Shortly afterwards I was seized by a deep embarrassment for my childhood self. I couldn’t help imagining how I must have sucked the air out of the room when I said all this stuff about spider mams to adults: a motherless fact-merchant braying about maternal abandonment, utterly oblivious to how clearly it reflected my own grief and sadness and anger. In that moment, I knew two things: firstly, that there were still things I’d not emotionally grappled with in twenty years; and secondly, that I was right about spiders, and Louise Bourgeois should have looked it up.
This was not my first breakdown. I first realised I was depressed one morning in 1996, as an old lady was telling me IRA bombers just weren’t what they used to be. Fay Poultice was probably only sixty or so, but seemed ancient to my ten-year-old self. I often sat beside her on the bus, since my siblings and I rarely sat together on the way to school. It seems odd now, but it could be we were getting our recommended daily allowance of each other at home and relished the opportunity to sit in the company of others, even if they spent the entire journey wearing the ears off us with absurd pronouncements, as Fay did. Fay insisted the concept of lunch was a new invention that hadn’t existed when she was a child and was likely concocted to make money for people who made sandwiches, which she detested on account of them being ‘common’. She was the first person I’d ever heard speculate about chemtrails, the theory that the cloudy emissions seen trailing aeroplanes are not emissions at all, but a cocktail of nefarious chemicals the government showers on the populace for a variety of effects. American conspiracy theorists posit that these chemicals make us more obedient and compliant. Fay thought their purpose was merely to stain clothes just after you’d hung them out, forcing the plain people of Ireland to buy more washing powder. As we watched the Derry countryside hurtle past our window, Fay would declaim on all things under the sun, while passing me Fox’s Glacier Mints. These she took from a small sewing tin she carried just for sweets, palming them off to me with one pinch of her baggy hand, plopping them into my paw with fingers so spindly her knuckles looked like knots tied in an empty glove. Fay spoke often of her husband, a man so frugal it bordered on the folkloric. He was so abstemious, she said, that he’d switch the gas off while he turned his bacon, would skin a louse for a ha’penny, and if ever he found a plaster he’d cut himself. I never met Mr Poultice, but his wife’s slanders were so regular and so scabrous that I had barely flinched, aged seven, when she told me ‘that cunt would peel an orange in his pocket’.
I usually chatted along amiably with Fay, delighted to hear the insights of someone who addressed me as an adult, but on that particular morning I hadn’t slept properly in weeks. Too withdrawn to contribute, I rubbed the bags under my eyes as she filled the silence with another of her favourite topics: the IRA bombings that had been prevalent in England since the end of the ceasefire earlier that year. Fay spoke about bombings as if they were weather events. If she reflected on a ‘mild’ or a ‘bad’ weekend, she meant in terms of the explosive content of the news and would expound at length on any incidents I might have missed. Her interest struck me, even at the time, as oddly detached. I never heard her utter a single word in favour of republicanism as an ideal. It was more as though she was giving me the football scores. She recounted each casualty, and the strategies by which they were wrought, with the same dour affect she used when talking about a new post office in Moville, or the names and numbers of pills she had to take for the good of her legs.
‘Bus bomb in Aldwych, killed the young lad carrying it.’
‘Five pound of Semtex on the Charing Cross Road. Left in a phone box. Controlled explosion.’
Fay loved a controlled explosion. Everyone loved controlled explosions, since they were always the best footage on the news. Amid the sad faces and drizzly rain of Northern Irish life, there was something futuristically charming about Wheelbarrow, the little robot they sent in to trigger them. Wheelbarrow looked like a tiny crane mounted on tank tracks, and the combination of its ungainly form and jerky remote-control movements gave it a tragicomic quality every time it rolled over to a parked car or wheelie bin, obliviously trundling toward certain death.
Local bombings were less frequent now, so when her itinerary of away matches was over she filled more silence describing how easy it would be to bomb each place we passed. Fay saw the world as a wide-open field of knolls, crannies, bottlenecks and pinch points, all of which a bomber – a smarter class of bomber, I surmised – might exploit. ‘One could go off by the pillar box there, another two in a van at the other end – total carnage.’ ‘If you blew up a flatbed there, all the traffic would be blocked up and it’d be like shooting fish in a barrel after that.’ There was an air of disappointment in the way she described these hypothetical insurgencies, as if she’d do a better job, given the chance. Luckily for all concerned, she lacked any such inclination. Besides, her husband had sold the car that could have helped her get to and from her detonations, on the grounds it wasn’t cost-effective with the bus only a mile down the road.
Interactions of this kind were fairly standard. The bus driver, Fintan, was a paunchy man from the west of Ireland who would have been an unlikely candidate for the job, even if he hadn’t looked uncannily like Hitler, which, in fact, he did. He appeared to despise his work and had a hatred of children matched only by a fondness for swearing and an alarming indifference to road safety. Fintan screamed at traffic lights and growled at babies, and behaved as if driving the bus was ruining other, more important plans he’d scheduled for that morning. It wasn’t even a dedicated school bus. Fintan’s was the main Bus éireann coach from Ballybofey to Derry, which crossed the border in front of our house twice a day in each direction, and usually ten minutes either side of its scheduled time. More than once it didn’t stop at all, galloping cheerfully past us as if the handful of schoolchildren waving their arms in the pouring rain were a charming roadside attraction best admired at high speed.
And high speed was the order of the day. If my dad drove as if he had an injured child in the back of his vehicle, Fintan drove as if he was the fella who’d run them over. If he did pick you up, you had roughly four seconds to ascend the stairs, receive your growl and proffer your bus pass or change. You’d barely have time to think that man really does look like Hitler before the door clanged shut like a bear trap and the bus pummelled onward. More than once his accelerative zeal prompted a clatter of tiny limbs, as infants who failed to take their seats were scattered like limp little skittles along the coach’s central aisle.
*
I was usually delighted to hear the insights of people who addressed me like an adult, to learn about the running feuds Fay had with her hairdresser and offer what consolation I could when she told me Mr Poultice had spent another November week refusing to stick the heating on. My lack of interest in joining in as Fay issued her regular commentary on bombs and bombing was a grave sign that I was no longer capable of enjoying anything.
Some time in February 1996, I stopped sleeping. Each evening, a chill would settle in my stomach after I came in from school, suspending me in a fog of anxiety I couldn’t shake. A sad, stringy tension seized me as bedtime approached, and my mind swarmed with dread. I couldn’t place what was wrong, only that this formless feeling was pervasive, and I’d spend every evening in fear of the sleeplessness ahead.