I started high school, or secondary school as they called it, in September 2000 in a school that was girls only (unusual back home but entirely normal in Ireland). The school was called St Anne’s and apparently had a Catholic ethos, not that I saw much of it. It came up in class one day that my father had founded his own church. I think they were confused by that. When asked if it was a Catholic church or a Protestant church, I wasn’t sure how to answer. I said it was a Christian church and that we followed the teachings of the New Testament. They didn’t ask me anything else and, thankfully, I was left alone again. Our teachers were all female and two of them were nuns. I had two years till graduation.
School was okay. Stricter than Boston, but then home was no longer as strict as Boston. I was scared to make friends. I kept to the corners and tried not to engage. I didn’t think I deserved friends. The incident had caused mayhem in the lives of all the people I cared about. I had nothing in common with these girls. Without our church group, there was nothing to bond us. I liked U2, I guess, and The Cranberries, and sometimes I swapped CDs with girls, but I never invited anyone home and I nevergot invited to their houses either. I was sick with loneliness but terrified to join in.
Erin visited during summer vacation the year after in 2001, but she had changed into a different type of girl. Outwardly, she was still beautiful, and attracted a lot of male attention, but she had no interest in guys. She had been such a cheerful, outgoing big sister, but now she wanted to stay home. Mom had sighed one day when we were both sitting glumly sipping wine on the sofa, ‘I guess I have two nuns on my hands.’ Erin burst into tears and fled to her room. I was stricken by the thought that I had ruined her future by letting Milo tickle me. That night, I took Erin out to a bar. I’d never seen her drunk. I thought it would be good for her to let her hair down, but she didn’t enjoy it at all. After three drinks she wanted to go home and refused to come to a nightclub with me. We only made passing references to what had happened in the fall of ’99.
Living in Ireland was weird in the beginning because I didn’t always get the cultural references, but it did seem that America was the centre of the universe for Irish people. Mom and I went into Dublin city centre when President Clinton visited that first December. Hillary and Chelsea were there too. I got a glimpse of them through a lowered car window. There were thousands of people there waving American flags. I mean, everyone knew that he’d made a big mistake a few years back with Monica Lewinsky, but Irish people were more than willing to forgive. Dad had tried to protect us from the details when it happened, but Dawn Linskey in Altman told us what a blow job was. Laquanda had said it must be illegal.
After 9/11 in 2001, Irish media went nuts. It was all everyone talked about for ages afterwards. I never knew how connected the two countries were. It seemed like anyone you met in Ireland had only two degrees of separation from someone who lost their life in that terrorist attack. Everyone in school sympathized withme even though I didn’t know anyone who died. I felt such a fake, accepting condolences on behalf of New York, a city I didn’t even know all that well.
A teacher, Miss Wallace, took me aside one day and asked me if everything was okay at home. She had noted that I didn’t mix with my classmates and that I ate my lunch alone. I insisted that I preferred it that way. She sent me home with a letter for Mom suggesting that I seemed to be extremely antisocial. Mom was annoyed at me. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said, ‘could you not make an effort to fit in?’
I think Miss Wallace asked Lindsay Dillon to try to befriend me. She didn’t seem to have friends either. She was tall with straight hair and still wore an Alice band in her hair. She was not a cool girl. Her school skirt was long, and she wore socks up to her knees, whereas the other girls rolled their skirts up and pushed their socks down, exposing as much bare flesh as they could. Lindsay began to seek me out at lunchtimes and occasionally we swapped our snacks. She didn’t ask why we’d moved to Dublin, although the concocted story was that my mom wanted to be close to her ageing mother. We became friends, but not like Laquanda or Tasha. Lindsay was much more serious. We did go for a drink occasionally, but Lindsay always wanted to go home earlier than me. Mom didn’t mind what hours I kept. It was unexpected, because back home I’d always thought Mom was the disciplinarian in our house but maybe she had been enforcing Dad’s rules.
Lindsay was nice but it was a different kind of friendship to the one I’d had with my American girlfriends. I learned quickly not to say ‘girlfriend’ when referring to female friends. Girlfriends were girls who were in a relationship with boys. But Lindsay didn’t talk about boys or pop music or sex or celebrity gossip. We talked about movies and books, and I occasionally accompanied her to classical concerts. I think, from the tauntsand whispers of the other girls, they thought we were lesbians. Lindsay and I went to the theatre together a few times. They didn’t have anything equivalent to Broadway in Dublin, but sometimes they would put on American plays with actors doing terrible accents.
In January 2002, I had to fill in a form to say what college I wanted to go to. There was only one course that I was interested in and that was Drama and Theatre Studies in Trinity College. Lindsay wanted to do Law there. We studied like crazy. I had to go do an interview. They asked about a show I had seen, and I had to give my critique on the spot. I talked about musical theatre and the shows I had seen on Broadway.Riverdancewas the only musical Ireland had ever produced as far as I knew. They asked who were my favourite non-musical playwrights and I was able to talk about Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman. They were more impressed when I dropped those names. A few weeks later, I got a conditional offer in the mail, depending on my final exam results. I had also signed up for English and Philosophy, but I planned to drop those as soon as I could. I was happy for the first time in many months – I didn’t have to force a smile or pretend. When I went to tell Mom, I found her in tears in her bedroom.
Dad was looking for a divorce. He had met somebody new. Kathy.
We had held on to the idea that Dad would eventually come and join us, but apart from a week around Independence Day and Christmas, he had never visited. Mom had gone back to spend time with him every few months, but it wasn’t enough to sustain a marriage. I held off telling her about my college success, but she and I got drunk together that night while she told me all about falling in love with my dad. There were details I hadn’t heard before. How he had charmed her and pursued her and how she made the difficult decision not to go back to Dublin forChristmas that first year, leaving Grandma on her own. I guess Mom was totally smitten. Poor Grandma.
Now that a divorce was imminent, and after the shock wore off, I think she was relieved not to have to go back to Boston. Dad had been out of my life for two years, but I was still sad. Even when he’d come here on vacation, I could tell he didn’t like it. I got a laptop and an iPod from Dad to alleviate my upset and his guilt. Mom did a course in basic computer skills and got a job through a friend in a boys’ school as an administrator. She didn’t need to work, but she liked earning her own money, even if it was a pittance compared to what Dad paid in alimony. She was single for the first time in her adult life. I wondered if she would start dating again, but she showed no interest in that, and it wasn’t the sort of thing I could talk to her about.
Grandma was the most upset. ‘Having a divorced child on top of everything else,’ she said. The ‘everything else’ meant me and the incident. Grandma should have been kinder to Mom. None of this was her fault. It was mine.
7
I started my degree course in Trinity College in September 2002. I moved out of the apartment into one in the city with my schoolfriend Lindsay Dillon. Dad was obliged to pay maintenance, and my allowance was always generous.
That year, in my first week of college, Erin called to tell me that Milo’s mother had jumped off the John W. Weeks Bridge into the Charles River and died. I was devastated by this news. Poor Mrs Kelly. I remembered her in church, shivering in a coat that wasn’t warm enough for a Boston winter.
‘How do you know, Erin?’
‘It was on the news,’ she said, but I could tell she was lying.
‘Are you in touch with Milo’s family?’ She had never been friendly with his sister, Margie, back in the day, but maybe they had talked to each other.
‘No.’
I didn’t pursue it. Another life not just destroyed, but over. I couldn’t think about that. I pretended not to care. It was easier than talking about it.
I loved Drama and Theatre Studies. We studied all kinds of theatre from puppetry to Japanese Noh. I discovered lots of new (to me) playwrights. I learned about mime andcommedia dell’arteand the structures of classical plays. I loved acting. The ease with which I was able to slip into another character’s head was thrilling to me and noted by my classmates. I was still shy,but if my character called for me to burst into a room and berate a group of strangers, I had no issue with that. I also had a gift for accents. Bizarrely, every accent except the Irish one, despite being surrounded by it. Sometimes we were encouraged to spend entire days living in another character’s shoes. I loved that. Even before the end of my first year, I had been offered work in a stage play by a director who had come to see a showcase I was in. It was a reasonable-sized role, but the college didn’t approve of students taking professional work during term time. I had to turn it down.
Lindsay had a boyfriend, Stuart, a nerdy, tweedy guy. She had met him on her first day in Trinity. After about two weeks, he stayed the night in our apartment. Lindsay blushed all the way through breakfast next morning. We had never spoken about sex to each other, but I could tell she had done it. Stuart wasn’t unattractive, I suppose. Tall and rangy, he wore thick glasses, but when he took them off, his face was pleasant and open. He was polite to me as well.
Irish kids drank alcohol a lot more than Americans did. They didn’t have to wait until they were twenty-one. That’s not to say there weren’t American kids who drank at a young age but my fellow students in Trinity got wasted a lot.
When I got to Ireland, Mom was more relaxed about my drinking. I was seventeen then, but she didn’t know the extent of it. I drank in my room and hid the bottles.
In college, it was different. I was drinking with fellow students, and no longer felt I had to hide it. I liked the way it made me feel. It helped me with the shyness. If I had a glass or two of wine before I went out, I was able to walk into the student bar on my own. It was liberating. Soon, I was experimenting with all kinds of liquor and what they called alcopops, drinking as much as my classmates, if not more. I liked being drunk. I was someone else then. Confident, chatty, attractive, wild and promiscuous. Sex was normal. Everyone was doing it. I don’t remember muchabout the first guy. I know he had rooms in Trinity because that’s where I woke up. I had turned into the girl that I used to pray for.
In college, I was trusted to study on my own, to go to bed in a timely fashion, to dress appropriately, to attend lectures, to eat sensibly. By the beginning of my third year in September 2004, I did not do any of these things. I spent twice as much time in the student bar as in the library or at classes. I hooked up with a guy once a week. And I didn’t care if they had girlfriends. I wasn’t looking for a relationship; I was having the time of my life. I had lots of friends, kids from my class and other classes, other courses. My life was chaotic, but it matched my mood. Oblivion was where I wanted to be. Not having to think about Boston, or my broken sister, my absent father or Mrs Kelly. I remember going into a bar in town where UCD and Trinity students hung out, and Gillian MacArthur found my name carved on the back of the toilet door:RUBY COOPER IS A SLUT. There weren’t a lot of Ruby Coopers in Ireland so I knew it was about me. Outwardly, I laughed at the person who wrote that, pitied them for how uptight they must be. Privately, I was hurt and lay low for a while, drinking in my room.
Lindsay told me I had to grow up. I didn’t think I was causing any more havoc than the other kids in my year, but Lindsay pointed out that we weren’t ‘kids’ any more. She didn’t like the smell of weed in our home, or that I brought different boys back all the time, or that I kept her awake playing music, and she definitely didn’t like that I drank myself into a blackout twice a week. ‘Look at yourself,’ she said, ‘drinking doesn’t suit you’ – spoken like a teacher. Why did she have to be like that? I was growing up. As one of my drinking buddies had put it, ‘It’s a rite of passage to have a few blackouts in your teens’, though she probably didn’t realize I was older than all of them, because of missing a year of school after the incident and then being held back a year in Ireland in order to do their two-year cycle for Leaving Certificate exams. By then, I was twenty-three.
8
Erin
