Fame!
Much of my childhood was spent feeling starved of the attention I surely deserved. There being eleven of us meant we were all getting less direct adulation than most children, and then my mother was cruelly withdrawn for ever, cutting that already meagre ration in half. I should have realised this was a problem for each of my siblings, but in my head no one had it as bad as me. For one thing, I came late in the pack, arriving at a time when my parents were so used to small children that the lustre of yet one more was probably somewhat diffused. I figured this alone started me off with something of a handicap. My older siblings had enjoyed fractionally more attention, and for longer periods, as they had each constituted a greater overall percentage of the total stock until their immediate successor was born.
I began deploying a miser’s arithmetic to gauge this shortfall. Were one to use this metric – and, baby, I invented it – then as the ninth child simple mathematical logic meant my relative attention stats were at near-critical levels. The fact that my two younger siblings must therefore have more parlous stats than me was not something I deemed noteworthy. At seven, I was tabulating a mental index that catalogued every second of favour my siblings got at my expense, every shred of attention, sympathy or recognition. What was most galling was the fact that I was undoubtedly the most interesting member of my family, and by a long way. Why was Daddy so endlessly fascinated by, say, Mairead’s GCSEs or Maeve and Orla’s summer trip to America, but not the fact I’d seen a very large pigeon outside? Why was he putting so much time and effort into helping Shane or Dara prepare for university abroad, and yet so unenthused by my big news that sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs died out due to an asteroid impact in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula?
I bristled at being ignored like this, since I thought I had a good shot at leading the clan. Look at the facts: I knew hundreds of jokes cribbed from at least eighteen joke books, I could draw Sonic the Hedgehog freehand, and I’d read my way through the entire house so could always recommend amazing reads for the whole family – and even where to dodge the rude bits in Jackie Collins novels, by volume and page number, in case anyone was bashful about such things. On the physical side, I could jump right over the fence as long as I used one hand, and could regularly get to one hundred keepie-uppies, twenty if someone was watching. I mean, I was putting together a pretty impressive portfolio here, and it was getting me nowhere.
Reluctantly, I came to realise it was better to compare myself to my immediate contemporaries, focusing on the attention Caoimhe, Fionnuala and Conall received from Daddy. As Wee Ones we were the shakings of the bag, leftover bits of excess batter that clung between the folds of newspaper from the chippy order. This placed us in a different category of interest, for everyone. Evidently the closer you got to adulthood, the more interesting you became; which, considering how uniformly boring teenagers and adults appeared to be, seemed like a joke, and not one of the gut-busters from Jerry Chmielewski’s 1978 classic Jerry’s Joke Book: Crazy, Funny, Polish and other Ethnic Jokes, which I had read from cover to cover, and from which I could recite if you cared to ask. Worse still, this arrangement wasn’t merely unfair but wildly inefficient. I was the star player, sitting on the bench week after week. It was odd that life had designated me the sole protagonist of reality, then so wantonly wasted my talents
It was probably, I surmised, a bit like neglect, and I almost certainly had it worse than any child who had ever lived, even those ones standing up in dirty cots wearing ratty jumpers in the fundraising ads for foreign orphanages. At least they were on TV. For a few days at the end of 1993, however, I too would find my way to the silver screen, when our home hosted an RTé camera crew. I was eight, I was irresistible, and I was not going to let my chance get away from me. This was the best thing that had ever happened to me, as is confirmed by the essay I wrote about it the next day in school, entitled ‘The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened to Me’. I was clearly at least marginally aware of how crass this might sound, so I began the essay with a little prologue, ‘The Sad Part’, which got the reader up to speed on the fact my mother had died, it was terrible, etc., etc. The meat of the thing was about how great it was that so tragic an event had led to me experiencing a few days as a screen star on Ireland’s national broadcaster.
Family Matters was a programme that dealt, appropriately enough, with all kinds of matters pertaining to families. Really boring Irish families. It was presented by two couch-dwelling presenters in loud outfits, who would throw to pre-taped reports on ‘issues’ and then circle back to the couch for follow-ups. Segments would include short pieces on, say, the rising price of school dinners, followed by a curt interview, in the studio, with the minister for education, in which she would say it was sad that school dinners were so expensive, and she’d look into it. Another segment would be about the difficulties of balancing work and home life, a topic illustrated with the story of a family in Roscommon that had to balance the demands of their llama farm with the extracurricular rigmarole of their kids’ passion for stilt-walking. They also did very worthy segments about tragic things that happened to families, and it was under this remit we were recommended, I presume by someone in Derry who had run out of friends to tell about our awful misfortune and fancied spreading the news further still. The word reached my father that RTé were interested, but he was reluctant, not least since this wasn’t the first time the media had come looking for an angle, and the previous occasion had not gone well.