If I Was a Child Again Read online

  It happened one morning in June; which seems strange now, given that love seems more suited to the soft glow of evening rather than the bright glare of eleven a.m. on a Tuesday. I was in the Scout Den, a further oddity, when you consider I knew none of the words of “Ging Gang Goolie” and the closest I got to rope knots was the double one I used on the laces of my brand new Doc Martens.

  Still, there I was. With my friend Elly. I was always with Elly. We were like conjoined twins back then, united in our efforts to run with the local cool crowd in spite of the fact that we didn’t attend the local secondary, climbing instead aboard the wheezing diesel train at Malahide station and taking the tracks less travelled to Raheny, where we attended Manor House, which was considered posher (we wore gym knickers when we played hockey and had ‘indoor’ shoes) and nerdier (we did O levels in transition year instead of setting up companies and volunteering at Meals On Wheels), with the added horror of its single-sex status. This desertion to a different school made outsiders of us in our home town. We were as exposed as the stout Americans who came to search for their roots, dressed for golf.

  My red hair didn’t help. The colour of a bag of carrots back then. Titian, my mother called it, to hide her disquiet that each of her three children were tarred with the same brush.

  “Portia had Titian hair, you know,” she told us.

  There didn’t seem any point in telling her that Shakespeare held no sway with my peers.

  The talk that morning centred around Deathwish, another recently formed garage band who were now on the cusp of disbanding. Some question-mark over the musical allegiance of the drummer in whose bedroom a Phil Collins album had recently been discovered: Against All Odds.

  “Jesus,” said Elly, who knew about my copy of that exact album but would carry my dark secret to her grave, if it came to it.

  At the window, something caught my eye.

  Not something.

  Someone.

  He stood at the end of the small, rickety pier, gazing out to sea. Not in a dreamy way, as I was wont to do. But with purpose. Focus. Looking for something that he would surely find, with a glare of such intensity. He wore skinny jeans. We called them tight back then. Milky blue jeans with the accidental-on-purpose rips along the thighs and across the knees. A green parka with the hint of a Walkman poking out of a pocket, and of course, a pair of Doc Martens, scruffy enough to suggest he’d driven his father’s car over them a few times. A shock of black curly hair. Brown eyes. Skin that wasn’t tanned but looked like it could, given a chance.

  He turned then and the sun poured over his face and down his body and he seemed otherworldly somehow. Ethereal. I drank him in like a Rock Shandy. He was the Heathcliff to my Cathy, I decided. The Mork to my Mindy. The flake in my 99. He waved and I waved back before I realised that he was waving at someone else and I lowered my hand slowly so no one would notice.

  “I’m in love,” I told Elly on the way home for dinner. I was in no hurry because, for starters, my sudden outbreak of love was proving incompatible with haste and also, it was Tuesday, which meant pork chops and boiled potatoes and mashed turnips with brown sauce with a glass of milk on the side and two biscuits – one fancy, one plain – for dessert. Elly’s dinners were more exotic. Her mother made curry with raisins in it. I told my mother about the raisins once and she wouldn’t believe me.

  “Brilliant,” said Elly who was in love herself and eager for some company in the endeavour. “Who is he?”

  When I told her, her face darkened with worry. “He’s . . . very popular,” she said.

  “Out of my league, you mean.”

  “No way! Just . . . you know. Tricky to gain access.”

  I nodded. I knew how precarious our position was, out here on the periphery.

  “I can’t help who I fall in love with, can I?” I said. The drama was powerful. I could feel the pull of it already. Epic it was. Like a battle. And there I was, a casualty already. A fallen soldier. A prisoner of war.

  She nodded, grim. She understood. We linked arms and made plans to visit O’Connor Jeans again that Saturday to try on the Levi’s we’d been saving for. We’d been trying the same pair on for months and were about three weeks’ pocket-money away from the prize. With jeans like those . . . well, anything was possible, we agreed.

  The making of this plan took us all along the estuary, to the end of our road where the smell of furious turnip reached for us like the steam that rises from a cow pat on a hot afternoon.

  We stopped outside Elly’s house. “What are you having for dinner?” I asked, briefly distracted from my situation.

  She shrugged. “Pasta bake, I think.”

  My mouth watered. I’d mentioned pasta to my mother several weeks ago but she’d just said, “Mmmm” and continued poking the charred remains of a cod across a blackened frying pan.

  “I’ll ring you later,” Elly said. “We can come up with more plans.”

  I loved that. We. I wasn’t alone. I had back-up.

  Being in love turned out to be a fairly full-time occupation. First of all, there were the imagined scenarios in my head which were time-consuming to set up. The walking. The talking. The handholding. The clinches.

  Oh, the clinches. They could stop me in mid-sentence, mid-EastEnders, mid-walk-to-the-shops-for-a-sliced-pan.

  “Those dishes will be dry before you get that tea-towel anywhere near them, my girl,” my mother said, grabbing the towel from my hands and flicking a corner of it against my bare leg. A good aim, she had. And a deft wrist.

  “Ciara has a great imagination,” my English teacher wrote in my school report. Turns out she was right. The clinches. I had been reading a lot of Jilly Cooper and Sidney Sheldon which helped fuel my imaginings.

  Then there was the strategic positioning. A complicated system of finding out where he’d be at various hours of the day and night and then strolling oh-so-casually into that very place at that very time. Standing at the pinball machine with Elly placed in pole position, all the better to see him, my dear.

  “Where is he?” Hissed through a tiny gap at the corner of my mouth. Another ball down the chute. Another life lost.

  “He’s at four o’clock,” she said, glancing around under cover of a toss of her long brown hair and bleached fringe. Magnificent, she was.

  “What’s he wearing?”

  “What he always wears.”

  “Who’s he with?”

  “There’s a gang of them.”

  “Any girls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many?”

  I could see Elly doing a brief headcount while pretending to count the change in her purse to see if she had enough money, for a milkshake perhaps. Cunning.

  “Three. No wait, four. One of them’s shaved her head.”

  Talking about it. That was probably the most time-consuming bit. Hours we spent, against a backdrop of Brothers in Arms (“So Far Away from Me”) talking, talking, talking.

  In the end, all we really came up with were these two facts:

  I loved a boy.

  The boy didn’t love me back. Nor was he aware of my existence, as far as we could make out.

  So far, despite our great efforts, I had managed to detain him in conversation on only one occasion. He was waiting for a bus and I “happened” along. Here’s how it went:

  Him: Hiya, Claire.

  Me: Um, it’s actually . . .

  Him: Do you have the time?

  Me (coquettish): For what?

  Him (talking in slow, loud voice): Do. You. Know. What. Time. It. Is? (pointing to his wrist to further clarify)

  Me: Oh, eh, yes, of course, it’s . . . (pushing the sleeve of my – matching – parka up my arm) Oh, no, sorry, I’ve . . . forgotten my watch.

  Bus arrives and I disappear in a dark cloud of exhaust fumes.

  Him (hopping on bus, graceful as a gazelle): Seeya, Claire.

  That was it. So far. In my darkest moments I conceded that it wasn’t a lot.
r />   I came up with the plan on a wet Wednesday afternoon, slumped in front of Monsters of Rock on the telly.

  A love letter.

  Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  “Are you sure that will work?” Elly asked.

  “Positive.”

  “What are you going to write?”

  “Something discreet. But clever. Original. And intriguing.”

  If my plan was to work, I would have to be outed as the author so there was no way I wanted to claim responsibility for a lengthy tome where sense was far outweighed by sensibility.

  No.

  Like many stories I’ve written, a couple of things happened to trigger the piece.

  The first thing was The Scorpions. I was doing some fairly obsessive listening to “Still Loving You” around this time, the needle digging a deep furrow into that particular groove of the record.

  The second thing was my mother, shaking her head at the kitchen table, leaning over my book list. “Shocking,” she said. “The price of that Spanish book. And it’s a new edition, of course, so no chance of getting it second hand.”

  Spanish! Of course! The guttural sound of it, the dance of the words along a sentence, the V’s pronounced as B’s, the speed of it, the shape of the words in your mouth, the comic strangeness of the upside-down punctuation marks.

  It was perfect.

  I kissed my mother’s cheek and she glanced up, still annoyed at the shocking price of schoolbooks and the sneakiness of the new editions that parted her from her hard-earned cash, but now confused at my sudden display of affection.

  “Thanks, Mam.”

  “What for?”

  “Everything.”

  She regarded me with deep suspicion as I left the kitchen at a trot.

  Still Loving You.

  That’s what I’d write.

  But – and here was the rub, as Shakespeare might say – I’d write it in Spanish. How intriguing could a Titian-haired girl with gym knickers and a jolly-hockey-stick be?

  I wrote it on my hand.

  Te quiero todavia.

  A lot of time was spent on the type of paper I should use. Nothing flowery or flouncy. Nothing love-lettery. No pictures of butterflies or any other insect. And absolutely no hearts.

  In the end, I bought plain but expensive writing paper that was neither white nor cream but something in the middle. Ivory, the lady in the shop called it. I measured the length and the breadth of a page and plotted where each word should begin and end, so that the sentence would be perfectly central and in proportion to the rest of the page.

  I wrote each of the three words with lavish strokes and flourishes the likes of which I had never achieved before or indeed since.

  Te Quiero Todavia.

  No “from”.

  No “to”.

  Just three words. In Spanish. Anonymous. Like a Valentine’s Day card except a letter instead of a card and June instead of February.

  Inspired.

  I bought an envelope. A stamp. Folded the page oh-so-carefully. Slid it inside the envelope. Gummed it. Sealed it. Wrote his name in a careful disguise of block capitals on the front. Copied his address out of the phone book. All this took me less than twenty minutes. The standing in front of the post box, deliberating, took a good bit longer. In the end, Elly grabbed it, stuffed it through the dark mouth of the postbox.

  “Whatcha do that for?” Incensed.

  “It’s nearly six. We’ll be late for dinner if we stand here much longer.”

  “Fair enough.” Our mothers were united in their love of punctuality.

  “What are you having?”

  “Gammon steak with pineapple.” Nonchalant. Like it was nothing.

  “Actual pineapple?”

  “Tinned.”

  “Oh.”

  It was Friday so we were having grilled mackerel, with mam roaring, “Watch out for the bones, for the love of God!” before every mouthful.

  Even the plate of smelly, greasy mackerel with its mean, hard bones couldn’t quell my excitement, my nervousness, my anticipation as to what might happen . . .

  In the end, nothing happened. Not really. There were rumours of course. There were always rumours. About a letter. An anonymous letter. A foreign language, people said. Italian maybe.

  Nobody knew what it meant.

  Or who had sent it.

  Perhaps my chemistry teacher was right after all. Her comment in my school report read, “More planning needed in the organisation and execution of experiments.”

  Never a truer word . . .

  Ciara Geraghty lives in Dublin with three children, one husband and a dog. She has written four novels: Saving Grace, Becoming Scarlett, Finding Mr. Flood and Lifesaving for Beginners.

  Story 17: Unconditional Love

  Caroline Grace-Cassidy

  I close my eyes behind the open white hall door in Stella Gardens and listen to the seagulls squawk, their sounds combining, making interesting music in my young head. I’m immediately reminded of “Billie Jean”. I hum it. I tap my white-runnered foot and watch the multicoloured laces bop. I’m totally and utterly in love with Michael Jackson and I know in my heart that someday I will marry him. Sometimes in interviews I know exactly what he’s going to say before he says it. I get him.

  I stop tapping and I move from behind the door to the gap where I feel the cool outdoor air on my face. I open my eyes ever so slowly and gaze up as the seagulls’ whiteness soars across my head and they dip in and around the flats. I move out as my eyes follow them twisting and turning my body like this until I become slightly dizzy and only then do I stop. I’m reminded of the Waltzers in Funderland. My favourite.

  I leave the door ajar as is my granny’s wish and I smell the Brasso from the newly scrubbed metallic numbers on the hall door: 141. The knocker and gold letterbox gleam at me. I step over the newly disinfected step and hop onto the little path as I reach for the gate. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a gate on my own detached house in the suburbs that this gate holds such immense excitement for me. I love how it creaks when I open it, like my dad’s guitar case. I love lifting the latch and replacing it. My very own fortress. I inhale the air deeply and am instantly in my happy safe place.

  I’m on a journey. I never take this journey at home. I am not allowed. I am going to the shops on my own. I am going for the messages. I have the five-pound note in the sole of my runner. Under my knee-high white socks. There is a picture at the top of my socks but it’s faded so much now I can’t remember what it was. I crumple my toes up tight in my runners. Five pounds is a fortune to be trusted with. I am getting a small turnover of bread, four slices of hard cheese and two hard tomatoes. She always emphasises the word hard.

  The house next door is so close the two front doors are almost touching. I really like Mrs Nolan – if she sees me skip past she will ask me in for a glass of TK red lemonade. It’s always warm but I don’t mind. I love her ornaments – especially the small brass man with the fishing rod. Her blind is still down. I skip on. Rita Nolan (lots of Nolans around here) shuffles down the road towards me in her slippers (no one wears their slippers outside in my area).

  “I only wear them in the mornin’, love, to get me bottle of milk,” she told me the time I enquired. “Me feet are swelled in the mornin’.” Her slippers don’t fit quite right so her heels stand on the backs of them, squashing the brown material down. Sometimes when she walks I can see that she’s not really wearing tights at all but socks that look like tights but only come up to her knee. “Knee highs,” my mother explained.

  “Howrya, love?” she asks me now. No one ever asks me how I am on the street at home. “Howsa yer granny? Is her ulster any better?”

  Granny has a pretty bad leg ulcer.

  “Not too bad, thanks.” I like playing chatting on the street – it makes me feel older and I fold my arms up high the same way Rita has hers. “She’s going to see Professor Higgins in the morning.” I divulge as much information as I can
because I know this is what Rita likes.

  “Tell her I’ll call in later for her Christmas Club money,” she says and off she shuffles only about four steps before she begins another stop and chat with Michael the window cleaner. I stand with my arms still folded. He balances a ladder and a red bucket on his old-fashioned black bicycle. He removes his cap when he talks to her. I want to stay and listen but I know I’d better move on. I bet they’re talking about the fall Mrs Hughes had in Number 76. It was a bad one from what I’d overheard. Stood up to feed the gas meter and keeled over. On the floor all night, poor love. Till the home help knocked at seven with her porridge and couldn’t get an answer. A broken hip by all accounts. That son of hers in London has a lot to answer for. The louser.

  I turn the corner and head for the lane (the lane is the shortest way) – all in all it usually takes four minutes to get to the shop. I know this because Granny bought me a digital watch from the stall on O’Connell Bridge. It is pink with a plastic strap and I absolutely love it.

  I stop for a minute and stand looking in the window of Lily Bon-Bon’s sweet shop. I will come back later for my quarter of apple drops. I made up my mind in bed last night, under the many woolly blankets and the pink, blue and yellow stripy cotton sheets, snuggled into my granny’s back, that I’d go for apple drops. I have just been too focused on strawberry sherbets for ages now and it’s time for a change. Granny likes mint Toffos. She keeps hers in the pocket of her apron and can peel the paper off without having to look at them.

  I pull myself away from the window display of red-and-white candy canes and I push the heavy door into Tom’s shop. There is always sawdust on the floor. Tom is the biggest man I have ever seen in my life. That’s because he’s from Kerry, my granny told me. I’m never going to Kerry – the people are just too big. I stand on my tippy-toes and shout my order.

  “Two slices of hard cheese when yer ready, Tom, please!”

  Tom may be big but he’s slightly deaf so you have to shout.