Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(3)

Mammy’s body returned that afternoon, and was to be waked in our home. While the house was filling up, me and the other Wee Ones were being kept out of the way as things were made ready. I was mesmerised by the strange acoustic novelties now occurring in rooms removed of their furniture; the echoing clang of chairs and tables dragged about the place; the strange, loud, reverberating clicks of clocks that went, despite tradition, unstopped. It was customary for mirrors to be covered too, but Daddy had forgone both these measures since, for all his religious devotion, he saw them as affectation.

Our great big bungalow lay on the border of Derry and Donegal, with ‘on the border’ being here quite literal. Where our fence ended, so did the international jurisdictions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, its Crown Dependencies, all British Overseas Territories and the wider Commonwealth. Situated as far out from the city as it was, we rarely had many visitors, let alone enough to crowd our decidedly roomy environs. Now, there were people everywhere. Moreover, there was a sense that these were all people I’d simply never seen in our house before. They weren’t strangers exactly, they just weren’t house friends. These were people I’d only ever seen in the middle of town; ones who’d stop Mammy with a holler and a hooting laugh, as if bumping into someone in a shop was the greatest miracle since that pig in Ballinasloe that sang hymns. They’d grab her arm and talk a few feet above me, invariably bending down to smush my face and ask, ‘Dear God, Sheila, which one’s this now?’ They’d never guess my name, since I was on the younger end, and it was generally hard enough for my parents to keep track, but I was pinched and cuddled and told I was the spit of whichever sibling it was that they did happen to know. And now here they were, in our kitchen, the life squashed out of them, all serious and nervy as they carried dishes about the place and sheepishly searched, cupboard by cupboard, for whisks or dish cloths. Over these two days we would host a throng of well-wishers who’d come to pay their respects, see how we were doing, and inevitably bring us food, plates or cutlery. There were casseroles and tureens of soup and pyramids of vol-au-vents being shaped and reshaped like ice sculptures as they sat on that huge kitchen table, which had been moved especially for the purpose. This may have been the single biggest change; the table’s twelve-foot length completely altering the room’s dimensions when placed against the opposite wall, under that giant, high, ugly mirror, in which I was still many years from catching my own reflection.

In the time-honoured tradition of all Irish crises, sandwiches were liberally distributed. Egg and onion, of course, but also ham, and not merely the thin, wet slices you got for school lunches, but the thick, rough-cut chunks that still had the fat on – the type used exclusively by millionaires, Vikings and, it was taken for granted, Protestants. To add to the general sense of occasion, fifteen-year-old Dara had been dispatched to Lapsley’s to pick up two hundred Regal King Size cigarettes. The 160 that made it back from the shop were distributed around the house on oblong trays of polished silver, the kind of dish more typically reserved for bringing meat joints to neighbours’ houses. Individual cigarettes were also offered freely to guests by hand, as if we were not a gathering of grief-stricken Northern Irish Catholics at all, but a cabal of New York sophisticates toasting a dazzling new biography of Lyndon Johnson.

Still more people filed in. Friends my mother had accumulated in her six short years teaching in Derry, but whom her children knew only by titled rank, like Mr O’Mahoney, Father Collins, Sister Deirdre, Dr Cleary. And more cups, plates, cutlery, napkins, sandwiches, not to mention all manner of glazed meats and boiled vegetables, wrapped in foil and on plates their donors were prepared to never see again. The sheer mass of food on display may have given an outsider the impression that we were doubly afflicted; not merely a giant family bereft of a loving mother, but one just pulled from six weeks under an avalanche, in which they’d had little or no access to potato salads, gravy or fruitcakes in that time.

I’m not sure if this was the origin of our family’s long-standing collection of dark, dense fruitcakes, but I’ve always believed it to be the case. The notion that anyone enjoys Irish fruitcake – a foodstuff that boasts the consistency, shine and taste of a wet boxing glove – is so fanciful I’ve long theorised that every gifting of a fruitcake is just that person offloading one they themselves were cruelly gifted some days (or years) earlier. Brown, thick and studded with dried fruits of dubious age and origin, fruitcakes are the nutritional equivalent of concussion. They are so unpalatable, so repulsive, so reminiscent of a bundled-up tarpaulin that’s spent a week in the rain, you’d have little chance of getting someone to accept one unless the occasion precluded their making a scene. I’m still largely convinced that all of rural Ireland is engaged in a dense, berried pyramid scheme devoted to circulating the same thousand cakes in a never-ending merry-go-round of spongy offal. Despite our best efforts at redistribution, there were fruitcakes in our house that stayed for years. Some of them we dared not move for fear they’d become load bearing.

In a kindly gesture, Phillie Riordan had brought dozens of spirit miniatures, the little overpriced booze bottles you get in a hotel minibar. These were sincerely appreciated, not least by Dara, who instituted another light tax for his own ends before decamping to the garage to play pool for the evening. Phillie had no doubt procured the miniatures via respectable means, but the odd specificity of such an offering delighted those for whom it conjured images of our upright and respectable GP pilfering his haul from hotel minibars over several years. There were also the kind of large, stainless-steel caterer’s teapots you see at church fairs. Did we borrow those too from the convent, like we did the dozens of sandy-coloured folding wooden chairs? The latter now stretched from the back door and through the kitchen, out the front hall, and up against the piano in the dining room where Mammy lay in her coffin, on a table that was too high for me to see her without being lifted.