Maeve's Times (36 page)

A
hairdresser told me people do desperate things to their heads in February. They are so fed up of life being cold or wet or dark or whatever, they make reckless decisions and get the lot lopped off, or the colour changed radically to counteract a pallid face.

They sit discontentedly in their chairs before and after the transformation and even though it’s not good for business, she would often suggest to them that they do something else, rather than a revolution with their hair which they might spend a year regretting and growing back to the proper shape or returning to the proper colour.

‘Like what?’ a gloomy woman said to her last year.

It was a puzzlement but the hairdresser was a woman of courage. ‘You could go to line dancing,’ she suggested. And the gloomy woman did.

And on the very first night, she met a man in the line as they were dancing whom she liked much better than her husband. And he tilted his hat forward and talked in a nice jokey country and western style. The gloomy woman seemed to be cheering up by the hour.

Her husband just looked up from the paper when she came home in the evenings and he said they were all cracked to be doing that sort of thing, and there was someone, somewhere making big money out of eejits buying fringed skirts and laced boots.

The children were grown up, but still mystified when they heard their mother was leaving home and moving in with the man from line dancing; their father was philosophical.

‘She was always that way in February,’ he said. ‘It was a kind of a thing with her. It was as if she thought the good weather would never come again.’

Apparently, he shook his head about it, accepting it as inevitable, just one more of the many bad hands that life dealt. His wife walking out on him.

Whether there might also have been something wrong with their lifestyle was something he never paused to speculate about in the following months, when the good weather had come back but his wife was still with the man who tilted his hat.

The hairdresser said to me that from now on she’s keeping quiet: if someone wants a head shaved to the bone in February, she’ll do it. But I said no, the gloomy woman was somehow waiting for that man in the line dance. The hairdresser must not feel responsible, she must go on interfering in people’s lives. Doing that is just proof that we are alive.

This friend of a friend, also an anti-February person, gives a St Valentine’s Day party every year. The simple rule that nobody who is officially or emotionally attached can attend. The theory was you wouldn’t have lovebirds canoodling and making you sick, or old staid married couples nodding and patronising everyone to death. No, this was to be a gathering where the mindset of everyone was unencumbered – her phrase, and a fairly horrible one, it has to be said.

Anyway, it turned out to be a fine gathering over the years as the group changed from being twentysomething to thirtysomething, and a new decade is approaching.

Some people have dropped out because of getting involved and attached, which presumably was what a lot of it was about.

Some have moved from one state to another and back.

Everyone brings a bottle of good wine and they can ask to include new blood as well. If these people are unattached and come along bearing the requisite bottle, that’s considered great too.

But last year two deceivers were at the party. Men who were certainly committed officially, and as far as their wives believed, committed emotionally as well. Dublin is a small city; they were unmasked at an early stage. Now a shadow hangs over this party.

Everyone had thought it was for real. Now, you might just as well go to a night club, they all say.

One of the parents at a school I know has a cookery class in her home. She has children round each Tuesday in February and they all bring their own ingredients. They are boys and girls and they all sit and watch her do it first; then she gives them boards, dishes and part of the kitchen table each and they do it themselves.

They have made gingerbread, pizzas, cheesecake and pancakes. That was last year’s repertoire.

The children and their parents would have been happy for it to go on all year, but the woman said no, it was only February, in order to beat the blues.

I said I didn’t know children felt low in February.

‘Who said anything about them feeling low?’ she asked. She was doing it to raise her own spirits.

There are two men I know in Dublin who have hardly noticed February for the past 20 years.

February is quite simply the time they put their heads down and make money. They’ll dig your garden, cut things back mercilessly, they’ll teach your children to drive in your car, take your rubbish to the dump, they’ll collect dry cleaning, stack trolleys in supermarkets, clean windows and cars, clear out garages and attics. I know they offer their services to drive drunks home, and I suspect they also drive other people’s hackney cabs.

This is all on top of their day jobs, which could be described as office work.

They have regular clients; they strike a rate and work almost around the clock. But only for this one month of the year.

Why only February?

It’s the month before March, stupid. And March is when you go to Cheltenham. Do you know nothing?

Since I left teaching and got more or less in control of my own life, I always tried to have a holiday in February. The sun on your shoulders seems to do you twice as much good in the month when you know it’s going to be dark when you wake and dark while you’re still at the keyboard. So today, I should be in South Africa.

I have the highest of hopes about the sun, despite the telephone interview I did for a radio station there. I was burbling on about how much I was looking forward to the heat, and the talk show host said I should bring my umbrella, which I thought was a weak but good-natured weather joke, so I laughed immoderately.

Apparently it wasn’t a joke at all; the rain was bucketing down outside the studio. She was giving me practical advice.

I tell you this so that you will not hate me for having gone to the sun yet again.

F
orty years ago this week I did my Leaving Certificate. The biggest, laziest, youngest girl in the class, my head was full of lollipop music that summer. I think my whole life must have related to it since I have no other memories at all of the time all my revision was done to the tune of ‘The Man from Laramie’, and ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’. If I kept the record player really low in the bedroom I was allowed to play it but they could apparently hear it everywhere so I used to sit on the floor beside it reading my North and Hillard and rapping out the words.

‘With ask, command, advise and strive.
By ut
translate infinitive.’ It went almost magically to the Johnston Brothers’ version of Hernando. Try it. And you could sing the prime ministers of Britain to ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ too, if you had a mind to.

It was too late to put anything to the tune of ‘Rock Around the Clock’, because we knew the real words too well and it wouldn’t work trying to put in the French verbs that were conjugated with
être
or whatever had to be sealed into the brain in those last weeks and days.

There was a thing in trigonometry, the proof of a sine or a cosine I think, it went beautifully to ‘It’s Almost Tomorrow’, and in fact I liked it better at the time than the Dreamweavers’ version. But some songs were sacred. There were a lot of things I could have sung to ‘Memories Are Made of This’ but I didn’t want to destroy the sound of Dean Martin’s lovely velvet voice by listing the terms of the various Land Acts or Home Rule bills. And of all the songs that summer, it was the one I loved best.

I was terrified that somehow I mightn’t have any memories. That life would pass by and I wouldn’t have enough fresh and tender kisses to look back on, not to mention stolen nights of bliss. I was dying for a stolen night of bliss. It was the only thing that kept my head down to do any study at all. Whatever chances there might be of getting together a stolen night of bliss if you had the Leaving, if you hadn’t, then there wouldn’t be any chance whatsoever.

I remember that I got a small piece of steak with my tea when the others would just have sausages. My father and I, the workers, would get steak. It was meant to give me great energy for all the studying I was doing but in fact, of course, it only made me feel guilty.

The great surge of energy only went into dancing ‘Mambo Italiano’ round the bedroom to myself wondering did I look like Rosemary Clooney and singing ‘Rock and Roll Waltz’ in what I thought was a terrific take off of Kay Starr. The steak fed my delusions that I would in fact be a performer and that the Leaving Cert was not only not essential, it might even hold me back.

But I was the eldest of the family so there was more than usual depending on this result. They would get some kind of inkling from my score whether the show was on the road, or if they had been fooling themselves and we were all as thick as planks.

So I decided regretfully that I would have to get it to keep the peace, and to reassure them. And once it was got I could go off on stolen nights of bliss and be ‘discovered’.

I would be an Educated Rock Star and when Dickie Valentine would lead me on stage with him to do a reprise of ‘The Finger of Suspicion’, pointing at me all the while, no one need ever know that I had got my Leaving Cert, I could just keep quiet about it.

I suppose it all proves I wasn’t nearly old enough to leave school or indeed to be allowed out anywhere if these were my views. I am trying to be honest, but ‘discovery’ is definitely what must have been uppermost in my mind that May and June. Suez hadn’t happened, Hungary hadn’t happened; Ronnie Delaney’s Olympics were later. I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about knowledge for the sake of it or an academic career, just scrape in, do law, be a judge or something until I was discovered. I thought a lot about Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier and a bit about Khrushchev and atheistic communism, but much, much more about someone, hopefully Tony Bennett, who was going to ‘Take My Hand’ because I was a ‘Stranger in Paradise’.

I remember the first day of the Leaving Cert and there being some idiotic row at school about whether we should wear our uniforms or not. There was a View that said we should, it would sort of straighten us up, make us realise that this was all work and part of the studying process. There was another more liberal View which won in the end that it didn’t matter if we went in our vests and knickers as long as we tried to write down what we had been learning for over a decade.

We would meet girls and even fellows from other schools on the way home and compare the questions. You didn’t really want to talk to anyone who hadn’t done it. We all hated showing the papers to the teachers and our parents.

The poor teachers would say, ‘Well at least you knew that, didn’t you?’ stabbing at something and you wouldn’t remember whether you had known it or not.

And at home the exam papers were always spread out on the kitchen table and studied by everyone. Even Smokey the disdainful cat used to come and look at them as if he could have got through them with no worries. And they assumed I would have done brilliantly in English.

‘Aren’t you always telling long, rambling stories about things, the essay would have been no trouble to you,’ my mother said proudly.

‘And those are grand straightforward questions about Shakespeare,’ my father said approvingly. They were indeed, but only for people like himself who had read and understood it all. Not so straightforward for those who had tried desperately to set the Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech to the tune of she wears red feathers and a hula hula skirt. And none of them were any good at Maths or Irish so that had to be an unknown quantity, and I did a lot of dealing with the Almighty about good behaviour and putting Stolen Nights of Bliss on hold for the foreseeable future if I got the exam.

And then there was an endless, endless summer waiting. I think the sun shone every day but Met Éireann, of course, will tell me that it never came out at all.

And then there was the day the results came. We were in Ballybunion, and we had a Fuller’s cake for tea and I was allowed to eat two of the four solid chocolate drops on top myself. And compared to all the Einsteins in Kerry, of course, my Two Honours were a poor thing. And only a Pass in English. Imagine!

Still it was worthy of being celebrated. And it was. In style.

I wish they knew that of all their children, I was to be the least educated of all. But Two Honours in those days served fine to start me off for the rest of my life.

And of course if I had it all over again I would have worked harder, read more, opened my mind, made them prouder of me. But that’s only what I think now as I look back on a summer that seems like the other day.

‘I
don’t like summer myself. Personally,’ said the girl in the pale pink shorts and the dark pink halter top. She was eating a huge ice cream cone and waiting in the crowds to see the USS
JFK
come into view in Dún Laoghaire.

She looked like an advertisement for summer, with her shiny hair, her 97 small, healthy teeth, her light suntan and her air of well-being.

‘I know,’ said her friend, who was no use as a friend. She had said ‘I know’ to people for all of her 18 years and you could tell she would do so forever. ‘I know what you mean.’

The girl who didn’t like summer, personally, was at least a person of views; she was prepared to elaborate on her stance.

‘You see the thing about summer is that you expect so much from it,’ she said earnestly. ‘Every time you open the papers or turn on the television there’s someone saying, “Here comes summer,” and you get all excited and then nothing much happens at all.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said the other one.

Socrates had a friend like that, didn’t he, when he was writing the Dialogues, some dumbo who said ‘Assuredly’ every two pages or so.