And I was dying about him—I really was—he was that good-looking and streetwise and together. Sometimes I’d be waiting for him and I’d see him coming up the street before he’d spotted me. Then I’d stand there, watching him, and I couldn’t believe my luck.
When I met Robbie I was a good girl trying hard to be a bad one. I was at Queens, studying Russian and living in a flat with four girls from Lurgan who were all doing geography and knew each other from school. I’d got talking to one of them in the coffee bar at the end of the first week: they’d rented this flat, she said, and there was a room going spare if I didn’t mind it being a wee bit poky.
“How poky’s a wee bit poky?” I asked.
“There’s space for a single bed. And a window as well, but it’s too high up to see out.”
I said yes right away. It was cheap, and already I hated my landlady. Besides, if there’d been enough room they’d have stuck in another bed and I’d have had to share. But they didn’t really want me, nor I them. They were into country and western and the Scripture Union and cocoa in their pyjamas and studying hard. I wasn’t, but I might as well have been. I was stuck with them, knowing there was more to this student-thing than I was getting, not knowing how I was going to lay hands on it. Until I met Robbie, that is, and everything changed.
It was in the canteen of the Students Union. I mostly didn’t go there because it was cheaper to eat at the flat, but I was going to see a Russian film at the University Film Theatre and there wasn’t time to go back before it began. There I was, a plateful of food on a tray in one hand, cutlery from the plastic bins in the other, when Robbie knocked into my elbow and near sent the whole lot flying.
“Sorry,” he said.
“That’s alright,” I said, though my fried egg had a wet, orange look to it and the chips and sausages were afloat in spilled Fanta. Then he was trying to give me his plate and I was refusing and he was insisting, and the end of it was we were sitting at the same table sharing his chips and his fry and I never did get to The Battleship Potemkin and the girl I was supposed to see it with never spoke to me again.
After that I was Robbie’s girl.
I thought it had all been a providential accident, but a week hadn’t passed before he was telling me he’d had me picked out, he was only waiting his chance.
“What d’you mean by that?” I asked him.
“I fancied you, stupid,” he said, sliding his hand between my thighs. But I wasn’t having that, or not right away, so I made him spell it out.
He’d fancied me, he said. He’d seen me around, but somehow I always vanished before he got near enough to speak. Then there I was, right under his nose, so he’d knocked into me, just to get talking like, and look how we’d ended up.
Robbie wasn’t a student, but he lived two streets up and he shared a flat with students. He used the university canteen because it was a good place to pick up girls. He looked at me hard when he said the last bit, but I wasn’t going to rise to that one; I knew it was sort of a test to see would I make a fuss.
I didn’t rise, but I did take my courage in both hands and I asked him why he fancied me. I wasn’t fishing for lies or for compliments either—I badly needed to know.
He said it was my hair, but he wouldn’t say anything more. Later, when we’d been to bed a few dozen times in about two days, he said he’d been right, so he had, I looked so repressed, a volcano waiting to blow.
I didn’t say anything. Part of me was offended, and part of me was the opposite. Repressed at least held potential. And I sort of liked the volcano bit. But maybe he’d meant frustrated?
A couple of weeks later I moved into Robbie’s flat. His flatmates smoked dope and drank way too much and never went near the Scripture Union. I was shy with them, but I liked them as well, and soon I knew loads of the wrong sort of people and felt I was halfway alive.
Just the same, it wasn’t that long before we started looking around for a place of our own. It was Robbie’s idea, but I was into it too. We wanted to be by ourselves.
We found a place and moved in, and Robbie began to talk about getting married. I’d say I was nearly flattered to begin with, but then it dawned on me that he meant it and I panicked.
I couldn’t, I told him, I hadn’t even finished first year. Besides, I was way too young, and everyone would think I was pregnant.
He gave me a funny look.
It was a shock that look, I can tell you.
“Hold on now,” I said to him, hardly knowing what I was saying. “Marriage is one thing—I could maybe even get used to it. But not pregnancy. Pregnancy is definitely, definitely out.”
He laughed and said he could always get a rise out of me, and when did I want to get married, what about early July? He’d take extra time, and we could go off somewhere over the Twelfth Holiday and I could start into my second year with a ring on my finger, then everyone would know who owned me.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have had the wit to hear that, but I didn’t. I never had sense—my mother was never tired telling me that—I never had any idea of what I was doing till it was done.
Before we were married I took Robbie home to Derry for the weekend. Londonderry, I should say, for I was a proper Protestant then, a paid-up member of the tribe. It only turned into Derry after I’d moved down South.
We went to Londonderry on the bus. Separate rooms and best behaviour. Robbie’s idea. I could have told him for nothing we weren’t about to get anyone’s blessing.
My brother, Brian, took me aside about half an hour after the introductions.
“You’re not serious, are you?” He didn’t expect an answer.
I phoned my mother from Belfast for her verdict, though it was plain as the nose on her face what she’d thought. But I couldn’t ever leave her be, I always had to force her hand, to make her spell things out in black and white.
There was a small, deep silence down the phone line. Then, in that neutral, damning voice of hers, she told me he was common.
And I laughed aloud, for he was, he was all the things she had reared me against—he was working-class, sectarian; he drank too much; he neither knew nor cared what people thought.
And there was I, the teacher’s daughter.
I laughed, but she’d hurt me and she’d meant to.
Poor Robbie, he wanted me to have my family’s blessing; he was trying in his own way to do right by me.
Dream on. The only thing in his favour was that he wasn’t a Catholic, but even I couldn’t make her say that out loud, for being sectarian was part of being common.
So that was that. My father was dead, and I’d no other siblings, which meant there was no one else to object except for Robbie’s family. And they did, by Christ they did. If they said I was the wrong girl for him then that was far and away the kindest thing they said.
None of them liked me. His brother Billy said four years, five at the most—it would take that long for the bed to cool. And there’d be no children—not unless I got caught—there’d be nothing to hold us together, so we’d part.
His sister Avril said my mother’s unsayable: at least she’s a Protestant. Which shocked his sister Rita, for it had never once occurred to her that anyone belonging to her would even think of marrying out.
They said all this to