Under My Skin (12 page)

Outside Daniel sits on the pink cart. It is rotten now. Left to die in the long frozen grass. There are two wooden shafts pointing upwards and I go and sit next to him. It is not a nice place to sit. There is a smell of old wet wood and underneath, a place for yellow fungus, frogs, slugs.

‘She’s cleaning,’ I tell him, and he kicks at the ground. A loose stone skitters across the frozen earth. He looks worried. We are both wild but Daniel is worse than me.

He scrunches his face up in the cold and refuses to come inside. His knuckles are red and blue with a summer suntan still on the backs of his hands.

‘She’s like a white tornado,’ he says and we both start to laugh. And from the window she watches us as she piles old newspapers into bags for burning. We have grown up on toast and cornflakes and we eat everything from paper plates and she sees us now, exactly as we are, in the mess of our lives and how we stand in the middle of it, laughing.

Upstairs Pappy is painting again. The older canvases are turned away from us now. There are paintings of grey stormy skies over the lake, with rolling clouds and pale yellow shafts of sunlight pushing through. Everything is the colour of a wet autumn, always damp and dark. Or as Juna says, ‘The colour of a bog.’ His new paints came down on the Dublin bus. They were wrapped in brown paper and different to before. They have flashy lipstick names – ‘African Dust’, ‘Rhinestone Blue’ and ‘Lemon Ice Cream’. He is using acrylics and crayon instead of oils. We collected them for him along with Juna’s three-day-old chicks. They arrived with their little feet sliding, in another brown box, one that felt alive and warm. He wears an old white shirt when he paints. There is a red splash of paint where his heart is and some yellow flecks up near the collar. He stands in his socks with the shirt on over a jumper and there is a hole in the heel of his sock. His bedroom is used as his studio now and there is a two-bar electric heater sitting in the grate. Old canvases lean on every wall but there is something different on the easel today. Sometimes he goes to it and makes a lot of tiny brush strokes – but mostly he just stands still and stares. He puts his hands to it and mixes the colours and blurs the harder lines with his fingertips. Then he pulls the corners of his mouth down and nods and shrugs and then he sits down on the chair. After supper I bring him
some of Juna’s special walnut cake and a pot of coffee on a tray.

In the end the painting is of two leather slippers. Soft calfskin slippers with pointed toes. They are covered in as many colours as he could think of. Blue rhinestone, ruby-red, hot pink, azure blue and emerald-green. There is turquoise and jade – a million tiny jewels perfectly positioned and formed.
Indian Slippers
it is called.

Daniel. Origin, Hebrew, meaning – God is my judge.

It is September. Almost one year later, 1993. We are standing at the lake. ‘Ghost Lake’. It is calm. Warm. Quiet. There are smooth grey and white rocks near the shore. Two small wooded islands. A ramp with worn-out wood, pounded for years by children running in bare feet. I can hear the hollow call ‘Geronimo!!!’ They whooped it out like young braves going to battle, the words flying up and echoing in the trees and hills as they ran and bombed off the end. The trees where we found the charm bracelet. The red and white sign that says, ‘No Running No Jumping No Diving’.

It is Daniel’s idea to take the boat out.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Just a little way and we’ll come straight back.’ He watches me for a moment and smiles at my face. The sun is going down. Late afternoon. No cars. Not even the grey-haired lady who swims for her arthritis. Behind those hills, the house. Behind those trees there is an orange tent. The swimming coach who leaves tomorrow morning. A dental student from Dublin. A young, muscular man in Speedos who has taught me, amongst other things, to swim.

Daniel walks to the edge of the lake.

He makes a stone jump six times over the water.

‘Six,’ Jack says and he frowns into the sun. The boys are wearing shorts. Denim cut-offs to their knees. Both darkly tanned. I am wearing a new sky-blue bikini made from towelling material and it soaks up the water like a sponge. For a moment the boat is forgotten and Daniel walks to the end of the ramp. He stands on the first diving board. His hands are on his hips as if he couldn’t care less. His legs are tanned. Even his toes. My brother is more beautiful than I am. Jack waits with me near the shallow part. I know nothing about him yet except that he is a tall, silent boy and Daniel’s first real friend after me.

At fourteen I am growing. ‘Coltish,’ Juna said. An awkward country girl with red cheeks and tangled blonde hair. There are bruises on my knees and a star-shaped scar over my navel. I could not say Daniel as a child, so I called him Danny and Daniel called me ‘Star’.

He jumps lightly on the diving board. It is at least ten feet over the water. He stretches. Yawns. We watch. He lifts his arms. Out by his sides like he might flap and fly. And then he swings them back quickly and with one single bounce – and in his t-shirt and shorts – he is diving in. The water splashes back and then there is silence again. Daniel cuts through the water, taking several strokes before surfacing, and by the time he comes up Jack has looked right into my eyes and I have blushed and looked away. Daniel’s black hair is sleek and shiny when wet. He swims towards the red ladder and begins to pull himself up. He is panting and he stands for a moment watching us and sees that something has changed. He looks at Jack and then at me as if we have betrayed him.

‘Hope, come here to me,’ a voice says and when I turn I see
Juna standing on the shore. Sometimes my grandmother is like a vapour. A bright streak of light. She just appears out of nowhere and I think she must be able to fly and get in under doors.

I lift myself with my hands and drop easily into the water. I swim slowly because I know they are watching me and I keep putting one foot down because I am terrified I will drown. I swim as far as the red buoy and wait there, my eyes turned to the horizon, away from him and away from her.

Jack offers Daniel a cigarette. My brother grins and then wipes the water from his face and puts one between his lips. They stand then as they usually do, saying nothing but liking the fact that the other one is around. I had never seen two boys who are good friends until then. How quiet and calm their friendship was. When my friendship with Doreen is built on laughter and talk and sound.

Daniel turns towards the boat again and blows cigarette smoke towards it.

‘We’ll row out to the first island,’ he says casually and all the time he refuses to meet my eyes.

‘Come on, Star,’ he says suddenly, and his face breaks into his bright happy smile. He knows I will not go out there with them, that my fear of the deep water will keep me on the shore. He knows he will win with this and he also knows that there was somewhere else I want to be.

‘Teach her to swim,’ Juna said, ‘and I’ll bake you a flan.’ The dental student thought we were mad. He arrived at her house
when we were trying to get a cow off the front lawn. He came on a five-speed racing bike and Daniel, for no reason, began calling him ‘Doc’. In the middle of our tea Pappy came in smelling of sweat and manure and ordered everyone, including Doc, outside to help bring a heifer in. ‘Get a bottle of treacle,’ he said to Juna, ‘she’s bound up.’ I was mortified. My family are generally embarrassing people and I already thought Doc was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.

When we came back there was a cat on the kitchen table with his head stuck in the milk jug. ‘Get down, you bastard,’ Pappy said without even blinking, and I felt like crawling under a chair.

‘Doc… Hope’s afraid of water,’ Daniel said. We were sitting around the kitchen table eating salad with all the windows opened up over the fields. Everyone was passing the real plates around and being helpful and polite.

‘Daniel,’ I said, ‘please shut your cake-hole.’

Sometimes I have no time to check myself. I am always saying that sort of thing. And Granny Juna was looking at my father and shaking her head. Doc, who has just turned seventeen, looked at me and gave me a smile.

‘I’ll have her swimming by the end of the week,’ he said.

My grandmother always pays in food. Tomatoes from the greenhouse. Heads of lettuce. Gooseberry jam, and she is very good at pies. Fish pie. Steak and kidney pie. Chicken and ham pie. Shepherd’s pie. Cottage pie. But it is summer so she offered Doc her aquaphobic granddaughter and a flan.