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The living room – also known as the sitting room or, more commonly in Derry parlance, the good room – is my favourite room in the house, featuring its greatest asset: the grand, south-facing eight-metre-square window that looks out over a beautiful scene of County Derry and Donegal. We like to say that it faces the Foyle, but it actually more directly faces Reservoir Meats, the meat-processing plant on its northmost bank, where both of my older brothers held summer jobs in their teens, and which luckily is also too distant to be visible. On the hills to the south-east are several gigantic wind turbines that add a futuristic majesty to the view which otherwise would look like something from a cover of Ireland’s Own. The good room was where we gathered to watch TV and work our way through Daddy’s vast, vast collection of video tapes.
Certain governing laws were true of those long sunny days when Raiders of the Lost Ark had just come on, or the second half of the FA Cup was set to kick off. It was an absolute certainty that such a moment would be the cue for the compressed, crackly hiss of an unfamiliar car driving into the front yard, which meant visitors.
When we were small, and so starved of attention and distraction we voluntarily spent time with our siblings, the prospect of visitors, no matter how mundane, was something to be celebrated. Even if it was one of Daddy’s friends from prayer group, or a local eccentric who assembled wicker popes in his spare time, we would receive them as emissaries from the wider universe as gratefully as if we’d been manacled to the furniture and barred from all outside contact. But this glad, happy feeling toward visitors had switched off entirely by the time we reached twelve, at which point we greeted the prospect of guests with unsurpassed dread. By that age, all adults seem so preposterously boring that if Neil Armstrong himself had arrived, fresh from the moon and carrying several species of lunar spider he wanted to show us, we would have cursed the interruption, since it would more than likely have arrived at just the time when we were enjoying doing something else or – bliss itself – nothing at all.
Once we heard that crunch of gravel, we were quickly drummed to action stations. In an ecstasy of nervy fumbling, four of us would scatter to the kitchen with the kind of haste that wraps your heart around your back. Daddy would answer the door and we prepared the hospitality required. The most senior present would cut up some of the ubiquitous fruitcake. Another would be on biscuit assembly, laying an appetising selection of our fanciest biscuits on a plate. Convention dictated that one circular biscuit (a Coconut Ring, Jammie Dodger or Toffee Pop, in ascending order of fanciness) went in the centre, with auxiliary circle and oblong biscuits radiating outward from the middle in a floral burst, a brown and beige mandala that screamed refinement.
Whoever wasn’t immediately necessary for arranging or preparing food would also decamp to the kitchen, not out of any great desire to be helpful but in the hope that this feeble pantomime of bustling activity would legitimise their having left the sitting room, for entertaining visitors could be an awkward affair. Most visits were punctuated by long silences scored by deafening clock ticks and tea slurps off the good china. A deadening series of bulletins was delivered as to the visitor’s well-being, and that of their children and other family members, as if my father was the overseer of a minor fiefdom, one who demanded from his subjects not gold nor grain but news of each child’s academic progress and extravagantly detailed descriptions of the elders’ medical ailments. Barney, it turns out, had done the 11+ now and had actually done quite well in the language section, which was fascinating because he’d gone into the exam thinking it would be the maths that saw him through.
At the time, of course, I had neither the imagination nor the empathy to realise that my father had no more wish to converse with these people than we did. It never occurred to me that Daddy would, or could, be bored in the company of other adults. I simply didn’t think he had the good sense to be. When considered sanely, adult life – with its radio documentaries, coffee breaks and HP sauce – was so incongruously, immorally bleak, so staggeringly lacking in diversion, that it strongly suggested adults were incapable of identifying pleasant experiences and were simply dead to all joy. A bit like how dogs don’t mind living outside, or French people like France. Surely, if they were in possession of the slightest discernment, there’d be much less time dedicated to attending Mass, voluntarily listening to country music or making trips to the dump. How could one justify their frankly insane lack of interest in sitting upside down on sofas?
It seemed as though all adults everywhere were engaged in a heartless competition to be more insufferably boring than each other, just so they could be left in peace. These interactions were the perfect example of this evil art. They featured my father’s full vocabulary of impressive, noncommittal tics: rapid intakes of breath, flattening jumper folds, scratching placemats with index fingers, more rapid intakes of breath but this time while saying ‘this is it’ or ‘there we are’ or ‘ah sure anyway’, each of these offered with the absent-minded air you have when the cashier is asking you if you do Nectar points, and you’re boiling to get home for a shite. It is, of course, illegal for an Irish person to say, or even imply, that they’d like a guest to leave their home. If a friend were to arrive on your doorstep, covered in pigshit and carrying an open container of the SARS virus, you would still have to offer him a cup of tea at least twice. Once in your home, a guest must be made to feel welcome for as long as is humanly bearable.
Perhaps this is why my father would so routinely get us to perform for guests, since the idea that several children belting out an off-key Irish ballad was genuine entertainment seems outlandish. These recitals were often not enough, and the performances would be followed by more offers of tea and biscuits and fruitcake. At some point the exchange of mangled fricatives would slow down, and the pace of throat clearings and mumbled half-answers would increase, indicating the universally recognised consensus that a social interaction is drawing to a close. The endpoint would be the slap of the thigh and a fondly intoned ‘Right!’ before standing up and exhaling, in a gesture which is about as close to shooting your guest out of a cannon as is legally permitted.