Getting Notions

‘GROW, GROW, GROW, your goat, gently down in Sneem.’ My father is singing when I come home. I never knew he could sing.

‘Of course he can sing,’ says my mother.

‘Well there’s a turnip for the books,’ I say and she says, ‘Grainne, one of you is bad enough.’

‘When did he stop singing?’

‘What do you mean stop?’

‘Well I never heard him before.’

‘It’s not my fault,’ she says, ‘you forget all the good things.’ And from the front room comes a plangent baritone that I can’t even imagine coming out of my father’s face.

‘He sounds in great form.’

‘Yes,’ she says, a little warily (‘Warily, warily, warily, warily, siphon off the cream’).

‘So what’s the latest?’

‘Oh nothing new here.’

‘Well he’s singing at least.’

‘Yes.’

‘Anything strange or startling?’

‘No. Grainne. Nothing strange’, and she laughs, as well she might.

‘Any improvement?’

‘Well, he reminds me more of himself. I suppose.’

‘That’s good.’ And this sudden breach of the privacy that surrounds marriages and sickbeds makes me familiar.

‘In what way. What way do you mean?’

I look in to the sitting room to say hello. My father is sitting in the wing-chair in the space between the door and the window. He is wearing a coat and hat, with one of my mother’s silk scarves around his neck and another around his wrist.

‘There’s something different about him.’

‘Would you say?’ says my mother, making me feel like I am six years old again, trying to fix the difference between her words and the smile on her face.

When my brother Phil arrives we all sit in the sitting room and talk over the sound of the television, the way we did as children, except that when we were children my father did not sit in the corner and croon, I don’t care what anyone says.

We grew up a few years ago and started to look at each other when we spoke, which was always somehow surprising. It was Phil who started it. After he got a job and a flat Phil would walk across the carpet and turn the television off—a self important gesture, we thought. Tonight however, Phil seems as keen as anyone to sit and hoot at the ads, shout at the news and tell me the graphics are wrong again. All of which I find reassuring. It means that I am not the only one who has noticed.

Because if it comes to a choice between watching the television and watching my father’s wig, the television wins hands down. The choice is made easier for us by the fact that the wig has grown since the last time we saw it and we don’t want to mention this fact to each other, no matter how loud or entertaining the programme might be. We don’t want to look at my father’s wig long enough to see if it is still growing; say a half an hour, plus commercial break. We don’t want to find out whether the wig has just started to grow, or just stopped growing. Which is to say, we want to find this out urgently and with every straining optic nerve; with every orbital muscle and cord of tissue that keep the eyeballs, as we have discovered, so tenuously in our heads.

We watch the news and I tell my mother that the reporter once threw a typewriter out of a first-floor window at her lover who was leaving the building. Then we watch the ads and my mother says ‘How much would he get for that now?’ and I say ‘I dunno. Loads.’

Then we watch a chat show and Phil says he saw the host going into Brown Thomas’s last Christmas which is my cue to talk about his sex life and my mother’s to say ‘I don’t think he would sleep around, he’s far too clean’, and mine to say ‘Maybe he does it in the shower.’

These are old conversations, but it is difficult to be original when there’s a wig growing in the corner of the room and the man under it is laughing his head off.

‘Why do you not do any good programmes?’ says Phil as the chat show switches from amputees to disco dancing champions. ‘Hot on the heels’, says the presenter, ‘of their recent success.’

‘WAVE!’ shouts my father. ‘Do you remember Josie?’

‘This is an excellent programme,’ I say.

‘It’s awful,’ says Phil.

‘Married that guy in Jordan before he left her,’ says my father.

‘Awful,’ says Phil. ‘Look at that woman’s backside. Who was responsible for that? Who was responsible for letting that backside on, in pink lycra?’

‘You want beautiful?’ I said. ‘Look in the mirror. You want good telly? It’s the woman down the road making a show of herself.’

‘Poor Josie,’ says my father. ‘Cad a dheanfaimid feasta gan Ahmed?’ My mother starts to laugh. She says ‘Yes I remember Josie.’

‘Well there you have it,’ says my father and she laughs again.

Phil and I start to panic. We turn up the volume.

‘Tatty,’ says Phil. ‘Condescending. Self important.’

‘You want self important? Look at you. In your Armani knickers because you can’t afford the suit.’

‘Under where?’ says my father.

‘Here it is,’ says my mother, for no apparent reason and puts her hand on his arm.

‘People don’t want the telly getting notions,’ I say. ‘They just want some company out of it, a bit of gossip, a bit of drama, a sing-song around the piano.’ In the corner of my eye, I see my father’s wig creeping imperceptibly down his neck.

‘You don’t even believe that. Look at that nonsense,’ says Phil, who sees where my eyes have strayed and wants to fix them back on the set.

‘So? It’s my job to believe it,’ I say.

‘You wish.’

Upstairs my mother finds me looking at a new picture on the wall. It is a picture of her, with a baby in her arms. The baby is me. She sits in the grass and holds me up for the camera, mother-love in her face and love for the person taking the picture in her eyes.

‘Why did you put that up?’ I say to her.

‘Grow up, Grainne,’ she says, on her way to the bathroom.

‘I’m in that picture.’

‘I would have thought’, she says, ‘that was the point.’

‘Who took it?’ I say. ‘Did Da take that?’

‘Who do you think?’ she says as she closes the door.

She stays in the bathroom too long, while my father sings downstairs and Phil sits in silence. My mother cries privately but with no shame. She cries easily, because it is her right to cry, in her own bathroom, in her own life. She cries quietly, and with abandon, because her tears, like her children, are her own.

Downstairs the chat show has shifted to a half hour about the Shannon. Local people stand up in the audience to be on the television and to be counted.

‘Hydroelectric Scheme,’ says the television. My father starts to croon.

‘Airport,’ says the television. He breaks into song.

‘Satellite link,’ says the television, a dream my father had, hanging in space while the earth rolled under it.

‘The pale moon was rising,’ sings my father. ‘Above the cream fountain.’

And suddenly there is a choir of girls singing with him in three-part harmony: the serious altos in their velvet dresses, the gamey mezzos with their air-hostess eyes and the poor, glorious soprano, her lips grasping the high notes like a horse picking up a polo mint. They sing to break your heart, the Flower of Irish Womanhood, their eyes true, their hands sweaty, their virginity as real as Irish Coffee. (Why not?)

In the corner of my eye I see that I was mistaken. The wig has stopped growing. The wig is not growing anymore. With a bit more effort we might realise that it was always that length, ever since we were children. Then the wig starts growing again.

And all the time, stretching and twisting between myself and Phil on the sofa, is our childhood, in three-ply.