The Shelter of Neighbours (25 page)

I had three books, and two jigsaws, and a dress-up cardboard doll with dozens of paper dresses to be cut out and affixed to her flat body with tabs. Also, a small Irish colleen doll and a pair of leopard-skin gloves. All things I craved and had at some stage, coming up to Christmas, asked for. A good haul. But not half as good as Orla's, it seemed to me now.

There wasn't time to dwell on the problem, though, once we all rose and the great day got under way. We had to get dressed up in our Christmas clothes and go to Mass, and then eat the big Christmas breakfast of grapefruit and sausages and rashers and pudding. Tony and his wife, Marcella, called in from next door and had a glass of sherry with my mother and father. Then there was the huge preparation for dinner, and then dinner itself, which lasted for hours.

The washing-up.

At about five, when the day was slipping away, dismayingly, unbelievably fast, as it did every year, we retired to the dining room. Like everything else, this was part of our ritual. We would sit by the fire there and play one of the board games one of us had got from Santy. This year the game was Cluedo.

Cluedo was a very good game, which I enjoyed tremendously. The interesting characters, Miss Scarlett and Colonel Mustard, the locations – the Library, the Conservatory and the Ballroom – and, above all, the tiny, realistically modelled weapons, elevated it to a different plane from other, less personable board games: it approached the condition of theatre, something we all adored. But after two games, my mother and father wanted to take a break – he fell asleep in his armchair and my mother played some baby game with our little brother who was getting cranky. Orla, who had tried out her bike before dinner and abandoned it in the front room, wanted to have a go of my paper doll. Reluctantly – because once you cut out the dresses, the joy of the paper doll is much diminished – I decided to let her. I instructed her not to cut out more than three outfits, leaving ten for me.

As soon as she started snipping I slipped out.

There were fires in several rooms of the house for Christmas Day – the dining room, the bedrooms. In the kitchen we always had the Aga. But the front room wasn't heated, nor was the hall. It was freezing out there. It felt colder than it would out of doors.

Never mind.

I got the bike out of the front room, wheeled it to the end of the hall, and sat on the saddle.

Down I fell, just the way I fell off Imelda Fogarty's bike.

But it was a small bike and there wasn't far to fall. Also, I fell on the linoleum of our hall, not the rough surface of the road outside.

I tried again immediately.

Again.

Again.

I'd no idea how you did it. And nobody had ever explained how. You just do it, they would say. You just do it.

You have to find out for yourself.

I tried, I tried, I kept falling off.

On what must have been the twentieth attempt, I leaned sideways and started moving. I stayed on for about four cycles of the wheels, for a few yards.

The hall was one of those narrow, long halls you get in the Victorian houses. (It seemed long to me, anyway.) It wasn't a bad place to learn to cycle; it looked like a shiny brown road, but it was indoors and had walls close by to grab onto, so that gave one confidence. I kept at it and after about an hour – it could have been five; it could have been weeks because I was in a zone where time stood still, even as I concentrated fiercely on learning to move – I could cycle the length of the hall.

At about eight o'clock, time for our Christmas tea, my mother came out, yawning, to go down to the kitchen and put the mince pies in the oven.

‘What are you doing out here in the cold, alannah?' she said. She didn't give out to me for being on the bike.

‘I can ride a two-wheeler!' I might have been declaring that I'd landed on the moon.

I gave a demonstration. By now I could go the full length of the hall, turn around and come back again. Actually, as I knew, I could go anywhere. I could cycle.

They all came out then, to see if it was true.

‘It's not her bike,' Orla said. But she was tired and sated with Christmas, and she didn't really care. She preferred the doll to the bike, anyway.

My father had woken up. He laughed and said, ‘She can do it, all right.' He seemed to appreciate my sense of triumph more than my mother or Orla did.

He asked me to demonstrate again, which I did, gladly. Then he opened the hall door.

Outside it was dark, but the street lamp on the other side of the road glowed, and there were lights in most of the windows. Janet's window was lit up magically by her Christmas tree, the only one on the street; they were just coming into fashion. Snow was falling. Big flakes drifted down through the black air like petals, and melted as they touched the ground.

My father jerked his head in a gesture that meant, have a go outside.

‘She'll catch her death a' cold,' my mother said. She was still standing in the door of the dining room, catching a bit of the heat from the fire in there.

I went out before she could prevent me, not stopping to put on a coat. It wasn't much colder outside than in the hall, anyway. Up I hopped on the two-wheeler that was like a motorbike and down the road I sailed, like a seagull in the foam of the ocean, or an eagle in the sky on a summer's day, the soft white snow falling on my bare head and Christmas frock.

It's easy to ride a bike, everyone says. And that is true. It's a knack, like swimming – or like standing erect on your two legs and walking on the face of this earth. All a question of confidence, and trust. Trust in yourself, and trust in the way the physical world works. You have to know that you can keep your balance, and you have to be certain of that from the second you mount the bicycle and lean forward and start pedalling. He who hesitates falls off.

‘Once you learn, you never forget,' my father said.

That's true, too.

My sister asked me how to do it. I couldn't explain. ‘You just do it,' I said, as Imelda Fogarty had said to me. ‘It's cinchy.' She learned anyway, of course, but I never noticed when. Maybe you never do notice these milestones, which are among the more important in the greater scheme of life, except when you pass them yourself.

U-turns

As a reward for getting the Corporation scholarship (which wasn't all that hard to get, if you were poor, because it was means tested), my mother bought me a real two-wheeler. It was not new. We bought it from our cousin Bernadette, who had used the bike to get from her bedsitter to the box factory in Rathmines, where she worked in the office, doing the books. Bernadette didn't need a bike any more because she'd just got married. Her husband was head foreman in the factory. ‘She'll soon be driving her own car, wait and see,' my mother said. She was pleased, because she liked Bernadette and was glad she'd done well for herself. It was my mother the Tiger's ambition that all her younger relatives should end up richer and hence happier than all her older relatives. Her own mother had been a dairymaid who died of tuberculosis of the spine four years after her marriage. Her grandparents had been farm hands who could neither read nor write. My mother was planning that I and my sister should get the Leaving, and everything else, she believed, would follow on from that: new cars, semi-detached houses in the suburbs, pensions. Husbands, she didn't seem so interested in, but if they came with the prerequisite house and car, which Bernadette's did, they were to be welcomed.

The bike was pretty – red with white mudguards, a wicker basket in front, and, on the handlebar, a gleaming silver bell engraved with a schooner in full rig. The saddle was a padded white one, soft on the bum. I would need the basket, because I planned to cycle to school.

I was going to secondary in Ballsbridge, Marymount, an ordinary sort of school, whereas nearly everyone from my primary was going to St Bridget's, a famous all-Irish school on the north side of town. And why was I going to Marymount? Because it was nearer home, because the fees were lower, and because I had a half-scholarship there, as well as the Corporation scholarship, so we'd have a bit of money left over from that for extras, of which there were an enormous number. The uniform alone had cost a fortune, coming from Brown Thomas, a shop we'd never set foot in before. (We seldom even went down Grafton Street. Our shopping was done on Camden Street and South Great Georges Street, which were much less posh.) And then there were lots of little things. A divided skirt for gym, hockey boots, a hockey stick, a tennis racquet – all the things girls in those days needed for school, a long list of very expensive and mostly ugly things to wear and hit balls with.

Now I had the bike I would save money on bus fares, I pointed out to my mother. Somehow she did not seem to understand what a great saving would be involved. But it was eight pence a day at least – thruppence to and from school, and tuppence for the return journey at lunch time, when the fare for schoolchildren going home for their lunch was a penny. ‘That's more than half-a-crown a week we'll save,' I said. I chatted a lot to my mother, about everything. ‘That's really quite good, isn't it?'

‘Yes, alannah,' she said. She looked and sounded drained, and I knew that the whole secondary school project was becoming too much for her before I'd even started. Nobody had ever gone to secondary school in our family before. I mean, not in my immediate family, where I was the eldest, and naturally the first to go, but in the entire family going back to the beginnings of time. They'd all finished school at fourteen, the ones who went at all – which were, my grandparents, born around 1890, and their parents, born around 1865, but not their parents born around the time of the Famine, before there were any schools in Ireland. (You wonder what children actually did all day, when normal children go to school. Just played around until they were old enough to work. Hard to imagine.) Anyway, all this meant that going to secondary was a big step. A small step for me and a giant leap for my family, a jump into, as my mother would have hoped, a new socio-economic milieu. She wanted me to get a good job and be well off, not like her, who had to scrimp and save all her life. Education was the way to riches. And that was the point of it. But the path to riches was proving too costly and impoverishing. And as with all investments, there was risk involved. She knew, I guess, that interest rates could fall as well as rise, and that if the worst came to the worst, even her capital would go. (Though she must have known there wasn't much fear of that, given my general record as a studious and docile child.)

I didn't cycle to school the first day. Togged out in my stiff navy tunic and snowy blouse, my tie and blue blazer and matching beret, I took the number 18 bus from the stop under the chestnut trees around the corner from our road. I went up the stairs at the back of the bus, planning to sit at the very front, but there were three girls in the blue blazers and berets there already. Naturally, I sat as far away from them as I could, even though there was nothing I longed for more than their friendship. There was another girl, from the next road to ours, on the bus, too. I knew her by name and to see. Yvette.

Yvette was one of those girls who was so beautiful, even as a tiny child, that she had acquired a special status, not exactly a celebrity status, but the status of a precious object, maybe like an icon or a work of art, in the neighbourhood. Nobody expected anything of her. She didn't need to be well behaved, or clever, or to help around the house. (Though she was perfectly competent at all these things.) It was enough for her simply to exist. The only child of a widow, who had an office job, her hair was perfectly blond, at a time when ‘fair' meant a sort of light brown. (Mine was black, which I did not appreciate one bit. Later, I got to referring to it as chestnut.) She had the face of a big china doll, the kind of doll that we all coveted before Sindy and Barbie came along. Usually, Yvette was dressed in pastel frocks, pink or mint or pale lemon, so it was a shock to see her in the navy tunic and blazer of a peculiar shade of blue, neither light nor dark. She looked lovely in it, of course. The stern design – pleated skirt, narrow waistband, baggy V-necked bodice designed to accommodate a bust in a state of gradual and inexorable expansion – looked chic on her. The beret nestled in her blond curls like a bluebird in a golden nest. Still, it was a shock to see her in the same uniform that I was wearing (hers fitted properly, which helped; it's not easy to look chic in a uniform that is four sizes too big, like mine and most people's). It was awe-inspiring to think that she was embarking on the self-same adventure. I wondered if I would actually get to know her. It would be like becoming acquainted with Shirley Temple.

But getting to know her wouldn't be easy, because the next day I didn't take the bus, but started going to school on my new bicycle.

My mother, it turned out, was worried about that. Her Tiger ambition deserted her. Faced with saying goodbye to me as I set off on my bike, she became an ordinary fussy pussy-cat of a mother.

‘Be very careful now,' she said anxiously, as she did my plaits for me. I still couldn't do them properly myself. Her fingers flicked them into shape swiftly and expertly, the way they did everything. There was literally not a hair out of place when she snapped the elastic bands around the ends of the braids, and there wouldn't be, until she released them again next morning. In fact, I could have kept my hair in my mother's plaits for my whole life without bothering to redo them, so perfect and tight was her handiwork. ‘Watch out at the traffic lights and when you're turning corners. Make sure to look over your shoulder.'

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,' I said, tossing my horsewhip hair into her face.

My mother had been fostered out as a child to an old aunt and uncle in Wexford. They were not even her blood relatives, but the brother and sister of her stepmother. Her mother had died when she was three, and after a few years, her father married again. Annie. Granny. My mother loved her. Granny had been a cook for a Big House and could cook delicious puddings and bake a perfect apple pie, a rich fruit cake. In all her ways she was ladylike and meticulous. We had her wedding photograph, a big one that had been doctored to resemble an oil painting, over our dining-room table. But even though she loved her, Granny sent my mother down to Wexford to be company for these old people. Ben and Bea.