Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(57)

I usually chatted along amiably with Fay, delighted to hear the insights of someone who addressed me as an adult, but on that particular morning I hadn’t slept properly in weeks. Too withdrawn to contribute, I rubbed the bags under my eyes as she filled the silence with another of her favourite topics: the IRA bombings that had been prevalent in England since the end of the ceasefire earlier that year. Fay spoke about bombings as if they were weather events. If she reflected on a ‘mild’ or a ‘bad’ weekend, she meant in terms of the explosive content of the news and would expound at length on any incidents I might have missed. Her interest struck me, even at the time, as oddly detached. I never heard her utter a single word in favour of republicanism as an ideal. It was more as though she was giving me the football scores. She recounted each casualty, and the strategies by which they were wrought, with the same dour affect she used when talking about a new post office in Moville, or the names and numbers of pills she had to take for the good of her legs.

‘Bus bomb in Aldwych, killed the young lad carrying it.’

‘Five pound of Semtex on the Charing Cross Road. Left in a phone box. Controlled explosion.’

Fay loved a controlled explosion. Everyone loved controlled explosions, since they were always the best footage on the news. Amid the sad faces and drizzly rain of Northern Irish life, there was something futuristically charming about Wheelbarrow, the little robot they sent in to trigger them. Wheelbarrow looked like a tiny crane mounted on tank tracks, and the combination of its ungainly form and jerky remote-control movements gave it a tragicomic quality every time it rolled over to a parked car or wheelie bin, obliviously trundling toward certain death.

Local bombings were less frequent now, so when her itinerary of away matches was over she filled more silence describing how easy it would be to bomb each place we passed. Fay saw the world as a wide-open field of knolls, crannies, bottlenecks and pinch points, all of which a bomber – a smarter class of bomber, I surmised – might exploit. ‘One could go off by the pillar box there, another two in a van at the other end – total carnage.’ ‘If you blew up a flatbed there, all the traffic would be blocked up and it’d be like shooting fish in a barrel after that.’ There was an air of disappointment in the way she described these hypothetical insurgencies, as if she’d do a better job, given the chance. Luckily for all concerned, she lacked any such inclination. Besides, her husband had sold the car that could have helped her get to and from her detonations, on the grounds it wasn’t cost-effective with the bus only a mile down the road.

Interactions of this kind were fairly standard. The bus driver, Fintan, was a paunchy man from the west of Ireland who would have been an unlikely candidate for the job, even if he hadn’t looked uncannily like Hitler, which, in fact, he did. He appeared to despise his work and had a hatred of children matched only by a fondness for swearing and an alarming indifference to road safety. Fintan screamed at traffic lights and growled at babies, and behaved as if driving the bus was ruining other, more important plans he’d scheduled for that morning. It wasn’t even a dedicated school bus. Fintan’s was the main Bus Éireann coach from Ballybofey to Derry, which crossed the border in front of our house twice a day in each direction, and usually ten minutes either side of its scheduled time. More than once it didn’t stop at all, galloping cheerfully past us as if the handful of schoolchildren waving their arms in the pouring rain were a charming roadside attraction best admired at high speed.

And high speed was the order of the day. If my dad drove as if he had an injured child in the back of his vehicle, Fintan drove as if he was the fella who’d run them over. If he did pick you up, you had roughly four seconds to ascend the stairs, receive your growl and proffer your bus pass or change. You’d barely have time to think that man really does look like Hitler before the door clanged shut like a bear trap and the bus pummelled onward. More than once his accelerative zeal prompted a clatter of tiny limbs, as infants who failed to take their seats were scattered like limp little skittles along the coach’s central aisle.


I was usually delighted to hear the insights of people who addressed me like an adult, to learn about the running feuds Fay had with her hairdresser and offer what consolation I could when she told me Mr Poultice had spent another November week refusing to stick the heating on. My lack of interest in joining in as Fay issued her regular commentary on bombs and bombing was a grave sign that I was no longer capable of enjoying anything.

Some time in February 1996, I stopped sleeping. Each evening, a chill would settle in my stomach after I came in from school, suspending me in a fog of anxiety I couldn’t shake. A sad, stringy tension seized me as bedtime approached, and my mind swarmed with dread. I couldn’t place what was wrong, only that this formless feeling was pervasive, and I’d spend every evening in fear of the sleeplessness ahead.

I was ten. Insomnia had never been a problem. I was that child who could sleep on a chicken’s lip. Hot cars, busy ferries, sun-blasted poolside lounging chairs – I never needed more than a few minutes before I was completely unconscious. Sleep was an old friend who’d never given me any trouble but now bore me some unaccountable grudge. It was like forgetting how to blink, or breathe.

Each night in bed, my brain edged toward drowsiness and I circled my fatigue with paranoid attention, intent on making its dull spark catch fire. This only prolonged the agony until I was wider awake than before, and the whole cycle would repeat until some meagre, restless half-sleep was achieved. At first, the horror was confined to nights, the evenings, but soon the knowledge of what was coming would creep into afternoons, until I was in a constant state of tired dread. A heaviness swirled once my head hit the pillow, relenting only when I finally collapsed with exhaustion around 5 a.m. I awoke at seven to a fear of having to get through yet another day and night.