Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(6)
‘Hello, is this the Central Library?’ I asked.
‘Depends,’ came the inscrutable and suspicious reply some moments later. ‘Who’s asking?’
On balance, Halloween was not an ideal time to return to school after Mammy died, since for the teacher it meant explaining the nature of death to twenty small children in a room that was dressed like a haunted house. Like the lustre of those new corduroy trousers – long since dulled by mud and sick – the frenetic activity in our home had faded. As the heaviest traffic of well-wishers abated, we had been left to grieve in peace, but now we had to go out into the world again. God knows how my dad fared at work, having to negotiate his colleagues’ well-meaning but gormless attempts at consoling a man who’d lost his wife and the mother of his eleven children. Although I’d say it’s likely they weren’t in a room filled with novelty cobwebs. If the question I had asked all those distraught mourners at my mother’s wake sought a literal answer, I was to receive it many times over the coming months. Everyone would hear that Mammy died, and in case they hadn’t, my teacher Mrs Devlin would be good enough to remind them.
Other than its being Halloween, the main thing I remember about that day was the kindness of a boy named Philo McGahern. I don’t know that Philo and I ever had two conversations in all the time we knew each other, but he made such an impression that, three decades later, his name and face remain embedded in my memory. Philo was an unfortunate-looking child: drooping mouth, strangely large eyes and brittle, blond bristles that emerged from his head where hair should have been. He had a shiny face, which must have been due to an ointment or balm that gave off a medicinal, mentholated smell like an old lady’s handbag. I presume it was for the skin condition that caused the steady fall of transparent flakes from his cheeks and chin. These settled on his school jumper in such volume that he had the permanent look of someone who’d just eaten a croissant lying down.
The teachers in my school all dressed up for Halloween itself, even the nuns. Witches and banshees were popular among the sisters, but I seem to remember Sister Francistine coming as the Bride of Frankenstein, complete with stacked black bouffant threaded with a shock stripe of purest white. This is still par for the course in Derry at Halloween. Novelty costume shops spring from nowhere to dominate the local high streets, fulfilling demand for bottom-tier dressing-up supplies. Sometimes existing premises will alter their entire business model in October, since it makes better financial sense for them to sell witches’ hats and Donald Trump masks in those few weeks than, say, pets or insulin. You can’t throw a tiny plastic pumpkin without hitting a sign advertising ‘ice scream’ or ‘2-for-1 Squeals’, prices ‘slashed’, and long-gestating discounts being ‘back from the dead’. At some point in the nineties, restaurants hit upon gravey as a pun, and it’s one they still ride pretty hard. For the lazier proprietor, there’s a near-ubiquitous emphasis on the fear that might be induced by special offers, and practically every storefront in town is daubed with a slogan like ‘deals so good they’re scary’, which even by the standard of such things has always struck me as a dubious claim. My father is the only person I know regularly frightened by prices, and those only on the higher end.
There are, of course, those who go above and beyond the call of witches, ghouls and topical celebrities, and instead strike out on their own. More abstract variants of fancy dress became a highly sought-after niche within the circle of true believers, and a cult developed around increasingly outré and involved rig-outs. My sister Caoimhe was one such person. The year she dressed as a road was probably my own personal favourite; a long black dress with road markings down its length, flecked with toy cars, street signs and roadside shrubs. My little brother Conall once dressed as Jack Woltz from The Godfather, contriving an absurdly uncomfortable backpack that worked as a vertical bed, pillow, and bloody horse’s head, in which he walked around all night. My friend Paudie spent weeks making a shower, complete with rectangular frame festooned with a plastic curtain and soap dish, his skin-tone bodysuit adorned with strategically placed artisanal lather he’d made from cotton balls. Even more alarming was the fact we bumped into two other people who’d made their own shower that evening.
I think my all-time favourite was the man I encountered wearing a long-haired wig, sandals and a kaftan. The kaftan was overlaid with a lacy bra, on to which he had crudely stapled two white bread rolls, or baps, to use the local parlance. I stopped him to ask what he was; Burger Christ? Breadroll Shepherd Boobs? He took a dramatic swig from his bottle of Buckfast, arcing it to his lips to prolong the moment with the cocksure swagger of a hair metal guitar solo. ‘John the Bap Tits,’ he said.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been so impressed in my entire life.
Thankfully, Mrs Devlin wasn’t costumed for her announcement, which came a few days before Halloween itself. She stood at the front of the class, and I beside her like a solemn little urchin, fumbling with my sleeves. Mrs Devlin had a commanding aura, one of those indomitable older women that you could imagine spending her bank holidays in a small static caravan in Donegal, doing thousand-piece jigsaws of Pádraig Pearse, or knitting balaclavas for the Provisional IRA. In appearance, she was effectively Little Old Lady #6 from a Central Casting extras catalogue, with a solid, shiny hive of nut-brown hair, a sharp, dropped mouth and am-dram whiskers on her pointed chin. Standing in heels, she was roughly 4’ 11”, and weighed about six stone soaking wet, perhaps five, discounting brooches and hairpins. If you picked her up and shook her by the boots, your carpet would shortly be littered with hankies, rosary beads and those minty sweets that smelled of Philo. She wore tortoiseshell glasses that were fixed about her neck with a chain, as if selected by a hungover costume supervisor who’d been given five seconds to dress a sketch in which an old lady complains about the soup in a three-star hotel. She rarely smiled or showed affection, but she’d spent the entire morning doing both as she held my hand.