The House that Jack Built

by Catherine Barry

  The House That Jack Built

  Catherine Barry

  © Catherine Barry 2001

  Catherine Barry has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2001 by Pocket/TownHouse.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to John and Maureen Barry for being my parents and loving me unconditionally.

  Thanks to Jonathan, Mark, Frances and Damien for keeping the faith when mine was dwindling.

  Thanks to Darley Anderson, my agent and friend. You changed my life in a matter of hours.

  Thanks to Clare Ledingham and Suzanne Baboneau my editors, for excellent guidance.

  Thanks to Treasa Coady of TownHouse Publishing and Ian Chapman from Simon & Schuster for finding me.

  Thanks to my truly wonderful and talented friend Peter Sheridan, who believed in this book when I couldn’t. You supported and encouraged all that is good in me and I love you for that.

  Thanks to Phil Costigan of St Mary’s School, Killester who planted the seed all those years ago.

  Thanks to all my friends in Killester and Raheny, especially Dave and Patricia Coyle, for giving me a life beyond my wildest dreams.

  Thanks to my children, Davitt and Caitriona, my best critics, my best friends, and my best teachers.

  My thanks to Vincent who started all this. You said five years… here I am! Thank you for showing me how to live. I will always love you and you are always with me.

  Most of all… thank you, God.

  To Vincent.

  Your gift, as promised.

  Chapter 1

  ‘Is there anyone here with any Irish in them? Is there any of the girls who would like a little more Irish in them?’

  Phil Lynott, Daly mount Stadium, 1978

  I lost my virginity on 31 December 1978. I lost my knickers too. When I stepped out of the blue Fiat van, they hula-hooped around my knees, worked their way down my calves and finally crash-landed on the moonlit beach. The whole ordeal had taken exactly three minutes. I, Jacqueline Joyce, of Clontarf, Dublin, had waited fifteen years for this momentous occasion, and I had been saving myself for the right man. My accomplice in crime was my brother’s friend Matt. As he was one year older than me, I expected him to be fully experienced in the art of love-making. Wrong.

  In a hopeless attempt to salvage what remained of his manhood, he savaged my self-esteem on that ill-fated journey home afterwards.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ he spat. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of foreplay?’

  This remark only served to make me feel worse. The sexual fiasco must somehow have been my fault, I thought. I searched my mind for a humorous retort.

  ‘Sure, I’ve read all his books.’ It was a lame effort.

  Already my beau was engaging in the serious business of rolling a joint large enough to wipe out armies.

  The night in question fell two weeks before my sixteenth birthday. It seemed only fitting. After all, it was New Year’s Eve and Matt (abbreviation for Matthew) had presented me with a pre-birthday gift: a pair of dangly silver earrings sporting multi-coloured feathers, and a bottle of Tramp — the quintessential kit for an upwardly mobile amateur hippie of my description.

  The evening was off to a good start, despite the fact that Matt had arrived predictably two hours late. I had borrowed a cheesecloth ankle-length dress from a kind friend. She had purchased it from an Indian shop on trendy Grafton Street. The fact that she was a blubbering four-foot nothing, as wide as she was long, who resembled a St Patrick’s Day float, did not deter her. On slender little me, the dress was perfect. It was the ideal 1970s sexual aid, buttoned conveniently right down the front; any would-be suitor would be hard-pressed not to manipulate the simple structure to his advantage. A few delicate flickering fingers could have it gaping open in one minute flat. I knew because I had done a dummy run twice, and timed it myself. My attire that evening was very important. With a spray of Tramp in all the right places, and my feathered friends jangling from my ears, I felt like a woman. Not at all the fifteen-year-old girl that I was in reality. I was in love with Matt Howard and tonight was ‘the’ night. There was no doubt about it.

  Earlier on in the pub that evening I was feeling queasy. Partly with excitement about what was to come, but more probably because of the six Bacardi and Cokes I had poured down my throat in a show of bravado. Matt and I linked little fingers under the table. I thought it was cute and I felt really happy.

  The fact that Matt was mysteriously disappearing into the toilet every five minutes did not diminish my enthusiasm. ‘The Sea View’, a dingy pub that boasted hideous 3D maroon wallpaper, had only one saving grace. It was conveniently situated 100 yards across from the seafront. Glasses clanked noisily, people laughed heartily; bad jokes were standard and vomiting compulsory. Swilling my Bacardi and Coke around the glass like an expert wine-taster, I watched the curious comings and goings.

  Matt had disappeared again.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked my friend Karen. ‘Is he constipated?’

  ‘Yeah, looks like it,’ she laughed. ‘Hey, Mick,’ she beckoned to the barman. ‘Do you serve laxatives?’

  ‘Yeah, we serve anyone,’ came the tarty reply.

  Matt returned looking sheepish and glassy-eyed. He sat down beside me.

  ‘Where were you?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Ah man, the van was giving me trouble.’

  Not bad, I thought. I had heard worse. The truth was, of course, that Matt and his cronies were making their ritual rounds of the local chemists, gathering prescribed bottles of cough medicine. None of them had a cough to speak of, and the prescriptions were forged. It was a cheap and effective drug at the time. Failing that, they were crossing the road to the seafront where most of our hash supply was dealt. The peeling green-painted shelters came alive at night. Couples huddled inside them, making use of their over-sized duffel coats to camouflage their adolescent groping. Dutch clogs, red and yellow, scraped the pavement in haste, as five and ten spots were discreetly negotiated. Gangs congregated along the Clontarf Road, and all the way down the causeway. This was New Year’s Eve. You were supposed to be drunk, at the least stoned, but preferably both.

  I had had a crush on Matt since I was nine and a half. We had enjoyed a turbulent and ever-changing relationship. Of course, Matt wasn’t aware of the fact that we had been having this fictitious affair. Most of it had been created in my head. I had obsessed about him for so long that I missed this important tiny detail. We had broken up, made up, had sex, gotten married and divorced. All in my pea-sized immature imagination. My mother had already pointed out my ‘blind spot’ regarding Matt.

  ‘That boy is trouble,’ she would sigh under her breath. She remarked that when he was around, he always seemed vaguely incoherent. ‘Did he have a head injury or something?’ she would ask innocently.

 
This question wasn’t completely without basis, for Matt constantly behaved like a hospital patient who had taken too much ether. He was always taking too much of something. I defended him hotly and refused to acknowledge the fact that he had perfected the art of being in a near-permanent state of coma. That was all he did, get permanently smashed, day in, day out. The rest of his time was spent trying to maintain it.

  Matt had been a frequent visitor to our house as far back as I could remember. My younger brother Jason and his friends had one thing in common: they all loved music. They listened to music incessantly, swapping new LPs and exchanging gossip about forthcoming albums and so on. It was not unusual for them to stay in the back room for four or five hours a day, just listening to music. The only lull occurred when my father found a copy of a Black Sabbath record. He found the very title of the band offensive, and music was banned completely for two weeks. Eventually, he gave in and allowed them to play ‘morally enhancing and spiritually uplifting’ records. Now they played Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells day in day out. My dad found it difficult to admit that it was ‘creative’. It was never off the turntable.

  Occasionally, Jason would emerge from the smoke-filled cesspit to make tea and toast (the staple diet of the day). Copious amounts were wolfed savagely, and my father often wondered aloud whether the other boys were ever fed in their own homes. It was during these intermissions that I tried hard to make myself known. The gatherings were sacred and ritualistic. Nobody was allowed in. The best option was to offer to dust the piano (my father’s pride and joy), to attend to the gathering ash and fingerprints left by the lads. It came as a welcome suggestion, any day.

  Sheepishly I would enter, armed to the teeth with Mr Pledge and any number of old rolled-up vests and knickers, a look of supreme single-mindedness on my freckled face, as if my mission was one of gargantuan importance. For all my acting abilities, they hardly nodded an acknowledgement.

  Not surprisingly, as I boasted the most hideous braces across my front teeth, which were prominent enough in themselves without drawing any further attention to them. They were a feature which invited cruel remarks from schoolchildren. They had taken to calling me ‘Plug’, after a riotous character from the Bash Street Kids strip in the Beano comic. I made several desperate attempts to ‘lose’ my braces and to break them, but to no avail. My final attempt ended in tears of frustration; I had buried them in the dog’s kennel, and the dog proudly presented them to my father at the dinner table. He wagged his tail furiously, the braces in the grip of his mighty jaws. Dad retrieved them from his drooling mouth, and patted him affectionately.

  ‘Good dog! Good boy!’ There was a look of smug satisfaction on his face. ‘I’ll make her eat them,’ he muttered under his breath, and I fled to my bedroom in terror.

  Still, the first time I was permitted entrance to the sacred domain it made way for my second encounter with true love. From the orange turntable a variety of throaty vocals poured forth. On this particular day, it was the beautiful velvety voice of John Martyn that made its way into my heart. My first experience of elation, via music, stayed with me for life. I became a slave to music, as had all my family before me. My sister was bopping to the likes of The Real Thing, The Chi-Lites and The Stylistics. In the fog-infested den, I was introduced to such geniuses as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, Led Zeppelin, Supertramp, Genesis, Joan Armatrading, Fleetwood Mac and James Taylor. I tinkled the odd note on the piano, while I feigned the dusting operation. The boys shouted loudly over the music, exchanging opinions on their idols, breathing in note and lyric as if their very lives depended on it. In an ironic way, it did help to alleviate the boredom and treachery of Intermediate Certificate exams just around the corner. Much better to hang loose with ‘Bull Frog Blues’ or chill out to ‘At Seventeen’ by Janis Ian.

  The gang were an elite gathering of friends of all ages between thirteen and seventeen. Friends, at that age, were simply the most important thing in your life. They were harmless really. Lazy legs sprawled across the floor. They were the proud owners of a candle, moulded into the shape of a mushroom, which was ignited with religious fervour every time they gathered. The candle represented the quiet rebellion of those who sought inspiration in magic mushrooms, ten spots, oblivious of the inherent danger of such drugs (this wouldn’t come to light for another two decades).

  A mellow bunch, they would while away those summer afternoons. I, a scrawny thirteen-year-old feeling the first pangs of adolescence, clung lovingly to the piano keys and listened, with pricked ears and clanking braces. In years to come, the boys eventually accepted my presence among them without rancour, as long as I held my tongue. I had formed a slight lisp, which I still have today. This became more pronounced on drinking sprees later on in life, but that’s another story. I admired Matt from afar. My head was filled with romantic notions about him. I longed for the day when he would speak to me personally. I had tipped my cap. I was smitten.

  Matt had developed the perfect art of laughing at himself. I loved it. He made me laugh. His sense of humour was extraordinarily attractive. His impressions and contorted faces kept us all rolling in the aisles. It was probably this quality which kept me hopelessly hanging on, for so many years. I didn’t understand why he laughed so much. I had no understanding of drugs and their effects on behaviour. I recall coming home from school, lopsided from a heavy school bag, and on entering the hall, standing still to see if I could hear his voice. When I did, I raced upstairs to get changed. Wild horses could not keep me from the object of my affection.

  It was not until some years later, though, that the inevitable happened. He spoke to me. He actually noticed me, and spoke to me! I knew he was speaking to me, because he was looking at me, and calling me by name. I tried to appear cool and aloof, and give a devastatingly intelligent response. A hushed silence engulfed the room, leaving only the words from Boston’s ‘More than a Feeling’ taking centre stage. How appropriate. I have no idea to this day what he asked me, nor do I recall what my response was. I only knew that I had been rocketed forth into a new dimension of Nirvana.

  I was a more rounded fourteen-year-old, the day Matt first graced me with his personal attention. I had some notches under my belt, so to speak. I had French-kissed a boy that year, for the first time. It was a dare I had consented to, during a game of Spin the Bottle. I didn’t want to appear to be ‘tight’. The revolting encounter had left me none the wiser, and I pondered the whole ‘teenage philandering’ thing. Yet, in this very precious moment with Matt, I was bursting to shout the fact out loud. (‘I French-kissed a boy, sunshine, so don’t act the bollox with me.’)

  I was a woman of the world now. How I wished that I had a dirty great love-bite on my neck. That would have brought the message home, good and proper. Instead I went for a gleaming grin, which exposed straight, white, brace-free teeth. That ought to have done it, but instead he abruptly turned his attention to my brother, who was wearing headphones so big that he looked like Minnie Mouse taking a growth spurt. Oblivious of the hash-heavy atmos, and mouthing Mick Jagger’s ‘Brown Sugar’, Matt made a second effort. This time I was prepared. A teenage twit, opportunistic to the last. ‘Howya,’ he said.

  My journey had begun.

  So, to New Year’s Eve, 1978. Now the great night was upon me. I was just about to turn sixteen. I was just about to become a ‘woman’. Had Matt passed out in front of me, I would have proceeded alone. Nothing was going to stop us. New Year’s Eve seemed an appropriate time to shed my adolescence once and for all.

  Without discussion we left the pub and drove in silence to our ‘nest’. Searching out seclusion on Dolly-mount Strand was proving difficult. There were more writhing bodies in rocking cars than the bumpers in Bray on a summer’s day. The traffic was like Fairview in the rush hour. Was everyone in Ireland losing their virginity?

  The most important rule of the night was to appear to be ‘cool’. If I had been any cooler, I would have fro
zen to death. I tried to display a little maturity although I was scared shitless right down to my size 32AA teen bra. If he was afraid he did not show it.

  ‘Are you sure you want to go ahead with this?’ he asked softly, his hand cupping mine on the gear stick.

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ I replied, confidence oozing from every petrified pore. ‘It’s not the first time, you know.’ It was a bare-faced lie.

  ‘Me neither,’ he smiled.

  Fuck. ‘Oh. How many times?’ I query. Suddenly I have visions of this Casanova who has bedded the entire population. A poster of him with Most Wanted Lover captioned underneath is bill-boarded from here to Howth.

  ‘Only one other time,’ he said.

  That seemed even worse than before. I had wanted him to be the first so badly. However, now that I had convinced myself that he was an accomplished and artful lover, it spurred me on to increase my own fictional romantic exchanges. Another blatant lie unfurled.

  ‘Yeah, I can’t remember how many times I’ve done it, to be honest.’

  Pause. No reply.

  ‘I’m not saying I know it all or anything but you’re not dealing with a novice here.’

  Silent, cringing, self-inflicted humiliation.

  We eventually came to a standstill at the end of the strand. We had been driving around in circles for so long, I expected to see the bright lights of Holyhead across the way. Instead the familiar outline of Howth Head lay to my left, and the rosary-beaded lights of the East Wall lay in front. They reminded me of God, and in advance of the penance I would surely get when I went to Confession next week, I tried to say three Hail Marys in succession. I was appalled to find I couldn’t remember anything after ‘Thy womb, Jesus’. Matt was smoking another joint, the Bacardi and Cokes were making me sick and I was bursting to go to the toilet.

  I got out and squatted in an undignified fashion at the back of the van. A gust of wind and sand whipped around my thighs. I wasn’t sure if I’d pissed on my shoes or given the Fiat a free car wash. It was dark and scary and the popping grass was giving me some weird paranoid thoughts. I had begun to appreciate why Matt was always in ‘good form’. I had dabbled innocently with drugs only to get closer to him, and wasn’t really enjoying their effects. My stomach churned but I didn’t want to appear foolish.