In some school years, it was easier to isolate the age groups in which we did not have a representative. In primary school we once had emissaries in six out of seven classes. We’ve since been told tales of completely unconnected third parties working out their relative age groups by referring to which O’Reilly was in their year. Even within our own home, it was necessary to erect internal subdivisions that simplified things. This we did by separating into three distinct castes, which ran in age order thus: the Big Ones (Sinead, Dara and Shane), the Middle Ones (Maeve, Orla, Mairead and Dearbhaile) and the Wee Ones (Caoimhe, me, Fionnuala and Conall). When my mother died, the youngest of us was two. I was myself three weeks shy of my sixth birthday; the celebration of that was, I have been led to believe, a decidedly subdued affair.
It’s an infuriating quirk of the brain that I remember my first taste of a banana sandwich but not the moment I was told Mammy had died. The closest I can manage must be some moments – perhaps hours – later: a clear image of walking through pyjama-clad siblings who were crying in all directions. It was morning, but since Daddy had left so early the curtains hadn’t yet been thrown open, a practice fastidiously encouraged the second he woke. This tinged everything with a dark, greyish unfamiliarity that only added to the queasy gloom of the moment.
There are differing accounts of how the news was delivered, but we know Daddy rang to tell us some time after 6 a.m. Some remember Sinead answering the phone, others her pleading with Dara to get it. The Big Ones – then aged thirteen, fifteen and seventeen respectively – had understood the gravity of those last few trips to the hospital better than the rest of us. To children reared to believe no news was good news, a 6 a.m. phone call bore all the gut-punching potentiality of, well, news.
We’d been to see Mammy the preceding weekend. I once more find I only have very faint memories of that final visit. I can see her in bed, tired and pale, laughing through the web of tubes taped to her face like a child’s art project, but it’s impossible to know if this was on that occasion or some earlier trip. Those tubes were a common point of reference for us in the years after her death, my sister Maeve becoming convinced they’d strangled her. By contrast, I have quite floridly detailed memories from later on that day, playing outside in the tall trees that lined the clinic, presumably after the Wee Ones had been removed to give my parents some space from their more oblivious children.
Apart from that I can remember very little of that week, save that morning on the couch with Margaret and a smattering of sensations from the subsequent wake. My father had called Phillie and Margaret with the news before he left Belfast, so they could come over to our house and look in on us until he returned. They arrived in the early morning to a surreal mess of sobbing. It also fell to them to intercept Anne as she pulled in to begin her day’s work, around seven. Anne was a saintly woman who tended to the house and its numerous infant contents, most especially since Mammy had fallen ill. Anne was particularly beloved of my mother for her superhuman propensity for calm, an invaluable asset on those days when the cruel humiliations of cancer seemed inexplicable, or she simply found herself without the will to talk.
Anne was as steady as rain and implacable as taxes; the kind of strong, rooted Donegal woman you could imagine blithely tutting if her hair caught fire. Looking out the kitchen window past our own shaken tears, we watched as the news made even her steadfast frame crumple backward. We saw her face collapse and her knees buckle, hands grasping her mouth before they steadied themselves on the car door behind.
This was, of course, a mere precursor to the sight of my father returning to sobs and screams, holding us all as we heaved, and crying loudly himself. The sight of my father crying was so dizzyingly perverse that I couldn’t have been more shocked and appalled if bats had flown out of his mouth. Daddy’s stoicism was as solid a fixture in my life as rain, or Savlon. This was the man who had forged time and space with his own rough hands, unafraid of heights or the dark or spiders or anything, save for being caught without some WD-40 when he needed it. In many ways, my father’s grief hit me harder than anything else. It would be from the wreckage of this moment that he would reassemble the universe for us.
Mammy’s body returned that afternoon, and was to be waked in our home. While the house was filling up, me and the other Wee Ones were being kept out of the way as things were made ready. I was mesmerised by the strange acoustic novelties now occurring in rooms removed of their furniture; the echoing clang of chairs and tables dragged about the place; the strange, loud, reverberating clicks of clocks that went, despite tradition, unstopped. It was customary for mirrors to be covered too, but Daddy had forgone both these measures since, for all his religious devotion, he saw them as affectation.
Our great big bungalow lay on the border of Derry and Donegal, with ‘on the border’ being here quite literal. Where our fence ended, so did the international jurisdictions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, its Crown Dependencies, all British Overseas Territories and the wider Commonwealth. Situated as far out from the city as it was, we rarely had many visitors, let alone enough to crowd our decidedly roomy environs. Now, there were people everywhere. Moreover, there was a sense that these were all people I’d simply never seen in our house before. They weren’t strangers exactly, they just weren’t house friends. These were people I’d only ever seen in the middle of town; ones who’d stop Mammy with a holler and a hooting laugh, as if bumping into someone in a shop was the greatest miracle since that pig in Ballinasloe that sang hymns. They’d grab her arm and talk a few feet above me, invariably bending down to smush my face and ask, ‘Dear God, Sheila, which one’s this now?’ They’d never guess my name, since I was on the younger end, and it was generally hard enough for my parents to keep track, but I was pinched and cuddled and told I was the spit of whichever sibling it was that they did happen to know. And now here they were, in our kitchen, the life squashed out of them, all serious and nervy as they carried dishes about the place and sheepishly searched, cupboard by cupboard, for whisks or dish cloths. Over these two days we would host a throng of well-wishers who’d come to pay their respects, see how we were doing, and inevitably bring us food, plates or cutlery. There were casseroles and tureens of soup and pyramids of vol-au-vents being shaped and reshaped like ice sculptures as they sat on that huge kitchen table, which had been moved especially for the purpose. This may have been the single biggest change; the table’s twelve-foot length completely altering the room’s dimensions when placed against the opposite wall, under that giant, high, ugly mirror, in which I was still many years from catching my own reflection.
In the time-honoured tradition of all Irish crises, sandwiches were liberally distributed. Egg and onion, of course, but also ham, and not merely the thin, wet slices you got for school lunches, but the thick, rough-cut chunks that still had the fat on – the type used exclusively by millionaires, Vikings and, it was taken for granted, Protestants. To add to the general sense of occasion, fifteen-year-old Dara had been dispatched to Lapsley’s to pick up two hundred Regal King Size cigarettes. The 160 that made it back from the shop were distributed around the house on oblong trays of polished silver, the kind of dish more typically reserved for bringing meat joints to neighbours’ houses. Individual cigarettes were also offered freely to guests by hand, as if we were not a gathering of grief-stricken Northern Irish Catholics at all, but a cabal of New York sophisticates toasting a dazzling new biography of Lyndon Johnson.