Mam was still just Mam. Yes, she’d cried, and yes she’d been wretched when the callers came and again at the time we had the Mass that Dad said he wouldn’t go to and she’d shouted at him, the only time I ever heard her, and in compromise Father Tipp said he’d say the Mass here in the kitchen and Dad said all right to that, and yes, she let her hair go tangled more often, but once the worst was over she had sort of recovered, if recovered is something people ever do. What I mean I suppose is that she carried on. Women carry on. They endure the way old ships do, breasting into outrageous waters, ache and creak, hull holed and decks awash, yet find anchorage in the ordinary, in tables to be wiped down, pots to scrub, and endless ashes to be put out. The only changes in Mam were that now whenever she was in the village she went into the church to light a candle, and that since Peggy Mooney’s she was continually asked for flowers for the altar, and she obliged, and in the way customs form in small parishes soon it was clear that Mam would be cutting our flowers and bringing them into Faha church until the end of time.
I had a season to grieve, and then had to go to the Tech on my own. But the fact is grief doesn’t know we invented time. Grief has its own tide and comes and goes in waves. So when I went I was no more over it or out of it or any of the other absurd things whispered in my wake going down the corridors. For the first weeks I had a status above Julie Burns who had to have all her teeth removed, or Ambrose Trainer who had come from Dublin and had an infected nose piercing. My status was Half. I was The Other One. I was the one who had Half of Her Gone. In the toilets that mascara’d ghoul and Trainee Vampire Siobhan Crowley asked me, ‘Can you feel him? Over there, on the other side? Can you?’
Teachers too treated me with circumspection. My story had preceded me into the staffroom, and created that space around you that stories do. I moved from The Girl Who Wears Glasses to The Girl Who Had the Brother to The Girl Who Walked On Her Own to The Girl Who Read, parts I stepped into with alacrity and relief, relishing the solitude and soon somehow proving both adages, that our natures are incontrovertible, and we become what others expect.
Stories though wear thin after a time. In this world compassion is a limited commodity, and what is first considered appropriate so soon becomes annoyance. Why is she still like that?
She does it for effect.
She likes the attention.
She’s just so, odd.
As if wilfully, and to further confirm the indelible quirk of my own character, I loved poetry. Mrs Quinty, who was unlike Miss Jean Brodie In Her Prime in all things except seeing in some girls a flicker of intelligence, became aware of it when we read Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mid-Term Break’, the one where his brother dies, where in the second-last line we learn the bumper knocked him clear, and I said I liked that clear because it went with the classes to a close in the second line and though sad somehow clear had hope in it. Mrs Quinty did not know then that my father had prepared the ground, that I was already hum-familiar, or that I was drawn to poetry for reasons of mystery. She gave me the anthologies the sale reps brought her and which she had told them she would consider using. Small and taut and resolute she came down the classroom, placed one on my desk and said, ‘You might like to take a look in this.’ Just that. She did not edit, guide or censor. She didn’t go Teacher Mode, didn’t ask me to tell her what I thought or to write up a report or turn the gift into an exercise. She did the most generous and implausible thing, she gave me poetry.
Note to future Swains: reading a poetry anthology in the school yard, while it now has precedent and may appear natural and unremarkable to Swain-minds, is not best equipment for the vicious nightmare that is teenagehood. Reading poetry sealed my fate. In the Tech it classified as off-the-scale weird and left me in the same company as Kiera Murphy the Crayola-eater and Canice Clohessy, The Constipated, in whose unique case shit didn’t happen.
I lost the skill of dialogue. I was invited to no birthday party, except the time Mr Mulvihill, who had married an easterly wind called Irene, and to spite her, phoned to say he was inviting the whole year to his Sinead’s fourteenth.
I didn’t go, and I didn’t care. When I lost my brother I lost more than half the world. I was left in somewhere narrow as the margin, and in there, parallel to the main text, I would write my marginalia.
Chapter 2
There are four of us in purgatory, a concept I didn’t believe in until I was in it. I am the youngest. Eleanor Clancy is the oldest. Like Miss Toppit in Martin Chuzzlewit she wears a brown wig of uncommon size. She says Ah pet to me and to the nurses and when they lift her out of bed her shins are sharp and look like they’ll snap so I look away. Mrs Merriman doesn’t speak at all now. She did when she came in, but now she’s too upset. She’s too upset to be here. She wants to remain in the actual world, where her Philip needs her and will not manage without her. She doesn’t want to be in this in-between place, which is neither here nor there. Mrs Merriman has the side with the wall and to it does her wailing, these high waily moans she tries to strangle coming out and that we pretend not to hear. Jackie Fennell is our cheerleader. She looks like one of those actresses they get for TV hospital dramas. There can’t be anything wrong with you when you’re that gorgeous. Jackie’s Lucozade is white wine smuggled in by Benny, so she can’t share it. But she could get me Green & Black’s chocolate or Glamour or magenta nail varnish if I wanted. We’re all here for something different. There are more things that can go wrong with you than you can shake a stick at, Timmy said.
I’ve a pain in my face telling you where it hurts, Mrs Merriman said.
My body which my dungeon is, RLS said.
The curtains are blue plastic and they come around in a single soft swish and when they do you know it’s Business.
Mr Mackey comes with Dr Naradjan to look at my results. Mr Mackey is The Top Man; he has the world’s most perfect suit and was either born in a new white shirt or can put one on without adding any human creasing. His only flaw is those ties with little symbols on them somebody pretended for a laugh would catch on. Today they are silver fishes.
‘I am quite concerned about these, Ruth,’ he says.
When it comes to that multitude covered by what Mina Prendergast with nineteenth-century-drawing-room manners calls Matters of the Heart, some women are practical. Some women see the hurt, consider the damage, and embark on a remedy right away. Some women have no hopelessness in them. They will surrender their beauty, sacrifice music dancing laughter, suffer heartache so profound there’s a clean hole right through the centre of them, but still they will not be defeated. My mother is one of these.