The Fields (26 page)

On the downside, all hell breaks loose at home when we don’t come back. The Donohue clan go bonkers when they find out that Saidhbh’s been lying to them, that she’s with me, and that she’s just had our miscarriage, and that, worst of all, she’s in England. They can’t believe it. Taighdhg especially is heartbroken and has to take two weeks off work just to let it all sink in. Gary sends me a massive letter, eight foolscap long, giving me a blow-by-blow, real serious like, of everything that happened since the news broke. He says that my mam and his mam and all the usual gabbers had a mega-coffee meeting over at his, and they went through two packs of malted milks, and a half-jar of Maxwell House, not to mention all the John Players, and that practically every word on the table had some connection to me and Saidhbh, and to all the trouble that we’d caused. We were like bandits, he said, like his and hers lovers on the lam like you see in movies, and Maisie O’Mally said that we had scandalised the whole Rise and most of greater Kilcuman itself.

The big coffee morning was called mainly to see if there was anything that the women of The Rise could do together for the Donohues who, apparently, had taken it all much worse than my mam and dad. They said that Taighdhg had been in shock from
day one, when Saidhbh called and broke the news and said she wasn’t coming home. Taighdhg told her that she was talking rubbish, and that if she wasn’t going to come back he’d have to do something about it. And that even though he didn’t have a passport and didn’t agree with international travel as a rule, he was going to get one first thing in the morning, and go right over to fecking England and bring his daughter back.

Saidhbh told him that if he dared attempt to come anywhere near London town, or specifically Glengall Road, she’d kill herself on the spot. She was up in Aunty Grace’s bathroom at the time, and had locked herself in, with the cream phone flex sticking out under the doorway, snaking its way into the bedroom socket. It was during the first of many of her locking-herself-in phases, and she was just mad enough to scare Taighdhg into taking her seriously, especially when she warned him that she had a fistful of Fiona’s Lady Shaves blades in front of her, and that she’d slit her own throat if he even thought about coming over, or about sending anyone over in his place.

He got the message, put the receiver down, and hit the bottle good-o. Gary’s heard that there were huge fights in the house after that, with Taighdhg Donohue cursing my name, blaming me for everything, and threatening to call in his contacts with The Movement to take care of me once and for all. It took Sinead Donohue hours of reasoning and gallons of coffee to calm him down, and to convince him, even to the slightest degree, that his own daughter might’ve had a part to play in the entire unfolding drama.

And yet, even then, and such is the man’s love for his only daughter, he blamed everything else but Saidhbh. It was the TV, he said. It was the movies. It was the music. They’d brainwashed her with their insidious Englishness, and plucked her right from out of his arms, and from the all-embracing love of Ireland. And now look at her! In London! For God knows how
long! He knew, he said, from the very first day that she started listening to Boy fecking George that nothing good would come of it.

Of course, he’d held his tongue for too long, because he knew that nobody would listen to him, and they’d all call him an old fogey and a square and a bogman. But he said that he knew what he was talking about, because it was called Post-Colonial theory, it was on the teachers’ syllabus, and it meant that all those episodes of
Minder
,
Grange Hill
and
To the Manor Born
, plus all those songs from Kajagoogoo and Spandau Ballet, had made Saidhbh see the once proud Irish people in the same negative way that the Brits see them. She had become the star of her own Irish joke, like the bit in the
Kenny Everett Show
where the Irish farmer, with a pig under his arm, runs straight into a wall because he’s so thick. And everyone in the audience, all the Brits down at the BBC Television Centre, laugh not just because he’s run into a wall, but because he’s run into a wall and is Irish too. So Saidhbh, because of all her telly and music, had started to think, and against her better instincts, that England was the cool place to be and Ireland was just for old fogeys with cloth caps and pigs under their arms and an inability to tell the difference between brick walls and open doors.

Sinead Donohue was a harder nut, they all agreed, and hadn’t shed a single public tear since this whole debacle broke, and hadn’t missed a single day at the Book of Kells or Kilmainham Gaol. Gary says that everyone at the coffee morning kind of agreed that Sinead was a bit of a cow underneath it all, and deserved all the trouble she got anyway, and her lack of crying and collapsing had proved what they thought all along, which is that she was too into herself, and her role as a famous super guide, and a mini-hero to tourists from all over the world. And if she’d only kept her eyes on what was happening a little closer to the hearth then none of this would’ve happened and poor
Devida here, meaning my mam, wouldn’t be left frantic with worry for her only son.

Gary says that Mam didn’t seem that worried at all, and told everyone to shut up when they suggested that she was still in shock. And when the biddies asked her if she was having trouble sleeping at night, she said that everything was grand, and that what was done was done, and that she trusted her sister Grace to the bitter end, and knew that I couldn’t be in a safer place on Earth. Some of the women thought she was putting on a brave face, and asked her about the scandal of it all, and the shame that her son had brought down upon their house, and told her that they wanted to call the new Parish Priest, Fr Murray, on her behalf. But Mam just shot them down straightaway and said that she had lost a lot of faith in the Church since Fr O’Culigeen left for the missions. Didn’t have a going away hoolie or anything. Didn’t even come up to the house to say goodbye. Just finished a week of Masses with a quick communal confession on Saturday evening and then headed off to the South Seas first thing in the morning, on a top-secret mission to turn the little savages into altar boys.

No, the real one Mam was worried about was my dad. He didn’t do anything dramatic when he heard the news. And, in fact, he barely reacted at all. He was shuffling round the house in his slippers and scratchy dressing gown at the time, on his morning lurch around, after taking the pills and carefully running a comb down and around all the balding patchwork of hair clumps that have become his head these days. Gary’s seen my dad recently, and knows what he’s talking about. He says the medicine’s taken out another big chunk of hair, real weird like, in a strip right round the back. Says he looks like a new baby who’s rubbed himself a special baldy spot from lying on the flat of his back, and turning left and right for ever.

Mam had to lure him into the kitchen, pretending there was a
freshly baked scone with jam and cream waiting for him when he got there. But instead she made him sit down, and told him the whole score about me and Saidhbh, and the baby, and then the no-baby, and then us being stuck in London for the moment until Saidhbh stops being a bit mental. She said he looked around the kitchen, turned his stubbly jaw to the side, and just rubbed the light pink surgical scar on his neck. He stroked it weakly, running his finger along its path through the prickles, and asked Mam for the scone she had promised him. It seemed on the surface that nothing had happened at all, and that he had nothing to say about it. But Mam told the coffee girls she could swear that another precious light had just gone off in his eyes.

Gary wrote that my mam cried for a bit at this stage, but that all the mams gathered and clucked around her and told her that Dad would pull through, and they decided, being positive, that it was probably better that I was over with Aunty Grace until Dad fully kicked the cancer. Just so Mam could handle it in her own way. They said there’d be plenty of time for me when Dad got better. And then they chuckled and giggled together as they dreamt, with some excitement, of the big day when Dad’s strength returned and he could effortlessly grab the bamboo stick and beat me black and blue for my sins.

Of course, it’s hard to tell exactly how mental Saidhbh had really become, because, thanks to the toll the whole experience has taken on her, she has mostly given up talking.

We barely saw her at all in the first few days, thanks to the bedroom lock-in. And she broke that only for quick sobby calls home to her mam, and some rapid-fire trips to the kitchen for some toast, or an apple. She did these during the day, when the others were out, and I’d often try to catch her on the stairs. I’d be sitting with a bowl of Frosties on the brown denim beanbag in Aunty Grace’s telly room, with the door to the hall wide open, and reading
The Ladybird Book of London
and learning all
about how the Great Fire was started in a baker’s shop on the funny-sounding Pudding Lane, or how Dick Whittington was a real-life actual mayor and not just a fairytale fella, or how there was nothing more delightful than a trip to St Paul’s or a visit to Madame Tussauds, and how you had to be careful when you spoke to an attendant in Madame Tussauds because, or so the book warned me, they might be made of wax! Which made me feel a bit weird. But not as weird as the sound of Saidhbh thundering down the stairs in her bare feet, with her thin Mickey Mouse nightie flowing behind her as she swooshed by the open door, like a particularly tormented breeze, on a sudden snack break between quick pees and sobby calls.

On these occasions I’d drop the book and fling myself out of the beanbag, and make a dash for the door. But I’d end up just standing there, frozen within the door frame, a hand tentatively reaching out to her as she passed, like trying to catch a ghost. And me with a million unformed words on my lips. All blocked by fear, and by cat-nurse mode, and by the need to say, and to do, exactly the right thing that would bring her back to me, and to us, and to all of our lives.

Eventually, Saidhbh was talked out of the room by Deano. He sat at the door for a whole weekend, and didn’t say much at all, other than the fact that the universe had a plan, and that Saidhbh could relax now, because she was surrounded by goodness and light. He told her a whopper on the Sunday lunchtime shift, and it was probably the one that did the trick, about how he had accidentally blinded a man once, in his dark days back in Ireland, with a broken bottle and everything. And how he thinks about that blind fella nearly every day, in the same way that Saidhbh must be thinking about her baby. But the difference is that Deano says he’s managed to forgive himself for blinding the bloke back home. In the same way that Saidhbh needs to forgive herself for almost going through with an abortion that somehow led to the
death of her would-be first child. And yes, he says, piling it on thick and fast, pulling no punches, maybe the child did sense the negative energies that were directed against it in the abortion clinic. And maybe that child then decided to absent himself from humanity, and disappear that very evening, back into the ethereal realm, leaving Saidhbh with only mush for memories. But even if the child did all this, and brought the end of his corporeal form upon him or herself, it was clear that this was not Saidhbh’s fault. The child, says Deano, putting some much needed icing on the cake, will only come into a world that’s ready to have him. And you, my sweet darling girl, were not ready to have him. But take heed and know that he’s out there, in the heavens, waiting for the right moment to come back to you. To feed at your breast. And to live in your heart.

Naturally, Fiona and Aunty Grace are in floods at this, listening closely from the bottom of the stairs, with me in between them. Fiona rubs my shoulders too, as if to say that I must be hurting deep deep down inside for the tragic loss of my baby that never was. And that I must be imagining all the winter bike rides that we’ll never have, me and the little one, or how I won’t ever be able to teach it to throw
Top of the Pops
-style shapes to Bronski Beat in the bedroom. And I know what the nuns say, and I know what the brothers say, and the priests, about the sacred life of the child pinging into action from the very minute the girl gets preggers, and I know that Aunty Grace has been here before herself, in painful times gone by, and so I point my head down to the carpet, like a good boy in church when the communion bell rings, and I play along. But somehow, and somewhere inside, I’m guessing that this is all wrong, and that feeling totally rubbish for the sake of a little red blob of mucus just doesn’t seem right when we should really be thinking about the brilliant girl at the top of the stairs who’s worth more to me than all the overflowing buckets of blobby red mucus in the world.

Of course, we’re not surprised at all when the door clicks open and Saidhbh suddenly appears looking a bit red-eyed and bedraggled but otherwise not like a woman emerging from the depths of despair. She glances at Deano, and then down at us, and acts like it’s any normal Sunday, where you’ve just woken up from a jammy afternoon kip only to find your friends and family surrounding you on the landing and the stairs below. Oh hi, she says, casual as anything, addressing me, Fiona and Aunty Grace. She then says that she’s hungry, and that she wants to go out for some food, and for a change of scenery.

We all agree that this is an ace idea, and practically fall over each other, grabbing coats, keys and shoes, in a helter-skelter attempt to get kitted up and out the door before Saidhbh has time to change her mind and dash back upstairs for another lock-in.

Aunty Grace takes us to the Crown and Anchor on Cavendish Road, near the Kilburn mainline station. It’s her local, and she gets a big wink, and then a hug, from a big fat fella from Offaly with a huge pink turnip head and rolled up sleeves, navy tracksuit bottoms and brown shoes. He’s on his knees when we arrive, fiddling with a plug at the back of a sparkly, glowy, Space Invader machine. His name is Larry, and he’s the boss, and Fiona says that Aunty Grace’s nickname for him is the Last Port of Call. Which means that when the girls at work can’t get real jobs as secretaries in offices, and when they can’t even get backup jobs as waitresses in restaurants, and, in fact, when they can’t get any sort of paying job at all, at all, Aunty Grace gives them a wink and a nod and drives them over to Larry, the last port of call. Because Larry, says Aunty Grace in a jokey way, is always in need of more girls because he’s a desperate man for the women, and doesn’t know where to put his hands. And most of her girls go blemming out the door by the end of their very first shift. Oh yes, says Aunty Grace, he’s an awful fella, meaning
that it’s gas the way fellas are always grabbing at girls’ boobs and bums.