‘Did ye hear Mammy died?’
I don’t remember faces dropping, nor anguished sighs, but I’m told I accumulated many such reactions before someone came up and stopped me from traumatising any more of these good people. The solemnity, not to mention the permanence, of my mother’s death was lost on me then, and it would take a while to sell it in a way I really took to heart. Months later, in much the same manner of a man who remembers a packet of Rolos in his coat pocket, I’d straighten my back with delight and perkily ask the nearest larger person when Mammy was coming back, on account of how she’d been dead for ages and was, surely by now, overdue a return.
The funeral itself was a beautiful affair, with eight priests scattered from chancel to apse in Long Tower church. The service was led by Bishop Edward Daly, a man made famous by his fearless work on Bloody Sunday, traversing the Bogside with his blood-stained handkerchief. He was a family friend back in my dad’s home town, a man who’d been babysat by my granny in his youth. When my parents moved to Derry, he drove them about and showed them what was what. Just six years later, he was officiating at Mammy’s funeral. There were over a thousand attendees, and other than standard weeping, the silence was broken only by the softly warped lilt of Long Tower’s great organ and Dearbhaile, three years my senior, who screamed so hard her shoe fell off, and Phillie had to take her outside to be sedated.
Mammy was laid to rest in Brandywell cemetery, high up the steep, grassy hill that runs up into Creggan, looking down over Brandywell Road and Derry City’s stadium. Some years later, a fibreglass statue of a paramilitary volunteer was erected a few graves in front of hers, a fascinating departure from the ambience of angels and urns graveyards typically aim for. Mounted by the INLA – very much the Andrew Ridgeley of Irish republicanism – it was a striking addition to the neighbourhood. The aims and deeds of the INLA are too complex to go into here, but it is odd that, to this day, any time I visit my mother’s grave it hovers on the edge of my vision like a giant G.I. Joe, only one who’s about to give a prepared warning to the world’s media. If you were to construct a heavy-handed visual metaphor for how large a shadow the Troubles cast over everything in Northern Ireland during my childhood, it wouldn’t be a bad shout.
On the way home, Daddy rolled down the window of the hearse and thanked the policemen marshalling the traffic at Nixon’s Corner. This was the checkpoint that lay two miles from our house, the very same one we’d go through each morning. That they had taken the time to facilitate the cortège and its followers was a bending of protocol that my father greatly appreciated, the kind of touching moment you could imagine Van Morrison singing about, when he wasn’t phlegmily screaming at some studio engineer.
In the months that followed, left more and more to ourselves, the shock would subside and the slow, rumbling grief would come in successive, parallel waves. The impacts would come to each of us individually and at different speeds, and then be magnified by all of the subsequent considerations of everyone else’s grief, cross-bred and multiplied by the twelve of us trying to make sense of it, whether together or apart. When you lost the energy to be sad, anger would tag in for a relief shift. My older siblings would work through their own grief and then consider the horror that we younger members still had to go through, and the abject desolation of the whole thing would reheat inside them all over again.
My mother wouldn’t be there any more to kiss grazed knees or carry me to bed when I pretended to have fallen asleep in the car or dry my hair with the static force of a hydroelectric dam. She would never cock an eyebrow at the socialist-tinged T-shirts or abstruse electronica of my teens. She would never smile politely at girlfriends she found overfamiliar, or text me to say she loved them the second I got home. Mammy would never send a text message full stop. She would never read an email or live to see the words ‘website’ or ‘car boot sale’ enter a dictionary. Mammy didn’t even live to see Bryan Adams’s ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ get knocked off UK number one, its perch for the last four months of her life.
It seems blasphemous that my mother’s death even existed in the same reality as those moments that subsequently came to define my youth; taking the long way home from Nixon’s Corner so I could listen to Kid A twice, or poring over the lurid covers of horror paperbacks in a newly discovered corner of Foyle Street library. How is my mother’s passing even part of the same universe that gave me the simple pleasures of ice cream after swimming lessons in William Street baths, or scenting the sun cream on girls’ skin as they daubed polish on their outstretched, nonchalant nails. My life wasn’t over from that point on. I’d laugh and cry and scream about borrowed jumpers, school fights, bomb scares, playing Zelda, teenage bands, primary-school crushes and yet more ice cream after yet more swimming lessons. I’d just be doing it without her. To some extent, I’d be doing it without a memory of her. The most dramatic moment of my life wasn’t scored by wailing sirens, weeping angels or sad little ukuleles, nimbly plucked on lonely hillsides. Mammy’s death was mostly signalled by tea, sandwiches, and an odd little boy in corduroy trousers, announcing it with a smile across his face.
2
Halloween
Considering Derry spent the latter half of the twentieth century beholden to the tremors of large, loud explosions, its inhabitants’ fondness for fireworks is greater than you might imagine. None in the city are bigger or louder than those that come in late October, when Derry throws the biggest Halloween celebration on Earth. The entire city goes for it full-strength, with a whole weekend of parties and events, all of which are fully costumed. Office workers, postmen, supermarket cashiers, your bus driver, all taking part in the broad spectacle of public japery that takes over the entire city for at least a few days, and often a week or two beforehand.
Something in the region of 100,000 fancy-dressed people flood the streets for outdoor events, and this in a city with a population of 110,000. Ordinarily, Derry folk are stoical and dismissive, and have earned something of a reputation for being wary of grandstanding. There’s an unspoken distrust of anyone attracting too much attention to themselves. It’s likely a survival tactic, from a time when people in Derry felt slightly less safe than they do now. There’s a caginess to the city’s older inhabitants likely baked in from the bad old days, when cultivating a healthy fear of outside attention was probably quite wise. One legacy of the Troubles for people my age is that we can’t even attack our elders for being grumpy and churlish, since back when they were kids, they were all being stopped by police four times a day or dragged out of their homes by soldiers at 4 a.m. for having the wrong surname. I came into my teens when the worst of the Troubles was finally receding, but that queasy paranoia was still everywhere around. And I mean everywhere. I once called the library on Foyle Street, looking for a book of ghost stories.
‘Hello, is this the Central Library?’ I asked.