Shall we do it like an AA meeting? My name is Noelle Donnelly and I did something bad.
I’m not about to make excuses, but I had a tough time growing up. Two horrible brothers above me. Two below. And a sister who died when she was only eight. My mother and father were unforgiving of the limitations of children. They believed that a child should be a grown-up in every way apart from the way of having an opinion you could call your own. Not that religious, which was strange for the times and the place. Church on a Sunday was a good opportunity to find out that everyone else’s children were doing better than their own. The Bible had some good quotes that could be used to sow a seed of terror here and there. We all believed in hell and heaven, even if we believed in nothing else. And sex was something that only disgusting people did, married or not. We never asked after our own provenance, imagined a kind of chaste communion across a brick wall somehow. Because they had separate bedrooms, my mother and father.
Home was a ten-bedroom villa on a hill, sheep all around, a mile and a half to school, downhill going there, uphill coming back. My parents took in orphans sometimes, in emergencies. They’d arrive bleary-eyed in the small hours, huge sets of siblings that they housed in the dormitory room in the attic. We called it “the orphan room” long after there’d been an orphan in it. So my parents can’t have been all bad. But mainly, on the whole, yes they were.
We were known as the clever family. You know that family? We all know that family. Pianos all over the place. Books beyond belief. Grade As or you had failed. That was all we ever talked of. Academic success. My father was a maths teacher. My mother was a writer of books about medical history. We all went to the best schools and worked harder than everyone else and won all the awards and all the medals and all the scholarships and all the trophies going. I swear there was not a scrap of anything left for anyone else.
Well, I was clever enough to keep up, there was no doubt about that. But I was at a disadvantage for being (a) the middle child, (b) a girl, and (c) not the girl who had died. Michaela. That was who I was not. Michaela, who was bonnier than me and nicer than me and yes, naturally, cleverer than me. And also much less alive than me. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that that would make me all the more precious to my mother and father. Well, at least we still have our lovely Noelle. But no.
Michaela died of cancer. We all thought it was a cold. We were wrong.
Anyway, that was me. The less bonny, less clever, less dead sister with the four horrible brothers and the mum and dad who judged more than they loved.
I did OK. I got into Trinity. I got a degree in mathematics, a PhD in applied mathematics. I moved to London shortly after I graduated and it was nice for a while just to be clever Noelle, not just one of the Donnellys. I tried my hand in the financial sector, thinking that I’d quite like to be very rich and have a performance car and an apartment with a balcony. But it really wasn’t me and everyone there knew it wasn’t me and so I left before I’d earned enough money for a scooter let alone a car.
You know, when I look back at this time, I’m amazed by myself, I really am. I was so young and so appallingly unsophisticated, didn’t know a soul, yet there I was in the seething belly of the metropolis, had a room in a flat in Holland Park of all places. I had no idea then how high I was flying in that postcode; I thought everyone who came to London from Ireland lived in a road full of big wedding cake houses. I didn’t know that Walthamstow existed. And I was cute, you know, looking back on it, had model looks, almost, in that bare-faced, hollow-chested sort of way, all legs and tangled hair and huge watery eyes. No one ever told me I was pretty, though, not once; I don’t really know why.