STORY: Grey Street
Niamh, a feminist and doctoral student, is faced with things very alien to her outlook when her aunt and caregiver tells her story. She can deal with this revelation, but can she get over its effect on her own past?
Contains slight discussion of sexual matters, but nothing explicit.
Grey Street
Christina Nordlander
Niamh had already written three hundred words on her thesis, so the rest of the morning she let herself take it easy and burn time on the internet: the usual blogs, Pure Virgin of Babylon and Queer Allies, and a couple of new ones. On the cleared area next to the keyboard lay the new notebook with its yellow protective cover and industrial-strength spiral binding, a present from Aunt Anna. The sky had been covered, but the clouds had opened up over Grey Street, neat standalone houses where the red brick was patterned with white.
She got another hundred words written before she had to go downstairs and get something to eat. From the living-room she heard voices: Anna and a man she didn’t recognise. Anna hadn’t said that they were having workmen over. Niamh didn’t go to them, but she heard him in the hallway while she was boiling up the noodles. She glanced through the doorway. He was perhaps in his mid-forties, perhaps younger, comfortably dressed in a leather jacket. The door clattered shut behind him.
“Who was the guy who was here this morning?” she asked that afternoon.
She was washing up, Anna was cutting pork fillets on the worktop next to her. When Niamh glanced up at her, her face was almost hidden behind her fall of coppery hair, the same colour as mum’s on the photographs.
“An old friend, you might say,” she said after a while.
A pause.
“How’s the thesis going?”
It felt like she was asking that every day now, but it was flattering.
“It’s getting to be a bit slow,” Niamh said, managing a laugh so she wouldn’t whine. “I work hard for a while, then I end up sitting in front of the internet. It’s the blogs… I read all the comments on the posts, and that sucks out a few hours I might have been working. I don’t even like it. I need better work discipline.”
“Don’t work yourself to death, that’s why you get those slow spells. You’ve got until autumn, you’ll make it.”
That night Anna turned on the TV for a debate programme, and Niamh brought the Irigaray book down to the living-room to read in the same room. She’d made a couple of pages of notes when Anna drew a heavy breath and the TV switched off.
“I have something I should tell you,” she said.
Niamh looked up. It was black outside the windows, with a golden reflection of the light in the living-room. Cancer? It could only be something about Anna; anything else she would be able to deal with.
“It is about my life before you came here,” Anna said.
She felt her face relax. She’d opened her mouth to ask when Anna continued:
“Until a couple of years after I took you in… maybe from ‘84 to ‘88… I worked as a dominatrix.”
The word bothered her before she had connected it with Anna. Even as a word it felt slippery and glamorised. Wasn’t there a neutral term for it?
“But why did you do that?”
Her voice sounded like she didn’t believe it. Anna’s printed blouse rippled when she shrugged.
“I needed money, and I wanted to explore my sexuality. There are worse jobs, far less ethical.”
It felt like nausea.
“So you did all those things with them?”
She could barely express herself, she sounded like a stupid child. Had she sounded like that when she was twelve and gossiping about sex with the other girls?
Anna nodded.
“Mainly men. There was the occasional woman, but only a few in all that time.”
Niamh’s hands lay stiff in her lap. In the silence, Anna went on:
“Matthew and I are still friends, but that is all.”
“Because you needed money.”
Anna might have nodded again. She couldn’t make herself look up at her.
“So if I started prostituting myself, would you be OK with that? Because I needed money?”
Anna’s hair moved slowly as she shook her head.
“No, I wouldn’t like it, Niamh. But you’re an adult human being.”
She paused.
“And you know that it’s not the same thing as prostitution. I did perform those services for them, but I never slept with them.”
From the words it seemed like she was trying to excuse herself, but you couldn’t hear it on her voice. Was that better, then?
“Well, I guess that’s good…” she muttered.
Anna went on:
“And yes, I needed money. You are old enough to know how much that means. Especially when your mother died and I had you to take care of…”
“So you mean that there was no childcare subsidy, that there weren’t any other jobs… no, I don’t know how old you think I am.”
“But be quiet!”
It was the first time Anna had lost her patience during the talk. Niamh straightened her back until it hurt.
“I never said it was the only way for me to support us. You’re perfectly correct, there were other ways. But this helped. We weren’t living on Grey Street then. It was because of my, yes, work that we could move here.”
She made a stiff little gesture towards the large windows and the lawn in the dark outside. One day, daughter, all this will be yours. She felt ill.
“It’s given us so much more,” Anna finished.
“But you never had sex with them.”
She got to her feet. Anna looked up.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Partly because you met Matthew,” Anna said. “Partly… it’s just as well that you found out. You’re mature enough.”
“I would have preferred not knowing.”
Anna’s gaze was set on something behind her.
Niamh went to bed and turned out the light without reading. It had felt like she wouldn’t be able to sleep, but that was a childish thought, as childish as thinking that you could live on principles without money. Nature took out its due. When she woke up, it took a while before she remembered what had changed.
*
Perhaps it was good to be raised by someone other than your parents. You healed up faster when you found out things about them that you wanted to forget; it wasn’t one of the things that you felt in your own flesh.
Anna had gone out to one of her clients, the house was quiet. The next time Niamh had to top up her water bottle, she stopped in front of the certificate on the faded rose-patterned wallpaper:
ANNA CORRIGAN
Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts
Modern Languages
The Victoria University of Manchester
Her own certificates hung below, B.A. and M.A. in gender studies.
She sat down and found another hundred words. When her attention started to flag you opened the browser and nourished the anger with hentai, porn games about raping women, ignorant comments from someone who might just be trying to get a rise out of people:
Besides, 70% of women have rape fantasies, so she probably enjoyed it.
It showed her what she was fighting against.
It didn’t fill her with the same poisoning rage any more. A couple of years ago she would have yelled at Anna about it; unnecessary, because Anna agreed with her. Perhaps it was a good thing: if nothing else, this course had desensitised her.
After two hours on the thesis she’d worked up to a fifteen minute break. She walked down the shadowy staircase and went for a quick walk up the hill. A fountain in artificial stone dribbled behind a gate. The hills were romantic, just curtains of mist in front of the sky. She just had to walk without thinking about anything other than the chapter. It was nice to get to be a machine for a while. Once she’d handed in the thesis she would be able to go hiking until her blood sugar dropped. Perhaps she would reward herself with a music player. It felt like an almost forbidden luxury: getting to walk as far as you wanted under the grey sky and being able to listen to music at the same time.
When she got back to the house, her body was calm from the repeated motion. The door was idyllic with deep panels and silk-matte glass in the pane. She’d written six hundred words; she would get up to fifty thousand at least. Maybe she should vacuum before she switched to reading. She needed to make up. It didn’t matter how she felt about what Anna’d done in her youth; Anna had raised her, alone, and paid her university fees.
The air felt bland and almost stale on her skin. That money had paid for these years. Her education was built from it.
It was stupid. Anna had quit while she herself was in nursery school. How much money could you make from something like that? Anna might have supported her with the money she got from the interpreting and Patronus Conference Space. The last few years she too had started making money from undergraduate teaching.
Inside, she went to the living-room and stood for a while in front of the shadowy bookshelves. She went to her room and looked down on her computer without turning it on.
All she could do was keep going like before. As soon as she’d graduated she would be able to find a full-time job and start looking for an apartment. The thesis would help others, even if it was just one student. There would come a point when she could start living off money that she’d earned and knew where it had come from.
She turned on the computer and heard it whir into life.
It wasn’t enough. She would hand in her thesis and graduate, but Anna’s money had paid for the entirety of her studies. It was intertwined with her, the way that the food she’d eaten during all those years had built her body.
THE END
Contains slight discussion of sexual matters, but nothing explicit.
Grey Street
Christina Nordlander
Niamh had already written three hundred words on her thesis, so the rest of the morning she let herself take it easy and burn time on the internet: the usual blogs, Pure Virgin of Babylon and Queer Allies, and a couple of new ones. On the cleared area next to the keyboard lay the new notebook with its yellow protective cover and industrial-strength spiral binding, a present from Aunt Anna. The sky had been covered, but the clouds had opened up over Grey Street, neat standalone houses where the red brick was patterned with white.
She got another hundred words written before she had to go downstairs and get something to eat. From the living-room she heard voices: Anna and a man she didn’t recognise. Anna hadn’t said that they were having workmen over. Niamh didn’t go to them, but she heard him in the hallway while she was boiling up the noodles. She glanced through the doorway. He was perhaps in his mid-forties, perhaps younger, comfortably dressed in a leather jacket. The door clattered shut behind him.
“Who was the guy who was here this morning?” she asked that afternoon.
She was washing up, Anna was cutting pork fillets on the worktop next to her. When Niamh glanced up at her, her face was almost hidden behind her fall of coppery hair, the same colour as mum’s on the photographs.
“An old friend, you might say,” she said after a while.
A pause.
“How’s the thesis going?”
It felt like she was asking that every day now, but it was flattering.
“It’s getting to be a bit slow,” Niamh said, managing a laugh so she wouldn’t whine. “I work hard for a while, then I end up sitting in front of the internet. It’s the blogs… I read all the comments on the posts, and that sucks out a few hours I might have been working. I don’t even like it. I need better work discipline.”
“Don’t work yourself to death, that’s why you get those slow spells. You’ve got until autumn, you’ll make it.”
That night Anna turned on the TV for a debate programme, and Niamh brought the Irigaray book down to the living-room to read in the same room. She’d made a couple of pages of notes when Anna drew a heavy breath and the TV switched off.
“I have something I should tell you,” she said.
Niamh looked up. It was black outside the windows, with a golden reflection of the light in the living-room. Cancer? It could only be something about Anna; anything else she would be able to deal with.
“It is about my life before you came here,” Anna said.
She felt her face relax. She’d opened her mouth to ask when Anna continued:
“Until a couple of years after I took you in… maybe from ‘84 to ‘88… I worked as a dominatrix.”
The word bothered her before she had connected it with Anna. Even as a word it felt slippery and glamorised. Wasn’t there a neutral term for it?
“But why did you do that?”
Her voice sounded like she didn’t believe it. Anna’s printed blouse rippled when she shrugged.
“I needed money, and I wanted to explore my sexuality. There are worse jobs, far less ethical.”
It felt like nausea.
“So you did all those things with them?”
She could barely express herself, she sounded like a stupid child. Had she sounded like that when she was twelve and gossiping about sex with the other girls?
Anna nodded.
“Mainly men. There was the occasional woman, but only a few in all that time.”
Niamh’s hands lay stiff in her lap. In the silence, Anna went on:
“Matthew and I are still friends, but that is all.”
“Because you needed money.”
Anna might have nodded again. She couldn’t make herself look up at her.
“So if I started prostituting myself, would you be OK with that? Because I needed money?”
Anna’s hair moved slowly as she shook her head.
“No, I wouldn’t like it, Niamh. But you’re an adult human being.”
She paused.
“And you know that it’s not the same thing as prostitution. I did perform those services for them, but I never slept with them.”
From the words it seemed like she was trying to excuse herself, but you couldn’t hear it on her voice. Was that better, then?
“Well, I guess that’s good…” she muttered.
Anna went on:
“And yes, I needed money. You are old enough to know how much that means. Especially when your mother died and I had you to take care of…”
“So you mean that there was no childcare subsidy, that there weren’t any other jobs… no, I don’t know how old you think I am.”
“But be quiet!”
It was the first time Anna had lost her patience during the talk. Niamh straightened her back until it hurt.
“I never said it was the only way for me to support us. You’re perfectly correct, there were other ways. But this helped. We weren’t living on Grey Street then. It was because of my, yes, work that we could move here.”
She made a stiff little gesture towards the large windows and the lawn in the dark outside. One day, daughter, all this will be yours. She felt ill.
“It’s given us so much more,” Anna finished.
“But you never had sex with them.”
She got to her feet. Anna looked up.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Partly because you met Matthew,” Anna said. “Partly… it’s just as well that you found out. You’re mature enough.”
“I would have preferred not knowing.”
Anna’s gaze was set on something behind her.
Niamh went to bed and turned out the light without reading. It had felt like she wouldn’t be able to sleep, but that was a childish thought, as childish as thinking that you could live on principles without money. Nature took out its due. When she woke up, it took a while before she remembered what had changed.
*
Perhaps it was good to be raised by someone other than your parents. You healed up faster when you found out things about them that you wanted to forget; it wasn’t one of the things that you felt in your own flesh.
Anna had gone out to one of her clients, the house was quiet. The next time Niamh had to top up her water bottle, she stopped in front of the certificate on the faded rose-patterned wallpaper:
ANNA CORRIGAN
Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts
Modern Languages
The Victoria University of Manchester
Her own certificates hung below, B.A. and M.A. in gender studies.
She sat down and found another hundred words. When her attention started to flag you opened the browser and nourished the anger with hentai, porn games about raping women, ignorant comments from someone who might just be trying to get a rise out of people:
Besides, 70% of women have rape fantasies, so she probably enjoyed it.
It showed her what she was fighting against.
It didn’t fill her with the same poisoning rage any more. A couple of years ago she would have yelled at Anna about it; unnecessary, because Anna agreed with her. Perhaps it was a good thing: if nothing else, this course had desensitised her.
After two hours on the thesis she’d worked up to a fifteen minute break. She walked down the shadowy staircase and went for a quick walk up the hill. A fountain in artificial stone dribbled behind a gate. The hills were romantic, just curtains of mist in front of the sky. She just had to walk without thinking about anything other than the chapter. It was nice to get to be a machine for a while. Once she’d handed in the thesis she would be able to go hiking until her blood sugar dropped. Perhaps she would reward herself with a music player. It felt like an almost forbidden luxury: getting to walk as far as you wanted under the grey sky and being able to listen to music at the same time.
When she got back to the house, her body was calm from the repeated motion. The door was idyllic with deep panels and silk-matte glass in the pane. She’d written six hundred words; she would get up to fifty thousand at least. Maybe she should vacuum before she switched to reading. She needed to make up. It didn’t matter how she felt about what Anna’d done in her youth; Anna had raised her, alone, and paid her university fees.
The air felt bland and almost stale on her skin. That money had paid for these years. Her education was built from it.
It was stupid. Anna had quit while she herself was in nursery school. How much money could you make from something like that? Anna might have supported her with the money she got from the interpreting and Patronus Conference Space. The last few years she too had started making money from undergraduate teaching.
Inside, she went to the living-room and stood for a while in front of the shadowy bookshelves. She went to her room and looked down on her computer without turning it on.
All she could do was keep going like before. As soon as she’d graduated she would be able to find a full-time job and start looking for an apartment. The thesis would help others, even if it was just one student. There would come a point when she could start living off money that she’d earned and knew where it had come from.
She turned on the computer and heard it whir into life.
It wasn’t enough. She would hand in her thesis and graduate, but Anna’s money had paid for the entirety of her studies. It was intertwined with her, the way that the food she’d eaten during all those years had built her body.
THE END