‘Protest’ by Kathy D’Arcy
In the peak-awkwardness years towards the end of school and the start of college, I remember walking around the city alone a lot, not knowing what I was looking for or if I was even looking for something.
It’s strange how people can smell certain kinds of loneliness on you. I would be sitting in cafés or on park benches, pretending to read, and I would be approached by the same kinds of people over and over again in a way that never happens now. Arriving in pairs, they would strike up a genial conversation they knew I couldn’t quit, before asking something like if I had found Jesus (in those days, I really had: he watched me all the time). Would I like to come with them to their prayer meeting, or their picnic in the countryside, or, as the case may be, their hate rally?
That’s how I briefly ended up in the anti-choice movement.
The group I gave in to (you know it, the one with the amusingly fascist-sounding name) was led by a young blond man whose transparent eyelashes and carefully-worded sentences reminded me of my edgy buddy Jesus. He accosted me in the street with those eyelashes, and I accepted his invitation to my first meeting.
It was a mix you see a lot in that movement: half Rich Retired, half Emotionally Confused, with the former recruiting the latter. Eyelashes was different, and there was a hushed awe surrounding him. He was so young, so beautiful, so cold, so articulate – the RRs were in ecstasies over him. He spent a lot of time talking to me that night, while we ate ham sandwiches and glued photographs of foetuses to cardboard, and I went home with a pocket full of tiny-feet badges and a heart full of excitement.
My first and last street protest coincided with my parents’ wedding anniversary. I told my mother I needed to go to the city to buy them a last-minute gift, and she warned me to be ready to return in time for the special Mass. I walked through drizzle to where the small group of bright-eyed zealots were bunched outside Brown Thomas, setting up a table with a white cloth and already shouting things like ‘Abortion is a Sin!’ A young comrade of the EC type asked if he could be my Heathcliff. ‘I’m so glad you came – Keep Abortion out of Ireland!’ interrupted Eyelashes. I went to stand behind the table. I have no idea what I said to people. What is there to say that in any way makes sense of wanting to force people to stay pregnant? I had yet to become sensible of the bodies of real, alive women in the narrative. I do, however, remember two encounters: a young woman whose arm I patted while I spoke, who responded quietly, ‘don’t touch me,’ and a school friend who came over to say hello and then backed away, bewildered, when I whispered that she shouldn’t talk to me because I was being weird. I suppose it’s heartening that I was already apologising.
When a group of long-suffering Gardaí showed up, I took my Verbal Warning and backed away so I wasn’t arrested. I couldn’t do it to my parents on their anniversary, I explained to Eyelashes, though of course I couldn’t do it to my parents on any other day of the year either, until I no longer needed them to come and collect me afterwards. ‘That’s completely up to you,’ he said messianically. He and the others all stayed put, sat on their placards, and went in the van. A red-haired woman showed us all the tear in the shoulder-seam of her orange blouse as they lashed her in. Our youngest, a thirteen-year-old someone had brought, lost the run of himself and began taunting the officers; he was slammed to the ground onto one of our foetus placards. I was unimaginably jealous.
As the van-loading drew to a close, a young woman approached. ‘There’s drug dealers around the corner, why don’t you move them?’ she shouted at the guards. They ignored her; they seemed to know her. She came to chat to me as the van pulled away, and implied that of course I would be follow- ing the van to the station to wait for my friends to be released. She wanted to come with me. She had a round, pale face covered in amber freckles, and wore a Fortycoats-style collection of jackets.
The station was in a part of town I had never been to, well away from Brown Thomas and its bright neighbours. It was – still is – a huge square block of authority between the more ramshackle end of the city centre and the river. It was my first time at any kind of Garda station. We went inside and asked about the others. ‘They’ll be released soon enough,’ said the officer behind the desk with a withering smile. At the pale girl’s suggestion, we sat outside on the kerb and waited.
Soliciting her agreement to my limited range of anti-choice slogans didn’t take long, so to pass the time, she talked an endless, dreamy flow of facts and stories about herself; I learned everything about her and immediately forgot it all. When I self-importantly said that I wrote, she said that she did too. Even though she’d had to leave school early, she said, she still remembered the last thing she had written there. It was a story about a girl who had a mes- sage to deliver. She trailed helplessly into the story itself.
The girl was young, and lost. She was lost in many heavily-described ways, both physically and metaphysically. She had to deliver the message to save someone – herself? The world? But in truth she had nobody and no home and was totally alone. The world she described around the girl was quiet and disinterested; she moved through it with her mysterious package like a wraith. Eventually the girl got on a train with the message, even though she didn’t know where she was supposed to take it. On the train there was another girl. She had a message too; or did she? No, she didn’t. Anyway, they talked, and after a lot more narrative buildup they realised wordlessly that they were going in the same direction. The last sentence hung and trailed. She sat back to see my face.
A man in a suit went to walk around us and stopped. ‘Nora!’ he cried in surprise. He wanted to know how the pale girl was, and what she was doing there. He seemed benevolent, avuncular. An ID badge for some organisation was clipped to his jacket pocket, but I couldn’t read it. She smiled and looked at him, then at me. She said to the kerb that he must have mistaken her for her twin. He looked at me, then back at her.
‘Eh, your twin?’ he said.
‘Yeah, my twin,’ said the girl. ‘You know. She had the baby. She’s fine.’ Behind us, the city sounded faintly.
‘Oh. Okay,’ the suited man said. He looked at his watch, then at me again.
‘Well, take care of yourself anyway.’
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment in the months that followed when I crossed over from anti- to pro-choice, what the steps were. I remember start- ing to hear the words that were coming out of my mouth, wondering, ‘do I really think like that? Or is this just about me being right?’ I remember being scared to think too much about it. I remember looking at a pregnancy test.
The big old window above us creaked open a few inches, and the thirteen-year-old stuck his head out. He shouted and laughed until a hairy hand caught his collar and cracked the back of his head against the frame, then he let himself be pulled back in. The group was being released. Within minutes they were all with us on the street, rhapsodising about police brutality. The pale girl went to each one to congratulate them and gave everyone big, expansive hugs from within her many coats. Eyelashes came over to me.
‘You’d want to watch your wallet there,’ he whispered with a smile.
From issue #6: spring/summer 2018
About the Author
Kathy D’Arcy is a poet, workshop facilitator and and youth worker based in Cork city. She recently completed a Creative Writing PhD in UCC, where she teaches with the Women’s Studies MA programme and has taught Creative Writing undergraduate and adult education courses. Her poetry collections are Encounter (Lapwing 2010) and The Wild Pupil (Bradshaw 2012). She is editor of Autonomy (New Binary Press 2018) and was Chair of Cork Together for Yes in 2018. www.kathydarcy.com
