Whitethorn Woods Read online

  By then I had fallen totally in love with Lara but she thought I was gay and I couldn’t convince her otherwise.

  ‘Nonsense, Fabian, you can’t fancy me, sweetheart, you’re as gay as a carnival!’ she would laugh. ‘We’re friends, you and me, it’s only some silly hissy fit you’ve had with some gorgeous guy and you want to tell him, “I’m going out with a girl, so look at me!”.’

  ‘I am not a gay man, Lara,’ I said in a level voice, ‘I am one hundred per cent heterosexual.’

  ‘And so are Gerry and Henri and Basil in the salon, I suppose,’ she mocked.

  ‘No, of course not. But I am.’

  It was no use. I told her my name was Bruiser, and she laughed even more. Or George, I suggested in desperation, and she told me to make my mind up.

  The nervous woman who was running Milady’s kept telephoning me to know what to do about the electricity bill, or whether or not to order more conditioner. Now to top it all off one of my best stylists was having some kind of hysterics in the staff room, roaring and bawling and totally incoherent about having ruined someone’s hair and not having understood that her husband was desperate to have children, and about people not trusting other people.

  It was all we needed on a busy morning.

  Gerry and Basil, who were usually great with tantrums and nervous breakdowns and people howling, couldn’t make head nor fist of it. Henri said we should call the paramedics. I went in and sat with her.

  ‘Pandora,’ I said gently.

  ‘Vi, my name is Vi,’ she cried. I had forgotten. She was always Pandora in the salon.

  ‘I’m Bruiser – that’s my real name,’ I said. I thought it might help. It didn’t.

  ‘Bruiser?’ she said in disbelief.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ I confessed.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘That’s all we need – you’re called Bruiser.’

  I decided to get down to the problem. She started to sob again so I got about one word in four: there was Ian who was her husband, there was her eleven o’clock lady, there was poor Brenda Desmond and the Frenchman, and there was the new moon.

  I wondered if Henri was right. Maybe she had just gone mad and should be sectioned and locked up. I got her a drink of water and patted her hand.

  I was told that Lara was in the salon. I said she’d have to wait. And I went on patting the weeping woman beside me.

  ‘You don’t want to annoy Lara,’ Pandora-Vi blubbed at me.

  ‘I don’t care if we annoy Lara. Lara has annoyed me, she persists in thinking I’m gay, she makes fun of me and sends me up. Let her bloody hair extensions wait until I’m ready.’

  Vi looked up with a tear-stained face.

  ‘But that’s idiotic, Fabian, just to look at you, anyone would know you swing both ways.’ She was red-faced and earnest.

  I wanted to give her a good slap, but this was not the moment to argue my sexuality down to the bone with her. She saw the look on my face, however.

  ‘It makes sense to be bisexual when you think it through,’ she gulped. ‘Less chance of making a mess of things, always another option open.’

  ‘I am not bisexual, Vi. I have sex with women, do you hear, women, girls, birds, babes, broads, whatever. Not enough of them, I have to say, not nearly enough. From now on I’m going to sleep with any woman who has a pulse. And that will show those know-all Laras out there. That will teach them …’

  I saw Vi’s mouth in a round O of horror. She was staring not at me but over my shoulder. I knew it before I turned. There was Lara, listening to every word. Looking very disapproving indeed.

  ‘How dare you make Pandora cry,’ she began. ‘Big bully. Poor Pandora, what did he say to you?’

  Pandora was of course in floods of tears again, triggered by this sympathy. Again I heard a few key words: babies, new moon, Ian, eleven o’clock lady, Frenchman, bracelet. Totally disjointed, completely off the wall. Yet Lara understood at once. There was no problem, she said, we were all to pretend we knew nothing about anything.

  Well, that would be easy for me. I mean, I did know nothing about anything.

  The eleven o’clock lady could be given a voucher, Vi was to stop taking the contraceptive pill, Ian loved her, the bracelet was for Vi, not the eleven o’clock lady: all was well, nothing to cry about. Main thing was to avoid stress.

  It was complete gibberish.

  Yet Vi had dried her tears, blown her nose and was actually smiling.

  ‘Hard to avoid stress in a salon like this,’ she said ruefully to Lara.

  ‘Go somewhere calmer, somewhere nearer home,’ Lara suggested.

  ‘Where?’ Vi asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure Tiger or Bruiser or whatever he’s called here will have a master plan for you,’ Lara said but she was smiling at me. A different kind of smile, as if she saw me properly for the first time.

  And I did have a plan there and then.

  Vi as it happened lived fairly near Milady’s, out in the farthest suburbs of Rossmore near the Whitethorn Woods. She could be manager there. She could have babies and bracelets, and new moons, whatever she wanted, and the eleven o’clock lady would be kept away from her. Whatever they wanted. Was that all right, could we all go back to work now? Please?

  And we did and I looked at Lara’s eyes in the mirror and told her she didn’t need hair extensions, her hair was beautiful as it was.

  She said, she wondered was there something a bit unprofessional about the way I was stroking her neck. Was it rather like a doctor and a patient and maybe I could be struck off for unprofessional behaviour?

  I said I thought not, I thought that different rules entirely apply in a salon and she laughed a warm enthusiastic laugh and said I was not to dream of sleeping with every woman who had a pulse.

  She had been there for that bit too …

  CHAPTER 15

  The Intelligence Test

  Part 1 – Melanie

  You know the way it is: people think that because you’re deaf, you’re slow. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. If you’re deaf you’re often as sharp as a tack because you have to pick up so much from the other senses. I look at people’s faces all the time and I watch to see what kind of mood they’re in. I mean, if you look at the way people can clench their fists, or bite their lips, or just fidget, you know exactly what’s going on. I could walk the whole length of Castle Street and Market Street in Rossmore and tell you what kind of a mood the town was in.

  So when they all started talking about the intelligence test, well, of course I knew it was important. And the more they said it was nothing to get worked up about, the more I knew it. I’m not a fool, profoundly deaf, yes, but not at all stupid. It was all about this school for girls like me called St Martin’s.

  ‘You’d love it there if they have room for you, Melanie,’ my mum said over and over. ‘It’s a kind of legend in education, their girls do so well in life. But if they don’t have room then no problems, we’ll just go and find another place. There are lots of places.’

  But I knew it had nothing to do with St Martin’s finding room for me, and I knew that there weren’t lots of other places. If I managed to get the questions right on this intelligence test I’d get in, it was as simple as that.

  I had already met a girl who was at school there so I knew all about it, it sounded a great place. This girl who was called Kim said they had fantastic food, and you could be a vegetarian if you liked and even though it was a girls’ school there were dances with fellows at them. They would even teach us to dance properly by getting us to recognise the reverberations in the floorboards. They had art classes and an exhibition every year and played a whole rake of games like netball, and hockey, and rounders, against hearing schools as well as other deaf schools. All the girls wore a sort of uniform, any kind of cream-coloured blouse and a navy skirt or navy jeans.

  They had all kinds of flashing lights instead of bells, and make-up lessons as well as lip-reading and ordinary things. />
  I was desperate to get into St Martin’s.

  But my mum and dad were even more desperate. It would be free, you see, on top of everything else. Some rich deaf person had left a fortune to provide an education for girls with hearing problems. Now the money wasn’t the main reason they were so keen on it. They mainly wanted it because girls from St Martin’s got everywhere. They got to go to university and had great jobs. But it would be a help because my mum and dad hadn’t much money and they had Fergal and Cormac to look after too. I know they’re not deaf. But they need schooling too.

  Dad’s business is always threatening to close down. My mum’s back is bad and she has to do long hours at the supermarket to keep things going. I knew that Mum used to go up to the well in the woods to pray that I would get my hearing restored, which was kind of ridiculous really. How could they reverse something that had already happened? And if they were able to, then there were a lot of people worse off than I was.

  So even though they were doing their best not to pressurise me, they were sick with anxiety in case I wouldn’t pass this test.

  The test itself didn’t really worry me. I didn’t think it was going to be very hard. It was going to be general knowledge and fitting shapes into spaces. That wasn’t hard. And there would be identifying objects from pictures or drawings. Kim, the girl I knew who was already at St Martin’s, said it wasn’t too hard. She had problems with a picture of a kite, she said, she never saw one in real life because she hadn’t been allowed to go out running after kites in case she didn’t hear traffic and might get killed, so she didn’t know what they looked like. But she knew everything else so she got in okay.

  On the day of the test, I’ve never seen my mum and dad so worried. My mum kept changing her clothes – the suit was too formal, she said, the frilly dress made her look like a poodle, the jeans made her look as if she hadn’t bothered. What was the right thing to wear?

  I didn’t think it mattered all that much what she wore or indeed what I wore. But she was dead nervous and their bedroom floor was covered in clothes like it never was before. So I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that she could wear a black plastic sack for all I cared – I said that I thought the suit was the best and she could wear a pink scarf to make it look kind of lively. Mum stopped fussing and started kissing me and saying I was a treasure and that I’d obviously get into the school no matter what anyone wore.

  My dad cut his face three times shaving and I said it was like going out with someone who had been involved in a massacre. Suddenly his eyes filled with tears.

  ‘You’re so bright, Mel. You know marvellous big words like “massacre”. They’d be mad as wet hens not to take you in that school.’

  We were nervous wrecks when we set out for the place.

  We took a train from Rossmore to the town where the school was and then a bus to the gate and we walked up the long avenue. Well, the school looked terrific: as I said, there were these huge sports grounds and there was this walled garden that Kim had told me about where every pupil had a flower bed and they could all grow what they wanted, and I saw through the windows a terrific art room – I could see girls painting a mural and I longed to be part of it all. The school where I was at now seemed so dull compared to it, and it was so hard to get the teachers to remember I was deaf, and so tempting to stop paying attention. But if I were here in St Martin’s I’d work so hard, I really, really would. I must not tell them that though. It would sound like pleading or begging.

  It would all depend on the test.

  When we got in, both my parents had to go to the loo as soon as they got in the door and I stood in the big hall and looked around me. I could just see myself here for the next few years. I imagined having friends that might come and visit me at home and I would go to their homes. They would hate my brothers Fergal and Cormac of course but I would probably hate their brothers and sisters too. My parents would come and visit me here during term time, and see my flower bed, and my exhibit in the art show.

  A woman came up to speak to me. She was obviously used to dealing with deaf people. She didn’t speak until we were looking at each other.

  She was very glamorous looking, with long, dark, curly hair and a big smile. She was very elegant in a tight black skirt and a yellow blouse with a black and yellow brooch on it. She had a book bag over her shoulder and both her hands were free so as well as speaking to me she signed.

  This was unexpected.

  You see, I thought they didn’t sign at this school. I thought they would disapprove of it, and believe it was holding us back. When I went to my lip-reading classes three times a week I was told over and over that if I wanted to live in the real world I shouldn’t sign.

  But then she had signed, and she looked like a teacher. It might be a test. A trick even? It was so hard to know what to do.

  But then maybe she might be deaf herself? Courtesy demanded that I should reply in sign language but I decided to speak aloud as well to show I could.

  She had asked me, was I lost?

  I said, using both ways of talking, that no, thank you, I was waiting for my parents who had both gone to the bathroom and that then we were going to go for an assessment. She said that was fine and she’d see me later because she was going to be taking part in it all.

  She looked around the big hall and gave a sort of a little sigh.

  ‘You must like it here,’ I said.

  ‘I do. Very much,’ she said and there was something sad about the way she spoke as if she was going to be leaving soon. You have to try so hard when you’re deaf to pick up the words, you end up picking up loads of other things as well.

  My mum and dad were so nervous and they kept getting confused, answering the questions they had to answer, which were just ordinary things for filling in a form. I wanted to scream that I was the one being tested, I was the one meant to have the language problems, and that if they could see my mum at the checkout in the supermarket, she was so fast she was like a wizard, and my dad was so reliable in his company that he had the keys to everywhere and if people got locked out they had to come to him. They didn’t look like reliable people – they looked like people who couldn’t remember if they owned their house or rented it, and they seemed to have trouble remembering what age Fergal and Cormac were.

  Anyway the woman with the black curly hair came in to join us and she said her name was Caroline and she would go through a few things with me. She would ask me some questions.

  Well, first I thought it was a kind of a joke. They were things a five-year-old would know about – the colours of traffic lights and who was the Taoiseach of Ireland and who was Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States and what animal did St George get involved with; then a little harder like in what part of your body would you find a cuticle or a retina. And then a few puzzles about the speed of a train or the length of a platform.

  They asked me to tell them about Rossmore and so I told them about all the fuss about the bypass road which would cut through Whitethorn Woods. I said I was in favour of it really because it is so hard to cross the street there at the moment with all the huge lorries, and that really places should want progress rather than looking back. They seemed interested but of course it was hard to know.

  Caroline asked, did I want to ask anything myself, so I asked about the signing and what was their policy on it, and she said that a lot of deaf people liked talking in sign because it made them relaxed so St Martin’s didn’t discourage it, they just used it as a second language. And that seemed fine to me.

  Then she said she had a hard question: if a house painter was going to paint the numbers on a housing estate from one to a hundred, how many times would he paint the number nine. I looked at her waiting for the real question. That was it.

  I kept looking at her, waiting.

  ‘That’s it. There’s no catch,’ she said. But there had to be a catch. Anyone would know the answer to this one. They couldn’t let you i
nto a great school like this or keep you out over something like this.

  She asked me to write down the answer on a piece of paper and I did. When she looked at it she nodded and folded it over and involved everyone else in the room.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked the Principal.

  The Principal said nine. The Assistant Principal said ten. My mother said eleven. My father said definitely eleven, because there would be two nines in ninety-nine.

  Caroline smiled at them all and asked, ‘Do you know what Melanie said?’

  They all looked at me and I felt my cheeks go scarlet.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought you meant every single time he painted the figure nine …’

  ‘I did,’ said Caroline. ‘And you were quite right, the only one in this room who did get it right.’

  They all started playing with their fingers: ‘Nine, nineteen, twenty-nine …’

  Caroline put them out of their misery. ‘Melanie said twenty times, the rest of you all forgot ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three, etc. Well done, Melanie.’

  My mum and dad were beaming at me and giving me a thumbs-up sign. The Principal and the Assistant Principal, to give them credit, were laughing and a bit ashamed of themselves.

  Then they came to the identifying objects bit.

  They were all on cards and to be honest it was very easy at the start: rabbits and houses and sunflowers and buses and things. And we moved on to what might have been the slightly harder things. Now I didn’t want to get too confident but these weren’t too bad either. Things like a truck, or a food mixer, or a violin, or a saxophone.

  But there was one I couldn’t work out at all.

  It was shaped like a triangle. I turned the card round a bit until I could get a better look at it. No, I still couldn’t see what it might be, the drawing was very simple, too simple; there were no real clues.