I was ten. Insomnia had never been a problem. I was that child who could sleep on a chicken’s lip. Hot cars, busy ferries, sun-blasted poolside lounging chairs – I never needed more than a few minutes before I was completely unconscious. Sleep was an old friend who’d never given me any trouble but now bore me some unaccountable grudge. It was like forgetting how to blink, or breathe.
Each night in bed, my brain edged toward drowsiness and I circled my fatigue with paranoid attention, intent on making its dull spark catch fire. This only prolonged the agony until I was wider awake than before, and the whole cycle would repeat until some meagre, restless half-sleep was achieved. At first, the horror was confined to nights, the evenings, but soon the knowledge of what was coming would creep into afternoons, until I was in a constant state of tired dread. A heaviness swirled once my head hit the pillow, relenting only when I finally collapsed with exhaustion around 5 a.m. I awoke at seven to a fear of having to get through yet another day and night.
Weeks turned into months. Fatigue made me sloppy and confused in school. I grew more sullen and withdrawn, staring vacantly in class, picking at my food at mealtimes. I lost weight, and brown-beige bags grew under my eyes like coffee stains. I don’t remember saying anything about any of this to my family. It felt as though what was happening was on the edge of speech, or something I would be ashamed to say out loud. I don’t think anyone noticed anything. There were nine of us living at home at this stage, each of us as self-absorbed as the next, so a failure to spot one sibling acting a bit more mopey than usual was probably understandable.
Whether brought on by stress, lack of sleep or the ravages upon my diet, I eventually developed severe abdominal pains and had to be brought to the doctor. Our GP was Phillie Riordan, the family friend who had supplied the spirit miniatures for Mammy’s wake. He was the kind of doctor who would shake a child’s hand in greeting, as if you were not a ten-year-old insomniac but a city gent being shown round a country club. Gerry had an outsider’s insight into what was plaguing me, and a doctor’s knack for saying one thing while doing another. He produced a stethoscope, poked my stomach, felt my pulse and said, as if we had just been speaking on the very subject, ‘Tell me, Séamas, what are you so sad about?’
‘I don’t want Daddy to die,’ I replied, in that very moment thinking and saying those words for the first time. This simple act of open thought caused my legs to buckle and I burst into tears. I realised that I hadn’t thought to cry in years. It felt as though I was breathing soup. Daddy crossed the room and, before he grabbed me, I could see he had red eyes and a wobbly lip. He placed a massive hand on my head and held me to his chest. All decorum was lost and my sobs grew less reserved. Within seconds I was pushing a microwave lasagne out through my sinus cavities onto his heaving stomach.
‘I’m not going anywhere, pet,’ he said in a throttled, throat-clearing kind of a voice, with me shaking in his arms. I stayed clamped to him, a baby spider cleaved to his father. I apologised for his ruined tie, and he told me he loved me and basically promised he would never die. It’s a promise to which I still hold him.
Dr Gerry waited a respectful minute before informing us that I needed to get to hospital immediately. Whatever the cause of my sadness, my appendix was about to explode.
When the IRA began decommissioning its arms at the end of the nineties, bombings became less frequent altogether. Fay undoubtedly missed the removal of her favourite topic from public discourse, but she told me the real downside was the headaches and heart attacks it was causing local cows. Decommissioning meant rendering the IRA’s stores of guns, munitions and explosives inoperable and dumping them in undisclosed sites around the countryside. This was done with independent observers, their locations never revealed. Fay’s uncle, she claimed, knew precisely where they’d gone, and he had the dead cattle to prove it.
Uncle Paudie had come to believe his land verged on to one such dump, in which tonnes of nitroglycerine had been deposited and filled in. Workers in chemical plants talk of a condition termed ‘bang head’: severe, debilitating headaches caused by prolonged exposure to nitroglycerine. This exposure also bestows a tolerance for the substance’s other main effect: dilating your veins and regulating blood flow to the heart. The problem, Fay said, was once you built up this tolerance you’d suffer withdrawal if you were ever deprived of it, leading to the ‘Sunday heart attacks’ that befell chemical engineers who imbibed industrial nitrates at work, only to suffer cardiac arrest once that dependence was interrupted at the weekend.
Uncle Paudie was sure some residue must have seeped into the water table, since his cows all started getting headaches, although the exact manner in which one discerns a cow’s headache went unreported. It was only once they were moved indoors that the heart attacks started. A few at first, then more, until he had an entire building filled with bovine corpses and his livestock population had dwindled to those small few who were left, all groaning in various states of cephalalgia.
I didn’t stake much on the veracity of Fay’s story, since it had the hallmarks of pub-friendly rural myth, and this was the same woman who later told me, five full years after the euro replaced the punt as Irish currency, that she’d never used it, and still bought everything with ‘old money’. This was a lie so patently futile I still don’t know what she intended to gain by telling it. The truth of Uncle Paudie’s cattle was less important than its lessons on unintended consequences. There was a sinister poetry to the notion that burying the poisons of the past led Derry to a future without daily bombings, while also filling a muddy shed in Carrigart with dead and dying cows.
*
They say that the pain of bereavement never leaves you. But it is easier if it’s all you’ve really known. I was so young when Mammy died that I sometimes felt as though I didn’t know her well enough to grieve the same way my older siblings did, and that it was somehow false for me to claim the same pain as them. I think I’ve struggled with the shame of this my entire life. I did not experience the same grief as other members of my family, or friends who’ve been similarly bereaved, because it happened before I was able to understand it. The funny version of this story is the anecdote that forms the title of this book, but that hides a deeper sense of inadequacy, that my high placing on the hierarchy of grief was false, inauthentic. To a large extent, me telling this story is designed to hide that shame. It’s true that my experience simply wasn’t the same as that of my older brothers and sisters, and couldn’t be. I still sometimes feel embarrassed when grieving friends approach me for advice, as if I could ever review the coping methods used so successfully by that chirpy little five-year-old and write them the same prescription. ‘Right, here’s my advice – are you taking this down? Step one: be five.’
In truth, the pain didn’t leave as well as I thought it had. I muddled through the shallow understanding of grief my five-year-old self could manage, and when the collective tears died down I told myself the job was done. I’d buried it, out of fear and shame and an inability to know how and when to grieve for myself. So, during sleepless nights, it stopped waiting for my permission and sought its own way out. Its price was not waived, but deferred, and the bill had finally arrived. I would have other breakdowns throughout my life, in churches, at roadsides, or standing beneath giant zoologically suspect arachnid sculptures, each born from further layers of unprocessed pain that had accumulated, like heaps of dead munitions, below the surface.