‘Pro-Choice Supper Club’ by Niamh Campbell
I knew Claire Bright at school, where she became known for a near-unthinkable transgression. Her name is like the sharp cold succour of sunlight in springtime, isn’t it?
Ours was a convent school. Music was taught in the old dormitory, in a large room facing a nuns’ walk and the sea that would be racked in high weather. Suddenly, during class, rain would be lashed against the long loose panes like gravel, or trapped air would pipe in the chimney flue, or wind would travel down the flue and push against the piece of plywood sealing it. It would cause the wedged plywood to squeak against the frame of the fireplace. On the walls were amateur paintings of a jazz quartet, different musical instruments, and crooked screens of musical notes. From the windows you could see the grey bank of the sea, but of course every desk and chair faced the other way, taking in two blackboards with faded notation lines.
In this room there was always an inoffensive odour of decay and candle-wax, like the air inside a church, until a foul note suggesting something very intimate began to develop when I was I suppose fourteen or fifteen, when music class was still compulsory. The smell was at first gourmet, deep and rich like chocolate or perhaps like red meat. Some girls had begun by then to give off adult odours of various hues – at one end, a thoughtless horsey cornstarch metabolic sort of smell, but at the other, rank B.O., and in between the sebum of our scalps, the cheese-and-onion of our junk nursery food, the urinary note of cigarette smoke, the old-banana glow kinked through with sugared disinfectant issuing from week-old sanitary bins. To begin with, the smell in the music room was interesting, redolent of fruit and fermentation, but it became, day to day and week to week, something unspeakable, and all the more so for being familiar to us. It aged from lunchbox mould to bachelors at mass through garam masala and ammonia, coming to rust and the shellfish packing plant until at last someone discovered a bloodied tampon inserted behind one of the notice boards, and drew it out, and saw just what it was, and shrieked. I don’t know how I heard that it had been deposited by Claire Bright but, within a short space of time, this was the rumour we all believed.
She was the kind of girl you would believe it of. She was visibly troubled, having eyes that slid sinisterly from side to side in her head and coarse black hair in a bowl cut. She said strange prophetic-sounding things and read large science fiction novels. She did not have many friends. Neither did I, because I was, by then, already bored of everything, but the only means I had of expressing this were petulance and lamentation and inward migration. I don’t think anyone noticed me at school but they certainly noticed Claire Bright.
We said: she’s a lesbian. We said: she’s a Satanist.
I think how darkly compelling it is to picture the schoolgirl with her coltish thighs extracting a swab of cystic tissue and new blood, gummed clots, water-thin haemorrhages, and stowing this, as what – a curse? A hex? A rebellion? To have a vaginal channel wide enough for tampons at fifteen is itself unusual and obscene. She seems to me like a kind of midnight horse or symbol. We were thrilled and declaimed her but we wished, I know, that we had done it ourselves.
I don’t know, now, if Claire Bright really did this thing. I think she would have been expelled if it was traced to her, don’t you think? Perhaps she was expelled, and I have forgotten it.
I know that many years later I was walking down the long traffic island in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, putting flyers into the hands of assembled protestors, women chatting and eating ice creams and setting up tripods or unfurling large banners, when I looked into a white face with deep-set eyes and heavy black hair worn in a Chinese-shiny bob with bangs, and I recognised it as the face of Claire Bright. This recognition did not hit me at once. We smiled at one another on a mutual impulse of recognition and, further down the traffic island where I was still handing out flyers mechanically and saying steering group meeting, steering group meeting repeatedly, I remembered her name, I remembered the tampon.
I realised that I had never seen that tampon nor been told conclusively that she had been involved. The story made me laugh now. But also it seemed somewhat disloyal or unsisterly of me to tell anybody. During the parade I remarked to one of my companions, I know that girl, I knew her at school. She responded Claire Bright just as I said Claire Bright and added: she’s an artist, she has a studio in Pimlico.
These days it is easy to find out whatever you like about a person.
But it was not until later again that we actually met. She said yes, I remember you; she put her hands over her face in a grotesque of despair and moaned, oh god oh god, that school. This was at a musical fundraiser in a basement social space on a summer night. Claire Bright played keyboard for a girl who set Natalie Barney passages to music. There was only a dark dais dripping with banners to play on, and some salvaged church benches for the audience, and most of us sat with our jackets bunched on the concrete, drinking from cans. Afterwards Claire included me in a conversation with a group of girls all drinking cider lotus-legged, as the night got on and the air grew crisp and the man who rented the social space began running people, and at this point someone said let’s go to the studio!, and it became apparent that they were referring to her studio. It was a night alive with city trees and Buddleia, the canal coarsely fragrant, the white ghost bike bracketed to a bridge festooned with fairy lights and memorial photographs. I felt well and happy for the first time that I had come back to Dublin. In my life, and despite the convent, I have always found it difficult to make friends with women.
It had been many years since I had seen the ghost bike. I drifted my hand over the stiff white saddle and leaned in to look at the photographs, waiting for those stragglers in the singing, drinking group to catch up and climb from the towpath, but the photos were blurred. As I was doing this I was suddenly delivered back to a dream I had had, some nights before, of a tree decorated with trinkets and medals and lights, a large tree in the garden of the grand house that belonged to my lover’s wife. A great number of my dreams involve parties or festive events and I am often lost or anomalous, like a thirteenth fairy, in these dreams, and this was no exception: my lover’s wife, a willowy beautiful woman with a brittle English voice, had been guiding me and some other women around the house and showing us things, holding a flute of golden liquor in her hand. There were fireworks and many lights everywhere, trestle tables of punchbowls I suppose, but the point or the prick or the punctum of the dream was a given trinket on the tree that revealed itself to be a little locket photograph of me – taken when I was a child – that I happen to know in reality belongs to my mother. By the idle logic of the dream I understood this to indicate my lover’s wife or family had somehow known me as a child and I felt compromised and thrilled by this. By now the canal stragglers had caught up; we crossed the street like scattered straws and climbed the stairs to an attic overlooking the water. While I half-knew some people, most were strangers to me, which made me glad that I was drunk and tightly high.
It was the women: the women and girls, the floating crowd, the frail hysteria, which had made me think of the dream.
Now in the attic people pulled cushions out and lit roll-up cigarettes, gasped into cans, opened a window pane to make a vaulting gesture to the sky. There were severe stars, more than was typical for the city, and a half-moon. Some people had bought chips. Some were men.
‘Do you remember much about school?’ Claire Bright asked me.
‘Not much at all really. We left years ago.’
‘I have a sister there still.’ She folded herself leggily into lotus at my side. I could tell that several girls in the group were impatient to get her attention and that she was popular. The last thing I wanted to talk about was school.
‘I’ve seen your art online,’ I told Claire. ‘It’s brilliant.’
‘Oh god oh god,’ she said. ‘What I’m working on now, it’s killing me.’
A man with red hair lay on his back on the floor with a cigarette cocked in his hand and began to sing, baldly and humorously, come with me and I’ll treat you decent, I’ll stand you drunk and fill up your canon. One girl sang a protest song in a quiet voice. When a person sang, they closed their eyes and were alone in the moment, but also a part of the room and the listening ring. I thought of my childhood and the kitchen chairs dragged up against the wall to leave the linoleum clear, the adults singing long dolorous songs together at the end of the night. The only song I could perform was ‘Henry Lee’, and as I did I heard my voice issuing smokily and jazzier than it had when I was a child, and feeling liquidly delicious in my throat. Afterwards I was happy and arrogant. When the time came to leave in the early morning Claire Bright announced that her latest project was a deck of bespoke Tarot cards and drew a card for each of us before we went. Mine was hand-drawn in charcoal and looked like the shroud of Turin.
‘Ah,’ she intoned deeply. ‘You will spend six weeks without makeup: you will become more confident, with clearer skin.’
I laughed and replied that this would be no trouble for me.
From issue #5: autumn/winter 2017
About the Author
Niamh Campbell’s short fiction and essays have appeared in The Dublin Review, 3:AM, gorse, Five Dials, and The Tangerine. She was awarded a Next Generation literary bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland, and annual literary bursaries in 2018 and 2019. She holds a PhD in English from King's College London and is a current postdoctoral fellow for the Arts Council of Ireland at Maynooth University. Her debut novel This Happy was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2020. She was the winner of the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. She lives and works in Dublin.
