My confusion around her really was at its apex around that time, when I was preparing for my first holy communion, and kept finding it hard not to picture Mammy as the Virgin Mary, the way it’s hard to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest without doing the same for Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy. She just fitted the part: a beautiful, sinless woman to whom people were devoted, and who spent her days now gazing, head tilted in silent stillness, from Catholic walls. Mammy had left traces of course, beyond the little tics and facial similarities people would spot here and there in each of us. She was the rapidly decaying scent of herself in the Datsun behind the house, and the sing-song cadence of the grace we said before meals. She was the daffodils in the garden, and the prayer pinned above the TV in the kitchen. More specifically, she was the text of this prayer itself, since she had written it out in crispest Loreto script.
The fact it was handwritten seemed to bind her that little bit more than the words themselves, and left us unwilling to remove the prayer – written hurriedly on red construction paper and intended to be temporary – for over a decade after she died, preferring instead to let it became increasingly tattered, steam-stained and ravaged by the travails of a working kitchen. When it finally did come down, it seemed like a tiny little fraction of her memory went with it, but it really was too grimy to remain. I think it was the chip pan, mostly, that did an even worse job on the other major wall adornment of that time, a soiled Garfield cuddly that hung, arms outstretched, like an irreverent feline Christ. It bore a spatula, fork and irretrievably yellow-tinged apron that declared MY KITCHEN, MY RULES, barely readable due to the layer of chip fat in which it was coated. I suppose I miss them both.
I don’t know how I felt in the early days. I probably had it easier than my older siblings, who had to work through the whole gamut of abandonment, depression and anger when they had a little more emotional intelligence and so felt it harder. I just know that by the time I was old enough to piece together an idea of my mother as a whole, complex person, the details I had to go on weren’t particularly whole or complex. Occasionally, like that nurse, people would spot who I was and tell me about her. A guy in Baldies’ Barber on Castle Street kept me there for half an hour telling me about how much she meant to everyone in Foyle Hospice, an institution she ardently supported. My friend Eoghan’s uncle stopped in his tracks to buy me a pint when he discovered Sheila, an old teaching colleague of his, had been my mother. He took me aside and insisted she was the finest woman he ever met in his life and teared up with pride when he heard we were all doing so well, as if we were a basket full of puppies he now knew to have safely crossed a treacherous ravine.
She didn’t teach in the secondary school I attended, but a lot of the teachers there had known her, either through my older brothers, or because teachers generally seem to know each other in small cities. Occasionally one of them would stop me after class and give me a halting oration on her particular qualities, as when Mr Costigan held me lightly at the shoulder as everyone else filed out of my first day in his class. ‘The word I’d use to describe her is grace,’ he said, with a faraway look in his eye, once all the other boys had left. ‘She had an extraordinary grace and compassion to her that you just don’t see in many people.’ I loved hearing these things and would sit and savour every last word. It happened quite a lot. Derry people are quite forward, of course, but it is also a testament to how much she meant to so many people, and how much her death affected them. ‘She was one of God’s angels, Sheila O’Reilly,’ one woman said as she stopped me in the central library. I was trying to walk out with some books I hadn’t rung in at the time. ‘Sure as anything, she was.’ They spoke as though she was a saint, which I obviously liked, but which also made her seem strangely remote. I longed to get a sense of who she was as a person, as a real, breathing person, beyond her intense dislike for an Australian soap, bees and coffee ice cream.
As I got older, I realised there were other people’s memories that could fill the gaps, and having heard all the tales of how wonderful she was – and she really was – I found that I delighted more in hearing the scant few negative stories I could wring out of those who knew Mammy best. I spent my adolescence seeking out those corners of family events where they would be uttered like blasphemies through boozy breath and glinted eye: of how she could be holier-than-thou, that she could never get jokes right, how she couldn’t write a story to save her life. Best of all was that beautiful evening I heard my mother’s friend Patricia – in her glorious, mouth-bending, mid-Fermanagh twang – describe my mother’s singing voice as ‘sufficiently awful to disprove the existence of Gaww-id’.
Telling old stories is a large percentage of what we do when we return home. We sit around the huge kitchen table, which contained us comfortably back when our feet dangled inches from the floor. Even at full stretch, our fingers wouldn’t reach its centre unless we leaned far enough forward that our chins pressed against its cold surface. These days we barely get round it at all. The whole thing creaks when we laugh. We do still fit, but if you need to nip to the toilet or grab another bottle from the garage, it’s often easier to escape by slipping underneath and through a hedge-tight bramble of legs shaking with laughter than to inch past all those backs, pressed flat against the wall-seats lining either corner. Around that table, no one finishes a sentence, and we delight in each other’s misremembered notions, undigested memories, embarrassing acts from the past – recollections of Mammy, of each other, of ourselves. It’s there that the story of me at Mammy’s wake will be endlessly relitigated. Only I’ll be told I used slightly different wording, or actually it was only for a few minutes, or no, it was way worse and I was leaping around the place in full song. When corrected, I’m sure I intend to change my internal records, but those newer details rarely stick. We each long ago settled on our favourite tales, and each retelling grips them tighter to our tongues. We appreciate the preciousness of our own stock of memories, and perhaps there’s no harm in jealously guarding them, safe from anyone who’d take away whatever clutch we have left. Laughing in those wee small hours, we rinse away with wine our shame for all the silly stories that we tell ourselves.
4
Numbers
There’s a story my family tells around Christmas. As kids, that time of year was obviously pretty manic, but made more so by the fact each of us fancied ourselves as having prominent careers in showbusiness. We all sang in choirs at one time or another, and some of us in several at the same time.
I was less involved than most, yet even I sang in choirs for at least ten years, and the Christmas period was a time of constant shuttling between different masses or meetings or festive performances. Most of us were then also in school shows, nativities or orchestra recitals, and in the run-up to Christmas, a few of us even did the fully produced commercial pantos in town. I somehow never made the cut for those things, which I found odd because my kind eyes and easy way with people reminded many of a young Marlon Brando.