Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(13)

Lacking the memories to form a coherent sense of Sheila O’Reilly in my head, I relied instead on what I could see of her around me, specifically all the times I’d see her each day. She was the giant, lovely photograph in the good room, and the smiling face in a few other family portraits throughout the house. She was the printed-out brochures for her anniversary Masses, and the small laminated Mass cards that were placed in a few of the bedrooms. I realise now she was becoming a fragmentary presence; more an idea, or set of loosely positive values, than a human being. I think people presumed I remembered more than I did, and I was too ashamed to admit that I didn’t, so I would gamely agree each time teachers told me that Mammy wouldn’t like this or that bold thing I’d done, or would have been proud of me for others. I was often told incredibly specific things about her that I didn’t know where to put.

‘Your mother hated coffee ice cream,’ my dad might say, offering a delightful little garnish of detail for my older siblings, an extra bit of colour to add to the full and complex idea of Mammy they had in their heads. For us Wee Ones, however, such details were a different prospect. We didn’t have the same store of detail, so the fact that she hated coffee ice cream, loathed Home and Away, or adored the two-penny slot machines in Bundoran would attain undue prominence, since these might be the twelfth or thirteenth facts we knew about Mammy in total. By the time I was seven, I’d forgotten what Mammy’s voice sounded like, but would pepper people with jarringly irrelevant facts about her to convince them, and myself, that I remembered her well.

‘I knew your mother,’ a nurse once said to me as she administered a jab in school. I was seven and, as ever, glad to hear someone praising her, so nodded as she withdrew the needle and dabbed my arm with cotton.

‘She really was a wonderful woman,’ she continued, with touching sincerity.

‘Yeah, she was,’ I agreed, before adding, meaningfully, ‘and allergic to bees, of course.’

My confusion around her really was at its apex around that time, when I was preparing for my first holy communion, and kept finding it hard not to picture Mammy as the Virgin Mary, the way it’s hard to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest without doing the same for Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy. She just fitted the part: a beautiful, sinless woman to whom people were devoted, and who spent her days now gazing, head tilted in silent stillness, from Catholic walls. Mammy had left traces of course, beyond the little tics and facial similarities people would spot here and there in each of us. She was the rapidly decaying scent of herself in the Datsun behind the house, and the sing-song cadence of the grace we said before meals. She was the daffodils in the garden, and the prayer pinned above the TV in the kitchen. More specifically, she was the text of this prayer itself, since she had written it out in crispest Loreto script.

The fact it was handwritten seemed to bind her that little bit more than the words themselves, and left us unwilling to remove the prayer – written hurriedly on red construction paper and intended to be temporary – for over a decade after she died, preferring instead to let it become increasingly tattered, steam-stained and ravaged by the travails of a working kitchen. When it finally did come down, it seemed like a tiny little fraction of her memory went with it, but it really was too grimy to remain. I think it was the chip pan, mostly, that did an even worse job on the other major wall adornment of that time, a soiled Garfield cuddly that hung, arms outstretched, like an irreverent feline Christ. It bore a spatula, fork and irretrievably yellow-tinged apron that declared MY KITCHEN, MY RULES, barely readable due to the layer of chip fat in which it was coated. I suppose I miss them both.

I don’t know how I felt in the early days. I probably had it easier than my older siblings, who had to work through the whole gamut of abandonment, depression and anger when they had a little more emotional intelligence and so felt it harder. I just know that by the time I was old enough to piece together an idea of my mother as a whole, complex person, the details I had to go on weren’t particularly whole or complex. Occasionally, like that nurse, people would spot who I was and tell me about her. A guy in Baldies’ Barber on Castle Street kept me there for half an hour telling me about how much she meant to everyone in Foyle Hospice, an institution she ardently supported. My friend Eoghan’s uncle stopped in his tracks to buy me a pint when he discovered Sheila, an old teaching colleague of his, had been my mother. He took me aside and insisted she was the finest woman he ever met in his life and teared up with pride when he heard we were all doing so well, as if we were a basket full of puppies he now knew to have safely crossed a treacherous ravine.

She didn’t teach in the secondary school I attended, but a lot of the teachers there had known her, either through my older brothers, or because teachers generally seem to know each other in small cities. Occasionally one of them would stop me after class and give me a halting oration on her particular qualities, as when Mr Costigan held me lightly at the shoulder as everyone else filed out of my first day in his class. ‘The word I’d use to describe her is grace,’ he said, with a faraway look in his eye, once all the other boys had left. ‘She had an extraordinary grace and compassion to her that you just don’t see in many people.’ I loved hearing these things and would sit and savour every last word. It happened quite a lot. Derry people are quite forward, of course, but it is also a testament to how much she meant to so many people, and how much her death affected them. ‘She was one of God’s angels, Sheila O’Reilly,’ one woman said as she stopped me in the central library. I was trying to walk out with some books I hadn’t rung in at the time. ‘Sure as anything, she was.’ They spoke as though she was a saint, which I obviously liked, but which also made her seem strangely remote. I longed to get a sense of who she was as a person, as a real, breathing person, beyond her intense dislike for an Australian soap, bees and coffee ice cream.