in Australia! He is reaching up, taking the wire off the gate when a gust of wind blows his hat off. The gates swing open. He stoops to retrieve his hat but the wind nudges it further from his reach. He takes another few steps and stoops again to retrieve it but, again, it is blown just out of his reach. I think of Santa Claus using the same wrapping paper as us, and suddenly I understand. There is only one, obvious explanation.

  My father is getting smaller. It feels as though the trees are moving, the chestnut tree whose green hands shelter us in summer, is backing away. Then I realise it’s the car. It’s us. We are rolling, sliding backwards without a handbrake and I am not out there putting the stone behind the wheel. And that is when Mammy takes the steering. She slides over into my father’s seat and puts her foot on the brake. We stop going backwards. She revs up the engine and puts the car in gear, the gearbox grinds – she hasn’t the cl
utch in far enough – but then there’s a splutter and we’re moving. Mammy is taking us forward, past the Santa sign, past my father who has stopped singing, through the open gates. She is driving us through the fresh snow. I can smell the pines. When I look back, my father is standing there, watching. The snow is falling on him, on his bare head, and all he can do is stand there clutching his hat.

  CAITRIONA O’REILLY

  Amour Propre

  Self-love. Amour Propre. Or, more properly, self-respect. This is something I have never understood. Perhaps it was omitted from my make-up, the wiggly tail of some essential chromosome, forever gone bye-bye. Or perhaps it was leached out of me in childhood, as the Americans would have it. Got Parents? Then You’ll Never Lack a Scapegoat. It’s even better if they abandoned you in childhood, of course, whether because of death or infidelity. Then you’ll enjoy a lifetime of pinning your assorted guilt, inferiority, Oedipus, or Electra complexes on someone who can never answer back, like a blindfolded kid at a party trying to pin the tail on a donkey. Daddy, that bastard, he really did fuck you up.

  You’ll notice I appear to be preoccupied with tails. Perhaps it’s because I was born without one. It’s not that I envy men their penises; I have always thought that carrying around such a visible sign of sexual arousal, a red flag mechanically hoisted at the first sign of dangerous currents, must be a terrible trial. On dates, back in the days when I used to go on them, I would occasionally find myself staring pointedly at a boy’s trousers, just to find out whether he could stand me. It didn’t matter a damn what tripe he was talking, the one-eyed trouser-snake never lied. It used to make me feel like a dowser, or like some kind of sibyl. It is no coincidence, I’ve often thought – though I never wrote an essay on the subject for fear of shocking my Classics professor – that the very first inhabitant of Delphi was a giant snake, later replaced by a woman too crazy to understand the significance of her own observations. And of course sometimes, if a man spots you eyeing his groin, that acts as a catalyst. Which fouls up the experiment in a most annoying way. More often than not, though, they just cross their legs and sit there looking self-conscious. Maybe this is why I never had much success with men. They are fond of directness, but in its proper place, which is in bed. Before and after, they prefer you to be ill-defined, a little blurred about the edges. And I can’t blame them for that, since I too would like the world around me to be nice and soft, like wax, the better to receive my impressions. Only it isn’t. It’s hard and sharp and angular, and its edges impinge.

  I remember my mother’s puzzlement the first time she heard Whitney Houston’s ‘The Greatest Love of All’, with its unexpected denouement. My mother certainly did not think that learning to love yourself was the greatest love of all. I suspect she thought Whitney might be singing about instructing oneself in the subtle art of masturbation, and she thoroughly disapproved. ‘That’s rubbish,’ she said. ‘That just gives people a license to be selfish.’ It was the same when we discussed the meaning of the word hedonism, which I’d just looked up in the dictionary. It seemed like an ideal religion to me, and I said so. My mother disagreed. ‘But what’s wrong with pursuing happiness?’ I asked. My mother said there was a world of difference between happiness and pleasure, and that hedonists were after the latter. I professed myself unable to see the distinction. ‘Never mind,’ said my mother darkly, ‘you’ll understand better when you’re older.’ So many things were relegated to this abstract place, this floatel for embryonic ideas, that I always thought my mother should have had a formal, abbreviated response for my more awkward questions, like the English Prime Minister: ‘I refer the honourable gentlemen to my previous answer.’ It would have saved both of us a lot of time.

  The nuns never warned us about self-abuse, probably because in its female form it was simply unimaginable, located on the obscure outer reaches of decadence and therefore partaking of shadowy myth, along with fellatio and the murder of John Paul the First. Although I do remember Sister Mary Magdalene saying once, ‘girls, never let a man into your mouth.’ I puzzled over this for a long time, imagining hordes of tiny men, like intrepid jelly babies, climbing over my chin or abseiling from my forehead in an attempt to get past my pearly whites. I think I concluded that Sister Mary Magdalene had suffered a temporary syntactical aberration, like a glitch in a computer programme, and had really intended to say something else. I had by this time looked up oral sex in the dictionary, knowing that if there was a name for something then it had to exist, and I couldn’t conceive that Sister Mary Magdalene had ever even heard of such a thing, let alone admitted in public to knowing about it.

  No, I am not one of the world’s great masturbators, and profess bemusement at the obvious self-enjoyment of others. It’s a bit like extreme ironing; some people get a kick out of taking a Moulinex and a pile of crumpled washing to the summit of Mont Blanc; I don’t. Such a lot of fuss about nothing. If I touch myself at all, it is with nervous fingers, examining myself for protrusions or excrescences that have no business being there. Once, observing a raised white scar on my arm, the doctor told me I had proud flesh. I thought he was joking until he explained that it was a technical term meaning the over-enthusiastic healing of a wound. Zealous my flesh may be, but it is not proud.

  It’s easy to be someone like me in this country. The weather here is so terrible that you are never forced to wear T-shirts and shorts, so you can avoid having to shave your legs every week. The shaving of legs, pubic mound and armpits is something I long ago decided I was not going to participate in. The constant effort involved in maintaining oneself in a state of ideal hairlessness has never appealed to me. It’s not just that I’m lazy, it’s that I have always kicked against it as a complete waste of my time. I’m indifferent to my scrubby bits, and since I am a celibate, I have no one else’s instinctive disgust to take into account. I never swim, and so avoid the collective gasp of horror that would accompany my appearance at the shallow end, resembling a pasty, hirsute larva. I never wear short skirts or transparent tights like other women. I couldn’t now – should I want to – arrive at a state of mutual nakedness with a man, for fear he should vomit at the sight of my unkempt herbaceous borders. (I’ve heard it said that some men like hairy women, but I’ve never met one). And I never travel to warm countries. When I was nineteen I spent a summer in Barcelona as an au pair, and had a terrible time.

  Spain was the opposite of me.

  Everyone walked around half-undressed, smooth-limbed, honey-skinned and fuzz-free.

  Which is another thing. Why do women’s magazines always describe female body-hair as ‘fuzz,’ as though it were something delicate, almost pleasing, like the down on a bumble bee’s back? It is exactly hair, coarse and deeply rooted, especially so around the nipples, as though an ugly daddy-long-legs crouched at the edge of each pink star.

  In Spain, I sweated acridly through my blouse and cotton trousers, enduring the repeatedly expressed incomprehension of those around me. In the end, I gave up and came home early, ostensibly because the couple I worked for were both raving alcoholics, in reality because I was obstinately determined not to submit to the razor. I have never ventured south of Wexford since.

  I learned a long time ago that I am an invisible sort of person, and likely to become more so. This is because I am not a beautiful woman. I am not even attractive. During my teens, after my features had changed from baby-cuteness and assumed their proper, adult proportions, I noticed that none of the boys showed the least interest in me. I watched the jigsaw of myself gradually resolve into a coherent image, until the indisputable fact of my plainness occurred to me like the first dull ache of a bad tooth. I think I was depressed for about a week, before realising there was nothing to be done. I wouldn’t say I forgot about it, exactly. I still notice that men do not stand back ostentatiously to allow me to pass them in doorways, or smile at me in lifts. And this is not self-pity. I despise those obese tantrum-throwers on Oprah Winfrey, whining about how it’s not their fault t
hey weigh sixty stone, it’s because they felt ugly in their teens, so food became their best friend: ‘I knew the refrigerator would never let me down, even if everybody else did.’

  Boo hoo.

  I am not like that. For one thing, I’m not fat. And for another, I don’t lack sexual experience.

  I met Victor in the call centre where I worked just after graduating. All of us were filling in time, servicing debts, paying extortionate rent for decaying bedsits in Georgian squares that were gradually being reclaimed for the city’s corporate class. Most of us felt panicked, out of step, and tried to remind ourselves, as we fielded the abuse we received nightly over the telephones, that this was just a stop-gap before better things. We watched the friends who had scoffingly told us that the kind of degrees we wanted were a waste of energy buy their first cars and put down payments on their first houses. It was a bad time.

  Victor had just finished his H.Dip. and was applying for teaching jobs all over the country. He seemed to like me. In fact, he appeared to find me irresistibly sexy. I went along with this for about six months, enjoying his body more for itself than for what it could make me feel. I liked watching him. He was not especially handsome, but there was something so good and honest about the tension in his body before he came, and his almost childish delight and gratitude afterwards. I was touched. I felt the tiniest bit sorry for him, as though he were a little boy who was going to grow up and find out that there’s no such person as Santa Claus. We were both very excited about each other at first, and experimented with all sorts of positions and techniques. It was like starting to learn another language and discovering that you’re already fluent. This was when I finally understood the difference between pleasure and happiness. I shaved regularly.

  We never lived together. He used to visit me at my bedsit or I would call round to his. We would have spaghetti and a bottle of cheap wine and we would go to bed. Then, after about six months, my body stopped wanting him, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.