January invades the collar of her coat and hits her cheeks like a bracing slap. When they switched to online teaching, Una decided that it would be reassuring for her class to see her seated at her desk as usual, their artwork tacked to the wall behind her, a small continuity in lives turned upside down. That was what she told anyone who asked why she didn’t just work from home, like most of her colleagues. The walk is good exercise, she might add, and we all need the vitamin D, don’t we? The truth is, she misses her desk, and if she does not get out of the house, she is afraid she might murder one of her housemates.
She crosses Drumcondra Road, past the Tesco with its ever-present, socially distant queue, past the shuttered shops and the take-out only cafe, and on to Clonliffe Road, the route she has taken every day since she started her first and only job. It was never meant to be permanent. She would meet and marry someone, maybe from the country like herself, and settle down in some suburb, where she would have two children, taking long maternity leaves for both before returning to teach once the youngest was in Montessori. But without her noticing, 20 years have slipped by since she was a trainee teacher in St Pat’s, when she could be light-hearted about the grimy redbricks and relentless traffic of her northside neighbourhood.
She stayed on in her student house long after her friends had gone, negotiating a promotion to “house mother” with the landlord which earned her a few euros off the rent and the guarantee of the en suite bedroom. Every September a new group of student teachers descends on the house. They hail from all corners of the country, bringing their different accents and habits and bits and bobs. But without fail, come December, they have become a generic blur of young women she has given up differentiating. She often gets their names wrong, mixing them up with previous residents.
These days they are not so much hanging around the place as draped, wearing their bunny onesies, hands wrapped around ever-present mugs of tea as if they are in danger of hypothermia. Never mind that the house is like a sauna because they keep hitting boost on the heating. Some of them have not been washing themselves much, either.
The chain has been unlocked, which means Robert got in ahead of her again. She enters the code and waits for the gates to groan apart before hurrying up the driveway past the goal posts and basketball hoop; an empty playground produces an uncomfortable kind of silence.
A cloud of cleaning chemicals wafts through the front doors but she’s glad to get in out of the cold. Even motoring along for an hour, arms at full swing, did not fully warm her. She bypasses the principal’s office and the staffroom as quietly as she can and continues down the corridor, her rubber-soled shoes sticky against the beeswaxed parquet, until she reaches her classroom: Múinteoir Una Sugrue, Ranga 6. She turns the key in the lock and lets herself in, pausing a moment to inhale the warm-biscuit scent of 20 cohorts of sixth class that even the most industrial disinfectants have failed to eliminate.
Right. Claudia and Geetika. The SNA works with them on their English every day but Una gives them extra help because their parents do not want them to fall behind, they emailed to say. Next, she moves on to the Irish homework, where most of the class needs extra help. She sighs. By the time she is half-way through, she can feel herself fading, and the day has not even begun. She minimises the file on her desktop and stretches. Time for a break.
“Oh!”
Robert Moynihan, principal, is standing in the doorway, a steaming mug in each hand. She has asked him to knock but he never does.
“Lá alainn eile, Una.” Every day he says the same thing, whether it’s pissing rain or blazing sunshine. Another lovely day. He proffers one of the coffees. This is the new routine he’s started since the third lockdown. She wonders if he comes in because she does. It occurs to her that he might be lonely.
“Put it on the table, más é do thoil é.” She has to ask him to do this every day. Keep your distance, she wants to scream. For all she knows, he’s down in the pub every night. Well, would be, if the pubs were open. He’s a great believer in not overreacting to a crisis. She is convinced it’s what got him the promotion, shepherding 300 pupils safely out of the building when the staffroom went on fire, phoning the emergency services as the children milled past, then checking that every room was empty before the fire brigade arrived. It wouldn’t have surprised her in the slightest if one of his cigarette butts had caused it.
She caught him once, taking a sneaky puff out the window, back when they were both new to the school. He put a finger to his lips and grinned, something just between them. For a while, she considered him a contender. They often ended up on the same pub quiz team or sharing front gate duties. They’re even from the same county so there’d never be a row over the football.
He puts the two coffees on the nearest desk and steps back. “Busy?”
“Projects,” she says. “You?”
He laughs. “Planning ahead. Amsterdam 2022.”
The sixth-class trip to Amsterdam is the highlight of the children’s entire primary school experience. They leave Dublin at stupid o’clock, tear around the city visiting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and the Anne Frank museum, stopping to eat poffertjes and waffles and McDonald’s, making it back to Schiphol Airport for the last flight. There’s always a bit of drama: someone lost, someone puking, someone elbowing €200 worth of Delft off a shelf in the gift shop. But then, Mr Moynihan is good in a crisis.
It was the nearest they came to romance, on their second trip. They snatched an hour to themselves, meandered through the historic streets before stopping for hot chocolate in Puccini’s, where they sat among cushions of cerise silk in the bay window as evening turned the city purple gold. It seemed to her as if a hush had fallen over the whole world. Their eyes met; he made a movement; they began to speak at the same time. One of them started again, but by then the canal was black, the buildings in shadow.
She wonders if he is thinking about it too. Or if he even remembers. But why would he remember a moment that almost happened? And what is he doing anyway, planning a trip abroad when they are not allowed to go beyond five kilometres from home; has he nothing better to do?
“I better get on with those projects,” she says. Something passes across his face – confusion, or hurt, maybe, so she adds, “Thanks for the coffee. It is nice to know there’s someone else in the building.” Someone, anyone, for security and human connection, or him, Robert? She can’t decipher his expression any more than she can her own mind.
With an effort, she opens Marisol's project. "Tagalog and Irish are the official languages of the Philippines and Ireland. They are compulsory subjects in school in both countries." She reads on. "Irish is hard and I never met anyone who speaks it. No one in my class would do Irish if they had a choice." It's not the approach to the Decade of Centenaries she was hoping for. She tries to imagine telling her dad about it.
As Gaeilge. He came into the world with the Irish Free State and he won't budge on the English, even now, when not a single person in the care home speaks Irish. If it wasn't for her and Dáithí, weeks could go by without hearing his native tongue. She reminds herself to call him later. He's so deaf, she has to shout, "Cén chaoi ina bhuil tú, a Dhaid? Cén aimsir atá agat?" The days when he knew who she was are long gone, when he might ask what the weather is like above in Dublin and how the teaching is treating her. These days she'll get a few undirected shouts, if she's lucky.
When she phones the care home, unless the manager answers she can’t be sure they even know who she is inquiring about. Dáithí is not much better. Not a hope he’d put a narrative together himself, she has to do all the asking: does he do the window visits, did he get the soft liquorice Dad likes to suck on, does he have enough backy to keep him going? In return, she gets monosyllables and grunts. Jesus. If her brother is representative of middle-aged Kerrymen, she thanks her lucky stars she got out when she did. She would rather live alone or even with a litter of overgrown bunnies than marry a gom.
Amsterdam! She sniffs. If she could get as far as Kerry, it’d be good enough for her.
She ploughs on through the projects, then sets up the work for the next day on Seesaw. They’ll have a Zoom check-in, too, the poor divels. She schedules the meeting and copies the link in an email to the parents. When she finally looks up from her screen, she is surprised to find the classroom in semidarkness, the afternoon sky turned leaden. Great. Just what she needs. She tidies her desk, switches off the computer and puts on her coat. A last glance around, then she locks her room and retraces her footsteps down the corridor. If she hurries, she might make it back before the deluge.
She has reached the front door when it hits her. Hurry back to what? Her housemates, in slipper-socks and blankets, spooning cereal into themselves, eyes glued to their Netflix binge du jour. Snickering at her futile attempts to make herself heard for her dad. With a glance towards the office, she steps outside and plucks her phone from her bag. A wet plop craters on the screen. She wipes it with her sleeve and presses back against the wall for shelter, listens to the ring until she gets cut off. Her next attempt goes straight to voicemail, as if anyone listens to voice messages. Not her dad, that's for sure.
The rain is starting in earnest. She is feeling around the bag for her umbrella when the phone purrs into life. She fumbles, nearly dropping it onto the concrete steps in her haste, then there he is, by some accident of ancient fingers and modern technology, smiling up at her.
“Dadaí! Dia duit. Is mise. An gcloiseann tú mé? Can you hear me? Is mise, Una.” He draws back, as if he is aware that something is happening on his screen. He is nodding and smiling. Not at her, she knows that, but it doesn’t matter. He’s there, that’s enough. She forgets where she is, forgets the rain. A montage of memories floats up from the screen: Dad holding her hand on the way to O’Brien’s to pick up the groceries; peeling a potato for her, cutting her meat up small; pushing her on the tyre swing. She begins to cry, she doesn’t know why.
The screen has gone blank but it doesn’t matter now. She puts the phone away and slips the umbrella out of its sheath.
“Una!” Robert emerges from the school, his jacket held over his head. “Wait. I’ll give you a lift. Just let me lock up.”
He pushes a strand of thinning hair off his forehead and blinks that way he does when he is at his most sincere. How nice it would be, to give up the long walk and climb into his warm car, let his music and chat wash over her. Give up on the house share, keep driving until they got to his apartment in Smithfield, bought before prices went mad; give up on her savings towards a down payment on the three-bed in the suburbs, which gradually became some tiny north-facing studio apartment, the price of which kept moving beyond her reach; and settle onto his couch, feet tucked under her, sipping a mellow red while he stirs his signature spaghetti bolognaise in his galley kitchen.
He peers at her. “Una? What’s the matter?”
She smiles through the tears and the rain. “It’s my dad,” she confides. “I don’t know when... “ Her voice breaks. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.”
“I’ll drive you,” he says without a moment’s hesitation. When she doesn’t react, he explains, “To Kerry. You can phone the home on the way, set up one of those special visits.” He is blinking madly behind his rain-fogged glasses. “What do you think?”
She looks past him to the school where long ago she interviewed for her job, the original building which houses her classroom now extended in every direction to accommodate the area’s young population; pictures it on that App, her desk the point zero of its five-kilometre circle, all the roads and avenues fanning out around it, encompassing the post office, the doctor’s office, the Spar, the park, the castle, the supermarket, the sea front, the Dart. And beyond: Fairview, Clonliffe Road, Drumcondra. Beyond that…? Any further is beyond her imagining. She forces her attention back to his expectant face. What was he thinking? That she would leave her circle? Impossible! There will be no drive to Kerry, no window visit, no apartment in Smithfield, no bolognaise.
She snaps the umbrella open. “No, go raibh maith agat,” she tells him. “Lá áilinn eile is ea é, nach ea?” Another lovely day. And she steps out into the rain.
Paula McGrath lives in Dublin. She is the author of two novels, Generation and A History of Running Away and Generation (both John Murray)
