I’d been called Freckles since the first week of school when I arrived at twelve years old until I left at eighteen. Even now, if I randomly meet someone from school they still call me Freckles, unable to remember my real name, or probably never knew it in the first place. While they never meant any harm, I think I always knew what they really saw of me was skin. Not black or white like most of theirs, so white it reflected the sun. Not a Thurles colour, but a colour they desired and went through bottles and sprays in order to get but came closer to looking tangerine. There were plenty of girls with freckles who didn’t inherit the nickname but freckles on darker skin to them was different. It never bothered me, in fact I embraced it because it went beyond a nickname and held a deeper meaning for me.
Pops’ skin is as white as snow, so pale in some parts it’s almost transparent like tracing paper, with blue lines running beneath. Blue rivers of lead. His hair is greying and thinner now but it was curly red and wild. He has freckles, reddish ones, so many on his face if they joined up he’d be a sunrise. You’re lucky they call you Freckles, Allegra, he’d say, all I was ever called was matchstick or, even better, fucking ugly! Then he’d guffaw loudly. Ding-a-ling-a-ling my hair’s on fire, ding-a-ling-a-ling, call nine nine nine, he’d sing and I’d join in with him, singing the song he was taunted with. Me and him, ganging up against the memory of them.
I never knew my mam, but I know she was foreign. An exotic beauty studying on Irish shores. Olive-skinned, black-haired and brown-eyed, from Barcelona. The Catalonian Carmencita Casanova. Even her name sounds like a fairy tale. Beauty it seemed, met the Beast.
Pops says I had to get something of him. If I didn’t have freckles, he doesn’t know how he could have claimed me. He’s joking of course, but my freckles were the calling card. When he’s the only person I have and have ever had in my whole life, my freckles connect me to him in a way that feels vital. They are my proof. An official stamp from heaven’s bureau that bind me to him. The raging mob could not come to our house on horseback, with torches of fire, demanding he hand over the baby the mother didn’t want. Look, she’s his, she has his freckles, see.
I inherited my mam’s skin tone but I inherited Pops’ freckles. The parent who wanted me. Unlike Mam, who gave me up to have everything, he gave up everything to have me. These freckles are the invisible blue ink-line, the permanent scar that connects me to him, dot to dot, star to star, freckle to freckle. Link them and you link us on and on and on and on.
Two
Joining the Gardaí Siochana, the Irish police force, had been my lifelong goal. There was never a Plan B and everyone knew it. Detective Freckles is what they’d called me in our final year.
Ms Meadows the career guidance teacher had tried to push me into doing a business degree. She thought everyone should study business, even the art students who went in with their creative bendy thoughts and came out like they’d had electroconvulsive therapy after being preached to on the advantages of a basic business degree. Something to fall back on, it was always said. Business made me think of a mattress. I was hopeful about my future, I wasn’t contemplating failing never mind planning on falling back. She couldn’t convince me to change my mind because I saw no other place for me in the world. Turns out I was wrong. My application to the Gardaí was denied. I was stunned. A little winded. Embarrassed. With no mattress to fall back on I did some recalibration and found the next best thing.
I’m a parking warden with Fingal County Council. I wear a uniform, grey pants, white shirt, a high-vis vest and patrol the streets, not unlike a garda. I got close to what I wanted. I work on the side of the law. I like my job, I like my routine, my route, my beat. I like organisation, and order, rules and clarity. The rules are clear and I uphold them rigorously. I like that I’m fulfilling an important role.
My base is Malahide, a suburban village outside Dublin city, beside the sea. A pretty spot, an affluent area. My home is a studio flat above a gym in the back garden of a mansion on a leafy road bordering Malahide Castle and Gardens.
She, Becky, does something with computers. He, Donnacha, works from home in his art studio, one of those nice garden rooms, doing fine art ceramics. He calls them vessels. They look like bowls to me. Not for cereal, you’d barely get two Weetabix in the base and it doesn’t have the depth for enough milk, especially with the Weetabix absorption levels. I read an interview with him in the Irish Times culture magazine where he describes them as definitely not bowls, which is a description that brings him great insult, the bane of his professional life. These vessels are receptacles for his message. I didn’t read far enough to get the message.
He talks a curious kind of prattle with a faraway look in his eye as if any of his agonising wonderings mean something. He’s not a listener, which I thought would be typical of an artist. I thought they were supposed to be sponges absorbing everything around them. I was half-right. He’s already so full of shit he can’t make room for any more absorption, he’s just leaking it all out now on everyone else. Artistic incontinence. And it costs five hundred euro minimum for one of his tiny bowls.
Also five hundred euro is my monthly rent and the catch is that I be available for babysitting duties for their three kids whenever they ask. Usually that’s three times a week. Always on a Saturday night.
I wake and turn to look at my iPhone: 6.58 as always. Time to process where I am and what’s going on. I find being one step ahead of my phone first thing in the morning is a good start to the day. Two minutes later the alarm rings. Pops won’t own a smartphone, thinks we’re all being watched. He refused to have me vaccinated, not because of the health dangers, but because he had a theory they were inserting chips into humans’ skin. He once brought me to London for a weekend for my birthday and we spent most of the time standing outside the Ecuadorian Embassy calling Julian Assange’s name. The police moved us along twice. Julian looked out and waved and Pops felt something monumental passed between them. An understanding between two men who believe in the same cause. Power to the people. Then we saw Mary Poppins in the West End.
At 7 a.m., I shower. I eat. I dress. Grey trousers, white shirt, black boots, raincoat in case I need it for those little April showers. In this uniform I’d like to think I could be mistaken for a garda. Sometimes I pretend I am. I don’t imitate a garda, that’s illegal, but in my head I do, and I speak like I am. That air that they have. The aura. The authority. Your protector and friend when you need them, your foe when they think you’re acting the maggot. They choose which one they are at any given moment. It’s magic. Even the new fellas with chin-fluff can do that stern disappointed old-before-their-time look. As if they know you and know you can do better and Jesus why did you have to let them down. Sorry, Garda, sorry, I won’t do it again. And the girl ones, you wouldn’t mess with them, but you’d definitely go on a session with them.
My hair is long, coarse, black, so black it has a blue sheen, like petrol, and takes an hour to blow dry so I only wash it once a week. It goes back in a low bun, cap on and low over my eyes. I wrap the ticket machine over my shoulder. Ready.
I leave the garage, fifty yards from the house, separated by an enormous garden designed by an award-winning landscaper. The pathway from my place weaves through a secret garden, the route I was told to take, towards the side of the house, where I get out through the side pedestrian gate, special code 1916, the year of the Irish Republicans’ uprising against the British, chosen by Donnacha McGovern of Ballyjamesduff. If Padraig Pearse could see him now, doing his bit for the Republic. Making bowls in his back garden.