People drown because they have to breathe in, they can’t not. Granda Ban told me that at the wake of a fisherman over thirty years ago. His voice tickles my ear and I’m back in that room with him and my Auntie Eileen and the fascinating remains of the blue-lipped Bart Macroom. I’ve never forgotten those words. When that night floats close, I hold my arms out and hug it to me, and I am once again that eleven-year-old girl, a girl who was out of reach of her mammy for the first time ever, a girl who thought the local fortune-teller would finally confirm her wildest dream – one day, maybe that very day, she would grow wings and fly.
– Poor auld Macroom! He’d worked that river his whole life dreaming of landing the perfect fish and now he’ll never know there was a fine salmon on his line when he was found. Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard, wee Mary?
I put on my best pious face and sighed. I wanted Granda to be in no doubt that I was all grown up, but my chance to shine was ruined by Auntie Eileen who tutted and phutted at him before she hustled me away. She didn’t want anyone, including her father, egging me on. Even then I had a reputation for whimsy.
I was not supposed to be in with the big men puffing on pipes and telling tales. They were enjoying the respite of a nearly natural death in 1970s Northern Ireland. The Troubles rumbled constantly overhead like a thunderstorm, only tonight there would be no visits from the RUC or the British Army because it wasn’t a wake for anyone involved in the IRA. There was every chance one of the big men would have one whiskey too many and lift me up to kiss Macroom’s dead cheek, just for the craic.
I had been designated to help the ladyfolk with the tea because Auntie Eileen only had her daughter Bernie, and Bernie was not well enough to navigate kitchens or corpses. There was no shortage of help, kettles were boiling, big steel teapots were being filled, a production line of bread butterers, fillers and slicers were arranged around the table, knives and tongues moving at speed. A lot of good, strong tea is drunk over Northern Irish remains. The mourners are sorry for your trouble while they eye up the quantity and quality of the ham sandwiches flying round on the fine-china wheels of borrowed cake stands. It was already past nine o’clock but the wake wouldn’t thin out until after midnight.
I was employed to cut up a heavily laden fruitcake that someone had baked and brought to feed the mourners. For some reason – kindness or madness – they had fashioned a fish out of candied orange peel on the top with an alarmingly large glacé-cherry eye. It looked up at me, succulent and pink, and begging questions.
– Auntie Eileen, what happened the salmon?
– What salmon?
– Dead Macroom’s salmon! The one he caught?
– For God’s sake, Mary! You wee spook! You’re worse than Granny Moo! Get that cake on to a plate and get round the wans in the front room. Tell them fresh tea’s comin’!
I’d run on, laughing at the swipe of the tea towel on my backside. Auntie Eileen had never hit me in her life; she was the reason I knew it was possible to spare the rod and not spoil the child. She was the reason I knew I wasn’t nothing though Mammy had told me I was in every way, every day.
I remember watching her as I have a hundred times since. She was a fair beauty with her wild black hair in a high knot and our famous Ban Rattigan clan ‘white’ eyes which are in fact a pale grey-green. She moved from one person to the next with a sunshine smile at every step.
She put her arms around my neck when the fortune-teller, Decker McHugh, blew in, stinking of pigs and drink. He always pitched up at a wake for the free fire and free food, and later the free whiskey. His services were in demand at the height of the Troubles when most people didn’t make it through a week without a threat to body or soul. He read the leaves, and all the tea drinkers crowded around him because he only ever allowed one lucky person the chance to know what dangers or delights lay ahead.
With a light tap of his middle finger on my forehead I was picked. I was the one! He sat back to settle himself for the task ahead. Oh, I was made up! A special girl at last.
I supped up my milky tea and watched Decker swirl the cup in his big hand. I knew what I wanted to hear – that my bony shoulder blades would break through my skin, covered in feathers – long white feathers sweeping the floor like all the best angels from St Bede’s. I would take off as soon as I’d shook them dry. I’d leave the muck of The Hill behind. I’d be away in a matter of minutes, over our hill, over the next hill and the next, across the border, along the steely grey stripe of the Cloon River, the green grass shivering below me as I swooped through the valleys. I’d be out of Mammy’s reach for good.
I chewed my fingernails down to the nub in pure excitement. Decker spun my cup dry and looked into the brown leaves, his bushy eyebrows drawing together in a frown. Auntie Eileen pulled me closer, I could feel the rosary beads in her apron pocket and the smell of the Coty talc Bernie was always doused in. We both leaned in for the big news.
– There’s naught but rough seas for this wan, said the sorrowful showman.
– You could say that for any woman young or auld, Decker McHugh, you buck eejit, snorted Mrs Johns who lived down the back lane.
– What else would you expect in the Six Counties? roared somebody else.
It took Eileen a long while to settle me that night. I thought of the white waves rolling over the sand at Bundoran on our one-Sunday-a-summer seaside outing. How cold the water was off the coast of Donegal, how easy it was to get a lungful of salt and burny eyes, how the waves dragged you back even when you were running as fast as you could to get to the beach, the watery fists wrapped tight around your ankles, your mammy not caring, your daddy too far away to notice. Was that the rough seas he meant?
– You’ll travel, said Auntie Eileen to placate me. That’s all it is!
– Do you really think so?
– Sure, you have to take to the sea rough or not if you want to get as far away as America one day?
Auntie Eileen was a big fan of America. She was a big fan of anywhere that wasn’t Carncloon. She’d already been to New York – that’s where she’d got married and where Bernie had been born. I feasted on her tales of true love, of adventure. I was right by her side as she walked down Fifth Avenue describing the dresses she saw in the windows, imagined the coffee places where she tasted her first proper cup (‘it’s not even a bastard cousin of that Camp shite, don’t ever forget that, Mary’), watched her learn to eat spaghetti by twirling it on a spoon.
Her stories were the best boiled sweets ever invented, changing colour and getting sweeter every time I rolled one round my tongue. They tasted of freedom. My head fairly bloomed with its possibilities. If she could do it, so could I, we were the same blood. It was Mammy who first called us two rotten peas podded thirty years apart.
The hum of Macroom’s wake had carried on below us. Decker, safe in the knowledge that there would be no unnerving British Army Saracens on the street, took a fit of singing ‘The Boys of the Old Brigade’ and Eileen went back downstairs to see if she could hide the whiskey. I lay listening to Bernie choking on her wet snuffles and wondered if I could take her with me, back to her own country where she could breathe in without drowning.
The stormy seas first hit when I was a green girl of sixteen, but they did not carry me off. My life has been landlocked except for the times the Cloon burst its banks and the water let itself in like an old friend. The five children I reared looked forward to the floods like a day out, splashing through the kitchen like ducks. They are all gone now, grown up too fast, and my silly dreams of sleeping in, of being left alone for just ten straight minutes, have been realised.
When I think my voice is going to crack on the phone to them, I remember those days of wanting to be up, up and away from here, so I smile and laugh as they check again and again that I’m alright, that I’m coping, that I’m keeping busy. It’s because I’ve lost their father.
I lost him three hundred and seventy-two days ago, so many sunrises and sunsets with not much light for me in between. He isn’t hiding behind the barn or fallen down a bog hole. He’s not dead, just taking a break, and I feel a white-hot poker of regret from my womb to my throat when I recall that it’s me he’s taking a break from. He did well to last as long as he did. Not many men would have survived a mother-in-law like his, never mind a marriage like ours.
I blamed him when I failed to fly because it was him who clipped my wings. That’s the lie I told myself at sixteen and I repeated it so often that it came to be true. I fashioned a cage out of self-pity and slipped it over my head like a boned corset to hold myself together and to keep him out.
Wouldn’t it have been great altogether if Decker McHugh or anyone else at Macroom’s wake had been sensible or sober enough to tell me that rough seas make the best sailors? Wouldn’t it have been even better if I’d figured it out for myself before it was too late?