Every Gift a Curse by Caroline O’Donoghue

Author:Caroline O’Donoghue [O’Donoghue, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529513769
Publisher: Walker Books Ltd.
Published: 2023-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I’VE NEVER BEEN TO A PROPER CLUB BEFORE. JUST GIGS, usually, or pubs with sticky little dance floors. The bigness of Scarlet is immediately daunting, as is the darkness. All the walls are black, and a thin fog is coming from behind the DJ booth, so it’s difficult to tell what is space and what is boundary.

Waves of coloured light pass over my face, blinding me a little, sending my brain into Process mode. I remember those epilepsy warnings you sometimes get before films or concerts: This contains flashing lights, which may affect people prone to seizures. I never thought they could ever apply to me. Now, I realize, they do. The fireworks did it first. Colour and light set my mind off, give it a job to do. It immediately starts looking for heads to enter. Like an underworked police dog, my gift is seeking a scent.

Michelle and her friends find me quickly, and then Danielle, the girl who is supposed to be my little sister, hands me a shot of something that tastes like liquorice. “Sambuca,” she yells at me, and then everyone starts dancing.

They’re a nice bunch, Michelle’s new girls. I’m not sure what happened to her friendship with Niamh. Maybe that was one of the many decisions she made about herself after she moved school. The new girls are loud and sweet, and none of them recognize me from the newspaper. They think I’m kind of cool, actually. They wish, privately, that they had the confidence to wear boots and jeans to the club.

I get a little drunker. My dancing gets bigger, the silly expressive way that Fiona and I like to do when we’re out together, when we try to be Kate Bush. The girls laugh, but in a nice way, and slowly start to abandon the sexy bum shuffles that they began dancing with. We’re throwing our arms all around the place, and one girl breaks into an Irish dance out of nowhere, and we all laugh and make a circle around her.

Then another girl, from another group, makes a funny show out of “challenging” her to a Riverdance-off. The DJ notices and puts on a sort of electronic Irish trad mix, and we go wild, believing ourselves to be the controlling stakeholders of the club, and wonderful dancers besides.

And it’s all just girls, girls being stupid together. There’s a touch of mourning to every movement, the grief of being without Roe, the loss of Fiona to Belfast. But there’s hope. A tiny dash of it. Life isn’t school, I realize. I don’t need to live and die by Fiona’s approval. I don’t need to be afraid of other people. Some pal of Michelle’s puts her arm around my shoulders. The collective noun for a group of girls is not “a threat”. It can be anything. A gaggle of girls. A choir. A parliament. A galaxy.

The Caroline Polachek cover of “Breathless” by the Corrs comes on, the DJ attempting to gracefully transition us out of the trad mix back into proper dance music.

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