After the Rising

1995-4

No. Sorry. No can do.

“But, Jo, you have to…If you’re not there —”

“You can tell me all about it afterwards.”

“I really think —“

“Maeve, I’m not going.”

We are looking at each other across an impasse when the tentative sound of steps comes down the corridor, followed by a male voice calling, “Hello? Anybody there?”

And then with great satisfaction, knowing it’s the last thing I want, Maeve is throwing the door open and ushering Rory O’Donovan into the room.

“So, Dev,” he says, after my sister has made her excuses and left us alone together. “What’s going on? Why are you receiving us in bed, like a courtesan? You don’t look sick to me.”

As he’s talking, he’s pulling out the chair from the corner and bringing it over, close to the bed. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to. Lying low, avoiding the mob. Avoiding me too, you brat.”

Brat-sh. The soft Irish T. He sounds so Wexford to my ears now, such a strong streak of Mucknamore in his accent: the nasal vowels, the singing rise and fall to his sentences. But of course it’s my speech that has changed, not his. I am struck again by the newness of him, the short hair that makes him look unfinished.

“It’s all a bit Mucknamore for me.”

“I knew it.”

“I hear you’re a full-fledged resident now.” I speak as if I only heard today, as if Maeve and Dee, my Wexford friend who also lives in San Francisco, hadn’t passed on everything they knew about him since I left. “Was it the progressive liberalism that drew you here? Or the cultural stimulation?”

“No need to sneer, city girl. It’s a good place to live.”

I raise my brows into a question. The Rory I knew could not have been happy here.

“I like that it takes me only thirty traffic-free minutes to get to work. That my nice house cost half-nothing compared to a similar place in the city. That, after work, I can go walking in clean air or swimming in a clean sea. That I drink in a pub where everybody knows me.”

“Stop, you’re scaring me.”

He laughs, then waves towards the window. “Look at it. Look at how lovely it is.”

The window frames Mucknamore in full seductive act. Over to our right, the setting sun throws streaks of orange and pink and red along the sky and the sea borrows and flaunts the colours like they’re its own. Waves shimmer around the curve of The Causeway and, between Coolanagh island and the sea, flat sands glisten with foam. Above it all, seabirds circle and swoop, silver-and-gold underwings flashing in the dazzling, dying light.

“When did you ever care about scenery?” I ask.

“I think I always did, Jo. I know I brought that sight away with me everywhere I travelled and never saw anywhere that looked better. And when the time came to…” He hesitates. “…To… figure out where home was,” he says instead of what he was going to say: when the time came to get married. “Well… Here I am.”

Here he is, turning around the chair to sit into it, backwards, his thighs straining against his trousers, his bulk too close. “And you? You’ve wound up in San Francisco.”

“Yeah. I left London in ’82.”

“And that’s home for you? You like it?”

“Sure. I like that I’m surrounded by millions of people. That my two-roomed apartment is worth a ludicrous amount of money that keeps on rising. That I can choose from a hundred bars where nobody knows me.”

He tosses his head back into a laugh, the way he always did. It’s all the same: the crinkles round his eyes, the missing tooth that shows only when his lips are stretched into his widest smile. “God, Jo,” he says. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Of course I have.”

“You look so much the same. I was surprised by that.”

“I’m twenty years different. Just like you.”

“Twenty years.” He lets out a long whistle. “Is that what it is?”

Yes, Rory, I think but do not say. That is what it is.

When I was a girl, I had one person who was all mine. A secret person, into whom I poured everything. A boy.

He lived up the road from me and was my own age, but I was not supposed to speak to him. He didn’t go to our local school. Each morning, his sister brought him into Wexford town in her blue Mini on her way to work. He never came into our shop, just like I had never walked up the side road that led to his family’s farm. And if he, or any of his family, met me or any of mine, our eyes automatically went towards the ground or the sky.

I knew he was never given instructions in how to do this. Like me, he was born to it.

Outside school hours, I saw him often. Obedient until our teens, we never gave each other even a hello. But we did look. Whenever I would sneak a veiled glance towards him, across the road, or the church, or the beach, I often found him looking back. We could get locked in these stares, but never for long. We were afraid of being noticed and we were shy. Those few seconds could be so intense they hurt.

At night, in bed, I would summon up in my mind our most recent encounter and run it through my head like a movie, milking it for detail. I had no time for other Mucknamore boys, with their bruised legs and dirty hands and slow minds. Boys who always had to be in a group, jostling or jeering or running about, yelling and waving their arms. Pretending to murder each other with sticks, from behind trees, or yelling about doing it for real: “I’ll kill you, I’ll fucken kill you.” For all their shouting, those boys could never do what he did: walk down a road alone. He was different.

Like me.

He became an altar boy and every Sunday he was on show at Mass, performing holy chores. Holy communion became the high point of my week, those few seconds at the altar when I let out my tongue for the host and his hand was beneath my chin holding the paten, close enough to touch. What ferocity I brought to watching him as he bowed low, or rang the little bell, so much that, even now as his adult self sits before me, I can see eleven-year-old Rory, good shoes and grey socks jutting from beneath his surplice, a sliver of shin revealed as he reclined on the altar steps, and remember how the thoughts of approaching the altar could make my hands shake so bad I had to sit on them.

What was all that? First, I thought it was pure love. Afterwards, that it was crazed adolescent hormones. Now, I wonder what on earth I was projecting onto him. And how did Mrs D. or Gran or, especially, Maeve not notice, standing and kneeling so close to me? How could such fervour have been contained by my skin?

It led me to break the unspoken rule and ask at home about the O’Donovans, about why the two families were estranged.

Granny Peg said, “Ah now, pet, don’t go digging up all of that. You’ll only upset your mammy. And Auntie Norah.”

Auntie Norah was the key. That much I’d figured out. Miss Norah O’Donovan: his aunt really, not mine. His aunt, but living with us. And — like us — never, ever talking to them.

Now his adult eyes are bouncing all over me, like they can’t get enough of what they are seeing. “How on earth,” I ask him, “did you end up with my mother as a client?”

“You were surprised?”

“Stupefied.”

“I knew you would be.”

“But how did it happen?”

“It began nine years ago, when I moved back to Mucknamore. If I was going to be living here, I decided I couldn’t carry on avoiding Parle’s pub. Most of the lads I hang around with drink here and anyway; the whole quarrel had come to seem so pointless. So I gathered up my courage and, one early evening after work, when I thought the place wouldn’t be too busy, I took myself in.”

“Wow!”

“After taking the big step, she wasn’t even there herself. It was Eileen Power behind the counter. I asked her for a pint and she looked at me boggle-eyed. ‘Excuse me one sec,’ she said, and scuttled off, leaving me standing there like a right eejit. Three or four others were in, delighted with the goings-on, on the edge of their stools to see what was going to happen next.”

I throw my eyes up to the ceiling.

“I know. Only they were all watching, I think I’d have run out. I was so nervous. After what seemed like a day and a half, out she came, with Eileen running behind her. ‘Can I help you?’ she said in her best frosty voice, and I knew straight away it was going to be all right because I could see that underneath the frost she was flustered herself. ‘A pint of Guinness, please, Mrs Devereux,’ I said. She stood there a minute. Everybody was watching. When she picked up a glass and pulled the tap, it was like the whole place let out its breath.”

“And that was it?”

“That was it. I’ve been a regular ever since. I even get – got – a Christmas drink. I even,” he says, face wrinkled with apology, “became fond of her.”

I groan.

“Ah, Dev, her bark was worse than her bite.”

“Don’t you start.” I never try to make anyone else see Mrs D. my way. Why do they all feel the need to defend her to me?

“What about your own folks?” I ask. “They can’t have been too delighted to see you tippling in the enemy camp?”

“I didn’t tell them at first. I knew it wouldn’t take long for it to get out. My father was given the job of tackling me. ‘I hear you’ve been seen in Devereux’s,’ was what he said to me, as if it was a brothel or something. I just laughed, said the old feud had nothing to do with me, that what was past was past.”

“That simple, eh?”

“What could he say, if you think about it?”

A familiar feeling coils inside me, deep and cold. “So…A happy ending all round. How moving.”

He knows what I mean. That it could be that easy, after all they put us through. That he could just say, what’s past is past and, miraculously…it was.

He leans forward in the chair. “I often wondered how things turned out for you, Dev, but I never got the nerve to ask your mother. Our association – hers and mine – was very much on her terms.”

“That sounds like Mrs D. all right.”

“So I never asked. But I often wondered,” he repeats. He leans in close to me, picks up a strand of my hair. “You never changed it,” he says. “When you made your grand entrance into the church yesterday, that was the first thing I thought: she never changed the hair.”

He tugs the curl straight, then winds it around his finger. I let him, but only for a second, before jerking my head away, folding my hair over the opposite shoulder.

“You live alone?” I ask, knowing the answer.

“No.” He tries not to hesitate. “No. I got married nine years ago.”

I had a follow-up line prepared for this inevitable moment but, having invited it, my brain has now decided to evacuate. Silence lengthens and loads. It is he who breaks it. “We have two children,” he says.

“Two? That’s lovely.” That’s lovely? Oh God, is that the best I can do?

“Boys?” I manage after a while, though we both know I saw them this morning. “Or…em…girls?”

“Ella, the girl, is five. Dara is four.”’ His face is expanding with that look parents take on when they talk about their children.

“And your wife, is she from round here? Would I know her?”

“No. She’s from Cork.”

“So you’ve done it all,” I say. “Wife, kids, law practice in town, big house in the country.”

“I’ve been lucky, I suppose.”

Does he not remember that we never wanted all that? Maybe he is right, maybe I haven’t changed as much as he has. Certainly he’s coming over as all grown up whereas I, since arriving in Mucknamore, am reliving the gauchest horrors of adolescence.

I am not normally like this! I want to scream at him. I am a syndicated magazine writer! I have a des. res. in Lower Haight! Sometimes people ask for my autograph!

“What about you?” he wants to know. “Are you married?”

“Oh no. No. You know monogamy was never my thing.”

“Never say never,” he smiles, which makes me want to slap him.

“Hey,” he says, seeing my face. “I didn’t mean that whatever way you’re taking it. I just meant…”

“I’m single because that’s how I like it.”