The Fields (17 page)

The birthday tea ends with me going quietly upstairs with a slice of Fiona’s cake and
The Zen of Physics
, while Mam and Dad argue in the garage about whether I’m a pervert or not. The girls have all given me filthy looks, as if it was my ingenious plan all along to ruin my own birthday tea. I’ve only been on the bed about twenty minutes, and have just had a chance to look up ‘multiverse’ in the
Zen of Physics
index, when Mam appears at the open door, all red-eyed, puffy and crying faced.

I say nothing and just kind of shrug. She sits down beside me, still snuffling back the tears and mucus from the fight with Dad. She’s got that look on her face – an awkward half-smile – that tells me there’s something to do with mickeys coming up. She
gave me the same look before the unfinished ‘babies’ chat on the way back from Kilcuman.

This time, though, she comes straight out with it, and asks me who told me about the book. I practically wet myself. Not ready for this one. No, sir. I say that I just heard, ye know. But from who? she says. I say, again, that I just heard about it, but she keeps pressing. Like a Rottweiler. ‘From who?’ is her mantra. I decide I’m going to choose a fella from school, but I have to be careful. Has to be someone credible. Someone mad enough to be a reader of sex fantasies. Mam tells me that she knows I’m protecting someone, but she wants to hear the truth. The doorbell goes as she’s saying this, and I’m hoping that I can sit in silence long enough until Mam has to go down to deal with the visitor. Only she’s having none of it. She bangs on a bit more about the truth, and tells me that all families are sacred, and our bodies are sacred, and how she doesn’t want this kind of filth in the house. So tell me, where did it come from?

Now, of course, I should’ve been a bit cool about it, and named one of the lads from the retreat. Say, Daryl McDonagh. That would’ve made sense. In between gulps of burnt potato skins in front of a full-length mirror, his dad might’ve forced him to read
The Story of the Eye
to see if he could hold his food down while simultaneously reading about a castrated testicle humper. But Mam’s voice is getting a bit strict towards the end, and there’s anger in there too, so I kind of panic, and just say the first name that comes to mind. Gary!

Mam goes, Gary?!! As if to say, Are you out of your fecking mind? Little Gary with the gadgets?!! But, yes, I say it again, Gary! Gary knows all about it. In this cunning trick, I am picturing O’Culigeen in my mind, but actually putting Gary’s face on O’Culigeen’s body, which makes the lie easier to spin. Mam, though, wants more details. She wants to know where he got the book from. She says she knows Maura Connell like a sister, like
she knows herself, and she just knows that she wouldn’t have that filth in her house. This is about to get dead complicated, because I know I have to make up someone else now. Some other luckless character is going to be drawn into the web of nasty sex. And yet, just as I’m about to land it all on the head of poor little Pilibeen, and say that he’s way mature before his time, Fiona suddenly sticks her head into the room. She looks at me, and casually says, right at that moment, one of the sweetest sentences I’ve ever heard in my life.

It’s Saidhbh, for you.

Saidhbh comes shuffling into the room before Mam has had a chance to leave. She’s gorgeous. A vision in the snow-washed denim of Jon Bon Jovi and Madonna’s white ‘Borderline’ lipstick. She doesn’t even look me in the eye, but instead clocks Mam full-on and asks her if it’s OK to take me on an outing tomorrow to Knocksink Wood. There’s a whole gang of us going, she says. It’ll be a grand ole hoolie, wading in the river and marching through the trees, and we’ll get some fresh air into those lungs of his! Mam has always been a fan of Saidhbh’s because Saidhbh is young and glamorous and religious and not her daughter. She agrees straightaway, but again, gives Saidhbh the serious look, woman to woman, that says, You’ll be his mam for the day!

Saidhbh then looks over at me, but not into my eyes, just somewhere above my forehead, and with her own face fixed like a robot, says, blankly, All right fella. Ten a.m. On the dot.

And then she’s gone.

My sleep is rubbish that night. I can’t imagine what’s going to happen. Worst-case scenario, it’s another beating from Mozzo, who’s probably back to being her boyfriend again, and who’s heard about my kissing effort. Best case, she wants to go to a brand-new Hollywood comedy.

As it turns out, it’s beyond best. Yes, we meet at ten in the morning. But by one o’clock that day, the day after my fourteenth birthday, me and Saidhbh are snogging like mental all over the fallen brown pine needles in the Wicklow mountains, just eight or nine feet from the main path in Knocksink Wood. It feels as if we’re deep deep inside the forest and magical miles away from the track. But that’s the effect of the Stag extra-strength cider. And when we eventually sober up later, before we get back, we’re a bit embarrassed to see that we were actually doing everything, the works, just feet from the main sun-dappled drag. We cringe when we imagine all the dog walkers and families tottering on by, and seeing us, gripped and entwined at the foot of the trees, faces stuck together like glue, arms locked around each other, for ever. And ever.

So, yes, safe to say that, contrary to her yarn in the bedroom, there was no one else invited to the Knocksink trip. Instead, Saidhbh just grabs me when I round the corner from The Rise and gives me a big smacker on the lips. She says that she has been thinking about us for months now. And that she can’t make sense of it all, but she can’t make sense either of life without us being together. She then says that, once she had decided to be with me, she had to wait until I turned fourteen before she could act. Because otherwise, she says, dead seriously, because she’s four years older than me, anything we do would have been a sin in the eyes of God himself. A mortal sin. Just think of it, she says, a woman of her age, and a boy of my age. It’s unholy.

She says, in Goddy mode, that it’s taken her months of prayers, and petitioning the Lord, and asking for his permission, and begging him to let this be the right thing in her life. She even did an extra Rosary before bed for fourteen days on the trot. She fasted too, without anyone at home knowing. Skipped three evening meals in a row, and offered them up to the souls, and
waited for a spiritual sign to proceed, or not, with our loving relationship.

She said she was already feeling faint, on the last day of the three-day fast, when the sign finally came. It was her period. Came gushing out in Sister Veronica’s French class, at least a week early, and sent her fleeing from the room, with her sports bag under her arm and a big wad of school bog roll in her pants. She came bursting into the home kitchen and found her mam at the table, eating a bowl of monkey nuts and staring into the unassembled hand-cranked meat grinder that she uses for shepherd’s pie, and on her first sherry of the afternoon.

They had a chat, she said. Their first real heart-to-heart, about being women, and having periods and what it means in the world to have babies and families and to be the cornerstone of everything that society, even the world itself, rests upon. Sinead Donohue even poured Saidhbh out her very own glass of sherry. Saidhbh said it was a mega-deep chat, and a sign in itself. Especially when, at the end, her mam went on a big rant about love, and how nothing made sense without love. And she looked into Saidhbh’s eyes and told her never to give her body up to anyone without love because without it she’d be screwed for the rest of her life. Like a cracked monkey-nut shell, without the nuts.

But what about God? Saidhbh said, in the midst of all this, surprising her mam, yet again, with what a holy moly she could suddenly be when the mood took her, and making her wonder, I guess, even for that split second, how she ended up with a little Maria von Trapp against her best efforts. Well? continued Saidhbh, confused by all this talk of Mr Right and love everlasting. Where does God figure into all this?

Apparently, Saidhbh’s mam just smiled, went all knowledgey and wise, took a swig from her sherry, and said, ‘God is love.’

Saidhbh said that she wasn’t sure if all this meant that her mam had been very careful in her romantic life to pick herself a
fella, Taighdhg, who she loved truly and thus had avoided, as she said, being screwed for the rest of her life. Or if she meant that she didn’t actually love Taighdhg at all and was, speaking from bitter experience, truly bollixed for ever and warning Saidhbh not to make the same mistake as her. Either way, the nod from God was all that Saidhbh needed to hear, and with spiritually sanctioned love on her mind she hatched her plan to make her move on the day after my fourteenth birthday, which would be, according to her reckoning, the beginnings of my manhood.

We get the bus to Knocksink, with a huge Deveny’s Off Licence bag clinking away at our ankles. Saidhbh has bought all the booze. Twelve small bottles of Stag. Which, for me, who’s only ever had two cans of HCL and some straggly bits of party booze from other people’s sloppy seconds, will be more than enough to do the job.

It’s a cold February morning, and we’re wrapped up well, me in a grey duffel over the grey grandad shirt, her in a black bomber with badges over a denim, over a polo, over two T-shirts and a bra. It’s sunny, though, too, and as we sit, as is our style, in silence on the top floor as the Saturday-morning bus winds its way up through Kilcuman, Sandyford and into Enniskerry, we sweat from the effect of sunlight mixed together with the smoky bus heater, and so we take off our layers, bit by bit, in a quiet, half-embarrassing striptease.

We mostly hold hands, though, all the way. God, I love her hands. So soft, and so warm, like a dreamy five-fingered skinplug into the flex of her soul. We squeeze tight, sometimes knuckle-breaking tight, all the way. It’s like everything in our bodies, our hearts and our minds are rushing into our hands and all we can do is squeeze for all we’re worth, and hope our fingers snap and break and our hands meld into one big sloppy gory mess of blood and passion.

We kiss a bit too. Just little pecks on the lips. Saidhbh is gorgeous up close. I’ve never smelt her face before, at this distance. And it’s heaven, a dizzying mix of make-up, stale coffee and old ladies’ lipstick. And even when we get so close that she goes cross-eyed, it’s still kind of magic.

We start drinking the booze the minute we get through the forest gates. We drink and walk as we go, along the smaller brown footpaths near the start, and the bigger wider sandy ones halfway up. The goal of the walk is to go from the Glencullen river right up through the trees, along the side of the valley, until we peep out at the top and get some sort of majestic view of Dublin below that will make us feel proud to have made the effort. But we’re not that fussed. We’ve both had about two and a half bottles of Stag by the time we reach the wide sandy path, and that’s when our kissing gets a bit crazy and we detour into the trees and the beds of fallen needles.

We lie together on my open grey duffel, taking turns at being on top of each other, and we kiss. And that’s all we do. I run my hand over her bra at one stage, but that’s only because I’m guessing that it’s the right time for that. But Saidhbh nudges me away, just to let me know that this is going to be a kisses-only day, and that no matter what I think I saw her do with Mozzo she’s actually a serious woman, a religious woman, with beliefs and convictions and is not going to go to hell because of any mistakes she makes with me.

We kiss for ages. We do this thing called shifting. Which is, Saidhbh tells me later, like Frenchies without the tongues. So we just kind of clamp down on each other’s mouths, breathe through our noses and go open and shut, open and shut, open and shut, with our mouths for ever. A bit like we’re both eating a very chewy bit of steak at the same time, only without using tongues, and with no steak.

During all this I’m totally loving it, and it’s like the best day in
my life by a million miles so far. But there’s nothing really happening in the mickey department. I’m not all flushed and randy, like I used to be when James Bond got it going with the back-stabbing Chinese spy-girls who were hiding behind his fold-up bed in the downtown hotel room. My heart isn’t beating madly, and I don’t even feel like tearing off Saidhbh’s clothes. Which is probably why she swiped my hand away during the bra feel – she could tell my heart wasn’t in it. I even have time to think about lots of things while we’re shifting. It’s that relaxing. Open and shut, open and shut, open and shut. My mind wanders, and I decide that I must warn Gary about
The Story of the Eye
. I decide too that I’ll try to concentrate more in school. And maybe get better grades in my exams because of it. And who knows, I could eventually go to college and study architecture like Mam has always wanted for me, so I could become a famous designer and build skyscrapers in New York and build a nice retirement home for her and Dad down in the country. That last bit was her idea, but I kind of felt the pressure nonetheless. I even wrote ‘Architect’ on the back of my maths jotter, to remind me what I needed to be when I grow up.

We pull back from the shifting briefly, and look into each other’s eyes and smile. Saidhbh calls me Jim the madser. I call her Saidhbh. It’s mental, just to be able to say her name so close to her face, and to kiss her. And for those kisses to turn into another fifteen minutes of shifting.

After about an hour of solid shifting, no joke, we take a break. Both of our mouths are wrecked. Our lips are swollen and red, like Ronald McDonald on a bad day. Saidhbh cracks open some more Stag. We slug it down, rubbing the cold glass bottles carefully over our mouths, and lie back underneath the trees, staring up at the branches from below and making chit-chat. This is clearly the best bit, and I can see why O’Culigeen is so into it. Only we don’t talk rubbish about travelling the world and getting
revenge on our sheep-shagging brothers down the bog. No, we do dead intimate stuff, like stories from our families that we’d never have said before on the bus into O’Connell Street.

Saidhbh, especially, can’t wait to tell me about what goes on behind closed doors at Donohue Towers. Says that her dad has nervous breakdowns the whole time, because he can’t stand the pressure of being top dog at Coláiste Mhuire ni Bheatha, and because his own dad, her grandad, died in a midnight farm blaze when he was still tiddly, leaving him to be raised alone by a useless alkie mam. This meant that he had to grow up imagining that the whole country of Ireland and all its history was his mother and father combined, and that he belonged more to old gobshites like Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera than the real flesh-and-blood bodies that brought him into the world. She says that half the time her mam is like a nurse to him, taking the booze from his hands, stuffing food into his mouth and cleaning him up before the school day begins. She says the whole thing has turned brother Eaghdheanaghdh into a mute. He doesn’t know what to say about it all. Just listens to his constant thrash metal upstairs, head-banging alone in the corner of his bedroom, and biding his time until he’s old enough to flee the nest.

Saidhbh tells me that the worst bit is the way people talk about her dad, and gossip behind his back. She says that it’s a nightmare in school, and that she’s forever crashing into conversations about how her dad is a real-live IRA supporter, and has plenty of no-joke IRA friends, and how he has turned the family home into a safe house for escaped IRA prisoners. Last year, she said, was the worst. The very day after the Maze breakout she couldn’t go into a single class without hearing someone whisper about her dad, and her family, and how there was a whole gang of ‘RA men sleeping on the floor of their sitting room and the only reason that the guards hadn’t been called is that nobody wanted to have their kneecaps blown off in a punishment shooting. It got so bad
that she had to leave school for nearly two weeks. And so did her dad. Just until the story died away, which was around the same time that the two lesbian nuns went on the
Late Late
and distracted everyone into hysteria for the rest of the year with a what’s-the-nation-coming-to? scandal.

Saidhbh pauses for bit, and I say, Well? And she goes, Well what?

I ask her if there really were IRA fellas on the floor of her sitting room after the Maze breakout. She smiles and says that it’s for her to know and me to find out, and then she rolls half on top of me and we start shifting like mad. Really fast this time. Open-shut-open-shut-open-shut-open-shut. Jaw-breaking stuff. It gets really slippy too, which is good this time, because it stops our mouths getting totally wrecked beyond recognition.

We take a breather after ten minutes, and Saidhbh rolls off me and asks about my family. I tell her that it’s totally nuts. And that my dad’s a bit like her dad, only without the breakdowns, the booze, the songs, and the IRA buddies. I tell her that he acts like he hates us all most of the time, especially me, and just can’t wait to fall asleep reading the
Indo
in the evening. I go, ‘Bastard!’ But I can tell it’s not that impressive a story. So I tell her about last night, and the big birthday blow-up over
The Story of the Eye
. I describe it brilliantly, and Saidhbh is in knots as I’m telling it. She strokes my face as she’s laughing, and lets her head fall fully forward on to my shoulder in between the chuckles. And as she does I breathe deeply her neck smell, and the light downy hairs behind her ear rub against my lips and I want to die with happiness.