***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***
Copyright © 2018 Caoilinn Hughes
It’s our right to be virgins as often as we like, Gael told the girls surrounding her like petals round a pollen packet.
“Just imagine it,” she said. “Louise. Fatima. Deirdre Concannon.” She pronounced their names like accusations. She snuck the tip of her index finger into each of their mouths and made their cheeks go: pop. pop. pop. “I did mine already with this finger,” she said. The girls flinched and wiped their taste buds on their pinafores. “Blood dotted the bathroom tiles but it wasn’t a lot and it wasn’t as sore as like . . . piercing your own ears without ice,” she concluded ominously. “And now I don’t have to obsess over it like all these morons. You should all do it tonight. We’ll talk tomorrow and I’ll know if you’ve done it or not.”
Tiny hairs on their ears trembled at her inaudible breath like Juliet’s. Gravely, she confessed: “Some of you will need capsules all your life. All the way to your wedding night because of being Muslim or really really Christian. Wipe your snot, Miriam. It’s a fact of life. It’s also helping people. Boys will think they’re taking something from you, when the capsule cracks. But you’ll know better,” she said. “You’ll know there was nothing to take.”
Gael was eleven. It was her last term of primary school. Perhaps that was why the proposition backfired. The girls were getting ready to fly off to some other wealthy, witheringly beautiful leader. But Gael wasn’t disturbed by this. She no longer needed a posse. It would be tidier if they fell away than having to break them off.
“Really really Christian like your brother?” Deirdre replied. “Isn’t he an altar boy?”
Gael rolled her eyes so dramatically it gave her a back-of-socket headache. “He hasn’t got a hymen, Deirdre, so he’s obviously irrelevant.”
Deirdre and Louise’s mirth was exacerbated by the fact that Miriam’s tears had now formed a terra-cotta paste with the foundation she’d tried on at the bus-stop pharmacy earlier. How much would the virgin pills cost, Becca wanted to know. What would Gael price them at?
“What-ever,” Gael said. “What does that matter? Pocket money is what. Everyone’ll want them. Hundreds if not millions of people, Rebecca. So choose.” She challenged their noncommittal natures, looking from girl to concave girl. “Well, are you or aren’t you? In?” She addressed the dandruffy crowns of their heads. Of late, they’d become less worthwhile spending time with. Even playing sports, they didn’t want to sweat. Headbutting nothing, the chimney-black sweep of her hair kicked forward and she thrust them off like a sudden squall that separates what’s flyaway from what’s fixture. Stupid girls, she thought as the lunch bell trilled and they straggled toward their classrooms. Back to times tables: the slow, stupid common operations.
Turning her back on the blackboard, she took a bottle of TippEx from her bag and began painting her nails a corrective white. It smelled of Guthrie’s bedroom. Acrid. Concentrated. Tissues fouled with paint from cleaning his brushes. Exoneration. Her little brother: the acolyte. On the ninth nail, she lifted her head from the fumes to find Deirdre Concannon striding into the room alongside the Guidance Counselor, who approached Gael’s desk with a blob of tuna-mayo in the corner of her puckered mouth, a mobile phone held out and a polite invitation for Gael to take her depraved influence elsewhere. The number Gael dialed was familiar. Though, as Mum was out of town, it was to be an unfamiliar fate.
Jarleth had sent a car to collect them and take them to his work several hours ago. On the phone, his secretary had informed Gael as to the make of the car and the name of the driver. (Both Mercedes.) There’d been no chastisement thus far, other than an afternoon confined to a windowless meeting-room penitentiary in his office building.
In the same school but two years behind his sister, Guthrie had been encouraged to go home too when his whole class concluded their postlunch prayer in perfect unison: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, Hymen.” Gael was already waiting at the school gate when Guthrie had come dragging his satchel-crucifix across the tarmac, in utter distress and confusion.
His blue eyes were red-rimmed as a seagull’s by the time he finished his homework under the artificial lights of Barclays’ Irish headquarters at 2 Park Place in Dublin’s city center, just around the corner (though worlds apart) from the National Concert Hall, where they often watched their mother yield a richer kind of equity from her orchestra.
Guthrie spoke quietly into his copybook. “You always do this when Mum’s gone.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“But you’re not.” He made a convincingly world-weary noise for a ten-year-old.
Their mother was Principal Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra—one of Ireland’s two professional orchestras— with whom she gave some hundred concerts a year, on top of guest conductorships where she might perform eight shows in a week, hold interviews, benefits, meetings, recordings, travel . . . generally returning home prostrate.
Gael searched for Ys in the ends of her black hair. Absently, she said, “How was I to know my idea’d make all the sissies go berserk?”
Guthrie’s wispy beige hair kissed the polished pine table where he rested his head on his arm. He was slowly translating Irish sentences from his textbook with his left hand. He was a ciotóg. A lefthanded person. Meaning: “strange one.”
Ffadó, ó,
A long time ago
bhí laoch mór ar a dtugtar Cúchulainn.
there was a great hero warrior of the name named called Cúchulainn.
He stopped writing and let the pencil tip rest on the page like a Ouija board marker. After a while, he lifted it and moved it to a blank page where he began drawing Cúchulainn in profile, sword brandished. It was a giant weapon with an intricate hilt. Guthrie gave his hero long flowing locks and a chain-mail vest and shin guards. When all the details had been filled in, Guthrie began to add squiggles all around the figure and wild loops in the air—childish in comparison to Cúchulainn’s frenzied expression.
“Are they clouds?” Gael asked.
A barely perceptible shift of his head. “Trees?”
“Waves,” he said softly.
“Wait.” She considered the sketch anew. “He’s in the sea? With those heavy clothes on?”
Guthrie exaggerated the hero’s grimace and drew a twisted cloak in place of saying yes. He strengthened the line of the chin and the nostril brackets, for defiance. “He’s fighting the ocean.”
Watching the pencil go, Gael wondered at this. Cúchulainn battling the humongous Atlantic. An invisible duel, in slow, deliberate motion. Had he no mind for reward or reputation, should he win? Or rescue, should he lose? Maybe he was just proving something to himself; testing the muscle of his character, no thought of audience. There aren’t viewing posts in towers of water. No adjudication. Why else would a person take on the tireless sea but to learn the strength of his own current? Guthrie lifted his head to reveal a pale yellow mark where his cheek had been pressed against his forearm.
“That’s what it feels like,” he said, evenly, erasing some lines from the drawing and brushing the gray rubber scraps to the floor. “The way you get dragged in the white part.”
“What feels like that?”
Some moments passed without answer.
“Oh,” Gael said, realizing. “That doesn’t sound relaxing.” “It’s not.”
“But you know it’s only gravity, dragging you down, right? It’s not like, a monster or Satan or anything.”
Guthrie seemed to think about this. “It’s me,” he said. “The warrior?”
He shook his head and Gael half expected feathers of pale hair to come falling off like when you shake a dead bird. “The one dragging.”
“Guthrie! That’s not a good thing to think. It’s not your fault.” Gael said this, though she knew it was a lie to make things livable. Her parents had sat her down a few weeks ago to explain the situation. “Your brother doesn’t have epilepsy. He only thinks he does,” Jarleth had said. Sive had looked dismayed by that explanation and had taken over. “It’s called somatic delusional disorder, Gael. I’m sure you’ll want to look it up. But what’s important is that he’s physically healthy,” she’d said, “but there’s one small, small part of his brain that isn’t well. The doctors say when he’s older, it might be easier to address him directly about it, with counseling. Right now, he gets extremely stressed and anxious, aggressively so, if we talk to him about the disorder. He thinks we’re telling him he’s not sick. Which he is, just not in the way he thinks. So it’s better for everyone to treat it as what Guthrie believes it to be. And that’s epilepsy.” What Gael took from this was that her brother was too young to understand the truth and it was part of his sickness that he couldn’t.
“Guth?” Gael repeated, “It’s not your fault.” “Dad says so.”
A clout of anger to the chest. “Dad’s wrong.” “He’s mad at me.”
“He’s just . . . frustrated to see you break something every time you have a fit.”
“It’s not on purpose.” “I know.”
“I don’t control it.” “I know that.”
“If it was to . . . If I just wanted to skip PE, Miss McFadden would just let me do extra arts and crafts so long as I don’t plug stuff in or use scissors or knives or strong glue, she said I can. Or even something else.”
Gael made a shocked face. “She must’ve been drunk or something. McFadden’s a prick.”
“She can tell that you think that. You make her mean. She said you’re arrogant but I told her you’re nicer when you’re not at school.”
“Who cares about nice.”
“She said, ‘That’s convenient.’ ”
“It’d be convenient if she got mad cow disease from a burger.” “Don’t, Gael.” Tears surged in his eyes again. “I like her.”
“Fine, sorry, I take it back! No mad cow disease for Miss McFadden. She’s probably vegetarian, Guthrie, don’t cry.”
“It’s not—” he said hoarsely.
Gael took his hand from his mouth, where he was chewing on the outer heel of his palm. “Don’t do that. Please tell me what’s wrong.” He tried to explain but sobbing hampers syntax. Gael pieced together the howled-out word clusters. Dad had warned him he’d have to be moved to Special School if he kept having fits. “But it’s . . . not special . . . special is . . . special . . . means . . .”
“It’s a euphemism,” Gael said. A word she’d learned recently and learned well.
Guthrie blinked at her rapidly. This was new information. “A what?”
“A euphemism. Here.” She took his pencil. “You learn it and say it to Dad if he ever threatens that again. You-fa-mism. It means when one word is just a nice way to say something worse. And it’s a lie, Guth. There’s no way you’d have to move schools.”
“Dad wouldn’t just say it.”
“He doesn’t see it as a lie. He sees it as a way to protect you. He’ll say whatever he thinks will work, to keep you safe. Does Mum know?”
“What?”
“That Dad said that.”
Guthrie shrugged. He was looking at the word Gael wrote in block letters on the page beside his drawing. Underneath the Irish homework. He was catching his breath. “She never said it.” He took the pencil back up and began to graze it across the whole drawing, diagonally, hazing it in lead.
“Hey!” Gael pulled the copybook from him before it was ruined. She slapped it shut and slotted it in his schoolbag. It was annoying how often their mother was touring these days. She should be dealing with this. “Look at me,” Gael said. “You didn’t have a fit today. Even with . . . your classmates taunting you . . . like silly little dipshits.” She didn’t add: because of me.
He turned his face from her, to the door, where money missionaries in drab suits and skull-accentuating hairdos passed by the glass panel.
Gael watched the quiver of her brother’s shoulder blades. The handholds of his vertebrae. “Come on, Guth. If he comes in and sees your eyes all red still . . .”
“Those estimates submitted this morning—” Their father’s voice at the end of the corridor carried in as it would through state-of-theart soundproofing. “—having you on . . . fourteen basis points . . . thirteen too many.” With only the length of the hallway to prepare for his arrival, Gael got up and paced the room, checking behind the freestanding whiteboard and testing the wall of locked filing cabinets until one opened. She rooted inside and pulled out a roll of Sellotape. “Quick,” she said, twirling Guthrie’s swivel chair to face her and biting off a length of the tape. “Stay still.”
He pushed back from her. “What are you doing?”
Jarleth’s voice loudened. “—who they take their cues from. He’ll call it how he sees it.”
“Trust me,” she said, wiping his tears with her thumb, which didn’t dry them at all.
“Stop.”
“Don’t try to talk,” she said, and plastered the Sellotape across his chin horizontally, so that his lower lip became huge and half-peeledback and his pink gums showed like a cranky gelada monkey. “It won’t hurt. I promise.” She wrestled him to connect another length of tape from his temples to the base of his cheekbones, packing his puffy eyes into a tight squint. Shushing her brother’s protestations, she braced against his piddly hook punches and completed the collage of his face. On the chair, they wheeled along the table, spinning as they went: the schlepping planet and its beleaguered moon. The last sticky swath gave him a piggy nose from which mucus-water dribbled, threatening to make the whole composition come unstuck.
The door had opened and Jarleth stood there, refastening his watch, like an actor stepping onto the stage mid–costume change. He considered his progeny aloofly. The lines would come to him in due course, or some midmanager would prompt him. This wasn’t an important scene.
Gael had jumped to attention, then felt somewhat abased at having done so. Such obeisance. She bent down, not in genuflection but to rummage through her bag for her pocket mirror. Handing it to Guthrie, she said, “We’re playing Who Am I.” Jarleth gave her a Playing, is it? look. His straight eyelashes pointed at her, then moved to the beverages that had been served to them. A can of Sprite for Guthrie. Sparkling water for Gael, who had asked for coffee, but the receptionist had tucked her chin into her chest and had declared Ms. Foess “very sophisticated altogether takes after her father doesn’t she but I don’t think your mammy’d be happy if we sent you home all jittery now would she missus?” Gael had given her best tsk in reply: the sound of a control-alt-delete command. “If you’re going to use third person, commit to it,” Gael had said. “I’ll have sparkling water. Pellegrino, please.”
Guthrie hadn’t dared to open the compact mirror to guess who he was supposed to be, but at least the disguise had worked. Horseplay trumped waterworks in their father’s eyes.
“It’s ten past three,” Jarleth said. “Since you two have run out of homework, I’ll have to call Carla.”
“Oh Dad,” Gael said. “Don’t call Carla.” To Gael, Carla was the most depressing kind of adult—the kind that sees children as a separate species, blind to the puerility of her own life. Girls’ nights out on indisposable income. Deliberately limited vocabulary. Lip-gloss mania. Guthrie didn’t like Carla because of her general negligence and bad cooking. Their mother liked her threatlessness.
Indifferent, Jarleth took his mobile phone from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and spun it the right way up like a cutthroat razor. The suit was that classic navy-gray color that exists only on the suit spectrum. It had a muted pinstripe and was paired with a crisp white shirt with sloping collar corners, silver button cuff links (that had been no one’s gift to him) and a silver and blue tie patterned with a tight grid. His white-gold Claddagh ring looked attractive against his spring tan. He’d gone out cycling for hours on Sunday after mass and the sun shone down on him, he declared upon return, sanctimonious on his carbon cloud. (He never wore cycling gloves or shaved his legs: the two most effeminate aspects of cycling culture. The spandex was just practical.) In the office, he was a bit like a bride in her gown alongside all the bridesmaids, in that none of his colleagues—even fellow executives—dared to wear the same shade of dominion. It was true, he wore it very well. When he stood in the daylight, the high thread count made the suit appear pale blue, though this room had no windows. Today was one of those rare days when Jarleth hadn’t matched anything with his eyes, which he liked to think of as green, though they were brown as hundred-euro banknotes dropped in a puddle.
“You dropped something,” Gael said, to divert his attention from finding Carla’s number. Gael threw her only banknote onto the carpet as she stretched. There goes Susan’s hymen pill deposit.
Jarleth looked at the folded fiver. “Buy yourself a coffee.” He glanced at his watch.
“Tell you what,” Gael said. Her father preferred propositions to questions. She was well trained to please him. The technique had the opposite effect on her teachers, but parents pay cash and report cards are easily forged. “We’ll go to Stephen’s Green Shopping Center till you’re done,” she said, tilting her head toward Guthrie. “I’ll hold his hand.”
Jarleth studied her with some seriousness. “You have time to kill because your teachers were too provincial to appreciate your business idea—clever, if low-margin and most certainly age-inappropriate— and now you’d like to fritter away that hard-won time in a shopping center?”
“I’ve karate at half shix,” Guthrie said, or at least that was what it sounded like through the Sellotape matrix. “Buth I can not go if it’s ease—easiel . . . Thath?”
“Market research?” Gael lifted her shoulders to her ears in a cutesy shrug.
“Walter Lippmann had a great name for the masses that congregate in shopping malls instead of libraries,” Jarleth said. “ ‘The bewildered herd.’ They trample each other down for discount espresso machines. You’ve seen it.”
“We already have an espresso machine,” Gael said. “There’ll be something else you want.”
“I might need something.”
“What do you need? Tell me what you need. What your brother needs.” Jarleth strode over to the tabletop phone to dial 1. “If I’d only known my children were deprived. Anything, Gael. I’ll have Margaret put in an order, whatever it is. Next-day delivery.”
“I get the point,” Gael said, glancing at Guthrie repentantly, then refocusing.
“What point?” Jarleth thrust one hand into his trouser pocket and pushed his stomach out so that his tie slipped to the side and Gael could see the dark coiled hairs of his lower belly through the slits in his strained shirt. He used his body like this on purpose: the body language of an older, uglier, larger man; his form unambiguated by an undershirt. This seemed to make him all the more attractive to women of her mother’s age, and younger, Gael had observed of late.
“What’s my point, Gael?” He always managed to keep his full lips—the same ballet shoe color as the rest of his face—relaxed, even when the words coming out of them weren’t.
Gael put on her straightlaced voice. “My time’s more valuable than the time it would take to walk to Stephen’s Green to go shopping.”
“Good.”
Thankfully, he never said “good girl” like relatives and teachers and strangers. Gael hated the phrase in the way she hated people who mixed chocolate with fruit. A denigrating thing to say. It even had the sound of a gag. G-g. A cooing baby sound. Worst of all was good girl, Gael. Miss McFadden had paid sorely for that in fourth class.
“Good,” her father repeated. “What else?”
“Huh?” Gael skimmed her mind for What Else.
The landline phone on the table rang shrilly. Jarleth picked up and listened. “Tell him I’m on a conference call with London. I’ll be there when he sees me.” He spanked the phone to its cradle, gave a sharp sigh and frowned at Guthrie, then at Gael. “Who is he, then? Picasso’s Weeping Woman?”
A grin ripped through her concentration. Gael tapped Guthrie on the knee, where the mirror sat in his palm. He opened it and held it at arm’s length to try to take himself in. For a moment, nothing registered. They waited. Then, it came as the kind of wave you see at the last minute and you have no choice but to duck under. His face bulged through the tape and the composition slipped apart, taking all the fine down of his cheeks away with it. The laughter was so against his will that his eyes were going again. Straining to make out what he was saying, soon Gael was at it too and it didn’t occur to her to stand outside herself to check for giggling; to alter herself toward the caustic, brusque laughter of men. At last, Guthrie steadied him- self and sputtered it out. “Deirdre Concannon,” he said.
“Asshole in one!” Gael clapped her hands once. She turned for her father’s reaction or reprimand, but he was no longer there and the door was shut.
A taxi arrived soon after to take them home. Jarleth said he’d be late and to use the money on the hall table for takeout. Not to wait up.
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