‘At least it’s safe?’ I venture.
‘Nothing’s ever safe in Ballyfrann,’ Layla mutters as she passes by. ‘Have ye had your tetanus injections?’
I pull my black polyester jumper down over my grey polyester skirt. Button up my duffel coat again, as wind bites skin.
And it begins.
This school is very different to our Cork one, way less sanitary. Lots of greys and browns and terracottas, holes worried in paint, where you can see the colours from before poking through time. Like the rings on a stump. The prefabs must be older than they seem. Brian went here, we know that. When it was just the cottage. The culture shock is strong. I almost cry with relief when I see a plastic chair with a penis drawn on it. I look at Catlin. See she’s happy too.
‘Just like home,’ she says to me. ‘Do you see the detail on the balls?’
I nod. It does look old. ‘Maybe it’s Brian’s,’ I say, instantly realising my mistake when she makes retching noises. ‘I meant his work, Catlin. Jesus. His work. Argh.’
Over the course of the long, cold day, Our Lady of the Mountain Village School starts to grow on me. Like a fungus, or an oddly comforting series of warts. The bathrooms, in a separate sort of shed-yoke, smell of cigarettes and wee. Someone has taken the batteries out of the smoke alarm. It beeps unsafely every now and then. Punctuating the silence all around.
I kind of like it here. It isn’t bothered with unimportant things like appearances or adequacy and that’s fine. There are only about thirty of us in the entire building. Like, one per cent of the population of our old school. It’s ridiculous. We basically met everyone today. It took five seconds.
Layla has two brothers, Fiachra and Cathal. They mountain-bike to school, ‘too active for the bus’. Catlin pokes my ribcage when she hears this. Twice. One for each physically fit possible Galway boyfriend. I don’t know. I suppose I can see it a little. If you like your David Bowies young, and with acne.
There are six people from the village in our year, apart from us. Charley Collins, a broad-shouldered girl with the fiercest eyebrows I have ever seen, her brother Eddie, Layla, Fiachra, Cathal and another new girl who’s starting sometime soon. Some kids bus in from the towns near Ballyfrann, but not too many. The nearest town is an hour away, and lots of kids from there just go to Galway city for their lessons. The kids from Carraig stick out, with their normalness and polo shirts. They look like regular country kids. Who knows what side of a GAA pitch their bread is buttered on.
There’s, like, a glow of health and muscle off the kids from closer to the castle. Does everyone here exercise? What’s wrong with them? Have they no Netflix? I don’t like it and I don’t trust it. I glare down at my hands like I’m Mamó. Mamó, who, by the way, refused to leave the village to come to Mam and Brian’s wedding despite her actual name being the Irish word for grandmother. We should be glaring at her.
‘What are the teachers like?’ asks Catlin, not really caring, but wanting to fill up space. She’s eating salad with a travel fork she uses to stab her question into the air. It has pomegranate seeds in it, and feta. Mam is over-compensating. It won’t last.
‘OK. I mean, we don’t really get to know them or anything. The teachers don’t stay long, maybe for like a year,’ Charley says. ‘It’s too far out. There’s nothing to do, if you’re not from here. They fill up their CVs, move somewhere else.’ She says somewhere else like other people say Paris or New York. I remember her father from the wedding, and the move. A wide, red-faced man, surrounded by wide, red-faced brothers. Hairy fists.
‘The Collinses,’ Brian had told us. ‘I’m related to them, distantly. Everyone in Ballyfrann has Collins blood. In their veins – or on their hands, they say.’ And then he laughed. ‘It works out well. They take care of their own.’
The wedding was a deeply awkward day.
‘What do people who are from here do?’ asks Catlin hopefully.
Charley shrugs.
I look out the window, the teacher’s voice becoming background noise. The mountains dark and angry, blurred by clouds. The trees blade-sharp. I shiver. So does everyone, in fairness. The heating in the building doesn’t work.
Miss Feehlihy, the principal, is a creep. She shakes our hands and tells us several times how great Brian is, offering no helpful information before retreating off into her little office. Her bottle-blonde hair looks fire-hazard dry.
‘What’s the deal with her loving the hole off Brian?’ I ask my sister, who raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow.
‘Your eyebrow has some innuendo on it,’ I tell her.
‘Jesus, sorry. How embarrassing.’ She wipes it off with a hand that she then uses to give me the finger. Her nail polish is flawless. Mine’s already in bits. This place is full of splinters, and other things that bang and catch and snag.
‘She definitely has the horn for him,’ Catlin says. ‘Mam probably cock-blocked her.’
I shake my head and point to the poster on her door. Puppies and kittens. It is the crappest thing either of us has ever, ever seen.
‘She cock-blocked herself, Catlin,’ I tell her.
Our faces sombre. Recognising tragedy.
The Ballyfrann kids are friendly but distant. Like we were their aunts or nerdy cousins. We eat together at break and try to make our way into a group at lunch by asking about where things are and following them.
Here is a sample exchange:
‘So, what’s Miss Edwards like?’
‘Like a teacher.’ Thank you Cathal or Fiachra, one of Layla’s brothers. The way he says it isn’t like a dig. More a why-are-you-asking-me-things.
‘Do you know the castle?’ asks Catlin. Looking at her face, I can see the physical effort all this trying-to-make- bored-people-interested is taking. She isn’t used to this.
‘Yeah.’ It was more syllable than word. My sister needs this, Eddie, I think. Please try to care.
Eddie has a babyish, open face and wouldn’t have gotten the time of day off Catlin in our old school. I look at Catlin’s face and notice an almost imperceptible twitch. She was tallying. Eddie runs his big, thick fingers through his tufty, red hair and doesn’t notice.
‘We live there now,’ she offers.
He says, ‘OK.’ As though castles were caravans.
We eat in silence.
Sometime later, a terrible thing happens. Catlin says to Charley, ‘I like your pixie cut.’
And Charley says, ‘Thanks,’ and bites into her sandwich, like she doesn’t know that when a girl says a nice thing to you, you have to say one back. I can sense the hairs on the back of Catlin’s neck pricking up. Her brain scrolling through all the things about her you could compliment. Her hair, her skin, her eyeliner, her brogues. The little cameo she’s wearing with the Infant of Prague on it. She looks at me in semi-desperation. What is wrong with these people?
I look at Catlin.
‘Smoke?’ I say.
She smiles.
I haven’t started smoking or anything, but escape from social situations is a beautiful thing. When you are a pretend smoker, you can take off for ten to sixty minutes and no one will ever know. We sit at the back of the overgrown school garden, behind a bush, beside a wrought-iron gate. Our fingers move along beside each other, turning flaking brown to something skeletal.
‘Don’t let them get to you,’ I tell my sister.
‘I won’t,’ she assures me, sucking her cancer stick to ash in twenty seconds flat and lighting another.
‘A woman after my own heart,’ says a smooth, deep voice. It’s a lanky yoke of a man. Staring at us through the railings. He’s wearing a leather jacket, jeans. A white T-shirt. His hair is slicked back. All that’s missing is the motorcycle and he’d be a 1950s bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. He puts a large, pale hand on the gate and hops it easily. Dusts off his trousers.