We present an extract from Every One Still Here, the debut short story collection by Liadan Ní Chuinn.
A young girl spends her days on a double-decker bus. A bride-to-be prays to St Valentine's bones. Flowers are found, left in bouquets, all over a museum. Teenagers gather to dissect the human body. Teeming with compassion and thrumming with energy, the stories in Every One Still Here are scrupulous in their attention to detail, epic in their scope.
From Novena
Tara spends many hours of her life on her phone. It would disturb her to think just how many hours, so she doesn't. If someone had her phone, they could know more about her than any person ever has. The phone is not separate from Tara. It is an extension of her. It remembers things better than she does, suggests words in the patterns she uses them; it knows her thoughts. She is there, in the screenshots she takes, in the Notes that she makes.
She maintains two Instagram accounts: one using her name, followed by and following people from school, from various jobs. She posts stories relating to her stall, what hours she’ll be at the market, and posts pictures of herself only occasionally, maybe once every three months, when she looks very happy. She has a second account on which she follows the accounts she actually wants to. Things are harmless but this is it: she is still scared that other people might see. On this account, Tara follows a lot of Mormon women, beautiful people with seven, eight children for whom they sew dresses and make from-scratch sourdough bread.
Things are split. Tara works at a call centre, but there is her life, and then there is the image of her life; she does not disclose the call centre on the Instagram account. Each week at the market, she takes a photo of the stall all set up, her pastel take-away cups, and shares it. She writes things like: coffee BEANS, one of your five-a-day?! She staggers posts throughout the week, vaguely giving the impression that she’s working at it full-time. When she meets people, she talks about the stall. They bring it up, because they’ve seen it. It looks right. It looks good. There she is, twenty-six, with the help of a teenager because business is just going that well. She doesn’t ever, directly, lie.
Moll works on the weekends; she got the job in a manner that left Tara the last to find out. Tara came home and her mother relayed the conversation she’d had with Rita, Moll’s grandmother, with the confidence of someone who had given complete assurances, and Tara understood that she was being informed rather than asked; that, in fact, the arrangement had been made. She gives Moll twenty pounds a day. She does not need the help and she notices the money, but she has enjoyed being able to say, sometimes, that she’s nipping out for a smoke break. Tara doesn’t smoke, but it lets her stand outside on her phone.
She stands outside. On her phone, a Mormon woman is milking a cow by hand. There is the sound of milk hitting the bucket, the small warm words of children weaving in and out around them. There is an enormous dog, a toddler clinging to its yellow fur.
There are so many of them, these families. Tara spends months, spends years, of her life like this: watching. These Mormons, these women, they feed their children raw milk. They film their children galloping on horses with no helmets, no saddle; let them run, unattended, through huge farms and fields. They follow none of the rules in which Tara believes. But nothing bad ever happens to them. She’s unsure when but she realised, at some point, that the world is like this: some people have seven children and all of them live.
******
Moll’s mother tells people that her mother lives with them, but this is not the truth: they live with Moll’s grandmother. Moll’s mother is a social worker. She works unhealthy hours, under extreme stress. Moll says that her mother turns everything into a negative. 'Isn’t this nice? ’someone might say to her, enjoying meeting up. ‘If only, ’Moll’s mother will say, ‘if only we’d done it before.’
Her dad is in Derry. She sees him often but has never lived there. Her dad’s parents brought him to Dungannon from East Timor when he was a baby, some time between walking and school; he’s lived in Derry since university. She used to stay with him every weekend but now it’s less regimented, it’s more when she fancies. Moll tells people that as a child she thought herself funny—every talent show, every drama class, she was up there, trying—and took years to realise that her father killed himself laughing only because he loved her. There he was: eyes-closed, knees-weak, thigh-slappinglaughing.
She’s woken by her grandmother, who comes into her bedroom, opens the curtains, pulls her duvet away, saying always, ‘Molly? ’with that tone: expectation. She takes a small backpack and she walks up the road. She’s learning to drive, something her grandmother and mother are paying for. They got her insured on the car and gave her L-plates for her birthday. When she’s in Derry, her dad takes her to a car-park and they practise bay-parking. At home, she does one lesson a week. People are invested in the learning. ‘You’ll have so much freedom, ’they say. They seem so certain. She looked at Tara’s Instagram account before she started working for Tara at the stall. It was a little embarrassing.
Tara says, unironically, Reunited and it feels so good! She uses crying-laughing emojis. She shows Moll what photos she is planning to post before she posts them. ‘Got them all up so everyone knows how much fun I’m having! ’she says, as though—as though she knows it is strange, as though she is self-aware, but she can’t stop feeding into it, trying to make others jealous.
It’s difficult not to believe that a person has always been exactly how you find them. Here Tara is, Moll thinks: someone who has always pretended to smoke, someone who has always been bleaching their darker hair blonde, someone who has always kept her bank-card, cash and ID in the fractured pink plastic of her phone case.
Every One Still Here is published by The Stinging Fly
