Sins of the Mother

by Irene Kelly

  It was the first time somebody had told me that I could change my life. I felt strengthened by her words and the next day we visited our GP, who referred me to a drugs counsellor. It wasn’t long before I was on a methadone programme and, though it was hard at first to break the habit of smack, I was soon stable enough on the programme to come off it altogether. Best of all, it freed me from the criminal life because I no longer needed to go out robbing and stealing to fund my habit. Finally, I could relax and just be myself.

  It had been hard to leave my family, and especially my dad. He didn’t approve of Irene or the fact that she had three kids with another man but, worse, he didn’t want me to leave Ireland and start my own life. The way he saw it, a family should stick together. There was no big argument between us, that wasn’t his way. My father was subtle; he let you know what he was thinking in little ways, like his expressions and the way he acted. He said things to my brothers but he never said anything directly to me, so I only got to know what he was thinking by talking to my siblings. By the time I was twenty-three the rest of my brothers had joined his army of thieves. We were nine young healthy lads – a force to be reckoned with – and my dad knew that as long as he had his sons around him, he would always be well protected. If I left it could start an exodus – that was the way he saw it.

  But I had to make my own life. I didn’t belong to him and I knew, the moment I held my daughter for the first time, that I wanted to do things differently. As a father, I wanted to be there for her, for her to feel secure. I didn’t want to leave her alone in the world the way my father had left me. So when I was extradited back to Ireland to serve my sentence for the pub job, it nearly killed me. I sank into a terrible depression in prison, prompting a return to smack. It was easy enough to get my hands on – usually there was a group who bribed or blackmailed an officer to get him to smuggle in the drugs. Of course, I felt eaten up by guilt for going back. All that effort to get clean had been wasted! My guilt made me want to get high even more, to escape the self-loathing that plagued me. It was a vicious circle.

  Then, one day in March 1992, I found another way to escape. There was a fella four cells down from me who liked to paint. I used to wander into his cell in the daytime and watch him for hours – carefully selecting his colours, mixing them, sweeping his brush across the canvas, building up the layers and the shapes until there was an actual picture in front of him. The whole process was fascinating.

  ‘Here, Matt, why don’t you try to do a bit yourself?’ he suggested during one of these extended visits.

  ‘What? No! I wouldn’t be able to do that,’ I scoffed. ‘I can’t draw a straight line!’

  Well, I had no idea if that was true or not – in fact, I had never tried painting before.

  ‘Here.’ He went over to his box of art tools and dug out some materials. ‘Here’s two brushes and three tubes of paint. And, okay, yes, here’s a small canvas. Why don’t you do something?’

  I took the stuff he handed me and went back to my cell. Why not? I might as well give it a go. So I sat down and painted a picture from my head – it was a corner of a room with a table and a piece of fruit on it. The next day I showed it to my new friend.

  ‘That’s not bad for your first go.’ He sounded impressed. ‘Give it to us and I’ll take it up to the art teacher.’

  It wasn’t long before word came back from the art teacher – I was to put my name down for his class right away! So I joined the art class and started painting with the teacher, learning different techniques from his art books and magazines. I was astonished to find that I could pretty much copy any style that I tried. I loved the post-impressionist style of Paul Gauguin and accurately reproduced some of the work he did of the native women of Tahiti. I tried my hand at some Van Gogh works and then moved on to Goya, Renoir and even the surrealist works of Salvador Dalí.

  For the first time in my life I was learning something. I was acquiring knowledge and I was using my hands in a creative way. It was as if my body had an innate understanding of painting, I could sense what I had to do and I did it naturally. This was a form of escapism I had never known before, one that actually used my brain creatively. It was astonishing that I’d never so much as sketched before now – it felt like I was born to paint.

  The reaction I got from others when they saw my work was amazing. I had real talent, they said appreciatively. As the months passed, I started to develop my own style and express myself on the canvas. I gave way to my deepest, darkest emotions and created a few self-portraits with very dark, thick oils. I poured all my blackness and bitter self-loathing onto the canvas, even using my hands to paint at one point, instead of a brush. I painted the darkness inside me and the result was a very thin skull with penetrating, bloodshot eyes. Looking at that portrait, you would know there was something wrong with the artist. You could see my soul was tortured and disturbed. They were powerful images.

  Irene organized an exhibition of my work, which was a huge boost, not just to my confidence, but also to my case for parole. The parole board could see I had changed and built a new life in England. ‘Go back there,’ they told me. ‘Take your family and return to England and keep away from your old life.’ So I was allowed out shortly afterwards, having served two years of a seven-year sentence. And for the first time it felt like I had a family to return to and somewhere to go.

  In Ireland I was afraid to be myself for fear of people laughing at me. And showing weakness was dangerous in that world. It was the burden of being my father’s son – I couldn’t do anything that people would interpret as ‘going soft’. But in England I’d been free to explore a different way of life. By my nature, I wasn’t a tough guy and that was why I had spent so long escaping reality through drugs. I had been living a lie. Now I could have the quiet life I wanted.

  But before I returned to England, I had to do one last thing. My parents had split up – my mother finally got sick of my father’s many affairs – and my mother lived on her own in the family flat; she had seen Jennifer a lot while I was in prison, which was comforting. My mum was a proud and devoted grandmother to all her grandchildren and it made me feel better to know that at least while I was locked up, my daughter was getting attention from her extended family. The one person Jennifer had never met was her granddad, my father. It was an emotional moment for me, introducing my dad to his granddaughter, but he took one look, grunted and walked out of the room without saying a word. At the time I was so angry, but a year later he died suddenly in an accident and I was comforted by the fact he had seen her at all.

  Losing my father made me think a lot about what it meant to be a dad. I pored over my memories of him and tried to separate my feelings as an adult from the ones I’d had as a child. As a child I had loved and admired him without question but, the older I got, the more I saw his faults and the more I resented him for what he took from me. I loved him but I also hated him for not being there for me, for forcing me into a life of crime and for making choices in his life which hurt all of his family.

  It made me think hard about the kind of father I wanted to be. By now I was back on the methadone programme and I was determined to make it work, no matter what. Far from starting an exodus as my dad had feared, I was the only sibling in my family to leave Dublin and reject a life of crime. I didn’t want my daughter following in my footsteps, the way my father had groomed me to follow him into the family business. I wanted her to have the freedom to choose her own life, I wanted her to be her own person. Imagine what you could have been with the right opportunities, I told myself. Imagine the kind of life you could have had! You can give that to your child. You can right all the wrongs from the past.

  Irene

  ‘This is the last time I ever go to prison,’ he told me during one visit. ‘I won’t be able to leave Jennifer again. I don’t care what I have to do to survive, I can’t leave my little girl without a daddy.’

  Jennifer was one year old when her daddy was sent to prison and, lik
e all of us, she missed him horribly. I tried to keep us all together. Meanwhile, to help pass the time in prison, Matt took up painting and I was astonished to find he was an incredibly talented artist.

  Sadly, by the time Matt was out of prison and we were preparing our return to Manchester, the boys had other ideas. Now fifteen and sixteen, they were headstrong and they had got used to being back in Ireland where they had grown up. They didn’t understand my determination to leave all my family and friends, and it was hard to explain. In the end, they persuaded me to let them stay in Ireland with their father. So we crossed back on the ferry now just four of us – me and Matt, three-year-old Jennifer and Anna, who was twelve. It broke my heart to leave the boys behind but they wanted the chance to live in Ireland, the country they had grown up in. I hoped they would be happy but I couldn’t stay with them. I knew I couldn’t survive if I stayed behind.

  Back in Manchester we picked up where we left off. I worked full time in a factory and Matt got painting and decorating jobs. Anna missed her older brothers a lot but she was happy to go back to England. She adored Matt and was so thrilled he was living at home again. Every now and again I had my dark days, but they were manageable – Jennifer gave us both hope. She was a shining light in our lives. Smart and beautiful, she astounded her nursery teachers by reading and writing at three years old. The others had done okay in school but Jennifer was bright, really bright, and I knew I wanted to give her all the chances I had been denied in my life. I wanted to give her the best education possible. Matt and I didn’t talk much about the past. Neither of us wanted to look back, only forwards. So we didn’t hang photos on the walls, we didn’t visit our family in Ireland and we didn’t tell Jennifer about our troubled pasts. She didn’t need to know – she was a child. And over here, she was free from the pressures of a society throttled by religion and poverty. We threw a protective ring around her and we prayed it would shield her from the pain and misery we had left on Ireland’s shoreline.

  From then on the house was much quieter, though I found it more peaceful. If Jennifer was lonely at least she was safe. We weren’t big socializers – Matt didn’t drink, which was the main way of making friends in our area. A naturally private man, he seemed content to keep himself to himself. And I had one lovely friend called Pat across the street who I met at the bingo. Though Pat was twenty years older than me I felt very comfortable in her company; from the word go we were close. She was a very caring person and I saw her several times a week. Apart from Pat, we didn’t make friends. It suited us that way – we had spent a lot of time in our past surrounded by others. Now it felt peaceful to be left alone.

  The years passed. In the quiet of the night, the voices visited again. I had tried so hard to hide from them, to run away from them. But somehow they always found me. And after my mother died, they would not leave me alone.

  18

  IRENE

  Reckoning

  It was the call from my sister that prompted my return to Ireland.

  ‘You better come,’ said Agatha sadly. ‘Things are getting bad with Mammy. She’s in the hospice now and the cancer’s spread everywhere.’

  Matt was worried for me – he had seen how badly my mother had hurt me in the past and during our years in England, I had finally found peace, away from her.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked as I carefully folded clothes into my suitcase.

  It was February 1996, Jennifer was five years old and Anna fourteen. Of course, I didn’t really want to leave Matt or the kids, but I had to go for my own peace of mind. I had to give my mother one last chance to make things right.

  ‘It’s only a week,’ I reasoned. ‘I have to go see her now. I have to know if she’s sorry. There won’t be another chance to do it.’

  ‘Well, maybe . . .’ he mumbled, sounding unconvinced. ‘Just don’t expect too much, okay? Some people can’t change.’

  I spent a week in the hospice at my mother’s side, returning each night to Justin’s home, where he lived with his partner and her four-year-old child. I loved spending time with Justin and Katie – they were a lovely couple and very easy to be around. They were clearly devoted to each other. He was eighteen now, working on the trains – I was proud of him, he’d grown into a responsible and mature young man.

  At first, I had been shocked by my mother’s altered looks – she seemed shrivelled and frail in her massive bed, her hair was limp and grey, and her complexion was a sickly yellow colour. It was so different from how I remembered her – she had always taken great pride in her appearance. But there was something about the eyes that was unchanged; the beady, malevolent stare was the same as it always had been. If she was surprised to see me when I arrived, she didn’t show it.

  ‘Are you comfortable, Mammy?’ I asked her each morning. ‘Is there something I can get you?’

  ‘Get me a cup of tea,’ she’d rasp back. Her voice had deteriorated into a hoarse whisper. There were never any pleases or thank yous – her manners certainly hadn’t improved in the years I’d been away. Though we talked about Justin, Philip, my siblings and their families, as well as her health, she never once asked me about Matt or the girls.

  My father was still living in the house they had shared and I saw him very briefly, twice, when he visited my mother, but we barely exchanged five words. Looking at his dirty, dishevelled state I felt disgusted. He was like a tramp and he smelled terrible from not washing or changing his clothes.

  For the most part, I just sat at her bedside and tried to help make her last days comfortable. Various family members came by at different times to drop off flowers or sit with Mammy for a while. It was nice when they were there to chat and catch up on all the family news. But when it was just the two of us, the hours dragged by. One day, Mammy got a visit from two nuns. Mammy always loved the nuns. It was strange – my experiences had been dreadful in St Grace’s but still Mammy thought all nuns were saintly, wonderful people.

  I had been outside having a cigarette when they’d gone into Mammy’s room, and when I came back in they were sat on the chairs at her bedside. I almost recoiled in shock when I saw them. Just the sight of these ancient, wizened little women in their habits made me sick to the stomach. It was like I was being haunted by the ghosts from my past. I sat down in the corner of the room and some physical memory seemed to rise up inside my body. Without knowing it, I tried to make myself as small as possible so they wouldn’t look at me or talk to me. I wanted to be invisible at that moment. I heard my mother cackling away recalling some memory from her youth. Leave. Please just leave! I willed the nuns to go away. I knew it was crazy but even as a woman of thirty-seven I felt fear at the sight of a nun.

  Each day, I arrived in the hospice at 7 a.m. and left at 9 p.m. at night. Occasionally Ma asked me to put her in the wheelchair to take her down to the canteen for a cup of tea. She always made me take my purse, never once offering to buy me a cup herself.

  ‘Mammy you know I came over from England to see you,’ I said one day as we sat in the canteen together. I kept my eyes on her and my voice level.

  ‘Well you haven’t been over much before now,’ she retorted, looking out towards the hospice garden. She never showed any interest in what was out there, though it was a lovely place to walk around.

  ‘But I am here now, Mammy,’ I said quietly, still looking at her.

  Silence.

  ‘This tea is too weak,’ she grumbled. And that was it. That was the closest we got to having an honest conversation.

  Ma had medication to keep the pain at bay – I knew now that the cancer had spread to her bones and kidneys – and she spent a good few hours a day asleep. Then I would just watch her, willing her to say something to me when she woke up. It was so hard to be there with her. I wanted to ask if she was sorry for how she treated me, but it didn’t feel right to prompt her. She had to want to apologize.

  My arms still ached occasionally and now I knew why – Frances told me some years before that Mam
my had broken both my arms when I was a baby. We had been talking over the phone one day about our mammy and she remarked off-hand, ‘I never understood why it was always you that got the beatings.’

  ‘Didn’t she break my arm once?’ It was a vague recollection backed up by regular bouts of pain over the years, which convinced me that something like this had happened.

  ‘No, it was both arms,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘She broke both your arms.’

  I didn’t say any more on the subject. It was too upsetting, so I just changed the conversation.

  I examined the flaky skin on Ma’s face and hands, the thin, weak little wrists and discoloured nails, and thought about myself as a helpless baby, lying in my pram with casts on each arm. What sort of mother breaks her own baby’s arms?

  Are you sorry, Mammy? Did you really mean to hurt me? I wondered. But each time her purple-tinged eyelids flickered open and she looked about her, at first confused and then finally arriving at a realization of her surroundings, she just stared right through me. No words of apology escaped those tight, dry lips, nothing except demands and instructions.

  Finally, the day came when I was due to leave. It was now or never. That morning Agatha and I had gone to see Mammy together. My older sister fussed around, changing the flowers, emptying the bins, folding clothes and generally clearing up while I sat in the armchair, watching my mother. Eventually, at midday, I picked up my bag and stood by my mother’s bed. She was propped up against a mountain of pillows, her eyes fixed vacantly on the TV.

  ‘Right, I’m going home now,’ I said flatly.

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ she said. Had she heard me? Did she understand 1 was leaving to go back to Manchester? Surely she must know this would be the last time we would see each other.

  ‘I have to get the plane in two hours,’ I said, my heart breaking. In the whole week I had sat by my dying mother’s bedside, there had been no meaningful words between us at all. Nothing. It was as if I truly didn’t matter to her.