The Fall Girl (6 page)

My mother shouts at me to stay quiet.

‘Sorry.'

‘Sorry,' she squawks, mimicking me, I think. She's staring at me with queer eyes.

Careful not to make any more noise, I pull out a stool from underneath the kitchen table, sit down and pour some cornflakes into a bowl. My mother is sitting opposite me polishing my dancing pumps with short, swift swipes of the brush. I do my best to eat in silence, allowing the flakes to go soggy in the milk before spooning them into my mouth. All the while, I'm wondering where my father is.

‘Don't forget,' she says, putting the shoebrush and tin of polish back into the cupboard. ‘Shoulders back, chin up, toes out-turned and no raising the foot above the knee.'

‘Yeah, OK.'

‘Yes, OK, not yeah –'

‘Yes, OK.'

‘The traditional way is the best way. That's why it's called Traditional Irish Dancing. I don't like that modern version of it that they're at nowadays. All that kicking and leaping about like jinnets. It ill-becomes any young lassie to be throwing her legs in the air like … like … like a good-time girl. Without a modicum of modesty.'

My father arrives back from wherever he's been, whistling. It's not a tuneful happy whistle.

We drive to Moynehill, where the
Feis
is taking place, only my mother's odd cutting remark perforating the brutal silence.

‘I told you we should have left earlier,' she says when we arrive at the car park and find it full.

I'm sitting directly behind her, staring at the back of her head, her lacquered mesh of mousy strands glistening and prickly. The tips of my fingers are tingling with vicious desire. The only thing stopping me from digging my nails into her brambly scalp is that damned Fourth Commandment and the serious consequences of breaking it.

My father turns around and looks out of the back window to reverse the car. He hasn't responded to her niggling remarks, but his face bears all the signs of exasperation.

‘Don't worry, Daddy,' I say, ‘we've loads of time.'

‘Indeed I know that, love,' he says. ‘It's just that some people like to make a mountain out of a molehill.'

‘While others,' my mother screeches, ‘insist on making a molehill out of a mountain.'

I hate their angry tones and the way they can't look at each other.

Inside the hall, my mother takes a tight, bossy grip of my hand and hurries me through the audience towards the side of the stage. I can hear a musician tuning his fiddle from behind the moss-coloured velvet curtains.

‘I'm afraid,' Miss Jackson says, ‘I can't allow the parents backstage, Rita. It's chock-a-block back there.'

Unimpressed, my mother mumbles something about poor organization, then stands stubbornly and intrusively at the top of the stage steps, straightening my Celtic brooches and flicking specks of dust off my shawl. No one can pass up or down the steps.

Eventually, one of several women jammed in the queue cranes her neck over the other heads and yells, ‘Oh, take your time, why don't you, missus?'

‘Honestly, the ignorance of some people,' my mother retorts before
excuse me, excuse me
-ing her way back down the steps with stiff-necked loftiness.

Lesley is already in the back room when I get there. My God, her dress! It's dark red, with a full skirt that hangs just above her knees. There's a white crocheted band around the neck and cuffs. Intricate Celtic designs of green, white and
gold adorn the bodice, skirt and matching shawl. Both dress and shawl have a golden lining.

‘What do you think?' she asks, twirling.

‘I love it.'

‘You can have a lend of it, if you like.'

‘But you're wearing it.'

‘I'll tell you what,' she says. ‘When Miss Jackson lines us up to give us our competitor numbers, you go first and I'll go last. That way, we won't be dancing on stage together and I'll have time to change back into this,' she touches her dress, ‘whenever you're finished.'

I look down at my own dress. Its long, pleated skirt is hanging around my waist like a heavy curtain.

‘Oh God!'

‘I know,' Lesley says. ‘It's desperate hicky.'

After we swap dresses in the toilets, I stand in front of the mirror staring at my reflection, feeling just about as startled as the ugly duckling had when he saw the image of a swan looking back at him from the shimmering water.

Lesley starts pulling down her gold-coloured panties.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Look,' she says, holding up the heavy pleats over her waist. ‘I've two pairs on. You'll need to wear these gold ones so that the audience won't be able to see your other knickers.' She hands them to me. ‘Arse of gold, that's what my brother Keith calls me when I wear them.'

‘Janey Mac, knickers and all; my mother's gonna kill me.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know. I just think she will.'

‘Sure, she'll not even twig it's you.'

‘What if she does?'

‘Here,' she says, standing behind me and undoing my plaits,
‘I'll put your hair in a bun and she'll surely not know you … silly old bag.'

Girls who pass in and out to go to the toilet giggle and point at us as Lesley bunches my hair into a ponytail and starts twirling it around and tying it down with hairclips she's pulling one by one from her own bun.

‘There,' she says. ‘Now shake your head to make sure the bun won't fall out while you're dancing. Like this.' She shakes her head wildly, laughing.

Even in my dress, Lesley looks happy.

When I shake my head, I hear clips falling on to the floor. And when I stop, Lesley tells me the bun looks like a daddy-long-legs.

Miss Jackson comes in, complaining that she's been looking all over for me.

‘What in the name of God are ye at?' she says. ‘Why aren't you wearing your own costume? And what kind of hairstyle is that?'

‘Will you fix her bun?' Lesley asks. ‘Pleeease.'

‘There isn't enough time. She's on in a minute.'

‘Ah, go on. It'll only take a minute.'

She calls Lesley a pushy article and tells her to pick the clips off the floor. Quickly.

Fixing a bun is no problem for Miss Jackson. I've never seen her own hair styled any other way.

‘Doesn't she look lovely?' Lesley says about me.

‘A picture,' Miss Jackson says, talking out through the clips she's holding between her puckered lips, ‘though I dread to think how her mother's going to react.'

Bun in place, I hurry out to the stage and stand facing the audience, two other dancers to my right. The compère is calling for silence.

‘Thank you, thank you,' she says. ‘Next we have the first three competitors of the under-ten reel, as you can see, from three different schools of dancing – the Jackson …'

My right calf is wobbling. I try to steady it by standing with my legs together, flat-footed. But I can't stay like that. In a few moments, the music will start and I will have to dance. My heart is battering against my chest, the rapid rhythm throbbing in my ears, like the beat of the bodhrán. Inside my head, I pray for the stage floor to melt underneath my feet and swallow me, like quicksand.

‘Good luck, Frances.'

I turn and see Lesley waving at me from the wings, hands up, fingers crossed, egging me on. And then the music plays and somehow my right leg is stretched out in front of me, straight as a fiddler's bow.

The memory I have of performing the reel is not of how I dance, but of how I feel.

Nothing exists but me and the reel – a whistling wind at my back, chasing me, pushing me forward, encircling me, trying playfully to trap me. And no matter how much I try to sidestep it, or hop out of its way, or unravel myself from it, or stamp my feet in mocking defiance, it is still at my tail, controlling me, charming me. As I skip and pirouette, my skirt rises and falls, like flapping wings, lifting me. Yes! That's how I feel – lifted … unreachable … free.

And then the music stops and I'm conscious again of the solid floor beneath my feet, the stage, the other dancers, the musicians, the adjudicators, Lesley in the wings, Aunty Lily watching over me and, somewhere among the applauding audience, my fuming mother.

Or perhaps not, I think, when I see the look of pride on Miss Jackson's face.

‘Terrific, Frances,' she says. ‘Absolutely terrific.'

Then she starts lining up the next three competitors.

Lesley and I hurry back to the toilets to swap costumes. As we stand facing each other, giggling our way back into our rightful dresses, our slender limbs covered in goose-pimples, I feel warmer than I've ever felt before.

‘Frances. Frances, love,' Miss Jackson says, coming in the door. ‘Your mother wants you. She's not very happy, I'm afraid. She's taking you home.' Her voice is trembling, the way my father's does when he's arguing with my mother.

‘Why? What did she do?' Lesley asks.

‘She didn't say. But she's probably annoyed over ye swapping your costumes. You'd better hurry, love,' she says touching my shoulder, ‘before she causes a scene out there.'

‘My dress was lovely on her,' Lesley says.

‘I know that, Lesley. But obviously that's not how she sees it.'

I'm standing in front of the mirror, back in my own dress. Raising my eyes, I look up at my reflection and think how much I hate being me. Lesley is almost in tears, saying that they need me for the set dancing, that I can't go home. Miss Jackson tells her to keep quiet. I have to go and that's that.

‘But she's done nothing bad,' Lesley says, resting her head on my shoulder.

‘I was a good-time girl,' I say, now deeply regretting my foolhardiness.

‘What do you mean by a good-time girl?' Miss Jackson is looking at me anxiously.

‘I had a good time … danced my own way, not
her
way. She's gonna kill me.'

‘However your mother feels, love, you're a good child. The best. You –'

A girl shouts in the door that Frances Fall's mother wants her RIGHT NOW.

‘Look,' Miss Jackson says, hand on my shoulder, ‘go home and I'll give your mother a ring tomorrow. There'll be plenty of other
Feiseanna
.'

When I say goodbye to Lesley, she throws her arms around my neck and kisses my cheek. Then she hurries out on to the stage, where her number is being called for the third and final time.

My dress feels like a heavy sack as I trudge my way out to the side steps, where I find my mother standing at the bottom with a face like thunder.

‘Home,' she says. ‘Now.'

Stepping out in front of her, I hurry down the hall towards the exit, her menacing footsteps catching up behind me.

My father is already in the car, weary-faced, with the engine running. Not a word is spoken until we reach Castleowen and head out the Crosslea road. Suddenly I feel terrified.

‘I'm sorry, Daddy,' I whimper, hoping to find refuge in his parental desire to protect me. ‘I'm really sorry.'

‘You shouldn't have disobeyed your –'

‘You stay out of it,' my mother shrieks.

‘Between youse be it so,' my father says resignedly, and now I want to cry.

He doesn't even come into the house. He needs a walk, he says, to clear his head.

‘Upstairs and into your bedroom.' The horrible, flat tone of her voice unnerves me.

Inside my bedroom, she orders me out of my costume and into my nightie. I feel quite sick but just do what I'm told.

Standing in my underwear, I reach over and lift the pillow to get my nightie. That's when she grabs me. Before I know
it, I'm across her knee, panties down, the patterned carpet beneath me becoming more blurred with every blow of her hand across my bottom. I try to wriggle away at first, but her left hand is pressing down firmly on my back, while her right hand does the punishing, smack after smack after smack, until the pain has numbed me and the shock has dazed me into submission. There are words coming out of her mouth – ‘Ever … ever … dare … bad … disobedient … betrayal … Judas … cheap … slut … '

Other words too. I can't hear them all with the ringing in my ears.

It's not the flesh-stinging pain that bothers me, as I lie curled up and shivering on my bed afterwards. Had I landed on my bottom in a bunch of nettles, I'd understand that the soreness would pass. It's the inner pain that lingers, like a hole in my soul.

I hear the tap running in the bathroom – my mother washing her hands of me, the dirty sinner. I feel so small, so ashamed.

There's something wrong with me; there has to be because I don't understand why what I've done is so bad, such a terrible sin. But it must be. Otherwise I wouldn't have been beaten. It's not as if she's ever hit me before. There's badness in me and my mother can see it. She's good at sniffing out badness. And why wouldn't she be, her being such a holy woman? Stations of the Cross … rosaries galore … novenas … Mass three times a week. A better woman to pray you wouldn't meet. Oh, she can sniff out the sinners all right. And maybe she's right about Lesley too, the way she showed Stephen Taylor her Cindy doll's tits and the way she sang that dirty song to Mary, the woman with the mop. And then lied about it. How can I love a girl like that? Why do I?

I don't want to get beaten again. I'll be a good girl from now on.

When it comes down to it – obedience or humiliation – obedience wins, hands down.

It's chilly tonight. I cannot sleep. Behinds my curtains, the icy moon is casting a silver beam on the front lawns. The trees that swish their golden arms during the day are still now and silent. It's a lonely picture.

All those sayings –
spare the rod, spoil the child
;
be cruel to be kind
;
for your own good
;
tough love
– was that my mother's mindset on the day of the
Feis
? Did she believe that she was doing the right thing? Was it really about discipline? Did she love me underneath it all?