Carrying … buckets?
No one is actually punching or hitting, just pushing, pushing, pushing. There’s about twenty of them, and the closer I look, the more I see how familiar they are.
Fiona, recovered from the initial shock, is standing on top of the stage with me.
“Maeve,” she says, pointing. “Look.”
I follow her finger and see a tall blond man in a soft grey sweatshirt and navy peacoat standing with his back to the wall.
“Isn’t that the guy from the cafe?”
And it is. It’s Aaron. Aaron has brought the Children of Brigid here, to Roe’s gig. To a queer charity cabaret night. He’s not moving. He’s not even speaking. Just standing, watching the fury impassively. For a moment, our eyes meet, and I’m sure that Aaron can see me for who I am. The other sensitive. But his eyes rove on as he keeps scanning the room.
“Where’s Roe?” I shout over the din. “Can you see him?”
A drag queen has taken her shoe off and is clubbing someone with it. The pink-haired lead guitarist from Small Private Ceremony is shoving a CoB member back, yelling at him to hit her with his best shot. The CoB kids aren’t doing anything except pushing and shouting: shouting the worst kind of words you can think of, words that were probably thrown at Jo and Sarra last week when they were in Centra queuing for a hot chicken roll.
And then, somebody gets grabbed. A fourteen-year-old boy who I had noticed on the way in for having better make-up than a Jenner sister is held by the back of the head, and dragged to the doorway where the people with the buckets are waiting.
“What’s in the buckets?” Fiona yells. “What are they doing?”
My mind goes to the worst. Piss? Blood? Animal poo? What on earth could they possibly have in there?
The boy’s face is pushed into the bucket, held there and, a few seconds later, is pulled out again dripping wet.
Water. I think it’s water.
His mascara is running down his face, his foundation an orange mess. He is pushed back into the crowd, shell-shocked and crying.
They’re taking his make-up off.
They’re trying to take everyone’s make-up off.
As the realization sparks and carries, the room goes wild. Punches are thrown. Blood starts to spatter. The cabaret crowd start to fight. And that’s when I see him. Roe, his mouth coated in blood, his dress torn at the shoulder. He is trying to get to Aaron, but he is being stopped by a boy I recognize as Cormac, the boy from the CoB meeting who played GAA and shaved his legs. Roe pushes past Cormac and manages to square up to Aaron, who seems calmly surprised that Roe wants to speak to him. He gives a “who, me?” look of indifference, as if Roe has wrongly recognized an old neighbour.
I stare at Aaron’s face and realize that this is exactly what he wants. He wants the cabaret crowd to descend into violence: he wants them to throw punches, to stab with stiletto heels, to go out of control. He wants to be able to maintain that all CoB did was show up with a few buckets of water. He intentionally brought only twenty or so Christian teenagers with him, against a crowd of one hundred. He wants it to look like an uneven fight. He wants to lose.
This, I realize, is a PR exercise. And Roe, screaming and shaking Aaron by the shoulders, is doing exactly what Aaron wants him to do.
Gay mob descends on Christian charity group!
‘Art’ collective goes wild!
Life’s a Drag: how the city’s drag scene turned violent!
I imagine the pieces in the paper, the segments on the radio, Aaron giving perfect soundbites to the press, the endless talk panels. “Yes, of course, the CoB shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but I think we can agree it’s all gone a bit too far…”
The crowd is too thick for me to be able to get over. Fiona, who seems to have realized the intention to all this at the same time I have, is recording it on her phone. “These guys have showed up and started attacking people,” she shouts over the din. She is on Instagram Live. “They’re attacking queer people.”
Above the wall where Aaron stands, there is a framed photo of the Cypress the year it first opened.
And then I see her. The Housekeeper is standing by Aaron, river water trailing off her. Her dress is wet and plastered to her body.
By now, it seems normal for her to make an appearance. When an imbalance occurs in the world, something else must rise to meet it. Aaron came to Kilbeg because he spied a hole in the fabric, the hole the Housekeeper cut for him. But whose side was she on? Was she here to support Aaron, or to support me?
I hold on to my bracelet. My sailor’s knot. I keep my eyes on the frame. I try to remember the spell, and imagine myself tying a lasso around the picture frame and bringing it forward. I picture it smashing on Aaron’s head. I breathe. I start a chant.
“Tip the frame, tip the scales.
Where Roe wins, Aaron fails.”
I keep it up, over and over, faster and faster. Roe keeps shouting at Aaron, Aaron keeps his shit-eating grin up. Another kid gets grabbed and thrown into some water.
“Tip the frame, tip the scales.
Where Roe wins, Aaron fails.”
“Maeve, what are you doing?”
The frame is wobbling. It’s moving.
“Fi, give me your hand.”
“What?”
“I said, give me your fecking hand.”
She gives me her hand, and I slide it into the sailor’s knot bracelet. The white satin of my dressing-gown cord is netting us together in a single spell.
“Just hold it. And watch the frame. Watch the frame, Fiona. Above his head.”
You’re a sensitive, Maeve. You can do this.
I start the chant again, and soon Fiona starts it, too. We do it together, urgent, frantic.
“Tip the frame, tip the scales.
Where Roe wins,
