The Fields (21 page)

He says that it’s an absolute disgrace, at my age, and he gives me a shove. His hands, however, are weak as anything. And it’s a bit like being shoved by a dizzy scarecrow with no hair and bad breath. I shrug him off with ease, drop the Weetabix box on the table, and dart up the stairs before he’s had time to steady himself against the cereal shelf.

Normally, he’d give up now, and stumble into the sitting room, and spend the rest of the morning on the couch, sweating and trying to get his breath back. He hasn’t chased anyone up the stairs in months, maybe even a full year. Because of his condition. But something’s flipped in him this time. And sure enough, I’m hovering outside the bedroom door when I hear him, in a mad half-pelt, shooting out the kitchen and up the stairs, bamboo cane clattering the banisters as he goes. It’s like he’s channelled every last pulse of energy in his weedy body down into his legs.

Feck! I dart into the loo and lock the door. He’s on it in seconds. He bangs hard like a bastard, and roars at me. He tells me that I’m a disgrace, a disgusting disgrace, and that I’m no fecking son of his. He bangs hard on the door for a good half an hour, calling me a disgusting disgrace whenever he has the breath. He kind of collapses eventually, and sits on the floor, propped upwards against the door.

Mam comes home from Mass and gives a right yelp when she sees him there. I eventually emerge and help her to drag him into bed and she calls the doctor. Dad gets given more painkillers, and a huge bottle of Lucozade, and is told, from now on, to get out of bed only twice a day. He never mentions the Debs again. Not to me. Not to Mam. And, wherever possible, from this day forward, he avoids talking to me, or looking me in the eyes, or generally acknowledging my presence at all.

Saidhbh tells me that she’s pregnant just under three weeks after the Debs, on 21 June 1985. It’s like that book says. The best of times and the worst of times. And at these times, me and Saidhbh are stronger than ever, and back doing the nudey-nudey full time. And she’s even stopped threatening to go to confession about it. We’re like real adults, and we go to the movies, and we study together, and we kiss, and I quiz her on her upcoming Leaving Cert biology papers – aqueous and vitreous humour, all thirty-three vertebrae, the venal and the renal, and so on. And she tests me on my Peig, and on next year’s history and geography books, all in the hope that I can pull myself up by my bootstraps, and not be such an embarrassment to my family and my dying dad.

And in these times too, and in that department, and despite all the gloomy words from the doctors, Dad stays in a permanent state of dying without, thankfully, actually dying. He still doesn’t ever get out of the grey scratchy dressing gown but, despite the new orders, he leaves the bedroom whenever he feels like it, to come downstairs to make a bit of chat with Mam, and to eat some dry toast, and very occasionally to get riled up and furious when Gay Byrne has a whole show devoted to divorce. This has
a positive knock-on effect on the whole atmosphere in the house. And even though he does his very best to ignore me, and barely passes a single glance in my direction from the morning of the Debs meltdown onwards, the general mood around the place becomes much less like a funeral home. Mam, for a start, seems happier, and she goes back to calling Dad a terrible man, and boasts about how every cloud has a silver lining and how she’s not doing half as much cleaning up any more now that she has her ‘little maids’ to help her.

At this Susan and Claire usually chirp up and do a version of a song they learnt in Sister Maureen’s English class, where they go, with hands together under their chins, ‘Two little maids from school are we!’ And anyone who’s listening laughs, even Dad. They boast too that becoming maids was the best thing that’s happened to them, and that they can now change the hoover bags, and make an entire tray of German apple slices without Mam’s help. Meanwhile, Sarah and Siobhan come home every Sunday, with exciting tales from the worlds of banking and typing. They hand over cash to Mam and they eat the big Sunday roast, and they can even, depending on his form, drag an old argument out of Dad – who pulls his hands away from his face long enough to say that they’re both dirty Jezebels now that they’re living on their own and going to nightclubs and staying out till all hours and doing God knows what in the back of heaven knows whose car.

Things are going well for Fiona too, over in England. She sends over typed letters, from Aunty Grace’s electronic typewriter in London – one to Mam and Dad, one to the girls, and one to me. And in them she describes her working day in the recruitment firm, and how a lot of her job is about calming all the young girls down when they get to reception, and helping them to fill out their forms. Because some of them, she reveals, are from way down the darkest parts of the bog, and have only just
made it, by the skin of their teeth, all the way over to London. The poor little things, she says, they try to hide it from her, but after ten minutes of shape-shifting on the reception sofa it’s obvious to see that they can’t read or write.

Aunty Grace, however, is apparently brilliant with them, and always manages to calm them down, and give them a little lecture on being a bit of a gobshite for never going to school, but then she still manages to find them some sort of work, even if it’s just day here or a day there, making coffee for some big-city flash boys with red braces and cigars. Fiona writes that it’s brilliant living with Aunty Grace, who has always wanted a daughter, and that even though she seems tough on the outside, the two of them get on amazingly well and spend most nights, till the wee hours, drinking red wine and chatting about fellas, specifically about this bloke called Deano, who works in the recruitment office and has his eye on Fiona. In her letter to me Fiona says ‘wink wink nudge nudge’ after the word Deano, but to everyone else she just calls him Deano. It’s her code for saying things are going very well in the shifting department.

At the end of her family letter she asks how everyone’s doing, each by name, and she even includes Saidhbh when she mentions me. This kind of thing would normally get a big oooooooh from the girls, especially during Sunday roast, with Sarah and Siobhan there, but the best thing of all that’s happened recently is that me and Saidhbh have become so normal that no one says a thing, and just lets it flow past them unnoticed. In fact, the subject of me and Saidhbh is so old that no one even flickers any more when it’s mentioned. No child-snatcher jokes, no me-and-my-granny jokes, and no sneers about k-i-s-s-i-n-g up a tree. It’s just dead normal, and in fact is more than normal and makes me seem brilliant in the eyes of Mam at least, who is forever rubbing my head and telling me that I’m a very mature boy for fourteen, and that Saidhbh is a very lucky woman.

Of course, Mam initially couldn’t help herself, and one day on a casual walk in Castle Mount Park, she gave me a good grilling about what me and Saidhbh actually get up to when we’re alone. There was no excuse in the world at all for the walk. It was around four in the afternoon, the girls had just got in from school, and Dad needed to be woken for a shower, because his old work chums Jack and Aoife Madigan were coming over to visit tonight, and Mam thought he looked a state with the old white stubble growing goodo all over his face. He’d have to hook the shower pipe up because a bath would just wreck him completely for the rest of the day, she warned. So she was in the midst of all that – of giving Dad a lecture about not being dead yet, and needing to find some gumption and clean himself up, and also preparing tea for the girls – when she suddenly asks me if I want to go for a walk. I knew, straight away, from the way she wasn’t looking at me, that it was going to be just like our sex-talk walk. So I kind of agreed, like the way you do when Spits McGee asks you to come up to the board even though you know he’s going to thump you when you get there.

So she waits until we hit the gates of the parks, and then she leaps all over the subject, saying that she’d been listening to Gaybo’s radio show this morning, and it was all about the young people today, and what they get up to when the parents aren’t looking. And what they do at Wesley and Bective discos, and how the Gardaí are always finding girls and boys feeling each other’s mickeys and fannys in the stands at Lansdowne Road at midnight. And she knows that I’m way too young for any of that, and that Saidhbh is more like a big sister to me, replacing Fiona, she guesses, but with a little bit of kissing, because she’s heard that from Claire and Susan, but she just wants to check that there’s nothing else going on but kissing.

Naturally, I act all Don’t be stupid, Mam, sure I barely know what kissing is! I’m totally over the top with how rubbish me and
Saidhbh are with anything other than holding hands. In fact, I don’t even admit that we kiss, and instead make an eeuurrghh face whenever Mam uses the word. I let her bang on with her theory that Saidhbh is the new Fiona, because it seems to make her happy, and makes her feel that some element of her life, at least, isn’t falling apart at the seams.

She chats away by herself for a while more, and we round the basketball courts, and go through the tiny bit of the park that’s vaguely woody and would definitely hold perverts, rapists and abusers at night-time. And then, finally, just as we start to turn back towards the main gate, Mam goes all weird, and her voice goes a bit throaty and snotty, and she tells me that if we had divorce in Ireland she would’ve divorced ‘your father’, meaning Dad, years ago. She doesn’t say why, but I guess that all the talk about couples and kissing and what to do and what not to do has started making her think about the beginnings of her love life, and all the fellas that she used to kiss in the porch when her own father would bang down on the floor from above. And maybe she was thinking of one fella in particular. Because Dad always slags her off about Tim Coolan, this awful bald eejit who calls once every three months to the front door, and brings chocolates for the family, and a snooker statistics book for Dad, but is really here to see Mam, because they used to be boyfriend and girlfriend back in the day. Tim is widowed, but Dad jokes that he killed his own wife because he couldn’t get over losing Mam to a handsome whizzkid salesman like himself.

These slaggy joking sessions usually don’t last long, with Mam either joking back at Dad, telling him that she chose the wrong one there, clearly, or else just sharply telling Dad to shut up, and making all of us take a special note of that one, because it definitely struck home. And anyway, as I say, after telling me that she would’ve divorced Dad if the country wasn’t so backward and full of finger-pointing bogmen, she goes really quiet and snuffly,
and without looking up at her once I can tell that she’s crying like mad. Part of me wants to ask her, Are you thinking of Tim Coolan? But the rest of me knows that it must be totally rubbish being married to a human dressing gown that’s inches away from dying every day, and comparing that to when you look back at the first time you kissed a fella, or he held you in his arms, or the first time you told a fella that you loved him, it must be like comparing the world’s sweetest and lightest and creamiest pavlova to a plate of shite.

Either way, she has a big weep, and by the time we get home it’s all over, and she’s ready to get going again as World’s Number One Mam, to lift Dad out of his dressing gown and hoist him into the shower, and maybe even shave him at a push. Plus she’ll do the girls’ tea, make them eat their potato-cakes, and listen to their stories about who is a fecking cow, and which teacher is picking on them, and about how much money they’ll need for the school trip that Mam can’t quite afford to send them on. But most of all, Mam will be content in the knowledge that, no matter what’s happening around her, and how the world is falling apart, at least her son, her only son, her precious son, isn’t like one of them kids on the Gaybo radio show, and actually doing real-life rude stuff with his girlfriend.

Naturally, I don’t tell Mam about Saidhbh being pregnant. I don’t tell anyone, in fact, not even Gary. I’m in shock mostly, for a whole day after she tells me. She just phones up ours on a Sunday morning, speaks to Mam and asks her to tell me that she needs me to come to hers urgently with the biology notes she left up in my bedroom. This is a mad message to leave, and clearly rubbish, because her Leaving Cert biology exam is already over, and she screamed and whooped last Wednesday evening about how she’ll never look at another biology note for as long as she lives.

Nonetheless, I gather up a load of old papers, some of my history mixed with her biology and geography, flash them at Mam and the girls, who’ve come back from Mass, and tell them that I’m on an important mission to save Saidhbh’s Leaving Cert. Secretly, I’m dead excited, and I’m imagining that the entire Donohue clan have just whizzed down the driveway and Saidhbh is already lying flat out on the big double bed upstairs, waiting for her man to arrive and do all the good stuff that makes us both so brilliant together.

Sadly, that idea gets rubbished the minute Eaghdheanaghdh opens the door with his big bored puss on him. He looks at me and shakes his head and tells me I’m in big trouble, because Saidhbh’s been crying all morning and their mam and dad know that it’s my fault. I can hear Taighdhg from the sitting room shouting out, Is that him? But another voice, Sinead, quickly silences him, and tells him to mind his manners. He says that manners is what it’s all about, and as the two start snapping at each other, and deciding just whose business all this actually is, Eaghdheanaghdh flicks his head backwards, towards his left shoulder, meaning that I can slip past him and up the stairs.

I can barely imagine what in feck’s name is going on until I burst into the bedroom and find Saidhbh lying in a heap on her covers, and holding her tummy with cupped hands, like she’s either trying not to fart or she’s hiding a newborn kitten behind her fingers. I know straightaway. I just know. I don’t even have to ask her. And she doesn’t have to say. Instead, she does a big snuffle, wipes her red ruffled face, pulls back the pillow she’s been lying on, and then flings three white plastic sticks at me. The sticks, she later tells me, were purchased at the Dublin Well Woman Centre, in Ballsbridge. She had to make the trip into town, last Friday, especially for them. She says she got the brainwave, like a bolt from the blue, during PE, when everyone started moaning about their periods and she, suddenly, realised that she
hadn’t had hers in yonks. She bunked off school that very afternoon and flew into town on the 62 bus. She said they were nice in the Well Woman, but a bit too nice. Very chatty, and trying to ask her to sit down and tell them everything about her life. They were good-looking women with kindly eyes, and nice jewellery, but Saidhbh was having none of it. Just the sticks, please, and nothing else.

The sticks are home pregnancy testers, and they work through the magic of piss and windows. She peed on all three of them, and each of their tiny glass windows told her the same thing – preggers.

I ask her if she’s told her parents, and she says that she’s not a complete thick. Though, she adds, she must be pretty stupid to let me do this to her. I say, hurt, and still not sitting down on the bed beside her, that I didn’t ‘do’ anything, but she doesn’t listen. She’s off wailing and ranting, asking me how the hell she’s going to become a teacher now, and what’s her life going to be like as a mam at seventeen? I tell her not to panic, and that there’s a way out of this, because there always is. She gives me a look. I’m thinking on my feet, but I’m remembering Don Cockburn on telly, and the news stories, day in and day out, during the Eighth Amendment debates, and the girls they interview in shadows who’ve gone over to London on the ferry, and sorted themselves out. Hard shaky voices of women whose souls are now as black as their shadows and can never have a public face again because they’ve killed the babies in their tummies.