Still more people filed in. Friends my mother had accumulated in her six short years teaching in Derry, but whom her children knew only by titled rank, like Mr O’Mahoney, Father Collins, Sister Deirdre, Dr Cleary. And more cups, plates, cutlery, napkins, sandwiches, not to mention all manner of glazed meats and boiled vegetables, wrapped in foil and on plates their donors were prepared to never see again. The sheer mass of food on display may have given an outsider the impression that we were doubly afflicted; not merely a giant family bereft of a loving mother, but one just pulled from six weeks under an avalanche, in which they’d had little or no access to potato salads, gravy or fruitcakes in that time.
I’m not sure if this was the origin of our family’s longstanding collection of dark, dense fruitcakes, but I’ve always believed it to be the case. The notion that anyone enjoys Irish fruitcake – a foodstuff that boasts the consistency, shine and taste of a wet boxing glove – is so fanciful I’ve long theorised that every gifting of a fruitcake is just that person offloading one they themselves were cruelly gifted some days (or years) earlier. Brown, thick and studded with dried fruits of dubious age and origin, fruitcakes are the nutritional equivalent of concussion. They are so unpalatable, so repulsive, so reminiscent of a bundled-up tarpaulin that’s spent a week in the rain, you’d have little chance of getting someone to accept one unless the occasion precluded their making a scene. I’m still largely convinced that all of rural Ireland is engaged in a dense, berried pyramid scheme devoted to circulating the same thousand cakes in a never-ending merry-go-round of spongy offal. Despite our best efforts at redistribution, there were fruitcakes in our house that stayed for years. Some of them we dared not move for fear they’d become load bearing.
In a kindly gesture, Phillie Riordan had brought dozens of spirit miniatures, the little overpriced booze bottles you get in a hotel minibar. These were sincerely appreciated, not least by Dara, who instituted another light tax for his own ends before decamping to the garage to play pool for the evening. Phillie had no doubt procured the miniatures via respectable means, but the odd specificity of such an offering delighted those for whom it conjured images of our upright and respectable GP pilfering his haul from hotel minibars over several years. There were also the kind of large, stainless-steel caterer’s tea-pots you see at church fairs. Did we borrow those too from the convent, like we did the dozens of sandy-coloured folding wooden chairs? The latter now stretched from the back door and through the kitchen, out the front hall, and up against the piano in the dining room where Mammy lay in her coffin, on a table that was too high for me to see her without being lifted.
With its folded chairs, industrial quantities of tea and expanding population of desolate mourners, the house soon took on the appearance of a field hospital. Beside those standing in twos and threes, engaging in murmured conversation, still more slumped alone in chairs, rendered insensible to others by stifled sobs. Everywhere stood puffy-eyed people with features so red and blotchy it was as if bandages had just been ripped off their faces. I can still remember the slowly disappearing mirage of finger-shaped, blood-evacuated flesh on Giovanni Doran’s cheeks as he withdrew the hand that clasped his face so he could shake my father’s.
There were, everywhere, people who’d been jarringly removed from their appropriate contexts. Mr O’Mahoney, who commanded the dignity of a sphinx in the secondary school I would later attend, was reduced to fumbling his way through a chat with my older brother Shane, in which he told his then-thirteen-year-old student that his own mother had recently died, and thus he knew what Shane was going through. A polite type, Shane was nevertheless incapable of hiding his contempt for the equivalence. Thereafter, the conversation took on that stilted air common to those chats you have with sales staff once they tell you the price of an item and you keep talking only so they’ll never suspect you don’t regularly spend ￡28 on lemon-scented handwash.
Most guests, already sombre and teary when they arrived, were stunned into traumatic shock once they greeted the body. Gripping the coffin’s edge, they stared in dejection at my mother, who lay stately, pale and dead at forty-three. Some regarded her casket as if it were a grisly wound they’d discovered on their own body, registering the sight with a loud gasping horror that made all around them redouble their own racking sobs. Some witnesses collapsed in the manner of someone cruelly betrayed, as if they’d arrived at the whole maudlin affair on the understanding they were being driven to a Zumba class.
In any case, a sniffled consensus prevailed that my mother looked ‘just like herself’. This sentiment was always spoken with an air of relief that suggested Irish morticians were sometimes in the habit of altering the appearance of the dead for a laugh, but on this occasion had read the generally melancholy feeling in the room and realised it would be best to make up her face to look as much as possible as it had in life. In a nice touch, you might have noted, her clothes had also been chosen from her own wardrobe, rather than from some jolly old hamper in the corner of the morgue filled with feather boas, pirate hooks and floppy, felt-lined cowboy hats. Many’s the wake, you might presume, owed its lively atmosphere to the hilarious sight of your late Auntie Pauline dressed head to toe as Henry VIII.
And so this cycle repeated; people arriving bearing fruitcake, ashen-faced, clasping hands and embracing those of us there gathered, only to see the body and suffer an emotional collapse that might range anywhere from throttled gasp to guttural wailing. Hundreds would come in the next two days, causing hushed embarrassment among those who inadvertently arrived when things were already hectic, or had realised they’d called at a more prominent time than their relation to the deceased might warrant. As always, even in kindest company, an unspoken hierarchy of grief asserted itself.
Wakes surround you, smother you even, with loved ones and acquaintances and workmates and long-lost pals, prompting a cycle of social interaction that gives the entire process a strangely unreal tinge. Perhaps that’s the point, and the whole system is just a ruse aimed at preventing emotional breakdown by demanding a ritual period of event management for the mourner. Of course you can be alone with your dark, broiling thoughts, but only once you’ve made and distributed six hundred cups of tea.
My memories are scattered: Dara and Shane playing pool in the garage, and the latter winning since the former was getting increasingly merry on pilfered spirits; the twins, Orla and Maeve, acting adult and serene, though they were not yet twelve; my youngest brother, Conall, six weeks from turning three years old, looking even more confused than I did, being passed from person to person in a daisy chain of cuddles so never-ending I don’t know that his feet touched the ground all day. My own contribution to people’s memories of the wake is somewhat less dignified than I’d like, but has become a venerable classic on those boozy nights when my family come together and retell our favourite mortifying tales about ourselves.
A system had been put in place to try to marshal the movements of us Wee Ones, who were a bit too young and, let’s face it, thick to understand precisely what was going on. Hence my being fussed over with sadness by Margaret, or Anne, or any of the Big or Middle Ones. Of course, they couldn’t repress my ebullient run-around ways for ever, and before long, I was wandering free through the gathered mourners. I was simply too young to grasp that the only thing sadder than a five-year-old crying because his mammy has died is a five-year-old wandering around with a smile on his face because he hasn’t yet understood what that means. We laugh about it now, but it really is hard for me to imagine the effect I must have had, skipping sunnily through the throng, appalling each person upon their entry to the room by thrusting my beaming, three-foot frame in front of them like a chipper little ma?tre d’, with the cheerful enquiry: