Academy Street (4 page)

In school she grows to love Mrs Snee, her teacher, and she knows Mrs Snee loves her
too. Every day she gives her jobs to do. On cold days Mrs Snee lets the children
leave their bottles of milk beside the fire to warm them. Tess doesn’t mind leaving
home each morning. The house is too quiet now. It is worse when her father comes
inside. The wireless has not been turned on since the funeral. Denis cycled to the
town one day and got the batteries recharged, but that night when he went to turn
it on her father said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ in a cold hard voice and
Denis backed away without a word. She had always been afraid of her father but now
it is worse. His face is dark and cross all the time. One night when the priest came
to visit she heard her father say, ‘What’s gone
is gone.’ At night he stares into
the fire. He does not seem to like anyone—not Denis or Claire or her—except maybe
Evelyn. She is the eldest. He gives her housekeeping money every Saturday. She keeps
the ration book and sells eggs to the egg-man from Henaghan’s, and swaps some of
the butter she churns for sugar and jam and other groceries that John Joe Donnellan
sells in his travelling shop. She sends Denis to the post office, or to town to order
chicken-feed. Denis is seventeen. He has blue eyes and thick black hair. When he
was a baby he was blond like Oliver. They were all blond at the start, her mother
said. Denis sits in the kitchen at night, his arms folded, his long legs thrown out
in front of him, not saying anything. No one says much any more. A silence came on
the house the day of the funeral and it has stayed. Tess thinks that they would all
like the silence to end now, but no one knows how to put an end to it. She looks
at their faces at night. She hears her own heart beating in her chest, in her head
and ears too,
thump, thump, thump
, deafening her. She watches Denis’s chest rising
and falling. He can hear his own heart too, she thinks. They can all hear their hearts—Claire
and Evelyn and her father—making an awful racket, thumping inside them, like hers.

In the cold, Maeve’s feet break out with chilblains and she cries at night. Claire
rubs on Zam-Buk and she is kept home from school for two days. Tess goes alone and
stays back after school to help Mrs Snee tidy up. The light is fading when she leaves
and her boots begin to hurt. She hurries along the road, almost
running, pulling
her coat tight. Up ahead is the Black Bend and the tinkers’ camp under the trees.
She sees the flames of a fire rising and people gathered around—more people than
she has ever seen there before, all moving, slow and wavy, in front of the fire.
There are men standing at the edge of the camp, smoking and drinking from brown bottles.
As she draws nearer a strange quietness fills the air. Not even the dogs are barking.
She stops and looks back the way she has come. The road is empty and she grows afraid.
Her eyes meet the eyes of the tinker man who cleaned the school lavatories. He bows
his head very slowly and Tess looks away. She walks on, faster, her head down. As
she passes in front of the camp a woman lets out a terrible cry. Tess stands, frozen.
There are women and teenage girls gathered in a circle in front of a tent. They look
up and see Tess and a hush falls on them. The circle opens and Tess sees a wooden
table and on it a child is lying, dressed in white. It is the tinker girl, her eyes
closed, her face snow-white, her hands crossed on her chest. She is dead. At the
end of the table, a woman is combing the child’s hair. It is the tinker woman who
came to Mrs Glynn’s door. When she sees Tess she stops and bows her head. The flames
of the fire are dancing on her face. Tess cannot move or take a step. Then the girls
and women close in around the table again and Tess looks at her feet and walks on,
beating down the fear.

At the tea they are all looking at her. ‘What’s wrong with you, why don’t you answer
me?’ Evelyn asks her. ‘Why aren’t you eating? And you ate no dinner either. What’s
wrong? Did
you lose your tongue or something?’
I did answer you
, she replies.
I’m
not hungry
. But then, after a few more answers, she knows they have not heard her.
Her words are not working, the sounds are not coming out of her mouth into the air.

‘Did something happen in school, Tess?’ Claire asks her softly, and she runs from
the kitchen, out to the front hall and up the stairs. At the turn she stands under
the stained-glass window. She thinks of the tinker girl’s white face. She remembers
the day she stuck her tongue out at the tinker girl and now she is dead. She turns
her face up to the window, longing for the sun to pour in and warm her. She joins
her hands and says a Hail Mary. She listens for the words, to test her sound. But
no sound comes. She prays louder, harder. She gives a little cough, and tries again.
She starts to cry. She touches her face and the feel of the tears makes her cry more.
She climbs to the top and runs along the landing to her mother’s and father’s room.
On the dressing table she picks up the photograph of her mother in her nurse’s uniform
and carries it back to her own room. She takes off her boots and gets into bed with
the photograph in her hand.

When she wakes it is dark. She knows from the silence of the house that it is the
middle of the night. Across the room she can make out Maeve’s shape in the other
bed. She moves a little and feels the mattress damp under her. She puts a hand down
between her legs. She has wet her knickers. She gets out and takes them off and climbs
back in, keeping away from the wet spot. She remembers the photograph and feels around
until she finds it on the pillow.

∼

Her talk does not come back. Her father and Evelyn bring her down to Dr O’Beirne
and he sits her up on a high table and asks her questions. But she cannot answer
them. One day Denis sits beside her on the low wall. ‘You’ll be all right—any day
now you’ll be as right as rain,’ he says. ‘I bet you by Christmas when Santy comes
you’ll be talkin’ away to him.’ She says her prayers, like Claire and Mike Connolly
tell her to do, but her talk does not come back, not even for Christmas. At school,
Mrs Snee brings her up to her desk and tries, in a kind way, to trick her into talking.
On one of her visits Miss Tannian takes her aside, tells her to take deep breaths
and say her own name.
Tess
, she keeps saying,
Tess
, as if Tess does not know her
own name. Sometimes people get cross with her. She gives up trying to answer them.
She looks into all their faces and their eyes and then they give up too. Little by
little she gets used to it. She does not miss talking at all. She does everything
they ask—all her chores—and they all get used to her silence.

One day when Evelyn and Denis are gone to town her father wants help with the sheep.
Tess is told to stand in a gap leading into the yard. Claire is standing at the avenue
and Maeve is at the orchard gate which has fallen off its hinges. Her father and
Mike Connolly go off into the fields to round up the flock. They are gone a long
time. Tess hates when there are big jobs like this going on—when the cattle are being
dosed, or the sheep are being dipped or shorn. She lies awake at night thinking of
all the things that can go wrong, all the dangers.

Then the sheep appear, running, bleating, Captain nipping
at their heels, and behind,
her father and Mike Connolly. She moves a little to the right, then to the left,
trying to spread herself across the gap. She feels the ground shaking from the pounding
of their hooves. The smell of them, their greasy wool, reminds her of mutton. Her
father shouts,
Keep back a bit
. Mike Connolly is talking to Captain all the time,
making little whistling sounds that Captain understands. And then something small
and dark—a cat or a rat or a bird—darts across the track and startles Tess and she
jumps and one of the sheep sees what Tess has seen and turns and breaks away and
rushes towards the gap, towards Tess. The others break and follow and in an instant
the whole flock is coming at her, diving past her, right and left, into the open
field beyond. Her father and Mike Connolly and Claire are waving their arms, shouting
at her. She stands, trapped, as the sheep shoot by, brushing off her arms, leaping
past her head, their hooves like thunder so that she has to crouch down and cover
her head to save herself.

They are all shouting at her. The sheep are spreading out in the field behind her,
Captain after them. They will go on and on through all the gaps into the far fields.
Her father is coming, running, his face red. ‘Get into the house, you!’ he roars.
‘Get in,
get in out of my sight!
’ He has his hand raised and she thinks he will lash
out and wallop her as he passes. But he runs on in his wellingtons. And then Mike
Connolly comes through the gap, older, slower. Their eyes meet for a second. She
longs for him to nod or say something but he looks away and keeps on going.

She walks around to the far side of the house where the sun never shines and no one
ever goes. There’s an old rag hanging on the barbed-wire fence. A bird is singing
in a tree. She leans over the fence and vomits, her hair falling into the flow. She
reaches out for the rag to wipe her mouth. It is her mother’s old blouse, faded and
tattered, hung out to dry a long time ago, and forgotten.

For a long time she cannot look at her father. She tries to stay out of his path.
He has a way of looking at her, a long mean look, as if he is about to say something
terrible that will shame her. He keeps his eyes on her when she moves around the
kitchen. With each step she is afraid the ground will open and pull her in. She can
hardly breathe.
I have no mother
, she thinks,
I have no father
. When he is going
to a fair or a funeral she brings him his good coat and hat. Once, he said, ‘Good
girl’, but he never says her name. Mike Connolly says her name. She has grown shy
with Mike, and ashamed, since that day with the sheep. Claire is the nicest, always.
She says there’s a doctor in Dublin who can help her to talk again but Tess shakes
her head. Some nights when the moon shines in her window and shadows cross the wall
she jumps out of bed and tiptoes across the landing into Claire’s and Evelyn’s room.
Claire puts a finger to her lips and lifts the blankets and lets Tess in beside her.
They make chaireens and Tess sleeps all night like that, against Claire’s lap, inside
Claire’s arms.

There are nights when she is afraid to sleep. She lies in her bed, remembering. Captain
starts to cry below her window.
She gets up and creeps down the stairs and opens
the front door. The moonlight is on the steps. She does not say a word, just looks
at Captain and he walks in and follows her up the stairs, into her room. He jumps
on the bed and curls up against her. He understands something about her, maybe everything,
and her heart begins to open. In the darkness, in the perfect silence, she hears
the smallest sounds—Maeve’s breath from across the room, the flapping of an insect’s
wings high up in the corner, the tap dripping far off in the bathroom and in her
mind she sees each drop falling through the air into the white sink, landing and
sliding down inside. They are all asleep in their rooms, their eyelids flickering
as they dream, and the rooms are silent and sleeping too, and downstairs the coals
in the fire are almost gone out but still glow a little in the dark, and a thin line
of smoke disappears up the chimney, curling into little puffs along the way. And
the table and chairs all stand there, and the dresser, watching, waiting—in her mind
she can see them all. And outside the hens and ducks locked up for the night, and
the birds asleep in the trees and the cows in the cow-house and everywhere, all over
the farm, worms and insects and small animals are curled up under stones and hedges
and bushes. She can see them all. She imagines herself small, so small that she can
see everything, hear everything, hear the blades of grass whispering, the pebbles
laughing in the dark. She strokes Captain and he sighs. She can feel the beat of
his heart against her. She is amazed at how happy she is. In her bed, in this house.
With the lawn and the barns and the fields around her. There is
nowhere else she
wants to be. In her most secret heart she knows there is nowhere she loves more.

When morning breaks she walks outside and crosses the courtyard. It is Saturday and
no one is up yet. The sky is blue and the sun has reached the orchard wall. The coach-house
door is open and inside someone is moving in the shadowy darkness. She looks in and
sees Mike Connolly reaching to hang the horse collar up on a hook. When he turns
and sees her he gets a little fright. Then his eyes soften, but he says nothing.
A time will come when no one will talk to her at all, or even look at her. She is
a disappearing girl.

In the darkness her eye is caught by something bright and shiny on the floor, a coin
maybe. She steps inside and as she runs towards it she hits off the corner of the
work bench. She cries out.
Ow
. She holds her side and rubs her hip and, when she
looks at Mike, the tears come.

‘Aw, now, come here to me,
a stór.
’ He kneels beside her. He puts an arm around her
and makes a pitying sound with his tongue. ‘Where’s it sore?’ he asks.

She mumbles through the tears, and keeps rubbing her side. He gets up and goes to
where his old coat hangs from a nail and comes back with two toffees. ‘Now,’ he says.
‘Here. Eat this and you’ll be better in no time. Sure, you’ll be better before you
get married!’ He takes the paper off and her mouth starts to water. As soon as she
tastes the toffee she smiles.

‘Now! What did I tell you, what did I tell you! Of course, now you’ll have to marry
me!’

It was a game he used to play with herself and Maeve
when they were small. Whenever
they fell or cut themselves or got upset he’d say, ‘You’ll be better before you get
married.’ She would wipe away the tears and say, ‘I’m going to marry you when I grow
up, Mike.’