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.

   

Exams, Holiday, All the Married Lesbian Priests.

                                                     Finally Definitely Over at Last.

We are getting closer now to the beginning of the end. The Leaving Certificate, the Junior Certificate  begins. "I'm glad" the boy tells me.  "At last. Soon it will be over."  "Yes" I say  "but are you ready?" "Yeah" he says, "Kind of.  In a way. You can be lucky."  Oh.  "But anyway, I'm so sick of it, everyone,  teachers, you, everybody,  talk,  talk,  talking about it, asking about it,  telling me what to do about it,  I just want it to be over."  Me too,  dear boy. Quite as much as you I'd say.
                                           
                                            Just tie my arms behind my back and let me at it.
                                        
The boss on the other hand is absolutely totally ready for it, going to chew it up and spit it out. Why she'd even have a go at the Leaving Certificate if she could. She has a study plan. She has exam timetables taped to the wall in her bedroom, to the fridge door in the kitchen.  ("You can google it, if you want it, and eh print it" the boy told me) She watches disapprovingly as he slinks out to play xbox with his friends, goes fishing for an hour (or eight).  " Back in an hour"  he sings over his shoulder on his way out the door. She arranges her pens and calculater in a transparent pencil case and asks you to up the fruit and fish oil quota in the weekly shop, oh and dark chocolate! Brainfood!  You find yourself wondering if it will all be an Egregious Anticlimax for her in the end. She wants to be challenged is all.  "Do you think she should be handicapped, maybe"?  her Aunt offers  "like a, you know, horse in a race? Make it interesting for her?"  Hmm.

                                         Everybody needs to get away sometimes (though not with you)

We'll go away after I say. A week in the sun.  To recover. "Not me" the boy says. " Not with you. No offense, but I'd rather have the money. For like a week in Magaluf,  or Camping, or  Norway. Or whatever.  With like my friends. No offense".  None taken.  And never mind, the Boss and the Beautiful One are in. "So, did you go away with your friends and not your family to Spain after your leaving certificate" the Boss asks.  "Me?  Nope. We went to Wexford. The seaside. Like every other year, and had a hoot. And that was the first week. We had two weeks of carnival in the summer. My father, your grandfather you know,  went to the races in Galway in July and we, back at the ranch,  had a party! Picnics, films, trips to exotic places (the Japanese Gardens, the National Stud) to do exotic stuff.  My mother put on her "on vacation" hat,  tossed aside the everyday grind, and really,  home wasn't humdrum home that week. It was America, it was Italy!
                                                   
                                                 
"The only bum note ( I was on a roll now) was the Cattle Count every evening. Had to be done and reported back to your man in Galway, as he shaved in a Salthill BnB before the evening session. There was always one of 'em  missing. Or two.  Keep counting she'd say.  Keep at it.  I always wondered why she wouldn't  just tell him they were all there,  yeah, yeah all present and correct,  yeah all there dear,  just say they were,  maybe even OMG not bother counting at all,  because they always turned up, in the end, always,  and let us get of to the cinema or whatever jolly awaited.  But she wouldn't. She had too much character. Always.

                                                    Resistance being Totally Futile.

The day before the Exams start the Boss takes an hour out from book-learning and hangs out with me, idly watching the Nuns Story on television. "So, right,  how do you like become a nun,  I mean get to be one," she asks me. "Do you know?" "Vocation" I say "You heard all about it from the Nuns at school. The Lord calling you when you hit puberty? And girls resisting maybe? But the nuns said he, the Lord,  always got you in the end. So you used to think about that. I mean I had like a lot of other things calling me at the time, as you do. So was I like resisting? Did the fact that I really didn't want to mean I had to? I mean I lost a whole year of adolescence to that actual dilemma. Positively Hagridden.

The Boss had that expression on her face now.  That interested certainty that she would never ever  have been that soldier. She would never ever have been that dumb. "So, anyway, (I was really on a roll)  when I got past that, I lost the whole of the  next year to Lesbianism?  being preoccupied about being a Lesbian? I mean how could you be sure you weren't. Like the vocation, how could you know you  weren't in denial? I mean I just wanted to be bog standard normal, commonplace, nothing to see here move on.  I mean I figured I could hack being a Lesbian if I was one, but not the not knowing.  "Oh I know!"  the beautiful one walked in on this, "I  used to worry about that too.  But the thing is, no one ever is. Normal I mean. You just have to, sort of,  learn to be yourself, that's all" So she had that expression on her face now, the interested certainty that she would have cracked it, had cracked it. Easy peasy.  "Hmm, maybe so" I said. "But, its quite the burden being really truly you,  Miss Oh So Young and Certain. And you have to carry it on your own"
                             
                                         No Dinosaurs were hurt in the writing of this Blog.

"Well anyway," the Boss moves things along,  "Anyway, I mean Priests and Nuns, aren't they like dying out. So what will happen to the Church then?"  "The church dies too" I say firmly.  "But" her broad creamy  forehead creased, " that's not good. People need like spirituality? And Priests to do stuff?"   "Yeah,  they do. They do need stuff.  But that's just be too bad.  I mean why not Married Priests,  Women Priests?  What a shot in the arm, what a forgiving sunburst of energy blasting into the limp, shamed Church Body. So how about it?  The remedy in the Church's own hands. But they won't.  The Catholic Church is a Dinosaur, and will go the away of all the other Dinosaurs. And stuff the people, they don't rate in all that blinkered male hubris.  No sir,  let them eat cake, basically.  Now go to bed and let your great brain sleep the sleep of the totally prepared, angel girl. Tomorrow, it all kicks off."

                                                               Once we were Dinosaurs

So maybe back then if I thought that one day I could become a Married Lesbian Priest, I would have been less tormented by it all. Or tormented about something more useful to me. But guess what, I still can't. Dinosaurs.