Sunday 9 September 2018

The Heart's A Slave.


It was the best of months it was the worst of months, August. A roller-coaster month and now it's done. We are, I am, drifting around psychic chasms, looking out at the trees on the road, the leaves beginning to turn,  getting lost oftentimes in a Thousand Yard Stare. I'm counting on coming about in time.


                                                  For today I am a Debutante.


It all kicked off with a second hand Debutante's Dress, a handover at a hotel, a Saturday morning trip up the motorway.
"I mean like, I'm getting something good?  But not, I mean new? not wasting money?  But like,  good.  I'm gonna sell it afterwards. We won't want it afterwards?"
(Yeah, yeah, clogging up the wardrobe space with the others, her last year's satin affair for some hopeful lad's event, the beautiful girl's three floaty concoctions. Crumpled stained and forgotten)
"I mean it's like a big decision to make on a Saturday morning early, darling girl?"
I point this out, speeding up the quiet motorway in the brightest cheeriest morning sun, feeling quite unequal to the task at hand. She had a summer cold. I have a suspicion she is feverish.
"so, will you like, will we, maybe...nip...into the hotel bathroom or something? Sort of discreetly try it on?"
"Yeah yeah, we will, we could? I hadn't thought..."
She only sees the big picture, this girl.

And so we crowd into the hotel bathroom, me, the debutante, the owner of the dress  (last year's debutante) and her Mammy watching the beautiful dress protectively. We wait outside a cubicle for the dear girl to change. And wait. There are many many hooks and eyes, tiny satin buttons, requisite arranging....
I decide to take a walk down the thickly carpeted hotel passage for this bit, following the smell of brewing coffee, moving away from the other Mammy's breath hot on my neck as we wait.

"Ah lovely! lovely! yes, ah yes. that's just...."
A Man stands with the the other Mammy, looking in at the glowing girl in the champagne dress, the jewelled bodice flashing, the floating skirt hanging dreamlike under the garish bathroom light.
He, moving in to catch this vision at a better angle, catches my eye instead and melts away from the ladies bathroom fast-ish.  A remnant from yesterday's wedding, last night's bash, I'd say, dishevelled and wandering in search of the gents, falling into this bathroom tableau randomly, with lip licking acquesience you might say.
Anyway, we close the deal, we have the best, the most perfectly wonderful Debutante's Dress. We take it home, she, satisfied that she has herself a really good dress without buying into uncool insane extravagance. Me, satisfied that she is satisfied. God is in the laughing morning sun.

And perfection is fleeting.  Champagne dresses invite staining, despoliation.
The debutante, waltzing downstairs to the kitchen,  modelling the entire ensemble, the beautiful shoes peeping out under the beautiful dress, stretches out an arm, long fingers finding the spoon, to stir the supper on the hob. She doesn't see the splash of blood red sauce flying faster that light to the beautiful dress. Taking the shine off things.

A tiny tiny stain, I say. Minuscule! "sure you wouldn't know it was there unless you actually knew it was there" I tell her. She is distraught, distinctly feverish now, and sips sadly on the proffered mug of Lemsip. I try some anti-stain solution dabbing, but she decides that I am making things worse, that we may have to have it dry cleaned, but oh, wouldn't that be such a terribly uncool waste of time and cash and besides she doesn't want to think about it anymore  anyway (putting the tainted dress away, across the landing, away away in another room)


                                             
                                                  Mitchelstown  and Castletownsend

And anyway, at that point she had moved on! projecting, anticipating the Indie concert in Mitchelstown, a late summer concert,  a pre Leaving Cert results 'sesh' planned back in the dog days of pre exam cramming. I leave her and her dizzy dark eyed friend at the concert site, watching them melt into a multitude of carefully tanned girls in tiny shorts, of laughing boys, and breath a sigh.

I am taking advantage of things, taking myself down to the sea to see my very good friend, knocking around West Cork for the warm glad weekend that's in it. I meet the lovely woman in Skibereen, and we sit basking, drinking coffee, talking for hours.  Afterwards we go to Castletownsend to look at Harry Clarke's stained glass windows again. We climb the steep stone steps to St Barrahane's Church and watch the sun pierce the vivid blues and reds of the Nativity, Saint Peter and Saint Luke.  We discover a window obliquely to the side of the alter, never spotted before, a picture of a slim and perfect man miniatured, delineated, stained in blue and pink. St Luke. We marvel at the things you miss, until you have eyes to see, mind to receive.

On Sunday, I take the long road home, listening to the dazed and chattery girls in the back, telling in chorus, Indie stories of collapsing tents, Facebook friends met in tents, at sessions, wandering...and pushing upfront to hear, so close so close, him, Jake Bugg, they coulda shoulda touched him....they hear the music still, intoxicated yet with boys, attention, other stuff...
The dear girl wants to keep on keeping on, hasn't slept for hours, for days! She messages friends at home about a gig that evening, unwilling, not wanting about all else to stop.


                                                            ...old stains forgotten...

She was dissuaded. She was advised to save herself up, to keep her pagan fire for the Debutantes Ball, the Leaving Cert, the trip to Collage after? She was directed to the quiet of her room, to nurse the spiking temperature, to rest the whispery croaking voice, to still the slightly nutty light in her staring eye. Ah yes, the morning brings realisation.  She was ill! And boy did she gave that it's due, gave into it until Debs night.  But then, ah then, downing a Lemsip, sucking on a throat lozenge, she cast aside the fever, donned the dress joyfully, as thought the dash of ruby red had never stained the thread, or lurked in fold under fold of diaphanous creamy pink, as though it never was.


                                            Another window, another staining, dear Harry Clarke

And you, snapped back from murky dreaming by the singing iPhone, at 6am. ("keys? you have your keys? you won't forget, you'll bring your keys? my what? my keys? my....yeah,  I will... I wont... forget my....oh um Mum?  forgot my... keys"?)
standing at the window, waiting for her to walk in from the bus, behold her in the pearly morning light striding up the path, hair flying behind, a fistful of dress caught up casually in her hand, a white sock that may be a surgical dressing on the right foot, the feet encased in flat summer sandals. (the cruel heels for the photographs). An Amazon Girl, a Vision, back from the Bacchanalia, from wars.

Inside the door, she stands talking breathlessly about the night, the people, dancing, as you take in  the splatters of pink and red of blood...the champagne skirt... blood stained...
"yeah yeah I was, we were, like, laughing? we were sitting for a moment and like, glass, a piece of glass? goes up in to my heel? and it was... bleeding? and a man, he had a first aid box, he wrapped my foot for ages, oh for ages, and the blood you know the blood it kept on coming,  kept on bleeding, so I started feeling dizzy? I was crying? but it was ...grand, oh in the end he stopped the bleeding, he worked like really hard to stop the blood?"
"Oh but...oh... did no one...I mean no one, call..."
"and so then I went back dancing? when I saw no sign of bleeding, sure the bandage held till morning, and we danced, we danced together, in our bare feet, in our flats, I mean you only stopped for drinking, it was savage, it was brilliant, and I never, like I never felt...no... pain..."

And afterwards they crowd onto the bus and sing, the whole way home, the whole ninety minutes of the journey in her bloody dress, it's thin jewelled bodice....
(" a coat? you want I bring a coat? you wouldn't take a... coat!.. to your debs?")
and she shivered for the journey, "kinda registering I was cold? really cold?"

And so, dear readers, more August days of spiking temperatures, the dear girl valiantly feeding herself with vitamins, zinc, Lemsip, submitting to foot bathing and binding, ahead of the Leaving Cert exam results, the Leaving for College.


                                     ...  just tell us already? just say, how did we actually get on?...

 I was on the lemsip myself when that day dawned (for nerves), watching again though the window as she in the midst of a jittery chattering rabble set off for the school, for the envelopes solemnly handed out one by one, while we waited to hear. I waited for the last time, for my last childs' exam results. And the phone's incongrous sweet song came quickly, my faint voiced girl calling, to say "Yeah. Yeah....it was... good...it was...grand...?"
a silence while I marshalled my resources to respond appropriately, no matter what..
"So um what... what did you...  how did you exactly ... get on"?
Anyway, she got on superbly, so much so that she was for once and only once, silenced.  Monosyllabic in her response.

There followed a day of events, an interview with a journalist, a photographer from the paper, (her results were very good indeed), visits, congratulatory messages and the evening's great big Party of Parties.  You were uttering grim warnings to the dear girl though the car window, as you delivered her (again, again) to the gathering for Prinks, before the Actual Leaving Cert Party. Afterwards,  climbing grimly to your bedroom, slopping your yellow Lemsip, you felt the same alien virus that had grappled with the debutante for the entire month, stirring ominously in you.

And that night she came home early-ish. "Hot! It was too hot! and I mean crowded?"
In the morning  she began the packing for College and for her actual leaving. I was taking her to University in Amsterdam in two days time.

                                                    Leaving Home Forever.

We flew out in the morning and I came back on an evening flight, thinking how utterly pointless it would be to stay over, having left her and her massive suitcases at her college apartment?  Thinking how I'd deliver her, (carefully planned out in my mind) via plane, train and tram to that place, and then, after dinner together, would just, I mean, go? Never actually coming in my mind to it, to that final leave-taking at Station Central in Amsterdam, the convulsive hug, the look-back at my Amazon Girl standing tensed, upright, like the child I left at the primary school, the girl I left at the secondary school gate, and so here we are, here we are, now, where I can't bring her home again, ever.  The tannoy blared, the people melded, losing edges as I walked, my back against her. Walking blind for the airport train. ( dont look back)

Her summer cold hummed in my blood all the way back on the plane, spiking on arrival so that I slept in my car in the short term car park for the few hours till dawn and drove home in the kind of rain that feels as though its been flung sideways from a bucket at the windscreen of your car.

Home. People murmuring, sympathetic, about nests? empty nests?, you are not, you say, a bloody bird? a stepford, sad sack Mammy, you are not! even while, ah, getting ambushed by her book on the kitchen table where she left it after breakfast, and her shoes, under the radiator,  her recordings on the sky box for that show we watched together,  and her coat, her old cream jumper hanging at the end of the stairs, until you realise you're living now, that you live now, in her abandoned house. You live in her abandoned house, with everything unpicked and  flittered by absence. 

Oh get a bloody grip you tell yourself, just get a bloody hold. And it isn't as though it's the first time, after all.  After all, the Beautiful Girl, she went to college? Up to Dublin, student lodgings? Ah but she came home for weekends with her stories and her laundry till we more or less could manage being apart for each and every livelong day. And besides, you could always get in the car and get her, if she needed, if you needed.  And you always had another one at home.  Until now, until now...

 It's a hardy women who has children, I say now. And a hardier one to lets them go.


Anyhoo. September's here. At last.  Just about. There are things that I've signed up for in the great wide vacuum left me.  I am going to Australia, at last, at last. And to Holland in October and to Paris in the Spring to see the Beautiful Girl.

Still, you wonder, all that loosing, all that flying, all that texting, all the talking on the phone,
surely something's gotta give... gotta fail, gotta break...
surely. Surely...
heart's a slave. Heart's elastic, beating helpless, it's a universe expanding. It's a slave. It's a slave.

   

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