Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(46)
La Coruña gave us respite from the tedium of life in Derry in a place where the weather and the people were sunny and bright. Perhaps the most striking moment of fame throughout the trip was when we sang in the local church, like some sort of visiting youth group of mourning Irish children. As with so many of our public outings, I have no idea how this came to pass, save that any thought that it was spontaneous is slightly undone by the clear memory I have of my father getting us there an hour early so he could bolt together the microphone stands he’d brought with us.
This is an aspect of my father that might surprise you, were you ever to meet him. He’s a quiet and unassuming man, with a kindly smile and a very relaxed view on life. He doesn’t look like the type of person who’d bring musical instruments, microphones and mic stands nearly two thousand miles from Ireland to Spain so that we could sing to a churchful of strangers. That my father did this – packed a twenty-six-foot caravan with the clothes, food, tents and miscellaneous luggage of ten children, while also making sure to include the equipment necessary for us to perform as a fully electric choir – didn’t raise an eyebrow at the time. We went along with it, since singing at large Catholic gatherings was completely routine. Our performance ended with rapturous applause from the parishioners, and an uncomfortable impasse when it became clear they were blocking the route back to our seats, and thus impeding the exit that would signal for their applause to stop. They ended up clapping for what seemed like minutes, many of them in tears, not sure of when, or if, they would be permitted to stop. We thus continued standing there, like eleven little Stalins singing puzzlingly Christ-themed party songs at the Third International.
There were a few hiccups during the holiday, such as when all the gas in Auntie Aileen’s house was switched off and a brief investigation revealed Jeremy to be the culprit. There was also the moment when I grabbed my Uncle Eduardo’s reassuringly tanned hand on the beach, only to look up and discover it was not his hand at all, but that of another, quite alarmed, Spanish man, who recoiled from my clingy little grasp as if the see-through pallor of my Irish skin was infectious. But, for the most part, it was bliss, and we were as sad to leave as Aileen and Eduardo were, presumably, quietly relieved to have their house back to themselves.
Providence conspired to give our return trip a moderately memorable epilogue. As we approached Cherbourg, Conall cried, ‘I can see the road!’
‘Very good,’ we replied.
‘No, through the floor,’ he clarified.
It was at this point we realised that the tow bar for the caravan had put so much strain on the minibus, it had wrenched a welt in the floor, right beneath where we were sitting. Unfortunately, it happened to be Bastille Day, so there were no garages open, and it seemed as though we were destined to spend a dismal day and night in the caravan, until we passed a farmhouse whose inhabitants, a family of eight, saw our distress and waved us in. Miraculously, they had everything we needed to fix the problem, not merely cutting tools and hammers, but steel and an oxy-acetylene torch. This last was wielded by the man of the house, the most French person I’d ever seen in my life, who performed the necessary welding with such nonchalance that the cigarette he smoked never left his bottom lip throughout. The lady of the house brought out lemonade, and Sinead thanked them all profusely in her best French, translating back to us their animated questions about the nature of our family, and their sincere commiserations upon hearing of our situation. She translated, too, their adamant refusals of any payment, which greatly pained my father until he remembered some Spanish brandy he had been gifted by a member of Aileen’s church, which he himself would have little use for, and which he knew custom would bar them from refusing. They were much obliged, probably because they knew the value of it more than my father, who would subsequently discover it cost well over a hundred pounds. It was, I suppose, a small price to pay for getting us home in one piece.
Well, most of us. The trip home did precipitate one final departure. The Enya soundtrack, the cigar smoke, the constant, desultory rounds of I Spy, all seemed lacking, since they were leading us away, and not toward, some greater destination. Where the journey over had been suffused with a constant, gladdening fizz of anticipation, there was now a sense that summer was moulting layers of fun, and all enjoyment in the universe was creeping toward its natural end.
Perhaps it was this disaffection that led us to decree that Jeremy must not return to Ireland with us. In a short court proceeding held in the minibus just before we boarded the ferry, he was sentenced to death by a jury of his peers. He was seized and held by Shane, who said a few words before hoisting him half out the sliding window and then slamming it shut, cutting him in two and spraying his guts across the French countryside.
Conall wailed. We all regretted it immediately, more so when it became clear that our baby brother accepted Jeremy’s demise as final and definite. Afterwards, he never once pretended Jeremy had survived. He had been real and alive, and Conall had watched him die. The bubble, like Jeremy’s torso, had been burst. And Conall never again asked when someone dead would be coming back.
11
The Grand North Atlantic Home-Taped VHS Archive
Ferghal’s dad had a poitín still, made from corrugated iron and covered in moss so you could only get at it from the one end. The cops didn’t bother with it since they had bigger things to worry about than Denis’s homebrew hooch, and the craggy hill that traced up from Termonbacca and out toward Creggan was uncharted land to them and their armoured cars. Ferghal’s dad was awful fond of talking about the still, its contents and the arcane processes of the trade, not to mention the near misses with vandals and smugglers, tussles with neighbours, or the odd bedraggled fox that might pad through the scrub toward the sweet-smelling, foul-smelling vats. No trip to Ferghal’s house was complete without Denis telling some tall tale about his rough and roguish secret life as a contrabandist. The great joy of Denis’s life was when someone gagged, uncontrollably, at the mucky liquid he’d scraped from the still that week. One sniff and it was promised you’d go blind, two and you could read people’s thoughts for a fortnight. A drop on your tongue and we reckoned you’d speak six words to the dead, then die. Denis was the sort of low-level eccentric who prevailed throughout my childhood, men who seemed completely normal until you had a conversation with them about planning permission or female newsreaders and found that their many and varied eccentricities would foam to the surface, fully realised.