Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? Read online

  In a kindly gesture, Phillie Riordan had brought dozens of spirit miniatures, the little overpriced booze bottles you get in a hotel minibar. These were sincerely appreciated, not least by Dara, who instituted another light tax for his own ends before decamping to the garage to play pool for the evening. Phillie had no doubt procured the miniatures via respectable means, but the odd specificity of such an offering delighted those for whom it conjured images of our upright and respectable GP pilfering his haul from hotel minibars over several years. There were also the kind of large, stainless-steel caterer’s teapots you see at church fairs. Did we borrow those too from the convent, like we did the dozens of sandy-coloured folding wooden chairs? The latter now stretched from the back door and through the kitchen, out the front hall, and up against the piano in the dining room where Mammy lay in her coffin, on a table that was too high for me to see her without being lifted.

  With its folded chairs, industrial quantities of tea and expanding population of desolate mourners, the house soon took on the appearance of a field hospital. Beside those standing in twos and threes, engaging in murmured conversation, still more slumped alone in chairs, rendered insensible to others by stifled sobs. Everywhere stood puffy-eyed people with features so red and blotchy it was as if bandages had just been ripped off their faces. I can still remember the slowly disappearing mirage of finger-shaped, blood-evacuated flesh on Giovanni Doran’s cheeks as he withdrew the hand that clasped his face so he could shake my father’s.

  There were, everywhere, people who’d been jarringly removed from their appropriate contexts. Mr O’Mahoney, who commanded the dignity of a sphinx in the secondary school I would later attend, was reduced to fumbling his way through a chat with my older brother Shane, in which he told his then-thirteen-year-old student that his own mother had recently died, and thus he knew what Shane was going through. A polite type, Shane was nevertheless incapable of hiding his contempt for the equivalence. Thereafter, the conversation took on that stilted air common to those chats you have with sales staff once they tell you the price of an item and you keep talking only so they’ll never suspect you don’t regularly spend £28 on lemon-scented handwash.

  Most guests, already sombre and teary when they arrived, were stunned into traumatic shock once they greeted the body. Gripping the coffin’s edge, they stared in dejection at my mother, who lay stately, pale and dead at forty-three. Some regarded her casket as if it were a grisly wound they’d discovered on their own body, registering the sight with a loud gasping horror that made all around them redouble their own racking sobs. Some witnesses collapsed in the manner of someone cruelly betrayed, as if they’d arrived at the whole maudlin affair on the understanding they were being driven to a Zumba class.

  In any case, a sniffled consensus prevailed that my mother looked ‘just like herself’. This sentiment was always spoken with an air of relief that suggested Irish morticians were sometimes in the habit of altering the appearance of the dead for a laugh, but on this occasion had read the generally melancholy feeling in the room and realised it would be best to make up her face to look as much as possible as it had in life. In a nice touch, you might have noted, her clothes had also been chosen from her own wardrobe, rather than from some jolly old hamper in the corner of the morgue filled with feather boas, pirate hooks and floppy, felt-lined cowboy hats. Many’s the wake, you might presume, owed its lively atmosphere to the hilarious sight of your late Auntie Pauline dressed head to toe as Henry VIII.

  And so this cycle repeated; people arriving bearing fruitcake, ashen-faced, clasping hands and embracing those of us there gathered, only to see the body and suffer an emotional collapse that might range anywhere from throttled gasp to guttural wailing. Hundreds would come in the next two days, causing hushed embarrassment among those who inadvertently arrived when things were already hectic, or had realised they’d called at a more prominent time than their relation to the deceased might warrant. As always, even in kindest company, an unspoken hierarchy of grief asserted itself.

  Wakes surround you, smother you even, with loved ones and acquaintances and workmates and long-lost pals, prompting a cycle of social interaction that gives the entire process a strangely unreal tinge. Perhaps that’s the point, and the whole system is just a ruse aimed at preventing emotional breakdown by demanding a ritual period of event management for the mourner. Of course you can be alone with your dark, broiling thoughts, but only once you’ve made and distributed six hundred cups of tea.

  My memories are scattered: Dara and Shane playing pool in the garage, and the latter winning since the former was getting increasingly merry on pilfered spirits; the twins, Orla and Maeve, acting adult and serene, though they were not yet twelve; my youngest brother, Conall, six weeks from turning three years old, looking even more confused than I did, being passed from person to person in a daisy chain of cuddles so never-ending I don’t know that his feet touched the ground all day. My own contribution to people’s memories of the wake is somewhat less dignified than I’d like, but has become a venerable classic on those boozy nights when my family come together and retell our favourite mortifying tales about ourselves.

  A system had been put in place to try to marshal the movements of us Wee Ones, who were a bit too young and, let’s face it, thick to understand precisely what was going on. Hence my being fussed over with sadness by Margaret, or Anne, or any of the Big or Middle Ones. Of course, they couldn’t repress my ebullient run-around ways for ever, and before long, I was wandering free through the gathered mourners. I was simply too young to grasp that the only thing sadder than a five-year-old crying because his mammy has died is a five-year-old wandering around with a smile on his face because he hasn’t yet understood what that means. We laugh about it now, but it really is hard for me to imagine the effect I must have had, skipping sunnily through the throng, appalling each person upon their entry to the room by thrusting my beaming, three-foot frame in front of them like a chipper little maître d’, with the cheerful enquiry:

  ‘Did ye hear Mammy died?’

  I don’t remember faces dropping, nor anguished sighs, but I’m told I accumulated many such reactions before someone came up and stopped me from traumatising any more of these good people. The solemnity, not to mention the permanence, of my mother’s death was lost on me then, and it would take a while to sell it in a way I really took to heart. Months later, in much the same manner of a man who remembers a packet of Rolos in his coat pocket, I’d straighten my back with delight and perkily ask the nearest larger person when Mammy was coming back, on account of how she’d been dead for ages and was, surely by now, overdue a return.

  The funeral itself was a beautiful affair, with eight priests scattered from chancel to apse in Long Tower church. The service was led by Bishop Edward Daly, a man made famous by his fearless work on Bloody Sunday, traversing the Bogside with his blood-stained handkerchief. He was a family friend back in my dad’s home town, a man who’d been babysat by my granny in his youth. When my parents moved to Derry, he drove them about and showed them what was what. Just six years later, he was officiating at Mammy’s funeral. There were over a thousand attendees, and other than standard weeping, the silence was broken only by the softly warped lilt of Long Tower’s great organ and Dearbhaile, three years my senior, who screamed so hard her shoe fell off, and Phillie had to take her outside to be sedated.

  Mammy was laid to rest in Brandywell cemetery, high up the steep, grassy hill that runs up into Creggan, looking down over Brandywell Road and Derry City’s stadium. Some years later, a fibreglass statue of a paramilitary volunteer was erected a few graves in front of hers, a fascinating departure from the ambience of angels and urns graveyards typically aim for. Mounted by the INLA – very much the Andrew Ridgeley of Irish republicanism – it was a striking addition to the neighbourhood. The aims and deeds of the INLA are too complex to go into here, but it is odd that, to this day, any time I visit my mother’s grave it hovers on the edge of my vision l
ike a giant G.I. Joe, only one who’s about to give a prepared warning to the world’s media. If you were to construct a heavy-handed visual metaphor for how large a shadow the Troubles cast over everything in Northern Ireland during my childhood, it wouldn’t be a bad shout.

  On the way home, Daddy rolled down the window of the hearse and thanked the policemen marshalling the traffic at Nixon’s Corner. This was the checkpoint that lay two miles from our house, the very same one we’d go through each morning. That they had taken the time to facilitate the cortège and its followers was a bending of protocol that my father greatly appreciated, the kind of touching moment you could imagine Van Morrison singing about, when he wasn’t phlegmily screaming at some studio engineer.

  In the months that followed, left more and more to ourselves, the shock would subside and the slow, rumbling grief would come in successive, parallel waves. The impacts would come to each of us individually and at different speeds, and then be magnified by all of the subsequent considerations of everyone else’s grief, cross-bred and multiplied by the twelve of us trying to make sense of it, whether together or apart. When you lost the energy to be sad, anger would tag in for a relief shift. My older siblings would work through their own grief and then consider the horror that we younger members still had to go through, and the abject desolation of the whole thing would reheat inside them all over again.

  My mother wouldn’t be there any more to kiss grazed knees or carry me to bed when I pretended to have fallen asleep in the car or dry my hair with the static force of a hydroelectric dam. She would never cock an eyebrow at the socialist-tinged T-shirts or abstruse electronica of my teens. She would never smile politely at girlfriends she found overfamiliar, or text me to say she loved them the second I got home. Mammy would never send a text message full stop. She would never read an email or live to see the words ‘website’ or ‘car boot sale’ enter a dictionary. Mammy didn’t even live to see Bryan Adams’s ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ get knocked off UK number one, its perch for the last four months of her life.

  It seems blasphemous that my mother’s death even existed in the same reality as those moments that subsequently came to define my youth; taking the long way home from Nixon’s Corner so I could listen to Kid A twice, or poring over the lurid covers of horror paperbacks in a newly discovered corner of Foyle Street library. How is my mother’s passing even part of the same universe that gave me the simple pleasures of ice cream after swimming lessons in William Street baths, or scenting the sun cream on girls’ skin as they daubed polish on their outstretched, nonchalant nails. My life wasn’t over from that point on. I’d laugh and cry and scream about borrowed jumpers, school fights, bomb scares, playing Zelda, teenage bands, primary-school crushes and yet more ice cream after yet more swimming lessons. I’d just be doing it without her. To some extent, I’d be doing it without a memory of her. The most dramatic moment of my life wasn’t scored by wailing sirens, weeping angels or sad little ukuleles, nimbly plucked on lonely hillsides. Mammy’s death was mostly signalled by tea, sandwiches, and an odd little boy in corduroy trousers, announcing it with a smile across his face.

  2

  Halloween

  Considering Derry spent the latter half of the twentieth century beholden to the tremors of large, loud explosions, its inhabitants’ fondness for fireworks is greater than you might imagine. None in the city are bigger or louder than those that come in late October, when Derry throws the biggest Halloween celebration on Earth. The entire city goes for it full-strength, with a whole weekend of parties and events, all of which are fully costumed. Office workers, postmen, supermarket cashiers, your bus driver, all taking part in the broad spectacle of public japery that takes over the entire city for at least a few days, and often a week or two beforehand.

  Something in the region of 100,000 fancy-dressed people flood the streets for outdoor events, and this in a city with a population of 110,000. Ordinarily, Derry folk are stoical and dismissive, and have earned something of a reputation for being wary of grandstanding. There’s an unspoken distrust of anyone attracting too much attention to themselves. It’s likely a survival tactic, from a time when people in Derry felt slightly less safe than they do now. There’s a caginess to the city’s older inhabitants likely baked in from the bad old days, when cultivating a healthy fear of outside attention was probably quite wise. One legacy of the Troubles for people my age is that we can’t even attack our elders for being grumpy and churlish, since back when they were kids, they were all being stopped by police four times a day or dragged out of their homes by soldiers at 4 a.m. for having the wrong surname. I came into my teens when the worst of the Troubles was finally receding, but that queasy paranoia was still everywhere around. And I mean everywhere. I once called the library on Foyle Street, looking for a book of ghost stories.

  ‘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.