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New Irish Writing: May 2020’s winning story

Manageable by Fionnuala O’Leary

Illustration: Yiming Wei

Fionnuala O’Leary
Thu May 28 2020 - 06:00

The drumroll throb in your stomach continues as the taxi driver snakes his way out of the cul-de-sac, all talk and blasting 98FM. Cocooned in his Toyota, the heater fogs the windows and you long for thoughts of New York to blur around the edges.

“Ah now, c’mom, Paulie,” the driver says to some disembodied caller. “Wind yer neck in.”

The accent makes you ache a bit and you want to tell him (Tony, according to his driver ID) to get off the stage. But that doesn’t seem like something you would say now. The words stick at the back of your throat instead, a stolen thing you have been forced to swallow.

Fionnuala O’Leary

“It’s only about a 10-minute ride,” you say.

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Tony eyes you in the mirror without breaking his one-way conversation with the radio. You tell him the GP’s address, convinced your parents’ semi-detached house has undergone some change only you can’t see.

The limbo began when your dad picked you up from Arrivals. He waited by the Spar in Terminal 2 with new lines around his eyes and a halo of greys. His right hand rested beside a folded cream hanky in one pocket, the other jiggling an infinite number of €2 coins. You buried yourself in the wool of his blue Marks & Spencer jumper. You wanted to fill your head with that familiar aftershave instead of the thought that he was a little more broken on each return, that he had dismantled, joint by joint, bone by bone, in your absence. He smelled like fresh Sunday newspapers and mugs of Barry’s with the bag left in.

“Alright Mousey,” he said. “Flight okay?”

“Grand, yeah. It was long, wasn’t direct. Felt a bit plane sick but other than that.”

“And Customs? Your mother said you were worried.”

“Not the nicest. Your man at the desk asked why Dan wasn’t with me so I just said he couldn’t get off work. I got through no bother with the card.”

Later, your mam asked, and how’s Dan? You nodded, twisting the diamond around until your ring finger was bruised-berry red. Your dad sat opposite, shielded by the paper and inspecting his tea. You didn’t discuss the apartment in Woodside, yellowed with age and asbestos. They knew The American gave you a reason to stay.

He was seduced by an accent you never really utilised in a filthy little bar on 61st Street. This man looked past the gnawed fingertips and freckled knees because you were the real deal, blue-eyed and black Irish.

“My mom is from Clare but my dad is second gen,” he said, sipping some Brooklyn craft beer you can’t remember the name of.

You kissed him then, drunk and desperate, two years before the Eighth Amendment was repealed by a thousand different stories with the same plot. You left when Irish politicians were too busy basking in the afterglow of marriage equality to worry about pregnant girls on planes. Silent statistics wearing cotton bottoms and bloodied pads.

That night, he proclaimed to be 90 per cent Irish and nine per cent Neanderthal. DNA analysis couldn’t account for that lone percentage though and you often wonder if it is responsible for his all-American rage. You sealed your fate in his bed regardless. While he slept, you examined the symmetry of his face, tracing the Celtic tattoos to the left of his heart with one wary finger. Swaddled in his blankets, you spoke about your family and gun laws in the mornings, but the nights were a series of plays with no clear conclusion.

The rest of it feels inevitable now. You were looking for something to lose when you boarded that plane to JFK and hurtled towards this, leaving bits of yourself in the baggage compartment and under your seat. You learned quick enough when you ask an American to slap you, they do it hard and with no apologies. Fucking them feels surreal and numb all at once because they haven’t inherited what is etched into your breasts and back and bones. You feel ancient under the weight of their circumcision, like a relic of something else. It’s the quiet longing of men at home – that intact Confession buried deep in sheets and sweat and silence – you miss most.

Days before you arrived back where you started, your thin-lipped manager Denise warned you the lead up is always better than the landing. Her Corkonian advice is legendary within the sweaty walls of Crowe’s on 28th Street because 17 years ago, Denise arrived in New York with nothing but the owner’s name and the will to get away. She worked her way up through the ranks of that Manhattan bar, with its clogged taps and dirty coasters, while you struggled with the cutlery.

“There’s always something hidden away until you get there, girl,” Denise said, securing your roll-ups with razor-like precision. “They’ll say they waited for the right time but no one tells you anything when they’re fine-tunin’ reality.”

She never lost her accent but yours is already slipping away – the Rs rapidly unrolling and drawn out to translate yourself for the regulars. But Denise swallows THs at will, filling her apron pockets with their dollar bills and landscaper recommendations. She paid Sean Donnelly, a morose Irish American with a mother-made chip on his shoulder, $15,000 for a marriage licence and a day out at the City Clerk’s Office. She told you not to marry someone for love or lust or anything else over here, bar getting your papers. You did it anyway and Denise never let you forget it.

“Marry one of them and your children won’t be Irish. No American will be moving home with you any time soon. Sure, you know what they’re like at home anyway – once you leave, you’re always The Yank.”

Dedicated smokers like Denise, so adept with napkins and lighting Marlboros during a New York thunderstorm, are usually spot on. Last night, the right time revealed itself in a Dublin kitchen that was always too close for comfort. Some echo of your 13-year-old self still hovered in the doorway when you sat at the table, biting her nails in sulky opposition to your return. You can’t remember if you’d left her the spectre there or brought her with you, a little shadow tucked away in the belly of your suitcase. You told them before the jet lag began to tug at your eyelids, while your mam nibbled the Hershey’s from Duty Free. She didn’t look at you in the silence that followed.

“Too powdery,” she said. “It’s just not the same as the real Cadbury’s is it, pet? I know you love a Fruit & Nut.”

She watched you pick at the red raw skin around your fingers and began to speak in that steely voice reserved for uncooperative Centra employees.

“You’re back with your own now, there’s no need for tears or catastrophising. That’s just life, these things happen ... No one’s dead, this is manageable. We’ll manage it.”

She squeezed your hand on the pine table then, the root of everything. In between the coffee stains and chocolate crumbs, you saw it was marked with a lifetime. Where did it grow before it became the resting place of elbows and plates, of manageable diagnoses? Where will you put those four clunky, battered legs the day you come back to an empty house? You’ll be long enough looking up at the steeple, you thought, as your mam fidgeted with a loose thread on her cardigan, your dad still rustling the paper. You are so tired of secrets.

Manageable feels more familiar today. It is a word you hold on your tongue and swivel around as the taxi weaves its way towards Phibsboro. It drives past the Brian Boru and up over the canal you stumbled across at 23. The nausea bubbles up through your throat until you can taste the smell of aftershave, cloying and ubiquitous.

“I don’t listen to this most days but it’s amusin’ sometimes, isn’t it?” Tony The Taximan says, finally including you in his one-sided chat with Adrian Kennedy. You agree, knowing this won’t be enough for Tony, with his innate suspicion of women with Stateside twangs.

“They talk absolute rot on American radio stations,” you say. “Literally, everything they say sounds like a question. I’d love to have a quarter of that confidence though.”

“Ah, yer livin’ in the States?” he says, brows raised in feigned surprise. “Brother went to the Big Snapple years ago. Got into construction at the beginnin’ but he owns a bar now in the Bronx. In anyways, he married one of them and the bollox never comes home, didn’t bother his arse comin’ back for the mother’s funeral even. His wife’s a Yank, of course. Awful yoke. They’re a different breed over there. They’d drive ye teh drink so they would, with the have-a-nice-days an’ everythin’ bein so fuckin’ awesome.”

Tony shakes his head.

“Couldn’ stick it for long hearin’ abou’ Tom, Dick, and Harry’s great-fuckin’-granny from the backarse of Mayo every day. No chance.”

He looks for the rear-view mirror approval and you nod, clicking your jaw in an effort to think of something clever to say. You can’t compete with that banter now, the kind that flourishes in East Wall railway cottages or at Hill 16 – it’s cultivated at weddings and wakes, within the brick walls and solid doors that give birth to savage wit and intermittent silences. The humour you lost is born in The Gravediggers and the dark recesses of the Dodder in Clonskeagh, leaving a trail of Bulmers’ cans and shite talk in its wake. And you feel like there are two of you in the backseat now, nodding away.

All those nights, you watched yourself weave through the heavy stench of piss and sleep in Penn Station, seeing bodies barrelling past crumpled sleeping bags from somewhere high in the ceiling. The LIRR train was an expensive way to avoid the subway. In those tin-can carriages, you thought about how you wound up here, scrolling through Pinterest quotes about travel and finding yourself.

NPR experts said we’d pay a price for Trump’s environmental policies and you dreamt about being at home when a catastrophe finally happened. After one particularly shitty waitressing shift, you sat beside a woman on a Flushing-bound 7 who screamed into nothing for 30 minutes. Her guttural wail made your ears hum, while everyone stared at their iPhones without moving their eyes. The sound stayed in your head long after you stepped out through the spit-stained metal doors and into the impatient crowd. The memory of it swims from ear to ear now as Tony tells you how to run a country.

“… more like the home of the fuckin’ brazen – nuthin’ brave about that carry on.”

The American took you to the Museum of Natural History two weeks before you held your mam’s hand in Glasnevin, where a doctor will soon confirm what you already know. The building was an oasis in the soupy New York heat with its tattered mammals and dead-eyed crocodiles. The dusty exhibits had an air of something neglected and familiar, like a grave people visited once a year out of a sense of obligation or guilt. The Giant Sequoia exhibit brought you back to your mam’s table, though – all 1,400 years and 300 feet of it felled within seconds.

You felt the barely-there movement for the first time then, while he spoke at length about the California Redwoods your unborn child would never see. You counted the rings on the sequoia, cherishing the topsy-turvy sense of a life inside you, a secret swimming within the dark orb of your belly. There were only so many excuses you could give for morning sickness and clicking hips. It was time to go home.

Fionnuala O’Leary is a reporter from Dublin living in New York. She holds a Masters in Journalism from DCU (2015) and a BA in creative writing from NUIG (2014). This is her first short story.