Dance Lessons: A Novel

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194 The boy is pumping up the front wheel of his bicycle, propped against the gable wall. These days he has grown even more secretive. He resents her every intrusion. Two days ago, the school exam results came. Fintan Dowd was top of his Gowna class. The local newspaper, the Mayo Journal, rang the house to interview this brilliant local boy, Gowna’s star pupil. So he feels confident of getting his first college choice: a new, European Union–funded degree program in international business offered at University College Galway. Long before he took his exams this past June, he has talked of nothing else. International business. It’s what he wants. Since that night of the thunder storm, Jo Dowd has made inquiries. The Cawley girl is already turned twenty-one. For three years, she has worked at the hospital in Galway as a hospital aide—one of those girls who wheels the tea trolleys around, doles out bowls of porridge to the sick and infirm. She lives in a staff room behind the hospital but now, with her younger boyfriend moving to the city, she wants to set up house and live like a whore with Jo Dowd’s son. Now Jo walks toward the gable wall. She forces her gait, her voice to stay calm, even-tempered, like approaching a skittish foal. “Where are you off to now?” He doesn’t answer. She listens to the air filling the tire, hss-hss-hsss. “I’m going out,” he says, without looking up at her. “Down the village. Carmel and I have things to arrange.” Dance Lessons * 195 Earlier, Jo heard him on the phone in the hall, making plans with that girl—plans to look for a flat together for when he moves to Galway City and the university. “At your age, things change. Things come and then they go again. You’ve your whole life ahead of you.” She forces the words out. And the other words are there, just there in her head, but she cannot say them aloud to him: And I’m proud of you, my child so bursting with brains, escaping to the city, leaving this cursed parish, where all my life I have been a laughing stock—the woman married off just to keep the family farm. They have all been laughing. But who’s laughing now? My boy the top of the school? Who’s laughing now? Oh yes, how strange those words would be now, spoken out loud to a boy who seems to resent her very existence. Spoken between a mother and her son for whom things have somehow escaped, gone. Died. He tightens the cap on the bicycle valve, then turns from the bicycle with his arms folded. He pushes his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. Since he finished secondary school he’s bought himself new spectacles with little gold rims that make him look like a young professor. He has that know-itall look. Like she’s some busybody maiden aunt—harmless, but definitely needing to be put in her place. “Mam, why don’t you say what you actually mean? And no, sorry to disappoint you, but your little speech changes nothing between Carmel and me.” Then he wheels his bike across the yard, the spokes tick-tick-tick. By September, Jo has grown demented with the vision of them tucked up in some student flat together, like rats in a nest, like tinkers in a caravan. On the Saturday night Late Late Show, some woman is bellyaching for the right to live with her boyfriend and claim herself as a tax dependent , to be put on his health insurance. “We are a country with our own, government-sanctioned apartheid,” the woman bawls into the camera. “Apartheid against the thousands of couples who want a divorce. Against the thousands of Irish girls who have to travel to England every year for an abortion—and all because of some church we don’t even believe in.” Jo switches off the telly and goes to bed. In bed, the woman’s words echo. Some church we don’t believe in. Laughable , so laughable. There are people—in the towns, in the cities—with all this 196 * Áine Greaney blathering and jabbing your finger at your fellow panel members on a television program. A church we don’t believe in. As if believing had...