Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(12)

8. She is in her bedroom.

It must be early in the morning, because the curtains haven’t been opened yet. Daddy isn’t in the room, so he may be in the kitchen or has already left for work. I’ve come into their room to find Mammy placing small foam pads in the front of her dress. The relative murk in the room is accented by two or three ineffably small slivers of sunlight that slice, wafer-thin, through the dark curtains. Mammy is not remotely fazed at seeing me come in, and as I sit on their bed she carries on, saying something to me I can’t place, as she sprays some perfume on her wrists and neck. I see the individual drops of the perfume ascend as motes of dust, as they pass over her shoulder and through the sunbeams poking through the window.



You may have noticed that there were more memories there than the five I previously mentioned. This is because, over the course of writing this book, three more have resurfaced, bringing the total to a slightly more respectable eight. Even light reading on the subject suggests that memories are scarcely trustworthy things, so I don’t really know how many of these are fully real recollections drawn from focusing on aspects of my life that were too painful to consider for the past three decades, or half-fudged fakes contrived from going over other people’s stories and looking at old photographs.

When people say memory is treacherous, I think it’s truer even than they intend. They usually mean treacherous the way Irish weather forecasters describe rainy roads or windy hills: as in unreliable, not to be counted on. They’re right, of course. Your brain can’t be relied upon to give you a full account of the things you lived through last week, let alone twenty or thirty years ago. When writing invoices for freelance work, I frequently put down the address not of my last apartment, but the one from two house moves ago, where I haven’t lived in nearly half a decade. I have several times been looking at pictures from a friend’s day out or birthday party and commented on how great the venue looks, even asking my wife if we can go there some time. It is then that I swipe one photo to the right and find myself, at that event with all those people, likely talking about how nice it is there. There’s a painting in my brother’s house that I have complimented, in effusive terms, as really livening up the place and showing a bold new direction for the sitting room’s decor, at least three times in the past two years. This would be slightly less maddening if it weren’t for the silence said painting has generated the other dozen or so times I’ve stood in that room. When it comes to ancient memories, especially those from childhood, it’s hard to know if you’re remembering the thing, or what you’ve been told to remember about that thing; suggested glimpses at the distant past, over which each subsequent re-tread is tracing thicker and thicker lines of falseness.

Every time you remember something, an imperceptible inaccuracy percentage creeps in, meaning the more you remember an event, a place, even a person’s face, the less reliable the memory will be. I got it in my head that my schoolmate Paul looked a bit like Boris Becker, and was surprised to discover how little I recognised him twenty years later, as my brain had slowly eroded every bit of information I once had about his face that wasn’t Becker-shaped. The longer you leave things, the more time these subsequent recollections have to spread the reproduction errors, carrying those extra added untrue details which, once insignificant, aggregate into a greater portion of the whole.

Memory is, however, also treacherous in that other, more sinister sense of the word. As I grew older, I felt that having forgotten so much of my mother made me a bad and unfeeling son, and the shame of deleting her from myself screwed into my brain, dripping poison where it went. Maybe this is why I ended up with so few memories – it hurt to remember, and in neglecting to do so, the road less travelled receded back into the bush. Years afterwards, I grieved Mammy in the more normal ways, and memories of the gormless naivety with which I conducted myself would be exquisitely painful. By ten or eleven, I would look back on this time constantly, locked into repetitive feelings of shame and remorse. I’d force myself to relive memories, like a tongue seeking the siren pain of a shaky tooth. I’d remember, too, how I capitalised on the attention I got for being a newly minted half-orphan. Maybe this is why, at some point, I stopped remembering those things, and so many of the times we had together drifted away.

Most people seem prepared to treat their memories shabbily, to consign them to a cavernous dustbin in their brains, never sought or ordered, only to be touched when necessary. Having deleted so much of my mother, I realise I started to undertake a rather different approach. I began to remember everything, holding my memories close and repeating them to myself, writing things down when necessary, but mostly savouring life as it happened in real time. I would not have the same thing happen to me again. Now, my memories would be put to work. I started to amass knowledge in a way that was avaricious and obsessive. And incredibly annoying. One time I asked my Uncle Frank if he knew what deciduous meant, so he humoured me by saying he didn’t. This was a cruel, cruel trap on my part, for I subsequently followed him around his own house making fun of him for his ignorance. There are dozens of stories like this from my childhood, so it would be handy if I could attribute this kind of behaviour to my bereavement. It makes for a sad picture, but on the plus side, it does let me off the hook when, to be honest, there’s just as good a chance I was merely a precocious dork whose mam had died.

I have extraordinarily detailed memories of how people treated me when they discovered Mammy was dead, how differently they spoke to me. Throughout my school years, indiscreet acquaintances would tell me how much their parents would talk about my family, using us as a devastating example for them to live up to, as if our experience were a cautionary tale to be shared round the dinner table. ‘You’re lucky you have your mother,’ they’d bark over salty gammon. ‘For God’s sake, poor critters over there, I don’t know how it is they cope at all.’ It was worse being fussed over by mams in person, of course. They’d fidget and mumble and laugh at everything I said. Often, they would buy me things for no reason. They’d ask about my dad a lot, and say how wonderful we all were, and him especially, but in a tone that suggested it was simply miraculous we hadn’t beaten ourselves to death with lead pipes from all the grief. Older Irish women possess an uncanny ability to fear nothing so much as causing offence, while being so clumsily, dependably offensive it would almost be better they never spoke at all. One time, Colum Dineen’s mum was driving me home when she quietly said, ‘You’re all great,’ while crossing herself, as if my family’s experience was itself contagious, a harbinger of death against which was needed specific and ritualistic protection right there and then. I was, in some sense, every parent’s nightmare, personified in a bookish lad hammering them with facts about Star Wars, or long division, or spiders, and wondering, in between big greedy bites on the way back from football training, why I’d been bought an entire mid-journey box of chocolates in the first place.