Something About Her

Chapter 1

Like a Dove

County Clare, Ireland
November 2012

Orla and I walked across the school field. All the other girls in our year were way ahead of us, giggling and jovially swinging their gym bags by the straps. It was that delicate time of the morning. That time when the mist swirls and floats above the ground, whispering itself away and disintegrating into the thin air above it.

"I could've sworn I put them in here," said Orla, rummaging around in her gym bag.

I walked close to her, observing the beauty of autumn. Frozen droplets of dew shimmered on the grass like miniature crystals and refracted the limp sunlight. Burnt orange leaves crunched and mud squelched beneath our school shoes.

With her teeth, Orla removed one of her gray woolen gloves. It flopped out of her mouth like the drooping ear of a bunny.

"I'm telling you, Ash," she mumbled, her teeth clenched around the glove, "Sister Molony is feckin' insane. That assembly this morning. I swear to God."

I stayed quiet and continued to look at her. She just kept fumbling around in her bag with her bare hand. After a moment, I took the glove from her mouth, fiddling with it and then putting it on. It was still warm from her skin.

"Aisling Delaney, you stolen my glove?"

I nodded and let my lips slide into a broad smile.

"Now we have one each." I showed Orla, wiggling my gloved fingers around in her face. She rolled her eyes.

"There they are. Thank Jesus. Thought I'd left them on the counter."

Out of her bag, she produced two bacon rolls wrapped in silver foil. My stomach rumbled as I saw them. She planted one firmly in the palm of my ungloved hand. It felt like a gush of warm water, thawing the coldness of my skin.

"I dropped by O'Connor's in case your mother sent you in without breakfast."

She was right; I hadn't eaten that morning.

"You got this for me?"

"Yeah, course." She laughed, her sage-green eyes catching me gently.

She turned to study her own bacon roll. Her tongue rested on her glossy rose-colored lips as she peeled back the foil delicately with slender fingers. Then, in one movement, she took a huge bite. It wasn't graceful, but I couldn't take my eyes off her. I watched the white dust collect around her mouth, her jaw clenching as she chewed.

Then I looked at mine. Unwrapping it, I took a sacred mouthful and tipped my head back.

"Fuck me," I breathed.

Orla nodded, smirked, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before depositing the greasy remnants onto her school skirt.

"Jesus. Fair play," I said, eating more of it. "This is worth the stitch we'll get for sure."

We were approaching the PE changing rooms by that point, so I had one last nibble and folded the other half of the bacon roll up for later, stuffing it into the side pocket of my gym bag. Orla had already finished hers. Letting out a sigh of satisfaction, she licked the corners of her mouth free of ketchup and crumpled the silver foil up into a ball, rolling it around in her palms.

At the scuffed changing room door, we stopped. I couldn't bring myself to open it. Behind it, all the other girls in our year were getting ready for PE, gaggling and babbling like a bunch of pigeons. They were all far too enthusiastic for our liking.

Orla stood behind me and I turned to face her. On her ski-jump nose, which was peppered with rust-colored freckles, there was still a small dollop of ketchup. I smiled delicately.

"What? What's funny?" Orla muttered.

"Think you got a bit carried away there," I replied.

I wiped the ketchup from her nose with the tip of my finger and licked it off my nail.

We studied each other's faces, our bodies fidgeting. Orla ran her bony hand through the bottom of her copper plait, and then dropped it, linking one of her fingers with one of mine.

I let the moment hang, feeling my skin tingle as she touched it.

"Alright then." My voice was weak. "Cross-country beckons."

I started to twist towards the door, intending to finally push it open, but Orla drew me back with one small tug. I looked at her and something caught in my throat. Our faces were close now. I could feel the warmth of her breath on my lips.

Orla assessed the field around us. No one to be seen.

Leaning in, slowly, like a dove tilting its head, she kissed me. It was as soft as silk on the corner of my mouth. I felt her fingers adjusting my chin so that our lips met completely. They moved together like dancers. I could smell her fresh, wind-brushed skin. I could taste the salty ketchup on her tongue. As we pulled apart, my heartbeat pulsed in the pit of my stomach. Both of our faces cracked into a squirming smile.

"We can't let anyone see us," I whispered.

"I know, Ash," she reassured me. "I know."

2

Mutual Confession

That wasn't the first time it'd happened. Orla and I had kissed once already. It had been about a week before, behind the art building. We'd ended up there after lessons and it had just sort of happened. After that, for the whole week up until we kissed again outside the changing rooms, my palms were sweaty and my stomach a constantly spinning merry-go-round.

During the last few years of school, Orla and I had become much closer. Sure, we'd always been good mates, but something had sort of shifted. I think it was our loneliness that brought us together. We didn't have many friends, but we didn't feel we needed them. We had our books and we had each other.

By the point we had our first kiss, it had been clear to me for a while how Orla felt about me, and, I think, how I felt about her. It was kind of obvious from the way we looked at each other, from how our conversations always had some sort of subtext, or from the way we reacted when our skin brushed up against each other.

Whenever we had a lesson that even touched on homosexuality, Orla would make a thing of muttering to me as we ambled through empty corridors after.

"As if being gay is a sin," she'd whispered to me once as we walked. "How long ago was the Bible written anyway? I mean, catch yourself, it's the twenty-first century. My parents wouldn't even say that sort of thing, and they're Catholic, for God's sake. I just won't have someone tell me I can't be that."

"Be what?" I'd prodded, quietly.

Orla had stared deep into my blue eyes. In that moment, she formed an expression. An expression which said, Isn't it obvious, Aisling? Her eyebrows were raised; her lips were screwed together. It was a look that confessed to me, and my own look succumbed. I confessed straight back.

Then we knew. A mutual confession.

The truth was, I'd known that I was gay ever since I'd seen Niamh O'Donnell climb a tree with bare feet at Aoife McGrath's sixth birthday party and got butterflies. A mundane point of realization, I know, but I try not to overthink it.

To be sure, though, my parents would never be fine about my sexuality in the way Orla's would be. My family wouldn't just struggle with it, and they certainly wouldn't accept it.

***

That Saturday night, a few days after our second kiss outside the changing rooms, Orla and I had arranged to go to the cinema. It was a sort of date, I guess. Not that I was particularly on board with that kind of thing.

No one would know it was a date, obviously. We wouldn't give anything away in public, just in case someone saw us and ended up nattering to someone else. It's not like they'd care about it themselves; it's just that everyone knew everyone where we lived, and I was worried.

Before I left for the cinema, I was up in my bedroom trying to put on some eyeliner. After school on Friday, I'd caught the bus home, as I always did, and I'd stopped off at the shop to buy it. I'd never worn eyeliner before, or any makeup really, so I didn't know how it worked.

I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The long mop of tangled brown hair, the small nose, blue eyes, dark eyelashes, and my lips, which were apple red from the cold.

I muddled around, trying to figure out whether the eyeliner went on the outside or the inside of my eyelid. Just as I was getting the hang of it, Ma called up to my room asking me to lay the table for dinner. I stopped, having done only one eye. Letting out a frustrated sigh, I slapped the eyeliner pencil down on my bedside table, thinking to myself that I'd do the other one later. The nerves before seeing Orla were like popping candy in my stomach.

I went downstairs and put out the plates, knives, and forks.

"Come help me bring things through once you're done," Ma called from the kitchen.

I finished straightening out the tablecloth. It looked like a big doily. Ivory lace pirouetting around the rim, sprouting stray bits of string where things had snagged it.

As I walked through to the kitchen, Ma spun around and looked me up and down. Her lips were wrinkled from scowling all her life, her eyes the same color as mine. Wafts of spice, wine, and earthy vegetables smoked around her as she moved. She wore her hair in a black bun above big pearl earrings, her charcoal linen apron tied into a perfectly symmetrical bow at the back.

"Sweet and merciful Jesus." Her voice was monotonous as she turned back to the stove. "The eyeliner is a bit much."

Her lips were tight and motionless, as if balancing a tightrope walker. The flames from the hob twitched, hissed, and deflated as she turned off the heat. Regally, she slipped on her oven gloves, one by one, and picked up the big, bubbling casserole dish. It spat and squirted beneath the lid.

"Bring through that bowl of rice and a serving spoon."

Silently I obeyed and took them through to the dining room. It was lit by a brass candle-style chandelier, bespangled with silky spider webs that no one had ever bothered to dust away. Ma had set down the casserole dish and was rearranging the tablecloth, rectifying what she surely saw as my shoddy work.

"What's the occasion?" she asked without glancing up at me.

She started changing the position of the knives and forks.

I put down the bowl of tepid rice, and the white lump of it jiggled like squirming maggots.

"I'm just going to the cinema with people."

"I wasn't aware."

Brushing her hands on her apron, Ma looked at me and raised her eyebrows. I didn't respond, but instead just stared deep into the steaming casserole vapor and sat down.

"Are you calling your father then, or shall I be doing that?"

The three of us ate mostly in silence.

It was always silent, and it was always just the three of us nowadays. My father was a distant, uninvolved man. He had never taken an interest in me.

I also barely ever saw my siblings. At Christmas and Easter, they would come home for a while, but otherwise, they mostly stayed away.

I was the youngest of four. Sean was the eldest, eight years older than me; then there was Jack, six years older, and Mary, who had left home for college when I was fourteen, abandoning me completely. The last thread attaching me to something outside of this nightmare had snapped when Mary left.

All three of my siblings lived and worked in Dublin now, only a few hours away on the other side of the country. I never spoke to them, and I don't think Ma or Pa did much either. We had never been close given everything that happened to me growing up. They had just ignored it, blanked it out, just like my father.

I sat there at the dinner table and pushed the casserole around my plate, then asked if I could be excused.

"But you're not finished." My mother dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a cream-colored napkin.

"You haven't eaten much. It's a waste," murmured my father.

"I'm not hungry, and I'll be late if I don't get going."

"Clear your plate first," instructed Ma. "And what time is it you'll be back?"

"I dunno, around eleven?"

An unimpressed nod. Ma sat upright, decorous, holding her cutlery, elbows pointed out. The piece of beef on her plate was being sawed, the toughness of it resisting incision.

I took my plate through to the kitchen and scraped the stodgy, conglutinated lump of food into the bin. The heavy bulk sank to the bottom of the bag. I watched it fade away, then put my plate in the dishwasher.

Walking up the road to the bus stop, I tucked my hands deep into the pockets of my long black coat. Breath fogged out of my mouth, and fat drops of rain plonked down from the sky, hitting me like a smacking hand.

I arrived late to the cinema and brushed off the drizzle that had gathered on my dark hair. In the foyer, I saw Orla up at the ticket stand. The flashing lights, red and white and candied neon colors, blurred around her perfectly still figure. Like fire, her hair set the grayness of the place ablaze. She caught sight of me, and that crinkle on her nose emerged as her lips turned upwards. I couldn't look away from her. I was in her grasp, and she knew it.

"Sweet or salty?" she mouthed from across the room.

I watched her lips moving like a paintbrush on a canvas, and I decided that perhaps I was on board with this being a date after all.

***

Orla swung her car into the curve of my road. After the film, we’d driven along the country lanes, humming along to the late-night radio music. When we got close to my house, I reached over and turned down the volume, causing the soft, crackling voices to mellow.

"Shall I pull in at the end there or go next to your house?"

Everyone should be asleep, I thought to myself.

"Outside the house should be alright."

The car pulled up, and she let the engine rumble for a second before switching it off. The windows to the place looked impossibly dark and full of shadows. No glint radiated from inside those walls. I watched it for a moment, the place that was meant to be my home. I didn't want to go inside.

"That was fun Ash, even if the film was a bit shite."

"Yeah, yeah it was great craic, and cheers for the lift back."

I turned away from the darkness and peered into her bright eyes. They were the colour of seaweed gliding on curling waves in the full moonlight.

I leant over to hug her. As I held her, I smelt her citrus hair, and as I drew back, our noses almost touched. Orla stroked my pale face with the back of her cold fingers, then she kissed me. Her lips touched mine, gently, then more decisively. Her hands moved to the back of my neck, her thumb stroking below my earlobe.

"Jesus."

"I know." Orla almost giggled, breathlessly.

"But what if they," I dipped my head toward the house, cleared my throat, "found out."

Her eyes widened, owl-like. She put her hand on my knee and rubbed the inside of my thigh. Both our breathing was heavy, and I could feel the air between us vibrating.

There was complete silence. It floated like an autumn leaf swaying slowly in the breeze, down from a tree to the ground.

Orla knew about my family. Not the details, but roughly speaking. She’d guessed it when we were much younger. At the time, I hadn’t denied it. I’d just told her never to ask me about it again, and she hadn’t.

"You look really beautiful, Ash."

That was all she said to me.

I pushed my lips together and shut my eyes momentarily as I breathed out, then I said goodnight, got out the car, and walked up the driveway. As I entered the house and clicked the door shut, I could smell the normal, rancid waft. Incense, fried onion, dusty carpets. I crept into the hush.

It was then that I heard it. The sound of a glass being put down on a table. The clink of ice. A swallow.

"Aisling."

The low, grassy tones of my mother’s voice croaked like a ribbeting frog. My heart ate up my chest and crawled into my throat.

Beating, beating, beating.

I poked my head around the corner of the sitting room to see her lying there, strung out on the sofa. There was a single strip of light across her face from where the curtain let in slim rays of moonlight. I could see her raw, bloodshot eyes. Her mascara painted like ripe, plum-coloured bruises under her eyelids. The smell of gin in the air, soaking into the carpet, reeking out like a chorus of shrieking gulls.

This, to me, was the real her. The woman behind the demure, pious exterior. It always had been, and it always would be.

"I saw you. In that car out... over there. I saw." She said, pointing in the general direction of the road. As she picked up her glass, the pings of the ice clanged like church bells.

"What you doing, kissing a girl?"

Her head tilted, wolf-like as she spat out the words. Moments passed and just the sound of her drunken breathing hung in the room. Her foot tapped the sofa cushion. Flints of sparkling dust drifted upwards, tiny bubbles, bursting.