Authors: Kerry Hardie
I was more used to the Healing, I could feel my confidence growing, and after a while I noticed my hands no longer flew straight
to the site of the pain. Sometimes they’d set themselves down somewhere different altogether; they’d rub at that place or
press into it, and I wondered, was this where the problem had had its beginning? I began to want to know more about the body
and its functions. I’d get books out of the library, and if I found something useful I ordered it from a bookshop in town;
when it came I
would scribble notes in the margins and mark off the relevant passages for myself None of this happened overnight, you understand,
but I could feel myself getting more detached from what I was doing and, oddly, more sure.
I didn’t always like this. Sometimes I would stand back and listen to myself, pronouncing on this or on that, and I’d miss
the shy, quiet Ellen, the dreamer of private dreams, the Ellen who stood out under the trees or walked up the road in the
springtime, following in its steps.
One shining morning in May I took my coffee out into the yard and sat on the bench and watched the soft light on the stones
and the running shadows laid down by the ash as the wind streamed its leafy branches. A goldfinch crammed its beak for its
young, and a wren flicked in and out of the sprawling silver-grey leaves of the marguerite daisies, swift and neat as a mouse.
It was there and gone, there and gone, and as I watched, it dawned on me that I lived a life now that drummed with too much
sound and movement, that left no space for small, elusive thoughts like wrens, that ate up my time and negated my solitude
and left me lonely among all the people.
Then I began to review this new life of mine that seemed to have overtaken me almost without my noticing. Marie had moved
to Dublin after the breakup, but Dermot had stayed in the house where they’d lived and often he had the two boys with him.
Sometimes he’d bring them over to us, but more and more rarely these days, and he seldom came when he was by himself. With
Catherine it was different as well. I saw her because she and Liam shared lifts to Limerick, and often she sat and drank tea
in the kitchen, but not in the old way, for now it wasn’t just the two of us and the conversation was always general or shop.
As I was thinking this thought the door of the studio opened, and Catherine came out, talking over her shoulder to Liam, who
followed hard behind. I made no movement, and they didn’t see me. Catherine was speaking, then Liam was nodding; she said
something else, and he threw back his head and laughed. How much better he looks, I thought, with that sudden insight that
comes when you suddenly notice someone you see every day without seeing. His colour was good; the grey hardly showed in his
curly brown hair; his body seemed less weighted down. Liam was coming back into himself, and I’d been so busy with living
my own separate life I’d hardly even taken it in. I did now. Then I saw that his overalls were marked with paint, and that
was another shock.
Catherine wore her androgynous look: she had on a man’s light-grey T-shirt, with those loose, open sleeves that always made
her arms look wistful, her hair was clipped back, and she wore faded jeans and sturdy brown boots on her feet. She turned
her head and saw me. There was a moment when she was still off somewhere else, then her eyes accepted mine, and her mouth
opened out to that wide, free smile that was the thing about Catherine I loved best of all. She said something to Liam, and
he glanced at me, nodded, touched her arm, and went back inside. She came over and sat on the bench beside me.
Catherine leaned her shoulders against the wall, stretched out her legs, and we stayed like that without talking.
I don’t like talking much, but most people do, they seem to want to spend as much of their lives as they can with sounds coming
out of their mouths. Catherine could talk if she wanted to, but if she didn’t she could stay quiet without any awkwardness
or unease. Most people aren’t like that—they’re either talkers or they’re not, and if they’re suddenly caught in the opposite
mode they’re so unnatural you want to shift yourself off away from them as fast as ever you can. That’s me. When I try to
make small talk
people go from relaxed to tense in about ten seconds flat, and their eyes start shooting around, looking for how to escape.
“Liam is getting better,” I said, when I finally wanted to speak.
“Yes,” she said. More silence. “Cancellation?” she asked, her gaze on the chestnut tree standing full-leafed by the gate,
all its tall candles burning creamy white and proud.
“Didn’t show up,” I replied.
“So why aren’t you inside?” she asked. “Why aren’t you baking bread or ironing or washing the floor?” She hadn’t stirred or
shifted, but there was the faintest edge to her voice.
“Is that what I’m usually doing?” I asked her.
“Something like that. Something busy and useful.”
“Is this criticism I’m hearing, Catherine?”
“Observation. It’s not like you to be sitting around.”
I didn’t say anything. I was in a strange mood. Here was Catherine, whom I’d been sort of longing for, and suddenly I wasn’t
sure if she was enemy or friend.
“I was trying to remember who I was,” I said. I didn’t know why I said it, or why I was suddenly angry with her, a dense,
dark anger that I thought was to do with having to carry so much while Liam got well and she laughed with him, then sat here
implying that I might be less than perfect.
“You’ve forgotten?” she asked.
“More or less. All these people. I feel invaded.”
“And you don’t like it?”
“I want to remember what it’s like to feel lonely again.”
“You could try doing more of what you’re doing now.”
“And who’d do all the rest? Liam?”
“Why does it have to be done? Why does everything have to be perfect all the time? Liam is getting better, the children are
well, isn’t all that more important?”
“Not perfect,” I said, ignoring her last question. “Only clean and tidy.”
“Perfectly clean and perfectly tidy.”
“You don’t understand, do you?”
“No. And I don’t understand why you want to be lonely. I’m lonely, and I don’t much like it. Most people don’t.”
“I’m not most people,” I told her stubbornly. “No one is. I’m me, you’re you, we don’t have to be the same. You used to tell
me that. It was one of the reasons I could talk to you. I didn’t have to be everyone else, I only had to be me.”
“What is it, Ellen? What are you so angry about? Is it the Healing?”
“I’m not angry,” I said furiously. “Or at least no more than I always am. And yes, of course it’s the Healing, it’s always
the fucking Healing.”
“I didn’t know you still felt like that,” she said quietly.
I said nothing.
“I thought you’d begun to like it,” she continued, her voice soft and careful. “You seem so much more confident now. You’ve
grown
so much.”
“You sound like a fucking Alternative.”
She winced. “Don’t you get any fulfillment from it at all? Even from the results? I mean, some of it’s incredible—”
“For fuck’s sake, Catherine, it’s not incredible. Everyone wants fucking miracles, but it’s their own bodies that are the
miracles, most of them would get better if I never went near them at all. Rest and time—that’s all they need. Let their bodies
do the work.”
“That’s
four fucks
in as many minutes,” she said.
“Well, that’s too fucking bad. Maybe I’m reverting; maybe I want to stomp around and say fuck; maybe I’m sick and tired of
helping people and being good. Anyway, why do we always have
to talk about me? Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing, how
your
work’s going? Why don’t you get a life that isn’t art or mine, Catherine, why don’t you go to India or China or somewhere,
why don’t you fall in love?”
I stopped. I didn’t know why I’d said that; I’d never thought about Catherine as someone who might fall in love, but why shouldn’t
she?
One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.
The song line sang itself in my head. That was how I thought about Catherine. What was the song? I wondered. Clear as a bell
it came back to me.
Green Grow the Rushes,
O. I hadn’t heard it for years. I sneaked a look at Catherine. Her face was tight and even paler than anyway. Hadn’t she
just said she was lonely and I’d completely ignored her? Perhaps she’d really meant it. She always seemed immune to men, as
though all that was grand but not something she’d ever bother with herself. Perhaps she wasn’t as immune as I thought she
was.
Suddenly I felt terrible about her as well as everything else. First I’d deliberately not heard her, and then I’d gone and
hurt her as well and only because I was in a stew and I wanted to take it out on whoever was around. I glanced at her again.
She had pulled in her feet and was getting up from the bench.
“I’m sorry you feel I’m intruding on your life, Ellen,” she said formally.
“Catherine,” I said, and stopped. She turned and looked at me.
“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t feel that at all, I don’t know what came over me. This is all just about the Healing.” She waited.
“It’s not that I don’t like it or that I do like it, or anything like that; it’s sort of beyond all that.… ” I paused, unable
to go on. She waited again. “If it wasn’t so strong I don’t think I could bear it. That doesn’t make any sense, does it? I
mean, I do it because I’ve no choice. If I didn’t I couldn’t live with it; I wouldn’t know
where to put it, it’s so strong. But it’s wearing me out. Whatever it is. It just gets too much for me.”
“It does, of course,” she said gravely. “But it’s what you’ve been given.”
I never expected such a cliche from Catherine, but there was something so strange about her that I didn’t point it out. It
was like she was showing me a part of herself I’d never seen before: intimate and vulnerable and awkwardly sincere. I’d never
thought of Catherine as being vulnerable, and it dawned on me that I’d never seen this sincerity either. She was mostly dead
offhand and matter of fact, especially when what she was saying was important. That’s why I trusted her with all this weird
stuff. She took the fear out of it. Or she had so far. Maybe that was about to change.
“Catherine,” I said carefully, and stopped again. I wanted her to go away now, but there was something I wanted to know before
she did. “Catherine—that paint on Liam’s overalls. Is he painting?”
“Yes,” she said, surprise in her voice. “He started after hours in the art school, just messing around to see what would happen.
Did he not tell you?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe he couldn’t while he was that low. Too risky. He might have fallen flat on his face all over again.”
“But he hasn’t?”
“No. Now he’s setting up here in the workshop. He’s planning to move his stuff here when college finishes for the summer.”
There was a lift in her voice, excitement. “And, Ellen, I think this is really going to work for him.”
O
CTOBER
1999
C
atherine hadn’t been over for ages and ages, but when she walked in I’d this funny feeling that there was something she wanted
to tell me.
I remembered how I’d messed up before and I made up my mind that this time I’d meet her halfway.
I thought it must be the nun-thing.
So I asked, but as soon as I’d opened my mouth I wished that I hadn’t, for now I was getting the lot.
“After I’d left the convent,” she said, “I didn’t know what to think about it. Part of me was okay with it but the rest was
so twisted up and ashamed that I wanted to lock the whole thing away in some press that was never used and fire the key into
the river.”
At first I thought she was talking about having been a nun, but then I realised she meant the shame was in leaving the convent
at all.
“Keeping the press door locked was like being a teenager with a secret diary,” she went on. “The more you wrote in it, the
more you dreaded somebody finding it on you and reading it through…. So I told myself I wasn’t a teenager anymore and if I
let myself go down that road I’d end up in an even worse mess—”
She stared into her tea mug as though she was reading the leaves. Then she looked up and her eyes were full on me and so I
dropped mine.
“I tried to slip it casually into conversation,” she said, “but it didn’t work because I didn’t feel one bit casual about
it. I was so paranoid that I always heard this silent gasp when I said the word
nun.
And I knew it was all my imagination—even back then they were leaving the orders in droves—but telling myself that made no
difference, I had to
force
myself to talk about it. After a while it got easier and soon it was old news.
“It was a bit like leaving the diary lying around unlocked,” she added. “In the end I’d got so used to people reading it that
I stopped minding. And then the minute I stopped minding, they stopped bothering. So dull. All those closely written pages.
At times I was almost offended.”
I nodded to show I was following her, though I wasn’t at all—she might as well have been speaking double Dutch.
“But it was different with you,” she said. “You looked so frightened I tried not to mention it. But then I’d forget and out
it would come. You always changed the subject.”
I was trying not to show that she’d got to me when she’d said I’d looked frightened, so I made myself ask her why she’d left
the convent. This seemed more tactful somehow than asking her why on earth she’d gone in in the first place.
“I didn’t leave,” she said.
“Well, you’re sitting here now so you must have—”
“I had this cough that wouldn’t respond to treatment. It meant I couldn’t sing anymore, which wasn’t easy because the choir
was the only part of the whole way of life that I loved. But I thought I’d been stopped from singing because I loved it so
much that I was using it to make all the rest bearable. I thought it was an attachment that I needed to give up.”