Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (16 page)

‘They won’t. They’ll be too busy beating the tar out of me.’

‘My dad’s going to find out.’

‘How will he?’ said Davy reasonably.

‘He just will,’ stuttered Jon. ‘He’ll kill me. He’ll get me by the throat and never let go.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Davy, too lightly. ‘We’re not kids any more. The sky’s not going to fall in on us. You’re just shitting your shorts at the thought of anyone calling you a faggot, aren’t you?’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Touchy, aren’t you? It’s only a word.’

‘We’re not, anyway,’ he told Davy coldly. ‘That’s not what we are.’

The boy’s mouth crinkled with amusement. ‘Oh, so what are we then?’

‘We’re mates,’ said Jon through a clenched throat.

One coppery eyebrow went up.

‘Mates who mess around a bit.’

‘Fag-got! Fag-got!’ Davy sang the words quietly.

Jon’s hand shot out to the stereo and turned it way up to drown him out.

Next door, Michaela started banging on the wall. ‘
Jonathan!
’ she wailed.

He turned it down a little, but kept his hand on the knob. ‘Get out,’ he said.

Davy stared back at him blankly. Then he reached for his jacket and got up in one fluid movement. He looked like a scornful god. He looked like nothing could ever knock him down.

Jon avoided Davy all week. He walked home from the training sessions while Davy was still in the shower. In the back of his mind, he was preparing a contingency plan.
Deny everything. Laugh. Say the sick pervert made it all up.

Nobody else seemed to notice the two friends weren’t on speaking terms. Everyone was preoccupied with the big match on Saturday.

At night Jon gripped himself like a drowning man clinging to a spar.

Saturday came at last. The pitch was muddy and badly cut up before they even started. The other team were thugs, especially an enormous winger with a moustache. From the kickoff, Saul’s team played worse than they’d ever done before. The left back crashed into his central defender, whose nose bled all down his shirt. Jon moved like he was shackled. Whenever he had to pass the ball to Davy, it fell short or went wide by a mile. It was as if there was a shield around the red-haired boy and nothing could get through. Davy was caught offside three times in the first half. Then, when Jon pitched up a loose ball on the edge of his own penalty area, one of the other team’s forwards big-toed a fluke shot into the top right-hand corner.

‘You’re running round like blind men,’ Saul told his team at halftime, with sorrow and contempt.

By the start of the second half, the rain was falling unremittingly. The fat winger stood on Peter’s foot, and the ref never saw a thing. ‘Look,’ bawled Peter, trying to pull his shoe off to show the marks of the studs.

The other team found this hilarious. ‘Wankers! Faggots!’ crowed the fat boy.

Rage fired up Jon’s thudding heart, stoked his muscles. He would have liked to take the winger by the throat and press his thumbs in till they met vertebrae. What was it Saul always used to tell him?
No son of mine gets himself sent off for temper.
Jon made himself turn and jog away.
No son of mine
, said the voice in his head.

Naz chipped the ball high over the defence. Jon was there first, poising himself under the flight of the ball. It was going to be a beautiful header. It might even turn the match around.

‘Davy’s,’ barked Davy, jogging backwards towards Jon.

Jon kept his eyes glued to the falling ball. ‘Jon’s.’

‘It’s mine!’ Davy repeated, at his elbow, crowding him.

‘Fuck off!’ He didn’t look. He shouldered Davy away, harder than he meant to. Then all of a sudden Jon knew how it was going to go. He wasn’t ready to meet the ball; he didn’t believe he could do it. He lost his balance, and the ball came down on the side of his head and crushed him into the mud.

Jon had whiplash.

Saul came home from the next training session and said Davy was off the team.

‘You cunt,’ said Jon.

His father stared, slack-jawed. Michaela’s fork froze halfway to her mouth. ‘Jonathan!’ appealed their mother.

Above his foam whiplash collar, Jon could feel his face burn. But he opened his mouth and it all spilled out. ‘You’re not a coach, you’re a drill sergeant. You picked Davy to bully because you knew he’s going to be a better player than you ever were. And now you’ve kicked him off the team just to prove you can. So much for team-fucking-spirit!’

‘Jonathan.’ His father’s face was dark, unreadable. ‘It was the lad who dropped out. He’s quit the team and he’s not coming back.’

One afternoon at the end of a fortnight, Davy came round. Jon was on his own in the living room, watching an old France ’98 video of England versus Argentina. He thought Davy looked different: baggy-eyed, older somehow.

Davy stared at the television. ‘Has Owen scored yet?’

‘Ages ago. They’re nearly at penalties.’ Jon kept his eyes on the screen.

Davy dropped his bag by the sofa but didn’t sit down, didn’t take his jacket off. In silence they watched the agonizing shootout.

When it was over, Jon hit rewind. ‘If Beckham hadn’t got himself sent off, we’d have demolished them,’ he remarked.

‘In your dreams,’ said Davy. They watched the flickering figures. After a long minute he added, ‘I’ve been meaning to come round, actually, to say, you know, sorry and all that.’

‘It’s nothing much, just a bit of whiplash,’ said Jon, deliberately obtuse. He put his hand to his neck, but his fingers were blocked by the foam collar.

‘You’ll get over it. No bother.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jon bleakly. ‘So,’ he added, not looking at Davy, ‘did you talk to your parents?’

‘Yeah.’ The syllable was flat. ‘Don’t worry, your name didn’t come up.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Forget it,’ interrupted Davy softly. He was staring at the video as it rewound; a green square covered in little frenzied figures who ran backwards, fleeing from the ball.

That subject seemed closed. ‘I hear you’re not playing, these days,’ said Jon.

‘That’s right,’ said Davy, more briskly. ‘Thought I should get down to the books for a while, before my A-Levels.’

Jon stared at him.

‘I’m off to college next September, touch wood.’ Davy rapped on the coffee table. ‘I’ve already got an offer of a place in Law at Lancaster, but I’ll need two Bs and an A.’

Law? Jon nodded, then winced as his neck twinged. So much he’d never known about Davy, never thought to ask. ‘You could sign up again in the summer, though, after your exams, couldn’t you?’ he asked, as neutrally as he could.

There was a long second’s pause before Davy shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, Jon-boy.’

So that was it, Jon registered. Not a proper ending. More like a match called off because of a hailstorm or because the star player just walked off the pitch.

‘I mean, I’ll miss it, but when it comes down to it, it’s only a game, eh? … Win or lose,’ Davy added after a moment.

Jon couldn’t speak. His eyes were wet, blinded.

Davy picked up his bag. Then he did something strange. He swung down and kissed Jon on the lips, for the first time, on his way out the door.

‘Listen,’ I said, my voice rasping, ‘I want to take you home but Dublin’s a hundred miles away.’

Lee looked down at her square hands. I couldn’t believe she’d only spent seventeen years on this planet.

‘Where’re you staying?’ I asked.

‘Youth hostel.’

I mouthed a curse at the beer-stained carpet. ‘I’ve no room booked in Galway and it’s probably too late to get one. I was planning to drive back tonight. I have to be at the office by nine tomorrow.’

The last of the conference goers walked past just then, and one or two nodded at me; the sweat of the
céilí
was drying on their cheeks.

When I looked back, Lee was grinning like she’d just won the lottery. ‘So is it comfortable in the back of your van then, Sylvia?’

I stared at her. It was not the first time I had been asked that question, but I had thought that the last time would be the last. She was exactly half my age, I reminded myself. She wasn’t even an adult, legally. ‘As backs of vans go, yes, very comfortable.’

The reason I got into\ that van was a poem.

I’d first heard Sylvia Dwyer on a CD of contemporary poetry in Irish. I’d borrowed it from the library to help me revise for the Leaving Cert that would get me out of convent school. Deirdre had just left me for a boy, so I was working hard.

Poem number five was called ‘Dh’a Theanga’. The woman’s voice had peat and smoke in it, bacon and strong tea. I hadn’t a notion what the poem was about; you needed to know how the words were spelt before you could look them up in the dictionary, and one silent consonant sounded pretty much like another to me. But I listened to the poem every night till I had to give the CD back to the library.

I asked my mother why the name sounded so familiar, and she said Sylvia must be the last of those Dwyers who’d taken over the Shanbally butchers thirty years before. I couldn’t believe she was a local. I might even have sat next to her in Mass.

But it was Cork where I met her. I’d joined the Queer Soc in the first week, before I could lose my nerve, and by midterm I was running their chocolate-and-wine evenings. Sylvia Dwyer, down from Dublin for a weekend, was introduced all round by an ex of hers who taught in the French department. I was startled to learn that the poet was one of us – a ‘colleen’, as a friend of mine used to say. Her smooth bob and silver-grey suit were intimidating as hell. I couldn’t think of a word to say. I poured her plonk from a box and put the bowl of chocolate-covered peanuts by her elbow.

After that I smiled at her in Mass once when I was home in Shanbally for the weekend. Sylvia nodded back, very minimally. Maybe she wasn’t sure where she knew me from. Maybe she was praying. Maybe she was a bitch.

Of course I had heard of Lee Maloney in Shanbally. The whole town had heard of her, the year the girl appeared at Mass with a Sinéad O’Connor head shave. I listened in on a euphemistic conversation about her in the post office queue but contributed nothing to it. My reputation was a clean slate in Shanbally, and none of my poems had gendered pronouns.

When I was introduced to the girl in Cork she was barely civil. But her chin had a curve you needed to fit your hand to, and her hair looked seven days old.

On one of my rare weekends at home, who should I see on the way down from Communion but Lee Maloney, full of nods and smiles. Without turning my head I could sense my mother stiffen. In the car park afterwards she asked, ‘How do you come to know that Maloney girl?’

I considered denying it, claiming it was a case of mistaken identity, then I said, ‘I think she might have been at a reading I gave once.’

‘She’s a worry to her mother,’ said mine.

It must have been after I saw Sylvia Dwyer’s name on a flyer under the title DHÁ THEANGA/TWO TONGUES: A CONFERENCE ON BILINGUALISM IN IRELAND TODAY that my subconscious developed a passionate nostalgia for the language my forebears got whipped for. So I skived off my Saturday lecture to get the bus to Galway. But only when I saw her walk into that lecture theatre in her long brown leather coat, with a new streak of white across her black fringe, did I realize why I’d sat four hours on a bus to get there.

Some days I have more nerve than others. I flirted with Sylvia all that day, in the quarter hours between papers and forums and plenary sessions that meant equally little to me whether they were in Irish or English. I asked her questions and nodded before the answers had started. I told her about Deirdre, just so she wouldn’t think I was a virgin. ‘She left me for a boy with no earlobes,’ I said carelessly.

‘Been there,’ said Sylvia.

Mostly, though, I kept my mouth shut and my head down and my
eyes shiny. I suspected I was being embarrassingly obvious, but a one-day conference didn’t leave enough time for subtlety.

Sylvia made me guess how old she was, and I said, ‘Thirty?’ though I knew from the programme note that she was thirty-four. She said if by any miracle she had saved enough money by the age of forty, she was going to get plastic surgery on the bags under her eyes.

I played the cheeky young thing and the baby dyke and the strong silent type who had drunk too much wine. And till halfway through the evening I didn’t think I was getting anywhere. What would a woman like Sylvia Dwyer want with a blank page like me?

For a second in that Galway lecture hall I didn’t recognize Lee Maloney, because she was so out of context among the bearded journalists and wool-skirted teachers. Then my memory claimed her face. The girl was looking at me like the sun had just risen, and then she stared at her feet, which was even more of a giveaway. I stood up straighter and shifted my briefcase to my other hand.

The conference, which I had expected to be about broadening my education and licking up to small Irish publishers, began to take on a momentum of its own. It was nothing I had planned, nothing I could stop. I watched the side of Lee’s jaw right through a lecture called ‘Scottish Loan-Words in Donegal Fishing Communities’. She was so cute I felt sick.

What was most unsettling was that I couldn’t tell who was chatting up whom. It was a battle made up of feints and retreats. As we sipped our coffee, for instance, I murmured something faintly suggestive about hot liquids, then panicked and changed the subject. As we crowded back into the hall, I thought it was Lee’s hand that guided my elbow for a few seconds, but she was staring forward so blankly I decided it must have been somebody else.

Over dinner – a noisy affair in the cafeteria – Lee sat across the table from me and burnt her tongue on the apple crumble. I poured her a glass of water and didn’t give her a chance to talk to anyone but me. At this point we were an island of English in a sea of Irish.

The conversation happened to turn (as it does) to relationships and how neither of us could see the point in casual sex, because not only was it unlikely to be much good but it fucked up friendships or broke hearts. Sleeping with someone you hardly knew, I heard myself pronouncing in my world-weariest voice, was like singing a song without knowing the words. I told her that when she was my age she would feel the same way, and she said, Oh, she did already.

My eyes dwelt on the apple crumble disappearing, spoon by spoon, between Lee’s absentminded lips. I listened to the opinions spilling out of my mouth and wondered who I was kidding.

By the time it came to the poetry reading that was meant to bring the conference to a lyrical climax, I was too tired to waste time. I reached into my folder for the only way I know to say what I really mean.

Now, the word in Cork had been that Sylvia Dwyer was deep in the closet, which I’d thought was a bit pathetic but only to be expected. However.

At the end of her reading, after she’d done a few about nature and a few about politics and a few I couldn’t follow, she rummaged round in her folder. ‘This poem gave its name to this conference,’ she said, ‘but that’s not why I’ve chosen it.’ She read it through in Irish first; I let the familiar vowels caress my ears. Her voice was even better live than on the CD from the library. And then she turned slightly in her seat, and, after muttering, ‘Hope it translates,’ she read it straight at me.

The reason I was going to go ahead and do what I’d bored all my friends with saying I’d never do again was that poem.

I was watching the girl as I read ‘Dhá Theanga’ straight to her, aiming over the weary heads of the crowd of conference goers. I didn’t look at anyone else but Lee Maloney, not at a single one of the jealous poets or Gaelgóir purists or smirking gossips, in case I might lose my nerve. After the first line, when her eyes fell for a second, Lee looked right back at me. She was leaning her cheek on her hand. It was a smooth hand, blunt at the tips. I knew the poem off by heart, but tonight I had to look down for safety every few lines.

And then she glanced away, out the darkening window, and I suddenly doubted that I was getting anywhere. What would Lee Maloney, seventeen last May, want with a scribbled jotter like me?

I sat in that smoky hall with my face half hidden behind my hand, excitement and embarrassment spiralling up my spine. I reminded myself that Sylvia Dwyer must have written that poem years ago, for some other woman in some other town. Not counting how many other women she might have read it to. It was probably an old trick of hers. But all this couldn’t explain away the fact that it was me Sylvia was reading it to tonight in Galway. In front of all these people, not caring who saw or what they might think when they followed the line of her eyes. I dug my jaw into my palm for anchorage, and my eyes locked back onto Sylvia’s. I decided that every poem was made new in the reading.

If this was going to happen, I thought, as I folded the papers away in my briefcase during the brief rainfall of applause, it was happening because we were not in Dublin surrounded by my friends and work life, nor in Cork cluttered up with Lee’s, nor above all in Shanbally where she was born in the year I left for college. Neither of us knew anything at all about Galway.

If this was going to happen, I thought, many hours later as the cleaners urged Sylvia and me out of the hall, it was happening because of some moment that had pushed us over an invisible line. But which moment? It could have been when we were shivering on the floor waiting for the end-of-conference
céilí
band to start up, and Sylvia draped her leather coat round her shoulders and tucked me under it for a minute, the sheepskin lining soft against my cheek, the weight of her elbow on my shoulder. Or later when I was dancing like a berserker in my vest, and she drew the back of her hand down my arm and said, ‘Aren’t you the damp thing.’ Or maybe the deciding moment was when the fan had stopped working and we stood at the bar waiting for drinks, my smoking hips armouring hers, and I blew behind her hot ear until the curtain of hair lifted up and I could see the dark of her neck.

Blame it on the heat. We swung so long in the
céilí
that the whole line went askew. Lee took off all her layers except one black vest that clung to her small breasts. We shared a glass of iced water and I offered Lee the last splash from my mouth, but she danced around me and laughed and wouldn’t take it. Up on the balcony over the dance floor, I sat on the edge and leaned out to see the whirling scene. Lee fitted her hand around my thigh, weighing it down. ‘You protecting me from falling?’ I asked. My voice was meant to be sardonic, but it came out more like breathless.

‘That’s right,’ she said.

Held in that position, my leg very soon began to tremble, but I willed it to stay still, hoping Lee would not feel the spasm, praying she would not move her hand away.

Blame it on the dancing. They must have got a late licence for the bar, or maybe Galway people always danced half the night. The music made our bones move in tandem and our legs shake. I tried to take the last bit of water from Sylvia’s mouth, but I was so giddy I couldn’t aim right and kept lurching against her collarbone and laughing at my own helplessness.

‘Thought you were meant to be in the closet,’ I shouted in her ear at one point, and Sylvia smiled with her eyes shut and said something I couldn’t hear, and I said, ‘What?’ and she said, ‘Not tonight.’

So at the end of the evening we had no place to go and it didn’t matter. We had written our phone numbers on sodden beermats and exchanged them. We agreed that we’d go for a drive. When we got into her white van on the curb littered with weak-kneed
céilí
dancers, something came on the radio, an old song by Clannad or one of that crowd. Sylvia started up the engine and began to sing along with the chorus, her hoarse whisper catching every second or third word. She leaned over to fasten her seat belt and crooned a phrase into my ear. I didn’t
understand it – something about
‘bóthar,’
or was it
‘máthar’
? – but it made my face go hot anyway.

‘Where are we heading?’ I said at last, as the hedges began to narrow to either side of the white van.

Sylvia frowned into the darkness. ‘Cashelagen, was that the name of it? Quiet spot, I seem to remember, beside a castle.’

After another ten minutes, during which we didn’t meet a single other car, I realized that we were lost, completely tangled in the little roads leading into Connemara. And half of me didn’t care. Half of me was quite content to bump along these lanes to the strains of late-night easy listening, watching Sylvia Dwyer’s sculpted profile out the corner of my right eye. But the other half of me wanted to stretch my boot across and stamp on the brake, then climb over the gear stick to get at her.