Bridget
Donegal wasn't so bad after a while. It was small and boring, as it always will be, but it started to feel more like home. I started to make friends with the other girls, and by the end of my first year there I had worked my way into a group. At first we played with dolls and makeup and did all of thsoe girly things, and when we were older we giggled about boys and continued to play with makeup.
Gran died when I was 13, only about six years after we went to Donegal, and I appreciated having the girls and their mothers to turn to when I was entering adolescence with a houseful of men. Mary's mother took me under her wing and I spent any afternoons with them. It was a good way to hide frm home, and that was something I did a lot then. It was terrible after gran died.
While she was alive she had kept a fragile but loving home for us. Until the end, the house was usually supplied with lovely cookies and muffins and things. She was a grand cook, gran. She probably let us run a little wild. Dermot and I, anyway. Colum would never be a worry to anyone. It was a stable home though, and no one worries about two heathen children and an alcoholic man who thinks he's still a child when they're under the supervision of a responsible old woman.
It was a bit different when she died though, wasn't it? Dermot could hardly take care of himself, much less us. Poor man was rather attached to us though, being the only family he had left, and I'll never forget him getting into a terrible fight with Aunt Maggie about it. After they had yelled at each other sufficiently, she tracked me down. she was dressed in neat, pretty clothes and flashy jewelry and she smelled strongly of perfume. She slipped me a piece of paper and said in a voice not quite sweet enough to cover the venom, "Bridget Darling, just call me and I'll take you away from that gombeen man." She kissed my cheek and left then. I almost called her several times, when I was angry and tired and all I could think about was how lovely it would be to live with a woman who would teach me to do make up and hair the proper way, not just out of magazines, and who would take me shopping for all of the fashionable clothes they had in England. I still wonder how things might have been different if I had.
As it was, it was tough. None of us knew how to cook. We ate a lof of sandwiches and frozen foods for a while, except when someone brought us food, which happened quite a lot at first. Colum, God bless him, tried. When I tried to help him, reluctantly, it only led to a fight. I yelled at him and broke a dish and he yelled back and somewhere in there I believe I hit him. In the end, we were covered in flour and eggs and we had to eat sandwiches. Oh, we both learned to cook eventually, but we didn't make the mistake of trying to cook together again.
We did work things out over time. We took turns cooking, depending on when Colum was working at his part time job after school. We started fighting more and more though. Over school, over gardes, over how late I stayed out . . . then there was my first boyfriend, Jack O'Malley. He was a perfectly nice boy, and weren't all the other girls jealous that I had caught such a handsome lad, and on the football team at that? And what do you think Colum did but chase him off almost as soon as I caught him? One date was all I ever got out of it, and who knows what sort of terrible things Colum did to him. We fought for weeks over that, but it didn't stop him from scaring other boys off. What sort of a brother does that sort of thing anyway?