For most of my younger days, it was nearly impossible to use the phone when I wanted, since my sisters spent most evenings calling a revolving cast of friends with great urgency, mere hours after they had last been sighted, safe and well, at school. The phone table itself was the most uncomfortable place to sit in our entire house. Possibly to dissuade us from near-constant use of the phone, it was as ill-shaped and wonky as one of our treehouses, almost as if Daddy had intended it as a piece of hostile architecture, the way city planners put those spiked benches in bus stations so homeless people can’t sleep on them. Despite this measure, my father was accustomed to picking up the phone by his armchair to hear one of his daughters angsting to a pal, as if the line was permanently connected to a switchboard for disaffected Northern Irish youths. When the internet was installed, it worked off the same phone line, meaning it was now not just permanently engaged, but also emitted an ear-splitting electronic screech if you haplessly picked up the receiver. In those days the internet was charged like a phone call, meaning that one month early in my use of the service I racked up over ￡100 of charges. I wish I could even claim it was for some agreeably salacious use, but I was mostly concerned with reading rumours about the new Star Wars prequels and downloading South Park sound clips.
Once a hub within our home, in the aftermath of the landline’s demise the back hall has become little more than a vestibule for various items of outerwear to be quickly grabbed if you need to go outside into the garage. There are roughly a thousand discarded shoes, and a mat for the dog, who is allowed to sleep there when she gets scared by the many things that now appear to terrify her very greatly indeed. There is a coat rack by the far wall which holds – and I have counted – twenty-eight coats, jackets, fleeces and items of hi-viz apparel, all of which at one point or another may have been in daily use by one or several of us, but which were for years kept as a last resort should someone need something to wear when nipping out for a fag. None of us live there any more, nor do we smoke when we return, so this stock of coats has been frozen in time since, I would reckon, about 2009. A recent dig through the archaeological strata uncovered a coat I’d forgotten ever owning, a tatty army surplus thing, its pockets containing a few crumbles of weed and a USB stick of bad techno.
The back hall opens onto the kitchen, where the first thing that greets you is the twelve-foot-long table that has served as the locus of family life for thirty-five years. It’s the first sign that you’re entering a house that was designed to accommodate my family’s ludicrous dimensions. It has a marble-effect top, which was probably meant to seem classy but looks more like the backdrop for the cover of a mid-nineties rap album. It was the venue for all the family meals we had together growing up, was the centre point of Christmas dinners, and is now the favoured spot for late-night drinking sessions when we end up at home together. The dogs like to sit underneath it. The steady hum and hiss of their snoring, accompanied by Italian football on Channel 4 and the dishwasher working its way through the dinnerplates we’d just used, was the soundtrack to my every childhood Sunday. That is until I started blaring the Aphex Twin and Autechre CD-Rs that would send Daddy in to rip the speaker plug from the wall.
After Mammy died, a kitchen rota was enforced that split chores up among us, ostensibly to cover the shortfall engendered by her death. This was slightly odd since our housekeeper, Anne, did most of the daily cleaning, but it did help at weekends and after dinner, while also instilling a bit of discipline for its own sake. The rota, famously devised by Maeve and Orla, ruled out the Big Ones since they were busy studying for exams, and instituted a master/apprentice system by which a Middle One and a Wee One were paired to split the cleaning tasks for the day; one washing, one drying, one sweeping, one picking up, etc. This kitchen rota was widely praised by adult observers, but also passed into O’Reilly lore as a wretched tale of forced labour and exploitation. It was common for the older siblings to treat the younger as willing servants, and to capitalise on their inexperience for their own gain. When time came to clean the bedroom they shared, Mairead convinced Dearbhaile, two years her junior, to split the room down the middle. This would have been a fair arrangement had Mairead not decreed that the dividing line would separate the room’s top and bottom halves, meaning Dearbhaile cleaned the entire room, leaving Mairead to make the bed on her own top bunk. Not that I was above such sharp practice myself. On the rare occasions we were gifted money, I kept a pot of 2p coins set aside that I could trade for any ￡1 coins Conall received, on the basis that the 2p coins were much larger and this must constitute greater value.
The rota was different in that it was systematic and operated in plain sight. The Middle Ones (then aged nine to thirteen) were a bit more savvy than their infant charges (aged two to seven) and wielded their power in a microcosm of capitalist malfeasance. Soon they had tricked us into doing almost all the work while they watched. So it was that a Middle One might put away the dishes after their partner had collected, washed and dried them.
Over on the far wall, beside the dishwasher, there used to be a serving hatch that opened into the dining room, which was by far the coolest thing in our house. Daddy got rid of it in a subsequent renovation, but I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven him, even though there was literally no reason that we would need a portal from the kitchen into the dining room since we ate all our meals in the kitchen, and very few objects were transferred from one room to the other, least of all those that were small enough to get through a hole that size. It was just cool. The disappearance of this little hole, smaller and way less useful than a door, united us in grief. Usually, you’d just open it to see what was going on in the dining room, only to find that it was, as usual, empty, or else occupied by a single, annoyed person, wondering why you’d opened the hatch to stare at them. It remains much missed.
The dining room itself is one of those things, like damp or bats, that are ubiquitous in rural Irish homes; rooms which are lavishly appointed but never used for their designated purpose. Not only did we never dine in there, it would stretch credulity for me to even imagine doing so. Having dinner in the dining room would be like watching TV in the hall or sleeping on the bathroom floor; a category error so flamboyantly unhinged it doesn’t bear thinking about. It housed a table and a grand dresser filled with plates and cups and all manner of other bric-a-brac deemed fancy or irrelevant. The good crockery therein was only used for very special visitors, either to make it clear that they were very special visitors or else give the impression that we were so profoundly fancy that we spent every evening drinking from perfectly unspoiled cups with a tiny gold rim, rather than those we actually used, which were a chipped mass of ceramic scrap bearing the logos of different chocolate bars we got in a few decades’ worth of Easter eggs. The room was used for every other conceivable purpose than eating or looking at the nice plates. It’s where we used the internet over the aforementioned achingly slow dial-up connection. It’s where my little brother and I played computer games or watched unfamily-friendly TV programmes. We used it for music practice as it contained a piano and about twenty dozen other instruments accumulated during my dad’s unflagging efforts to make musicians of us all. These stuck around for decades after we either left or stopped playing, meaning that if you stood up too quickly the entire room made a faint twanging, plinking, hooting noise, as if you’d startled a very small chamber orchestra. The dresser that contained the fancy plates was also slowly filled with bottles of whiskey my father was gifted by unimaginative friends and colleagues who didn’t realise he drank only one or two tumblers of whiskey per year, nor that his children would happily drain them for him. Nowadays, it serves as a makeshift spare bedroom for Christmases and other gatherings that exceed the allotted occupancy of the house. We’ve all at one time or another found ourselves on the singularly uncomfortable fold-out bed, drifting off to sleep with a prestigious view of what instruments now remain, as well as some of the finest plates in the parish.