Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(56)

The aftercare my father received from the hospital included offers of meetings, rehab activity programmes and support groups for people dealing with amputations, all of which he declined. I’d say it was because he wanted to move on, or because he didn’t want to be defined by his disability, but it’s more likely he simply couldn’t be arsed. He had spent so much time in hospital that he had no interest in going back for non-essential purposes, let alone hanging out with loads of new people into the bargain. In the first few weeks after the amputation, I noted the stack of unread pamphlets he’d been sent, advertising local get-togethers and sporting events for the benefit and interest of Northern Irish amputees. We laughed bleakly, unforgivably, as we saw that the legacy of the Troubles had monopolised even these, and that 90 per cent of the people featured in their articles were people who’d been injured in sectarian fighting, not those who stashed Fanta and organised annual world cups of rich, sweet desserts.

‘I could go with you,’ I said, ‘and tell them you lost the leg when the customs hut was destroyed. Taken out by a flying sink, maybe. That way you won’t lose feet– I mean face. Is that the phrase?’ We drove to the hospital, finding comfort in the laughter of the slaughterhouse, and through tears he told me just how awful I was.





13


Dead and Dying Cows


A few years before we were married, my wife and I took a city break to Bilbao, which did not go to plan. We hadn’t been on holiday for a long time and booked the cheap deal on a whim about a month before we were to travel. I don’t know what our plan actually was, but by the time the trip came around we hadn’t received the windfall we’d clearly been expecting to fund it, and subsequently had to slum it the entire time, with no cash beyond what we had to spend on transport and accommodation. My wife, a vegetarian, found there was almost nothing she could eat in any of the places we visited, and on more than one occasion her requests for a fully vegetarian salad were met with grilled chicken served with anchovy sauce. The rain was so bad that the only shoes I had with me became waterlogged within a few hours of our arrival and were noticeably smelly by the second day of an unjustifiably lengthy four-day visit. My feet swelled up, and more than once I’m sure other tourists moved away from me. One French gentleman pointed at my limp and sodden shoe and said, ‘Ze trench foot, yes?’

For three more days I took tired, smelly steps around a city that might charitably be said to contain two good days’ worth of tourism, with a First World War foot disease, under a wet mesh of rain that poured, ceaselessly, from a sky the colour of a switched-off telly. The only great memory that survives is of the Guggenheim, which we liked so much we visited three times. I was struck by Louise Bourgeois’s Maman, the thirty-foot sculpture of a spider that towers over its rear entrance.

Before I learned to package all the stuff I knew into the kind of A+ anecdotes for which I’m so rightly celebrated, I settled for simply following people around while I reeled off random facts: species of dinosaurs, collective nouns for animals, rare types of clouds, particularly snazzy prime numbers. And spiders. I knew loads about spiders. So when I read in the brochure that Bourgeois intended this big bronze monster, jealously guarding its abdominal clutch of marble-hewn eggs, as a tribute to mothers and motherhood, I knew this was bollocks. Spiders are terrible mothers. No maternal instinct at all. Spider mams just fuck off, and it’s left to the dad to collect, guard and then lick the eggs into shape, cowering on whatever godforsaken leaf she’s left him on until, finally, they burst in their hundreds, sending a spindly mass of spiderlings crawling all over his pliant, furry body. A process I refuse to believe even a spider wouldn’t find extremely upsetting.

I found myself saying all of this to my future wife like a crazy person. I had no idea where it was coming from. My eyes buzzed and my throat felt hot. I broke down, possessed with a baffling sense of indignation that spider mams had been let off the hook by the whims of this deluded sculptor. The rage came fully formed from many years of telling people these specific spider-mam facts.

Shortly afterwards I was seized by a deep embarrassment for my childhood self. I couldn’t help imagining how I must have sucked the air out of the room when I said all this stuff about spider mams to adults: a motherless fact-merchant braying about maternal abandonment, utterly oblivious to how clearly it reflected my own grief and sadness and anger. In that moment, I knew two things: firstly, that there were still things I’d not emotionally grappled with in twenty years; and secondly, that I was right about spiders, and Louise Bourgeois should have looked it up.


This was not my first breakdown. I first realised I was depressed one morning in 1996, as an old lady was telling me IRA bombers just weren’t what they used to be. Fay Poultice was probably only sixty or so, but seemed ancient to my ten-year-old self. I often sat beside her on the bus, since my siblings and I rarely sat together on the way to school. It seems odd now, but it could be we were getting our recommended daily allowance of each other at home and relished the opportunity to sit in the company of others, even if they spent the entire journey wearing the ears off us with absurd pronouncements, as Fay did. Fay insisted the concept of lunch was a new invention that hadn’t existed when she was a child and was likely concocted to make money for people who made sandwiches, which she detested on account of them being ‘common’. She was the first person I’d ever heard speculate about chemtrails, the theory that the cloudy emissions seen trailing aeroplanes are not emissions at all, but a cocktail of nefarious chemicals the government showers on the populace for a variety of effects. American conspiracy theorists posit that these chemicals make us more obedient and compliant. Fay thought their purpose was merely to stain clothes just after you’d hung them out, forcing the plain people of Ireland to buy more washing powder. As we watched the Derry countryside hurtle past our window, Fay would declaim on all things under the sun, while passing me Fox’s Glacier Mints. These she took from a small sewing tin she carried just for sweets, palming them off to me with one pinch of her baggy hand, plopping them into my paw with fingers so spindly her knuckles looked like knots tied in an empty glove. Fay spoke often of her husband, a man so frugal it bordered on the folkloric. He was so abstemious, she said, that he’d switch the gas off while he turned his bacon, would skin a louse for a ha’penny, and if ever he found a plaster he’d cut himself. I never met Mr Poultice, but his wife’s slanders were so regular and so scabrous that I had barely flinched, aged seven, when she told me ‘that cunt would peel an orange in his pocket’.