Mary Costello - Academy Street

In the cold, Maeve’s feet break out with chilblains and she cries at night. Claire rubs on Zam-Buk and she is kept home from school for two days. Tess goes alone and stays back after school to help Mrs Snee tidy up. The light is fading when she leaves and her boots begin to hurt. She hurries along the road, almost running, pulling her coat tight. Up ahead is the Black Bend and the tinkers’ camp under the trees. She sees the flames of a fire rising and people gathered around — more people than she has ever seen there before, all moving, slow and wavy, in front of the fire. There are men standing at the edge of the camp, smoking and drinking from brown bottles. As she draws nearer a strange quietness fills the air. Not even the dogs are barking. She stops and looks back the way she has come. The road is empty and she grows afraid. Her eyes meet the eyes of the tinker man who cleaned the school lavatories. He bows his head very slowly and Tess looks away. She walks on, faster, her head down. As she passes in front of the camp a woman lets out a terrible cry. Tess stands, frozen. There are women and teenage girls gathered in a circle in front of a tent. They look up and see Tess and a hush falls on them. The circle opens and Tess sees a wooden table and on it a child is lying, dressed in white. It is the tinker girl, her eyes closed, her face snow-white, her hands crossed on her chest. She is dead. At the end of the table, a woman is combing the child’s hair. It is the tinker woman who came to Mrs Glynn’s door. When she sees Tess she stops and bows her head. The flames of the fire are dancing on her face. Tess cannot move or take a step. Then the girls and women close in around the table again and Tess looks at her feet and walks on, beating down the fear.

At the tea they are all looking at her. ‘What’s wrong with you, why don’t you answer me?’ Evelyn asks her. ‘Why aren’t you eating? And you ate no dinner either. What’s wrong? Did you lose your tongue or something?’ I did answer you , she replies. I’m not hungry . But then, after a few more answers, she knows they have not heard her. Her words are not working, the sounds are not coming out of her mouth into the air.

‘Did something happen in school, Tess?’ Claire asks her softly, and she runs from the kitchen, out to the front hall and up the stairs. At the turn she stands under the stained-glass window. She thinks of the tinker girl’s white face. She remembers the day she stuck her tongue out at the tinker girl and now she is dead. She turns her face up to the window, longing for the sun to pour in and warm her. She joins her hands and says a Hail Mary. She listens for the words, to test her sound. But no sound comes. She prays louder, harder. She gives a little cough, and tries again. She starts to cry. She touches her face and the feel of the tears makes her cry more. She climbs to the top and runs along the landing to her mother’s and father’s room. On the dressing table she picks up the photograph of her mother in her nurse’s uniform and carries it back to her own room. She takes off her boots and gets into bed with the photograph in her hand.

When she wakes it is dark. She knows from the silence of the house that it is the middle of the night. Across the room she can make out Maeve’s shape in the other bed. She moves a little and feels the mattress damp under her. She puts a hand down between her legs. She has wet her knickers. She gets out and takes them off and climbs back in, keeping away from the wet spot. She remembers the photograph and feels around until she finds it on the pillow.

∼

Her talk does not come back. Her father and Evelyn bring her down to Dr O’Beirne and he sits her up on a high table and asks her questions. But she cannot answer them. One day Denis sits beside her on the low wall. ‘You’ll be all right — any day now you’ll be as right as rain,’ he says. ‘I bet you by Christmas when Santy comes you’ll be talkin’ away to him.’ She says her prayers, like Claire and Mike Connolly tell her to do, but her talk does not come back, not even for Christmas. At school, Mrs Snee brings her up to her desk and tries, in a kind way, to trick her into talking. On one of her visits Miss Tannian takes her aside, tells her to take deep breaths and say her own name. Tess , she keeps saying, Tess , as if Tess does not know her own name. Sometimes people get cross with her. She gives up trying to answer them. She looks into all their faces and their eyes and then they give up too. Little by little she gets used to it. She does not miss talking at all. She does everything they ask — all her chores — and they all get used to her silence.

One day when Evelyn and Denis are gone to town her father wants help with the sheep. Tess is told to stand in a gap leading into the yard. Claire is standing at the avenue and Maeve is at the orchard gate which has fallen off its hinges. Her father and Mike Connolly go off into the fields to round up the flock. They are gone a long time. Tess hates when there are big jobs like this going on — when the cattle are being dosed, or the sheep are being dipped or shorn. She lies awake at night thinking of all the things that can go wrong, all the dangers.

Then the sheep appear, running, bleating, Captain nipping at their heels, and behind, her father and Mike Connolly. She moves a little to the right, then to the left, trying to spread herself across the gap. She feels the ground shaking from the pounding of their hooves. The smell of them, their greasy wool, reminds her of mutton. Her father shouts, Keep back a bit . Mike Connolly is talking to Captain all the time, making little whistling sounds that Captain understands. And then something small and dark — a cat or a rat or a bird — darts across the track and startles Tess and she jumps and one of the sheep sees what Tess has seen and turns and breaks away and rushes towards the gap, towards Tess. The others break and follow and in an instant the whole flock is coming at her, diving past her, right and left, into the open field beyond. Her father and Mike Connolly and Claire are waving their arms, shouting at her. She stands, trapped, as the sheep shoot by, brushing off her arms, leaping past her head, their hooves like thunder so that she has to crouch down and cover her head to save herself.

They are all shouting at her. The sheep are spreading out in the field behind her, Captain after them. They will go on and on through all the gaps into the far fields. Her father is coming, running, his face red. ‘Get into the house, you!’ he roars. ‘Get in, get in out of my sight! ’ He has his hand raised and she thinks he will lash out and wallop her as he passes. But he runs on in his wellingtons. And then Mike Connolly comes through the gap, older, slower. Their eyes meet for a second. She longs for him to nod or say something but he looks away and keeps on going.

She walks around to the far side of the house where the sun never shines and no one ever goes. There’s an old rag hanging on the barbed-wire fence. A bird is singing in a tree. She leans over the fence and vomits, her hair falling into the flow. She reaches out for the rag to wipe her mouth. It is her mother’s old blouse, faded and tattered, hung out to dry a long time ago, and forgotten.

For a long time she cannot look at her father. She tries to stay out of his path. He has a way of looking at her, a long mean look, as if he is about to say something terrible that will shame her. He keeps his eyes on her when she moves around the kitchen. With each step she is afraid the ground will open and pull her in. She can hardly breathe. I have no mother , she thinks, I have no father . When he is going to a fair or a funeral she brings him his good coat and hat. Once, he said, ‘Good girl’, but he never says her name. Mike Connolly says her name. She has grown shy with Mike, and ashamed, since that day with the sheep. Claire is the nicest, always. She says there’s a doctor in Dublin who can help her to talk again but Tess shakes her head. Some nights when the moon shines in her window and shadows cross the wall she jumps out of bed and tiptoes across the landing into Claire’s and Evelyn’s room. Claire puts a finger to her lips and lifts the blankets and lets Tess in beside her. They make chaireens and Tess sleeps all night like that, against Claire’s lap, inside Claire’s arms.