But eventually, when chairs were being piled onto the formica tables, we were forced on to the streets again. It would be nearly dawn and we’d stumble into Tower Records where serious night owls with horn-rimmed glasses scoured through the back catalogues of Gerry’s Left Testicle or other punk bands from Papua New Guinea. We never lasted long there before we were thrown out. But sometimes, as the first ache of sobriety turned my stomach sour, I’d find myself flicking through the Irish section. The foreign names were unpronounceable, crammed with Os and Macs and crooked accents. I’d stare at the high cheekbones and bony elongated fingers of old pipers on sepia covers. There was even a tiny section reserved for sean-nós singing: a solitary, indecipherable wailing without any musical backing at all.
My mother once told me that my father, Frank Sweeney, sang as well as played the fiddle. He had reined in his wanderlust long enough to witness my birth before deserting us to return to Ireland. That was all I knew. I rarely thought about him or cared if he might still be alive. But sometimes during those raids on Tower Records I was glad that Roxy and Honor were goading a nerd as I searched in vain for what my mother once told me was his favourite tune, Last Night’s Joy. I’d take the earphones from a listening post and select a disc at random. A grainy dawn would have broken with traffic easing off, leaving only black taxis speeding to catch the lights. I’d close my eyes, listening to the ebb of that impenetrable music and think of my mother dying in Northwick Park Hospital a year before. I didn’t know what those tunes meant, each one sounding the same, only faster. Even their names gave no clue: The Frost is All Over, Jenny Picking Cockles, The Pigeon on the Gate.
They should have conjured up images of hillsides of barley shaken by the wind, or hares bounding through the winter dark as boots crunched ice on potholes along a lane. Instead I saw my mother’s face on a hospital pillow and thought of how I had never heard her listen to that music which, Grandad told me, my father had played in the back bedroom. My father’s music and my mother’s pain. Their daughter’s futile regrets after the bird had flown. The music gave way to white static and suddenly it was Bessie Smith I wanted to hear, her pain resonating in the heavy pausing as she sang, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
I should be over her death by now, but too much guilt seemed involved to properly mourn her. I’d listen to the clamour as another reel began, knowing that two hysterical girls were about to grab the headphones and shriek with laughter at what was playing. ‘Now that’s what I call jungle music,’ Honor would mock in her London accent laced with a Jamaican twang. What could I do, except pretend to share their mirth as the guard threw us out and we walked the streets until a taxi was found?
That was how, at six o’clock most Sunday mornings, I’d lean against my bedsit door, knowing the same memories were waiting to entrap me. I would be dejected and hungover, filled with regret for the passing of something I’d never properly known. I’d shut my eyes and see the swings in Cunningham Park in Harrow at dawn that previous August. For once the bowling greens had been without their flock of white-clad pensioners, but a group of teenagers still huddled around a ghetto-blaster, like zombies in a bad B-movie, as I had passed.
I hadn’t even found somewhere private to say goodbye to my mother back then. But there had been no special places for the pair of us, no woodlands where mother and daughter had run through a riot of spring flowers or avenues of autumnal leaves. I hadn’t even the memory of sharing a garden bench with her some summer night when she might have put names on to the scattered map of the stars. Maybe I had blocked such memories out that morning, because her death left a numb sensation. But, throughout her cremation, all I had kept remembering was a swing creaking in Cunningham Park, and my eight year old voice afraid to repeat the questions about whether I’d once had a daddy and where he might be. I could recall pain lining her face as, distractedly, she pushed me higher into the air than it felt safe to go, and the sense of being punished for saying something wrong.
Those swings were broken last August when I had knelt to scatter her ashes on the grass. She had always liked that view sweeping up to the public school on the hill. There was heavy rain forecast. I remember wondering if the teenagers had sat there all night. They finally lifted their heads indifferently to watch me open the urn. What did I expect to happen? That her ashes might dissolve with the dew or there would be a sign she was finally at peace? I felt foolish kneeling there. I rose and looked down. I had no God to pray to and I knew she couldn’t really hear, but inside my head I spoke, if not to her spirit then to the ache she had left behind.
My mother was always crippled with doubt, imprisoned all her life by walls. Not just the walls of Gran’s house from which she fled at twenty-two and to which my presence in her womb had forced her to return, or, later on, the walls of mental hospitals with bright day-rooms and discreet gates. It was the invisible walls of Gran’s ambitions which corralled her in, the tyranny of Gran’s dreams about how our lives should be led. She was their only child and now, with her death, I had been all they had left. But really Gran had abandoned Mammy for me long before she died, almost from the day she arrived home pregnant, in fact. The life they planned for me was plotted in a drawer of gilded photograph frames their own daughter had left blank. Their grandchild in a graduation gown, their grandchild smiling beneath her wedding veil, their great grandchildren playing in the cobbled drive of some house in Gerrards Cross which they had skimped all their lives to pay the deposit on.
Gran would have made careful plans about what to do with Mammy’s ashes, like she made plans for everything. Yet it wasn’t for revenge that I had stolen the urn that morning, but from an obscure desire to set my mother free. I had felt nothing except numb indifference towards Gran when I packed my suitcase as they slept, taking whatever cash I could find, and left without leaving a note.
The first trains would be running soon. I had bent down, wanting to touch the ashes but lacking the courage. I climbed the railings at Hindes Road and jumped. I hadn’t meant to look back, but when I did a dog was sniffing at the ashes, his owner fifty yards away as he cocked his leg. There was nothing I could do. I watched as he pawed them, then bounded away. Tears only came months later. Just then I had only felt a hollow sense of relief as I pushed the urn into a bin. I grabbed my bag and raced down Roxborough Road, towards the airless warmth of an early morning train and towards this bedsit where I had hoped to start a life I could finally call my own.
THREE
WHAT WAS IT THAT made me agree to accompany Honor’s brother, Garth, to that Irish Centre off Edgware Road one Sunday evening in September? I had been his alibi, playing at being a fag-hag as he marauded down from the gay bars of Islington into uncharted territory. Roxy and Honor had rolled four joints before we left and teased him about setting off on mission impossible, claiming that he would never turn the baby-faced singer who was due to croon Irish ballads there. But Garth liked challenges and I liked him so much that I would have agreed to go anywhere.
The Irish Centre was packed when we arrived. We drank sitting at the bar. I watched the singer strut about, awkward in a white shiny suit that was as tight around the bum as a toy sailor’s. The boy wasn’t even cute. He had no technique and little sense of how to deliver a song, except with the wooden voice of an altar boy. I wondered if Garth could really have seen him peering hesitantly through the doorway of an Islington bar as if the entire clientele were about to devour him? But Garth swore that it was the same face which he had spied by chance on a poster advertising Liam Darcy, ‘Drogheda’s Own Singing Sensation’, appearing at the Irish Centre.
There had been some sort of football final across in Dublin that day, relayed on a big screen at the bar. The centre was still packed with women and men mingling together in gaudy team colours. The singer’s face jerked around like a wind-up doll, trained to make eye contact with every corner of the room. Each time he reached us Garth was waiting to catch his gaze and wink. Grannies wandered up to the stage to lea
ve requests for him. One left a present of a heart shaped tart. The singer had become aware of Garth and now avoided our part of the bar. His head would stop rotating just before it reached us, but each time his cheeks reddened slightly as they jerked back.
‘You haven’t a hope, Garth,’ I laughed. ‘Come on, let’s get out of this dive and go to a club or something.’
Garth just laughed back. He was a handsome, well built man. I had already felt the envious glances of several women along the bar.
‘I’m having a ball,’ he replied. ‘Sure the kid was as pale as a ghost before we came in. Now look at his cheeks. Here, grab a beer mat and take a request up to him.’
‘I will not.’
‘Go on,’ Garth teased. ‘The Nolan Sisters. Weren’t they half Irish? Slip up to the stage and tell him Garth wants their old standard, Let’s pull ourselves together.’
I laughed again and began to peel the back off a beer mat. I remembered the envy I had felt for Honor on the first evening when I’d gone back to her flat and seen Garth teasing her while their mother kept putting on more toast for anyone who casually called in. He looked over my shoulder, joining in my laughter as I wrote.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘remember that last song he dedicated to everyone present with a little bit of Irish inside them. You tell him to sing the next one for anyone who fancies another little bit of Irish inside them.’
I was drunk enough to bring it up. When I turned a tall Irishman stood right behind us at the bar. I had noticed him already with a large family group who were growing increasingly rowdy. Often men his age made fools of themselves trying to look young, but from his suit I actually thought he was far older until I looked at his face. He was obviously well known at the bar, to which he had been coming up every twenty minutes to buy another round of drinks. He seemed to pay for everything and yet he stood out from the family gathering as much as Garth and I stood out from the ordinary punters at the counter.
‘Share the joke,’ he said and I stopped laughing.
‘What’s it to you?’ I asked.
‘Maybe I could use a laugh.’
‘Well, it’s private between me and my boy-friend here.’
‘I hope your boy-friend’s boy-friend doesn’t get jealous so.’
Garth stood up. They were shoulder to shoulder, both an inch either side of six foot. If the Irishman was into his forties then he wasn’t irredeemably so. Garth would probably be a match for him alone, but not for his family. I was frightened. I had never liked Irish people anyway, because your upbringing doesn’t go away. But the stand off between them was so subtle that not even those people beside us seemed aware of it.
‘He’s cute,’ the Irishman said and Garth’s eyes flicked briefly towards the stage. ‘And you’re everything an Irish mother would love her son to bring home: black, six foot tall and male.’
Garth continued staring ever so casually into the Irishman’s eyes. There was something boyish about his face, yet also something I didn’t quite trust. His voice was so low I could hardly hear it.
‘I hear he goes walkabout, our little altar boy. He’s a bit of a night bird, inclined to roam about like he doesn’t quite know which way to go. Personally I think it’s those apple tarts he has to take back to his room. I mean could you sleep, never knowing if some granny with no teeth and a black bra was going to jump out from inside one of them?’
‘I’ve never heard nobody sing with that accent before,’ Garth said.
‘It’s pure Drogheda,’ the Irishman said. ‘A class of knacker accent. You know knackers … cream crackers … tinkers? Travellers is the term we’re meant to use now. God looks down when a knacker is born and says: “I ordained that this child be born on the side of the road in a freezing trailer that will be burnt out by the locals before Christmas is over, but just in case he survives I’ll give him a Drogheda accent as well”’.
‘And is he one?’ I nodded towards the singer who had started an embarrassing line dancing routine while the crowd cheered. The Irishman laughed and used the opportunity to place his fingers for a second on my shoulder as if I were a child.
‘They wouldn’t let him through this door if he was,’ he said. ‘If he sneaked in they’d smash the glass he drank from before anyone here would use it. He’s from a wee house in Drogheda.’ He nodded to the barman who had assembled the massive round of drinks, then looked at Garth. ‘Our singer friend always stays at the Irish Club in Eaton Square. There’s an all night coffee shop across from the tube station in Sloane Square. I’ve come across him there at three in the morning. A man passing might do the same himself.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ Garth’s tone was guarded. The barman stood, waiting to be paid.
‘Bring lots of whipped cream.’ The Irishman reached for his wallet. ‘Apple tarts need a little extra something to help them go down.’
He handed a fistful of notes to the barman who began to pass the drinks across. Garth sat back. The Irishman ignored us as he relayed pints and shorts into the willing hands of family members who came forward to help. The table where his family sat was crammed with stacked glasses and crumpled cigarette packets. They were obviously the rump left over from a wedding reception. He rejoined them and bent to say something with his back to us. People laughed and some glanced in our direction. The Irishman didn’t look back but I felt nervous. Nobody talked to total strangers like that. Was he winding us up or setting us up? Garth had turned to the bar, nodding at the barman to fetch us two more drinks.
‘I hope I’m wrong,’ I said quietly, ‘but I get this feeling you’re going to walk out the door and have your head kicked in.’
‘Sweetheart, I have that feeling every morning I go to buy a newspaper,’ Garth replied. ‘I get that feeling so often that I stopped noticing years ago I ever had it. If you’re worried, Tracey, just take your coat and go.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m not leaving you.’
‘I don’t need no babysitting from here on in. The dude seems a bit odd but all right. Still you never can tell.’ Garth tossed a fiver on to the counter. ‘It’s my round, but I’ve got to shake hands with the unemployed.’
The encounter had left me agitated, but it wasn’t just concern about Garth. The man’s words made me feel uneasy about myself. If they knew that my father had been a tinker they wouldn’t use this glass again. I hated them and their half-assed sentimental music. I’d only come for a laugh but it didn’t feel right being here. We were drinking doubles but I got the barman to put an extra vodka into my glass. The Irishman peeled off from his family. I might have been nervous but I wasn’t going to show it when he approached again.
‘Luke is my name,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching you.
‘So?’
‘All evening just watching and sitting there thinking.’
‘Thinking what?’
‘That if pigs could fly.’
He had eyes which demanded you stare back into them. They were salesman’s eyes, I thought, and I wasn’t buying.
‘Pigs can’t,’ I said.
‘If they could,’ he replied, ‘your black friend might get an early tube to Sloane Square and leave you sitting here alone.’
‘What’s it to you if he did?’
‘I’ve been watching ever since you came in. I can’t stop. You hate this place more than I do.’
‘Why are you here then?’
‘Duty, guilt, habit.’ He glanced back. ‘You know yourself, family life is never easy.’
I followed his glance. It was obviously a rare coming together of relations, animated and yet fitting uneasily together.
‘When was the wedding?’
‘Yesterday morning,’ he said. ‘Yesterday evening was the family fight and tonight is the kiss and make up.’
‘Do they ever change their clothes?’
‘That’s tomorrow when they keel over and are carried home,’ he said. ‘To Dublin mainly, although a few have flung themselves as far as Coventry and Birmin
gham. The blonde girl in the blue outfit, she’s the bride. You’d think she’d feck off on her honeymoon, but there’s no fear of her letting us off the hook. She’s heading back to America on Tuesday, where she’s after getting born again. The first time was because of an accident down a lane off Camden Street. You’d think that second time around she might have got it right.’
The reference to hair wasn’t much of a guide because there seemed hardly a woman in his family not bleached blonde. But the bride stood out, beaming with zest and vitamins. She seemed as incapable of being quiet as she was oblivious to the irritation she caused around her.
‘She’s after getting hitched to some lad from Blackheath she met in Houston and nothing would do her but to be married in London so her new in-laws could meet her old out-laws.’ He laughed at his own joke. ‘I don’t think she informed them in advance that her grandfather Kevin was the biggest thug in the Animal Gang in Dublin.’
There was a family resemblance within some of them. The man who dominated the circle seemed a stockier version of Luke, like a crude police photo-fit. Squeezed into a dress suit, he looked dangerous and comic. He snapped at the bride who went quiet, as if struck. The conversation abated, then resumed as an older woman took her hand. The man who’d ferried most of the drinks passed behind the bride to ruffle her hair, coaxing a smile from her as he made peace all round. He was well into his thirties yet there was something baby-faced about him. As he passed us, heading for the gents, I knew he was another brother. He nodded.
‘All right, Luke?’
‘Hanging in there, Shane.’
He walked on with a glance at me.
‘They’re a surly-looking bunch,’ I sneered, hoping Luke would follow his brother.
‘Unpredictable too.’ He played up the insult. ‘Still you can’t swap your family after the January sales. You only get born with one, you have to love them and get on with it.’
But he showed no interest in rejoining them. I took a sip of vodka and wished Garth would return. I liked to choose my Sunday night men, not the other way round. Yet this Irishman had a come on I’d never encountered before. He seemed almost anxious to sell himself short. I revised his age to thirty eight and tried to decide if he was utterly drunk or sober.
Father's Music Page 2