Chapter 7
That year, in my first week of college, Erin called to tell me that Milo’s mother had jumped off the John W. Weeks Bridge into the Charles River and died. I was devastated by this news. Poor Mrs Kelly. I remembered her in church, shivering in a coat that wasn’t warm enough for a Boston winter.
‘How do you know, Erin?’
‘It was on the news,’ she said, but I could tell she was lying.
‘Are you in touch with Milo’s family?’ She had never been friendly with his sister, Margie, back in the day, but maybe they had talked to each other.
‘No.’
I didn’t pursue it. Another life not just destroyed, but over. I couldn’t think about that. I pretended not to care. It was easier than talking about it.
I loved Drama and Theatre Studies. We studied all kinds of theatre from puppetry to Japanese Noh.
I discovered lots of new (to me) playwrights.
I learned about mime and commedia dell’arte and the structures of classical plays.
I loved acting. The ease with which I was able to slip into another character’s head was thrilling to me and noted by my classmates.
I was still shy, but if my character called for me to burst into a room and berate a group of strangers, I had no issue with that.
I also had a gift for accents. Bizarrely, every accent except the Irish one, despite being surrounded by it.
Sometimes we were encouraged to spend entire days living in another character’s shoes.
I loved that. Even before the end of my first year, I had been offered work in a stage play by a director who had come to see a showcase I was in.
It was a reasonable-sized role, but the college didn’t approve of students taking professional work during term time. I had to turn it down.
Lindsay had a boyfriend, Stuart, a nerdy, tweedy guy.
She had met him on her first day in Trinity.
After about two weeks, he stayed the night in our apartment.
Lindsay blushed all the way through breakfast next morning.
We had never spoken about sex to each other, but I could tell she had done it.
Stuart wasn’t unattractive, I suppose. Tall and rangy, he wore thick glasses, but when he took them off, his face was pleasant and open. He was polite to me as well.
Irish kids drank alcohol a lot more than Americans did. They didn’t have to wait until they were twenty-one. That’s not to say there weren’t American kids who drank at a young age but my fellow students in Trinity got wasted a lot.
When I got to Ireland, Mom was more relaxed about my drinking. I was seventeen then, but she didn’t know the extent of it. I drank in my room and hid the bottles.
In college, it was different. I was drinking with fellow students, and no longer felt I had to hide it.
I liked the way it made me feel. It helped me with the shyness.
If I had a glass or two of wine before I went out, I was able to walk into the student bar on my own.
It was liberating. Soon, I was experimenting with all kinds of liquor and what they called alcopops, drinking as much as my classmates, if not more.
I liked being drunk. I was someone else then.
Confident, chatty, attractive, wild and promiscuous.
Sex was normal. Everyone was doing it. I don’t remember much about the first guy.
I know he had rooms in Trinity because that’s where I woke up.
I had turned into the girl that I used to pray for.
In college, I was trusted to study on my own, to go to bed in a timely fashion, to dress appropriately, to attend lectures, to eat sensibly.
By the beginning of my third year in September 2004, I did not do any of these things.
I spent twice as much time in the student bar as in the library or at classes.
I hooked up with a guy once a week. And I didn’t care if they had girlfriends.
I wasn’t looking for a relationship; I was having the time of my life.
I had lots of friends, kids from my class and other classes, other courses.
My life was chaotic, but it matched my mood.
Oblivion was where I wanted to be. Not having to think about Boston, or my broken sister, my absent father or Mrs Kelly.
I remember going into a bar in town where UCD and Trinity students hung out, and Gillian MacArthur found my name carved on the back of the toilet door: RUBY COOPER IS A SLUT.
There weren’t a lot of Ruby Coopers in Ireland so I knew it was about me.
Outwardly, I laughed at the person who wrote that, pitied them for how uptight they must be.
Privately, I was hurt and lay low for a while, drinking in my room.
Lindsay told me I had to grow up. I didn’t think I was causing any more havoc than the other kids in my year, but Lindsay pointed out that we weren’t ‘kids’ any more.
She didn’t like the smell of weed in our home, or that I brought different boys back all the time, or that I kept her awake playing music, and she definitely didn’t like that I drank myself into a blackout twice a week.
‘Look at yourself,’ she said, ‘drinking doesn’t suit you’ – spoken like a teacher.
Why did she have to be like that? I was growing up.
As one of my drinking buddies had put it, ‘It’s a rite of passage to have a few blackouts in your teens’, though she probably didn’t realize I was older than all of them, because of missing a year of school after the incident and then being held back a year in Ireland in order to do their two-year cycle for Leaving Certificate exams. By then, I was twenty-three.