The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (9 page)

Darcy announced our first show was to be two Monday evenings hence in nearby Kilcullen’s down-at-heel Ladysmildew Hall. She ensured that a snowfall of handouts lay thick about the streets the week before. She had us up all night copying them from an example she fixed to the larder door.

THE SWINEY GODIVAS

SEVEN BEAUTEOUS FLOWERS OF OLD IRELAND

In Their Very First Bloom

Songs to open your heart

Tresses and faces never to forget .
. .

Annora begged some dye from Mrs Godlin. The uniform black hid the patches on our worsted bodices. She sponged the grease and mould from our Sunday skirts with holy water. Enda, who had a natural way with these things, showed us all how to tie the black shawls in graceful folds.

Meanwhile, I pleaded with the Eileen O’Reilly not to come to our show, for I knew she’d never resist calling out some horror up at Darcy on the stage. Reluctantly, the Eileen O’Reilly agreed. ‘It would be hard for a body not to abuse Darcy Swiney and her setting herself up in all her great grandeur like a queen.’

When the day came, Annora professed herself unable to attend. ‘It is destroyed by my nerves, I am.’

She waved us off, murmuring, ‘God and Mary be with you. And the Holy Infant.’

‘Why wouldn’t they be?’ demanded Darcy.

Joe the seaweed boy jolted us in his cart towards Ladysmildew Hall. Somewhere between Harristown and Kilcullen the seven poor fatherless sisters became the Swiney Godivas, one of whom was half sick on a secret about a man on Harristown Bridge.

Chapter 9

When it was all over, our round-bellied mayor tottered up to the stage and told us, ‘But that was the grand singing intirely! It done a body’s heart good just to be hearin’ the sound of it.’

But everyone knew that what had made his knees shake so was not our voices but our hair and its long, slow tumble to the ground. We curtseyed until our knees rattled. Finally Darcy let us off the stage. We stood against the walls of the wings, panting. Only then did the audience straggle reluctantly from the Ladysmildew Hall, still looking over their shoulders.

Pertilly swept our hair back into chignons. Enda retied our drooping shawls.

When we came outside, we found Joe’s grin waiting for us. A great Irish rainbow had bloomed over all County Kildare with its fogdogs crouched right on the road back to Harristown.

My sisters tumbled joyfully into the cart. They were full to the neck of the wanting looks they’d been given.

‘Did you see the face on the mayor at the end?’ asked Oona.

Even my beloved Enda was alight with having herself eaten up by the eyes of men while she stood in her naked hair in front of them.

We were not out of Kilcullen before the twins commenced to argue as to which of them had sung out of tune.

‘Next time you’ll
both
do it properly,’ said Darcy.

Joe had to stop for Ida to vomit her bread-and-dripping in a hedge.

Holding Ida’s head gently in her hands, Berenice wiped her face with a corner of black silk shawl and soothed, ‘It shall be well, it shall be well.’

‘No it shall not,’ Ida wept, the thick tears of a nine-year-old undiluted by compromise.

I looked up at Darcy. ‘Ida does not want to do this again,’ I translated boldly. ‘And no more do I.’

‘The paper-worm Manticory doesn’t want to do it again?’ Darcy’s voice mocked mine. ‘Poor Manticory. ’Tis a pity so to vex her. Would she rather do something else to earn money then? Let me guess. Something with a man on a bridge?’

She swished one hand in front of her and one behind. ‘Now get back in the cart. Ida! Berenice!’

Oona worried, ‘What is all that about a man on a bridge, Darcy? And that’s not a nice way to be carrying on with your hand, is it, playing about your rear end like that, and for why are you crying, Manticory honey?’

I could not unburden myself even to Oona’s tenderness or in the shelter of Enda’s arm that soon encircled me as we continued on our way back to Harristown. I did not want to tell anyone what had happened on Harristown Bridge, because I did not want it to have happened at all. I could not be going on breathing with the knowledge of it in the minds of all my sisters and the pity on their faces.

I nodded to Darcy and she smiled. I had betrayed myself twofold. For Darcy had my obedience now and also the means to secure it any time she wanted it. I had dared to crunch God’s Body in the chapel, but I had seen the grave in the clover field and I had no means, hungry as I was, to devour my fear of my sister.

I was too ashamed even to tell the truth to the Eileen O’Reilly when she asked me, ‘For why are you so sorry and heavy in yourself, Manticory Swiney? How is it, and you so clever in your brains, that Darcy keeps you so black afraid?’

Unlike the coins dropped in the chapel collection plate, the Ladysmildew Hall takings were all for us. They paid the arrears for the silk shawls. They also ran to an orange and a peppermint sugar-stick for each sister, eight pounds of candles for the seashell lamp, five jars of treacle and a grand settlement of Annora’s account at the general store in Kilcullen. There was even an extra shilling each and yet another new hat for Darcy – a preposterous funereal confection of raven feathers and tortured black straw. I quietly dedicated it to Phiala the goose at the earliest possible opportunity. With my shilling, I bought a true silver locket on a black velvet ribbon. I’d coveted it for years as the store window’s dust had slowly dimmed its brightness.

There was a favourable notice in the
Wicklow News-Letter and County Advertiser
:

Seven sisters of lustrous locks and charming voices – the oldest a bare nineteen – could not fail to entertain, and frequently gave delight. As did the hair, which you’d never ask to take your eyes from.

At the next show, there were as many husbands as wives in the audience, and twice the number of shuffling boys.

‘Dregs!’ sniffed Darcy. For the finest flower of Harristown’s young men – accepted only on the production of a good-conduct letter from Father Maglinn – had long since departed for the Pope’s Irish Brigade in Italy: the remnants were not well thought of.

‘I just pray that the Eileen O’Reilly is not out there.’ Oona plaited her long fingers. ‘There isn’t a girl in twenty parishes I’d less rather see.’

Enda kissed the top of her head and stroked mine. At the thought of the butcher’s runt in the audience, Ida took a hank of hair in her mouth to suck, as she always did in moments of difficulty. As
she
always did, Darcy twitched the hair out of Ida’s mouth, gave it a good yanking, and promised a mention of it in her black book, plus a dose of Gilsol Indigestion and Wind Pills, the latest free samples from Willis’s Medical Hall in Dublin to be had at the Kilcullen dispensary. The familiarity of the threat comforted us all for a moment.

And once more we found ourselves on stage, one at a time, severally and all seven together.

Within a week, we were booked through the autumn, winter and spring, all around County Kildare and even into west Wicklow. There was not a parish councillor who’d deny Darcy, got up in her new hat, whenever she offered us for his wooden stage. Hoteliers requested us for their lobbies, big shops for their windows. We did country fairs at Ballymore Eustace and Baltinglass, shocked the sweet-faced Quakers at Ballitore and convulsed the sturdy residents of Dunlavin. We performed a soirée at grand Russborough House at Blessington, attended by all the members of the Killing Kildares, our local hunt. I strained to see the man who had wanted to brush my hair on Harristown Bridge – and I saw Darcy’s eyes questing for him too, and her anger at his absence. She wanted to extract some more money from him, I guessed. Her eye met mine; she read the agony on my face, and smiled.

After our show at Russborough, the Pennefathers of Rathsallagh House invited us too. And then the Tyntes of Tynte Park. The foxy troll was not there either, but I never stopped looking for him, not when we sang at the stark stone Grand Canal Hotel at Robertstown, nor when the Crehelp Brass Band welcomed us into town for a concert in the square.

Our names were on everyone’s lips. And the word was that we could bring in the customers, and whet their thirst for paid-for refreshment. But when we were asked for at the public houses, Darcy decreed that such a setting was not suitable for the Swiney Godivas, whose morals were as pure as their voices.

Darcy lied. Pure is not what we were.

Oh yes, we were adequate little actresses and creditable warblers. There was charm in our highly commercial mixture of English and Irish, enunciated in clear girlish voices. On a good night, our voices played lightly with your feelings, but they did not line your heart’s memories. Our dancing was not the most graceful you ever saw, and our feet were far from the most delicate. There was no great unloosening of wild Celtic joy to our performance, informed not by art but by a fear of Darcy. Indeed, Ida would sometimes fall body-lilty off the stage, purely so as not to have to be upon it, a phenomenon that Darcy deftly incorporated into the act as a comedy turn, with Joe the seaweed boy, our driver, at the ready to receive Ida’s quivering body. Onstage, I myself devised a functional mental mechanism for pretending that I was in the midst of a recurring nightmare and that I would shortly wake up.

All the while we sang we were offering something much more alluring than songs. The flower of our show wasn’t what was advertised. We sang and danced the paid-for hour, but the people handed over their sixpences and shillings for the single silent thing that we did in the final moments of our act, when we sat with our backs to the audience, and let down our hair.

Then the people leaned forward in their seats or took to their feet without realising it. Their mouths fell slack and their eyes widened in an effort to take in the wall of hair in front of them as it rippled from one side of the stage to the other.

You might have thought simple human hair unworthy of such commotion. After all, the hair on a person’s head is not usually kept hidden like that which nestles in the private places of our bodies. Head hair is generally exposed to view and therefore generally unremarked on. The length of Swiney hair was no secret in County Kildare. You might have thought that the sight of seven bald girls would have excited much more interest. But by the cunning choreography of the hairfall ritual, Darcy conferred on each bare stage the breathless intimacy of a wedding night. She made everyone our bridegroom.

And so we made freedoms with men we did not know to speak to, and with a hundred men at a time, and with women and boys too. We collected them in a mass, and we teased them until Darcy smelled the hunger on them. And she would give them our hair, just before they pleaded for it, always by surprise, when they didn’t expect it. On the Zambezi, David Livingstone had discovered a thousand yards of water smashing over a precipice. A parish letter from Naas drew the inevitable comparison: the Victoria Falls – they were the Swineys too.
The mighty power of the torrent
, the clerk wrote excitedly,
that is in the Swiney Godivas’ heroic hair, engulfing our imaginations in a tumbling fever
.

In those early days, even young Ida had a fine growth well beyond the lower tips of her chicken-wing hips, though it was thinner than it might have been because of her constant plucking of it to make wristlets and anklets. The rest of us hadn’t seen our knees behind us in some time for the heavy rain of hair that covered them. But now success seemed to stimulate our hair’s growth – or perhaps the better dinners we were presently eating thanks to our earnings had something to do with the extraordinary spurt of extra follicular inches we experienced in those first months on the stage. We were able to do away with the chairs for the final curtain of curls. When our hair dropped down our backs, we had only to incline our knees so that the hair fell near the ground or touched it.

Even if they knew what was coming, the audience drew breath, made moans, threw flowers and money. Hats were waved, handkerchiefs thrown up in the air. Darcy had us pick up the flowers and tuck them in our hair as we bobbed and smiled with downcast eyes. The money, we collected only after the audience had departed.

On the last day of summer, we gave an outdoor concert, letting our hair cascade down the stone parapets of the bridge at the Poulaphouca Waterfall. A clap like thunder and a nightmare of white light broke our pose.

Ida screamed, ‘We are exploded! It is the Fenians come to murder us!’

Down in the crowd, a man lifted his head from under a shrouded box on stilts and waved at us. It was the first time we’d been photographed and it was without our permission.

Darcy was already mumbling that now anyone could have a good look at us in a newspaper without giving her a penny. But I was tormented by a notion of all the years that had gone into growing our hair suddenly severed and our living curls ceasing to live, dispatched into eternity in a puff of magnesium smoke. All the photographs I’d seen were lifeless and flat. And there was no undoing or owning a photograph of yourself, as I understood it. Your image was etched, irrevocable as a wrinkle, on a glass plate that belonged to someone else. Now the photographer had taken our likeness, he would take it away, and there would be something abroad that did not belong to us, yet was us.