The Fall Girl (15 page)

‘Daddy, I don't want to argue about it. And I don't blame you for standing up for her, not any more. At this stage, I've come to expect it.'

‘She was a good lassie, Frances. She'd never –'

‘I'll ring you again in a couple of days, Daddy.'

‘Right so.'

‘And Daddy?'

‘What?'

‘Nancy will go to the anniversary Mass with you.'

‘She will,' he says, his voice wobbling. ‘Goodnight, Frances.'

‘Good –'

The line goes dead.

‘Feck you, Daddy,' I whisper, hanging up the receiver. ‘Why can't you just tell me the truth? She can hardly tear strips off you now, with her rigor mortis tongue.'

Two weeks earlier he'd asked me to go through my mother's belongings. Neither of us had been in her room since her death. He was anxious to have the room cleared out before her first anniversary, but he couldn't face it himself.

One morning while he was in town, I brought my CD player into her bedroom and turned on Tina Turner. She hated the ‘trollop'.

Her wardrobe was easy. I opened the doors, yanked her clothes off the hangers and stuffed them into a couple of large refuse sacks. It wasn't like you see in the movies. I didn't hold her garments to my face for comfort. There were no tears. I tied a knot in the top of the bag and left it by the bedroom door, intending to drop it off at the St Vincent de Paul shop later on in the day. Then I opened the top drawer of her dresser and emptied her jewellery into a small plastic bag, including her wedding, engagement and eternity rings. So what if they were worth a few pounds: I wanted nothing off her. There were four old, framed black-and-white photos in the next drawer. I sat on the bed and studied them. My grandmother, just her head and shoulders, fair and fragile. My mother and Aunty Lily at about ten and five, holding hands, Lily, one sock down and looking away from the camera; my mother, standing to attention like a little soldier and
just as solemn. Aunty Lily, about sixteen, twinkling eyes, unashamedly happy. My parents and me, I'm no more than a few weeks old, both of them looking down on me, tense faces. I put the photos aside to give them to my father.

The next drawer was full of underwear. There were hats and scarves in the one underneath. I opened another refuse sack and binned the lot.

When I opened the bottom drawer, I found a brown A4 envelope. I picked it up and sat down again on the bed. As I leafed through the documents, Tina was singing my favourite song on the album, ‘What's Love Got to Do with It?'

It was all the usual stuff – my grandmother's in memoriam card, her mother's and her own birth certificates, an old school report and her marriage certificate. The year
1963
catches my eye. I'm shoving the papers back into the envelope. Nineteen sixty-three! I pull the marriage certificate out again. Yes,
1963
. Dated
4 June 1963
. How can that be? I was born on 7 September 1963. She couldn't have been …

I hurried to my room and started rooting through my own drawers to check my birth certificate. It was there somewhere. Eventually I found it.

Date of birth:
7 September 1963
.

Mother's maiden name:
Rita Murphy
.

Father's name:
Joseph Fall
.

Bastards! How could they?

‘It must have been a slip of the pen,' my father said when I asked him about it later.

‘Shut up, Daddy. She was pregnant. Mammy was pregnant. Admit it.'

‘No, she wasn't like that.'

‘Stop it, Daddy.'

‘It's a mistake, that's all. I swear to you, your mother was not in the family way when we got married.'

‘So how come between the pair of you, you never noticed this slip of the pen all over the years?'

‘Come to think of it, your mother did mention it at some stage. But –'

‘Come off it, Daddy; don't lie to me.'

All she put me through when I got pregnant – all the hurt, all the pain. And he stood by and let her.

Joseph stirs and I open my eyes, putting the ensuing argument to the back of my mind. There's no point going over it; my father will be loyal to my mother until his dying day.

‘Hello, little Joseph,' I say, lifting him out of his seat.

A mouthful of milky froth gushes from his mouth. I wipe his baby-gro and nestle him close to me. As I walk towards the window, he lifts his arm and tickles my chin.

‘Look,' I say, pulling back the curtains and looking out, ‘the sun and the moon.'

Rocking him, I walk over to the television and turn it on.

There's a woman gazing into the camera. She looks disoriented. Her head is slightly tilted. Strands of lank hair hang over one side of her face. Two serious men sit on either side of her, eyes downcast. She talks, bites her lip, touches her chest with her hand and talks again. One of the men taps her shoulder and nods. There are cameras flashing.

What's wrong with the poor woman? Where's the remote?

I find it on the bedside locker and turn up the volume several notches.

‘…
this stage, all I want is my baby back. Please, please, bring him back to me. Please
.'

‘
And that was the press conference broadcast earlier today by the
Gardaí – a plea from the mother of the missing two-month-old baby, Nathan Maxwell, abducted earlier today from outside a shop in Henry Street where his German child-minder left him in his pram
…'

I've been in this place for seven weeks now. It feels more like seventeen. Maybe it's the ground I've covered that makes it seem longer than it is, or the sleepless nights. Nothing has changed, though. Except for the view from my bedroom window. The leaves have turned from green to gold.

But the past is still the same: untouchable. You can't rewrite history; isn't that what they say? Is that what I'm trying to do? And when I'm done, what will I have achieved? I'll still be the same person with the same past. I can't change who I am, no matter how much I'd like to. I've already tried that. Or, should I say, my dear friend Lesley did.

The Sunday morning after the new hairstyle incident, my mother's in a flap worrying about what the parish priest is going to make of my new image. She can't understand that no matter how many times I wash my hair, it won't fall flat. What she doesn't know is that Lesley has given me a jar of gel, and that it's shoved into an odd sock in the back of my underwear drawer.

I'm sitting at the breakfast table wearing the only outfit I possess that isn't totally humiliating – beige corduroy trousers
with a rust and cream shirt, though my mother insists on calling it a blouse. I'd bought them that summer in Mullaghmore when Nancy came to stay with us. We'd taken a shopping trip into Ballyshannon, where I'd been hoping to buy my first pair of denims. The cords had been a compromise, negotiated by Nancy.

‘You'll have to wear a headscarf to Mass,' my mother says, turning around from the sink where she's washing the dishes, and pointing her chin at me.

‘You must be joking. I will not,' I say, getting up from the table and dropping my cereal bowl into the basin.

‘Are you going to let her away with that, Joe Fall?'

My father is putting a pound note into the ‘Dues' envelope. ‘Leave me out of it, will you?' he says, licking the strip of gum. ‘I'm tired of all this arguing. It's getting us nowhere.'

‘Oh yeah, that's typical of you: ignore the problem and it might just go away.'

‘You're the problem,' I mutter, leaving the kitchen and heading for the stairs.

‘What was that?' She's on my tail.

‘You're the bloody problem,' I roar, taking the stairs two at a time and hurrying into the bathroom, where I slam the door behind me.

‘Time we were leaving,' my father shouts a couple of minutes later. ‘It's ten to ten.'

My mother is standing on the bottom step of the stairs, holding out a green and cream silk scarf folded into a triangle. ‘It's not a request,' she says, as I stomp downstairs; ‘it's an order.'

I push past her, lift my jacket off the coat-stand and walk out the door. The village is at its busiest on a Sunday morning, with everyone in the parish making their way to Mass. A
couple of bachelor farmers are rattling by in their tractors. Cars packed with children are pulling up around the village green. Women are clip-clopping down both sides of the street, finger-combing their hair and chatting to their men.

I think of how odd we must look – me hurrying along the edge of the footpath, trying to distance myself from my mother, her squeaking along on the inside in her rubber-heeled shoes, a carefully calculated few paces behind, and my father somewhere in the middle, with both of us and neither of us at the same time.

I stall at the steps of the chapel and wait for my father to catch up with me, and he, in turn, waits for my mother. Inside, she points to a pew and says to my father, ‘We'll sit in here; I'm feeling a bit weak and I want to be by the door for a breath of air.'

During the Mass, she keeps her head bowed and fidgets with her rosary beads. While the priest is consecrating the Host, she checks her watch and nudges me.

‘What?' I whisper.

‘It's only half ten. You didn't finish your breakfast until twenty to. You may stay put.'

‘Suits me.'

When Mass is over, the priest stands at the chapel door to greet the congregation on their way out. As we approach him, my mother grabs the hood of my jacket, pulls it up on my head and steps in ahead of me. I fall into line with my father.

‘Good morning, Father,' my mother says. ‘Lovely sermon … as usual.' She shakes his hand briefly.

‘Thank you, Rita,' he says, looking at her curiously as she darts out the door. Then he turns to my father. ‘How are you doing, Joe?'

‘Not a bother, Father, thanks. That's a grand morning.'

‘Powerful; long may it last. Hello, Frances.'

My mother's at the bottom of the chapel steps now, warning me with a threatening stare.

I pull my hood back down. ‘Hello, Father.'

‘Good Lord!' The priest tilts his head and considers my hair. ‘Is that the latest fashion?'

‘Oh, indeed it is, Father,' the woman behind me says, ‘that's the whole go now.'

Nuddy Neary, who's creeping up behind the woman, shouts over her shoulder, ‘You're gettin' very with it, Frances. You're like somethin' from
Top of the Pops
… one of them “Pan's People”, or is it “Legs and Co.” they call themselves nowadays?'

‘Begod, Nuddy,' the priest says, ‘you're the boy that knows a thing or two.'

My mother can't contain her rage when she gets home. She orders my father to peel the potatoes and, when he does, she gripes about him not having dug out the eyes.

‘The only way you can get a job done properly in this house,' she says, ‘is to do it yourself.'

As she lifts the roasting tray from the oven, hot fat sizzles and spits in her face. She bangs the tray down on the draining board and bulls out the kitchen door and up the stairs. My father finishes preparing the dinner while I set the table. We don't mention my mother's mood.

When my father calls my mother for her dinner, she picks up her plate, knife and fork from the table and brings them into the living-room.

‘Ah, come on, Rita. Let's not spend our whole Sunday like this,' my father says, standing between the two rooms.

‘Like what?'

‘Not talking to each other.'

‘What's the point of talking? No one listens to what I have to say any more. You and that cheeky brat in there have made that perfectly clear.'

After she's eaten, she goes out for a walk on her own and I take the opportunity to ring Lesley. When I tell her about the priest discussing my hairstyle, she says, ‘The priest! Deadly. What did your mental mother say?'

‘Nothing. She was too mortified to speak.'

‘Good enough for her.'

‘She just tore off down the street like she was being chased by a naked man,' I whisper, in case my father might hear me.

We both laugh down the phone.

‘Are you coming into town for a while?' Lesley says.

‘I've no lift.'

‘Just get out on the road and stick out your thumb.'

‘Yeah, OK, I will.'

‘Call for me. I'll wait in for you.'

When I have my jacket on, I pop my head in the living-room door and tell my father that I'm off into town for a while.

‘Have you told your mother?'

‘No.'

‘Don't you think you should let her know first?'

‘She won't be back for ages. I told Lesley I'd call for her in a few minutes.'

‘And how you do propose getting there?'

I hold up my thumb.

‘You will not! God only knows who'd pick you up. I'll run you in and collect you later too.'

‘Thanks, Daddy.'

‘Though God knows what sort of reception I'll get when I tell your mother where you've gone.'

‘I'm only going to meet a friend.'

‘Yeah, I know, I know.'

As I step out of the car at Lesley's house, my father tells me that he'll collect me at five o'clock.

‘OK.'

‘And you'll behave yourself, won't you?'

‘Of course I will,' I say, smiling in the door at him.

For the first time, age sixteen, I get to hang around the town with Lesley and two girls from her class. At last, a taste of independence.

We sit on a bench in the town square listening to
Ireland's Top 20
on Lesley's radio. Sharing her last two cigarettes between the four of us, Jackie, who lives in the same estate as Lesley, fills us in on the details of her first date with a boy called Pete.

‘Did he take off his specs when he was kissing ya?' Lesley asks.