My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind.

by Annette Sills

  Springer Bell yelped and scratched at the kitchen door. He was a lively beast and Karen always locked him in there whenever I visited because I got nervous around jumpy dogs. He yelped again and I winced. I was hungover. My head was throbbing and the inside of my mouth had the texture and smell of a nightclub carpet.

  I reached into my bag for my bottle of water. “Tell me about Dan. You looked pretty cosy when I left.”

  Karen flipped on her side and propped herself up on an elbow. “We were just chatting. He’s married. Nice bloke, though.”

  “Chatting, my arse.”

  I started to sing “Danny Boy”. She laughed and threw a cushion at me. I threw it back. For a brief moment I felt the old warmth return. For some reason that I didn’t understand, our friendship of almost thirty years had waned recently. Karen used to be like family. We saw each other at least twice a week, often turning up at each other’s houses unannounced, we swapped clothes, went on mini-breaks and holidays together and spoke on the phone for hours at a time. Our relationship had ebbed and flowed when we were younger, but I was confused about why she had distanced herself from me now. I suspected she was fed up with me offloading my grief on her. I was hardly a bundle of laughs anymore. The pain seemed to consume me sometimes. She was so supportive in those first weeks and months, but I guess she got weary. Her clients vented to her all day at her clinic. Why would she want to listen to me unburdening my grief when she got home as well?

  She picked up the cushion from the floor and hugged it to her chest. “Don’t worry about Bryonie Phillips and Tallulah, Carmel. It’ll all be forgotten in a day or two.”

  I threw my hands in the air in mock horror. “Don’t worry about Bryonie and Tallulah? You’re supposed to be a therapist. I’m an angsty nail-biting neurotic. Of course I’m going to bloody worry about them!”

  I laughed it off but I knew I would worry about that night and my shameful behaviour. The racing thoughts would keep me awake. At breakfast Joe had told me I was a disgrace. He was laughing at the time but I detected a serious undercurrent. He looks after himself and doesn’t drink that much nowadays. And now, on top of everything, I had to worry about Bryonie Phillip’s daughter Tallulah spreading rumours at the university about me being a drunk. I knew what students could be like. Especially ones like Tallulah. She was a sly little madam who’d had it in for me ever since I’d called her out for plagiarising chapters in one of her essays on Chaucer.

  I slumped back into the armchair. Karen swung her legs off the sofa, sat up straight then pulled an elastic band from her wrist and tied her hair back. She turned and looked out into the garden. It was long and narrow and bursting with colour in the sunshine. Cabbages and carrots sprouted in the vegetable patch, flowerbeds were alive with cerise tulips and daffodils and hyacinth and blowsy red-and-white shrub pieris crept up a side wall. She sat perfectly still and strummed her fingers on the top of the sofa, humming along with Chet to “I Fall in Love Too Easily”.

  I wondered what she was thinking about. Had something happened with Danny Boy that she hadn’t told me? It was more likely she was thinking about Simon Whelan, though. She swore it was over between them, but I didn’t believe her. I’d noticed she was wearing a bracelet I hadn’t seen before. It was lovely, gold with the two ends shaped in the form of a snake’s head with tiny emeralds for eyes. When I complimented her on it, she said it was new. Simon must have bought it for her. He was always surprising her with presents like that. It wasn’t like she was ever going to tell me though. She’d stopped talking about him. She knew how much I disapproved.

  Though Karen and I had been friends since we were eleven years old, she was still an enigma in many ways, especially when it came to men. None of her relationships had lasted longer than a year and the minute any boyfriend hinted at commitment, she kicked them into touch. The list was long and it included Alexia’s father Marco, a gentle Brazilian musician. When she fell pregnant at twenty he was desperate to stick around and play a part in his daughter’s upbringing. Karen was having none of it. She wanted to go it alone and she played cruel games over access. Marco, stung, moved to Leeds and started another family.

  Men fell at Karen’s feet at every opportunity. Maybe she just hadn’t met the right one yet but it struck me that she had attachment issues.

  She glanced down at her watch. “Sorry. I’ve got to get changed. I’m meeting some friends at the anti-austerity march in town.”

  Slightly piqued she hadn’t asked me to join her, I grabbed my bag from the floor and followed her into the hall. A silence hung between us like taut elastic. She opened the kitchen door and scooped up Springer Bell into her arms.

  As I went to open the door, I stopped in front of a new poster at the bottom of the stairs that I hadn’t noticed on my way in. It was a framed black-and-white photograph of Maya Angelou. She looked elegant and stately and across the bottom it said: “Love recognises no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

  I turned round. “Very romantic,” I said.

  She was kissing the top of Springer Bell’s head and I noticed she was blushing. I found it a little odd as Karen Obassi rarely did coy.

  Chapter 3

  I found the letter the following Thursday and nothing was ever the same again.

  I’d spent most of the week fretting about Bryonie and Tallulah Phillips. Of course I had. I was a champion fretter. I ruminated for days about things most people wouldn’t give a second thought to. Neurotic, highly strung, skittish, a born worrier – I’d been described as many things over the years. Apparently now my way of being had a name. It was called “mild to moderate anxiety”. I’d been both bemused and relieved to learn it had been classed as a medical condition. I traced its roots back to Dad dying. I was a happy little thing before then. Life with Tess afterwards was unstable and chaotic, and the world was no longer a safe place without him in it.

  I lay awake every night replaying the events of the fundraiser, thoughts racing round my head like greyhounds on a track. Bad thoughts. I worried about Joe. He’d been keeping his distance. He’d opted for a boxing class at the gym instead of our usual Sunday-night curry and he’d barely said goodbye when he left for a meeting in Warsaw on Monday. Was he as ashamed of me as I was of myself? That was all we needed. Our marriage was going through a rocky patch. I tossed and turned and sat up in bed, imagining Bryonie embellishing tales of my inebriation to Tallulah in the huge kitchen of their mansion in Chorltonville. I saw Tallulah surrounded by first-year students, cackling and tapping on her phone with her pink talons, flinging off messages to more students on WhatsApp groups, Facebook and Twitter. Why oh why did I do it? I drank too much when I went out because I was socially awkward and nervous. This led to me to do idiotic things and then I beat myself up about it for ages afterwards. As the week went on I managed to work myself into a right state. There really was no end to my fretting talents.

  I offloaded to my friend Mary at work on Wednesday. We were in the staffroom having lunch and trying to get some marking done. I couldn’t concentrate. I was fidgeting, constantly checking my phone and sighing loudly.

  Mary looked up from her laptop. “Everything OK, hen?”

  Barrell-shaped and Glaswegian, Mary Duffy had a doll-like face with large baby-blue eyes, a mane of soft black curls and rosebud lips. But there was nothing soft or innocent about her. An expert in the twentieth century novel, she was bawdy, brilliant and as tough as rawhide.

  “Remind me never to drink again, Mary.”

  “I’ll do no such thing. Why? What did you do?”

  I glanced furtively around the room. “Tell you another time.”

  “Sounds intriguing. Tell me now.”

  I leant over and lowered my voice. “I got really bladdered at Mikey’s anniversary do and made a show of myself. Tallulah Phillips’ mum saw me. I fell on top of the table where she was selling raffle tickets but I can’t remember a thing.”

  Ma
ry hooted with laughter and a couple of the other teachers glanced over.

  Then her face fell. “You don’t mean Tallulah ‘you better give me a first or else’ Phillips?”

  I nodded.

  “Christ.”

  “I know. I’ve really got to stop this drinking malarkey. I’m nearly forty for God’s sake.”

  “Och, bollocks to that!” She tore the wrapper off a Mars Bar. “As the man said, ‘Ageing can be fun if you lie back and enjoy it’.”

  A cheer erupted from the corner of the room. Someone had got the photocopier working.

  “Oscar Wilde?” I asked.

  She bit off a large chunk of chewy chocolate and shook her head.

  “Irvine Welsh?”

  “Close.

  “Martin Amis?”

  “Nope.”

  “I give up.”

  “Clint Eastwood.” She grinned and showed me her caramel-smeared teeth. “How’s Joe?””

  “Alright. He’s a bit mardy by times.”

  “How so?”

  “Tell you another time.”

  I didn’t want to go into my marital problems in the staffroom, but I knew I could tell Mary anything. She was a wise old owl and I found myself increasingly confiding in her about a lot of the things I’d normally tell Karen. Joe and Mary got along well. Joe was a United fan, Mary a Liverpool season-ticket holder and they slagged each other about football. Mary’s long-term partner, a Swiss lawyer called Monika, was serious and introverted and preferred tennis.

  I put my head down and got on with my marking. Little did I know that by the end of the week all my anxieties about Bryonie and Tallulah Phillips and Joe would be completely forgotten. What I was to discover would blow everything out of the water and make my all my fretting look trivial and insignificant.

  Thursday was a strange, unsettling kind of day. As I drove to Tess’s house in Brantingham Road, a weak sun dipped in and out of slate-grey clouds and half-hearted gusts of wind rose and fell away. I put Morrissey’s “Back to the Old House” on the CD player – a mournful tune about someone who has mixed feelings about revisiting their past – and the song was still echoing around my head when I parked outside at about eleven. Armed with black binbags, I was about to do a final sweep of my childhood home before the house-clearance people arrived and I was dreading it.

  The red-brick thirties semi where I was raised was the sick old lady in a healthy-looking street of identical houses. Luckily for us, Tess and Dad had paid off the mortgage early on, which meant we always had a roof over our heads after he died. But there was never any money for maintenance and the place had been in a state of ill-repair for decades. Clumps of concrete had fallen from the porch, the frosted glass in the front door was cracked and tiles were missing from the roof like gaps in a row of rotting teeth. The one thing Tess had taken care of was her beloved garden. She’d have turned in her plot at Southern Cemetery if she’d seen the state of it now. Hailstone was sweeping through the cherry blossom, and takeaway cartons and crisp packets littered the lawn. Someone had thrown an old chair over her cuckoo flowers and the Sherlock Homes SOLD sign was impaled on the rosebush she’d tended with such care.

  As I entered the gate, I narrowly missed treading on the corpse of a half-formed baby bird that had fallen from the cherry blossom. I stared down at it. A bulbous eye stared back. It was lying in a coffin of fuchsia petals, its pink jellied belly turned on one side. I took a tissue from my bag, scooped it up and as I was burying it by the rosebush I heard someone calling my name.

  I turned to see Samira Kahn herding two shiny-faced grandchildren into the back of her Ford Galaxy on the other side of the street. Samira lived at Number 28. Her eldest son Adeel had recently bought Numbers 34 and 36, and coverted them into a huge six-bed detached. The result was an impressive facade with Grecian pillars, a huge wrought-iron gate and wide gravel driveway. Samira shut the car door, shot at it with her key remote and hurried over the road.

  “Carmel!” she cried, placing the stress on the last syllable of my name instead of the first as she always did.

  I never corrected her. I thought it made me sound exotic.

  She took my hands in hers and squeezed tight. “How are you, my dear?”

  “Good.” I pointed up at the house. “Just doing a final bit of sorting before we exchange.”

  “I hear a young Pakistani family are moving in?”

  “That’s right. From Bradford. Two kids. He’s a teacher and she works for the BBC in Media City.”

  Her eyes widened. “Ooh! Maybe she can introduce me to the stars of Corrie.”

  “Corrie’s on ITV, Samira.”

  She winked. “I know. Anyway, I’ve gone off it since Deirdre died.”

  She glanced up and down the street and sighed. “Did you know we were the first Asian family in Brantingham Road, Carmel?”

  “I didn’t, no.”

  “March 1969 we arrived. It was only English and Irish then. Most of the neighbours ignored us. Many made nasty comments. But not your mother. Not Tess. She always said hello and stopped to chat. She knew that we were both strangers in this land. She sensed we had more in common than what was different.”

  I swallowed. “That’s really nice to know, Samira.”

  I’d always been bemused by Tess’s friendship with Samira and I often wondered what they talked about. Samira was a retired GP and Radio 4 listener with a season ticket at the Royal Exchange Theatre and Tess was an eccentric part-time cleaner who liked Irish showband music, knitting and gardening.

  As if reading my thoughts, Samira said, “Your mother and I would sit and talk for hours. She used to tell me all about her life in Ireland before she came here and I used to tell her all about mine in Pakistan.”

  “Really?”

  I was piqued, envious almost. Tess rarely spoke to us about her childhood. All Mikey and I knew was that her parents died before we were born and she had an older brother who’d moved to London. She said he was a good-for-nothing who’d ended up in a shelter in Kilburn. They were estranged and she clammed up whenever I asked about him. Whenever we went to Ireland on holiday we stayed with Dad’s family. I don’t ever remember visiting the village where she was raised.

  Samira sighed. “Your mother made me laugh but she also made me cry.” She paused then searched my face. “So cruel to have her son taken from her like that.”

  I stared down at the weeds that were coming up through the paving stones, my lips trembling. I knew the tears would come if she said his name. Mikey was everywhere: kicking a football against the side wall, blaring the Stone Roses from his bedroom window and painting “I LOVE PARIS ANGELS”, his favourite band, in huge blue letters on the porch wall for the entire world to see.

  I quickly changed the subject and waved at the yellow “Vote Labour Vote Kahn” signs in every second garden. “Adeel is doing well. I saw him on BBC North the other week. You must be really proud of him.”

  She rolled her eyes and folded her arms across her bosom. “Oh yes. He’s a hotshot politician but who does he leave his kids with all the time? Naniji. I ask you, Carmel. Where is my bloody life?”

  Adeel Kahn was a couple of years older than me. As a boy he was small and scrawny with National Health glasses bigger than his face and masses of determination. At eleven he won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar, one of the city’s top fee-paying schools, and then he went to Oxford. After graduating he returned to Manchester, set up his own business then got involved in local politics. The NHS glasses had long gone, he’d beefed up and recently won a narrow victory to become Labour MP for Withington.

  We both jumped at the blare of a car horn. His youngest was leaping up and down in the front seat of the Galaxy.

  Samira waved a fist and shrieked something in Punjabi. “Better go. I’m off to Pakistan tonight for six weeks and I’ve still got so much packing to do.” She put her arms around me and hugged me hard. “Don’t be a stranger, Carmel. Come visit.”

  I watched her hurry
across the road, a silver sari drifting like a cloud under her navy M&S blazer. Then, with a heavy heart, I turned and walked up the path to the front door.

  Chapter 4

  I stepped into the hallway and picked up the post from the mat. I listened for her voice. It was like trying to remember a song when I only had the first few notes. When nothing came, the tragedy of it hit me. My mother’s voice was gone from me forever.

  I opened the venetian blinds in the downstairs rooms. Strips of light flooded through the slats and dust motes danced on the shabby pieces of furniture: a cheap plywood coffee table, a saggy floral sofa, a scratched dining set dating back to the seventies. Imprints of her lingered everywhere – a yellowing smoke cloud on the ceiling above her armchair, a crescent-shaped coffee stain on the kitchen worktop, a cushion with an impression of her tiny backside. Cold seeped through the walls as I walked around emptying drawers and filling binbags with the leftovers of her life: half-empty pill packets, old cigarette boxes and the unused nail-varnish bottles and lipsticks she used to pilfer from Boots Chemists. In the kitchen I found an entire drawer of Ireland’s Own magazines and at the back of another a bunch of articles from the Irish newspapers. She had a wicked habit of tearing them out of the copies in the reading room in Chorlton Library. She’d been told off a number of times and banned twice but they always let her back in.

  I pulled a pile of her knitting from under the sofa cushions. As it unravelled in my hands, I could see her in front of me in the armchair as clear as day. A manic episode could keep her up all night knitting. Sometimes it was jumpers for Mikey and me but often it was baby clothes, cardigans or jumpers with matching booties in pastel colours. I’d find a pile stacked neatly on the armchair the next morning. She’d take them to the New Mothers group in the Methodist Church Hall and hand them out.