No One Wants You

by Celine Roberts

  It was a difficult time for me. I was very fragile emotionally. I remember an episode when my ambulance driver was angry that a patient was not ready for collection. I felt, ‘What is the matter? What is five minutes extra?’ I remember bursting into tears and being angry with the driver and shouting at him. I’m sure he was glad to go off-duty that day. It was bad enough when the patient was late, but to have the escort-nurse rounding on him as well.

  I felt very mixed up. I worked at that job for two years. I kept my head down and tried not to disturb anyone. I tried to work a routine job, in a routine life, without annoying anyone. I wanted to distract myself from the memory of Ronan. I turned so far into myself that I became depressed.

  In June 1988 I got a phone call from Tony in Buttevant to say that Kit was in hospital. I was extremely upset. I knew it was serious if Kit was in hospital. She wouldn’t even go to a doctor. She asked Tony to take her to the doctor because she had found a lump on her breast. He sent her to hospital for tests and that is when Tony called me. She was diagnosed with cancer. She was sent home without surgery.

  I went to see her by myself the following August. The first thing she said to me when I sat down beside her at the edge of the bed was, ‘Yer auld one is dying, a Gra.’

  She knew she was dying.

  I knew she was dying, but I did not want to admit it to myself.

  I only stayed two nights and Tony took me to the station at Charleville.

  I stood there alone.

  The conspiracy of silence between Kit and myself overwhelmed me. Both of us knew so much about each other and the difficulties of our lives, yet we never mentioned them.

  She also felt that she was unacceptable. It was the last time I saw her alive, although we spoke many times on the phone over the next few months. She was taken to hospital for radio and chemotherapy but it was all too late. She was finally sent home again.

  In her last phone call to me she was crying. That was not like Kit. She would be courageous and, rather than upset anyone, she would pretend that everything was fine. This time, between her tears, she was saying goodbye to me. After I put the phone down, my eyes welled up, the muscles in my neck constricted and I sobbed my heart out for two hours.

  She died next day – it was Sunday, October 23, 1988.

  I was almost 40 years old and one of the very few people to whom I felt acceptable in the entire world, was gone. I went to her funeral on my own, feeling numb throughout.

  * * * *

  My relationship with my father deteriorated. This was as a result of pressure put on him from my mother. If we met at any time, my mother always accompanied him. He could not relax in my company, as my mother disapproved of him even speaking to me.

  He told me that he also had financial problems. With such a large family, it seemed like money was always a problem. I assured him that I would help him out. He told me how much he needed. It was a significant amount to me but made a big difference to him. I was pleased to help my father and my family because it made me more acceptable to them. I was still trying to fill that emptiness inside of me.

  But it was evident from my father’s letters to me that his quality of life was less than he desired. Even his dog racing and gambling did not hold the allure that they once did. I think he expected to have an easier life.

  He did not want to have to cope with the problems arising between his wife, whom he loved, and his eldest daughter, whom he also loved, but in a different way. The problem was that his daughter and his wife did not form the expected third side of a stable family love triangle. My mother hated me and what I represented, and my father could not cope with that. She had closed a door on that part of her life for ever, and she never wanted to face it again. But every time she saw me, or my father mentioned my name, it triggered an angry reaction in her which was uncontrollable.

  On one occasion when my father, as always accompanied by my mother, came to visit me, one of my friends saw the strain and pressure that my mother was causing me. She arranged for my mother to visit a psychiatrist. Mother caused a fierce commotion. She insisted that she was not mad. She was highly indignant that any member of the Cliffords should even be considered for a psychiatric consultation. She ranted and she raved that she would not lower herself to even admit such deviancy.

  But my father was enthusiastic that she should go and keep the appointment. He eventually persuaded her to go, mainly because the consultation was in London and nobody at home in Ireland would know. It was just to be a one-off visit. Afterwards, I asked my mother whether the visit had helped her. She would not discuss it with me or anybody else, under any circumstances. And she never did.

  I went to see the psychiatrist myself, subsequently. I wanted to find out why she didn’t tell my father about my existence over the years. All he said to me was, ‘Was there ever anything that you kept secret from someone else?’

  ‘Of course there was,’ I said.

  ‘Well then,’ he replied.

  That was it. He would not entertain my questions any further. I had to resign myself to the fact that I would never get an answer to that question.

  After living with us in Surrey for seven years, Thelma had bought her own flat in Croydon. She now had a good job and was obviously well able to support herself. My parents came over to stay with her for a ten-day visit. They never visited me, or my son or my dead son’s grave, even though we were less than a ten-minute taxi ride away. I was not invited over to Thelma’s to see them. That really hurt.

  That visit was about six months before Thelma’s wedding.

  When Thelma became engaged to be married, I expected to participate in all the excitement leading up to the wedding of my sister. Instead, I was excluded from all the preparations, except that I was asked to make the wedding cake. I must have been good enough as a baker. That should have put me in my place. But I was so pleased to be allowed to do anything. I had placed my family on a high pedestal and I was grateful for any crumbs that fell from their table. They were much more important than me, and at least I had my uses.

  I also indirectly paid for the wedding dress, with a good bit of luck thrown in. The local church had a monthly draw and I paid for Thelma’s monthly ticket. It was only one pound per month. That year her name was on a winning ticket. She won £300 and that paid for the wedding dress.

  I used to feel that my father was exploiting me, through Thelma. I suppose I put myself in the way of being used. Yet I always felt protective of her and she was part of my real family, who was living with me. It was what I always wanted, a family to protect. I was so proud to have a family member living in my house. I never asked, nor expected anything from her. To her credit, she did help with the housework and, together with my son Anthony, she bought me my first dishwasher.

  Harry, Anthony and I were invited to the wedding to be held in Adare, County Limerick, in April 1991.

  We took our usual route to Ireland by car and ferry, as we had to transport the wedding cake, all four tiers. One tier was a special heart-shaped sponge, as Thelma did not eat heavy fruitcake.

  At the church, I found things very difficult, as it reminded me of my own wedding day. This was the first family wedding I had attended, along with my parents and siblings. The church was a small beige-painted purpose built edifice, which stood out starkly against the dull drab working-class Janesboro background.

  My father and mother walked their daughter Thelma down the aisle to the altar. I thought back to how my wedding day ought to have been. I really should have had my parents there. They should have been at my wedding, instead of the bogus family that I had to arrange.

  I sat behind my parents in the church. As they came in, my father said ‘Hello’ only to the three of us in general. My mother just gave me a look, as if to say, ‘Why are you here?’

  As the ceremony began, I thought, ‘Thelma has no baggage like me, no fears to deal with on her wedding day.’ I started to feel excluded.

  For Thelma’s wedding I had bo
ught a Moschino dress from the Ritz Boutique in Wimbledon. It cost me £725. Even my underwear was designer. It was a La Perla Body, so that no lines showed through the dress. It alone cost £95. I had French La Bourje tights from Harrods. My shoes and bag were from Russell and Bromley and cost £450. The outfit was finished off with a Norwegian natural blue fox jacket from a Knightsbridge furrier, which cost me £2200. All complemented by a navy hat, which was put together for me by Beverly Haynes, one of Jean Muir’s designers. I was dressed to the nines. Knowing how well and expensively my mother dressed, I thought that if I could wear good quality and expensive clothes, I would fit in, be acceptable and be good enough to attend an O’Sullivan wedding.

  When I first arrived at the church, the first three people I met were my auntie Eileen, my father’s sister, and her two daughters. Eileen had a turquoise suit and hat, with perfectly matching accessories. Both of her daughters were dressed equally smartly.

  I immediately felt that I could never match up to them or ever be as good as them. I felt that all my expensive dress-wear was in vain. And then I encountered my mother, dressed in what looked like a £1000 creation. I felt terrible.

  I felt I was an outsider, looking in. That is where I had always been.

  The church ceremony went smoothly. The priest made the usual harmless and inoffensive wedding speech to the bride and groom. He then handed over to the local parish priest who was assisting him, to say a few well-chosen words. After wishing the bride and groom well, he thanked Tom and Doreen for being such strong Catholics and such upright members of the local community. He thanked them for their extraordinary generosity to the local church and clergy, and for ‘always giving that bit extra’ as a financial contribution. When he said that, I remembered how, as their child, in another church, not 20 miles away, I had eaten the penny wax candles because I was starving from hunger due to a lack of food.

  You see, everything for me was a potential trigger. And yet, there was conflict. I was also proud of my father and mother, particularly as Harry’s brother and his wife and my friend Majella were at the wedding. The ego side of me wanted them to see my fabulously dressed family. I wanted them to see my cousins – the priests, and my aunts – the nuns and doctors. That was what the ego part of me was proud to claim a relationship to. That was what I thought I wanted. I wanted to belong, at any price. I thought that this family were ideal. But I now know that the ‘real me’ was questioning, ‘How could this family not know and care about me and the life of degradation and deprivation that they had consigned me to?’ Inside my head, there was this constant internal dialogue of conflicting emotions taking place.

  When the local priest got up and spoke in such glowing terms of my parents’ family responsibility and their more-than generous financial contributions to the Catholic Church, I began to seethe with anger. I wanted to go up to the altar, take the microphone from the priest and tell everybody present that it was all hypocrisy really, because I was the daughter that they abandoned to squalor and the ruination of my life. I wanted to ask all the parents present how they would have felt if it had happened to their young daughter.

  I wanted to include my auntie nuns, the relatives that sent me the First Communion dress that I was so brutally raped in. My ‘auntie nuns’ knew I existed. Every Mercy nun that knew me and spoke to me, referred to them. They must have known where I was. They could have got to me somehow. Instead they chose to ignore me.

  That day at the wedding I wanted to expose them as contributors and knowing collaborators. It was all organised through the medium of the Catholic Church, by its priests and nuns, albeit at the behest of my natural family.

  But once again I held my peace. That is what I did best, remain silent and tell no one. Little did Thelma realise how close she had been to having her wedding ceremony controversially hijacked by her new sister.

  After the photographs, we headed off to the reception. My sister Avril was matron of honour and my other sister Rosaleen was a bridesmaid.

  As Thelma had lived with me in London, I thought that she had accepted me as her sister. I thought that she would want me to be an integral part of her special wedding day. I was even instrumental in her meeting her husband, because his sister Majella and I were friends when I lived in Belfast. As their romance progressed, I suppose, in a way, I took it for granted that I would be matron of honour at her wedding. But then, one day, my friend Anna had told me that Thelma was having Avril and Rosaleen. I felt really hurt and betrayed, firstly because I was excluded and secondly, because I had heard the details second-hand.

  Thelma had phoned me at work soon afterwards and I said to her, ‘Anna told me you are having Avril as matron of honour and Rosaleen as a bridesmaid.’

  She said, ‘That’s right, they are my sisters. I grew up with them.’

  It was just as if she had stabbed me. It wasn’t because she had not chosen me as a bridesmaid, it was purely the fact that she regarded them as her sisters and did not see me as an equal sister. I was really hurt but I never showed my feelings. I suppressed my pain and my anger and continued to play their game. That is what it was for me at this stage – mind games.

  We arrived at the Woodlands Hotel for the reception. My mother and father were lined up in the foyer greeting all the arrivals.

  Except me! Neither shook hands with me. Neither said any words to me. I didn’t know why.

  I attempted to greet my mother with a kiss, but she averted her head and instead gave me one of her cutting stares. While standing in the foyer I asked Harry to get some drinks and to include my mother in the round. She declined his offer, in a sharp voice. As Harry headed for the bar, he shot me a glance which said, ‘Don’t ever ask me to speak to that woman again.’

  I tried everything to talk and be friendly with her that afternoon. But it didn’t work. I thought she looked miserable that day. She looks miserable in all the photographs. I followed my mother around if I thought that she was going to be in a photograph. If she posed for a photo, I would stand behind her.

  I was not going to let her forget me and she was not a bit pleased.

  But bad and all as I felt, I acted my way through the day, as if I had not a care in the world. I socialised with my siblings. I had in-depth conversations about trivialities with aunts on my father’s side. I spoke more to the groom’s family whom I had known for quite a long time, from my Northern Ireland days. His mother was lovely and was happy to see her son married.

  After the reception and the dancing was over, when the bride and groom were leaving the hotel to go on their honeymoon, I found myself standing beside my mother, I remarked to her, ‘You have lost a lot of weight.’

  ‘Yes I have,’ she answered.

  The tone of her reply was not as sharp as previously, so I felt she had mellowed or thawed out a little. I felt it was progress, no matter how small, as we hadn’t spoken to each other since the night of Thelma’s 21st birthday. I felt to some degree that I was to blame for the lack of communication. After Ronan’s death, I was back in survival mode, and contact with my parents or the fact of their existence in my life, became merely incidental. That short verbal exchange was the sum total of my conversation with my mother during the entire wedding. But I was pleased and prepared to accept any tolerance, however small.

  We were both, to some degree, to blame for the great breach that now existed between us.

  Next morning, as I was packing to leave the hotel, I had a phone call from my father.

  He asked me if I would go down to their house, or ‘call up home’ as he put it.

  I said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think that is a good idea, do you? My mother didn’t want to speak to me yesterday; why would she want to speak to me today? I am not going over there to be abused and shouted at.’

  He persuaded, ‘Oh forget about yesterday, your mother does want you to come and visit.’

  So I agreed to go. I had nagging doubts about going there and I was really nervous.

  As I thin
k about it now, I ask myself, ‘How many people feel nervous about visiting their parents in their own house?’

  I eventually arrived at the house and my father told me to hug my mother. As I approached her, she recoiled as if something horrible was about to touch her.

  I pulled back.

  Her eyes were looking daggers at my father. He threw his arms up in the air, turned on his heel and walked away. Then she looked at me and in the blink of an eye, we agreed a silent truce. I understood, in a strange way, how she felt because I knew how it felt to touch someone, when you did not want to be touched.

  Tea and sandwiches were laid out in the front sitting room. That had never happened before. The atmosphere was formal, yet quite civil and almost friendly. We even discussed my birth and my mother described how she got rheumatic fever after I was born. This was when she was living with her Uncle Jack, who took pity on her plight. He must have been the person who paid the £100 for her release from the home for unmarried mothers. She could not have stayed with Uncle Jack if she had an illegitimate baby hanging out of her. She was not allowed to return to her mother’s house at Clarina. She was good enough to stay at Uncle Jack’s house as long as she pretended that she did not have an illegitimate baby. But me, the illegitimate baby, regarded by the family as the dregs of the earth was not eligible for such careful consideration.

  My father said that he used to go up there and take her for slow careful walks, until she regained her full health. I wanted to ask her what she had told my father about her six-month absence. Where did he think she had been for six months? He must have asked her.

  Did she tell him a lie or the truth?

  If she told him a lie about where she had been for six months, did he believe her?

  Did he have his suspicions about why she had to leave for six months?

  Did it suit him, not to know where she was for six months?

  If she told him a lie, and he believed her, it may have suited them both not to pursue the matter any further. But if she told him the truth, then he knew about me. He would have known about me all along. Of course, I have no answer to these questions, as I never asked them.