And all of a sudden, in front of Doctor Roche and his big fat wife Kathleen, and Pat Hourigan and Dorothy with her shrieking tipsy laugh, and the Crawfords who Dad always did business with for years and years and Uncle Dicky and Auntie Pam and my halfwit cousin Richard, and Mam, and Eamonn, and Eamonn’s lovely wife, and Pokey with his little sly smirks and constant aura of having been hard done by, in front of all of them, Dad looked straight at me, and put down his wine glass, and said, in a voice that I hardly recognized, louder than he’d ever used at the dinner table: Man is it? Man is great, is he? You’re all about man all of a sudden, aren’t you? I thought your crowd was always down on man.
Your crowd? He meant lesbians, I knew. I felt this strange fuzziness in my stomach, and a tightening in my throat, and my mouth became instantly dry. I said that I meant man as in humanity. My words sounded whining and tiny and pathetic in my ears, like little fists banging on a stout, bolted door. I felt dizzy, the sickening vertigo that a sudden shock can bring. I felt like running away and vomiting and curling into as small a ball as possible and crying for days. I felt a sudden longing for my childhood bed and my battered, one-eyed Teddy and for Daddy to come wordlessly in and kiss me on the forehead and brush my hair back with his rough, lovely hand. I knew then that he didn’t accept me as I was, he wasn’t the man I’d thought, he wasn’t able to cast away the sting of stigma like an annoying thistle from his vegetable garden the way I’d imagined him doing. The other people at the table were all looking at their plates. Dorothy shrieked once and whimpered twice and slurped stupidly from her empty wine glass. Let me top you up, Dad said to her, in a normal, ordinary voice. The spell of mortification was broken. I ran from the room and nobody followed me, and I got my coat and drove away and didn’t come back for nearly a year.
IT TOOK ME AGES to understand what happened on the Horrible Sunday. Ger’s objectivity helped. She said parents have a vision for their children and their disappointment when that vision isn’t realized can manifest itself in anger. And it can be far worse when a child seems to be fulfilling their hopes, and then all of a sudden, as they see it, they veer off course. Is discovering your sexuality really veering off course? It is when the parents’ vision is centred on marriage and grandchildren and what they would see as convention and normality, Ger said. And safety. Leaving the herd isn’t safe. You’re the loose gazelle that the lion will chase. A child putting themselves in danger, physically or emotionally, can trigger a reaction in a parent that comes out as anger directed at the child, but is really their anguish and worry, verbalized in an inappropriate or awkward way. But the things Dad said, and the way he said them, were so scarily unlike him, so cutting, so cruel. That’s just the way he was reared, Ger reckons. She says people’s thoughts, when their upbringing is mired in dogma, aren’t really their own. Their opinions are twisted, not reflective of what’s in their souls; their words are delivered obliquely, like light being refracted through water — you can’t see their real feelings, just as you can’t see the true position of an immersed object.
So Dad is drowning in prejudice, basically. Ger laughed at that. She thinks it’s hilarious that I always look for the bottom line, the succinct phrase to describe a situation. You should be a politician, she says, you love sound bites. I must get that from Dad, that impatience with the abstract, that inability to concentrate on something that bores me, the desire to have things clearly and neatly and safely defined and compartmentalized. An old lecturer once told me I tended towards being dangerously reductive. Dangerous! Ha. I feel anger at things that I see as wrong. Many hold opposing views to me. Is it so bad that Dad has a problem with same-sex relationships? I wonder if he’ll be more or less accepting now that the law has changed and Ger and I could, if we wished, give ourselves the same standing in law as heterosexual couples. I suspect that our nascent legitimacy will only entrench him further. I don’t care, though, if he can never feel the same pride in me that I know he used to. I just want him to remember how he loved me. I want him to know I’m still his little girl.
Jim
A MAD OLD biddy burst in here earlier on. How is it ye couldn’t have kept that dirty animal locked up besides leaving him out to terrorize the women of Ireland? And how is it at all ye can’t find that little boy that was took? A little boy from out around here, you know! He’s out there somewhere now; probably being fiddled with and having his picture took by perverts, if he’s even alive! And now that other filthy fucker is out around the place, and who’s to say he isn’t in cahoots with whoever whipped that little young fella from under the noses of them townies inside? Look at the timing of it! Oh Lord. Oh Lord spare us.
And then she gave a couple of minutes crying and hegging and catching her breath. First I thought she was on about Bobby Mahon, and then I remembered all the mad hullabaloo on the news about that fella of the Murphys getting released. Nobody wanted him to be left out, I told her, but the law is the law. He has his time served. Time, she roared. TIME? What about all them missing girls? Who’ll give them back their time? Yerra, there’s no evidence to say he had anything to do with any of that, and anyway he’ll be back down around Baltinglass or wherever he’s from, I told her, a hundred miles or more from here.
There was no consoling her, though, and no moving her from the station door. She stood roaring in at me at full pelt for a solid half an hour. She saw a fella that was the spit of him thumbing a lift out on the Esker Line. He had the very same cap on him the hoor was wearing when he sauntered out of jail. She’d swear her oath twas him. Oh Lord save us and guard us isn’t it a fright to God to say children can be stole and good men battered to death in their own kitchens and rapists freed in the same few days? And there’s talk now of the pension being cut! Isn’t it an offence to His eyes to have to watch while people is left without protection from penury or madmen? What’s after happening to the country at all? Then she started on about how she was going taking all her tablets together and going off to bed and not waking up any more and I nearly told her go on so, you’d be as well off, you mad bitch. Thank God I caught myself in time. I blame them bigmouths on the radio and the television for a lot of this hysteria that’s after overtaking people. They fatten on the fear of others, them bastards.
I HAVEN’T SLEPT in four days. I watch the shadows on the curtain cast by the light of the street lamp outside our house as the breeze strokes the branches of the elder. Sometimes the branches take the shape of a giant reaching claw. All I think about is that little boy, and where in the name of God he could be. I lie there under a sheet of sweat and wonder is there a sort of a balance, a symmetry that the universe must achieve, the way water must always find its level. I led my sister Bridie’s little lad into mortal danger years ago; I let him be washed off of a rock and swept away. I took my eyes off him for a second and he was gone. I should have thrown myself in after him besides standing on a rock, roaring out at the wild ocean. I should have carried him into Heaven. God only knows the dark, cold place his little body lies.