At the Bridge Mill
It was a buoyant September evening, still bright at nearly eight o’clock, as though the year were trying to prove it had some fine weather left in it. The Carty sisters were headed to the theatre, but first, they had convened for a drink (one red wine, one pint of Heineken, and two brandies with ginger ale). The street was lined with cozy and inviting pubs, but for this occasion they had chosen the pub on the corner, the one that, more than any other, made passersby stop and say well, maybe just one.
The sisters sat outside so Helen and Dorinne could smoke. On paper, Dorinne had given up fags twenty years ago, but she took advantage of the rare evening away from her husband and children to snap up one of Helen’s Benson & Hedges. If she could have, she would have walked down to the docks to enjoy it staring out at the water, like a wild animal that dragged its kill away from the pack to tear into in lascivious solitude.
Helen, Dorinne, Jacinta and Marian did not collectively harbour a passion for contemporary Irish theatre. Their brother Gerald had written another play and instead of London or New York, he had brought it home to their small city in the west of Ireland. So here they were, sought-after tickets in hand, on their way to one of the most talked-about world premieres of the year.
Gerald Carty was the sort of playwright critics described as ‘staggering’ and ‘Joycean’. A Sunday Times article previewing this latest play called it a ‘soaring elegy with the power to change the national conversation about grief.' Dorinne took all this with a grain of salt. She hadn’t sat through one minute of his work since The Expectant, the career-defining big break that turned their lives upside-down twelve years previously.
If people cast Gerald as a genius, they cast Dorinne as a saint. Not because of anything she’d written or done, per se, but because Luke, her youngest child would never speak, walk, or live independently.
The Expectant had taken elements of Dorinne’s life and twisted it into a postmodernist midcentury tragedy set in a notorious institutional care home. Frozen in her seat at the Bridge Mill Theatre, Dorinne had watched in appalled disbelief as things she’d told Gerald in confidence after Luke’s birth were repeated by an up-and-coming actress standing barefoot on a minimally set stage.
“I’ll kill him,” she’d whispered to Jacinta during the interval, crushing the programme in her fist. “I’m telling you, I’ll kill him.”
She did no such thing, of course. Their long-deceased mother had raised her girls to never make a scene and for her sake, Dorinne managed to sit through the entire thing. When it was over, she fled in tears through a back exit.
They all loved their brother, but Dorinne and her sisters were never surprised to hear about difficult, drawn-out rehearsals and explosive ‘creative differences.’ They had Gerald horror stories of their own, and sometimes when the four of them got together they dredged up old grievances like they were searching a lake for a body.
“How are you feeling about tonight?” Jacinta asked Dorinne as they made their way from the pub onto the busy cobblestoned street.
“This isn’t like last time,” Dorinne said. “We’re all in it together, so we are.”
Gerald was plumbing family tragedies again with this new play, it was true. But at least he had given them fair warning, even shared excerpts for them to read in the privacy of their homes. It wasn’t just Dorinne’s life this time, it was Gerald’s too, it was all of theirs. Clarion was the story of their baby brother Patrick, who took his own life at the age of nineteen.
When their mother died, Helen, Jacinta, Dorinne and Gerald collapsed inwards to get the youngest two, Marian and Patrick, through school. Their father was no help at all. There were words now, and treatments, for the inert sorrow which confined him to his armchair even before Mam died. But at the time, all his children saw was a man who didn’t even lift his feet when a heavily pregnant Jacinta came over to hoover the floor. Eventually, there would be words and treatments too for what took hold of Patrick. But it would be years too late to save him. For this, his brother and sisters all blamed themselves and each other in different ways.
“Howya Dorinne,” a young man said as they passed Cunningham’s Fine Foods. Dorinne turned to see one of her son Enda’s friends pulling the gate closed in front of the shopfront and locking it. “Hi Jacinta, hi Helen, hi Marian.”
“Cian, how are you keeping?”
Cunningham’s hadn’t changed in fifty years, at least on the outside. Dorinne used to love the ritual of a Saturday in town, minding Marian and Patrick while their mother did the shopping. When Gerald came with them, he never left Mam’s side, making her laugh with sharp observations about the other shoppers.
“Night out, is it?” Cian asked the four dressed-up sisters.
”Ah I wish! No, it’s Gerald’s play at the Bridge Mill tonight.”
“Oh, that’s class.”
“We’re sick of them now at this stage,” Dorinne joked. “No, in fairness, he just keeps coming out with new ones. We’d better be off now, or we’ll miss it altogether. Mind yourself, Cian.”
When Cian and Enda were in their first year of university, the body of one of their school friends was pulled out of the powerful river which cut through the city. A few months later, Dorinne had joined the other boys’ mothers for a commemorative walk just before sunrise. They’d stayed a good distance behind their sons, giving them space to move as though they were still a group of eight, not seven. Dorinne remembered clutching a big flask of tea, though no warmth reached her fingertips through the sleek metal exterior.
The sound of helicopters overhead, searching for bodies, would always put a chill through her womb. First she’d picture the young men — for it was so often young men, her sons’ ages, Patrick’s age — and then she’d picture their mothers. When they’d lost Patrick, Dorinne hadn’t known he was part of a vanguard of boys who would never reach thirty.
She glanced back at Cian as she and her sisters waited at the pedestrian crossing. She wanted to remind herself that Cian, and by extension her sons and nephews, were alive and well, vital and laughing.
Thinking about Patrick now was like staring into a fire so hot it blurred the air. Sometimes, though, images hit her with searing clarity. His sheepish smile when he took a joke too far. The stack of comic books under his bed in the room he shared with Gerald. His fragile eagerness to be part of a group of lads.
“Right, here we are,” Jacinta said, smoothing down her coat as they reached the pedestrian crossing across from the Bridge Mill. Jacinta and Helen both reached into the purses and applied a coat of lipstick without a mirror, just the way their mother used to.
The Bridge Mill Theatre was a stately building overlooking the river and the disused flour mill for which it was named. Dorinne looked up the stone steps and remembered how delighted she’d been for Gerald when she came to see The Expectant twelve years ago. Tonight, the pillars were hung with violet banners which read Clarion by Gerald Carty in white letters.
Dorinne had forgotten Clarion was being presented by an annual theatre festival until a woman in a volunteer t-shirt blocked their entry, taking their names as though she were checking passports at a volatile border. A member of staff swooped to their rescue, assuring the volunteer that the Carty sisters were on the list.
“You’d think the clue would be there in the the name,” the young man whispered through his teeth, and they assured him it was fine.
Inside, Dorinne found that she recognised nearly everyone in the crowded lobby. Accepting a plastic flute of white wine from a passing tray, she looked around with interest at what her brother’s success had wrought.
It was no secret that Dorinne’s anger at Gerald was laced with envy. The height of Dorinne’s own writing career came when she was seventeen and published a story in a national newspaper. Embarrassed by what she felt the story revealed about her, she’d submitted it under a pseudonym. She’d never seen her name in print, much less on a banner.
When she was a young woman, an ambitious terror would choke her every Sunday night as she stared into the belly of another working week.
“What’s the matter with you, pet?” her husband would ask, wrapping his arms around her with the even-keeled steadiness the men in her family so conspicuously lacked.
“Do you think I’ll ever finish anything I write? Anything good?”
“Course you will.”
“Really?”
On and on until Luke was born and Dorinne stopped asking. If she was ever going to write, it wouldn’t be any time soon.
Now, for the first time, she had time to take a writing class. Her daughter had just started university and it was only Dorinne and her son Luke in the house most days. They hired a carer to come to the house for a few hours on Wednesday evenings so Dorinne could drive into the city and spend ninety minutes sitting around a table exchanging typed pages with strangers.
She’d return home with a fat folder tucked under her arm, filled with feedback from her instructor and classmates. She always felt nervous to read this, but she’d make a cup of tea, turn on one of the nature programmes Luke adored, and spread all her pages in front of her on the table in the sitting room. Once she got going, she’d read it all greedily, her insides contracting defensively at every critique and glowing at every word of praise.
When Dorinne was pregnant with Luke, her husband understood before she did how much was ahead of them. From the day they went for a scan and the ultrasound technician practically ran out of the room for a doctor, he put longer hours than ever in the garage.
Many a cold night, he didn’t come in until ten o’clock. He’d work his frozen fingers around his knife and fork like they were just another set of tools, and fall asleep within the hour. Desperately craving a bit of conversation or affection after another day in the house with five young children, Dorinne would swallow her disappointment and pull a blanket over him. In sleep, he looked just like their young sons, even curling his fists to his chest the way they did.
That first year of Luke’s life, Gerald called Dorinne more than anyone else. Her friends meant well, but they never knew what to say. If she met them with Luke in the pram, she could tell they were so deliriously grateful for their own children’s health that they felt too guilty to even look at her. Jacinta and Marian were a great help, but they had their own young families. Helen, who was living in London at the time, didn’t call once, but in fairness she had been equally oblivious to her other nieces and nephews.
And so Dorinne looked forward to nothing as much as she looked forward to ringing Gerald after everyone was asleep. Whatever happened during the day, she could rehash it to him and he would have something thoughtful and interesting to say. That he confided in her too made her feel so special, so chosen. She found herself narrating the day’s events in her head as she would recount them to him later, and mulling over his problems as well.
Three years later, in her front row seat at The Expectant premiere, it would become clear why he’d been listening so closely. Some of the things Dorinne said during their calls were repeated verbatim in the play. Other times, Gerald reshaped them until they seemed more poignant, more wrenching, and somehow, more true. It was like watching someone take a treasured beaded bracelet and remove the clasp so that each and every bead fell onto the floor.
The actress and Gerald would both go on to win Olivier Awards for Dorinne’s words, but in the end they all got it wrong. Dorinne wasn’t the tragic mother figure in Gerald’s play. Luke wasn’t a tragedy, nor was he a catalyst for one. He was a catalyst for infinitesimal and infinite changes in his mother, father and brothers and sister, perhaps. But mostly, he was himself and they loved him for it.
Still, it was not lost on Dorinne that instead of spending all that time talking to Gerald, she could have written something of her own.
Early in Gerald’s career, before the Expectant fiasco, Dorinne had attended enough plays with young children to know the Bridge Mill Theatre’s discreet exits and quiet corridors. Tonight, she made an excuse about getting a drink from the upstairs bar and disappeared. Half-expecting to be caught and scolded like a child, she tried the door to the balcony seats and found it unlocked.
The empty theatre was like a held breath. Dorinne looked down at the red carpeted aisles and rows of waiting seats, closed like clam shells. She was startled when two men strode onstage from the wings, and she stepped quickly into the shadows. Gerald led the way and the second man trotted behind him with a clipboard and transceiver radio. The set was meticulously dishevelled to look like a playwright’s idea of a work shed, littered with Lucozade bottles and Lion bar wrappers. Gerald hated mess and could not have abided the sight had he not personally curated it.
The man with the clipboard was called away by a garbled murmur on his radio, and Gerald stood alone on the stage, his fingers steepled under his chin. Watching him, Dorinne saw his much-younger self orchestrating games with toy soldiers and his sisters’ dolls, and little Marian and Patrick too, when they’d cooperate. She felt a prickly tenderness for the slender, clean-shaven man she saw now, there in his expensive collarless linen shirt.
Always the expert in solitude, Gerald suddenly sensed he wasn’t really alone. He froze suddenly, squinting into the dark. Dorinne had the choice to slip away now and spurn yet another of his masterpieces. She felt as though her heart were at the bottom of a well and someone was standing above, dropping heavy stones down onto it. No, she decided. Tonight every one of her parents’ living children would be under the same roof, remembering Patrick.
Gerald’s hands flew to his face when Dorinne stepped out from the shadows. Dorinne smiled down at him. Gerald looked around, as though for an audience or a witness, then smiled back.
Kirsty Warren is a writer living in Galway. Her recent work has been published in ROPES Literary Journal, Silver Apples Magazine and long-listed for the Cúirt New Writing Prize.