Slán

Whatever else I expected of my last day in Ireland, it wasn't to be captured in an extended frenzy of girls trying to understand how someone could be leaving them. I knew that saying goodbye to these girls, especially Charlene and Claudia, would be difficult for me; what I hadn't thought about was how their world is constricted in ways far more profound than the geography of their perimeters. For Charlene and her sisters especially, their knowledge of place barely extends beyond the locations they can walk to. A car ride is a rare treat. They have no vacations. Their annual school tour day takes them as far away from their center as they are likely to get in a year. For all of the girls the concept of travel across time zones is unimaginable. When they first heard from me about the time difference between Ireland and California they kept asking, What time is it now in California? What are they doing back there now? as they tried to grapple with the knowledge that my daughters were sleeping when I was so clearly awake. After many frustrating attempts to understand one of them finally tried to find an end to the confusion by asking, Which time do you like better, California's or ours?

In the morning I managed to slip out of their grasp for a short time. I headed to the main shopping street (some say the longest high street in Ireland, which is not a compliment) on a couple of errands. When I got there after the short walk, one of the banks was tranferring its cash. In Ireland this is a frightening scenario. The vicinity of the bank is surrounded by a convoy of black Range Rovers with blocked-out window glass. They are parked around the armored truck that is actually collecting the money. The Range Rovers are there to dispatch the guards, six or seven beefy men with closely shaved haircuts dressed in military camouflage. They stand at various posts on the street holding sub-machine guns, the straps across their chests and their fingers on the triggers. The men, seven or eight in all, look like the photos of mercenary soldiers in the news; they are not smiling. In addition to the private guards there are always at least two police cars belonging to the local Gardaí parked so as to force traffic away from the armored truck. This is a reminder of the raw violence that accompanied Ireland's quest for sovereignty, although the über-machismo of the scene also smacks of theatricality and a slightly over-extended hysteria. Later in the day as I walked into Tesco, an armored truck was also there, parked in front of the supermarket. The driver stood next to the open door of the truck; a Tesco employee in an apron and a name badge was transferring large bags of cash into a shopping cart. There wasn't a submachine gun in sight.

After an early lunch at the Eden Deli (temporarily the Ede Deli; some creep stole their N) and a last visit with the warm and caring Niamh, I headed back to the apartment and the full onslaught of my girls. For most of the day there were five of them with me: Charlene, 13, the eldest of her family; Victoria, 7, Charlene's sister; Shannon, 12, their cousin and the sly one in the group, always looking out for what she can get; a second Charlene, 9, pale and shy, with a face that nearly always looks on the verge of tears; and finally little Kaitlin, the younger sister of Charlene and Victoria, whose speech at age 3 consists of drawn-out yowls instead of words. Two other girls, Claudia, my upstairs neighbor, age 6, and her friend, another Shannon, who is slightly older than Claudia but looks more like 10 because of her size, stay at the fringes of the group. I have noticed that Claudia and Charlene and her sisters seem to have some antipathy, which I suspect has to do with the rough situation in which Charlene's family lives (see my earlier post), which sadly has a great deal of truth to it.

On the Saturday night of Claire's visit as we were relaxing in my apartment after a long day, I remarked how quiet the apartment complex was. But when I opened the window to prove my point we heard screams cutting across the still night. They were as harsh as I've heard, and they were coming from Charlene's mother; I recognized her voice even through the shrieks of her yelling, which pushed her voice up a good octave above it's normal tone. As we listened, an ambulance came slowly around the corner and pulled up in front of their apartment; half an hour later it left, the lights inside indicating that someone was riding in the back.

On Monday everything seemed back to normal. I talked with Charlene briefly, relieved to see that she and her ever-present sisters were okay. On Tuesday I ran into my landlord, who told me that the Collinses were being evicted from the apartment after the incident. My landlord, a kind man, is worried about them. He has found them places to live before, but this time Charlene's dad, who just got out of prison, is so out of control with drugs that no one will have them. I'm not sure if the family even knew yet about the eviction. Donal, my landlord, asked me if Charlene had started drinking. His question shocked me out of some sort of complacency or blindness about the true hopelessness of her situation. No, I responded. Not yet.

For now, Charlene is careful about accepting things from me. I have learned that if I want to give her or her family something, anything, I have to offer it to her in a bag so that others in the apartment complex don't see what she is carrying. She told me once that if she is seen accepting goods or money, the people living around her will accuse her of begging.

When I returned from my lunch (salmon quiche, excellent as always) all six of us, the five girls and I, headed to the library. I had books to return and some to donate to the collection, plus I was bringing the fiction books I had gathered while I was here to be distributed at the launch of the new book club that would take place that evening. Each girl wanted to carry something to help me. Kaitlin clutched a large library book to her chest and held onto it for dear life for the entire walk. When we got there the library was closed, so we marched back home. One more errand to accomplish later. We left Kaitlin at home for the trip to the recycle, a rather unsavory place on the edge of town that is anything but safe for little ones. After paying my €3, a disincentive to recycle if ever there was one, the four girls pitched in and we got the contents of my trunk, a good two months of paper, glass and plastic, distributed to the right bins in record time.

The girls wanted to help me pack, but by mid-afternoon they were restless and started pushing me to drive them to a hill they knew of outside Edenderry. Since I was reluctant to drive somewhere that could easily be much further than the 10 minutes' distance they promised, I ended up loading four of them in the car (Kaitlin being enticed back home by Charlene, since I refused to take more of them than I had seatbelts for, not to mention the lack of carseat for her) to make one more drive to Ballinderry. I knew Alan and Eleanor were at work, so we couldn't go into the house. This time I stopped at the front gate as I had done the first day I arrived , and told the girls that my mother was born in the house they could see in the distance. This was difficult for them to comprehend--sometimes it has been even for me. The house looks so big, sitting at the end of the avenue; it's only when you enter it that the scale of the place becomes intimate. After a minute or so of silence, one of them asked how many bedrooms it had. Seven, I answered. Although that sounded like a lot of bedrooms, putting a number to the rooms gave it a more human scale.

After pausing at Ballinderry we called in at Nodlaig's. I knew she would like to meet the girls, and I could also demonstrate to her why I would be late in getting to her house, the last stop of my last day in the countryside. We arrived to an already full house (Nodlaig adores visitors and tends to have lots of them; this time there was a big contingent loading turf into her shed), so I simply introduced the girls and we headed back to town. I still had what I thought was one more trip, which turned out to be two, to the post office, and very little packing was finished.

In the end I simply began to toss stuff in the car in the knowledge that I could pack in earnest once I got to Dublin and Dierdre's, even though I knew she and Eric wouldn't entirely appreciate the relative chaos. The two trips to the post office were made with all five girls in the car: the distance was very short, and arguing about the number of seatbelts seemed silly at this point, even to me. On the first trip I bought everyone an ice cream, begging them not to get it all over the back seat.

Back at the apartment the girls helped me clean, and Charlene and Shannon arranged the cushions and bricabrac that I had put away when I first moved in. Shannon is good at helping; her mother has taught her well about cleaning, and she sees what needs to be done.

Claudia came to the front door as I was beginning to show signs of stress over the level of noise in the house, with four of them saying, Kathleen, where does this go?, Kathleen, is this yours?, Kathleen, should we make the bed? Kathleen, do you want to save this? Kathleen, can I have this bowl/pillow/candle/pen/notebook? Claudia has something for you! someone shouted. I went to the door and there she was, with a small bag in her hands. The bag held a tiny plastic box and a card. Inside the box was a crystal angel, about two inches high, a travelling angel to guard me on my journey. The card said Miss You on the front and was signed by Claudia. For the first time since I began my many goodbyes I cried; I would miss her too.

Finally, it was time for me to leave. Charlene and Shannon wrestled my suitcase into the car and swept through the apartment one more time to see if anything was missed. Until the very last goodbye one or the other of them kept asking, Do you have to leave? Will you be staying in your apartment one more night? When will you be back? I will miss these wonderful, intrusive, sweet, infuriating girls. I drove off knowing that I would more than likely never see most or all of them again, and hoping that they might remember me from time to time on their own journeys, whatever those might turn out to be. They were nearly the first people to greet me when I arrived, and they were the last, except for Nodlaig, to wave goodbye. They were so much a part of the place that I got to know and to love, a place so full of life and so lacking in hope, the place of my ancestors, this small island that has been my home for the past three months.