Constellations Read online

  De Profundis

  On our final day, we arrive at the grotto concourse for morning Mass. Hundreds of pilgrims are gathered and the spectrum of illness is striking. There are carers with the gravely ill; adult children with infirm parents. A teacher pushes my wheelchair and we search for a spot to position ourselves. A steward approaches and begins to speak quickly in French, but I don’t understand. He grasps the handles of the chair, steering it towards the front of the crowd, where the immobile and very sick are lined up, not just in wheelchairs, but also in beds. There are people with oxygen tanks, crumpled bodies – men or women? – who can barely sit up. The steward positions me beside a man in a wheelchair who has a metal frame bolted to his head. He twitches occasionally but is otherwise motionless. There is drool on his face, and I want to say something to him but can’t. In front of me, another man who could be sixty or ninety lies in a hospital bed. His small frame is tucked tightly in, and the bones in his hand are like filigree. The skin is bruised, with swollen veins, which I recognise as a phlebotomist’s attempt to find a vein. Under the blankets, he is a husk, almost not there.

  At thirteen, I have never known death but I can sense it here. It clouds the air. I don’t want to look at these people, and yet I do look. This is the breakdown of bones, the slowing of a heart, the confinement of our own bodies: beings that once sprung into the world, vibrant and visceral and pulsing with life. But my feeling of terror is trumped by something else, something stronger: I feel like an imposter, with trivial, chalk bones. A woman behind me starts to whimper, softly at first, but then louder until her cries drown out the liturgy. The Mass lasts a long time, and I focus on the rise and fall of responses. People weep, or lie still on their mattresses. In the shadow of the grotto, I know that I will go home, and that I will live with my imperfection; that my surgically altered bones will carry me through the years. And under the cloud-heavy French sky, I am grateful for that.

  Via Dolorosa

  Two weeks later, I returned to the hospital for a pelvic X-ray. The doctor announced that my bones had deteriorated rapidly and I would need a major operation. Devastated, I tried to focus on gearing up for the complex surgery, rather than the prospect of more missed schooldays. The slow cycle of recovery. The boredom. Today, as an orthopaedic fix, an arthrodesis is only performed on horses – I imagine washed-up purebreds owned by sheikhs, dosed up on anti-inflammatories. It’s a last resort for pain relief, and involves fusing the ball-and-socket joint of the hip together using metal plates and screws. To heal fully, the bone solidifies over ten weeks, all of which are spent in a hip spica plaster cast. The cast covered two thirds of my body, from chest bone to toe-tips, and required two people to turn me over. It was a jaundiced white; the layers of mesh together weighed as much as an anchor. During ten weeks of bedpans and confinement, I learned (on the quiet) how to heave its sarcophagus heft out of bed whenever my parents were out. The bones slowly cleaved to each other, rendering movement minimal and the leg shorter. It held fast for twenty years, until two pregnancies sixteen months apart were like a bomb going off in my bones.

  Rotation, Abduction

  After ten weeks encased in my hip spica (I’m my own alabaster statue) a doctor attempts to remove it with a cast saw. Blade meets skin and I try not to imagine what’s happening beneath the plaster. The pain feels like a scald, of heat spreading. I explain this to the orthopaedic doctor – this man I’ve never met – and he does that thing I’m used to male doctors doing: he tells me I’m overreacting. A rotating blade is slicing into my flesh, but I need to calm down. The room fills up with screaming. Me, as ventriloquist throwing pain across the room.

  When my mother starts to cry, he demands that she leave the room.

  The blade cuts and cuts, with its own rhythm, and this man urges it on, like a horse in a race. Fifteen minutes later, I plead with him to stop and he finally gives up, visibly annoyed. In an operating theatre the next day, the plaster is cut away like a sculptor’s mould. Under the cast, there is old skin and new scars now: open, jagged lacerations, running down each leg like the broken line of a border. Around them, my limbs look tanned, but this is just weeks of dead skin layers. The leg swells that night and a nurse applies a compression bandage. Every time it’s removed, it pulls at the new scabs and the bleeding starts again. Twenty-something years on, I still have six ghost scars on my thighs and knees. Vertical lines, pink and fierce, telling a story.

  Hips and Makers

  During my second pregnancy, my hip finally deteriorated irreparably but a surgeon tried to explain the pain away as ‘just baby blues’. Eventually I convinced a doctor that the only solution to twenty-four-hour pain was a total hip replacement (THR). This was granted as if it was a privilege, rather than something essential. The familiar need to plead and convince, to prove myself worthy of medical intervention. My body is not a question mark, and pain is not a negotiation.

  I received a THR in 2010, when my children were tiny. After, I could cross my legs and cycle a bike for the first time in over twenty years. It beeps at airport security checks. I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. After years of medical procedures my scars are in double figures, but they too form a familiar landscape. Joints can be replaced, organs transplanted, blood transfused, but the story of our lives is still the story of one body. From ill health to heartbreak, we live inside the same skin, aware of its fragility, grappling with our mortality. Surgery leaves scars; physical markers of a lived experience encountering pain. I think of my children, hoping their lives are free from such moments. That atavism will spare them, and their bodies will fare better than mine.

  Sometimes I imagine myself in Lourdes, walking the hills with my ceramic and titanium joint. Looking at all that stone and religiosity, the grand grotto that frightened me, viewed through the eyes of my lapsed faith and non-belief.

  Although I do believe. Not in gods and grottos and relics. But in words and people and music. Our bodies propel us through life, with their own holiness.

  Relic and bone.

  Chalice and socket.

  Grotto and womb.

  In moments of distraction, there’s a Kristin Hersh song that often floats up from the floor of my mind. I’ve rolled the words back and forth like oars; sung my children to sleep with it.

  We have hips and makers

  We have a good time

  They keep me dancing

  Finally it’s all right

  And it is all right. When there is a day that is pain free, or the sun shines, or my curious children ask about the lines on my skin. I explain my good luck, grateful that things were not worse. I am an accumulation of all of those sleepless nights and hospital days; of waiting for appointments and wishing I didn’t have to keep them; of the raw keel of boredom and self-consciousness illness is. Without those experiences, I would not be a person who picks up those shards and attempts to reshape them on the page. If I had been spared the complicated bones, I would be someone else entirely. Another self, a different map.

  Hair

  In the 1980s, nearly every six-year-old girl I know has long hair of unremarkable brown, as I do. There is a whole vocabulary for these shades, but mine is frequently referred to as ‘mousy’, which makes me think of timidity, and of mice in hedgerows. A girl at school passes on a great and mysterious secret: plaiting your hair and leaving it in overnight leads to transformative gorgeousness the next morning. Caught up in this revelation, I bind my locks into tight plaits and pull the blankets over my head. The anticipation, the eye-scrunching excitement, means I barely close my lids on the first night. The bumps are hard to sleep on. It will be worth it, I tell myself, already imagining a new me. Waking early, I take my mother’s comb, with its collapsible blue and red handles. It’s an Afro comb, and I do not know how it came into my mother’s possession. Whether it was a gift, or an impulse purchase at a pharmacy counter. It is an excessive tool for the fi
ne, thin hair we both share. I loosen the bobbins and begin to brush, unravelling them as a skein of wool.

  And there I am: Rapunzel without the tower, and at six I am ambivalent about princes. A memory appears: Kate Bush in a video on Top of the Pops, all fierceness and red-brown mane, her hair so much part of her essence and energy. In front of the dressing table mirror, with its mottled edges, the plaits loosen. I stare at the waves, at this sea of hair. And for years to come, every time I hear David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’, and the line about ‘the girl with the mousy hair’, I think of those long ago plaits and that old mirror. Of weaving a spell out of your own hair, of how we can alter ourselves with one gesture, in one night.

  On a whim, months later, I tell my mother I want to cut off my hair. The hairdresser, my aunt, lives in a terraced house and cuts hair – only women’s, never men’s – in her kitchen. She is always immaculately made up, lip-glossed and kohl-eyed, with elaborate ash highlights. In less than an hour, mousy chunks are scattered on her lino. I regret it instantly, and for years beg my mother to let me grow it back. She refuses, saying that short hair is ‘easier to manage’. My aunt deems it a pageboy style, and every time we return for a trim, my mother tells her to cut it ‘like Princess Diana’ as she flicks through a magazine. I begin to miss my hair, the feel of it grazing my shoulders. No more night-plaiting and waking to hair that looks like rippled sand after the tide has gone out. On a trip to a family wedding in Liverpool, a man mistakes me for a boy and calls me son. I cry for hours. My godmother, who has always had short hair, consoles me. She gives me the first hardback I ever own, bound in red mock leather with gold indented lettering. I read, but don’t understand everything in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. These girls are as unique as they are similar. Their close, bonded friendships make me want to leave suburban eighties Dublin and relocate to their nineteenth-century world. And Jo – surely everyone’s favourite Little Women character? – does something that makes my admiration of her even greater.

  As she spoke, Jo took off her bonnet, and a general outcry arose, for all her abundant hair was cut short.

  ‘Your hair! Your beautiful hair! Oh, Jo, how could you?’

  Her newly shorn look invokes horror. Even Jo assumes ‘an indifferent air’, when it is clear she is distraught at the loss of her hair. Oh, Jo! We are crop-haired kindred souls! I think. The books we first read are the ones that indelibly affect us. The characters feel closer to people who are real, who merely happen to live in another time and place. As an only girl, I envied Jo and her sisters. Their closeness and connection was not unlike my friendship with my brothers, but hair was not something I talked to them about.

  Jo’s reason for cutting off her ‘one beauty’ is to help the family, who need money. Her sacrifice parallels the narrative in O. Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’, which also places hair at the centre. In the story, Della has some of the most exceptional hair in all of literature:

  [It] fell about her, rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her.

  Della’s motivation is similar to Jo’s. It is Christmas Eve and the opening line tells us how little money she has – ‘one dollar and eighty-seven cents’. Desperate to buy her husband a platinum chain for his beloved watch, she sells her knee-length hair to a wig-maker for twenty dollars. While she waits for Jim to return from work, she thinks: ‘Please God, make him think I am still pretty.’

  When Jim arrives home, he is shocked by her actions and changed appearance. The tragedy of their situation is elevated when he reveals that he sold his treasured watch to buy expensive (but now useless) tortoiseshell combs for Della’s hair. Their mutual sacrifice of precious objects reinforces their love, but not before Della fears her short, unfeminine hair will mean that Jim desires her less. ‘Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?’

  Della’s self-definition is through her physical appearance, specifically through the hair that her husband so admires. Her identity is bound up in her looks, and not something that stands alone. The story was published in 1905, when many women stayed home and didn’t work. Della is financially dependent on Jim, awaiting his return from work on the day she sells her hair. Economically powerless, she uses the one thing she has as a commodity, and the act of cutting her hair can be seen as either a castration, or an act of empowerment. I didn’t have Della’s luxurious hair, but cutting mine off at seven felt thrilling initially, until I longed for it to grow back. I had tomboy tendencies, and never felt like I wasn’t a girl. Femininity was an abstract, a word I didn’t know.

  Hair is dead.

  Each curl, every dyed or product-plied strand, is resting in peace. I used to believe the myth that hair continues to grow after we die, but the only part that is alive is inside the follicle under the scalp. And to me, it sounds made up, or just gloriously apt, that head, pubic and armpit hair is known as ‘terminal hair’. Keratin, the protein that forms its basis, is the same one found in animal hooves, reptile claws, porcupine quills, and the beaks and feathers of birds. Wing tip to split end, fetlock to forelock, we mammals are a menagerie of polypeptide chains. Each strand contains everything that’s ever been in our bloodstream. Are memories there too, lurking between medulla and cuticle, embedded in each lock?

  Not dead, but ‘terminal’. Protein and protean. Like blood, it’s difficult to tell male and female hair apart, but it is women who have been historically judged for their crinicultural choices. Reductively labelled in noir films as blonde, redhead or brunette (a practice that exudes privilege, and ostracizes people of colour and other ethnicities). Hair has been used to define women racially, sexually, religiously. It makes them into temptresses: represents a troika of femininity, fertility, fuckability. This conflict is inherent in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus where Venus is ‘born’. Depicted as new and unsullied as a baby, but represented as a fully formed, voluptuous woman. Naturally she must cloak her nakedness – with what else but a swirling mane. The women of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings have loose, abundant hair, like in Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. According to Jewish tradition, Lilith was Adam’s first wife and her name was long associated with female demons (one translation of her name is ‘night hag’). She was created at the same time as Adam, and not, like Eve, from his rib. The relationship soured because Lilith refused to bow to him, considering herself an equal, and not lesser. Emblematic of seduction, in Rossetti’s picture she is utterly preoccupied with combing her lush hair. John Everett Millais paints Shakespeare’s Ophelia as she drowns in the river, her hair a funereal shroud. If loose, untrammelled hair implies that women are morally questionable, hair pinned up and tied back means the opposite: respectable, prim and obedient. Hair as signifier and symbol represents everything from social position and marital status to sexual availability.

  In the song ‘Hair’, from PJ Harvey’s 1992 album Dry, the singer gives voice to Delilah, a biblical woman, with one of the most infamous hair stories of all. Delilah is anchored in history as a betrayer and fallen woman because she tells the Philistines the source of Samson’s strength. In Harvey’s song – as well as her obvious love for Samson – Delilah admires his hair, ‘glistening like sun’. She recognises its dual power – that it is possessed of actual strength, but also as a tangible thing she covets. Harvey’s lyrics plead: ‘My man / My man’, as Delilah realises that her betrayal means she can’t have him, or his hair. Samson is weakened and defeated without it, but there are other possibilities that come with the loss of hair. As a teenager, I learned that there was power in absence.

  Wogan’s Barbers was an old, wooden-planked room, now long gone from Dublin. One Saturday afternoon, aged sixteen, I had made up my mind and took the bus to the city centre. In its dark room (a different kind of waiting room), I queued among old men for an hour. When my turn came, I eased myself into the leather chair and the elderly barber encircled me in a black cape. Upon hearing my request, he sho
ok his head.

  ‘We don’t do that for girls.’

  Red-faced and watched by other curious customers, I slunk out the door and made my way to another barbershop. Again I sat down in another leather chair, and the cape ritual began.

  ‘You sure, love?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Last chance, now?’

  ‘Go for it.’

  The radio blared, tuned to a 1980s hits station. The clippers slid through my dyed roots, buzzing in my ears. He started in the middle, working outwards, and at first it resembled a samurai’s chonmage. In five minutes, it was all gone. Like Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (what must it have been like for an actress in the 1920s to shave her head for a role?). Shorn. On the bus home, I wore a hat against the February cold, and the word rolled around my head like a marble. Shorn. At school, there was outrage. A talking to. Fears of copycat head-shavings. Enquiries about my health. Jokes about Sinéad O’Connor, who had been on TV that week winning an award. In the months that followed, I was often mistaken for her. One man insisted I’d been in Filthy McNasty’s pub in London, drinking with Shane MacGowan. Every time I’ve shaved my head, or sported a suedehead of regrowth, there is always a response, especially from men. They are mostly horrified, or bemused; some declared it attractive: but I was always asked to justify myself. To explain what I’d done. And why.