The Birthday Party by Áine O’Hara

– She walks around the table and stands facing the audience –

My mother died when I was little and every year my dad had two dark days. Two angry days. The 21st of June, her birthday and the 6th of March, the day she died. We never celebrated much. This is my first ever birthday party. This is my first ever birthday cake. 73 candles. Can you believe that?

Can I ask you one more favour?
Would you mind singing Happy Birthday to me? Would you start though? Cause it’s MY birthday.

[Maisie sings]

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…
Happy Birthday dear Maisie, happy birthday to you.
For she’s a jolly good fellow, for she’s a jolly good fellow.
And so say all of us, and so say all of us!!

– She blows out the candles. She claps and laughs –
[Blowing and clapping]

– She takes a knife, looks at it for a moment and begins to cut up the cake –

When I was a child, em, there was no such thing as birthdays. I do have a very strong memory of my tenth birthday though. That was the first time that I ever properly felt fear. I was walking to school and I got really dizzy all of a sudden.

– She stops cutting the cake but keeps the knife in her hand –

It was as if the Earth was falling out from under me but when I looked down, it was there.

– Pause –

Still.

– Pause –

And my breath kept getting faster and faster until it felt like I was choking.

[Shaky breathing fastens and then slows]

I was so terrified. I climbed down into the field on my left and I ran and ran. I didn’t really know where I was going, I just wanted to hide. And down in front of the sea where I live, there’s this really old, dilapidated Protestant church. It’s been abandoned for years. And I sat there with my back against the wall willing the Earth to stop moving around me. I sat there all day. For hours. I thought I was going mad. I’d never felt anything like that before. I waited until I heard the other children coming back up the road from school. I waited until they had passed and then I went home. I never told anyone about what had happened.

Until now, I guess.
Ye’re actually the first people I’ve told.

– Pause –

Here, there’s enough for everyone.
Is anyone hungry? Does anyone want some cake?

– She places the cake into a biscuit tin and walks to the front of the audience –

Ye can pass it around.

I grew up, I got married. I had two children. Katie and George. They kept happening. I’d be cleaning the house, at mass or even in bed. There were other things too. Traps. It was like my mind was setting up traps for me. These kind of cycles that I couldn’t get out of, it was all about hiding. Sometimes it felt like I had no power over myself. I needed quiet.

Noises made everything worse.

[children shouting and talking]

Sometimes every sound annoyed me so much.

[sounds of children get louder]

Talking, forks scraping on their plates as they ate the dinner, the sound of the tractor and his low voice.

[metal scrapping]

– She puts her hands over her ears –

Stop!

[sounds of children and scrapping stop]

– She becomes more upset –

[Maisie screams]

STOP!!

[Silence]

Sorry. I’m sorry.

I couldn’t even talk. I would go months and months without talking when it was really bad. My husband, he was a kind man. I still can’t believe he didn’t send me off somewhere. He never said anything. He never said anything. He just kept on going.

There was this woman in our village, Susan. My husband Michael was friends with her brother, Peter. Susan’s husband left and eh, she had a nervous breakdown. She was sent to Castlebar.

In those days when you were sent there, you never came out. You’d hear stories of people being stripped naked and tied by their ankles to the bed, truly violent forms of restraint, it was believed that they couldn’t feel pain. The worst story I heard was of a woman who, they had this chair, kind of like a swivel chair but it was mechanically powered and they strapped her into it and spun her round and round and round at a high speed. It was meant to provoke ‘a natural interest in life’.

Peter, that was Susan’s brother, came down to our house one morning when she was in the hospital and, I opened the door and he asked to speak to Michael. They were outside for a long time. Susan had been bought out of the farm when she married. Peter didn’t know if he should take her out and bring her back to their home, the home that she had been bought out of; or if he should leave her in the hospital. Michael had heard all the stories I’d heard and probably more so he told Peter to get her out of that place. Now. Family meant more than land. I’m sure there was many more who weren’t lucky enough to get out. From then on Michael was a saint in Susan’s eyes. He saved her.

3 miles down the road from us there was this family, the Murphy’s.
They told everyone they had seven children. Mrs Murphy had been pregnant 8 times but another hadn’t survived.
Apparently, it took over 16 hours, it was a particularly difficult birth.
He was a beautiful baby boy, you’d almost never guess.
They kept him in the house until his second birthday when he was old enough to walk.

There was an old rusty shed at the back of their house.
It had no walls, just four steel beams holding up a corrugated galvanised roof.
They tied him like a dog to one of the steel beams.
They used to throw scraps of food to him twice a day.
He lasted three years and they had a party when he died.
They had a party when he died.

My name is Maisie O’Hara. I am 73 and I have done a lot of things that I regret.

– Pause –

I have a balloon here for each of you.
Here you go.

Yellow for you.
Would you like red? Ok here you go.

– Pause –

I get afraid of answering the door, of answering the phone.
I can still remember her voice. I saw her ghost in the window.
I looked in the window, at the seat beside the fire where she always sat and I saw her sitting there, quiet.

– Pause –

I can still see her standing at the back door. Staring in the window at me.

Terrified.

I just stared back.

 

Credits

Written and performed by Áine O’Hara
Curated by Róisin Power Hackett
Sound design by Paul Lynch at Studio 4

Commissioned by Arts & Disability Ireland as part of The Finest Specimens of Fossilised Duration edition of Curated Space in 2020, curated by Róisín Power Hackett.

Click here to visit Áine’s website