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.
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 leave 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