Barefoot Pilgrimage

by Andrea Corr

Who never made it here …

  I have miscarried five times. The first and second the most devastating, as I could not see yet what … who, I would later be blessed with. I walked and I prayed. And my mother-in-law, Pat (a blessing in herself), prayed and lit a candle for us every day. Torches and tallow lamps, often to ‘the little flower’, St Therese, for whom there is a shrine in the church of St Jean.

  ‘To the right and to the left, I throw the good grain that God places in my hands. And then I let things take their course. I busy myself with it no more. Sometimes, it’s just as though I had thrown nothing; at other times, it does some good. But God tells me:

  “Give, give always, without being concerned with the results.”’

  It was Easter time the first time, and the most lovely and inspiring man, a Jesuit priest called Father Brennan, who has just recently departed, said something to me that will never leave me. When he congratulated me on a pregnancy that was sadly, unbeknown to him, no more, I cried and he said:

  ‘After the crucifixion comes the resurrection.’

  Father Brennan taught my husband and many of our friends.

  This he would write on the blackboard every morning …

  ‘Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved

  Faith is not against reason, it is beyond it.

  If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.

  Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement.’

  My friend prayed for us in a special church in Laghet and Pat and myself later followed. (We will forget the bit where she nearly killed us, driving on the wrong side of the road, after leaving the church later … ehhh, Pat!! Something to paint and pray for, straight away …)

  When you enter this church, you see its walls adorned with everyday people depictions. Drawings and paintings of who and what they are praying about. Accidents, illness, forgiveness, mercy. All the more affecting as they are more often than not painted with an inexpert hand. All the desperate love, hoping for a cure and to keep who they love with them. Or even to let them go. It is so beautiful and sad.

  But really there must be something. A room with all that desperate love and hope in it.

  That is where and what God is, maybe. The room of love and hope.

  And the moment I stopped reaching for those I could not hold was the moment that I saw all that I have.

  Brett, Jean and Brett.

  After the crucifixion comes the resurrection.

  So how could I continue this story without speaking of the greatest blessings? In whose dimpled, impossibly soft hands sit the world’s wonder and its redemption.

  Their era that you who reads, and me who writes, will be one of which we are no longer a part. Ghosts looking out of picture frames. Old stories and visions of a past in which people terrorised and killed each other. But we loved each other, too.

  And I am praying that this love could be the majestical light that defeated the dark history they read about. Just another Grimm fairytale.

  We are advised to live in the moment. I believe we do have to look beyond ourselves, though. And that which is beyond us, is before us. They and their children will be there. There …

  And will there be polar bears, elephants, tigers, whales, tuna, salmon, Syria, Korea, Africa, Israel, the USA, the un-United States of America … this is endless … But there is an end, actually … Will there be oxygen?

  Will there … be?

  Jeanie has just turned six and yesterday I talked to a teacher regarding a concern I have about a friend hurting her feelings and it hurts me, as I am sure this does most parents, to think of her open spirit and innate happiness corrupted. That she will think of herself as smaller and feel ashamed in any way. Because I certainly remember the labour that brought on the birth of my self-consciousness and it is a sad and new beginning … The history behind it, a dreamy unreality.

  Blissful ignorance.

  A terrible beauty is born.

  The teacher welled up, though it’s an ordinary everyday playground tale, and advised me to nurture other friendships because ‘this world needs beautiful, naturally kind people like Jeanie.’ (Oh Jeanie, you’d better be kind if you’re reading this … Is that a burden? It could never be a burden to be kind, could it, love?) And this made me think … I am not telling this to say my daughter is extraordinary, though of course she is, but …

  This is where it starts, and if that is true then it also could be true that this is where it stops.

  ‘Galileo’ is what I listened to while I danced in the kitchen with her in me. My heart could ecstatically burst to the opera of Jean.

  A Happy New Beginning

  Brett and I moved to Washington DC and lived in Georgetown on Prospect Street. By The Exorcist steps (perfect), and Georgetown University. And I had dreams of attending and studying literature because when you think of it, my head now had fallen off and better late than never. But through the surreal days of an earthquake and Hurricane Irene, I discovered I was pregnant. Oh, I love that life. The electricity inside. The most beautiful secret. Lying in my bed just me and a baby that I didn’t know was girl or boy, but that I knew I loved. Every bite you take imagining your secret, yum-yumming inside.

  Her birth was dramatic and traumatic for both of us, though she, thankfully, remained strong throughout. The wee trooper.

  I did not. I nearly died. Blood transfusions and worrying heart irregularities that brought in more doctors and machines. But God is she worth it.

  Worth dying for.

  If I’d been in a developing country I’d likely no longer be … And she …?

  She wore a pink faux-fur coat

  Over OshKosh dungarees

  And she drove the streets of Georgetown

  In a pink convert a bling

  Pushed by her mother

  Just a stranger mum that sings

  ‘Skinny marinky dinky do’

  Like she’s flying without wings …

  ‘I love how you love it,’ my inner delight says to her, watching her ride a bike for the first time. Her face is like a light beneath a watermelon helmet and strawberry-blonde curls. She actually shines. An almighty, a creator, if there is one, could only look upon us with these mother-father eyes, surely? And if we made God up, then why did we make one up that is ever scolding and judgemental?

  ‘Love it, but don’t love it too much.’

  Even I don’t believe in him.

  The world is a wonderland. I don’t think we could ever love it too much. When you think about it, it is all going wrong because we are not loving it. Not loving each other. Not loving ourselves.

  I laughed my way into labour with our son sun, Brett. We went to the cinema and watched Anchorman 2 and I doubled over holding my basketball belly, and laughed every second step of the snowy walk home. He was born in a blizzard and I certainly could not describe the experience as a laugh, but it was a breeze in comparison to Jeanie. I received a bottle of Burgundy from a mysterious friend named Ron when we brought our baby boy home and he, ‘Booboy’, is to this day laughing and smiling. As if that really was where it all began for him.

  I wonder. Maybe Mammy laughed herself into labour with me. Washing the floor is the only story I remember. No, maybe not … That’s never funny …

  The happy, smiling boy is so very funny! He has no pants on now. Just a red-and-navy striped T-shirt and he is in downward dog.

  ‘Mumma … I’m going to do yoga!’

  Ha … and now he’s teaching Jeanie, who happens to be appropriately dressed, wearing a shiny blue leotard.

  ‘You need to do this, Jeanie …’

  My headphones on him and he is listening to ‘Man in the Mirror’ and shouting, ‘Mummmaaa … Michael Jackson has the hiccups!’

  And Jeanie says, ever practical, ‘He should have
cancelled.’

  Oh, ‘ever practical’ reminds me of Sharon. Now we can’t call this blasphemy, can we? She was only a child. Just as God made her …

  Jim came home from school horrified about the awful story he had just heard. The story of a man called Jesus Christ …

  ‘Who was nailed to the cross!’

  And this has me bumping again …

  ‘Sure he’d fall off if he wasn’t nailed, Jim,’ she said.

  I just told them that the ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ is their souls that will go on forever. Jeanie was getting all yuck about the bones and the blood.

  One day we were at the soft, hard opening of an extravagant hotel in which there was entertainment for our children laid on. While we, the adults, the grown down, up down ups, celebrated, babysitters watched as our children enjoyed first a magician … who was brilliant! Appearing doves and all, and I nearly wanted the kids to move aside so I could watch … But then there was a pirate whose gags seemed to be predominantly about how badly teachers are paid, and I noticed Booboy sitting on the babysitter’s knee. I walked him out and around the hotel and we happened to pass the magician, having a breather (… feeding the doves … no, he wasn’t really). Booboy let go of my hand, ran back to the man and said something that made him roar laughing. I had to follow and ask, ‘What did he just say to you?’

  Through his laughter he told me that ‘He asked me to make the pirate disappear …’

  Oh, I hope you are ever smiling, Booboy. My sun son.

  He calls the candle by me a prayer candle. And he keeps blowing it out on me.

  ‘Now the prayers are going up to heaven, Mumma.’

  I think they are, too, Boo.

  ‘It becomes all children, especially girls, to be silent in the presence of their elders,’ I read in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley today. ‘Why have we tongues, then?’ the daughter asks …

  I have said that it was remarkable to me that my father’s mother, Alice, was so religious, but now I feel that it would be truly remarkable if she had not been. If she had not sought comfort and strength in an Almighty. For surely she needed her faith in a Divine and in eternal bliss more than I myself need. When she died, a neighbour consoled Dad by saying that Alice had ‘never sullied her baptismal vows’. ‘Sullied,’ I say to myself. Why the reference to dirt? Oh, I think, it’s just not compassionate at all. Yet I, too, feel the need to have faith. And again I excuse this subtle shaming by reminding myself that it’s just the dress that man puts on God. Or the surplice. Humans are writing the rules and to be human is to be fallible.

  There is a truth that I have sidestepped on this walk. In deference to my daddy and indeed my husband, who are both good men, good husbands, good fathers. The truth of the disparity and inequality that still exists between men and women. My mother’s assumed role was to run the house and to shoulder the greater portion of the work regarding us children. A mother’s work was never done, yet Daddy had his weekends off. She was working in Hallidays, the old Clarks shoe factory, when she met Dad. This work was naturally dispensed with as soon as they married, a given at that time in Ireland. An unwritten law. Or was it actually written? What if she didn’t want to give this up? What if she liked it? These questions have been neither asked nor answered because I suppose what could be the point? But can you imagine the books we have not read, the music we do not hear, that could have been composed by these muted talents? The cures found? The theories constructed? There has to have been more than the few dim lights we have seen escape kitchen windows. I think of Irish writers and I list, as you could, Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Friel, etc., and I realise I have to google to find a woman. Of course I find some; Google is good. But they are not in my head or on my tongue and the few female names that are, are known because they inspired great men. The woman. The muse. The literal helpmeet. Could we possibly be so different to each other? Two souls fated to journey in the body of either a man or a woman. Could it be possible that only one soul has the capability to play an active part in cultural history and that this is dependent on its gender being male?

  Virginia Woolf said that in order to write, a woman must have ‘money and a room of her own’. I have the annual income, I earned it, but I walk to write, seek two hours of solace and then I return to my motherly duties. Sporadically I pick up my phone to type the thoughts that still swim and in these moments I can be asked what I am doing. I feel a little sneaky almost. This guilty pleasure. To write is a guilty pleasure. Imagine. I have a hangover from my parents’ male–female interaction as my husband has a hangover from his. It’s difficult sometimes to decipher whose hangover I am suffering under. I am sure my husband believes it’s my own. I suspect he is right. I remember when Mum got her secretarial job in Dealgan Milk Products, having not ‘worked’ in years. Quite an achievement to get this position when you think of the young, single, educated competition. I was in the hall, having walked in from school, and was poised to tell her that I’d been caught smoking when she turned round from the kitchen window and told me that she had gotten this job. Caught up in the relief that this good news might afford me, I disregarded the tentative look that she had when she told me. Like she was guilty. Guilty of wanting a little of her own thing. Guilty that we all were not enough for her. Tentative in case we might object. I regard this moment in my mind’s eye now because I recognise it. The kitchen window is replaced by a mirror and it is me that I see. I have a strong impression, though I do not remember it being uttered, that she worked even harder to maintain our home so that she could never be denied the freedom of her work. If everything continues as smoothly as before, then I will be allowed to do this. I feel the same in regard to my writing or drawing or thinking, even. Once our home runs well I can do this. I do not imagine that men think these thoughts.

  It’s interesting, anyway, and it makes me think of the hangover we might give our children.

  Things don’t always run smoothly here. Sadly not, for it is oft a jagged and perilous terrain. Because of this guilty pleasure I nearly flooded our apartment. Boo had gone to the toilet and he needed Mumma and then Mumma thought this might warrant a bath so she turned the taps on and returned to this pleasure. Some time later I asked Jeanie what she had spilled on the kitchen floor. I turned up to a kids’ party three weeks early last weekend. And speaking of parties, I just cannot master sending a Paperless Post kids’ party invitation. The first year the invitees were bewildered to read that they were being thanked by two strangers for the beautiful flowers they had never sent. The second year I invited Jeanie’s wee friends to what we in Ireland call a push-through. The party was to begin at 11 a.m. on Saturday and finish at 1 p.m. Sunday. I could go on …

  Act 2

  A ringing phone. Fumble in your pockets. Thank God it’s not you. Oh, it’s not anyone’s …

  Curtain up.

  It’s on a box of Pampers, on the stage …

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Andrea. It’s me, Caroline!’

  ‘How did you get this number?!’

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

  Only joking (ah, Gerard). But the second act does begin with a phone call from Caroline. Blame the drummer. She didn’t want to regret not trying to do anything together again. Be it a tour, an album, she didn’t know, but what’s the harm in seeing?

  So the four got together again, in a rehearsal room, organised by the fifth. Beneath a train line, in Putney, in London. And maybe it was the train that did it. There’s a line across from our house in Dundalk. You can see it when you play the piano in the purple-walled room, or when you sit on the window sill and sing around Jim. But we knew pretty quickly that we were not finished.

  Each of us played and sang, nervously I might add, what we had done, individually, on our ten-year ‘break’. But it was Jim’s piano to ‘Ellis Island’ and ‘Strange Romance’ that was to begin White Light.

  And it was
happening. We had unknowingly boarded the train and were moving along invisible tracks, from red to amber to green.

  And I never really admitted to myself that we were doing it again. There’s an anxiety that comes with the joy of motherhood that had ‘I can only do my best’ repeating like a mantra in my head. And I had a lot of irrational fear, as I imagine we all had. That we would be swept away into the mirrored hall of our past, where we ate, breathed and drank this life. And that my children and my new life would somehow no longer be. (I did say irrational.)

  Whenever the idea of resuming our work had come up before, either from John or our record company, I had always felt very negative about it. We had chosen to jump. We were not pushed, and so we went out on a high, and it is that image that endures. We are immortal there somehow. Spared the indignity of a desperate descent.

  But the music that was coming from all of us, the songs, I found worth that risk now. And that’s my subconscious I am recalling. As I said, I was not admitting it.

  For all these reasons we made most of this record off the radar, without letting our record company know we were doing it until we absolutely had to. I think that is why the writing and the making of White Light is closest to a first record. We allowed no outside pressure in, for as long as possible. We worked away ourselves, meeting Chris Young in Chestnut Studio in London every two weeks. Writing and recording simultaneously.

  As my children are the youngest, my siblings made it easy for me in that they travelled to London. So I would walk to the studio in the morning and walk home, for six o’clock, and resume mama activities. And I think it felt tenuous and precious, for us all. As if one of us might drop out at any time and it would collapse, so shhhhhh, tread carefully.

  We had learned real respect for each other and an appreciation, in our time apart. And now we knew what we hadn’t known before. That we did not have to do this. That we do not think the same, because we are a family. And that the magic in the four of us might actually be our contrary opinions running riot, and not our genetic closeness. Until, at last, they settle. So it is not easy. But anything worth doing could not be without some discomfort.