Sunburn E-Book

Chloe Michelle Howarth

• Herausgeber: Verve Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 463

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

** Shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2024 **
** Shortlisted for the 2024 Book of the Year: Discover Award by the British Book Awards **
** Shortlisted for the 2023 Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction **
** Longlisted for the Diverse Book Awards 2024 **
** An Evening Standard 'One to Watch in 2023 **
** An Independent ‘Best Romantic Summer Reads' **
** A Book of the Month pick for Diva, Irish Examiner, Novellic & Sainsbury’s Magazine **
** A Most Anticipated pick for PinkNews & Queer on the Street **

It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.

Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.

Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.

But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. Neither will be easy, but only one will offer her happiness.

Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp. An atmospheric sapphic love story and coming-of-age novel with the intensity of Megan Nolan's Acts of Desperation, the long hot summer of André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name and the female friendships of Anna Hope's Expectation.

‘A tender and heartfelt coming-of-age tale’ – Heat

‘A compassionate take on the push and pull between what's expected and what is felt’ – Herald

‘A deeply moving, heartfelt love story’ – Daily Mail

‘Lucy tells her story in a true, compelling voice, with an eye for minutiae, quaint apercus, and confidences that make her account moving and convincing’ – SAGA Magazine

‘Tender and poignant... Ideal reading for the last month of summer’ – Diva

'Intense and all-consuming - like the first love it describes - Sunburn transported me to the heart of summer and the heady days of late adolescence. I won't soon forget Chloe Michelle Howarth's addictive, lushly written debut' - Laura Sims

'Capturing all the intensity of first love, blended with the claustrophobia of small-town life, this debut, inspired by real experience, is tender and raw' - The Bookseller

'A beautiful coming of age love novel written with an insightful poetical prose, rich with religious allegory and texture which underscores the transformative, spiritual power of first love explored' - Scene Magazine

Leseprobe

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

Acknowledgements

Reading Group Questions

About Chloe Michelle Howarth

Copyright

Landmarks

Cover

For Erin

1

June 1989

Now is the time between birth and slaughter. Another Summer has arrived. I spend my days waiting for something to happen. Something glorious, even something tragic. Nothing ever happens.

It’s hard in the countryside, when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Life in the Summer goes slow, like one long, drawn-out fade of the sun. Doesn’t every day in Crossmore feel that way, at this tricky age? Without the structure of school, and without any amenities in the town, there isn’t much to do but hang around the village. Mother calls this loitering. She seems to take a stricter dislike to me in the Summer. I can understand that. Between my newfound admiration for drinking, the threat of a blundered attempt at sex, and the incurable frustration I feel, I wouldn’t expect her to like me very much. Often, I am just as annoyed with myself as she is. Yes, I am at a very tricky age.

Perhaps when Mother was my age, she was like me. Once she might have felt the same thrill that I do when sharing a cigarette with the girls or coming home late. Perhaps she has forgotten what it is to only get glimpses of independence. Those glimpses are everything to me. Feeling adult is everything to me. It gives me a sense of self, which is important, I think. Recently, I have really wanted to figure out who I am. There must be more to me than being Martin Burke’s best friend or one of the girls or the Nolans’ daughter. I’m just not sure what that is.

Today Martin and I walked the long and bumpy road into the village together. There is a lot of talk about Martin and me. We are only friends. Although I presume we will end up as something more than that eventually. Truthfully, I don’t like thinking about it. I just enjoy his company, that’s all. I function far better with him than without. When we were eight, the Burkes withdrew Martin from St Anne’s National School to go instead to St Andrew’s, twenty minutes away. There was some trouble with his older brother and a teacher which his parents didn’t want repeated. Off he went. I didn’t think I would even notice his absence. Besides one feverish breakout of kiss chase in the yard, we never really played together in school. I didn’t expect there would be anything to miss. But then he was gone, and I missed him every day. I felt so outside of things. It took me a long while to look around and not expect to see Martin smiling back at me. But it’s easy to adjust to things when you’re young. I got used to the void, it was fine. I was one of the girls after all, even without any girl friends.

On long school days, when I was missing him, I used to daydream that he and I could be married on our Communion Day. His and my school always joined up for the day, as well as the Gaelscoil, and still with the three classes there were only ever thirty of us. I knew that Martin would be at the altar in his suit, and I would be there in my white dress, and so it would just look right. I used to plan it so that when he said ‘Amen’, I would kiss him, and then we would be married. My most plain and easy dream; I don’t even think anybody would have been too upset with me if I had kissed him. It would probably have been funny and well-remembered.

He takes me as far as the chipper, where the girls are all waiting for me. He will bring the boys in later. Our groups were never really separate like this before. But around the time that Maria Kealy became aware of the boys as boys, we split in two. Maria’s interests very much influence the interests of the group, and so everybody became somewhat obsessed with the boys. If Martin and I were not magnets to each other, the girls might never speak to them. I am still waiting to find the boys intimidating. Often, I find my own girls more intimidating than them. Until I became the bridge between us all, I thought that I was a shy person, a sort of trembling leaf. Now I know that I am not a leaf, but a strong branch. I connect the blossom to the bark. Thanks to the girls’ weak hearts, I have realised my own bravery. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t give to swooning as easily as the others. These days the girls let themselves crumble when the boys come around. I’m hoping that I’m just late developing, and in a month or two, I’ll start to crumble as well. I can’t stand being on the outside of what everyone else is feeling.

The windows of the chipper reach from the ceiling to the floor, and they play the same Eurodance CD on loop. I can see the girls inside now. There is Maria. Endlessly lovely Maria, with her tightly curled hair, her pointed nose, her long and straight torso. And there is bright yellow-blonde Eimear, and flaxen lesser-blonde Joan. Bernadette, and her teeth which so desperately need braces, and Patricia, barely visible behind her camouflage of freckles. And Susannah, beautiful sunbeam Susannah, with her coat folded up on the seat that she is saving for me. The walls are lined with white tiles, and there are strips of fluorescent lights in the ceiling which put shadows on their young faces. The bell above the door chimes, announcing me, and they all turn to look. How would they describe me now? Susannah lifts up her coat for me, camel-brown suede, and before I can even say anything about it, she says,

‘Vintage.’

I could have guessed. A lot of my clothes could be considered vintage. They have been given to me by older cousins, some even saved from Mother’s youth. Somehow my sort of vintage isn’t as cool as Susannah’s. She is miles ahead of the rest of us, with double ear piercings, her own hi-fi, and a hefty inheritance coming her way.

This food gives us acne, and yet we eat it all the time. Bernadette is not eating because she doesn’t want to be seen with a mouth full of chips when the boys arrive. Bernadette doesn’t eat around people, I think we were in primary school the last time I saw her put anything in her mouth. She is perched on the end of her seat, sucking her teeth like she thinks they are dirty. Joan, with her oval face having perhaps the worst reaction to puberty of us all, asks a plain question, which starts a fire among us.

‘Any news about the Debs?’

This Summer, the Debs has been a greater concern to us than breathing. Before, we would have been interested on the day, with pieces of gossip about dates and dresses leading up to it, but this year it’s all we talk about. I really don’t know why. Perhaps because it’s only a few weeks away, so it’s in the air. Perhaps because going to the Debs is becoming less of a fantasy and more of a tangible reality. As girls only approaching Fourth Year, we would never get asked to go, but a girl in Fifth Year could be, and we know plenty of those. Perhaps it’s just because we like talking about other people.

With Maria’s sister Sorcha now a popular Fifth Year, we have access to an artery of information on the Debs, on the older girls and all their exploits. Gossip just comes out. Even when I don’t want to hear it, I hear it, and so I know about the older girls – about who is failing which class, and who has been cheated on, and who is on drugs. Sorcha provides details so secret that we have been told Laragh Donnolley wears a red bra for PE, and she lets the straps fall off her shoulders, hoping someone will notice. My bras are all white and come in a box. They seem both juvenile and geriatric compared to what Laragh is wearing. If the older girls knew how we idolise them, if they knew all the intimate things we have been told about them, I would be so embarrassed I’d have to change schools. But they must expect it, when they see us with our jaws on the floor and our pupils fat in awe as they pass us by. This admiration is the natural order, I’m sure. It has been this way since we were in primary school. A nun would send one of them around to our little yard to do a job, and we would crowd around them like insects surrounding a spill of honey.

There are plenty of other things that we could talk about, but we talk about things like bras, and boys, and the Debs. Even when we have feelings that eat us alive, and which desperately need to be talked about, we talk about things like this. Nobody wants to bring the mood down. Imagining Debs dresses is nicer than airing out our emotions. Those awful, shiny satin dresses in their gaudy colours, the sort of things that keep us from thinking of our troubles, whether that is good or bad. Our dream dresses, and the dresses we would choose for everyone else, and past dresses we have hated. We have pooled the information we have about existing couples, and we dole out the remaining Sixth Year boys among ourselves, as though we have a chance with them. It should be embarrassing to have these fantasies at our big age, but this is a private game for us, so it’s sort of alright.

Dates are always the worst part of this collective daydream, because all the good boys are already taken. All it takes is one wrong suggestion to be stuck with a boy forever. Eimear once flippantly said that Bernadette would look nice with Danny O’Neill in the year above us, only because they both have curly hair and freckles. Perhaps what she meant was that they look alike, not that they would look good together. These theoretical couplings can haunt a girl for life. Since Eimear said that, anytime Bernadette mentions a boy, somebody will turn around and say,

‘But what about poor Danny?’

And lately, she has started to say,

‘Well, yes, obviously there’s also Danny.’

She has never liked him, but we all know, and she knows, and he has started to suspect, that when our own Debs finally comes around, they will be going together. There are plenty of these assumed couples, Martin and I are often mentioned as one. To avoid this, I tease Bernadette about Danny.

‘Apparently, Niamh Mc has two dates.’

Niamh McNamara, glittering goddess of St Joseph’s. I could talk about her all day and not feel silly, it would be a discussion of divinity. More beautiful, more pure than any girl in Crossmore, she is something of an icon among us. Hers are the grades Sorcha cannot tell us about; hers are the bra straps we have never seen; she is so subtle, so dignified. Fully developed, giving, intelligent, saccharine Niamh, with English cousins who have sent her Debs dress over from London. She is only in Fifth Year and already she has the Sixth Year lads fighting over her.

‘Two dates? Well for some.’

‘Yeah, Séan asked her first of course, but now John is after asking her as well, apparently.’

‘Imagine choosing John over Séan!’

Bernadette’s eyes are stuck on me while I eat.

‘Would you be well?’

‘Yeah, well, apparently she did.’

Maria is so cute. Everybody likes her.

‘As if anybody would choose anyone over Séan!’

A sigh falls over the table at the thought of Séan O’Sullivan – six foot two, footballer, eldest of three sons.

‘Séan could ask me to cross the road with him and I’d die, never mind asking me to the Debs!’

‘Stop, he’s so cool.’

Susannah says through a bite of her burger, chewing with her mouth open. I watch the meat as it is reduced to mush on her tongue. The girls all laugh. Susannah has connections with older boys, they all know her because of her brothers. She does not disclose the details of these connections, but she knows how to talk to them. She knows how to talk to everybody; somehow she knows exactly what everybody wants to hear.

‘Poor old John.’

‘Yeah, but would ye listen! Apparently, she said yes to both of them!’

‘She could be asked by a third fella yet.’

‘She nearly could.’

‘I’d nearly ask her.’

I only say it as a joke, but it makes Patricia roll her eyes at me. It seems I cannot say the right thing to her, she is always looking at me like she hates me. It wouldn’t bother me much if she does, because she is the least interesting and least pretty of the girls. The others don’t like her either, they’ve all admitted it but they won’t stand by it. I think we would get on fine without her. Even before all the misfortune in her life, Patricia wasn’t a nice girl, but we have known her so long that she is unshakable. Sometimes knowing someone for a long time is the only reason you’d be friends with them. It isn’t much of a bond, and still it is unbreakable. Patricia’s father is a lot older than her mother, he is in the early days of dementia. Between her husband and her young twins, Patricia’s mother doesn’t have much time for her. The younger twin did not have enough oxygen at birth, they were not sure if he would live. He requires a great deal of care now, as does the older twin, as do all five-year-olds. It all means that Patricia lives a very lonely life at home. When she is headed for college, she will feel guilty for leaving her mother with so much, but she won’t let it stop her from leaving. Sometimes her father doesn’t recognise her. These times are becoming more frequent. Susannah feels a deep sympathy for her; sometimes they spend hours together, just the two of them, talking very seriously about life with half-parents. I only put up with Patricia because she understands a part of Susannah that I do not. I want Susannah to feel understood. Although when Patricia is sitting in the chipper, rolling her eyes at me, I forget to feel sorry for her. It might make me sound callous, but I have no patience left for her. Everyone else laughs at what I said about Niamh, they all know that the chance to spend any time at all with Niamh would be Heaven-sent.

‘I’d ask her if I wouldn’t look so ugly next to her.’

Joan laughs, and everyone laughs with her, and I just won’t look at Patricia anymore today. It’s the small punishment she deserves, which she might not even notice. Does that make me an awful person? I don’t think her hardships are an excuse for treating me badly. I sometimes wonder if I am the only one who thinks Patricia is a nasty girl or who remembers that she has always been this nasty. All I did was make a joke; everyone has moved on but me. I’ll keep my mouth shut a while, in case I say something else stupid. It’s nice to get engrossed in the girls’ imaginations while they talk about Niamh and her dress, and about how Séan will complement her so well. It’s nice to watch them, and hear them, and feel I am one of them.

Although it’s comforting, we have had this conversation so many times, and without staying engaged, I find my attention drifting from the table and focusing more plainly on Susannah’s mouth. The girls’ chatter is only a beehive’s buzzing near my ears, but I hear very loudly her teeth cutting through her food. The slap of her tongue off the roof of her mouth. The squelching of her spit raising a hundred decibels with every bite. Must she eat like a dog? My cheeks redden, but I make no moves to conceal this, and in a wild moment of abandonment – something I have never known before – I think, I would be the microbes in the beef that her body seeks and destroys if it meant she would be paying me even the slightest bit of attention. The warmth and the wet of her mouth.

What a thought to think! How suddenly and vehemently I think it. And how hot my cheeks are. It makes perfect sense to want to be inside her mouth, to be torn to pieces by her; until I catch myself wanting it, and I am shocked, I am disgusted. I almost laugh at my own absurdity. That wasn’t me at all, just a bad notion that got into my head to make trouble. That wasn’t me who thought that. What a weird feeling. Very discreetly, I bless myself and hope to be forgiven, and I hope that I never feel anything so inexplicable or strong again.

‘Lucy?’

I look up. They are talking to me.

‘John or Séan, I said?’

Blessed be this tired conversation. I could have stopped listening for a year and I would still know what I am supposed to say. It’s easy, these are my people, waiting for me to say the words and feed their hungry hearts. I understand these girls, I follow the pattern, it’s alright. I give them what they want.

‘Séan. Every time.’

They are drowned in a frenzy of giggles, and I let it wash over me, and as I see her mouth hanging open in laughter, I thank every angel in Heaven that Susannah has swallowed her food.

‘Oh, don’t let Martin hear you say that!’

Patricia winks, and I wish I didn’t let her wink at me. I want a second alone to settle myself. But here is Martin now, coming to the door of the chipper with all the boys behind him. He looks at me, not at the other girls. It feels very nice when he looks at me. My heart races, and I keep my eyes on him. It’s grounding. The girl behind the counter hates to see the boys coming. Bernadette sits up tall. It begins.

2

When I get home, Granny announces me to everyone.

‘Here’s our changeling, now.’

It’s her special joke just for me. I think it’s because I have recently gone from child to young woman; perhaps there is more to it, I won’t let myself be offended. Mother makes me sit at the table and eat dinner with everyone even though she knows I have already eaten, because I’m not supposed to eat at the chipper.

‘Waste of money and waste of appetite.’

Mother says as she heaps boiled vegetables out of the pot and onto my plate. I struggle through the carrots and parsnips while she smirks. My perfect Mother, a sweet and stinging honeybee. When I was a little girl, when I was very young and confused, just a small fruit fly bumbling around her kitchen, I refused to leave her side. Even at my small age, I understood that there were limits to love, and I felt sure that one day people would run out of love for me. I think with Mother, it started when I was in junior infants, when I received three slaps to the palm from Sister Loretta for playing kiss chase in the yard. Mother was always so smug over my good behaviour. Even today, she likes demure and cooperative girls. That day with my ruler marks was the first time she thought I might not be as easy to manage as I seemed. Granny said I must have done something awful to deserve it, because these things don’t happen without a good reason. But the truth was, I shouldn’t have been slapped, because I didn’t even want to play kiss chase that day. Without meaning to, I played the game and got kissed. How was I to explain all that? I couldn’t even say the word kiss in front of them, let alone explain the workings of kiss chase. Granny was so frustrated with me that she promised to slap my other palm until they matched, but it was an empty promise.

‘Ah, dote, you’ll be better before you’re married.’

Mother said, like she always did, although for the first time her tone was weary. Besides that, all they did was send me to bed a half an hour early, where I lay on the freshly washed sheets and inhaled the smell of her detergent, and I felt her love in the pillowcase.

We have never been the type of family to argue; we feel things very strongly, but we feel them quietly. Our deepest emotions may be manifested in the lightest of sighs, but not much else. The silence says a lot. All that upset has to go somewhere; I sometimes feel it moving under my skin, waiting to be lanced. One day, Mother will grow tired of me. This isn’t a worry or a guess, it is an instinct. Her affection will wane, and so I must absorb all the love she gives me while she is giving it. She was never annoyed by me staying so close to her in the kitchen. Granny used to threaten to put me on the back doorstep if I didn’t stop following Mother around. She used to say,

‘If we leave you out there for the night, another mammy will come along and take you away. We’d have no trouble then.’

Many times, Granny would open the door and point to the step and slowly count to three, but I was never actually put outside. Mother wouldn’t allow it. All I wanted was some company, to be one of the grown-up girls. I never thought I was being a pest until I was made aware I was one. Whenever Granny gave out to me, Mother would scoop me up, and with a little groan, she would sit me on her hip, and she would say,

‘Sure, Lucy is my little helper. There’s no one helps me as much as this one! Oh, but you’re too big to lift up anymore.’

Still she kept lifting me without being asked to, and I guessed that meant that I didn’t have to leave her alone. When I was a little girl, it was always like that. I was always welcome around Mother. I might even say we were inseparable. Now that I am getting older, it doesn’t matter whether I am right next to her or out of sight, I’m heavy in the air, I am something always on her mind, she cannot be without me, even when she is dying to be. Maybe I deserved it, maybe not.

After dinner, Martin comes over for my Irish lesson. Last year I dropped from the Higher Level class to Ordinary Level, and still I am falling behind. Unable to pay a tutor, Mother has enlisted Martin to come over and help me in the evenings. He does as she tells him. Isn’t that insulting? Granny used to try to help me out, but with her temper so short, it only made things worse. Martin is breezing through Higher Level Irish, so my curriculum is nothing to him. In the low and sleepy light, he sits next to me at the kitchen table and kicks me when he sees my attention fade. He is trying harder than usual tonight to keep me interested, as Mother can see us from the living room. She won’t look away from Glenroe for long enough to catch me daydreaming. He should know that.

Although it’s nice that he wants to help, I don’t think this is a fair way to teach me. Martin isn’t embarrassed about it, he thinks he is being helpful, and he is very happy about that. This deep into the Summer, I just don’t see the point in homework. Whatever I learn now will be forgotten by September, I promise. Then I will be back in the classroom, not listening and not learning. I don’t know why I need to waste my evenings preparing for that.

After an hour of trying to teach me, he gives in and lets us play hangman in his copybook. It’s sweet that Martin wants to help me, it’s funny that he thinks he could hold my attention. I like sitting at the table with him, with the evening air coming in the window. He never makes me feel upset or stupid when I can’t keep up with schoolwork. He makes me feel grounded. While I’m trying to work out which letters are missing, he tells me how cool he thinks my new jacket is. I don’t bother telling him that the jacket he saw me wearing today was Susannah’s and that I was only trying it on. It’s the compliment that counts. I don’t think he looked much at the jacket, but he definitely saw me admiring myself in it. He is attentive in ways that the girls aren’t. I want him to know I appreciate it, but I don’t want to have to say anything about it.

When he leaves, I watch from the back door as he disappears down the garden, out onto the dark road, taking the last of today’s goodness with him. Then I am left alone with my family. Mother comes downstairs in her dressing gown to take a painkiller. Something about Mother in her nightdress puts me on edge. She tells me to turn off Ciarán’s lamp when I am going to bed and leaves me alone again. I hate the quiet of the sleeping house, especially after a day out with my friends. The silence rings. It makes me feel so much more isolated than I really am. I ought to go to bed before I have a chance to do too much thinking. I linger at Granny’s door as I pass. When I was young, I would always go in and say goodnight to her. A big part of me wants to go in and do that now. Instead, I go upstairs and convince myself that she is probably asleep. As much as I like getting older, parts of it make me feel guilty and uncomfortable. I brush my teeth and knock a lump of dried toothpaste off the edge of the sink. I don’t know if it’s me or the mirror, but my face looks too long. It’s my hair, it doesn’t suit me at this length. I should cut it short again. That was flattering, but that was not very feminine. The girls all have long hair, even the boys have long hair. I want to look like all of them. I could look at myself in the mirror all night. In bed, I hear water run through the pipes. The immersion timer clicks off, and the house exhales. Today is over, and we have a few hours before we must start again.

Although we don’t discuss it, the girls had similarly melancholic evenings to me. Patricia went home to a darkened house, just the glow of the television on her parents’ worn-out faces to let her know that anybody was there. The volume was very low, their phone might as well be disconnected for all the use it gets. Eimear’s house was alive with the choir of her young siblings crying over bath time. Her mother did not notice as she came through the door and trudged up the stairs to her bedroom. As Susannah made her way up the steep driveway of her house, Croft Hall, she saw her father’s car gleaming in the evening light, and she heard her mother shouting. When she got inside, Catríona slammed her bedroom door, and Phil threw something heavy at it. He is not a big man, but he uses every ounce of the weight he has. Normally he would only visit when Catríona is not around. The rest of the time he spends with his shining new family in the city. Susannah didn’t bother asking him why he was in Crossmore.

‘Waste of time! Waste of money!’

He shouted, but softened when he saw Susannah.

‘Hi, Daddy.’

Taking her face in his hands he said,

‘Did you get something to eat, love? There’s no dinner made.’

She nodded, and he told her,

‘Great. Go away up to bed, why don’t you? We’ll go to the garden centre tomorrow before I go.’

He headed to the guest rooms downstairs, and then she was in a silent house, just like me.

This is how the days go, and how the evenings follow. This Summer has been so quiet, surely something explosive is to come. Surely, we won’t carry on like this for much longer, gossiping and eating and coming home to disappointing houses. In our separate and sad beds, we all think of each other, and although I don’t mean to, I think of Susannah and her chewing, and I say a prayer that I won’t think about it tomorrow.

Like always, my prayer goes unheard, and I struggle through four days of intense focus on her jaw, her incisors, and her amylase. I wish I could explain it.

When, finally, I come to terms with the functions of her mouth, and I think it’s over, she thrusts something new and unexpected at me. First it is the reflection of sunlight on the sebum on her forehead, and then it’s a blue pedicure, and then a golden crust of pus on her bitten and infected cuticle.

Regrettably, this is not a new fascination. Susannah is the very reason that I did not try to kiss Martin on our Communion Day. Among the flurry of ivory and white and organ music, there was the blinding light of Susannah, who looked as though she had been dipped in bleach. Hers was the only dress not borrowed from a sister or cousin. Suddenly, I could not forget that my own dress had been starched and rehemmed and passed around the family so many times that one wrong move might have unravelled it entirely. I spent half the Mass burning with jealousy over how brilliant she was. How was God going to see me as worthy of Communion, how was he going to see me at all, when she sparkled so beautifully beside me? I remember that day her prayers were said so perfectly, each syllable enunciated properly, as though she understood the words as words, and not just a slew of sounds she had committed to memory like me. Watching her pray was much more captivating than whatever Father McDonagh was doing with the wafer and wine. I could not feel my bony knees on the carpet at the altar rail anymore, I could not feel the draft of the church. She took her eucharist before me, and I quietly apologised to Jesus for the downgrade from her tongue to mine. It was a feeling of deep shame which I still don’t understand. Martin was then the last thing on my mind. As was our kiss. As was marriage. My interest in that has never really resurfaced with the same fervour. Sometimes I wish it would.

Afterwards, outside the church, I did not wish Susannah a good day, because my own day was ruined by her poise and beauty, and her terrifying grace. I never knew a person like her, nobody else made me so afraid. Back then, it was easiest just to hate her. I get the very same feeling now, even when it has nothing to do with Martin. I don’t know why it makes me feel so badly, or why I felt so guilty on my Communion Day. I don’t know why I remember it so well or feel it so strongly. But I am sure that if I can understand these pieces of my past, I will understand my present. And so I allow memories like that to circle, while fascinations like this evolve.

The first weeks of July come and go, and when the day of the Debs arrives, I hardly even notice anyone’s dress. I am too enamoured with the hole in Susannah’s jeans, her unshaven knee exposed. It’s alright, I’m sure in every group there is one friend who is superior to the rest, and everyone admires this friend. I am sure the other girls look up to her the same way.

When September comes, I do not hear any gossip from school. I do not keep up in my Irish class. I only go to school so that I might get another moment of her. With each shortening day, I am reading deeper into her unconscious movements. Perhaps I do not want it explained.

October brings a capsule of fake blood to her mouth, which she bites and lets drip down her chin, laughing as we walk all our young siblings around trick or treating. She tells me I am a good sister, something she doesn’t say to the rest of the girls.

December brings her blue lips, after she and Patricia sit talking in the ruins of an old farmhouse for hours, not leaving despite the cold. Afterwards, she tells me everything that they talked about. It all seems very personal. I’m not sure why she trusts me with it, especially when she has already vented to Patricia. Susannah tells me more and more these days. I wonder if it upsets Patricia.

February brings a new tube of frosted lip gloss, Phil’s way of saying sorry that he didn’t make it home for the weekend. We start spending all of our weekends together so that she doesn’t have to be on her own. So that I don’t have to spend a moment without her.

I am glad that we have so few classes together. When she is off excelling in Higher Level everything, I am struggling through Ordinary Level and enjoying the small respite from her. I have heard it said that the only reason she tries so hard in school is to try to impress her parents. That’s not fair, and it’s not true. Susannah is very clever, she doesn’t have to try, and her parents are never impressed. It’s not nice to admit, because she is my friend, but when she is in class with me, I feel under such pressure to concentrate and be smarter than I am, because I can’t think of anything more embarrassing than failing in front of her. It is not made easier when I cannot keep my eyes on the blackboard because they keep drifting to check what she is doing. I check the other girls, to see who they are staring at, and to make sure that I am not the only one falling behind. My grades might benefit from repeating the year in another school, where she is not.

All of Autumn, and into Winter, and now Spring, I have been far too deep in Susannah and her wonderful mouth. A year wasted on watching her. The long light of March is so welcome, I must clean myself in it, I must move on from this. Am I wrong to notice all the things that set her apart from the rest of us? She is better, nicer, prettier, just miles ahead. There’s no trespass, it’s just a year of watching, and observing, and waiting for the next thing that will make me crumble. There are times when it becomes so much that I can’t stand to be around her. But there is something in her attitude that I am drawn to. Perhaps it is the way that she hardly notices my admiration. Or the way that she can bully me or be my best friend and I can hardly tell the difference. Perhaps it is her moods, the glows and shadows of them, as though her heart is made of the changing sky. It’s humiliating to wonder if I have ever meant the same things to her as she does to me.

My only solace from all this is Martin. Seven months my senior, and his house just a scattering of fields from mine. The Burkes are the nearest thing to neighbours that we have. Originally, his proximity to us was the only thing that made us friends. It made sense for our mothers to share school runs, and with his siblings about the age of my siblings, the Burkes and the Nolans naturally fell in sync with each other. Now I don’t think I could function without him. I’ve known him too long, he has become a part of me. Since we were young, he has been a carbon copy of his two older brothers. Each of them a pale-eyed, dishwater blond. I can tell by his brothers what Martin will look like in two years’ time, and in four years’ time. It will not be altogether different from the way he looks now. I wonder if it is reassuring for him, to know that he will always look absolutely fine. The only look into the future I have are a few creased photographs of my mother. I try not to think about how we will grow up. I try to focus as much as I can on the moment that I am in. It makes things easier.

Like now, this evening in March, when Martin is in my garden, and I am throwing a sliotar towards his hurley. This isn’t my favourite thing to do, but I know that he likes it. When we were younger, I spent a great deal of time standing in goal for him or catching his handpasses, doing anything I could to get him to hang around with me. I was fascinated by him then. I was fascinated by a lot of the boys. In the last year, I’ve realised that even when I refuse to play GAA with him, he still likes to hang around together. Whenever I want him, Martin is there. He knows I don’t like to play GAA, and so he lets us just sit and talk. Still, I know he likes to play, so I put the effort in whenever he hands me the hurley. He isn’t like the rest of the boys; I don’t think they would want to have conversations with me. The stickiness of puberty has given us a lot to talk about. When we spend the evenings talking and playing in my garden, I feel so liminal. We are adults and children at once. It’s my favourite thing to do. Nobody else really makes me feel this way. With the girls, no matter how comfortable I feel, I am always afraid of being the odd one out. With Martin, there is no fear of that. I am never a loser with him. I never have to try. He just likes me as I am.

For all the long years of our childhood, we have been so closely together. Now that we are growing up, I sometimes feel we will be pulled apart. I am getting further from my family, from my home, from him. The girls and I get closer. Susannah and I get closer, and closer still. No matter how much I want to spend my time with Martin, it seems these days I am always with the girls.

3

March 1990

Here, the days drip by as slow as half-melted candle wax. Time is hard and soft at once in Crossmore. It is the meeting place of the old world and the new, I think. Once it was a big and important town, with a train track and a heaving mart, I have heard. There were plenty of young people, plenty of opportunities for them. Grandparents and nuns like to remember it, and they tell stories so well that I remember this version of Crossmore without ever having lived in it. There are two photographs of that old Crossmore in St Joseph’s Secondary School, one showing a steaming train with windows full of passengers waving, and the other showing crowds in the centre of the village. That Crossmore is very far away now. I sometimes wonder if the rest of the world even knows that we are still here.

There is no need to come by anymore. The train has stopped running, and the track has been eaten by grass and wildflowers. The mart has been relocated. There are more thorn bushes than people. Soon the sprawling farms around us will be halved and sold, and split between children, and halved and sold again, and the city people will come and buy up that land, and they will build houses to live in during the Summer, when we are worth visiting. They will make Crossmore important again, even with their absences; it’s the money that does it, although we will pretend it isn’t. Right now we are between uses, and it is very quiet. The last census reported that there are only 335 year-round residents in Crossmore, but as a year-round resident, I can say that number sounds awfully high. It feels like it’s the same thirty or forty of us milling around all the time. This is one of the few things Granny and I agree on.

‘They must be all hiding.’

She said, and sometimes still I wonder what ditch or ruin they are in, and if they would let me join them.

I suppose it’s nice to live somewhere quiet. To me, I think, a city would be an overwhelming melting pot. Dad likes to remind us that there is no chance of a bombing in a place as far away as Crossmore. It’s safe. It’s airtight. In a place so small, there isn’t much room for wild thinking or ambition. That can be a comfort. We may have been born unique, but the village blends us all into one person. We are superstitious, religious, traditional, that’s all. The only differences between us are slight. There are Protestants among the Catholics. There are rich among the poor. Those who have children and those who can’t.

The only true deviance from normality in Crossmore is Catríona O’Shea, Susannah’s mother. She is the stray that we all recoil and marvel at. She lives in the closest thing Crossmore has to a Big House, with no mortgage, and no obvious income, and no husband at home. A rural socialite is a funny thing to be. I wonder how she copes with the attention. Her life has always been scandalous, which makes Susannah’s life sadder and more dazzling than the rest of ours could ever hope to be.

‘Them O’Sheas are no Catholics.’

Mother says, as though it levels her and Catríona out. When I compare Catríona to Mother, and other women in Crossmore, I don’t know which of their lives I should be aiming for. What is worse, to be remarkable or unremarkable? I wish I had never noticed that we girls replace the women, that the boys seamlessly replace the men, and that we all follow a pattern. I ought to follow the pattern, to bask in all the wonderful security it provides. But then I see Catríona, disregarding patterns. Look what that has left her with: a buzzing social life, endless glamour. Something about it is sad to me. If not sad, then certainly scary.

When I was young, I never imagined there might be anything beyond the horizon. This was the only sort of life that ever made sense to me. Now I wonder if I could go somewhere else, somewhere that is busy, without thorn bushes, with functioning train tracks, a place that does more than buzz on the ghost of once being important, as our village does. Imagine a place where I could scream and not be heard, and fail and not be seen. A place where my insignificance would not hurt, because everybody would be insignificant. That is not where I am. Here, every breath is heard, every evil thought is known. It might be beautiful to look at, but it is abysmal to exist in; a sweet, sad dream. And while I could think of a million places that I would rather be, I fear that I will never have the nerve to leave. I fear that Crossmore is too deep in me, and I would not know how to exist elsewhere.

Everybody is frustrated when they are fifteen, I know, but knowing this doesn’t ease my frustration. It feels as though I am an island, apart from everybody else. Perhaps we are all islands, apart from each other. Perhaps everyone else feels foreign in their hometown too. Yes, perhaps we are all just islands, as wild and merciless as each other, separated by our countless defects. Perhaps there is no remedy for it, and all we can do is learn which parts of ourselves to deny and which parts to bring into the light.

We have mothers at home and fathers out working, we all have votive candles on the kitchen windowsill and masses of siblings to get lost in. Outwardly, we are all living the same life, but inwardly, I hope, everybody has as many private crises as I do.

My father, like most Crossmore fathers, is on the farm all day and in bed all night. He comes in for his dinner, sparkling with rain and smelling of sweet silage and sweat, his hands swollen and caked with grey dirt even after washing them. While he eats, he listens and mumbles to all we have to tell him from the day, and when we are gone to bed, he speaks quietly with Mother about adult things. There are a few hours on Sundays when he is around, cologned and well-dressed for Mass. We eat our midday dinner, and he takes his time; he bounces baby Padraig on his knee, and if I’ve been missing him, I bring down some homework I know he can manage, and he helps me with it. It’s just a way of being near him. The GAA pitch is only a short walk from the house, he goes down with the boys to watch the hurling and football. That’s where the real bonding happens. I have no business there, so I miss out. They always come back laughing or remarking on something from the match, but they can’t explain it, so it stays their private thing. He is a good father; we just seem to drift past each other.

My mother, like most Crossmore mothers, is in the house all day. She doesn’t think that she gets enough thanks. Maybe she’s right. Although the boys model themselves on Dad, they look so like her. The four of them have the same gently sloped noses, and soft eyes that make them look disappointed even when they’re not. Even little Padraig is starting to resemble her. I don’t think they realise how close to Mother they are, especially when they take such care to replicate everything Dad does, Tadgh especially. He has embodied all of Dad’s mannerisms – the way he answers the phone, the way he stands, the way he jokes. Even when Dad is cold in the ground, he will still be out working the fields as long as Tadgh is around. He has started to do the evening milking on his own so that Dad can come in and watch the news.

One day, Tadgh will inherit the farm; it isn’t a secret, it isn’t a dream, it is a custom that Dad won’t allow to fade. Whether he wants to or not, Tadgh will be a farmer until he dies. It might make us sound very grand, that there is land to be passed down, but the fields are very rocky, and so the cows never fatten as well as they could, and so they don’t milk as well as they should. Even when Dad has gotten different bulls in, the cows never turn out much good. It all goes back to the land. Every Christmas Eve, Dad tells us a story that he was told as a child, about the old tenants of the farm who were evicted from the land after the Famine. He says that the daughter of that family put a curse on the land, so that it would fail anybody who took it after them. When the new tenants came in, relations of my father from generations ago, rocks had come up through the earth and rendered the fields useless. Mother leaves the room when he tells this story. She doesn’t believe in it, but she is afraid of it.

‘Sure you’re all talk. How could any woman make rocks come up out of the earth?’

She calls in from the kitchen, trying to make Dad shut up, and when she thinks we can’t see her, she quickly blesses herself.

A curse probably couldn’t turn the fields to rock, but it’s a very easy way of explaining the cows’ poor yield. Stories like that carry weight. Even when nobody really believes them, they are taken as a sort of fact. Tadgh is getting a cursed farm that doesn’t make half the money it’s worth, we are not as grand as we might appear. Isn’t it convenient that the career he wants most in the world will be gifted to him?

Maybe if he didn’t spend so much time on the farm, Tadgh and I would be closer, but as it stands, I don’t know very much about him. He isn’t mean to me, but he isn’t kind. I suppose it’s hard to be either when we are so distant. Even sitting across the dinner table from each other, I feel like an imposition to him. He treats me more like a flatmate than a little sister. In school, he spends his lunches with the smokers behind the hedges, and in the bathrooms, older girls will ask me,

‘Is it true that your brother is with Claire Hayes?’

The name of the girl in question will change every so often, and I must pretend the reason I don’t answer is because I am loyal to my brother, not because I don’t know a thing about his personal life. I think if we made the time to talk, we could get along very well. Maybe when we’re older, we will. For now, he is only a shadow to Dad, the same way I am trying to be a shadow to Mother.

The girls come from families exactly like mine. Maria is the last of the Kealys for the moment. Her mother is the youngest of seven daughters, and Maria is the same. Long ago, that would have made her a healer, but these days it doesn’t mean a great deal. With so many daughters, there is every chance that Maria’s mother will try once more for a son. Eimear has little sisters who we play with. Sometimes I like playing with them so much that I fear they are only humouring me, when it should be the other way around. Susannah’s brothers are long gone from home, although they did both promise to come back for her when they are settled somewhere new. They have been gone for years, they have long since settled elsewhere, but still she clings to their promise, and she reminds us of it all the time.

‘None of this will matter when Damien and Joe come and get me.’

She always says, tossing her responsibilities away. It’s just a way of keeping her family together in her head, it’s harmless enough.

After me, there were six years of quiet at home, and then came Ciarán, who still sees the farm as a playground, and me as interesting. Martin is on the junior hurling team, and he comes over to coach Ciarán in our garden for hours on end. It makes Dad warm to Martin, it gives me something to do. I wonder if Ciarán and I will always get along, or if he will outgrow me and only be nice to me when he needs something. The day is quickly coming when I won’t be good for anything but drink and money, which is all Tadgh has been good for since last year. When that happens, I will have to be accommodating, because I am the older one.

I never expected a sibling after Ciarán, but last year Mother surprised us – and herself – with another pregnancy. Ideally, she would have stopped having children after me, because she only wanted a boy and a girl. In that life, there would have been room in the house for us all, and there would have been money to go around. Mother thought for sure that she was done with babies, with her youngest boy fresh from his Communion and her oldest headed for his Leaving Cert, but then she felt her belly hardening with Padraig. Dad told me I would never be stuck for attention, being the only girl among three boys.

I almost feel closer to Padraig than I do to Ciarán, probably because I have been tasked with changing his nappies and feeding him, and because he does not yet have the language skills to tell me to get lost. It appears that motherhood is the nearest thing to an inherited career that I can hope for.

Before us, and before Dad, Mother worked in the bank in Ballycove, and she made alright money, from what she has told me, but she gave it up to get married. She worked her last shift on the Friday, and she got married on the Saturday. When she tells us about her working days, she gets all wistful, like they are a dream she has just woken from and is struggling to remember. I suppose that is the case. She doesn’t often talk about it; when she does, it is brief, as though she is breaking a rule by reliving it. It’s not that she doesn’t like to remember it, I think it just upsets her because that part of her life is over.

‘They used to all wink at me, all the men who came in. It was annoying.’

She says, and I wonder if she means it. It’s hard to imagine Mother being winked at, wearing high heels every day and blushing. At home, her days are more than full, but being busy isn’t the same thing as being satisfied. She could be slowly cooking and cleaning herself towards her grave. Or she might enjoy it. Whether she regrets leaving her job or is very happy as a housewife, I will never know. Mother is not the sort of person to be honest when she could be ideal.