Fallen (2 page)

At the bottom of the stairs I'd a notion to look into a lecture theatre, just to smell the wood and chalk, or to find the place where I'd marked my initials on a desk at the end of the last lecture I attended. I'd broken the nib of my pen doing it. But when I cracked the door open, a young man I didn't
know was sitting up in the top tier of desks, making furious notes from a pile of textbooks spread around him. The surface creaked under the force he wrote with. He didn't look up. I let the door fall shut and walked back out through the tiled hall, the echo of my footsteps ringing in the eerie quiet of the summer hiatus.

I gave Mother enough time to get well out of earshot before going across the landing to Liam's door. I rolled my knuckles on the wood.

‘No,' he said, through the door.

‘It's me.'

‘I'm changing.'

‘I'm going out for a bit. Will you be here when I get back?'

‘I might.'

‘I'm sorry for being such a crank.'

Silence. I rapped the door one more time, with what I hoped he'd know were friendly knuckles, and went on down to the hall.

Lockie was running a feather duster around a picture-frame. She lowered her arms when she saw me. ‘I suppose you've seen him?'

‘I can't talk about it, Lockie.' My voice came out ragged. I read pity in her face and bolted past her, out into the glaring light and heat.

I'd known our Square all my life, but something was awry that afternoon. The spire of Findlater's Church threatened to pierce the blue of the sky, a blue so wide and high I felt it tilt when I looked up into it. The uneven roofline and crooked windows of the terrace on the side across from ours looked shambolic and rotten, rather than charming. An empty tram hissed past, on its way to the terminus near the Post Office; a full one went the other way. Down on the corner a newsboy
called a headline about Japan. It all felt like someone else's dream, impossible to enter. I hesitated, appalled by a growing sense that I'd nowhere, in fact, to go.

I would have gone to Eva's, but that's where Liam was going, to break his news himself. I'd only be in the way. I could have called on any of our friends, but what would we talk about, other than things I'd sooner eat glass than say? There was always the Rotunda Gardens, right there in front of me, where I'd find a shaded bench, but it would feel like defeat to hide, and so close to home. I couldn't face an hour in a tea-rooms either, not with a bad tooth. A splinter of pride got in under my breast-bone and lodged there. There had to be something I could do on my own, even if it was only to walk, with no particular aim. If Liam could make a decision to change the shape and course of his life with so little hesitation, and without consulting anyone – well, without consulting me – then surely I could manage to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving.

If I followed my usual route down Sackville Street, Liam might well overtake me on his way to Eva. So I turned east, along Great Denmark Street. Not since Liam and I were children had I been out and about and aimless like this, no one knowing where I was.

The sun beat against my back. I turned down North Great George's Street to escape it. The street was oddly deserted apart from a dog asleep on a step, a cat curled up in a window. You could read the history of this area in these decaying terraces of large Georgian houses, whose rooms once offered comfortable homes to gentry families, now mostly run to offices, boarding houses and tenements. One or two were near-derelict, with gapped windows and missing doors. Our own terrace had been saved from dereliction by its position and the trams; it had boarding houses and a small hotel to keep it going. Mother objected to it all and hankered after the
suburbs and the sea, but Dad was attached to our house, which had come down to us from his parents. I was attached to it too – I was a city person at heart.

A whiff from a drain checked my enthusiasm. Not even the most passionate Dubliner could admire the city's smells. Florrie devoted hours to concocting tricks to defeat them. She made pomanders, lotions and soaps, shaved lemon peel into the water our handkerchiefs were boiled in. Her latest venture was scented candles, but Mother put a quick stop to that, afraid for our lives if we left unattended flames around the house.

I turned left on to Parnell Street, then right on to Gardiner Street, with a vague notion of aiming for the river, where a person might reasonably stand idle at a quay wall and watch the water and the birds, the movement of ships and barges. So many people, so much industry – a reproach to my aimless, time-wasting existence. I envied Liam his easy entry to work in Dad's firm. He had a purpose and a pattern for his days. I'd none for mine. I was left casting around for something to occupy my mind while I endured Mother's many schemes for my improvement. I could read books 'til my eyes were near falling out of my head, but to what end? I loved the discipline of chasing an idea, assembling evidence, constructing an argument for college essays. I loved the almost physical sensation of learning, an expansive stirring and waking in my mind. When Professor Hayden suggested I go on for a Master's degree, I was glad of the chance to stay in college a little longer, while I made up my mind what to do in life. I knew I was expected to marry, but suppose I never met anyone I wanted? Suppose no one ever wanted me?

My schoolfriend Frieda Leamy had trained as a nurse after school, and Mother hadn't spoken well of her since. Mind you, she'd never been entirely happy about Frieda, whose father was a draper. Frieda's face was spoiled by a purple
birthmark that reached from one eyebrow to her collar-bone, as though she'd been scalded. It would put off the paying customers, Mother said, no wonder she needed to do something else with herself. But the truth was that Frieda had no interest in the shop, and now she was doing something she loved.

Eva thought I'd like teaching, but I couldn't see myself standing up in front of crowds of people to speak. I liked learning for its own sake, and if that was indulgent or impractical, Professor Hayden thought no less of me for it. I still smarted from her perfunctory handshake, which made me feel like someone she used to know but no longer took an interest in.

A disturbance of air blurred in an arc in front of me. A child swinging out of a lamp-post on a rope just missed catching me with her feet. She bumped to a standstill and grinned. Her face was ruddy and freckled. She held out her rope. ‘Have a go, missis?' A swarm of children on the step of a doorless house jeered me. I considered them with a mean eye, then stuck out my tongue. They roared and applauded. The tips of a few pink tongues poked back.

An empty dray drawn by two black horses lumbered towards us on loud, iron-rimmed wheels. The horses' hairy feet were heavy and slow, their breathing laboured in unison, as though, together, they made a single funereal beast. The child beside me hopped from one leg to the other, her mop of brown hair flopping in time to their steps. Looking at her, something in my own ribs rose to the memory of how it felt to launch myself into the air and fly around the post before spinning back to earth. Liam and I used to do it, whenever we managed to sneak away from the house to play on more casual streets than our own – back in the days when we barely needed words to know what was in the other's mind.

Rounding the Custom House, I was assailed by a low-tide stink of fish off the river. Seagulls crowded the sky, whinging and giving out. I was glad to turn back on to Beresford Place, where the windows of Liberty Hall were littered with green anti-recruitment posters. Good for them.

A little way along Abbey Street, near the paper stores, a small crowd was mocking a white-haired man on a step. He yelled back at them. He'd a bell in his hand he kept ringing. I couldn't hear what he said.

‘What is it?' I asked an old woman who held the skinny bowl of a clay pipe near her chin, between a finger and a thumb. The stem of the pipe ran into the many grubby folds and creases of her mouth.

She looked at me with lively eyes. Her lips parted with a sucking sound and out came the pipe, causing her face to collapse around her chin. ‘It's them vigilants as want us all to go round with our legs crossed and our knees in a knot, and the English papers banned because of their filth. Sure, why else would we read them at all?'

I moved away from the poison of her breath.

I dreaded Mr Hickey, the dentist, pulling out my own bad tooth, not only because it would hurt, but because Mother said it was a slippery slope. She should know – she was a martyr to her teeth. Lockie had only the front ones left, four top and five bottom, and a pair she called gnashers at the back. Enough to be going on with, she said, trying to cheer me up.

A throb in the bad tooth sent a bitter taste through my mouth. I put a hand to my cheek to quell it. I'd forgotten to ask Mother for the money to pay the dentist. I could go home and hurry back, but his rooms were two short streets away and by now every step was driving a searing pain through my cheek and into my ear. I'd go along early and wait, beg his indulgence about the money. He knew Mother well; he'd surely let me put the visit on account.

I was near crying by the time the Hickeys' maid answered their door and let me into the waiting room. I apologized for being early. ‘Sit yourself down. I'll tell him you're here,' she said, and went away. I supposed she saw people in a similar state, or worse, every day of the week.

Eventually Mr Hickey called me through. I hadn't been in his consulting room for years. It hadn't changed. A noxious smell I couldn't identify spread across the floor of my mind. I avoided looking at a chipped enamel dish with steel instruments, a pile of cut flannel, an angled light. His wife busied herself at a cupboard in the corner. She looked up and gave me a brief smile with little comfort in it.

The pain was overlaid by fright as I sat into the reclining chair, but there was no backing out now, with Mr Hickey looming over me. I'd forgotten how much I disliked his thick fingers, or the bushy yellow moustache that lay along his narrow lip. He wrapped a finger in a piece of gauze and poked at the tooth. I winced away from his hand.

He shook his head, scolding either me or the tooth. ‘That fellow will have to go,' he said. ‘You stay good and quiet, or I might pull the wrong one out.' He chortled.

‘Will it hurt?'

‘Not a bit.' His smile showed yellow teeth, big and square and strong-looking. He waved a rubber tube. ‘I'll give you the gas.' He patted my knee, glanced over at his wife. ‘Marguerite, I wonder would you …'

I didn't catch what he asked her for, but she went out of the room, leaving the door ajar. I watched her go with envy. Not having much option, I settled to my fate and the mask he held to my face.

‘You won't feel a thing.'

There was a thick smell of rubber, a green-smelling gas. I struggled on the first few breaths and then it was easy and slow and Mr Hickey became something marvellous, a fine
fellow altogether. The hairs that grew from his ears made me want to laugh, the idea of touching them threatened to give me the giggles. His hand arrived near my knee, a curious pleasant weight. Thoughts too heavy to speak formed in my mind and my knee was getting ready to answer his hand when Mrs Hickey came fussing back. ‘I couldn't find it – is that not enough of that now?' Her voice boomed and stretched away, then snapped back to a point. Their voices swam, there were loud creaks, he was twisting something over and back against the stretched inside of my cheek. It creaked loud in my ear and then there was blood in my mouth and a nasty-tasting rag to bite on.

‘Look at that!' Mr Hickey gazed with admiration at a disgusting, yellowed molar. A sac of greyish jelly wobbled at the end of a sharp-looking root. ‘An abscess,' he said. ‘No wonder it pained you. We're lucky it didn't burst. You'll be right as rain, now, once and you keep that socket clean and dry until it heals.'

Mrs Hickey passed me a rolled plug of cotton. ‘Bite down on that and hold still, as long as you can. Then another.' She gave me a packet with a half a dozen or so more plugs. ‘Your sister's here.'

Florrie waited in the hall, looking cross. She held an envelope addressed to Mr Hickey. ‘You might have told us you were making your own way here, Katie. Mother sent me to apologize if you'd forgotten. Or to pay if you hadn't.'

Mrs Hickey patted my arm. ‘There, now.' She took the envelope from Florrie. ‘You'd best find a cab to take her home, she's a tad woozy.'

In the cab Florrie started on at me with questions, but I shook my head and gestured at my mouth. I couldn't say a single intelligible thing.

‘You've blood on your chin.' She pointed to her own face to show me where. I held up a finger and she guided it into
place on my chin and dabbed it. ‘There.' My efforts didn't satisfy her, though. She hesitated over a fresh hankie she pulled from her purse, shot a look at the slumped, indifferent back of the cabman, gave a corner of the hankie a quick lick and scrubbed the blood from my chin. ‘Now you're decent.'

Sackville Street passed in a dizzy blur: the tram-lines, the Post Office, the flower- and fruit-sellers at the base of the Pillar, the hotels and shops, the curved sweep of the Rotunda, our Square.

Lockie opened the door. ‘Let's get you up to bed.' She came up with me to the room I shared with Florrie, turned the bed down, brought me a mug of salt water to rinse my mouth, a bowl to spit into and a flannel to wipe with. ‘But later,' she said. ‘Give it time to harden first, or you'll set it to bleed all over again.'

By then Mother and Florrie had gathered into the room. ‘Did he give you the gas?' Florrie asked. ‘They say he takes it himself, more often than he gives it to his patients. I wouldn't go near him, myself.'

‘Why didn't you say so sooner?' I lisped, clear as I could through the gauze packed into my enormous cheek.
Thay tho thooner
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