Big Girl, Small Town a Novel Michelle Gallen
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Big Girl, Small Town a novel Michelle Gallen ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2020 For Mehdi, who sees clearly What if we accept these points of light, their translucence, their brightness; what if we let ourselves enjoy this, stop fearing it, get used to it; what if we come to believe in it, to expect it, to be impressed upon by it; what if we take hope and forgo our ancient heritage and instead, and infused, begin to entrain with it, with ourselves then to radiate it; what if we do that, get educated up to that, and then, just like that, the light goes off or is snatched away? Milkman, Anna Burns Contents Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Acknowledgments About the Author Majella kept a list of stuff in her head that she wasn’t keen on. Her top ten hadn’t changed in seven years: 1) Small talk, bullshit, and gossip 2) Physical contact 3) Noise 4) Bright lights 5) Scented stuff 6) Cunter 7) Sweating 8) Jokes 9) Make-up 10) Fashion The full list of things Majella wasn’t keen on extended to ninety-seven items, with subcategories for each item. For example, make-up included nail polish, lipstick, foundation, mascara etc., and Majella had further itemized each subcategory: Item 9.1: Make-up: Nail polish • Is too heavy—weighing fingers down. • Looks utterly unnatural when colored—e.g., red, orange, black —giving people the appearance of wearing beetle carapaces on their finger ends. • Difficult to apply, requiring practice, time and skill. • Prone to smudging during drying period. • Impermanent: cracks and flakes sometimes in hours, but always within days. • Requires chemicals during the production process and for removal. • Complete waste of money. The list of things Majella did see the point in was much shorter: 1) Eating 2) Dallas (except for the 1985–86 season, also known as Bobby’s Dream) 3) UK Gold 4) Her da 5) Her granny 6) Smithwick’s 7) Painkillers 8) Cleaning 9) Sex 10) Hairdryers Sometimes Majella thought that she should condense her whole list of things she wasn’t keen on into a single item: • Other People. It was people who talked shit. It was people who made up rules that said you were cool or not because of what you wore. It was people who judged one-half of the human race for not wearing make-up, and the other half for wearing it. It was people who switched on lights, made noise, sweated and fought, wept and shouted. Majella knew when she came down to it, she wasn’t keen on Other People. Monday 4:04 p.m. Item 12.2: Conversation: Rhetorical questions — Majella? Her ma’s voice was coming from the hallway. Majella pulled the duvet over her head, balled it in her ears and closed her eyes. — Ma-jell-ah? She could still hear her ma’s oversize monster slippers slapping closer on the stairs. Joke slippers were item 10.4 on Majella’s list. — MAJELLAH? Are ye STILL lying in yer pit? Majella took her hands from her ears and began to flick her fingers to distract herself. She flinched as her ma cracked her sharp knuckles on the bedroom door. — Majella? D’ye not have work tae go til this evening? Majella had work to go to, just as she had done every Monday for the past nine years. And Majella knew that her ma knew that, because her work schedule and weekly Mass were the only routines their lives revolved around. She didn’t know why her ma was asking her a question that she already knew the answer to. So she didn’t reply. — Am ah standing here talking tae myself? Am ah just some eejit wasting her breath talking til her daughter’s door? Is there nothing that— Majella needed her ma’s voice to stop.—Ah’ll get up when ah’m ready. Ah’m not in tae six. Majella lay stiffly in bed as her ma stood outside the door for a few moments. She slowly relaxed when she heard her shuffling away and flopping back down the stairs. Majella waited until she could hear the telly chittering, then she swung her feet to the ground and stood up. She unlocked her bedroom door and trudged to the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She sat on the plastic toilet seat and began to pish. She pished for thirteen seconds, which was a good long pish, made possible by the two liters of Coke she’d drunk before bed. She’d read in one of her ma’s Your Health! magazines that Coke was a diuretic. The magazine highly recommended diuretics to its readership, to reduce bloating from excess water. But the Your Health! team weren’t fans of Coke—they recommended an all-natural organic dandelion tea that readers could purchase from their magazine or website. Majella had been impressed that scientists had proved that dandelions were a diuretic. At school everyone’d called dandelions “Pish-the-Bed” because they said when you picked one you’d wet your bed that night. Majella knew this wasn’t true, but in school, she watched the big boys in the yard pick on the wee-er weans, forcing them to pick a dandelion, then jeering at the child for the rest of the day. Some children wet themselves in class before ever getting near their bed, earning a scolding from the teacher, who would then dress them in the classroom- accident pants. Majella didn’t like the classroom-accident pants: the same washed-out pair had served both boys and girls for years unknown in St. Jude’s Primary School. Majella had only been got once by the dandelion gang. The big fellas had surrounded her in the school yard one break time. As soon as she’d understood they wanted her to pick a dandelion, she walked straight over to the nearest bunch, plucked the biggest bloom she could see and presented it to Charley Daly, the ringleader, with her blank face (the one she used when her ma and da or the teachers were shouting). Charley Daly had been pure raging. He’d knocked the dandelion to the ground and mashed it into the tarmac with his foot. Then he’d shoved Majella so hard she fell back on her arse. Majella had sat where she fell, watching him and his gang walk off behind the prefab classroom, then she picked herself up and went back to sitting on the step of Mrs. McHugh’s classroom on her own, where she’d hidden her hands in the cradle of her skirt, flicking her fingers and humming until the bell rang. Majella stood up and went to the mirror. It was spattered with flecks of toothpaste from where her ma’d brushed her teeth the night before. Majella couldn’t brush her teeth with the mirror like that, so she turned on the electric shower and stripped off as she waited for the hot water to kick in. Her da had installed the shower in 1988. It was the last home improvement he’d done. The last home improvement that had been made in the house in fifteen years. The grouting was now black with mold, the shower head leaking from a warped seal. The white tiles around the bath clashed with the patterned tiles that had covered the rest of the room ever since the seventies. Her da’d promised to rip the old tiles down and fit the whole room with plain tiles—he’d even bought enough tiles to finish the job. But when his brother Bobby died, he’d lost all interest in the bathroom and had left the tiles sitting where they still sat, locked in his shed in the back yard. Majella remembered him that autumn after they’d got the news. The way he shrank into a dark place inside himself. Things were never the same after that. Majella watched the steam rise and clot on the window, then she climbed into the green bathtub. The water was as hot as she could bear and she stood under it for a long time, until she felt sure that the smell of too many years of chip grease, fish batter, burger meat and sausage fat had been washed from her burning skin. Afterwards, when she was toweling herself dry, she thought she could catch the tang of incense from the funeral last week. She didn’t know how to wash that away. 5:00 p.m. Item 21, sub-items 1–4 (inclusive): The news Majella listened to the creak of each stair as she made her way down them. Ever since she was wee she had loved these sounds. She loved how they sounded different depending on whether you were coming up or down the stairs, and the speed at which you were traveling. She did not love the way the fag smoke drifting from her ma in the living room clashed with the fresh after-shower smell of her skin. She went into the kitchen, where she flicked the kettle on before dropping four slices of white bread into the toaster. She grabbed her soup mug and spooned three sugars into it, then went to the fridge. There was frig all in it, as usual: a carton of skimmed milk, a tub of spreadable margarine and twelve mini-bottles of her ma’s probiotic yogurt. She poured some of the anorexic milk into her mug, then closed the fridge.