It didn’t take long to learn her way around, the library being rather compact. The solar system was on your right as you went in; the Siberian Shelf above a radiator. Joan of Arc in one aisle; Henry VIII in another. She often passed the Middle Ages, among whose volumes hid Death, wearing a white toga and looking famished.
Naoise checked out stories of people and places that did not exist. Castles that went bump in the night. Dribbling ghouls and zombies (the vibrations of the letter ‘z’ adding to their scare-appeal). A parallel universe of witchcraft and wizardry. She’d save them for after dark and the light of her bedside lamp, turn the pages faster and faster, racing sleep, until she could barely tell if she was reading or dreaming.
Freedom was the name for the dizzying power that lasted through her library expeditions. No pleasantries ever needing to be exchanged with the librarian on duty. Even the round clock at high noon on the wood-panelled wall had no claim on her. From the first second she entered the building she was in other times, other dimensions. She was other Naoises.
✲
The Dolans’ girl, people in Terenure said. Their eldest, they might have added. A freckly slip of a thing with a brown bob of hair, but that wasn’t what people noticed. Fierce smart, they’d say. Smart as she was shy.
She never talked back in class. Hardly ever talked at all. She let her compositions do the talking for her, and her teachers when they read them out. Sure hated hearing herself in their voice as they pronounced her long words, ‘vociferous’ and the like, while doing their best to make each sound natural. What a blush she’d have on her then, willing herself to disappear. Please forget about me, leave me to my books, that blush said.
Still, it was a good primary for a pupil like her: Church of Ireland, open-minded staff and small, as in, four classes in the whole place. A dozen or so pupils to a class.
Too noisy, Naoise thought, when she heard the children playing together. It disappointed her that real life should be not one bit like The Sims. She’d made ten new friends that month on her PC, so why not any here? She wasn’t her pixel self, was why, climbing the scale of outgoingness. Not that the flesh-and-blood girls in her class helped much, haring and squealing the instant they got out at break, the opposite of the sort of quiet playmates she’d have invented. And to think they called her rude when she preferred to sit still and read on a playdate. She didn’t get it at all – there were more than enough books in her room for everyone.
She was terrible at reading faces or situations. Her blue eyes fled the eyes that surveyed her. Don’t worry, the girls laughed, they were only messing with her. Laughing at something she’d just said. Blimey! Who says blimey? Only Naoise and Harry Potter, that’s who.
Incessantly, she tried to parse the classroom’s English, the other children’s English, the children’s playground chatter, their element.
Adults she crossed in the streets and shops were no easier to understand. Their talk was small and baffling. She’d heard the strange things they did with words. For instance, the neighbouring suburb’s name of Ranelagh. Some said ‘Ran-uh-la’ (or Ran-la), others, ‘Ren-uh-la’ (or Ren-la). Why couldn’t they agree? You’d think they lived in different places entirely, and not the exact same neighbourhood and sometimes street, whenever they gave out their address.
And it wasn’t just the locals, Naoise had noted, it was the same with other English-speaking adults, tourists told to have a good day and who replied ‘you too’ in a British accent. Whereas people like her parents or her teachers invariably replied ‘same to you’. Which was right or better, Naoise wondered, or was it a matter of circumstance? It made her fretful not knowing the rule, or even if there was a rule, because what if a tourist ever wished her a good day? She’d be lost for words.
Sometimes the mere sound of an adult’s word could be as disconcerting. Her mother’s words for certain foods, for example, made her appetite vanish. She had to be the only child in Ireland, so her mother complained, to shake her head at potato ‘mash’. ‘Porridge’ she would not touch either – that is, not until years later, when she learned to think of it as ‘overnight oats’.
It was different if her teacher said ‘porridge’ to the class, because this would be during a game, simply a word said aloud then and nothing you had to eat, or formulate a response to, or risk mispronouncing as a name. Simply a word, to savour and play with, and for this reason classmates and teacher were all of a sudden in her element for a change, and Naoise knew precisely what to do. In her mind, the word’s letters shone, its bum note was pardoned. The game was dictionary-racing.
‘Porridge,’ said the teacher.
And his star pupil, who usually found this word’s sound so distasteful, and heard him say it, beamed as she opened her dictionary straight to P. She was seconds from the entry. The trick was not to part the pages in the middle, but further along, about seven-tenths of the way in. There, got it!
Five seconds flat – go, Naoise!
There were other games. One autumn school day in the early noughties, towards the end of Naoise’s time in primary, a new craze reached her playground. Everyone in sixth class, it seemed, was playing IRA. To an otherworldly eleven-year-old the name didn’t shock. Naoise took in her classmates’ instructions, listening intently. They were to divide themselves into opposing teams and each side to settle on a secret word – a word eight letters long if they played eight to a side – and each team member to become a letter in their word. So far so clear? Example: your team settles on ‘porridge’. Then the first child becomes P, the second O, the third and fourth R, through to G and E. Each side’s goal was to figure out the other team’s word by chasing and cornering their opponents, and then to extract from each one the letter they were.
‘Stop! I give up. Stop tickling. I’m G.’
‘He’s G!’
In some schools the game was banned after a boy in Kilkenny tumbled and broke his arm, but Naoise’s classmates were far more sedate. No pinches, wrestling or tugging of hair. They executed good-humoured feints, wrong-footing their chasers, confessing their letters laughingly the instant they were caught.
Playing along, Naoise quite forgot her shyness. The once-squealing girls, the indifferent boys, were now vowels and consonants dancing in all directions, and she felt the same pull towards them as she did towards the sentences in her library books. She was A one day, V the next, and all around her the playground spun and when the craze fizzled out and the IRA game disappeared, Naoise knew she’d never play its like again.
When summer took Naoise out of primary, this time for good, the long days filled with the cracking of spines on old library hardbacks. She’d graduated to heftier tomes, the classics, ‘improving’ novels and the like; and having come to them on her own initiative, before any grown-up or curriculum could foist them onto her, she entered into them without any thought for the difference in age – hers and the books’ – or indeed for their reputation as ‘difficult’.
Her library carried plenty of Dickens – David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, the works – as well as the Brontës and Eliot and Austen. Tall enough now, she pulled from the shelf one of the dustless classics which had left with half of Terenure’s borrowers before her, a book that had ridden high on park swings and sunned in gardens and absorbed tea and tears in strangers’ lounges, and when she opened its pages a smell of almonds greeted her, something like her mother’s make-up, sweet and flaky.
She began to read:
‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’
Of all the characters she met, she wanted most of all to be Emma Woodhouse.
She longed to become someone else, at least at regular intervals. There wasn’t much fun, she thought, in being Naoise Dolan. The Naoise whose choice of words sometimes caused other children to titter, or the Naoise who was dropping things, left, right and centre, or the one who was always getting the wrong end of grown-ups’ conversations. None of those Naoises interested her. She was glad at the idea that she might one day leave them all behind. Her body was beginning to alter. She craved adolescence, as much as she feared it, for all that it might make of her. Adolescence: it was a striking word, a confident word, how did a girl ever live up to it?
✲
‘How was school, Naoise?’
‘Mam!’
‘What?’
‘Don’t.’
Up her teenage daughter went. From her bedroom came the thud of a bag being dropped.
This was nothing new, for ever since Naoise had started at the High School (that was its name, the High School, Dublin), her mood had darkened. Along with her clothes. Black on black. And with them a full face of make-up that only accentuated her look of gloom. Hormones, people said. Typical teenage hormones. But no, it was more than that, her mother thought. Behind the disguise of an emo-obsessed adolescent she glimpsed confusion and brittleness.
The new school, her mother thought. The jump from 80 to 800 pupils. A jump in pressure too, given the thousands of euros in annual tuition fees. That might be part of it. And Naoise was sixteen now. Possibly some boy trouble? Not that she knew of. The vegan diet? She had nothing against it, Naoise having always been a fussy eater, but perhaps a pubescent girl – nearly a young woman – needed more, what was it, vitamin B-something or other.
Maybe, just maybe, it was related to all the time her daughter was spending on her phone and laptop. Simply accessing the news in 2008 was enough to depress the stoutest heart. Crisis. Crash. Slump. A global recession we must start preparing for. That was the prediction of the Irish Independent. ‘Hundreds of Staff Face Axe’, cried every second or third headline.
Her mother didn’t know. She didn’t know what to think. None of the above explained the sunglasses in November, or the hugs from relatives her daughter always found too tight. None of it explained how she was with other teenagers, in the agonies of indecision, wanting every conversation – online and off – to end and never to end, and worrying, once it did, what she’d done to cause it to do so. No wonder, however rote or trite, these conversations robbed her of all her energy. Some mornings even the shower was too far. She rarely finished what she started – a meal, a sentence – with the fortunate exception of homework.
