Margaret, the kindly lady with large hands who ran the group, took me by the elbow at the funeral. “Your mother was a lovely kind woman,” she said. “The new mothers loved her baby clothes. Nobody knits like that anymore. We used to call her ‘The Baby Lady’. She loved to hold the new-borns and sing to them. It made her very happy.”
There were baking all-nighters, too. A mountain of soda bread would appear on the kitchen table the next morning and I’d have to clean up the surrounding snowstorm before going to school.
Upstairs, I paused on the landing outside her bedroom. I’d found her lying at the foot of the bed the previous November on a morning of near-tropical rain. I’d rung and rung but she wasn’t answering the phone. I knew something was wrong. She rarely left the house since Mikey’s death six months before.
I entered, tightening the grip on my binbag. Most of her clothes and belongings had gone to the Heart Foundation shop so there was very little left in the room: a scattering of cheap pearls from a broken necklace, an empty bottle of Yardley’s Lavender perfume and a gnarled Maeve Binchy novel. I picked up the bottle, closed my eyes and sprayed, longing for her smell one last time. But it was empty. First her voice and now her smell had gone from me.
Under the bed I found an old picture that used to hang on the far wall. It was a still from her favourite film, The Quiet Man starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. In the top right-hand corner, the glass was cracked. As I stared down at it, guilt grabbed me by the shoulders, forced me to sit down on the bed and remember.
“I hate you. You are not my mother.”
She was sitting on the stool in front of the dressing-table mirror, frenetically brushing out her blonde locks. The table was piled high with jars of Nivea and perfumes and lipsticks, heated rollers and hairnets. Philomena Begley was singing “Blanket on the Ground” on the cassette player on the bedside table and Mikey had fallen asleep in his clothes on Dad’s side of the bed. It had been a hell of a day.
“None of my friends will ever speak to me again after what you did!” I hissed, stepping towards her. My ten-year-old hand grabbed the hairbrush and managed to wrestle it from her. I hurled it against the wall. It struck the picture which fell inches from Mikey’s face. The murderous look on her face was enough to propel me downstairs and out of the front door into the evening drizzle. I knew I’d be in for a belting later but a thousand lashes would never compare to the humiliation I knew I’d suffer at school the next day.
I’d noticed the signs the previous evening: the agitation, the talking and smoking at twice her normal speed. She’d circled a date on the kitchen calendar in red pen and kept doing it again and again. Dad had only been gone six months and I assumed it was something to do with him, maybe an anniversary of some kind. I plucked up the courage to ask and her face crumpled. She burst into tears, pushed me to one side and left the room. Later that evening I found her in the back yard on her hands and knees surrounded by suds and a bucket. She was scrubbing at the concrete with a wire brush, mumbling to herself.
I lay awake that night, worry gnawing at my insides. I knew something bad was about to happen. My world had changed since Dad died. It was full of danger and unpredictability now that he was no longer there. There was no one to shield me and Mikey from Tess’s episodes and mood swings. But at least the next day was Sunday and I wouldn’t have to get my brother to school when it all kicked off.
I woke late to the sound of the front door slamming. Out of my bedroom window I could see her sweeping down the street, dragging Mikey behind her. He was in his Sunday suit complete with dickie bow and waistcoat, his unruly mop plastered to his head. She was wearing a royal-blue skirt suit that hugged her slender figure, with yellow heels and a matching Monaco-style headscarf that trailed in the breeze. She looked like something out of Vogue and she lit up the dank Manchester street. An elderly couple walking their dog stopped and stared as she wafted past like a whiff of expensive perfume. Even though I knew she was up to no good, I was bursting with pride for my beautiful mother.
At about midday I returned from the shop to find a police car parked outside the house. Impulse told me to turn and run but I put the key in the lock. Holding my breath, I entered the living room.
Mikey was playing with his Evel Knievel toys in front of the fire and Tess was sitting on the sofa next to a roly-poly policeman. Strands of her hair were unpinned and her lipstick was smudged. The policeman looked like the TV detective Frank Cannon. He had a receding hairline, a hedge moustache and was scribbling something in his notebook. When I walked in, Tess inched away from him.
He put down his pencil and stared, a pink tongue resting on his lower lip.
He struggled to his feet. “What have we here, then? Another looker, just like her mam.”
Still staring at me, he put his notebook in his jacket pocket and fastened the silver buttons over his enormous belly that protruded like an extra limb. He moved towards me and slowly lifted his hand to stroke my cheek. Tess leapt to her feet and I ran to her. She grabbed Mikey and I could feel the gallop of her heartbeat as she pressed us both to her chest. Frank walked slowly towards us then stopped. Raising a log-like arm, he sent everything flying off the mantelpiece: the Croagh Patrick snow globe, the clay ashtray I’d made in pottery class and the framed photo of Dad that the three of us kissed every night before bed.
“Murdering Paddy bastards!” he said, picking up his helmet and waddling out of the door.
I was too scared to ask Tess what she’d done or who she’d killed. But I found out soon enough when Eileen O’Dowd arrived on our doorstep that evening. Eileen was a popular girl in my class and one of the few other Irish girls at Oakwood High. Most went to the nearby convent school. Eileen’s Omagh-born mother had recently done the unthinkable and left her alcoholic good for-nothing Irish Catholic husband for an English atheist called Jethro whose baby she was carrying. Eileen had been telling us for weeks about her baby brother Carl’s upcoming naming ceremony at the Railway Club. She’d been boring us senseless about the buffet, her new outfit and how her mum and Jethro were going to duet to a Cat Stevens song. She explained that the ceremony was a non-religious event on account of Jethroe not believing in God and her mum turning into a hippy.
That night she stood in the lashing rain on our doorstep with a face of thunder and her arms folded across her chest. I took in the soaking wet rims at the bottom of her new pink jumpsuit, the glittery eyelashes and the strawberry-blonde hair that the rain had flattened against her face.
“I’ve come round to tell you I can’t be friends with you anymore, Carmel Lynch, cos of what your mam did today,” she said.
I swallowed. “OK, Eileen.” My legs weakened and I tried to close the door but she put a wedged heel in the way.
“You have no idea, have you?”
I shook my head.
She glared at me. “Well, I’ll tell you, will I? Your nutcase of a mother ruined our Carl’s special day good and proper. She turned up at his naming ceremony at the club with your brat of a brother and shouted all the way during it. She called us all heathens, she said our Carl would spend his life in limbo and she called him the B word more than once.” She wagged her finger. “And I don’t mean bloody either. Uncle Tony had to get the police and they dragged her away kicking and screaming.”
My chin fell on to my chest and I wanted the world to swallow me up. I tried to close the door again but Eileen was enjoying watching me squirm too much to move her foot.
“And I wouldn’t mind but you lot don’t even go to the Catholic school or to Mass. Who does your mam think she is? My mam says she should be locked up.”
After a few more insults she turned on her heel and walked away.
“Bye-bye, Carmel!” She raised her hand in a wave. “Nice knowing you.”
“She’s not well!” I shouted weakly after her but my words were swallowed up in the battering rain.
I went back inside, went into the living room and turned off the TV. I’d been watc
hing an extended news programme about the Brighton bombing and how they’d nearly killed Mrs Thatcher. But now all I could think about was tomorrow and school. I was going to have to leave. How could I ever face any of my friends again? I could hear Tess moving around in her bedroom. Something inside me snapped and that was when I headed upstairs in a fury. The Brighton bombing wasn’t the only atrocity committed by an Irish person that day.
I stood up from the bed, put the Quiet Man picture into the binbag and looked around my mother’s bedroom one last time. When Mikey and I were growing up Tess’s mental-health issues were shrouded in mystery and shame. Friends and family spoke about her manic episodes in hushed tones, telling us she was “bad with her nerves’” or “a bit delicate”. It was only later in my teens that I learned that the pill bottles piled up in the bathroom cabinet weren’t to ease her arthritis as she claimed, but to contain her dark depression, mood swings and debilitating anxiety.
That morning, when I found her at the foot of the bed, rain was hammering on the windowpane like an impatient God wanting to enter. I didn’t know then that she’d suffered a massive stroke. My first instinct was to look around the room for empty pill bottles. She’d tried to end her life more than once before. After a lifetime of mental torment and now that Mikey had gone, I’d have understood if she’d wanted to do it again.
As I knelt beside her and closed her eyes, the rain suddenly stopped. And in the silence that followed I told her I loved her and that she was finally at peace.
Chapter 5
As I was about to leave the house, I returned to the living room and stuck a Post-it note on the old radiogram, reminding the house clearance people to drop it off at my house. I ran my fingers along the dusty mahogany lid. I’d persuaded Tess not to get rid of it. I wanted to restore it. Joe and I had a selection of vinyl and we’d actually use it. But, more importantly, it was once Dad’s pride and joy and the only thing I had left of his.
Like too many Irishmen in those times in Britain, he died in a tragic accident on a building site. On a day of torrential rain in Salford, he jumped down from his digger to inspect the edge of a deep trench where pipes were being laid. He then lost his footing on the treacherously slippery ground and slid into the pit. An avalanche of mud, copper piping and concrete followed. As the blood was draining from his body I was at Priory Road primary, colouring in a picture I’d drawn of the four of us. I was looking forward to showing it to him when he got in from work. In it we were on holiday in Ireland in front of my grandmother’s house. It was the last one I’d ever draw of us all of together.
My memories of him were fading but now and again I’d get flashbacks. He’d be hunched over the radiogram listening to Radio Athlone in the evenings or to the Gaelic football after Mass on Sunday. Michael O’Hare’s banshee-like football commentaries would be filling the room and Dad would be raising a fist in the air whenever his beloved Mayo team scored. The Irish showband and country-and-western records he stored in the radiogram were the soundtrack of my early childhood: Big Tom and the Mainliners, Frank Mcaffrey, the Miami Showband. Sometimes when he and Tess got in after a dance at the Irish Club, I’d creep out of bed, sit on the bottom of the stairs and listen to the shuffle of waltzing feet behind the closed door.
I glanced down at my watch. Five to one. I was meeting Joe at the Infirmary at two thirty for my scan appointment. I was starting to fret and imagine the worst outcomes. I grabbed the binbags and was about to head out the living-room door when a song that Dad used to play a lot came into my head. I started to whistle the tune to myself. “The Men Behind the Wire” was an old song about internment and the raids by British soldiers during the Troubles. He used to play it on a loop and always on low volume in case the neighbours heard. I knew all the words. He’d bounce me on his knee and laugh as we sang along together, and he made me solemnly promise never to sing it at school.
I always assumed Tess had given away all of Dad’s old records when I bought her a CD player. But I hadn’t actually checked inside the radiogram. So I turned back and opened the lid. By the side of the turntable there was a storage space and I was delighted to find a pile of about twenty forty-fives still there. I picked some up and sifted through them: Margo’s “If I Could See the World Through the Eyes of a Child”, Big Tom’s “Old Love Letters” – “Take Me Home to Mayo” – the song we played at Dad’s graveside, Tess’s favourite “My Son” by Brendan Shine as well as a selection of Jim Reeves and Johnny Cash. As I went to pick some more up I saw a brown envelope sticking out of the bottom of the pile. I tugged at it. It was fat and torn. I put the records back, sat down in Tess’s armchair and shook the contents on to my lap. Old bills, Mass cards and yellowing insurance policies fell out.
I found the letter inside an old birthday card.
Dad’s handwriting was beautiful. His words fell across the page like sloping rain. Black ink had faded to lilac and the blue of the Basildon Bond paper was blanched but I could read everything clearly.
Whalley Range
Manchester
3rd September 1960
My dearest Tess,
I hope you are keeping as well as can be expected in the circumstances. I lie awake every night wondering how you are.
Kathleen Slevin is a great girl to get the letters in and out, isn’t she? The ganger man on my new job in Salford is from Bohola. He knows the Slevins and says they are a decent family. It comforts me to know you have an ally in there.
Do you remember Pádraig Flynn from the dances in Ballinrobe? Tall fella with a lazy eye? He’s on the Salford job too. One of the men he lodges with told me he was asking questions about us. I may have to have a word in his ear. Sometimes it feels like there are too many Mayo people in this part of Manchester. It’s like I never moved away at all. I’m starting to wonder if we might be better off in London or Birmingham.
Not much has happened here since I last wrote. It seems to rain even more than back home. Earlier today I was watching yer man in his yard across the way – a big old beast with a knotted handkerchief over his baldy head. He breeds pigeons in a cage and coos and talks to them like a lover. Can you imagine! And the English say we are odd! I’ve half a mind to go over and ask if he could train one of them to fly between here and Tuam with our letters. Then Kathleen Slevin wouldn’t risk losing her job and I could wake on a cold morning with one of them outside my window, your sweet words attached to its foot. That’d make me an awful happy man.
Overtime is plenty at the moment, though I’m hammered in subs. Every penny is going into the tin for our new life together. I stay out of the pub except for the odd pint at the Irish Association Club in Chorlton of a Saturday. I can’t wait to take you there. There’s dancing every weekend.
I have an eye on a house for us not far from here. I took a walk over there on Saturday morning. It’s in a decent area and you can walk to the shops in Chorlton. I met a fella from Dublin, O’Grady, when I was looking. He lives across the road and his wife is a Corkwoman and a nurse at the hospital.
Anyway, my love, I must leave you now. My new roommate is coming up the stairs. He’s a Roscommon lad, nice enough but he snores like a prize pig.
Try not to be too afraid of what is to come. Your confinement will soon be over. Then we can start our new life together.
I think of you every minute of every day.
All my love
Seán
xxx
I looked at the date and frowned. September 1960. Tess told us she and Dad met on the boat from Dublin to Holyhead in 1962. I was sure of it. But, according to the letter, Dad was already settled here and he was waiting for her to join him. So, what was she doing in Tuam, a town in north County Galway miles from her birthplace in 1960? I read the letter again, this time slowly. When I’d finished I sat upright and inhaled sharply.
Your confinement will be over.
Confinement. The word rose up off the page and slapped me in the face. How could I have missed it? Confinement. Meaning impris
onment, detention or detainment. But also a euphemism for pregnancy.
I grabbed the arm of the chair. “Jesus.”
A car horn beeped outside and I glanced out of the window. A crow was skimming through the cherry blossom, a slither of black slicing through the pink.
I searched frantically for more letters, opening every envelope and scrutinising every bit of paper but I found nothing.
My phone buzzed. It was Joe.
Where are you?
I looked at my watch. Christ. I only had half an hour to get into town, park and get to my appointment. I’d been so engrossed I’d lost track of time. I texted back immediately.
On my way.
I stuffed everything back into the envelope and slipped it into my bag along with some of the old records. Dazed, I gathered the binbags, locked the front door behind me and threw the rubbish into the bins. I hurried to my car. As I was about to open the door I looked back at the house. The clouds opened and a momentary sliver of sun cast a long shadow over the roof. It looked different, the way the face of an old friend looks different if they do something unexpected or out of character.
That morning, I’d been hoping make peace with my troubled childhood. To move on and to find closure. But now everything had been flung wide open. Had Tess and Dad really had another child out of wedlock fourteen years before I was born? Had they really kept it secret from me and Mikey for all those years?
In my excitement I put my hand on my phone to ring my brother and tell him. Then I remembered.
My heart dropped with the speed of a falling lift. I couldn’t share my news with Mikey. I couldn’t tell him anything ever again.
My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. Page 3