Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(14)

As I got older, I realised there were other people’s memories that could fill the gaps, and having heard all the tales of how wonderful she was – and she really was – I found that I delighted more in hearing the scant few negative stories I could wring out of those who knew Mammy best. I spent my adolescence seeking out those corners of family events where they would be uttered like blasphemies through boozy breath and glinted eye: of how she could be holier-than-thou, that she could never get jokes right, how she couldn’t write a story to save her life. Best of all was that beautiful evening I heard my mother’s friend Patricia – in her glorious, mouth-bending, mid-Fermanagh twang – describe my mother’s singing voice as ‘sufficiently awful to disprove the existence of Gaww-id’.

Telling old stories is a large percentage of what we do when we return home. We sit around the huge kitchen table, which contained us comfortably back when our feet dangled inches from the floor. Even at full stretch, our fingers wouldn’t reach its centre unless we leaned far enough forward that our chins pressed against its cold surface. These days we barely get round it at all. The whole thing creaks when we laugh. We do still fit, but if you need to nip to the toilet or grab another bottle from the garage, it’s often easier to escape by slipping underneath and through a hedge-tight bramble of legs shaking with laughter than to inch past all those backs, pressed flat against the wall-seats lining either corner. Around that table, no one finishes a sentence, and we delight in each other’s misremembered notions, undigested memories, embarrassing acts from the past – recollections of Mammy, of each other, of ourselves. It’s there that the story of me at Mammy’s wake will be endlessly relitigated. Only I’ll be told I used slightly different wording, or actually it was only for a few minutes, or no, it was way worse and I was leaping around the place in full song. When corrected, I’m sure I intend to change my internal records, but those newer details rarely stick. We each long ago settled on our favourite tales, and each retelling grips them tighter to our tongues. We appreciate the preciousness of our own stock of memories, and perhaps there’s no harm in jealously guarding them, safe from anyone who’d take away whatever clutch we have left. Laughing in those wee small hours, we rinse away with wine our shame for all the silly stories that we tell ourselves.





4


Numbers


There’s a story my family tells around Christmas. As kids, that time of year was obviously pretty manic, but made more so by the fact each of us fancied ourselves as having prominent careers in showbusiness. We all sang in choirs at one time or another, and some of us in several at the same time.

I was less involved than most, yet even I sang in choirs for at least ten years, and the Christmas period was a time of constant shuttling between different masses or meetings or festive performances. Most of us were then also in school shows, nativities or orchestra recitals, and in the run-up to Christmas, a few of us even did the fully produced commercial pantos in town. I somehow never made the cut for those things, which I found odd because my kind eyes and easy way with people reminded many of a young Marlon Brando.

In any case, quite aside from the rigmarole of cooking and presents and the management of infant expectations that Christmas would demand from a single parent of eleven children, my father was rushed off his feet getting us to and from these various functions, and dealing with the preparations for overlapping performances. Walking through our house over Christmas was like a trip through the Warner Bros. lot in late-seventies Hollywood, only instead of showgirls and spacemen there would be assembled children dressed in their Sunday best, or as shepherds, or in the costume of some brutally crowbarred topical character favoured by school plays at the time. Many will remember my delighted turn as Reuben, the inexplicably French brother in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, not least for my having done the entire thing dressed as Eric Cantona.

The main event was our primary school choir performing Christmas carols in old folks’ homes and hospices, out of some misguided belief that the reedy timbre of our childish voices would provide balm to the elderly and dying. I remember finding the experience nice, in a way, although it was hard to gauge reactions since their clapping was generally quite slow and methodical, and having been told not to stare at the people with tubes connected to them, we decided to not look at anyone at all. My dad would be waiting for us to be done so he could take us home or, more likely, drive to the next place for another of us who was due at a similar engagement. It was actually worse if you didn’t have anything to do, since you’d still be going all over the place and waiting in the car while everyone else was performing, which was way more boring than singing ‘Frosty the Snowman’ to the infirm. One of those Christmassy mornings, my brother Shane was singing at three Masses in a row. That’s the 10, the 11 and the 12:15. After each, my dad would talk to a few fellow parishioners here and there, and pick up others of us who were at other Masses or concerts nearby. Owing to the comings and goings, headcounts got twisted, and on the drive back Shane turned round, surveyed the contents of the minibus and noticed that Dearbhaile was missing. She had been there in the chapel after the service but had obviously stayed too long chatting to a friend, and Daddy, understandably frazzled and depleted, had taken off without realising she wasn’t on board.

He turned tail and raced back to the church to pick her up. He was furious. ‘How did none of you notice she was missing?’ he fumed, and everyone felt chastened at their lack of awareness, imagining her now crying on the steps of the church alone, or worse, in the company of scandalised and judgemental parishioners – or clergy – wringing their hands, apt to be telling tales very soon about the poor, rudderless O’Reilly clan, demented by grief, incapable even of counting themselves. When the bus finally reached Dearbhaile, however, she was smiling and happy, and neither in the company of some sour-faced scold among the congregation, nor alone.