Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(21)

Sometimes my father’s eccentricities bend the world around him, conforming to the strangeness of his own mind, as when he became irate at a slow driver on the motorway and kept calling him a clown, only to overtake him and find that the driver was indeed a man in full clown make-up. And then there are his passions. My father’s idea of heaven is to stand in the aisles of a hardware store with a list of impossibly fiddly screws to gather, preferably so disparately spaced he can survey the entire shop’s contents for eternity. Throughout my childhood, any trip out of the house would usually feature an unjustifiable detour to a B&Q or garden centre, from which he would emerge with six hundred glow-in-the-dark cable ties, a box of satirical gnomes and enough random pig iron to keep his available stock of nuts and bolts hovering at an even two hundred thousand.


At my age, my father had five children and lived in a home he had surveyed, designed and built from scratch himself. I pay half my wage to live in a Hackney breadbin and feel like Bear Grylls when I sharpen a pencil with a knife. My dad drafted, constructed and installed septic tanks for his own homes, and for water treatment facilities all over Northern Ireland. If my sink were to get blocked right now, I would call the police. But besides all this, possibly the greatest achievement of my father’s parenting was letting us know that we were loved, and moreover giving us the knowledge that to love – and be loved – was the most important of things. This at a time when most of the men we knew couldn’t have found the will or way to express their feelings if their lives depended on it. Looking back, some of their lives literally did. I’ve always felt that we, his horrible, mocking children, take so much joy from making fun of him, telling tales of miserly standoffs in supermarkets, or overly zealous lectures on toilet roll application, because it punctures the worshipful regard in which we hold him, and brings him down to our level. But we love him to the end of the world and back, and thankfully possess the ease with that love to tell him all the time, in between mercilessly teasing him.


Now, we mostly live away, and Father’s Day is spent sending him WhatsApp videos from the grandkids and calling him to see if he liked the jumper/socks/Irish country CD we’ve sent him. But when we were children, he awoke each Father’s Day to the sound of soft padding at the carpet outside his room, and the doorknob stiffly turning as we filed in, conveying good wishes for the holiday. Or, more likely, he would have woken one hour earlier, to small, quick feet scurrying through the hall and to the kitchen, where his special breakfast was prepared. In that thick way of children, we had mastered the art of whispering louder than we spoke, and a cacophony of hushed screams, frantic scribbling and clanging saucepans would resound through the house, masked only by the steady clatter of moderately serious trips and falls, themselves so common as to have become white noise.

I imagine my father sat up in bed with a book set aside for the purpose, studiously ignoring the fights breaking out among the grubby little servers now traipsing down the hall, pushing a battered tea trolley towards his door. This contraption was three turns of a screw away from being shrapnel, and sported thick brass wheels which, even on the plush brown carpet of our hall, made a noise like the Eiffel Tower being folded into a quarry. It would groan under the weight of a cooked breakfast, some inane trinkets, a flower, an errant sock and the multi-coloured foliage of our many crumpled handmade cards. Once we’d made our way down the hall with all the stately grace of an exploding foal, my father’s bedroom door was thrown open. Feigning alarm and surprise, he pretended he’d only just now been roused by the eleven children unloading onto his carpet, pyjama-striped and laughing, like the freckled contents of a rural Irish clown car.

Standing in that bedroom, we’d laugh as he delighted over his plate of burned rashers, runny eggs and beans that looked like they’d been pre-digested. Luckily for him, we’d interrupt this feast to thrust our cards in his face. We would sing songs and read poems and hand him gifts; one year I gave him a frankly terrifying sculpture of him that I’d constructed from pasta shells. Back then I knew how to sum up what he meant to me. Thirty years later I’m content to reach for that, even if he’d probably prefer I wrote an entire chapter about dogs and priests.





6


An Entire Chapter About Dogs and Priests


Father Huck Balance stood in full vestments, scowling at the dog as the wind wrapped his stole around his face. He had been swinging the thurible fairly hard, and milky incense was now spewing out of it in a dense, Catholic fog. Rain was beginning to fall, and the smell of ozone mingled with the sweet musk of Mass to create an uncanny feeling of everything being out of place. It was the kind of grey, half-started day you’re always reading about in Irish short stories, where strong, unreasonable men attend the rural funerals of even stronger and less reasonable men. This was weather fit for killing your uncle, or nearly-but-not-quite bringing the wake house to a standstill by confessing your love for the widow of the departed, a woman you haven’t seen since that last time, so many years ago, that you, our author, are certainly about to describe in some detail. But we were not gathered by a hillside grave, nor huddling toward a country wake. We were standing outside our house waiting for the priest to bless our new twenty-six-foot ABI Award Superstar caravan. It was July 1992, just nine months after my mother’s death. By this point, I was likely so inured to Catholic rituals – and my family’s common deployment of them – that events like this, though interesting, even exciting, didn’t seem particularly odd. I’ve since realised that most families did not have priests out to the house to bless their caravan; it was more the sort of thing that bishops would do at Dublin airport with the plane carrying the Irish football team to a major tournament.