Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(45)

For the older kids, I presume this was a little embarrassing, but I thought it was great, and would probably have set down a little cloth cap and sung ‘Danny Boy’ for a few francs had the chance arisen. It was enjoyable to be an object of fascination, even if there was a not-too-small kernel of pity to people’s interest. In any case, if it was my wish to be stared at, then that wish came true many times. Not least when, a mile from our campsite in San Sebastian, as we were driving at high speed, the sliding door of the minibus fell off and clattered to the ground.

To this day, my father denies that this suggests any problem with the bus and blames his feckless children for the entire thing. ‘Yous didn’t close it right,’ was what he said then about the door, and it is a mantra he still repeats, over a quarter century later. I’m personally of the opinion that there should not exist a method of closing a vehicle’s door, no matter how careless, that would precipitate it being ejected from said vehicle several hours later, at seventy miles an hour. But such observations fall on deaf ears. Joe O’Reilly is a wonderful man, and a doting father, but he will often side with mechanical objects over his children. If it comes down to a dispute between one of us and a six-foot metal door panel clunking to the ground in a shower of sparks, he’ll take the door’s word for it every time.

We stopped to survey the damage, and Daddy, Shane and Dara retrieved the hulking door, which appeared still intact. They gingerly reconnected it on its rollers but, not trusting it to remain there, we drove the rest of the way to the campsite at a crawl, with Shane and Dara jogging alongside holding the door from without, like secret service agents escorting a world leader who had been reduced to travelling to a G8 summit in a minibus with caravan attached, via a two-star campsite in the Basque Country. God knows what the people who ran the campsite made of us as we turned the corner and entered their premises in a minibus held together with holy water, grease and the outstretched palms of two adolescent boys. We might as well have entered in a giant parping clown car with a big rubber horn, a backfiring exhaust pipe and Granny O’Reilly strapped to the roof in her rocking chair, firing off six-shooters to announce our arrival.


Daddy was able to mend the door, and we were able to continue our journey in this decidedly blessed conveyance – albeit after a strict lecture regarding the procedure for its opening and closing. We arrived in Galicia the following day. Once we were in La Coruña, we had two weeks of sun-dappled splendour with Aileen and family, tripping to the sea, sampling exotic local produce and eating them out of house and home. Aileen and Eduardo’s own sons, Jaime and Juan, had already left for university by this time, but returned for our visit, meaning my aunt and uncle went from having two people in the house to sixteen. Spain seemed idyllic – warm, relaxed and filled with inordinately pleasing local details that appeared to have been cribbed from a reductive and xenophobic cartoon: the daily siestas that saw old men snoring loudly from nearby balconies; even older ladies in spotted dresses who seemed to spend all their time shooing dogs and beating rugs against low walls.

God knows how Aileen was able to entertain us all that time, but she managed, with the heavily gendered result that the girls had shopping trips and the boys had football outings. No O’Reilly holiday would be complete without checking in on the interred remains of one of Christ’s apostles – in this case James, son of Zebedee – so we also did a day trip to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. I remember eating paella, and push-pop ice lollies which we didn’t yet have in Ireland, and tasting squid for the first time, deep fried, and loving it above all things, most especially since I could make out its little eyes and legs and felt pleasingly giant as a result. I remember the Barcelona Olympics were going on at the time, giving me a pleasant sense of being right at the centre of the world. Never mind it was taking place over five hundred miles away, so that, despite having travelled seventeen hundred miles to get to La Coruña, we were actually only four hundred miles closer to Barcelona than we had been in Derry. It felt as though I was there.

Daddy spent a lot of time with Aileen, speaking, I imagine, of the wife and sister they’d lost. I realise now that they were experiencing grief at different speeds. Aileen had had more time and space to reflect on and mourn her sister’s passing, while Daddy had obviously been kept busy with the daily demands of a full-time job and eleven children. More than most, Aileen understood how difficult all of this was going to be for us in the long run, and I think she suspected Daddy was still in shock. She knew for a fact that his children were, and the smallest of us particularly. Conall had circled the wake asking when Mammy was coming back, and still posed this question from time to time. Auntie Aileen was used to these kinds of queries, not least since she had been one of the people I’d confronted with my now famous death announcement, although my rendition for her had been a tad more bespoke. Having arrived at the house a little while later than everyone else, she found me in my parents’ bedroom.

‘Auntie Aileen,’ I said gravely, ‘I have some very bad news for you.’

‘Have you?’ she ventured.

‘Mammy’s dead,’ I said, with a solemnity that would have been slightly more impactful had I not been bouncing up and down on the bed. ‘If you want to see her, she’s in the dining room,’ I added helpfully, punctuating this sombre death notice with a commemorative belly flop.