The Fields (13 page)

Saidhbh and I are, officially, boyfriend and girlfriend. I know. It’s mad. Considering the four-year age gap, and the fact that she’s the heart-stoppingly fantastic Saidhbh Donohue, with pale lipstick, glossy brown hair, button badges and drainpipe jeans, and I’m someone who cycles a lot and wears Spider Man pyjamas and hovers around in the background at family hoolies, especially when she’s in the foreground, or upstairs on the floor getting felt by a fella in thirty-two-hole Docs. It’s mad. And normally her religious beliefs wouldn’t allow it, and all the priests in the world would call her a filthy fecking cradle snatcher for coming anywhere near me with romance in mind. But she makes an exception this time, just for me.

It starts, of course, on the very first day after the very first O’Culigeen attack. She’s heard all about the night’s excitement from Mozzo, who first comes crashing into her house in a big teary fit, saying that his mam’s been offered a gig, that very morning, a real bolt from the blue, as church caretaker in a parish right over on the Northside, and that they’re going to have to move to Clontarf, and live far away from The Rise. He’s looking for sympathy from Saidhbh, and is in full-on floods. Hasn’t even put his Docs on or anything. And he’s staring into her eyes,
holding on to her bomber jacket, begging her to think of something, to come up with a plan. He says that he’s not going anywhere. And that he’ll sleep on the floor of Saidhbh’s bedroom if she’ll let him. She says, making light of it, that the Northside’s not so bad, and that Mozzo can borrow my bike, and cycle over to visit her whenever he likes. This makes him go mental and he tells her not to mention my name, and that he’s already showed me what’s what by beating the crap out of my little arse down by the canal, and letting me know exactly whose bird belongs to what fella.

Naturally, at this, Saidhbh goes mental in return, and calls Mozzo a huge prat, leaves him sitting alone on the side of her bed, and comes rushing up to the house to see if I am OK. Mam sends her upstairs to me, and says that I’ve been quiet all day, with barely a word out of me about how I lost my bike and ended up coming home from Father’s at God knows what hour.

And true, thanks to O’Culigeen’s first night of meddling, I’m in a total state when Saidhbh arrives, and she says that she feels super guilty, imagining that it’s her fault that she’s found me here, on the bed, mousy and quiet and wondering what’s become of my world. She sits there for ages. Looks around. Picks some of my school books off the floor and tells me that
Peig
is agony, even when you’re in a school where they speak Irish all day.
Peig
is this book you do in Irish class, because it’s written in full-on Irish, with no English at all, and is a real-life story of this aul wan who lived down the bog and had a million children, half of whom emigrated, the other half died of being bog-Irish disease, and at the time of writing she’s ancient and smokes a pipe and generally moans a lot about how tough it is to be an aul wan down the bog with a load of bad memories rattling around inside her skull. Everyone in school is forced to read it, and if you don’t you can’t pass your Leaving Cert, which makes everyone hate it even more. We can’t stand this moany old bag, and her stories of
the old days when you had to eat nettles out of cow dung to stay alive. Most of us do mad graffiti on the word ‘Peig’ and change it to ‘Bog’ or ‘Bag’. However, Shitty-Pants Sweeny did the best one. He changed it to ‘Bitch’.

She’s dead patient, Saidhbh, and at first we begin as just friends. We go to
Police Academy II
in the Ambassador in town and we think it’s rubbish except for the bits when the black fella makes all the electronic noises with his mouth. The Ambassador is a massive old cinema that smells of Bazooka Joe sweet wrappers and pee. It’s right at the far end of O’Connell Street, which is full of corner boys and drug addicts who live in blocks of flats on the Northside and who have horses for pets and who’d kill you for half the price of a morning fix. It would normally be a big deal for me to go there on my own, without a big sister to protect me from knife-wielding junkies (although I never understood what exactly my sisters were supposed to do on my behalf if set upon by the knackers, other than to dazzle them into momentary blindness with the ultra-glowy multicoloured power of their Ton Sur Ton sweatshirts). But when Saidhbh calls up to collect me she gets the nod from Mam which says, Look after him, I trust you, you’re like his mam for the day now.

And we don’t do that much talking at first, me and Saidhbh. We barely say a word on the bus on the way in. Which is a bit weird, because the windows are all steamed up and foggy from the meeting of poxy cold and wet Dublin weather with the choky smoky heat of the bus’s indoor radiators, so we could be driving around in circles for all we know, and it’s not like there’s much for us to look at and distract us. Instead I draw a face in the misty window, using my little finger as a pen – for neater lines. It’s a standard screamy face with fangs. I start doing them a lot around then. And I can’t decide whether it’s because I’ve seen
An American Werewolf in London
at the school video club or
because it’s, like, some mad voice of terror screaming from deep within me. Either way, I’m pretty good at it, and Saidhbh is impressed.

Saidhbh’s best skill is art, so she should know. She’s gotten As in every art class she’s ever attended since she was a toddler. She doesn’t want to do art as a real job though. She wants to be a teacher, like her father before her. She says that she’ll probably use her art most when she’s retired from teaching. She’ll do green paintings of landscapes then, and make loads of money by selling them around St Stephen’s Green every summer to rich American tourists who want to always remember what Ireland looks like when they’re back in the US of A.

She nudges me in the side and calls me a little artist. I nudge her back and say, ‘Gir wan owra tha!’ Which means, ‘Get on out of that’ but spoken like an ole fella whose family have lived in Dublin for a thousand years and who thinks it’s the best city on the planet, and loves Guinness and being funny, and having a pot belly.

We do lots of nudging, Saidhbh and me. In fact, sometimes we do more nudging than talking. After the first month, I don’t dare ask her about Mozzo, because I don’t want to hear that he’s still her boyfriend, and that he’s travelling every day from Clontarf to see her. And she doesn’t dare mention him.

The cinema thing goes on for ages, all the way through the first school term, and right into the icy days of early December.
Short Circuit, Three Amigos, Jumpin
’
Jack Flash
and
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
. We do them all. Although for that last one, Saidhbh has to pretend to the manager that she’s my legal guardian, because it’s an over sixteens, and has this scene in it where the man of the house nips into the Mexican maid’s room and lies underneath her groaning and sweating while she wriggles and writhes in a silky white nightie right on top of his mickey. Me and Saidhbh turn to statues during this scene. We barely
breathe while it’s on the screen. It’s not like we were holding hands before it, or anything. But you can tell, when it’s on, that both of us are staring straight ahead, not moving a single muscle, not even our eyes. Just frozen in reaction, and in nervous thought.

I think about the fellas in school, like Shitty-Pants Sweeny and Steven Casey, and realise that this is exactly the sort of thing that would drive them crazy on a Monday morning, making them do humpety-hump signs with their hips and finger-through-the-round-hole signs with their hands. And for a while I think about how I’m going to bring it up, before Tech-drawing class, in the queue to get into the chilly prefab with the T-squares and tilted desks. I imagine nodding, and doing the old something’s-burnt-the-roof-of-my-mouth face, and telling the fellas that Mexican women are fecking amazing. And I imagine watching their faces, and wondering if any of them will tell me to shut up and go back to being the big bender boy that I am. But mostly I think about how sad the scene makes me feel. And I wonder if Saidhbh and Mozzo have done wriggling and writhing like this. And if Saidhbh has a silky white nightie. And I feel bad about how things have turned out for me in the humpety-hump department, and especially about how the hell I ended up playing a sweaty Mexican maid to Fr O’Culigeen’s randy man of the house.

Saidhbh and I don’t discuss the wriggling and writhing on the way home. We say that the film was a real laugh and that we loved the beardy fella falling into the swimming pool. And then, in the silences between us, I sing. I do this a lot. It’s a habit, like so many things, that has developed in me around then. It’s not fully blown belting it out either. Not me turning to Saidhbh and launching into ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’ from
Oklahoma!
(a Finnegan Family Favourite). No, it’s much quieter than that. I just find myself, sometimes without even noticing it, launching softly into a few bars of Jimmy in the same way that other people
would begin a conversation. So Saidhbh and I are walking from the bus stop on the Ballydown Road back through the villas and I start going, super high-pitched but soft too, ‘You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case!’

I usually do a few more lines, probably to the end of ‘Mother will never understand …’ and then I just stop, and start all over again. Sixteen paces down Rosemount Lane ‘Alone on a platform the wind and the rain …’ Another twenty to the corner of Clannard Crescent. ‘On a sad and lonely face.’ And then another thirty-five to the laneway into Castle Mount Road. ‘Mother will never understand …’

The best bit of all is that Saidhbh doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, she kind of likes it. At times she just walks quietly beside me, listening to my singing, super-high Jimmy-style. And at others, she hums along too, also super-high, but doing the keyboard bits as well. ‘Do, do, do-do, diw, do, do, do-do, diw, do, do, do-do.’ And every now and then, she does the singing too, except she changes the words a teensy bit, just because she can. ‘On YOUR sad and lonely face!’

Again, it’s not like
Oklahoma!
or
Annie Get Your Gun
, or any of the other FFFs that clog up our telly every Christmas on BBC2. It’s softer than that, and sometimes even hard to hear. And yet, in these moments, while winding our way home to our wet winter houses, along cold concrete roads, but singing in what Dad would call, in his boasty posh voice, sweet simpatico, I believe, if only for a moment, that there is purity and beauty in the world. And that I can have some part of it all to myself.

And then we reach the black-and-white metal gates of Saidhbh’s house. Mostly the farewells are dead simple, and Saidhbh takes the lead. She’ll call me a little madser, and do something sisterly like give me pinch on the upper arm while swooping down to give me peck on the cheek and tell me nicely to get lost. But this time, and I’d swear it’s the Mexican maid in
the silky nightie clunking around in the back of both of our minds, everything feels a bit weird. I’m waiting for her to call me madser, or Finno, or even, at a push, for a joke, Jimbo, but she doesn’t. She stands there in front of me, takes a few breaths, as if she’s about to start ten different sentences, but doesn’t.

We’re standing before the gate, blocked from the front window of the house by an enormous overgrown evergreen hedge. No spying view at all for know-all dad Taighdhg, or mute brother Eaghdheanaghdh. Saidhbh is wearing denim dungarees over Doc Martens, and one of Taighdhg’s old brown sports jackets that she’s reinvented and made look cool again with her trademark button badges of Madness and The Clash. Her brown hair is pulled away from her face in a loose, last-minute ponytail. And even in the middle of winter her skin is somehow a touch tanned, which makes her whitish lipstick look all the more magical. She is perfect.

The silence between us goes on for ever. Just standing there, like two lemons. I can’t bear it any more so I burst out suddenly with, ‘You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case!’ She’s clearly had enough of Jimmy today so, cutting me dead short, tells me to get lost and bends down for the little cheek-peck. When I say, ‘bends down’ I actually mean ‘leans a bit forward, yet in a downwardly direction’ – we’re kind of the same height, even with the age difference, although she’s always in heels – not dressy spiky things, but the healthy two inches that a decent pair of Docs will give you on a good day.

Anyway, she leans in for the cheek-peck and, for reasons known only to me and the creators of
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
, I suddenly, at the last minute, flick my head round to the front and make full contact, on the lips, kissy-kissy style.

For a nanosecond, just on that point of the clumsy, and cheaty, contact, I’m thinking, This is it. This is the moment when it all begins! When my life changes for the better! At last! But then she
shoots her head back and says, What the feck!? And she looks at me like she’s just kissed a great big steaming lump of plop. She puts her hand up to her mouth, does a little half-wipe (as if I was the one wearing the lipstick), and then heads into the house, shaking her head.

That’s it for another age. Right through Christmas ‘84, through January, and into the second week of February. Right until 6.45 p.m. on the night of my fourteenth birthday, to be exact. Not a word. Not a phonecall. Not a single Hollywood comedy. Nothing. The shutters, officially, come down. All because of one misfired peck.

As a result, Christmas is rubbish. Everyone gives me the wrong presents. They have me pinned for ever in the kiddie zone. With no idea of what’s going on inside or outside of me.

On the day itself I don’t say anything. I just tear off the wrapping paper and go, Wow! Boba Fett! And, again, Wow! I’ve always wanted a snow trooper with backpack accessories! The sisters all give each other clothes and earrings and Thompson Twins CDs and Paul Young posters. Mam gives Dad a load of practical stuff, like wipey things for the car windscreen, and clip-on things to stick in the boot, that can hold the wipey things. Everyone looks at him when it’s his turn to give her a present, and we all think, because he’s a dad, and because he’s still struck down with the dead-tired disease, that he’s forgotten, or he doesn’t quite have the energy to buy her one, let alone wrap it. But he goes all quiet and giggly and disappears out of the room and comes back with a huge box, big enough for a tumble drier to fit inside.