The Fields (32 page)

Before I can answer, however, she jumps down off the bed, grabs me firmly by both shoulders and knocks her forehead against mine while making a solemn promise that, if I stick with the School of Astral Sciences, she’ll turn me into a fully-fledged
healing machine before the year is up. You’ll be raising the dead, she says, again with a bit of a twinkle in her eyes.

Later that night, I almost smash through the front door itself in order to tell Fiona the news about Helen Macker. Deano has been moody the whole way home in the car, and is a bit fecked off about me being star pupil on my first night, so he’s miles behind me when I tear on up the stairs and into Fiona and Saidhbh’s room screaming, Guess what? Guess what? at the top of my voice. It takes me a second or two to notice that the main lights are already off, and that Fiona is crouched down on the mattress next to Saidhbh, who is lying by candlelight only, and half curled under the covers with her clothes on. Saidhbh looks a bit puffy, like she’s been crying, but I try to ignore it and tell Fiona instead about meeting Helen Macker and what a completely mad night it’s been. Fiona doesn’t say much at first, besides a few repetitions of ‘Isn’t that gas!’ before she cuts me short and makes big bug eyes that indicate the sniffling body on the mattress and then says that Saidhbh needs her rest and that I’m not to be annoying her with trifling stories. I look over at Saidhbh, giving her the questioning eye, and she just waves Fiona’s protests away like the queen to a servant, saying that it’s OK, for now, if I want to continue prattling.

I give them both the gory details. About Helen Macker being a make-up artist and a genius healer, and how she was asking after Fiona at the end, and how she hadn’t changed that much at all since the hockey days. I talk up the scars, and make them sound more gruesome than they actually were, because it’s more interesting for them and it makes Helen sound a bit grim and not as funny and chatty and fizzy as she actually was on the night.

I mention the healing too, and the many skills that Helen’s going to teach me for free. I tell Saidhbh all the things that Helen said about us and our baby too, and how she can feel through
my auric field that the baby’s still hanging around Saidhbh on an energetic cord, and how it’ll be up to me, given the right amount of healing lessons, to do the manly thing and to cut that cord and set the baby free to go back into the universe. Which will be like giving birth, only backwards.

Saidhbh shakes her head manically when she hears this, and gives the mattress such a series of jolts that Fiona has to steady her back down and hold on to her hand for calming comfort. Saidhbh says nothing for ages, but then pushes herself up on her elbows and tells me that I’m a complete idiot if I think she’s going to let me take Jackson away from her. Jackson is the name of our dead baby. I find out later, during a hugger-mugger downstairs with Fiona, that Saidhbh had taken the household record player up into the room and was listening to
Thriller
all afternoon. Fiona explains, trying not to get dead embarrassed, that Saidhbh has had her first ‘curse’ since losing the baby. And she seems to have taken it badly. I ask her if there was any song in particular that she was listening to, and I guess that it was probably ‘Billie Jean’, because that was the rude one that we weren’t supposed to listen to back home, because it was about having a child and not being married. Fiona slaps me across the back of the head and says that I’m a moron, and that Saidhbh was listening to the whole album straight through, if I must know.

Even ‘P.Y.T.’?

Yes, she says, and ‘The Lady in My Life’.

Saidhbh says that Jackson is the best thing that ever happened to her in her whole stinking life. In all this, she says, I knew there had to be a point, and a reason. God has put us through all this pain because of Jackson. He wanted to make sure that we were ready for him. As parents. She unhooks her hand from Fiona’s grip and rolls over on her side, showing me her back from under the sheets, still dressed in a lime-green sweatshirt, as she protects an imaginary space in front of her belly. She asks me, facing the
wall, if I think that, after all this, she’s going to let me take Jackson away from her? She tells me that they will only ever be separated over her dead body. And then she raises her damaged hand up above the sheets to let me know that she means business. She turns her face completely into the pillow and whispers the name Jackson softly to herself, over and over again, with little bites of My Love, and My Darling, and My Sweet Baby Boy dropped in for good measure. Fiona gives me a look. We get the point, and tiptoe out of the room.

Downstairs, me, Deano, Fiona and Aunty Grace have a hugger-mugger. We shut all the doors, Fiona puts on the tea, turns off the telly, and Aunty Grace drinks red wine. She listens to my Helen Macker story with a stony face and then says, straight away, that she’s going to put Saidhbh into a mental home up the road in Cricklewood. This causes a huge argument, with Deano basically saying ‘No way, it’s cruel,’ and Fiona and Aunty Grace saying ‘Yes way, it’s for her own good.’ I don’t really say anything, because I’m not good at arguments, and normally have brilliant thoughts that eventually come out as nervous sentences that are actually really obvious and not brilliant at all.

And besides, the whole thing makes me feel a bit sick, like the time I sat outside the kitchen door back home and listened to Mam and Dad arguing about sending Fiona to a no-nonsense boarding school down the bog because she was being a bit wild at the time. She had only just got her first few periods and was going a bit snappy with everyone, and saying ‘f’ this and ‘f’ that all over the place. And Mam thought that it was a terrible example to be showing Claire and Susan, and she just didn’t know how to handle her any more because Fiona would tell her to f-off with herself whenever she stuck her head inside the bedroom door.

Dad, of course, wouldn’t hear of it, and said that no daughter of his was going to be shipped off to the back end of beyond like
a common criminal, packed off to a load of country savages with no questions asked. Dad talked a lot about being tough, and loving strict rules, and how much he liked to give his kids a good old-fashioned belt to show them what’s what. But when it came to the big decisions, he was soft. Softer than Mam, anyway. And this time he insisted that giving Fiona a bit of a lecture, from him to her, was all that it would take. Mam scoffed, but Dad was right. Fiona got over the bad-girl blip, and was back to normal within a couple of days, and not cursing, not shouting at all. Which made Dad feel great, and like the best parent on the planet, but was probably more due to the fact that I told Fiona, the night of the argument, all about me sitting out in the hall and listening to Mam and Dad going at it, and planning to send her away for ever to a hideous and evil culchie-filled boarding school in the middle of the bog, where you’d be force-fed porridge all day by huge country girls with red faces and rolled-up sleeves and camogie sticks under their pillows, for belting you in the middle of the night for being a big angry effer and blinder.

Back then, outside in the hall, I had wanted to burst into the kitchen and hit Mam and Dad with a million different reasons for not sending Fiona to a bog boarding school. But I was frozen by the shock of listening, and by the danger of what they were saying. And I was frozen too by the possibility that the wrong result would be too much to bear. And so I stayed outside, like someone trying not to breathe on a house of cards, but willing them to fall in the right direction all the same.

It’s just like that here. And Deano can see that I’m rooted to the spot, so he makes a big deal about speaking for me, and saying that Winter Rain is going to help me to fix Saidhbh, and has promised to have her fit as a fiddle in no time.

Fiona and Aunty Grace go bonkers at this together, with Aunty telling Deano that he’s a gullible gobshite, and Fiona insisting that he stop using the name Winter Rain, and refer to
her as Helen Macker, or even Scarface. Anything but Winter Rain. Deano, in turn, tells them both that he pities them because they have closed hearts.

Aunty Grace takes a huge slug of red wine and starts crying, and tells Deano not to talk about her closed heart, and lectures him about the things she’s had to endure in her life, as an Irish woman in England, in order to get to where she is today. Fiona, equally choked up, continues on Aunty Grace’s behalf, and threatens to throw Deano out the door, and tells him to find someone else from one of his binjy-banjy classes with a bigger heart, maybe Helen Macker, and see if she’d put up with his nonsense. Deano starts crying too, and complains about his life, and never having a dad, and how hard it’s been for him to find his place in the world.

All three of them end the hugger-mugger totally flopped in each other’s arms and cuddling and crying at the same time. I’m feeling dead embarrassed for everyone in the room, like every single person I know in the whole wide world has suddenly gone mental at the exact same time. And I feel bad for Saidhbh, and the way we’re all talking about her, as if she’s a rotten old piece of burger meat, with her steak days long gone. So I try to sneak out and up to her room without attracting any attention. But Aunty Grace, all smeared and bedraggled, lifts her head out of the hug, and barks over at me. She says that Saidhbh can stay for the moment, providing that she doesn’t get any more nutty. She says that it’s up to me, and Deano, and all those binjy-banjy berks in Community to fix her. And when she’s up and ready, and back on her feet again, she wants us both out of here. No questions asked. For good.

By mid October I’ve paid for half the flights. Me and Saidhbh are going to arrive back home at Christmas like the conquering heroes that we are. Me, with a real-life job in the best restaurant in London. And her with her head totally sorted and a massive folder full of tree pictures under her arm. I prattle on about Christmas to Saidhbh whenever I can, because I know that it’s her favourite thing ever, and because it’ll be like this magical glowy place far away on the horizon but almost visible that will make living her life worthwhile. You heard about that sort of thing all the time back home from the coffee mams, about some ancient aul wan who goes, Oh as long as I make it as far as little Jacintha’s First Holy Communion I’ll be thankful to the Lord. And at that stage Jacintha’s only a baby, and everyone’s secretly thinking that the aul wan is a bit greedy and a bit cocky to think she’s going to live for another seven years. But sure enough she makes it right to the Holy Communion day itself and is the undoubted star of the hour, and of all the family photos and especially the big one with everyone gathered around her in the telly room like a giant multicoloured family flower with her as the ancient grey bud at its centre. She’s sitting in an armchair with plastic underneath the material in case she does a pee in her
pants, but she’s smiling quietly to herself and happy as Larry to have finally made it, as good as her word, this far and to this day. And then, the very next morning, she dies.

Well, Christmas is a bit like that for Saidhbh. The whole shebang. Everything. From buying the tree with her dad from the cute whore in the bus terminus in Oakfield, right through the giddy build-up of Bing Crosby records and Boney M’s ‘Boy Child’ to the big day itself. She loves it all. She loves the 10 a.m. Mass that whizzes by because everyone’s dying to get home to their presents, and she loves the way the priests know the people’s mood well, and so they don’t do a sermon but instead tell all the mams to get back to their kitchens and make sure that their turkeys aren’t burning, which always gets a big laugh, especially from the mams. And then there’s the visiting, with a million mad car trips all around Dublin to the uncles and aunties who, right up until your eighteenth birthday, always seek you out by the peanut bowls and the 7-Up, and give you a pressie and a big goozer on the cheek for your troubles. And then the big monster meal around the table, and the way the mams and the aunties always make everyone do games, like a proper family, where you stick a name on your forehead and you have a guess at who it is and I’m always Mother Teresa which is a bit unfair because she’s a girl and not really someone I think about a lot except when she’s on the news for being all sainty and wrinkly and covered with hungry babies.

And for Saidhbh, Stephen’s Day is even better than Christmas Day, because it’s the day when the Donohue family hold the famous Donohue Family Stephen’s Day Hoolie. And with this one, they go and leave the front door open all day, and everyone from all around the whole of Kilcuman, and anyone they’ve ever met in their entire lives, comes piling in for all-day-drinks, pies and a couple of sneaky rebel songs. And they don’t leave till four in the morning, till every last drop is drunk, and the voices are
hoarse, and it’s an official fact that this Donohue Family Stephen’s Day Hoolie was even better than last year’s effort.

And so I describe to Saidhbh how we’ll sashay through Dublin airport, with all the other long-lost children from all corners of the globe, and we’ll look at the glowy lights that offer us a hundred thousand welcomes in Gaelic. And we’ll get hugs and pats on the backs from our nearest and dearest and we’ll say that it’s great to be back on the Auld Sod, and describe how the flight was smooth as eggs but the traffic to the airport, in London town, was mad as be damned. And then we’ll squeeze into the car, and on to the roads, and to The Rise, home, and we’ll keep everyone up all night with crazy stories of life in London and all the oddballs you meet and the strange things that happen to you when you’re away from the embrace of your country’s bosom.

Saidhbh smiles at this. Things have been rougher than ever for her lately, so she’s not just being polite, for my sake. She’s had two trips to A&E in Paddington, one for a suspected heart attack and the other an overdose. With the heart attack it was a Sunday and we were all sitting around watching the English knackers shout at each other in
EastEnders
, and Saidhbh suddenly bursts into the room saying that she can’t feel her arm and has lost the ability to breathe. She crumples to the carpet in front of us, head on to the floor, and kind of passes out. We all go mental and Deano says that it’s a heart attack, and Fiona rings 999, and Aunty Grace screams that Saidhbh is too young for a heart attack. By the time the ambulance gets here Saidhbh is breathing again, and can feel her arm, but they say that it’s protocol now, and that Saidhbh has to go with them into A&E to be checked up and monitored in case she has a rare genetic heart disorder that could kill her at any minute. We follow the ambulance in Deano’s car, and we’re allowed into the beddy bit of A&E, and we sit in silence and say not a single thing while Saidhbh’s
monitors blip away happily for twenty-five minutes and let her go with a clean bill of health.

The overdose was scarier, even though I was in Border Town at the time. Aunty Grace said that it was like Saidhbh was so shamed by the pretend heart attack that she decided to kill herself to get over it. Only she didn’t actually kill herself, and just drank straight vodka up in the bedroom until she got knocked out, but not before munching back a whole load of Disprins that went all foamy around her mouth and made Fiona go pale with shock and call 999 again. When Saidhbh came to her senses this time, she just giggled, probably out of embarrassment. And when Aunty Grace got all rough with her and asked her about the Disprins, she just joked that she had a headache from the vodka. And everyone left it at that.

So it’s nice for me, and it’s real, when I see her smile about my Christmas plans. Her eyes too, they kind of kick into life, and I can see that she wants the dream. And I know that I can make it happen. For her. And for us.

I’ve booked the tickets for Christmas Eve itself, to be all atmospheric-y. I’m pretty sure there’ll be cameras from RTE there when we touch down. You always see it on the night-time news, capturing the tears and the hugs from that afternoon’s reunions. Our flights have a 2 p.m. landing, which should be just perfect for a homecoming close-up. I got them from an Indian woman on the Kilburn High Road called Gaganadipika, or Pika for short. She says her name means ‘Lamp of the Sky’ which, she adds, is a bit of a hoot, considering she spends her day booking people on aeroplanes. Pika runs a student travel company above a carpet shop, which means that she can get you a cheap flight or cheap boat trip as long as you can prove that you’re in college. And if you can’t, and as long as you’re of studenty age, she’ll just whip behind the counter and stick a small piece of grey cardboard
through a huge hot metal machine and, hey presto, you’re suddenly a student with your own plasticy student card.

I made her put the School of Astral Science on my card. Although she rolled her eyes when she did it. I told her that I was studying the chakras and the Hara line, and I gave a little hopeful nod, thinking that she’d open up her arms and say, Ah yes, in my country we all study that binjy-banjy shite, here, have your flights for free. But instead she just looked at me like she was a bit bored, and told me that I could pay the total of nearly five hundred pounds in weekly instalments.

Everyone at home, of course, is thrilled by the news. Every time Mam phones Aunty Grace she asks to be put on to me and Fiona and says that we’re not going to recognise the place when we get back, and she can’t wait to see what we think of the new suite. She says that Claire and Susan have been angels since we left, and that Dad’s going grand with the cancer, and she’ll get him to write us a card when he comes down in the morning. And usually, true to her word, a couple of days later we get a note scribbled on home stationery, letting us know just how excited they’ll all be to see us at Christmas.

The stationery was Mam’s idea. She copied Maura Connell, who said it was the done thing. Maura’s cards had a shiny silver edge and curvy writing, but ours were the thrifty version, with no edges and no curvy writing, just name and address smack bang in the middle of a yellowy piece of stiffened paper. You were supposed to send them to people to thank them for inviting you to their parties and social gatherings, but Mam quickly began using them for shopping lists, cake ingredients and notes to Dad – so that if he woke up when she was at Mass he’d be able to find his way from the fridge to the cooker and know what to put where.

His notes to me and Fiona are totally different. To Fiona he writes ‘Dear Fiona …’ And to me it is, ‘Well, Shithead …’ He
has called me Shithead on paper in the past. But always for a joke, like the time I was down in Irish Summer Camp in Galway, and hating it, and in need of cheering up. It was like a private joke between him and me, and a bit rude, and just crude enough to annoy Mam something rotten, and to prove that me and him were on the same team of crude and rude boyos. But when he wrote it this time, he knew, and I knew, and he knew I knew, that it meant something different entirely. There was anger in it. And resentment. And unspoken fury at the secret cause of his collapse on the Debs morning.

After the shithead intro, he races through a rapid rundown of the girls, saying how Claire got top of her class in recorder practice, how Susan got a hairline fracture in her middle finger during the netball finals, and how Sarah and Siobhan brought up a fancy new dessert called a Viennetta for Sunday dinner last. He closes as he began, a bit hard, by saying that my mother, meaning Mam, is very much looking forward to having me back at Christmas, and that he hopes, for all our sakes, that I’m taking care of my ‘friend’ Saidhbh. His sign off is Your Father, Matt, just in case I thought it had been ghost-written by Mam or one of the girls.

Gary also sends me a card. It’s like a blank birthday card, but it has Soft Cell on the front, and a Golden Discs sticker on the back. He says that everyone in St Cormac’s has stopped talking about me by now, but that he overheard his mam chatting to my mam about how Spits McGee is holding a place for me, in next year’s 314. Gary thinks this is hilarious, and makes lots of jokes about how I’m going to be this big huge fifteen-year-old thicko sitting at the back of a class full of tiny thirteen-year-olds who’ve barely got pubes. I’ll be like Kevin Doyle, he says, who was held back for two years for being dim and then just kind of gave up trying to learn and decided to beat everyone up for lunch money instead. That is, of course, writes Gary, if you’re coming back at
all! He says that he’s watched a programme on emigration on RTE2, where they interviewed all these ancient bogmen living in the filthiest parts of London. Half of them were alkies, half of them were a bit mad and lived on their own on a diet of canned Guinness and cheese sangers, but all of them said they told themselves the same lie: I’ll be coming home soon! Every Christmas, after all the celebrating was done, and the hangovers setting in goodo, they’d turn to their nearest and dearest, just as they’re boarding the boat back to London, and promise that they’d be coming back for good, any day now. Ireland, they’d say, was in their blood. It had made them who they are, and they’d never leave its mystical shores.

I get my first postcard from O’Culigeen around this time too. I know that it’s from him the minute I see the photo. Don’t even have to read it. Just a picture of these three scary-looking fellas in the middle of the jungle with small sticks, like slim pencils, stuck through their noses, and furry hats on their heads, and necklaces that curve into tusks on their chests. They’re wearing tiny pouches around their mickeys but otherwise they’re naked and you can see everything. Typical.

Straight away, I know that it’s him, without even looking at the back. I scoop it up off the carpet and shove it into my healing bag and drop the rest of the post casually on the breakfast table. I read the message in the loo at the School of Astral Sciences, and it says that he’s been thinking of me non-stop and that we have some serious unfinished business. He signs it FOC.

It makes me feel sick on the spot. I think of
Red River
, and how O’Culigeen’s ‘unfinished business’ clearly means that, like John Wayne, he plans to fulfil his final promise and actually kill me. The postcard is his way of telling me that getting sent out to the missions in Papua New Guinea hasn’t changed a thing. And that being surrounded by a thousand naked men with mickey
pouches swinging in his face every day of the week doesn’t mean anything to him when compared to the thought of strangling me, for real this time, with his bare hands. And that I can run all I like, but thanks, no doubt, to some blabbermouth penpal from Kilcuman parish, I can’t actually hide. It’s only a matter of time, he’s telling me, before he finishes what he started way back when.

I come stumbling out of the loo, pale as a sheet, and straight into Helen Macker’s arms. She can see that I’m all over the place, but she doesn’t say a single word. Instead, she reads me. She holds me up straight, and at arm’s length, and then stands back from me a full six feet. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and just lets her lids fall open. She takes me in, reads everything, all seven chakras, all circulating auric fields, and then snaps her lids shut, like clapping the covers on her magic binoculars. I see, she says, before telling me that I should be healee for the afternoon, and let her do the heavy lifting. Then she gives me a little wink, and nudges me over to the massage bed.

Helen and I are getting on brilliantly. She’s like a friend and a teacher and a bit of a mam and a sister all rolled into one. And, as well as Fiona, and Billy from Border Town, she’s one of the best people that I know in London. I’m all excited about her, and I try to get Fiona to meet her, or at least to drop me off at the school and to have a big girlygab about the old days when it was just them two against the world. But Fiona makes up a load of excuses about being too busy with Grace’s Angels, or being too tired to make the trip all the way to Islington. Then she tells me one night, after she’s cracked open a bottle of Aunty Grace’s red wine, that it’s more than that, and that I’ll probably understand when I’m older, but that too much water has gone under each of their bridges since they were kids, too many changes in their lives to make a reunion possible. But I can pass on her love all the same, if it’ll make me feel any better.