I wasn’t embarrassed about the pen marks. I didn’t care if people stared. The only big deal was the commotion they made of it and I certainly wasn’t the only girl who had marks on their skin. Jennifer Lannigan cut herself with a blade, tiny little cuts all over her legs. I had a good view of them in English class, the white gap between the top of her grey socks and the end of her grey skirt. We weren’t allowed to wear make-up in school but after hours Jennifer wore white make-up, black lipstick, pierced her own lip and listened to angry music by angry men and for some reason her entire package made it acceptable to us that she would do this insane thing to herself.
But I wasn’t a goth and drawing on your skin had no psychological explanations that they could find. The dorm supervisor went through my cubicle and removed all my pens, which were returned to me in the morning before class and removed again after study hour. People would watch me around pens like they would a child with scissors. So, pen-less, I kind of found myself in the same camp as Jennifer. I never understood the compulsion to inflict pain on oneself, but it was a means to an end. I took to using the sharpened corner of my ruler to scratch a line from one freckle to the other. I knew better than to scratch the actual freckle, I had been warned on the perils of cutting moles and freckles. I graduated from rulers as I found sharper items: my compass, razor blades … and pretty soon after, horrified by what she saw on my skin, the supervisor returned my pens to me. But she was too late, I never went back to using ink. I never liked the pain, but blood was more permanent. The hardened scabs between freckles were more distinctive, and not only could I see the constellations but now I could feel them. They stung when the air hit and they throbbed beneath my clothes. There was something comforting about their presence. I wore them like armour.
I don’t scratch the surface of my skin any more but at twenty-four years old, the constellations are still visible. When I’m worried or stressed, I catch myself running my finger over the scarred raised skin of my left arm, over and over again, in the correct order, from one star to the next. Joining the dots, solving the mystery, chaining the events.
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.