The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (10 page)

In fact, as grainily printed in the following Thursday’s
Freeman’s Journal
, the photograph was hard to make out. The Eileen O’Reilly came to school with her basket of pig’s feet. Brandishing the newspaper like a shotgun, she declared, ‘Now you have it. That Darcy Swiney’s hairs is jest like the divil’s claws clutching that poor bridge to tear it up by the roots.’

The other children clustered around, nodding. ‘Claws,’ they murmured. ‘Roots.’ ‘Crubeen?’

Our hair projected from the highest points of our personal topography – it was the stage up to which any eye was drawn. By virtue of its volume, our hair staked a great claim in the space around us. Yet the Eileen O’Reilly could tell Darcy’s as Devil’s claws, and Devil’s claws it was. What of the rest of us? The clearest thing about us had become suddenly negotiable.

‘Still’ – Darcy gave the Eileen O’Reilly a poke in the face – ‘I noticed that you your great self bothered your hide to trudge three miles out of Brannockstown to see us there.’

‘Me and your da!’ shouted the Eileen O’Reilly. ‘Did you see all them men gawping at the sight of ye? Come to guess who was cursed enough to call Darcy Swiney his everlasting daughter.’

The butcher’s runt loved to make up stories about Darcy’s father. At different times, she put it about that Darcy’s da had been transported for seven years for goat-stealing and sheep-hurting, that he’d personally disseminated the fungus that had caused the potatoes and the population to rot and had then run away to America with their goods in a cart. She also said that Darcy’s father was no Phelan Swiney but a Dermody from Knockandort, or a Doody from Forristeen or a Rorke from Rostyduff or a Galbally from Crehelp or a Fahy from Corncrake’s Hollow. She had it that he was the local Fenian, Denis Downey, a mad, gun-running Catholic tailor from Baltinglass who’d fathered six on his own wife. ‘And ye’ve seen the man’s picture in the papers!’ she crowed, ‘wid a great tufty head and a wild black beard on him thick as thatch. Bound to be the Darcy Swiney da!’

I never asked her to stop, because I loved it that she dared. And her scorn was reserved for Darcy. She did not torment the rest of us. Our hedgerow lessons continued in fits and starts, depending on the Swiney Godivas’ engagements. Soon the Eileen O’Reilly and I spent less time learning, and more time talking. She told me how it was in her home, how it felt to be an only child, and yet still not much noticed except to be fed. I explained to her about my tribal allegiance to Enda and Oona, and the alliance of Berenice, Pertilly and Ida.

‘That would be explaining it,’ she nodded, ‘what I see and hear at yon window or yours. There’s no sense in all that niggling and gnashing, without. I allus thought Enda the pretty one of the twins. She knows what to do wid a ribbon anyhow.’

‘She does.’ I smiled, rose and stretched my legs. The sun’s rays hung at a guilty angle: I had to rehearse a new song.

‘And Ida?’ the Eileen O’Reilly asked. ‘I think she is no great things in many respects. But she’s a dear girl in herself all the same?’

‘A dear girl, yes.’ I smiled and waved her goodbye. ‘You would like her, if Darcy allowed it.’

‘If she could walk across a field wivout pickin’ a fight with a blade of grass,’ the Eileen O’Reilly agreed. ‘If she can’t be bashing, she jest doan feel herself, do she? She’d druther foight than breathe is what she’d druther.’

The Poulaphouca picture brought us new and bigger audiences. Darcy became a convert to photography when she saw what it could do. Now our shows were attended by policemen, priests, gombeen men, county councillors, governesses, clerks, members of working men’s clubs and prosperous farmers in their swallow-tailed coats, breeches and high-crowned hats. They paid without a murmur for what fell out of our heads; a terrible sight of money they paid for it.

Chapter 10

Hymns, old songs and hair were fine and good to open hearts and purses, but Darcy decreed that the Swiney Godivas needed special songs made to order if we were to become a ‘living sensation’, a much more profitable kind of enterprise. It fell to me to compose our ditties, with new words constructed around traditional Irish airs, snatches of dialogue, banter.

Darcy also insisted that Ida should learn to play the dusty fiddle that Phelan Swiney, Mariner, had left hanging by the back door on one of his invisible visits.

‘It takes Ida five mortal hours to memorise the words of a song,’ Darcy grumbled. ‘Let’s see if she can play dumb notes.’

Ida took to her instrument with joy, hugging it to her shoulder. The music flowed through her with a rude ease that words never managed. She drew from the violin a sound of something ancient that had poured out of the earth unfiltered by the normal decencies. The thin geese were hypnotised by her playing and I sometimes saw the Eileen O’Reilly, narrow-hipped as an Irish stoat, swaying to it outside the window, her eyes closed, and bliss on her face.

Annora allowed Ida and myself to stay home from school sometimes to work on our songs. When he could, Joe the seaweed boy took me in his cart to the library at Naas. I was fourteen now, and had exhausted Miss Finaughty’s lending shelf. To her sorrow, I had not been so avid an attender at school since I’d met with the troll on Harristown Bridge, and always made sure I walked home with a sister or two. I was happier as the mouse in the corner of the cottage, quietly nibbling on a pencil in a nest of paper.

Since what happened on Harristown Bridge, I’d withdrawn into myself. My hair was the noisiest thing about me. That hair, which had drawn the troll and danger and shame to me, felt like a betrayer that lived upon my body. Why had it fallen to me, of all the Swineys, to wear hair that looked like stabbing or a spilling of blood? A bolt of red velvet flung down? A colouring allegedly infused with melodrama and lust? I would have been more suited to the soft russet of a deer, trying to stipple herself to invisibility in the shadows of the grass. Indeed Annora often said of me that my ankles were so delicate that I trotted about on deer’s feet. And my arms in the summer would dapple with freckles like a fawn’s back.

Now I was silent as a deer – except when I conducted my secret hedge lessons with the Eileen O’Reilly. The rare times I went to school, I never raised my hand to answer a question. Miss Finaughty gazed at me with troubled eyes. I did not return her look.

My tongue was silent but my pencil was busy and bold. Darcy wanted our performances invigorated with a wild and sparkling malice now that the local press had begun to froth about the marvellous salty banter that poured out of the Swiney sisters between their songs.

Like forks of lightning, those pretty tongues. It is like being caught in a storm. See the Swiney Godivas for that excitement alone
, said one writer.
And the hair of course. The inimitable hair
.

Into my sisters’ mouths, Darcy ordered me to put words that raised passions that led to words they made up all by themselves. Fighting words. Words that flashed and glinted as the Swineys ate the heads off one another; Oona carping at Pertilly; myself shamefully teasing Ida for the romancing of her mind. Most of all, it seemed, Darcy wanted to hear Enda chant under her breath ‘Brown Bitch Heifer!’ to Berenice, and for her twin to reply, ‘I’ll choke you for a dog!’

A few heifers and dogs later, and I was imagining myself clever enough to deploy Darcy’s malfeasance against her own stormy self. I was wrong.

‘That Medusa is not me!’ shouted Darcy, for whom I had concocted the lines:

And should you meet my snaky eye

You’ll turn to stone and, sorry, die.

Pertilly replied, ‘But that is you to the bone, Darcy!’

‘It’s true, Pertilly honey,’ declared Oona.

Both earned a slap. And in revenge, Darcy selected Pertilly for the role of Medusa, reserving Lorelei for herself.

‘The Lorelei had yellow hair herself!’ protested Oona of the milk-blonde curls. ‘She sat on a rock in
River Rhine
there, luring
German
fishermen to their deaths. They are a
fair
race, those Germans. And look, Manticory’s written it that way so.’

In her bass voice, she chanted:

‘I sing and comb my golden locks

and lure men in boats onto the rocks.

Then as they perish in the water

I sing and comb and watch the slaughter.’

Darcy sneered, ‘And who is
Manticory
to decide the colour of the Lorelei’s hair?’

She poked my thigh with her hairbrush.

The audience loved pairings of our twins, who were indeed decorative as crystal bookends or twin kittens, though only if you didn’t know the sweet rottenness between them. As well as tensely perfect duets, Darcy had them perform riddles, a different one every night, to make it more interesting for the increasing number of regular customers. I was kept busy concocting them – always with the same answer, one that would make the audience call out, ‘Your hair!’

‘What is delicate as a cobweb but lives on after death?’

‘What is the material border between life and death?’

‘What is the only human thing that lasts longer than love?’

‘Your hair!’ the audiences cried. ‘The lovely lovely hair on you! Bless you for long-haired, darling angels!’

But given the twins’ spite for one another, even the brief exchanges of riddles frequently turned barbed. Whatever Berenice’s response, Enda would raise a cynical eyebrow and drawl, ‘If you say so, sister.’ Which threw a delicate but sorry doubt on whatever her twin had just uttered. Berenice could devise no adequate answer for such a subtle slur. Whenever she tried to banter back, it fell heavily.

It came to the point, one night in Kildare Town, that, when Enda supplied her, ‘If you say so, sister,’ Berenice supplied Enda with a black eye, in front of an audience stunned to silence. Enda then commenced to wail, and Oona rushed onstage and wiped the tears with her own hair, crying, ‘Oh, let’s not make
great bones
about it, shall we, Enda honey? Divil a taste you’re freckened of a little slap!’

Fortunately the audience took this speech as a punchline to the mystifying violence, and applauded. And that encouraged Pertilly to lumber onstage too with a rendition of, ‘I am sorry I made you cry, but at least your face is cleaner now,’ soothing away anyone’s niggling suspicion that what they had just seen was not choreographed comedy, but war.

The review in the
Wicklow News-Letter and County Advertiser
was admiring of our
daring physical routines
, before settling down to a long and excitable description of our hair.

The Eileen O’Reilly, who saw the show, was full of pity for Enda. She knew what a punched eye felt like, of course.

‘You make that Berry-Kneesie pay!’ she urged me, ‘next time you write her.’

We busied ourselves about our lesson. I was teaching her the use of the conditional, for which she had small aptitude. The Eileen O’Reilly had a contempt for nuance and, like Darcy herself, was generally more comfortable with what was black or white.

Nothing escaped her scrutiny and consideration. Those blue eyes on her were always watching me. Even in chapel, she watched me.

‘Why do ye not pray any more?’ she asked me now. ‘I watch your lips and ye say other words. Bad words. You take your clothes to chapel, Manticory Swiney, but not yourself.’

I was tempted to confide. The Eileen O’Reilly was black good at outrage, having rehearsed her tongue on Darcy many a time. She knew what it was to be knocked about by a man’s large hand. I could imagine her in the flower of a rant against the man on the bridge.

‘We shall have that troll trussed and flogged on Kilcullen Hill,’ she would surely shout. ‘Where is he at all for his punishing?’

But I could not bring myself to share my shame with her. I needed her to think me finer than that.

So I laughed. ‘ ’Tis true I’m not much in the way of thanking God. He has never looked in on us Swineys except that He’s laughed down His sleeve at us and sent new troubles to destroy us.’

‘True enough,’ she said. ‘Darcy being as she is, and that bold Berry-Kneesie winning the war with Enda and all.’

I nodded.

‘Should be fixed, that,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Ain’t I just after telling ye?’

Enda’s punched eye swelled and closed. The left side of her face took on the colours of putrefaction. She was for several days deaf in that ear, though not deaf enough to miss Berenice chanting ‘I’ll choke you for a dog’ at her every time she was allowed near. Enda was offstage a fortnight, causing Darcy to cancel bookings: without our much-vaunted full seven-ness, the Swiney Godivas were in danger of being nullities.

After that, the twins both had Darcy’s eye on them at all times. Now that she had seen how profitable it might be, she sought to deploy their bellicosity to best effect. Each of them was allowed one good slap in the course of the show, but strictly no improvisation. For once the extra slap, pinch or kick was inserted, no one could know where it would all end. Whenever that happened, things always got difficult, not least for the offender after the show.

‘A quiet pinch for Enda, was it?’ Darcy would tower over Berenice. ‘Would you be so condescending to my ignorance as to tell me why you felt so entitled to ruin our future profits and make an untidy spectacle of yourselves?’