My sister,
Pauline, and I came to Tenerife on Saturday for a winter break. It was to be my treat but she wouldn't
hear of it, so we went Dutch, which spoiled it for me at first. I oh so
wanted to foot that bill!
But I have to say her pleasure in
the whole thing made up, a bit, for my initial disappointment. She was like a
child at the airport, excited in a way I haven't been since I was about
twenty.
"Where do we go now?" she asked, when we'd checked in, and
she couldn't hide the joy in her voice. It almost made me cry, to think that
she didn't know the way to the departure gates, a walk I make about thirty
times a year. "I'll lead the way!" I said brightly, pushing out the trolley,
relieved to note that her bags appeared presentable, and she herself looked
as well as most of those in the queue, all things considered (like her
smoker's complexion and her fourteen stones of flab). It's hard to believe
that Pauline used to be much better-looking than me.
We're twins, not identical, me and Pauline. From our
earliest days, she was the beautiful, bossy one, while I was mousy and
humble, appropriately enough, as we were born in Walkinstown in a corporation house about the size of a
comfortable mousehole. The street was called Mozart Road, which sounds
lovely, but unfortunately most of the residents wouldn't have known Mozart
from Thomas Moore. We had one of those quaint working-class childhoods people
are always writing about: fly-infested corner shops, luke-warm baths once a
week, big sloppy-looking clothes. Inside the house, in the world of adults,
life was stereotypically drab and not very harmonious.
But outside, out playing, was another story. That was a wondrous kingdom of hula
hoops whirring, skipping ropes twirling, balls bouncing with all the rhythm and
energy of a joyous symphony. The children's Mozart Road was Music Street, with Pauline, bossy and beautiful,
busily conducting the show. We played and sang all day long, skipping rhymes, ball rhymes, counting out
rhymes. "In and out goes Mary Bluebell"; "Plainy Packet o' Rinso!" and, my
favourite:
"Vote vote vote for De
Valera,
In comes Pauline at the
door Eye Oh!
Pauline is the one who can
have a bit of fun,
and we don't want Bernie
any more Eye Oh!"
I heard some kids singing that rhyme a few years
ago, in a park in Clondalkin. "Wuff wuff wuff for De Valera!" is what they
sang - the rhyme had endured, but not its meaning. Amazing!
***
Pauline was clever and
ambitious as well as being a bully. When we were seventeen she decided we were going to
university; it wasn't quite the October Revolution of Mozart Road, since
history had destined us to be that generation, you know, the first in the
family to go to university OR EVEN SECONDARY SCHOOL. Presumably there has to
be a first, why the big deal? But insisting that we go to Trinity was a definite coup, a sign of
Pauline's ambition and power. A few Mozart Road kids went to Belfield,
but we went to Trinity; Pauline loved Brideshead Revisited and it
was the closest we would ever get to Oxford. Her ambition was great but it
had its bounds: College Green.
"We're going everywhere!" she boasted, trying to compensate for the fact
that we were not going to make it to Lady Margaret Hall. "Rome! Paris! Trieste! "She'd read Joyce, too.
I believed it. Going to Trinity was a
leap so major that after that everything was going to seem like simple
addition. And in a way for me it has all worked out. I never travelled in the
sense we had intended to - you see I met Conor in Second Year and we got
married three years later and that sort of put paid to the bohemian
wanderlust bit, since he decided to make his career here (he started in the
bank; now he owns a management consultancy). But I've been on about a
thousand holidays. It's not quite the life of exotic travel I once envisaged,
but it's better than poor old Pauline's fate.
She was doing fine at college, at
first. We did English and Spanish, Spanish being the language they always
taught in poor schools, God knows why, maybe because a lot of poor people
speak it. Trinity made a big
impression on us and although we made none whatsoever on Trinity we were
fairly happy there. At the end of first year we got good marks but nothing
spectacular enough to attract anyone's attention, and although Pauline loved
to talk about books she didn't, in tutorials, because the tutors had
difficulty understanding her Dublin accent and weren't very tactful about
keeping that problem to themselves. After one of them asked her to repeat a Hiberno-English phrase she'd used in
class - she had said "I'm after saying that already" - she kept quiet. Hiberno-English! Everyone
stared at her as if she had strayed off a cabbage patch on an Abbey set.
In Second Year we drifted apart and made a few
friends independently. I met Conor, and apparently Pauline met someone too;
anyway by Christmas she was pregnant.
And, basically, that's what happened to
her.
"I want to have an abortion," she said, when
she told me her terrible secret. The word stunned me even more than the
horrifying word "pregnant"; I'd never heard her say it. I knew, vaguely, of girls who had had abortions, Trinity girls. But those girls
were always nameless and at a distance which made them impossible to access.
Friends of friends. Sometimes I wonder if they were mythical creatures. They
were certainly as elusive as dryads or mermaids. You heard about them, but
you never actually saw one, much less talked to one or asked her for advice.
We had no-one to turn to.
There was a family planning clinic in Dublin
then, to which people went for contraceptives which were still illegal. So in
desperation we sneaked off to it, looking over our shoulders in case anyone
we knew would spot us. The clinic was located in a quiet back street, in a
basement. We slunk down damp area steps into the den of vice, which turned out to be rather fresh and
pretty, like a country-look coffee shop: pale green, with Van Gogh posters on the wall. The staff all seemed to be English, or
to have accents that sounded English, a bit like Trinity, so we weren't as
fazed as we might have been. They were very slow to give Pauline information about abortion. They
tried everything else: get
married, consider adoption, keep
the baby. All impossible; she didn't want to marry the father and vice versa. If she went through with the pregnancy she'd miss her
exams and then wouldn't get her grant next year. And keeping the baby… where
would she keep it? On what? Nobody did that. Nobody would talk to her, if she did. She'd be a
leper.
In the end, reluctantly, they gave her a
London telephone number.
Even phoning London was a huge undertaking for
us. We didn't have a phone at
home and couldn't have used it if we had. We went to the GPO, into one of
those brown boxes with the swing doors . My pockets were full of ten-penny
pieces. We had to go through an
operator and we were terrified that someone would answer "Illegal Abortion
Clinic, can oy elp ewe?" and that everyone in the telephone exchange would
know what we were up to. But the
clinic receptionist was a model of discretion. And she informed Pauline, in a
high detached voice, that the cost of the procedure plus a night in the clinic
would be £300.
Three hundred pounds. And travel on top of
that. It might as well have been
three million pounds. Our fees for the year were less than a hundred pounds.
Our maintenance grant for the year was £150, and our mother got that. We had no
money. Pauline had no friends with money. We'd never gone to England, never
booked a ticket on the ferry, never stayed in a hotel or even a bed and breakfast. It was all too
much for us and we capitulated to fate. "I'll get back, I damned well will!"
Pauline gritted her teeth. "As soon as the little bugger is adopted I'll be
finishing my degree".
How she planned to do this was unclear,
because she missed the exams and so lost her grant. One of the Catholic agencies for unmarried mothers was
very helpful, though, and once she agreed to adoption they organised
everything - home, hospital,
adoption. But the plan oh so
misfired! When she had the baby, at one of those homes, it had mild Downs
Syndrome, so the couple who had it earmarked backed off and nobody else wanted it. Pauline could have left the baby -
Sebastian - in the home but she refused to do that because she had a thing about institutions. Also
she pitied Sebastian. She pitied him more than she pitied herself.
"I wouldn't 've let them adopt him either, even
if they'd wanted to, after I'd
had him," she said defiantly (she probably believed this but I don't). "Giving him up for adoption would
have been like cutting off my arm and giving it to someone who hadn't got an
arm of their own. Do you know what I mean?"
She rented a bed-sit in a run-down house in Inchicore,
pretending she didn't have a baby, and used to leave Sebastian in with a
woman while she was at work, and I babysat a good bit during the first couple
of years. Later Sebastian went to a day care centre which looks after him for
most of the day. He's old now but he still lives with her. Her main worry is what will happen to
him if anything happens to her, i.e. when she dies. She goes on about it, whines
actually, you know, about the lack of State services and back-up. It's true
but what can you do? She's done
everything she can. He probably
won't end up on the street. She should just let it go.
***
And Tenerife seems to have helped.
"This is the life!" she says. She's more relaxed than I've seen her for years, not that I see her that
often, since we move in such different circles. We're sitting on our balcony drinking red wine. She smokes like a chimney, drinks
like a fish, who could blame her but maybe that's the root of her weight
problem?
"Yes, isn't it?" I say.
"Do you ever wish you'd had the money, for
that abortion?" I ask. I'm happy with my tan, which is a good even brown already at the end of three days,
and I've drunk I'd say a bottle of wine already, you know how you can if you
get started. I'll pay for that next week. We've never discussed the abortion thing, not for
about thirty years and I don't know why I'm raising the subject now.
She doesn't answer. She just smiles and then she sings:
"Wuff wuff wuff for De Valera!
In comes Bernie at the door
Eye Oh!
Bernie is the one that can
have a bit of fun
And we don't want Pauline
any more Eye Oh!"
I'm amazed. I didn't know anybody else
knew that version, apart from me. But there you are. You think something is your
own little secret and then you find out it's common knowledge. I join in the
song with her. "Wuff wuff wuff!" I sing, and then I start giggling and she
starts giggling and we both nearly split our sides, we're like two kids
rolling around the floor tickling each other.
When Pauline told me she was pregnant that
time, I was preoccupied. I was deeply in love with Conor, drunk on love, the way you can be when
you're nineteen. I considered
fleetingly asking him for a loan, for Pauline. His father was a bank manager,
they seemed wealthy to me. But I'd just been with him for a few weeks; he
didn't even know I had a sister. How do you ask the hunk you've just started going with for £300 so
your sister can have an abortion? Conor was a lapsed Catholic, like me, but I didn't know how far he'd
lapsed at that point, you know? It was a big deal for him, dating a girl from Walkinstown; he believed
he was storming the Bastille when he asked me to the pictures - he lived in a
big house in Rathfarnham, where we live now, in the same house actually. We
inherited two years ago when his mother finally kicked the bucket.
So I didn't risk it.
Copyright © Éilís Ní Dhuibhne 2001. All Rights Reserved
