King of Morning, Queen of Day (17 page)

Rotate it.’”

Christian Brothers’ School overshadowed Heytesbury Street like Purgatory over Pleasure. The houses facing it maintained a spirit of defiant disarray—basement yards piled with decrepit mangles and juggernaut perambulators; tarnished brass and rusting palings; geraniums condemned on windowsills to the contemplation of their own corruption; white, crumbly dog turds; and greasy paper bags. Jessica knew her mother thought Roslyn Fitzpatrick and her family were below the salt, despite the good Old Norman name and the fact that Rozzie, with Jessica and the third member of their clique, Emma Talbot, sang the occasional pious trio in church to the general edification and pleasure of all. Jessica’s mother’s opinions were generally of little importance to Jessica, who thought of herself as one who did not judge by outside appearances, but by the heart. Like Jesus. The front room of number thirty-eight was piled with ragamuffin furniture and Victorian prints of supposedly inspirational nature. Between Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild leading a Junior Life Boy along the straight and narrow path and a framed Biblical chronology from Eternity through Creation, Redemption, and Apocalypse to Eternity again, the wireless glowed and hummed and picked “The Billy Cotton Band Show” out of the ether.

“Anne-Marie next door says Father Cumper makes you say twenty Hail Mary’s and five Our Father’s for listening to the BBC,” Rozz said. She made the same pronouncement every time they tuned the wooden wireless away from Radio Eireann; it added a little clandestine frisson to their listening. Feet beat time to the punchy rhythms of saxes and clarinets; the girls flipped the soft, shiny pages of
Picture Parade
and
Film Fun
and talked about boys. Rozz was in love with Bing Crosby, King of the Crooners, but settled for a roving Hoover salesman. He had recently been elevated from Permission to French Kiss to Permission to Undo Bra, but Permission to Slip Hand Down Knickers was some months distant. Em had not progressed beyond the first tight-mouthed kiss in the back of the tuppennies in the Carlton Picture House, but then she had only been going out with her apprentice tiler from Haroldscross for three weeks. A Byzantine atmosphere of intrigue surrounded the affair. If her mother ever found out she was going out with a Catholic… Further comment was unnecessary. Jessica remained the sole unenthusiastic gooseberry,

“Oh, come on, Jessica, you’ll have to get off with someone soon or it’ll heal up down there.”

“Eduardo in the Cagliostro fancies you. I saw him looking at you the other night. I would say he definitely fancies you.”

Eduardo Cagliostro was a curly-headed Italian Adonis, who unfortunately knew it. He was the son of an immigrant fried food shop owner. It was commonly supposed he slicked back his hair by dipping his head in the fryers. He was a classic smoulderer—on a good night, he gave off more smoke than the hot fat. He was every inch the Latino until he opened his mouth; a first generation Italo-Irish, he had inherited none of his Mama’s lilting cadences. His Rathmines accent was as thick as a toilet seat. Jessica despised him and never wasted an opportunity to publicly humiliate him for his hubris. But it was getting to look like it was Eduardo Cagliostro or the Little League of Decency and Purity.

“What makes you think I haven’t got a boyfriend? In fact, I have. I’ve been going out with him for four weeks and three days now, but I can’t tell anyone about him.” Minor lies boomed and rushed in her head and fused into major, then epic, lies, the familiar prelude to a feat of sustained improvisation. “His name’s Damian. He’s tall and very handsome, of course, and he has hair as black as a raven’s wing. I don’t know his surname; he couldn’t tell me. In fact, I don’t even know if Damian is his real name. He says he can’t trust anyone, not even me. He has to be careful. It’s difficult to arrange meetings. He can’t meet me in the usual places everyone goes, he can’t risk being seen, so it’s usually after dark, on a particular bench in the park, or down an alley. He leaves messages for me at Hannah’s Sweet Shop. He can’t ever come to the house. I can’t risk Mum and Dad seeing him.” She took a deep breath.

“You see, he’s on the run. He’s a volunteer in the IRA.” Hoots of derision greeted her disclosure. “No, it’s true, I swear to God. He was in the Tipperary Brigade but he’s on a special mission in Dublin. That’s all he’ll let me know about it, but I think there’s someone high up in the Free State government he’s been sent to kill. He’s got a gun—a Webley revolver—he carries it with him all the time, in case he’s ambushed by the Specials and has to shoot his way out. He’s let me see it. He carries it under his army greatcoat, which he says he got from a soldier he shot in the Galtee Mountains. He won’t let me touch his gun, though; he says it’s not right for women to handle weapons. I think that’s so old-fashioned and romantic of him. He’s twenty-two and he’s absolutely gorgeous. I think it’s because he’s a hunted man. He says he wants to elope with me and live together on the run, but I tell him that’s silly, and then he gets all sad because he’s thinking that this night might be the last time he’ll ever see me—tonight might be the night he gets gunned down in the streets by the Special Branch.

“I don’t know where he goes or where he comes from. He says it’s safer for both of us if I don’t know, but I do know that he’s in the IRA because of his older brother who fought in the Civil War and was captured and executed by what he calls Free State Traitors. When he talks about his brother he gets very pale and quiet and dangerous.”

The April 1934 copy of
Film Fun
caught her in full extemporary flight; mouthful of Mae West.

“You’re such a
liar,
Jessica Caldwell.”

She waved two fingers in the face of her accusers. “Up your bums. It was a bloody good lie. I almost had you believing it, didn’t I?” Billy Cotton’s Big Band BBC Beat battled futilely against the Catholic evening gloom descending the slab walls of Christian Brothers’ School.

Waiting for the eleven o’clock tram, she noticed there was still brightness in the sky. A sure promise of summer, this blue lambency in the far west, the smoking chimney stacks of Dublin silhouetted against it like the palisades and siege-engines of the army of heaven. Dark crescents and scimitars darted between the angular shadows; the swifts, returned from the lands of the heathen Moor and Berber, cut and creased the violet night. She imagined how Dublin would seem through their eyes. The streets, the alleys, the entries, the roofs and chimney pots, the stone Hibernias and marble harps and wrought-iron Celtic crosses would lose their human meaning and flow into a seamless landscape of canyons and valleys, of cliff faces and shallow ledges. Recalling the Saturday matinee Westerns, she saw Dublin become a great Monument Valley of buttes and mesas and badlands through which she swooped and veered. Through red-brick canyons lined with ledges, over hogback rooftops, circling volcanic chimney mouths, she would fly, looking down into a valley of shining trees where ponderous smoky animals lurched in predestined and invariable courses. She caught sight of her own face, looking up at the flocking swifts.

The tram drew up in a spray of blue sparks. Jessica swung onto a seat at the back. Her mother always told her to sit by the door so she could jump up if anyone tried to, well, you know, try anything. She was still perplexed by her experience of the point of view of a bird. She had always enjoyed a vigorous imaginative life, and if lately she had found her dips into the stream of consciousness becoming more powerful and insistent, she had always known on which side of the dividing line between reality and imagination she stood. But this had been real. She had been there, for one moment; she had seen as the swifts saw, been as the swifts were. Her inner and outer Dublins, the visible and tangible
Bailie Atha Cliath
of reality and the invisible, intangible
Anna Livia Pluribelle
of the heart were beginning to lose their separate identities and blur:
Ballia Liviatha Cliabelle.

The conductor was swinging his way up the tram, clicking his ticket machine. Jessica remembered that she had spent her fare home on a copy of
Picture Parade
from The Boulevard newsagents on Camden Street. Seat by seat the bulbous conductor loomed closer. Jessica improvised a barrage of lies, none of which stood the least possibility of convincing the conductor, when she remembered her emergency sixpence. Mother’s wisdom—the fund of final resort was tucked into her stocking top. Her attempts to surreptitiously slip it out only attracted the attention of the young dark-haired man in the heavy coat (surely too hot for a night like this) in the seat opposite. He smiled. Jessica scowled, wrestled with straining elastic, one hand down the inside of her skirt. Got it got it got it… The tram swayed over a set of points. The sixpence fell to the floor and rolled under the dark-haired man’s seat. Jessica commuted her
shit
to a sigh.

“Pardon me,” said the young dark-haired man. He bent down to rummage among the cigarette ends under the seat. The flap of that ridiculously heavy coat fell open. Tucked into the waistband of his trousers was an oiled black revolver.

There was a light on at the top of the stairs when she came through the smiling front door of number twenty. It did not seem a good omen. Father’s in his study late at night, all’s ill with the world. He opened the door, called her up in his I-don’t-want-to-wake-the-rest-of-the-house voice.

He did not look like any kind of a honey.

“I had a telephone call this evening,”

“That’s nice for you.”

“From Mr. Mangan. Apparently your performance was overheard by the entire lunchtime sitting. He gave me to understand in no uncertain terms that this was the last, the very last, time he was prepared to put up with this kind of behaviour.”

This was another well-established front of entrenched warfare.

“Oh, come on, you’re not serious…”

But he was serious.

“Really, Jessica, it can’t go on. The swearing, the lying, this compulsive vulgarity. It’s only a matter of time before you insult some customer. We really will have to do something about it.”

“You’re always saying that.”

“Which is my failing. No, this time, I have done something about it. I have made an appointment for you to see a specialist in problems of adolescents, a psychologist, a Dr. Rooke.”

“Are you saying that I’m a problem adolescent? Jaysus, Dad.”

He sighed, hands cast up in a gesture of resignation.

“The appointment has been fixed for Saturday morning. Eleven o’clock.”

“For fuc…” Then she saw the look of beleaguered defiance in his hands and eyes, and because she did love him, said, “Oh, all right, I’ll go. It might be a laugh. You never know…”

A
NYONE WHO CALLS MY
aged secretary Miss Fanshawe’s beloved Scottie Cromlyn a “little trigger” to Miss Fanshawe’s hatchet face is worthy of my undying admiration, and a certain degree of professional respect. I had been looking forward to this meeting with Jessica Caldwell.

The picture her parents had painted prepared me for some kind of monster, foul-mouthed and vituperative, a compulsive liar and braggart. Imagine my surprise to find in my waiting room (oblivious to Miss Fanshawe’s darkest glower) not some Dublin fishwife all chapped cheeks and puffed lips, but a girl of almost angelic beauty and demeanour (apart from a distinctly unangelic pout to the lips and shine to the eye) who spoke with a delightful soft South Dublin slur.

Every psychologist must, to some extent, be a master of subtle dissimulation and gentle deceit; ours would be a stimulating locking of horns—her innate talent against my professional training. I had no doubts that I would emerge the victor.

She succeeded in unnerving me at the very first test. I was administering a standard set of Rorschach inkblots. Jessica studied the first card from every conceivable angle before announcing, “A pair of kittens.” The second card, after a fraction of the effort, produced the same response: “a pair of kittens.” The third: “a pair of kittens.” The fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the same reply. I reminded her to say the very first thing that came into her head.

“That is the first thing that comes into my head.”

“Each one reminds you of a pair of kittens?”

“Yes. Anything wrong with that?”

“Well, is there anything else they might remind you of?”

“Like what?”

“Well, this one, reminds me of, well, it looks sexual to me.”

“It doesn’t look sexual to me. It looks like a pair of kittens. How does it look sexual to you?”

“Well, it reminds me of a woman’s vagina.”

“You dirty old bugger. If my mother knew she’d sent me here to look at dirty pictures…”

We proceeded to the word association test. It was even more farcical than the Rorschach inkblot test. Jessica clearly had the measure of me and manipulated the roles of questioner and questionee with such consummate skill that I became the one making lewd and suggestive replies and she the one pursing her lips and tutting, “Oh, Mr. Rooke!”

But maybe the old dog still has a turn or two.

“Well, Jessica, it’s clear to me we aren’t going to get anywhere with the regular psychological tests, so what we’ll do is, if you’re agreeable, I’ll put you in a light hypnotic trance and we’ll go back to events and incidents in your childhood, something you may have long forgotten, or buried in your subconscious, that might explain why you seem to need to engage in this kind of antisocial behaviour.”

“I don’t know about this,” she said. “How do I know what you mightn’t get up to when I’m under your power and totally helpless? For all I know, you could have five girls a day in here, obeying your every wish and whim.”

I bridled with outrage, then saw the devilment in her eyes.

She settled back in her chair, legs spread wide, fingers locked behind her neck. “Quite frankly, mister, I don’t mind what you do. You just have to look at me with those mad, mad eyes of yours…”

In fact, she did not have to look anywhere near those mad, mad eyes of mine. I used my trusted and true Maltese Cross and lamp arrangement. She proved a most amenable subject to hypnotism. In a very short time Jessica had reached a deep and comfortable state of trance. Hypnosis casts an entirely different light upon incidents and objects to memory alone. In the course of the regression I encountered several events, trivial in themselves, that took on an altered significance in trance: creeping from her bed on Christmas Eve to find the house filled with strangers standing around the Christmas tree; the thing that had stroked her hair in the ghost train at the amusements at Bray; a pair of hairbrushes, one backed with red for Grattan, the other green for Parnell; a porcelain doll in a basement window; a horse that had collapsed and died on the North Circular Road being winched into a knacker’s van; a dread of clowns; a long-remembered nightmare about the elevators in Switzer’s. We worked backwards through the years, reeling them out behind us like twine in a labyrinth—age seven, age six, her fifth birthday, then, shockingly unexpected: “I can’t go any farther.”