O'Donnell Slant

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-84840-839-5
Verlag: New Island
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

'A heartfelt celebration of all kinds of queer love' - Alice Linehan,  Gay Community News      A ground-breaking Irish lesbian love story, set across the decades from the 1980s AIDS crisis to the 2015 marriage referendum.    Ro McCarthy, single in her fifties and working a quiet job, is sustained by her love of books and her deep friendships. Although she still doesn't approve of marriage - not even for the straights - she is canvassing for yes in the 2015 marriage equality referendum. But, as the ghosts of her activist past join her on the campaign trail and her eagerness to confront a familiar discrimination turns to obsession and fury, Ro must finally face the long-buried trauma and loss of her youth.    Thirty years earlier, Ro is a young Cork woman living her best life in Boston, undocumented and working multiple jobs, making life-long friends, and falling in love with Jenny. Soon, however, the young gay men who have become Ro's new family - from Ireland and elsewhere - begin to die. Shocked and grieving, she finds purpose in AIDS activism and a community that is loving and living against all odds. In the wake of this macabre heyday which Ro just about survives, her charged entanglement with Jenny will bear witness to the resistance and survival of an invisible generation of warriors.    Slant is a headbutt to the heart, told from within a protective community, that will reveal and celebrate all the kinds of love needed to sustain a life. 

KATHERINE O'DONNELL was born in Cork and spent her childhood on the naval base at Haulbowline island, attending a two-teacher school. She studied at University College Cork and later Boston College on a Fulbright Scholarship. She worked briefly as a journalist in RTÉ. Katherine is now Professor of the History of Ideas at UCD's School of Philosophy. She has been an activist for many years, involved in, most notably, the Justice for Magdalenes Campaign and, more generally, with justice issues and the LGBTQ+ community. Katherine practices Buddhism and acupuncture and splits her time between Dublin, Cork and her converted camper van. Slant is her debut novel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Donnell, Katherine

Leseproben

1

(There’s) Always Something There
To Remind Me

‘Ro McCarthy?! What the hell are you doing here? It’s gone the hour – your team is already on the corridor!’

Helen Keogh, cleaning supervisor at the Copley Plaza Hotel, generally felt the need to put a rocket under my arse. And I suppose, in fairness, I regularly enough gave her sufficient cause for having that feeling.

‘Oh hi, Hel!’ I said, as I shut my jotter, stashed my biro in my coat pocket and slipped off the large laundry sack overstuffed with used sheets.

‘I’m actually finished my shift,’ I said. ‘I’ve punched out, like. I just had to write something down in case I forgot it.’

‘Is that for your college course?’ said Helen.

‘Yeah, it is. Well, kind of.’ I said. ‘Well … it’s related to it.’

Back then I never told anyone I wrote fiction. Most people thought my only creative streak was that I liked to cut my own hair (invariably ending up very short as I sought to correct the mistakes I made). I secretly wrote stories to contain emotions I had nearly or really experienced or to record things I had seen. I wrote stories to get a kind of a handle on things that puzzled me, to wrap a cordon around the things I didn’t yet understand.

‘Go on off home now and get some kip,’ said Helen. ‘Everyone else from the early shift is long gone and you’ll only be after confusing me, I’ll be giving you more work if you stay around here.’

‘Grand so.’ I grinned at her. ‘Have a nice day!’ I said in a mock-American accent.

‘Oh have a nice day, honey!’ she sang back at me.

When I got down to the hotel lobby I found a chaos of people my own age happily anticipating having a party on someone else’s expense account. I had heard this crowd was going to be here for the weekend. These international students were already on full scholarships at universities across America. They were to have three days and two nights in Boston, all on the tab of the Fulbright Commission. I was fascinated by the fizzing variety of nationalities. Everyone was ‘psyched’ as the Americans liked to say, and the happiness was contagious.

I mingled among the crowd and surveyed the groups milling around the reception desk, and that’s when I saw her. She stood alone between her suitcase and an aggressively large rubber plant, a little apart from the throng. She stood stiffly and at odd angles to herself, looking past the clutches of students introducing themselves to each other while waiting to check in. She was smoking a cigarette and the light coming in through the lobby’s high glass atrium caught the trail of smoke and made copper and gold glints in her astonishing halo of curls.

My gaze kept snagging on this girl, who seemed to be waiting for the melee to soften before attempting to register. She wore a long black jacket with shoulder pads and the sleeves, with striped lining, were folded up to her mid-arm. Her flowing white shirt reached below a stretchy black mini-skirt, she wore black leggings and dark-green pixie boots. I said a swift prayer that this girl was able to speak good English and I half-skated and nearly tripped across the lobby tiles to talk with her.

She made a polite reply to my ‘hello’. She had an English accent, which was disconcerting. Her afro head of curls was also much more blonde close-up.

‘I actually thought you might be Danish,’ I said, and I have absolutely no idea why I said that.

‘No, I’m English,’ she replied, in a very English voice.

‘Do you have Danish ancestry?’ Apparently I couldn’t just shut up.

‘None.’

There was a tinge of silence for some moments.

‘So where did you get your amazing hair?’

‘My parents. Sorry, that’s obvious,’ the girl said, blushing. ‘As far as we know all the ancestors are English. Though in Boston, I am surprised some people think I am Irish.’ She smiled.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. They hear an accent.’

‘You’re definitely not Irish, though.’

‘No.’

‘I’m Irish,’ I said.

‘Yes, I thought so. I mean, sorry, I presumed.’

‘D’you think I have an Irish accent?’

‘Yes. I mean it’s a very nice accent. I like it.’

‘I’m Ro, by the way.’ I put out my hand to shake and immediately felt an even worse eejit, but thankfully the English girl shook my hand in a firm and formal manner.

‘Please call me Jenny. My friends call me Jenny.’

‘My friends, and everyone else, call me Ro.’

‘R-O-W? R-O-E?’

‘Even simpler – R-O.’

‘Would you like me to call you Ro?’

I shrugged. ‘Well, Jenny, we’d be friends if you did, but I answer to many names. In work situations I’m often called Rosie or Rose, but I’m also called Roz or Róisín. I was christened Rosemary. Take your pick.’

Jenny answered, ‘There’s Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.’

We finished the quote together, both careful with the careful comma.

‘Pray you, love, remember.’

We relaxed in a comfortable silence, letting the frisson of poetry percolate. We stood next to each other and contentedly watched the students piling around the registration desk. I was glad I had found someone who liked to quote poetry. It is always good to find your own kind.

After a brief pause I asked, ‘Did you have far to travel today?’

‘Just across the river. Harvard.’

‘That’s a big suitcase you have.’

‘I know. It was hellish to take on the T. I suppose I should have taken a taxi, but it seemed it would be a simple commute. I should have just brought my satchel as you have.’

I deflected from admitting I was not, in fact, checking in.

‘What are you studying in Harvard?’

‘I’m not studying anything there really. I mean, I’m not registered for any degree, nor taking any courses. I’m just using my time there to finish up my Doctorate in English Lit.’

I could tell Jenny was assiduous in being pleasant, she was doing her best to be that English thing of being ‘cheery’ in the way people on British TV quiz shows make the best of a bad lot and show they are good sports.

‘A doctorate, like a PhD? Fantastic! So you’re doing that for college back home? Where do you go to college?’

‘Newnham, Cambridge.’

‘Wow, Cambridge! That’s wonderful. I love those opening scenes in Brideshead Revisited, where Sebastian atones for vomiting in the window by covering Charles’s room in flowers. I have a friend who watches those scenes from the TV series over and over again – he has it on video. Anytime he’s feeling a bit under the weather he sticks it on and it’s on rewind until he feels better. He had to get a second copy of the video because it started jumping, he rewound it so much. He’s a gay, of course.’

Jenny nodded. ‘Yes indeed, the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge can be very similar.’

Jenny smiled and nodded. Nodded and smiled.

I was about to explain that I was not one of the students checking in, that in fact I had just punched out from my cleaning shift.

‘You’re checked in?’ Jenny asked.

And with an electric prickle of all-over shame I copied Jenny’s nod. I nodded. Yes. I pushed out of my head, the fib, the untruth, the obfuscation, the misunderstanding, the joke (which would it be?) that I had just passed by Jenny.

I tried to say that I was studying part-time at the University of Massachusetts, that I was registered on the master’s programme in English literature and I should have it done within two years, but that felt like a lie even though it was, in fact, factual. The actual truth was that I was one of the 40,000 ‘New Irish’ in Boston. (I might say ‘undocumented’ or ‘don’t actually have my own Green Card’. I wouldn’t say ‘illegal’.) Jenny must surely have noticed the Irish people her age who were working all over Boston: if she had bought a coffee or a beer in Harvard Square, she would most likely have been served by an Irish person in their twenties. I tried to tell her I was one of the New Irish, but I felt a weird disjunction, a kind of shame, and it wasn’t only that I had just pulled a fast one in trying to pass myself off as a Fulbright scholar, it was simply that it was embarrassing to be from a country that was so patently failing at sorting itself out.

‘Where are you studying, Ro?’

‘Eh, same as yourself.’

‘You’re in Harvard too!’

‘Eh, no, like, I’m in Boston too. UMASS. And I’m also studying English. I’m nearly fluent.’

Jenny didn’t seem to get the joke, she nodded sagely.

‘What’s your dissertation topic?’

‘Well, eh, it’s a master’s I’m doing, so it’s all courses, like, no thesis as such.’

I tried to tell Jenny that I was a part-time student, but instead I ended up in a very long explanation about how I had tried my hand at waitressing.

‘I was crap at it. You know, I worked with brilliant girls – they could shimmy around and have banter with the customers and let them know the specials and sort out all the different options and combos and remember what to hold, what to put on the side, what to substitute, and they could get all the plates out and back without a bead of sweat breaking or a hair falling out of place. But me? I was a mess. I could only do a quarter of the tables everyone else could do. It just took me ages to get the orders down properly while remaining any way civil. If I speeded up it was just a disaster – I couldn’t say, “Hello, I’m Ro, your server for today,” without making it sound...