Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(27)
My father took over presenting duties the following year, since replacing a priest seemed, by that stage, as blasphemous as swapping out his beloved dog. That year the occasion was pitched as an evening of commemoration. It would be the last such service we did.
Something my dad reminds me of when we talk of my lapsed faith is that the church’s worst ideas don’t indict all Catholics. This is a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree, since in my experience ordinary rank-and-file Catholics are mostly decent and lovely people, who don’t literally agree with every little church teaching. But with Catholicism, you are in or you are out. You don’t get to pick and choose the bits you agree with, by definition. It’s like saying you’re a teetotaller who only drinks wine. There was once a huge movement toward creating a subset of Catholics who ‘agree with Catholicism except this bit or that bit’ and it became wildly popular with the public. It was called the Reformation, and those people are called Protestants.
A year after Elmo died, we forced another dog onto Daddy without really giving him much say in the matter, since we knew he’d say he didn’t want one. Luckily, it proved a massive and immediate success. The Labrador/retriever cross who has lived with him for the past ten years is, by some distance, his favourite child. From the gloom of loss, a bright shining star entered his orbit, and Daddy didn’t so much form a bond with her as initiate a cult in her name. Sally sends him birthday cards, ghost-written by my sister Caoimhe, which dwarf our own when they’re propped above the fireplace, crowding out the view like a ship’s sail he’s placed on the mantelpiece.
I think it’s fair to say that Sally isn’t quite as noble, wise or clever as Elmo. I got myself in a lot of trouble by claiming in a newspaper column that she lacked the intelligence God gave a sea sponge. Within minutes I was being sent images of the dog reading the Observer, with what I’m sure my father hoped I’d see as an upset expression. Unfortunately, Sally lacks the capacity to look anything other than delighted when she’s in my father’s company, so the effect was slightly undone. What Sally lacks in poise and grace she more than makes up for in being huge, hairy and filled with adoration. ‘To his dog,’ wrote Aldous Huxley, ‘every man is Napoleon; hence the popularity of dogs.’ Napoleon would be a sad demotion for my father, as Sally believes him to be God himself. And for all his religious devotion, my father is fine with that.
7
Fermanagh
‘T hese are all the ones I have,’ Patricia says, handing over a tightly wrapped bundle of envelopes. We’re speaking at a family get-together, to which she has been invited as my mother’s oldest friend. She’d heard I was writing a book, because my dad’s first response to the news that I was writing a book was to tell every person he’s ever met that I was writing a book. Soon, I was getting Facebook messages from old friends like Patricia, and also from people I didn’t quite know but whose profile pictures were either a freeze-frame of them trying to grapple with their webcam, or a close-up from a wedding, zoomed in to the point that their entire face was about four pixels wide.
‘Daddy,’ I said on one such occasion, ‘did you tell Miss Graumann I was writing a book?’
‘I did,’ he replied, in his best thank-me-later drawl. ‘I ran into her in Lidl. She was very pleased, you know: she always thought you were great at English.’
‘She was my German teacher, Daddy – that’s not even a compliment. Who else have you told?’
‘Oh, the silver surfers WhatsApp group, Kieran at the pharmacy, a few of the cousins and Celine, and Pam of course…’
The list went on, including the nice woman who cleans for him every Friday, his podiatrist and the postman. I started thinking it was basically everyone he’d spoken to in the past few days, and several people he would’ve had to go out of his way to encounter. I tuned back in when I sensed he was wrapping up, and he ended by confirming that the son of the man up the road who sells solid fuel was now also up to speed. I was, of course, delighted. As the ninth of eleven, there were very few landmarks of my life that were particularly momentous or memorable for Daddy. By the time of my arrival, my infant antics were probably a bit like watching those later Apollo missions, when they’d run out of ideas and just ended up driving around or doing step aerobics. My father ardently disputes that this is the case, but I have always presumed that after, say, number five or six, we all just collapsed into a mottled, whinging blur of nosebleeds and missing socks, an amorphous child-mass of sincerely loved but not necessarily individuated entities. I remember reading the scores of Christmas cards we received one year, when I was seven or eight, all addressed to Joe O’Reilly & Family, and working out that, in terms of total weight percentage, I barely constituted the dot over the ‘i’ in the word ‘Family’. If Hollywood, in their eternal search for propulsive thrills, were to make a film about us, I probably wouldn’t even be a named character, instead listed in the credits as ‘Second Fat Baby’, or ‘Crying Birthday Redhead’.
There were, of course, other benefits to Daddy spreading the word, and sitting with Patricia in Fermanagh, I now held some of them in my hand.
‘Hold on to whatever,’ she said as we sat down with a neat parcel of eleven letters, written in the last few years of Mammy’s life. ‘Sure, I know where they are. There’s no rush.’