Part 1: the birth (and near death) of a weirdo

Ballybrock, November 1979

1.

Biddy Weir was two months shy of her tenth birthday when she discovered she was a bloody weirdo. The awful revelation was a shock, to her at any rate, and from that fateful day Biddy’s life was defined not by her religion, the colour of her skin, or her sex; nor by what school she went to, her political persuasion or even which side of town she lived in: but by her oddness, by the undeniable, irrevocable fact that she was a weirdo, and a bloody one at that.

As far as Biddy knew, she was the only weirdo who lived in Ballybrock, a small quiet seaside town with church spires and hilly streets and seven fish and chip shops. And lots and lots of seagulls. There were others, of course, like the old lady with wispy pink hair and bright red lipstick who pushed her pet poodles around in a scruffy old Silver Cross pram. And the tall young man with the long wild beard who called himself The Poet. He walked up and down Ballybrock High Street fifty-one times each morning before going into Josie’s corner shop to buy a quarter of midget gems and a packet of Rizlas. Josie always wondered where he bought his tobacco, but she never dared to ask. Then there were Billy and Ella, Ballybrock’s resident drunks, who loved each other with a passion often openly displayed in public and lived for half of the year in the town’s decaying bandstand. Nobody knew where they went for the other half.

But Biddy didn’t know that these people were weirdos, for no one ever told her. They probably didn’t even know themselves. For although the people of Ballybrock would snigger and whisper and look at each other knowingly when they passed them in the street, recoiling and pulling faces and talking about how ‘bloody weird’ they were, nobody actually called any one of them a bloody weirdo to their face. Not once.

But Biddy knew that she was one, for Biddy had been told.

 

Ballybrock was a nice enough kind of a place, not picture-postcard pretty, but generally pleasing. There was a rough pebble beach which ran the whole way along one end of the town and was shaded by a big stone wall. People would sit on the wall in summertime, eating their chips from crumpled old newspapers or licking their ice creams, shooing away the hordes of greedy gulls. Further along the promenade stood the bandstand where Billy and Ella lived, and a big old cannon sat proudly on the end of the pier. Right in the centre of Ballybrock was a small park with swings and a pond with a little island in the middle where peacocks and caged coloured birds lived.

There were never any bombs or shootings in Ballybrock, not like lots of other places in the Northern Ireland at that particular time. In Ballybrock ‘The Troubles’ rarely troubled anyone. The people were mostly friendly and, on the surface anyway, didn’t seem to care if their neighbour was a Catholic or a Protestant. They looked out for one another and smiled and nodded as they passed each other on the street. And each year on the 12th July, regardless of what church they did or didn’t go to, most of the residents of Ballybrock lined the High Street to watch the bands parade in all their finery.

Most folk who passed through Ballybrock concluded that it must be a pleasant place to live. And all things considered, it was. Just as long as you weren’t a bloody weirdo like Biddy Weir.

 

Biddy had always known that she was different from the other girls at school. Her appearance, for a start, was a bit of a giveaway. Throughout her years at school, her uniform was either far too big or much too small. Regardless of her age, there never seemed to be a time when it was just the right fit. Her socks, which were supposed to be beige, were generally a strange colour of puce, and sometimes didn’t even match. And her scruffy shoes were often laced with scraps of coloured wool from her grandmother’s needlework box, which had sat on the sideboard since the old lady’s death. But it was Biddy’s hair that really made her look, shall we say, unusual. She was the only girl in her class who didn’t have long glossy plaits or swishing pigtails tied at the top with shiny blue bows. Biddy’s hair was copper and curly, neither long nor short, and it stuck out in every direction. But Biddy wasn’t interested in pigtails or plaits. Looking pretty as a concept, or even an objective, never crossed her mind.

Biddy didn’t have a proper school bag either, just an old string shopper with broken handles, which she tried to patch together with wool or thread, or even Sellotape.

And then there was her name. Her real name, that is, not the one she would become known by when she was almost ten years old. All of the other girls in her class had nice, sensible names like Julia or Jacqueline or Georgina. But Biddy’s young mother, Gracie, who had not really been ready to have a child of her own when her daughter was born, named her after a cat who had adopted her family when Gracie was eight. There had been many Flynn family cats over the years, they came and went with regular ease. But Old Biddy was special. She stayed far longer than any of the other cats and had only died the week before Gracie went into labour.

‘I’m not bloody well naming her after your mother,’ Gracie had screamed hysterically at Biddy’s father on his first visit to the hospital to meet his baby daughter, when he had tentatively suggested that Margaret might be a much more suitable name. ‘And just be thankful it wasn’t a boy.’ He didn’t dare ask what the boy’s name might have been.

As it turned out, Gracie Weir had swiftly realised that she wasn’t ready to be a mother and, in actual fact, had never really intended to become a wife. So, when Biddy was just six months old, Gracie ran away to join a travelling fair. The family never heard from her again.

So, that left Biddy, her middle-aged father and his elderly mother. Mrs Weir senior helped to rear the child as best she could while her darling son continued to work as a bookkeeper at Morrison’s, the local hardware store. She cursed the day that Gracie, ‘that little harlot’, had come to work at the store. At fifty, her boy Howard was much too old to leave home, and Mrs Weir had assumed that she’d succeeded in her life’s ambition – to keep him all to herself. The shame of the whole affair with Gracie and the child had nearly killed her.

‘But you’re more than twice her age,’ old Mrs Weir had gasped when Howard sat her down in their dark parlour to break the news, thrusting a cup of sweet tea and two Marie biscuits into her hands. ‘It’s disgusting. Filthy. How could you let this happen, Howard? How could you do this to me?’ It was even worse than when her late husband, Harold, had been hit by the train and killed.

Mrs Weir had consoled herself by believing that Gracie Flynn was nothing more than a shameless opportunist who had seduced her darling Howard for financial security and a roof over her head. None of this was Howard’s doing, of course. Helen, the nice young secretary at Morrison’s (not nice enough for her son, mind you), told her that Gracie had recently moved into one of those new council housing estates on the outskirts of town with her family – all ten of them. Nobody seemed to know where the Flynns had come from, but word was, they had a bit of a reputation for trouble. In Mrs Weir’s mind, that explained everything. After all, Howard couldn’t possibly have done the seducing himself as, quite frankly, he wouldn’t have known where to start. She suspected that Gracie and her abundant family were really gypsies who’d been forced to live ‘normal lives’ by the powers that be. When she put her theory to Helen, it wasn’t rebuffed.

‘I knew it,’ old Mrs Weir thought, pleased with herself, ‘I just knew it.’

‘Perhaps she got him drunk,’ she whispered confidentially to Helen. ‘Or perhaps she put one of her gypsy spells on him. He mustn’t have realised what was happening.’

Helen, delighted with this exciting turn of events in her normally mundane existence at Morrison’s, smiled and nodded. ‘Perhaps,’ she whispered back.

The truth of the matter was in fact pretty close to Mrs Weir’s imagined version. Howard was as shocked as anyone when Gracie fell pregnant after their somewhat brief fumble in the sand dunes during the Morrison’s annual Easter picnic. In almost fifty years, he’d never been drunk and he’d certainly never had sex and now here he was, getting pissed and making someone pregnant in the same afternoon.

As for Gracie, she didn’t even fancy Howard. How could she? He was old and odd, and, with his thick brown spectacles, green cardigans and stinking breath, utterly unattractive. But, in her first week at the store, she’d boasted to Helen that she could bed any man she wanted.

‘Not Howard, you can’t,’ laughed Helen, rolling her eyes. ‘Not even you could do that.’

‘Just you watch,’ Gracie had smiled coyly, tossing her copper curls.

Once the damage had been done, so to speak, Howard had no option but to propose. A hasty, modest wedding at the town hall registry office ensued, with two staff drafted in as witnesses and Mrs Weir senior as the only guest. The reception was a cup of tea and a ham sandwich at the Peacock Café in the park. It wasn’t quite what Gracie had imagined for her wedding day. But on the whole she was enjoying the drama of this new game, and decided to play along for a while, to see what happened. She could always leave, she reasoned to herself. If she’d learnt anything at all from her family’s way of life it was that leaving was easy. And at least there was no need for any further awful sex with Howard. He showed no interest anyway, but even if he had, she wouldn’t have hesitated to use the pregnancy as a get-out clause.

For a little while, Gracie almost enjoyed living in the dull but relatively comfortable environment of number 17, Stanley Street. It was quiet, such a change from what she was used to. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Howard’s mother, she might have even found it a pleasurable experience. Until the child was born, that is.

 

Mrs Weir senior had glowed with relief when Gracie ran away, and was more than happy to resume the cosseting regime that had served her son so perfectly well before his ill-fated marriage. Her only regret was that her daughter-in-law hadn’t taken the child with her. ‘Perhaps that Flynn family will take her,’ she quietly suggested to Helen on a rare trip into Morrison’s with the pram. ‘After all, there are more of them to help out. It’s the least they could do.’

It soon became clear, however, that none of Gracie’s relations were the least bit interested in the baby girl. When Gracie had married Howard Weir they may have been shocked by her choice of husband, and annoyed that there wasn’t to be a boozy reception, but at least it meant they had one less mouth to feed. Gracie’s hasty and mysterious departure was actually a relief to them, eliminating the concern that she would one day land back on their doorstep with the child in tow, as it was obvious the marriage wouldn’t work. Marriages never did in the Flynn family. Ever. So, when a postcard from somewhere foreign arrived one day, informing them that Gracie was following her dream and would never return, they hastily made it known to Howard that they had neither the time, nor the inclination, to be involved in Biddy’s life. For a short time, Mrs Weir hoped and prayed that the Flynns would come to their senses, change their minds and reclaim the child. Her prayers were shattered for good, however, when, a few months after Gracie had run away, the rest of her family upped sticks and moved yet again – this time, apparently, to Manchester, though no one really knew. And that was that.

So, Mrs Weir was stuck with Biddy. She didn’t know quite what to do with a girl, as, apart from her own darling Howard, she had never really been one for children. Still, she made sure that Biddy was fed and clothed, and once or twice, when they had an unexpected visitor for one reason or another, she even bounced the child on her knee and patted her curls.

Mrs Weir’s sudden demise from a massive, violent stroke coincided with the closure of Morrison’s and Howard’s premature entry to retirement. There really was very little hope of alternative employment for a fifty-three-year-old bookkeeper with a three-year-old daughter and no driving licence. But, as a man who was good with figures, he had made a number of small but canny investments in the past, particularly with the modest sum of money his father had left in trust when he died on Howard’s tenth birthday.

Mrs Weir had always suspected that her husband, Harold, was a secret drinker and that his outings to the weekly evening mission meetings at the bandstand often included a trip to the local pub. It was the only time he would ever smell of peppermint – ‘for my indigestion, dear,’ – and Ralgex – ‘my back is playing up today, and I didn’t want to miss the meeting.’ Her suspicions were confirmed when Harold’s mangled body had been found on the railway line which ran directly behind the car park at Crawford’s Inn. If Harold had come straight home from the meeting as they would do when they both went on Sundays, his journey would not have taken him anywhere near the Inn, or the railway. Mrs Weir never spoke of her suspicions, as her husband had been known as a good, God-fearing man, but she vowed that not a drop of alcohol would ever pass her son’s lips.

And look what happened when it had.

Howard was a clever lad. He did well at school and could have gone to university, made something of his life. But his mother had other plans. Mrs Weir decided that her son should stay at home and get a decent, steady job with no real prospects. She also made sure he had few friends and limited interests, so that he could spend as much time with her as possible. She even stopped taking Howard to the Sunday mission meetings, deciding that, since He hadn’t done a very good job with her husband, she couldn’t trust God to keep an eye on her son. She’d just have to do it all herself.

When his mother died, Howard cashed in one of the saving policies he had set up with his father’s inheritance fund and forgot about the rest. He put the money from the policy into a building society in the High Street. The interest from that, coupled with his meagre pension, would be quite enough for a man and a child with limited needs to live off for the foreseeable future. What point was there in having any more? He’d never been a spender, inheriting a tightness that had been in the Weir family for many generations. They were always keeping their money for a rainy day, but even when those rainy days arrived, they still went out with holes in their umbrellas. That was just the sort of them. And anyway, Ballybrock wasn’t exactly the kind of place that required high living. It was more than a little bit backward in coming forward, and when Biddy was a baby, there had been no cinema, leisure complex, or big fancy shopping centre in the town. Even when those ‘scourges of modern life’, as Mr Weir called them, did start to arrive, he never went near them, so neither did Biddy.

All things considered, however, Mr Weir did the best he could with his daughter. He took her to the park, where they would feed stale bread to the ducks. They would walk along the shore and watch the noisy gulls dive for fish and swoop across their heads. He would sometimes read her stories and, for her fourth Christmas, he even withdrew enough money from the building society to buy a portable television so the two of them could sit together for Watch with Mother. Gradually, a bond of sorts began to grow between the quiet little girl and her almost silent father. Neither of them realised it was love at the time. But it was. It was just their love.