The Amendments by Niamh Mulvey

Author:Niamh Mulvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

13

Martina never spoke to anyone about it again, not even to Nell, who came to her having been through the same thing – or so Martina wanted to think, wanted to believe. Nell came to her at a point at which Martina was beginning to feel restless, at a point at which she was beginning to feel complacent. She felt that all of her struggles had been overcome, all of her questions had been answered. She was only thirty-one, in that summer of 2002, and she was too young, she knew, to feel so – arrived.

That feeling had crept up on her. She returned to Ireland in 1999, having been away for just over a decade. She first completed her studies in Spain, her camino, and then the next four years she spent in Peru and Ecuador – a blessed, beautiful time, she didn’t want to leave. She would have happily stayed there for ever, living first in a small house, a shack, really, in a barrio in Lima, followed by a short stint in Quito, where she observed the hedonistic backpacker trail through South America, and heard the first Irish accents emerge from it. She avoided them carefully, she felt further away from her fun-seeking compatriots than she did the impoverished children she helped in the schools as a volunteer assistant, her Spanish so good by then that the locals made fun of her for her Madrid-influenced accent. Many of them thought she was actually Spanish and as her tan deepened she felt no need to correct them.

But then she was summoned home by the movement who were alarmed to find that things were diminishing at a rapid pace in Ireland, that several families who had once formed the core of the organization there were starting to fade away. The hogar she was sent to – there were only four in the entire country – was located only thirty miles from her home, from the farm, which was presented to her as something to celebrate. She did not feel celebratory about it, and she knew that they knew she did not feel celebratory about it, the senior hogareñas understanding better than anyone the complicated relationship most of their adherents had with their respective notions of home. But she had signed up to go where they needed her and so back she went, and got a job quite easily as a receptionist in the office of a prosperous local solicitor in a town only twenty miles away from the town where the Clerys lived; the Clerys who seemed to have spearheaded the growth of a little outcrop of holiness among a group of young teenage girls there.

And it was then clear to her why God had sent her back. She felt an immediate connection to those girls coming of age in this moment of enormous change – a change they could not even recognize, being, as they were, as they had to be, so much of their moment that they were blind to it.

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