My Name is E Read online

  Agnes wandered over and peered down at Abby as she lay hunched up, her clothes smeared with mud, chicken shit and corn. She held her head to one side, weighing her up, as if the idea that she couldn’t hear or speak was just too great for her to understand. Of course she was aware that her own father, Aidan, was partially deaf, but with him you wouldn’t know. He could speak and was certainly no imbecile. This was new, incomprehensible, not something she would have expected in her own child. She skewed her face, shrugged, turned away and continued to scatter corn for the reassembled chickens, leaving Abby to find her own way inside, which she instinctively realised had to be the case.

  After that Agnes took a shy, diffident approach to her, keeping her distance as if Abby was a possessed child, something to be wary of, her silence somehow devilish. It was the silence she found disturbing. She was certain something went on behind it, something deceitful, untrustworthy, something bad. Besides, as a woman who would have insisted she was as religious as the next person, though virtually never venturing into her church anymore, she assumed that if Abby’s silence itself wasn’t sinful, then it must at least be a punishment for something. She was far from clear in her own mind what the logic of that thought was, but wouldn’t have argued against some philosophical notion of perpetual return. The child was guilty of some crime, some sin, some tremendous wrongdoing committed in indeterminate time. The question for Agnes remained as to what she was still capable of.

  Harold took an altogether more forthright approach and decided to beat language into her, reasoning perhaps that if he made the assault loud enough she would surely hear. Agnes didn’t argue with Harold, but nevertheless found the beatings upsetting. So, with unusual sensitivity to his wife’s feelings, he took Abby outside into the yard, and on occasion into the pig-sheds, where he slapped her with both sides of his hands across her thighs and bare buttocks. There was no logic to the cause or frequency of these beatings, which resulted whenever Harold suspected some impertinence to her silence, to her refusal to hear.

  It was after one of his beatings that I found her by the shore nursing her wounds, sobbing, probably in time to the waves, with scarcely any volume or any demonstration. Up until that point we had been kept apart, Abigail Sempie, Judith Salt and Grace Powers. Grace appeared like a vision. I would have to admit that I was unnerved when she materialised out of the blue, just standing, looking on, someway along the shoreline. She was the first to speak, to sign. She raised her hand. Hello. Hello, welcome, don’t shun me. It was a benediction. We didn’t know sign, only Grace knew then, but, looking along the shore towards her, Abby tapped herself on the right shoulder with the tips of her fingers pressed together into a claw, indicating herself, then she groaned a single sound, a vowel. E. My name is E.

  *

  One sentence to describe us then, one sentence to denote who we were, who we are, but which is the topic, which the central theme, the driving concern? Well, here goes. Deaf children, three, girls, all born in the same village, in the same year, in the last and final year of the war, 1945. A miracle, a coincidence, an omen, a tragedy, a triumph? All of those, to different people, not all to all, but how is the conclusion of this cosmic configuration to be seen? Eclipse, luminosity, nimbus, corolla, glory? But then, who is to say? Who is to decide? Me? Martha Sempie? Harold Sempie? Agnes Sempie? Mr Drake? Deaf children, three, girls, born in the same village, in the last year of an appalling war. Miracle, coincidence, omen, tragedy, triumph? Let’s see, so few can hear.

  We called ourselves sisters. Grace was the first to say it. She approached Abby and handed her a small doll she had been indifferently carrying by its waist. At first Abby was hesitant, but then took it and held it as if it were a real baby. Grace screwed up her face at that. Abby’s tenderness was too serious, too maudlin, by far. For a moment Grace considered snatching back her bruised and battered offering, but then smiled and said she was Abby’s, indicating it, her open hands signalling the gift. Strangely enough, once the gift had been given Abby considered rejecting it. It clearly crossed her mind to throw the little doll across the sands, but just as her arm moved to eject it she stopped herself, and with an edge of defiance roughly pushed it closer into her chest. Grace mouthed her name. The doll was called Poppy. She let Abby know with great inflexions of her lips. Poppy, her name, the doll, the little pot thing with smudge marks and knotted hair. Abby understood but treated the information, the name, as if it were of no concern of hers, nevertheless she hugged the thing ever closer, but with deliberate petulance, and then it must have crossed her mind that she really should have responded in some way, so she looked up at Grace, who was still standing over her weighing up her handling of Poppy, and groaned her own name again, E, E like Pop-py.

  Grace screwed up her face again in a show of indignation and irritation and told Abby that she was Abigail, a Sempie, she knew about her. She turned to me and told me we would call her Abby. To underline the point, she looked down at Abby again and shouted it aloud, Abby, name, her. Abby replied that her name was E. Grace was satisfied, content it was the confirmation of what she had just said. With that confirmation she said we were like sisters.

  Sisters, three, deaf, Judith Salt, Grace Powers and Abigail Sempie, Abby. After that day on the beach when we found her, found each other, discovered her sobbing against the force of the waves, the day Grace named her for us, we always called her Abby, Abby with a pleading, questioning affection on the second syllable, and it seemed to please her, more often than not eliciting a groan of approval, the confirmation of, my name is E. It wouldn’t have crossed Grace’s mind or mine that we were claiming her, claiming her in the same way Martha had claimed her, naming her for something, naming her in the same way Poppy had been named, for pleasure and ownership. Poor little Poppy. She had been treated roughly, scolded every day of her life, until she was given to Abby and Abby cradled her, hugging her scruffy little figure to her with defiant affection. Grace couldn’t have predicted how much Abby would love stupid, little feckless Poppy, but she did, loved her without hesitation. What could Grace have been expected to predict, though, she was just a child, headstrong, determined and impatient, but still a child, as were her newly discovered sisters, children.

  Grace was perceptive though; we were sisters, sisters of a kind in so many ways, three similarly made but distinct patterns, three shades of deafness. Grace and Abby even looked alike, Grace being a tidy, well-groomed version of what Abby might be. The lines that made up Grace seemed more complete, more definite somehow, as if strength of personality was repeated in physical outlines. Even her colour was more striking. Of course, her clothes were so much brighter than Abby’s, brighter than mine, and her skin took on the sheen of her red checked pinafore, her face suffused with the tone. Abby was simply drab, her features washed of colour, her hair untidily swept across her head, her dress too large, hanging crookedly from her shoulders. Martha had kept her but never preened her. It is unlikely Martha would have known how. There was a quality about Martha that was neither masculine nor feminine but an aggregate of both, making something new, not asexual but hermaphroditic, epicene. She had never given any thought to the bringing up of a young girl, the only issue being possession. Abby might as well have been a species of chicken or pig. It was all the same to Martha. Harold and Agnes had not seen fit to improve on that.

  Funnily enough, although I had as much in common with Abby and Grace as they did with each other, I looked nothing like them. I was already noticeably taller, and even then stiffer, with my plumb-line back, and my propensity to purse my lips and screw up my eyes, and whereas they were fair with smooth skin, albeit one pink and one drained, I was dark, my skin mottled, its surface rough and blemished. I felt older than my sisters, even then, felt a responsibility for Grace’s playfulness and impatience, and Abby’s desire for confined spaces. I was the big one, awkward and exposed, but with enough physical strength to stand up for myself, for them, to some extent anyway. Isn’t that how sisters are though, no matte
r how close, particularly when there are three, two alike, one different, one the elder.

  It wasn’t surprising that we were related, everyone in the village seemed to be related in one way or another, there wasn’t enough population for it to be otherwise, and it was rare that anyone travelled, not then, except in desperate circumstances, which meant unemployment or homosexuality, never simply boredom. The village was a mile from the coast, one of a number of small hamlets, made up of farmsteads and terraced houses, ex-mining houses when the coast was pitted with coal and iron-ore mines and quarries, and on the fringes estates of post-war prefabricated houses which, despite their oddity, we took for granted. The prefabs meant nothing to us, nor did the disused railway escarpments, the spoil banks, the flooded workings, the tumbledown red brick walls that criss-crossed the countryside. They had always been there. It didn’t mean anything. Nor did the fact that we had been kept apart; but we found each other out and discovered we were sisters of a kind.

  My mother, Flora, was a Sempie. Her grandfather Jim Sempie and Martha’s father, Wilfred, were brothers. We didn’t know what that made us except sisters. Grace Powers’ grandmother, Nora, was a Shaughnessy. Nora’s brother, Aidan, was Abby’s grandfather, Agnes’ father. Again they didn’t know what that made them, but assumed it could only be sisters. Besides, Aidan was deaf, as was his Auntie Honor, as were Grace’s uncles Peter and Paul. – It was Aidan who taught Peter and Paul how to sign, then all three taught Grace, which was the only way it was taught then, through families, through clubs, then Grace taught us. – There was a lot of deafness in Grace’s family, but Grace hadn’t been born deaf. She had acquired it at some point in the few years leading to our discovery on the beach, as I had. It might have been scarlet fever, influenza, measles, no one said, not then. Perhaps we were ill at the same time, feverish together, dreaming vivid dreams – I remember a whole tribe on camels chasing me through a desert and my mother trying to hush me, not the camels, nor the men, but me, her frantic child, not realising that shouting out was for my own sake because that’s how it would have to be from then on, shouting to be heard. At least we could talk a bit, Grace and I, awkwardly and amateurish, and hear something, in fact, quite a bit, all told. We were Grade II deaf, but whether that was Grade IIa or Grade IIb was still to be discovered. Abby was Grade III deaf and had been from birth, but whether Grade III a, b or c, who could know? Of course, there was no deafness in the Sempie family, certainly none the matriarch would lay claim to, but then Abby’s grandfather was a Shaughnessy, a deaf Shaughnessy, deaf Aidan. Whether Aidan, Honor, Peter or Paul were born deaf or acquired it no one will ever be sure about. Certainly Martha detested the Shaughnessys, but that wasn’t because they were syphilitics or defectives – the way the deaf were usually seen – not that she ever claimed anyway.

  Chapter Two

  There was a tradition in the Shaughnessy family that Owen’s sister Moyna, Owen being Grace’s great-great-grandfather, had been the first victim of the Great Famine to be recorded as died of starvation. It was said how she bought a love-token, a charm of some kind, from a tinker man she called Panax. She confided in Owen that Panax had promised her that Michael Hoy couldn’t fail but love her. They were teenagers at the time. Owen himself went out onto the bog, but whether to chase the tinker man away or purchase his own token, his own charm, is no longer recounted. He remembered that the curlew and snipe were silent, and that he had never known silence like that before. He thought he saw the tinker man, someway in the distance, like a hunched monkey he said, described him, lolling off in the distance out of their lives.

  The next morning there was frost in July, a frost that wasn’t cold or crystal but powdery, forming a sheen on the potato leaves. Memory jumps then to the stink of rotten tubers. After that all the dreams of Panax were over. It didn’t matter anymore that Michael Hoy, handsome youth that he was, was the illegitimate child of Catherine Hoy, and that she had brought him up in the teeth of the most fierce opposition, shunned and excluded by unforgiving neighbours. Except, at the end, Owen remembers how a crowd went to feed them, but found they were already dead, and that someone else fell down beside them, relieved to have the permission to do so.

  Most people tried to sit it out, just waiting for the inevitable evictions when rents couldn’t be paid, but Owen decided that emigration was the only hope they had. He remembered Moyna’s reluctance and the terrible scene she made being taken away from Michael Hoy, the possibility of Michael Hoy, in a place that wouldn’t have allowed it anyway, and he could never remember it without, in his own mind, seeing her famished face with her thin lips, toothless mouth and purple gums, though he insisted to any audience that she was beautiful right to the last.

  She told Owen that Michael Hoy wasn’t dead, he was famished, and that wasn’t dying, it was a mistake. In the end she went with him, though. What choice did she have? There was no one else. On the road they passed bodies in the wayside, crystal ornamented bodies, frozen in brief time. From that time on Owen always maintained that wandering into the snow, into the cold, scarcely believing they would find the coast, was dying. Don’t look at me and believe I am not dead, he lectured two more generations, because I am, and I died in a place where there was food to feed them that had to be exported. He never said when Moyna died. The Shaughnessy myth was that she died en route and Owen carried her across his shoulders all the way to Wexford where a coroner registered that she had died of starvation, not disease but hunger.

  There was a scene in the snow that Owen kept to himself for most of his life, only telling his daughter Honor, whom he claimed was the image of Moyna, when he was dying himself. At the point when Moyna was certain she could go no farther she started cursing, swearing and blaspheming, then moaned and cried without ceasing that Michael Hoy had never made love to her, that no man had ever made love to her. She then ripped at her clothes, which were little more than rags anyway, and revealed her shrunken, wizened breasts and her childlike hairless sex, after which, she refused to cover herself, her rage never allayed.

  Whether it points to a cruel streak in Owen to have divulged the secret to Honor is not part of the Shaughnessy myth, because history would have it that Honor was a virgin, a deaf virgin, at the time, though Martha did scoff at the notion of any Shaughnessy being pure, even their imbeciles.

  Owen Shaughnessy in England didn’t exactly prosper but survived, though as everything is relative, survival to Owen seemed profound. He stayed in Liverpool for a while and considered America, but couldn’t face the prospect of another voyage with a boat full of corpses. In the end he drifted north with a group of farm labourers, who dwindled en route until he found himself alone at the extremity, the North West Cumberland coast. They were still digging iron-ore in bell-pits at the time, then taking it up into the nearby fells for smelting. He met Eistir and decided to stay. Eistir’s family worked in the nearby coal mines in Whitehaven.

  Nothing much was said about Eistir’s family, other than they found themselves in England in the hold of a coal-boat. Owen said she was a more sophisticated person than he was and even knew Dublin very well, though he never explained how. She died whilst Honor, their third child, was still young, there being something of a gap between Honor and her brothers, Dermot and Edward, called Ed.

  Apparently, before Eistir’s death Owen was quite a grim, humourless man but afterwards became quite the opposite. Of course he was drinking by then. At the time she died he had already finished with the mines and had been renting a small plot for a few years, having previously been forced to move his family on three separate occasions when the mines laid people off. As his drinking worsened and his health deteriorated Dermot, Edward and Honor kept it going. By the time he was ready to admit to Honor, his deaf child, how Moyna had died half-naked, completely starved, he was considered a bit gaga. After all, what was the sense in confessing to Honor? Except, of course, Honor was a marvellous lip-reader and wonderful signer, which she had learnt before oral education was made compulsory
in 1893, by which time she was already twenty-three.

  When Dermot married, another coal-boat migrant like his mother called Maura, Ed and Honor stayed on. Obviously Honor was deaf and didn’t have an opportunity to leave and Ed was either simple or lazy. Given the scale of the house it was evidently a crush when Nora, Christian and Aidan were born, once again the third child being deaf. Presumably Honor taught Aidan to sign because he could certainly do it, though there is no account of Aidan sharing any of his newfangled oral education with her, in fact it is very unclear whether Aidan had any schooling at all.

  Martha was surprisingly diffident in complaining about Aidan, her future daughter-in-law’s father, though for some reason no one could fathom was quick to brand his eventual wife, Hazel, little better than a whore, pronouncing it so that it rhymed with sewer. Nora, though, Aidan’s sister she hated absolutely.

  I learnt all of this later, not when we were kids, sisters, working out who we were, what our sisterly ties amounted to. I was a woman before I realised I had to confront that hatred, though even when we were just kids it was obvious she did hate them, despite her insistence that she had nothing against them, certainly not for being Catholic – an irrelevance above all other irrelevancies, she said – claiming she simply didn’t want them as her neighbours.