GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2024/25

EMER O’HANLON

‘The School Run’

maren

AFTER HIGH TIDES, Booterstown Station always smelt of rank seaweed and stale water, but just underneath it, you could sometimes catch the stench of rotting bodies. In those endless afternoons, before winter set in or lifted, the light waslong and angular. The wind carried the smell back to the platform where we stood waiting after school. The rot swollen up gradually to a climax, the dead girls beneath the surface crying out to be noticed.

kate

We lived our lives and talked in the darkness. That was how things were for most of the year, dark when we left our houses and dark when we came home to them. We were first on the train, early morning at the station, hockey sticks and PE kits and sagging bags of heavy books.

isobel

We all looked the same to the outsiders, but the subtle difference in the cut and colour of our uniforms signalled who was who.

TANITH

We told each other stories, in the blue glow of the early trains, and the grey of platforms just after sunset.

CARA

We told each other stories, like hunter-gatherers round a fire, or wives trying to forget the horrors faced by their husbands at war.

maren

They told each other stories because the alternative was talking about themselves, and nothing frightened them more than that.

kate

Maren moved to our school in second year. Before Dominican College, she spent her first year at a mixed, multi-faith comprehensive without a uniform. It was one stop before ours on the DART. She never took the train with us, she came to school in the opposite direction. See, Maren’s parents sent her to the comprehensive because they remembered their own school days with horror, hadn’t wanted to trap her at a convent. But the comprehensive was not destined to last.

bríd

Maren was well-behaved. In a way it was disappointing. She never smoked a cigarette or had a bump or took a sip of drink the entire time she was at the comprehensive. Her problem was that the school had no uniform. Maren needed that uniform to hide behind, without it parts of her true nature would get revealed. Her shoes had these weird hand-painted symbols on them—

kate

It was Wiccan symbols.

bríd

And that hairband she picked up at George’s Street Arcade pushed back her limp hair and made her ears stick out like a rat’s.

kate

She loved that hairband, but she never copped on that there were so many girls who couldn’t be seen around someone who looked like she did.

bríd

We all heard about the three girls in Maren’s year got pregnant. Her parents had a fit. Didn’t want her to have ‘bad influences’ so they scootered her away to our school.

kate

Maren didn’t mind leaving; very little work got done at the comprehensive.

bríd

She was a bitch the way she wouldn’t tell us anything about those girls. Thought she was so much better than us because she wouldn’t gossip, she’d say, ‘I’m not throwing them under the bus.’

TANITH

Every time she said it, there was a flicker of terror behind her eyes.

kate

If she’d only told us the story, we might’ve made friends quicker. Telling it might have made her remember the old girls better. But by the time I knew her, the story had gone all dusty in her head.

SHAUNA

Mr Condron the vice-principal used to walk up and down the road to school every day, looking for girls without their uniforms on.

isobel

Everyone said it that way, it was easy to make it sound dirty. Mr Condron liked us to create a good impression, with the right uniform.

CARA

The wrong coat, coloured scarves, the cardinal sin of wearing boots when it rained. All of them would get you in the shit with Mr Condron.

kate

You had to walk up a long, busy road to get to our school. Our parents begged us not to cut through the park, even though it saved you time.

bríd

Our parents said the park was full of knackers but we never got into trouble. Maren listened to hers, though, and she kept to the road.

kate

When she first joined our school, Maren would sit with the ‘nice’ girls at lunchtime, like Isobel and Shauna, the kind of girls her parents would prefer.

bríd

She was more approachable now she had the uniform. It kept parts of her true nature hidden.

isobel

Maren’s uniform was always slightly off, like her skirt was too short and long at the same time, and her jumper was weirdly baggy.

CARA

Mr Condron stopped Maren all the time because of her uniform. One day he told her, ‘if you can’t obey the rules, there’re other schools that’ll have you.’

bríd

To be fair to Maren, and I usually never am, he had it out for Maren, he picked on her. Like he never stopped that girl with the big fucking platforms.

isobel

In third year, Bríd and Cara started using their walk in the park to smoke before school. Me and Shauna would walk ahead of them quickly. I hated it, their jumpers would stink of it all day.

kate

Maren took the DART from the other direction, we rarely arrived at the station at the same time. She always did the walk up to school alone.

CARA

Sometimes, Mr Condron would come right down into the park, like he’d come looking around to see what the girls were up to. If he caught you smoking, it was always a big deal. We always wanted to see him have a run in with the knackers. Like what would he have done, fight them?

kate

Maren used to say that we should never be caught alone in the park with Mr Condron, that she’d seen what he did to girls there..

isobel

After Shauna left, I’d walk with Kate. She wasn’t a smoker but she didn’t mind it the way Shauna had. She wouldn’t bitch about the others with me.

SHAUNA

Bríd had her first shift in the park, a boy from CBC Monkstown called Declan. Mr Condron caught them and gave Bríd a detention.

CARA

Mr Condron was such a perv.

bríd

Declan wouldn’t come to the park after that. He was a real coward.

kate

Maren wasn’t the only girl in the school who wasn’t religious.

bríd

Most of us didn’t care, but she was the only one who shited on about it.

isobel

Some of us took Mass seriously. Some of us took the pledge, like me and Kate in first year.

TANITH

Most of us weren’t religious, but it was different when we prayed to the Mother of God. Mary was a skank, Mary was a whore, Mary was a teenage mam who blagged her way into becoming a hero.

bríd

Mary was such a teacher’s pet, a lick-arse, thought she was better—more blessèd—than everyone else.

AOIFE

It was a curse to be known as the teacher’s pet. You could be quiet and do your homework and still there’d be plenty of other girls the teachers would like more, even when they pretended not to.

bríd

There was a time when we were all very into the whole teen mam thing. We’d wreck Maren’s head with it. At the station, we’d shout to her from the other platform. ‘Hey Maren, do you know what they called your old school? So funny, it was Pill Hill, do you know why?’

kate

The name Pill Hill made no sense, I never thought it did. If they were on the Pill, how would they have got pregnant? Was it that we thought they were gobshites for not being on the pill, or whores for being on it?

TANITH

I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt about Mary, that actually hers was the only prayer I enjoyed saying. At Mass, I’d picture a plate of the most delicious fruit you can imagine. The kind of apples that were crisp and juicy at the same time, dappled yellow skin and pale white flesh underneath. Their taste, which I could imagine exactly, filled my mouth every time I said, “fruit of thy womb”. My lips moved around the words; I salivated in anticipation.

CARA

Did you ever see Naoise? He was meant to be beautiful. Have you seen his pictures online? It was along the sand at Killiney Beach that he collapsed, and within hours he was declared dead.

SHAUNA

Naoise’s brother was still alive. Eoin you called him. His hair was ginger and he wore Vans and skinny jeans.

CARA

Eoin was there that day, I think. Yes, Eoin howled. When Naoise collapsed on Killiney Beach, Eoin cradled his brother until the ambulance came. They say his palms are still scarred from how hard he pressed the sand into hands afterwards.

kate

Maren never met Naoise, but she knew Eoin. They were at Pill Hill at the same time. Naoise died the summer before she started there. Twice a day, I’d pass Killiney Beach on the train, and I’d think about those two brothers.

TANITH

Everyone knows how beautiful Naoise was, even the girls who had never met him alive.

bríd

Kate was certain no one knew about her crush on Shauna, which was daft. They sat next to each other in History and drew pictures in each other’s textbooks. They made up rhymes about the 1641 rebellion, which was bizarre because that was nobody’s favourite.

kate

What I liked about Shauna was her golden eyes, and her stomach, which was flatter than mine while also being pleasantly rounded.

CARA

The two of them planned this trip after school once, that they’d go to Debenhams in the shopping centre to try on clothes.

kate

Going there was Shauna’s idea. She said we should try on all kinds of clothes to look like different people. There were 70s floral housewife get-ups and cargo pants that made us look like a pair of butch dykes. I put on whatever I thought would make Shauna laugh, like men’s beach shirts or granny knickers pulled away up over my school tights. At onepoint, I had the mini skirt on, and Shauna was wearing a white dress that made her look just like Marilyn Monroe. My cheeks felt so hot then.

It was Shauna who pointed the dress out. It was so slutty, like fake leather, skin-tight, a black slip of a thing with a big silver zip down the front. I dragged the zip up and down a couple of times, the scandal and the allure of it, and Shauna said she would try it on.

My belly burned while I waited for her, but she never let me in to see the dress. I went in to look for her, eventually, and all I found was the dress lying crumpled on the floor, the zipper pulled all the way down.

CARA

Shauna didn’t keep in touch with us after she moved schools. But at Dalkey one day, we were looking at pictures of Ciara’s eighteenth, and there was Shauna standing in a line of girls.

TANITH

All bodycon dresses and platform heels from Korky’s.

bríd

Kate was pretending not to hear, but I saw her eyes flicker to Shauna.

kate

Her stomach still perfectly rounded beneath a tight stretch of turquoise. Her arched thighs were orange; orange tenderly applied.

TANITH

By third year, we no longer believed in the power of fortune tellers to bestow us a glimpse at our futures, but we still enjoyed playing with them.

CARA

The game was so childish. MASH: Mansion — apartment — shack — house. You’d list a whole number of options for your future, pick a number, and cross the options out until only one was left in each category: husband, city, job, you know.

TANITH

We were too old for MASH. But sometimes, during the short tunnel between Dun Laoghaire and Sandycove, you’d geta glimpse of the possibility of a life. A girl’s whole mood shattered right in front of you and you could witness it all.

kate

It was heaven it was torture it depended what your fortune teller said.

TANITH

Maren often hinted that she would tell fortunes for a price.

bríd

We weren’t friends with Maren then, nobody was. Kate wanted to know if the story about Maren telling fortunes was true, but she would never go to Maren herself. She was terrified to talk about what her future might hold. So I went instead.

kate

I told Bríd to ask her something about Declan, like if she’d ever see him or shift him again, but she refused.

bríd

I made up a story about a man, a boy, who looked exactly like Naoise. ‘Gimme your phone,’ Maren said to me. ‘When’s your birthday?’ She flipped open my phone screen, and I told her the 3rd of September.

kate

My legs were freshly shaved, barely covered by my socks. The prickle as my short hairs stood up hurt me, and I tried torub them unconsciously. Maren bit her lips several times in succession.

bríd

She typed a word onscreen, it meant nothing to me. ‘Don’t show it to her,’ she said, meaning Kate, but of course I did as soon as we were on the train. I forget now what the word was.

kate

I will never forget the message I saw Bríd type, on Maren’s instruction. I wasn’t meant to look, but Bríd showed me as soon as we left Blackrock. I begged her not to. 

bríd

Maren told me to press the number three nine times, and the number nine three times, and to accept the first prediction it offered me each time. ‘Keep doing it til you get a message that makes sense, and use punctuation if you like,’ she said to me. I sent the message to Declan, for all the good that ever did.

kate

To me, Maren said: ‘Getting the punctuation right is a delicate skill.’ And oh, it is!

bríd

Eimear and I were friends in primary school, maybe best friends, but then she went to private school and I didn’t. Shesat next to me one day on the DART, and I was glad that Kate wasn’t with me, because I didn’t know how to talk to both of them at once.

kate

Bríd told me, ‘It’s lucky you weren’t there because I think me being alone was the only reason Eimear came to speak to me.’ Bríd said that Eimear wanted to talk about what had happened to the sixth years at her school. Gossip ran likeelectric down the DART lines, but it was unable to bridge the gap between private and normal schools, not in south Dublin anyway.

bríd

Eimear said, ‘In our atrium, there’s this portrait of the founder of our school. Her name is Carlotta. You can tell shewas all upstanding and gracious and that by her hair. It’s a small bun twisted down towards the nape of her neck.’

kate

‘Atrium.’ ‘Nape.’ The cunt.

bríd

That wasn’t actually the way Eimear talked, I made some of that stuff up. But Kate would’ve known if she’d been there, and the only reason she wasn’t on the DART was because she was ‘drinking coffee’ with Maren. Eimear never used the word ‘atrium’ but it was the kind of thing she’d say. She pissed me off every time I saw her. She was always going on about someone famous who went to her school. I was dead sick of her shellac nails too. 

kate

‘Her nails were all disgusting,’ Bríd told me, ‘like she’d tried to do that fake French manicure thing with Tippex.’

EIMEAR

This is what I told Bríd on the DART. The sixth years at my school pull a prank every year before they go on study leave for exams. It’s a gas tradition. But after what happened the previous year (and look, I don’t need to tell you about that) the teachers put their foot down. And Fiona, you know my middle sister Fiona, she’s been on the planning committee since the beginning of the year, so you can imagine. She was disappointed, but the other girls were raging.

bríd

Me and Kate met Fiona once before then, at the New Year’s party. She usually drinks West Coast Cooler at parties, but at this one, she had four jello shots. 

kate

Fiona was a stupid cow.

EIMEAR

Fiona is no big partier. She took the pledge — I mean, so did I, but she meant it. She never had a drink til she was eighteen, I swear on my granny’s grave, and she’d never been to a club before. The first time she ever did was the night of the Leavers dinner. We do a Farewell Mass for them in the evening, and then a big dinner. Then, after dessert, the sixth years leave the teachers chatting away to the parents. In the downstairs bathrooms, the Leavers change out of their school uniforms and do their makeup for going out. Imagine the teachers’ faces, seeing the girls dressed like whores for the first time!

bríd

I think Eimear was proud of that line, because she shrieked with laughter when she said it. Her laughs echoed all up and down the DART.

EIMEAR

Fiona’s dress was carefully chosen. Brown Thomas sale. Bodycon, but high on top so it didn’t look too slutty. The girls split into two party buses, both of which left the school at 10pm.

bríd

That’s when it started to get strange, Eimear said. See, Fiona was on the ‘edgy’ bus. It was Eimear who mimed quotation marks round the word, not me.

kate

Fiona was a dose.

EIMEAR

On the edgy bus they passed around vodka instead of spritzer, and Fiona, wanting to join in on the sesh for once, let it burn down her throat before the bus hit a speed bump, and it sloshed all over her face.

The vodka belonged to Isla, who had lost her virginity at fifteen and who had a folder with beer bottle caps glued to the front. Once the naggin had completed a circuit of the bus, Isla made her shaky way up to the front and showed off her prize. It was the portrait of Carlotta, which she had secreted from the atrium between the main course and dessert.

Isla screamed, ‘Carlotta’s coming to the rave!’ And Fiona bellowed back, ‘Where’s CA-AAAAAA-ARLLLL-OTTTT-A?’ She didn’t know where it had come from, the aggression in her, and she was shocked at herself. But therest of the bus chanted back to her.

‘WHERE’S CARLOTTA?’

They passed the portrait around the bus, roaring ‘WHERE’S CAAAARLLLLOTTTTA?’ Carlotta crowd-surfed their seats. Someone asked the driver to turn on the disco lights, and there was Carlotta, lit up in a glow of neon. Aoibheann, all clumsy hands, tried to give Carlotta a shot and spilt the drink all over the canvas. But when Fiona (still sensible, she can be a dry shite sometimes) leapt up to dry the painting off, there was no trace left, and she still swears Carlotta’s cheeks were a shade pinker afterwards.

And then Isla took back over, hoisting the painting back up in the air. ‘WHERE’S CAAAAAAARLOTTA?’ ‘WHERE’S CARLOTTA?’ the girls barked back.

bríd

I was telling the story to Kate. I thought she’d be more interested. But just as I reached the good part, we passed Killiney Beach, and it’s always useless trying to talk to her there. I knew she’d only be thinking about Naoise and Eoinand all that. Some days, that was the only thing she was interested in.

EIMEAR

The rest of the night — the Palace on Camden Street, the Jägerbombs — is all a blur to Fiona now. But like I said, she can be a dry shite, and she managed to keep Carlotta tucked under her arm all night. No one could find Isla. Fiona says she was probably away in some corner, off to shift a college boy now she and the fella were over.

bríd

Eimear said that the next morning, Fiona snuck back into the school early, to replace Carlotta before anyone noticed she was missing.

EIMEAR

Fiona says that just as she was returning the painting, she spotted a new figure in the background, standing in between Carlotta’s two children.

bríd

Eimear told me, the painting’s way above your head, so you don’t normally see the details unless you’ve got like, 20-20 vision. And Fiona was so hungover she couldn’t even keep down water.

kate

Still banjaxed, more like.

bríd

Eimear said that Fiona swore the new figure had Isla’s face.

EIMEAR

Isla was talking for ages about just not finishing school, she was only ever planning to stay for the prank. I think it was her way of making sure everyone’s still talking about her.

bríd

Then we were in Bray, and Eimear called her mam to tell her to pick her up cos her bag was heavy. And she did too, in the Lexus.

maren

Somehow, it happened that the three of us became inseparable.

bríd

Maren wouldn’t walk through the park. She said that it was because of what she’d seen Mr Condron doing to the girls without a uniform, and weirdo shit about dead things in the water.

kate

We walked to the DART station through the main street. We took our time, and the curved path round past the Frascati centre and the big lights. 

bríd

I guess she had to make up the daft stories. She knew we’d just call her a dose if she said her parents told her not to go through the park.

kate

Maren initiated us into drinking coffee in the busy hum of Starbucks. Pushed us from frappés to mochas and then to caramel macchiatos, and I learned to lie to my mother about why I wasn’t sleeping nights.

bríd

In the shopping centre, we laughed at the carol singers from other schools, and stole art supplies from the snooty craft shop. And if we stayed in Blackrock past four, we’d see Mr McNulty the art teacher making his way down to the Wicked Wolf. He went there every day after school.

kate

In the autumn of fifth year, Cara’s sister had her eighteenth there. The three of us were invited and I used Aoibheann’s ID.

bríd

No one liked the Wicked Wolf. Associating it with Mr McNulty didn’t exactly make it sexy. It was such a dump, but Iloved going there. I would always be the last one to leave the dance floor when we went. They had to literally turn the lights off to get me to stop dancing in that place.

kate

We sat at the back, to begin with, by that kitschy cigarette machine, and Maren poured gin from her hip flask into our cokes.

bríd

The hip flask leaked all over her bag and made her drip puddles of gin, she looked ridiculous. Maren and Kate wouldn’t dance, so they minded my drink when I went up for boogies. But one time as I returned, I saw that Kate had caught Maren’s wrist and beckoned her outside. It was then that I knew things would change.

CARA

A well-known novelist had gone to our school. No one had found her clever or funny back then, none of the older teachers like Mrs O’Rourke who taught her. They said they supposed there was a market for that sort of thing, but they hadn’t liked it much at the time.

isobel

Her stories were usually about lonely women with empty eyes who slept with many different men in the hopes offinding something, but they almost never did. It didn’t matter which city they lived in or what jobs they had; they were always alone and sad and failures.

CARA

She didn’t write those stories for school. When the teachers assigned creative writing homework, she’d concoct amorsel to appease them (not too good, not too bad.) She was adamant never to show anyone the monsters inside her.

kate

She didn’t have friends in school, exactly. My mam knew her. She said she remembered the novelist’s silences during parties, her sinister expressions at lunchtime.

bríd

Maren was a big fan of the novelist. She was ravenous for the details to be gleaned through Kate’s mam, and maybethat was the reason why it took Kate so long to invite Maren over to her home.

isobel

They all loved the novelist, I never understood what they saw in her. No one could move in her stories without a cigarette in their hand.

CARA

Let me tell you what we knew about the novelist. She had an affair with her professor in Edinburgh and returned home one last time just so she could have an illegal abortion on the island of Ireland. She threatened to throw herself from the roof of the school, and every year, on the anniversary of that day, she would find a high place to stand on to remind herself what she had to live for. She had a tattoo on the inside of her thigh, specially designed for her by Lucian Freud and teeming with occult imagery. She moved to Paris briefly because Samuel Beckett was haunting her. Beckett’s ghost could only speak in Japanese, and he needed her help in returning his use of French. Afterwards, she didn’t want to waste the Japanese she’d learned for the exorcism. The move to Tokyo was inevitable. 

TANITH

Kate’s mother was useful in piecing together what we knew about the novelist. Her books could be difficult to get hold of, and Jimena, the librarian, would always forget to order in the ones we begged for.

CARA

The novelist avoided linking her work to Ireland, but she mentioned our school once, citing it as the location for her formative nervous breakdown. I could only ever find one clip of her speaking about it, the time she tried to throw herself from the roof. I bookmarked it to save forever. She said, ‘I considered it my first breakdown, though in retrospect it was probably the second or third. But it was the one which left the greatest impression on me.’

TANITH

It was during the rehearsals for Les Miserables that I found it, but I never told anyone that it was the reason I quit the musical. There was a pile of old log books backstage, the ones they used in maths tests before the new rules came in. I read the log books during the lulls in rehearsals. In one, I found the novelist’s name written down. She used biro, that surprised me, and her letters were rounded, bulging, distended. The sight of them made my scalp itch.

Over every blank bit of page, she’d written the same words over and over again: I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present I am present

bríd

Kate may have ditched me for Maren by then, but she also wanted to go to parties that girls like Maren would never be invited to. For that, she had to come to me. She had a cover story anyway, she said one of the boys from Pill Hill would be there. She wanted to lose her virginity to him, she said. At that point, it was obvious she was getting the ride from Maren, but maybe there was truth to it. It’s just different with fellas, isn’t it? And trust me, if there was any girl who needed a good fuck and sometime soon, it was Kate.

kate

Eoin did not make an appearance at the party. Instead, I found one of the boys from Pill Hill, I tailed him for hours. Shared my precious naggin with him and let him to slip his tongue down my throat for information.

bríd

He told her about the rumour, the one we’d heard other girls whispering about. I never believed that story, it was daft, and I doubt Kate did either. That Eoin was some kind of medium, that he’d got those girls pregnant, only it hadn’t been him but actually his brother Naoise, who was possessing him from beyond the grave. She didn’t need the Pill Hill boy to tell her that, what did he have to add to the story?

kate

‘Eoin’s manky, like,’ the boy told me. ‘They all just wanted to ride Naoise.’

bríd

Kate asked him about Maren, but he didn’t remember her by name. Kate spat in his plastic cup, and he drank it. Then Kate called her da to pick her up. We were meant to leave together, but she went home early. She didn’t need to be at the party to learn that story, it was only what we’d all been talking about for years, since before Maren’s parents moved her to our school. If Kate wasn’t such a shite friend, she would’ve stayed longer with me. But because she didn’t, she never learned that Eoin did come to the party that night. Yes, that was where I met Eoin and maybe, if you believe in loopy stories, Naoise.

kate

Maren wouldn’t look at me for a week after she heard about the party. And I vowed never to ask her about Eoin again.

maren

After we left school, it did not often occur to Kate or me to think about her old friends. We live in Shankill now, and I work in Blackrock. I commute in the opposite direction, doing the journey Kate did to school.

bríd

After I finished school, and I did finish school, I swore you wouldn’t catch me dead on the DART. And mostly you didn’t. I left the DART line and, in time, Dublin too. But the DART was difficult to avoid completely. I had to spend the night in Bray, minding my mam’s cats. I took one of the early trains back, filled with commuters. I had forgotten how the light of the early mornings used to make me want to die. And then I saw Maren get on.

maren

I sat opposite her before I realised it was Kate’s old friend. If I’d noticed her sooner, I expect I would have pretended not to see her. I have no curiosity about her. But I sat opposite her, and we got to talking. Bríd had barely changed, in a way it was depressing. She never mentioned her daughter. She told me I reminded her of a woman she and Kate used to torment on the DART during their first year.

bríd

There was a woman who used to sit in the first carriage every day. That was where me and Kate, and later the others, always sat. She wore work outfits every day: a pencil skirt and blouse, a blazer, flesh-coloured tights even when it was freezing outside. Trainers on her feet, but I guess she kept heels in her bag or her office. This woman, if she got the seat by the window, would lay her head against the glass, looking nauseous and debilitated. Her hair was greasy and stringy, and the bags under her eyes were visible a mile away, even underneath all that foundation she slathered on.

maren

Bríd was still laughing when she told me this story. I can see that woman now. The way she told the story egged you on to despise how sad and tired the woman looked every morning. Mostly, I am very sorry for her.

bríd

Me and Kate, we made it our mission to destroy this entitled cow. She got on at Shankill, by that point she had to stand. She would hover by us in our seats, all piercing eyes and glares.

In the silence of the first train, we’d text each other back and forth. Awful, disgusting things about her. There’s part of me that’s ashamed of what we said about her, I don’t even want to think about them. We would never give up our seats for her. Not even when everyone around us was giving us dagger glares, not even after the day she fainted and then cried.

This woman, she stopped coming onto the carriage after some time. Maybe she went on maternity leave, or maybe she got another job, or maybe she or her baby died. Kate and I talked about all the possibilities. Kate didn’t like making fun of her the way I did. She asked me to stop sitting in her train carriage, a few years later, in fifth year. Well, she didn’t ask.

She just started reading more and more, usually the novelists’s books, and I stopped trying to talk to her.

maren

No, Kate never told me about that woman before. But there are still so many stories we do not know about each other.

bríd

Maren never told me any stories about herself. I thought she hated me.

maren

There were very few people I liked, back then. Aside from Kate.

bríd

As Maren spoke to me, she loosened her coat, because it was getting warmer, and I saw the swell of a curve.

maren

Bríd’s story jolted a memory in me, because I too had met the sad tired woman, back in our school days.

bríd

I wanted to ask questions, about Maren’s belly and about Kate. Instead, Maren told me a story.

maren

I took the DART back from Greystones after the first night I spent at Kate’s house. It was a weekday, but during the Easter holidays in fifth year. Easter fell early that year, and the weather was terrible. The carriage was quieter than normal, there were no school students, only commuters. At Shankill, a woman sat opposite me. It must have been her, the one Bríd told me about. She looked exactly the same. She sat opposite me and did all her make up, the routine of it terrified me. I watched her stomach the whole journey, the baby bump. Even when the train lurched forward and everything fell tumbling from her bag, papers and purses and lipsticks, the bump was all I could see.

bríd

Maren was more responsible than I ever was. She leapt up to help the woman collect her things.

maren

When I went to the comprehensive, I used to get cheese rolls in the Centra by the station. They were made thick with margarine, not real butter. God knows why, but I got a real hankering for them that day, the day I sat opposite the woman. As we approached Seapoint, the urge got stronger and stronger, and I sprang from the DART like a wild thing. As I walked up that narrow laneway, just opposite Alma Road, my shoe made a clicking sound.

bríd

‘I’ve never told this story to Kate before.’ That’s what she said to me on the DART.

maren

It was a printed card stuck to my shoe. It listed an antenatal appointment reminder, with that day’s date and my own name written on it. The only place it could have come from was the woman’s handbag,

bríd

We were passing Killiney Beach as Maren told me the story, that stretch of sand flitting past us. She whispered her secret to me, right there in the dim morning light, and her eyes were glistening with tears.

maren

When I read my name on the card, I wasn’t scared or unhappy or confused. Instead, it was bliss, utter bliss. And from that moment on, I prayed for that baby to be Eoin’s.