I first realised I’d erased my mother when I was eight. It was Mother’s Day 1994. Mother’s Day was always kind of a drag, but not for the reason you might imagine. It was just a bit awkward, teachers becoming nervy and sheepish when it was coming up, nibbling on fingernails, fiddling with bracelets, staring at me like some tea they’d gulped without checking if the milk was in date. For a week or so, I’d be the unwilling recipient of weak smiles and tender shoulder pats from ordinarily taciturn figures, all of whom were, like Mrs Devlin, stern little women with Derry accents that could rust a bike. Now they were suddenly tiptoeing about me like I was a sad little ginger landmine.
What’s weird is that throughout this time when people were walking on eggshells, I was aware that what they feared saying around me were invariably bland, generalised things that never could have hurt me. Mother’s Day, first communion, confirmation, and other such events at which my mother would have been present, I simply didn’t associate with her, since no tradition of her attendance had been established. Playground gaffes affected me even less. I’ve lost count of the times an ill-placed ‘your mum’ joke would be deployed before its issuer remembered I was Séamas of the Dead Mam, and a whole tedious spiral would kick off: first a collective ‘ooooooooooh, that’s lousy!’ would erupt from the others, and then my antagonist’s face would drop in a paroxysm of horror. At this point any hypothetical disagreement I had with the person was shelved, and I’d immediately shift gears to downplay the insult, since this interaction was always more annoying and painful than any supposed slight might have been. It was never any use. ‘Shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t—’ they’d splutter and cringe, while I’d do my best to reassure them, which always made them feel worse. They often cried themselves, like they were putting a hex on their own mums. They wouldn’t like it if their mam died, after all. Some things were no joking matter, and my mum was one of them, but I never really understood even this. The mum in a ‘your mum’ joke wasn’t a real thing, it wasn’t my mum. I once even tried to put this across by explaining that Mammy couldn’t have been so fat she had her own postcode, since she was skinny even before she got cancer. This made things much worse, and I never tried that strategy again.
As with Mother’s Day, it seemed that people who hadn’t grieved didn’t know what could make me sad. It felt alienating to realise that they still had such a Fisher-Price imagining of what it was like. The idea that my grief could be sullied by something as innocuous as a fat mam joke was almost blasphemous, and stuck with me more than any such joke ever could itself. What made their inability to empathise all the more clear was the freedom with which they constantly slandered their own mums, assaulting them with language more commonly used by dock workers if they didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas, or weren’t allowed to go out that weekend. It was those moments that stung me into sullen silence in the canteen, and would recur during fitful sleepless nights, the callousness with which they set fire to the feast they held in their hands while I looked on and starved.
So, no, I didn’t care about Mother’s Day. I didn’t understand why I was even supposed to. That this day was supposed to be especially painful for me was just one more indicator that none of these adults had a clue. It seemed crass, even at eight, that a pain so profound could be altered by the date on the calendar, a day that seemed so impersonal and silly and had nothing to do with my mother or our relationship. On the day itself, I didn’t mind the fuss, since it usually meant I’d be left to my own devices. While everyone else was getting high on maternal love, glue and finger-paints, the teachers would freeze and I’d get to read in the corner.
When I was eight, however, I did actually do something. Everyone was making sparkly cards. Kev was so overzealous with the glitter that the only thing he gifted his mother that year was an evening under a desk lamp, digging sparkly gunk from around his weeping eyeballs. The classroom was quiet, aside from the soft, slow snipping of those stumpy little scissors they give kids, the blue plastic ones with all the bite of a damp oven glove. It was to this soundtrack I remember sitting in the corner, having tasked myself with writing a list of every memory I had of my mother.
Straining from the effort, I wrote down ten. Ten clear memories. My internal accounting had fooled me into thinking my stock was larger than it was. I could cycle through them in my head and never bother keeping count, and ten was about enough that I had never realised how small the number was. Writing them down made it clear just how little of her I had left. I felt bereft. Worse still, I never kept that list and, years later, realised with horror that the best I could manage was five. At the point at which I started writing this book, that was all I had. I’d not been paying attention and I’d deleted half of my mother from myself. Losing yet more of Mammy felt like a second bereavement.
Whatever stock of memories I had of Mammy in the first place, I’d steadily got used to losing, without being aware that it was happening, or thinking to do something to stop it. I sometimes wonder if my impulse to read everything, know everything and broadcast to everyone all of these wonderful everythings I knew, well into my teens, was all about beating the encroaching darkness of things forgotten, about proving that I would and could never let my guard down again. The boy who knew everything couldn’t possibly have forgotten his own mother.
The memories I have left are patchy and fleeting, but can still rise, fully formed. They’re not particularly impressive or spectacular; they’re the kind of homespun everyday things that shouldn’t really have stuck around.
1. I am in a car, Mammy’s car, and we’re driving down Abercorn Road.
I have no idea when this would have been, since I can’t place my own age, but we’re on our own in Mammy’s horrible old Datsun, a white car in the shape of a loafer that would subsequently grow old and mossy in the little parking area around the back of the house, behind the kitchen. There’s music on the radio. My knees are pressed up near my chest, because like all little boys I am locked in a constant, futile cycle of actions designed exclusively to be scolded for. She is telling me to put them down, and placing her left hand on mine for a moment, before changing gear. She is humming along to the radio, which is playing ‘Eternal Flame’ by the Bangles. She is still smiling from something just said by the presenter before the song began. I feel like we were travelling from William Street, but we could have been coming from Nazareth House on Bishop Street, or our parish church of St Columba’s, Long Tower.
2. I am shouting at her on my birthday.
I suppose it would make sense that it’s my fifth. I am sitting in the kitchen with my friends around me, and Daddy to my right. I have, bless my little heart, become a little over excited by the day’s events and, in that constant way of children’s birthday parties, reduced myself to something bestial and cruel, a godless little horror. I believe I have just witnessed someone eating some of my cake before I’d got a chance to, and decreed this to be the last mistake they’d make on this highest of high holy days. I scream at them to stop, and all my little friends are looking at each other, or suddenly seem quite fascinated by their fingernails. Mammy, quite understandably, remonstrates with me about being nicer to my friends, and I scream in her face, quite forcefully because she doesn’t understand me, birthdays, or cake.