The roof stayed on Johns Farm when peace descended on Northern Ireland. I don’t know how, when we’d roared and danced through the kitchen like banshees! Bridie nearly broke a leg. We’d been sitting out the storm for so long that when the sun finally broke through we were dazzled by it. Tony Blair – or Saint Anthony, Patron Saint of Miracles and Lost Items as Auntie Eileen calls him – delivered the Good Friday Agreement in April. With Mo Mowlam and Bill Clinton and even the Pope wading in, he’d wrestled Ian Paisley, David Trimble, Gerry Adams and a score of other opponents on to the blank canvas.
I’d longed for an end to the madness as if it was the last boiled sweet in the whole of County Tyrone. Now it was here! Things can only get better! That’s what D:Ream, a bunch of lads from Northern Ireland, were singing last year for Tony Blair as he sailed into 10 Downing Street, all dimples and pigeon toes and promises. Things are a thousand times better already.
Serena is on the edge of sixteen, my boys will be teenagers in a peaceful country, they would not have to pick a side. They could leave the house and I’d have a good chance of them coming home again in one piece. Tony Blair, Senator George Mitchell and Bertie Ahern were all teeth and gums as the governments in Belfast and Dublin ended British rule and gave us a new Northern Ireland Assembly where Nationalists and Loyalists would have to share power. We just had to make it to 1999 when the agreement kicked in.
Serena announced that she had known all along that it would happen sooner rather than later! She was so confident, she knew what life could be like. Her and the cherished Nora Reilly were going to take on the world. Now the Troubles were over the Six Counties would need teachers and doctors even more. She thought she could see the future. I remember being just like her, daft. Lizzie Magee and me had thought that life was as easy to choose as a lollipop.
I watched her a minute, lying up against the pillows in my bed with the sketch pad she never left out of her hands now tucked under her arm. I marvelled at having produced her but even more remarkable was the fact that I hadn’t ruined her. We could talk, hug, kiss; we were MUCKY! There was never any talk of boys; they seemed to have been demoted in the overall scheme of a girl’s experience. She didn’t need anyone to make her feel good about herself. She was an open book, so when she settled herself nice as pie and tried to look casual I knew straight away she had been sent by John, sneaky.
We’d been having a look at Bono on the telly holding David Trimble and John Hume’s arms in the air when they had emerged together ahead of the referendum in May. There was a joy in the image that lifted our hearts. Serena wanted to know how I was doing? Only she’d been thinking it would be great for me to go on a course. She’d been thinking that maybe I’d like to learn how to drive now that the roads would be safer? There were plenty of opportunities out there for women like me, apparently. Women like me? I was a farmer’s wife: nothing more, nothing less.
– Things have changed since you were sixteen, says my wise child!
– Is that so? says I.
– Tell me again what happened?
So I told her again her favourite story of How Serena Came To Be and for a good few years now I’d even stopped thinking of it as The End of Mary Rattigan. I played up the glamour of the whole enterprise. I painted in the crescent moon, the summeriness of the night, the feeling of freedom, and glossed over the tiny fact that I was the tramp I’d always warned her not to be.
I never mentioned Joe Loughrey. He was irrelevant to the story of her even though he was the key to the story of me. I’d first told her about Jacques Bernier on her thirteenth birthday. She never expressed any desire to find him. I was glad of that, thinking what a shock it would be for him discovering that a few minutes of pleasure had led to a brand-new person. I had days when I could hardly believe it myself.
I’d never asked her to keep it from John but she hadn’t told him. She wouldn’t dream of hurting Dada by even bringing it up. The words we had set down when she was tiny had never left her: John Johns had taken the job on and he was all the daddy she would ever need. She was still his girl, right down to her bones. She sighed and threw herself across the bed, delighted she was the result of such a romantic interlude. Jesus Christ on a pushbike!
– Did Dada ever tell you about Catherine?
– No. I heard of a Catherine once but it was before my time …
– Honestly! You pair! Have you ever thought about talking to each other?
I was still desperate to know what had gone on so I got up and started folding clothes as if I didn’t care a bucky and, sure enough, Serena spilled the beans without realising she was being flipped. I’d get her to bend the main rule that John and me lived by – he didn’t want to know about me and I wasn’t interested in him. Deals don’t break themselves, y’know?
He had told my daughter all about the English girl that he had fallen for, hook, line and sinker, in London when he was just a boy. The English girl that I had never quite measured up to. She was the loveliest creature he had ever met, kind and decent and good. And funny, so funny, they had shared so many laughs. They had what? I closed the wardrobe door on my hand and bit back the yelp! She was a Protestant girl so they would have to get married in a registry office. John didn’t mind not being married in the eyes of God. He had sort of given up on God after his pal Shimmie Tollund was kneecapped for no reason.
Catherine’s parents would go mad but she didn’t care a jot because he was what she wanted. It was only about six weeks to the wedding when he thought there was something wrong one night. Her head was exploding; they both held on to it to try and keep it together, but the pain made her scream until she couldn’t scream any more.
The ambulance hadn’t come, bogged down in James Callaghan’s Winter of Discontent. She was trembling in the bed; he had held her close to make her feel less scared but she was still terrified and wide-eyed, looking straight at him, as she died in his arms. He didn’t know what it was that took her away so suddenly. The doctors didn’t tell him anything because he wasn’t next of kin.
He’d only known about the baby for two months, the best two months he had ever lived. He would finally have someone with his own blood running in their veins, the start of a family at last. My heart split open. Catherine and him had lists of names; she’d had time to cast on the stitches to knit a white wool blanket. His hope was that it would be a little girl – Bridie would have loved a little girl – but she had stayed with her mother, both of them gone in a flash as the pigeons circled outside.
Her parents wouldn’t talk to him, wouldn’t tell him anything after they found out that their daughter was shacked up with a Papist and a spit-on-the-ground Irishman to boot, living in sin. English people were still raw years after the Birmingham pub bombings. They didn’t care that he wasn’t involved, that she hadn’t been alone at the end, that Catherine had been loved. He was banned from the funeral for want of a piece of paper saying that he was the husband. He hadn’t been given the chance to put either of them to rest.
His heart was broken. He had never seen her face again after the ambulance men had taken her away. When Catherine died he had wandered every inch of London looking for peace and when none was found he came home to Johns Farm and Bridie but he couldn’t bear to tell her or any other living soul the story.
He had come to understand how someone could take their own life; the blessed relief beckoned more than once. He just buried Catherine and the baby whole and untouched in his memory and hoped the years would make it bearable. Maybe one day we could agree on the number of years? And then I was born, says Serena with a flourish, and the clouds were on the back foot for him forever. He got to have a perfect daughter after all!
– Mammy? Don’t cry! It was a hundred years ago!
– Oh, I’m not crying about me! It’s just so sad the many things that can happen to a person in one lifetime!
I hate to lie to her. The tears are all for me. They should be for him, only him, and the fact that he got stuck with a foolish girl who never took the time to realise that he was hurting. Did he never tell me about Catherine? Why would he when he knew I wouldn’t listen? I had stuffed my ears with self-pity the day that Daddy left my suitcase on the street. I had been comparing myself to a ghost for years.
I thought of his face as he drove me home from Omagh hours after the miscarriage. I had been inconsolable, so much so that I had selfishly thought that my loss was greater than his. Had we ever tried talking to each other I might have known that he was the one person who could understand, the one who’d already been on that lonely, bloodied road.
Now Serena thought that I’d been hiding down here in Johns Farm long enough; she thought that I should get back to my books. I nodded and nodded, hearing the sense being preached and feeling the panic rising. I would soon be out of excuses for hanging around the house.
John was obviously sick of me. I was dead wood so I would have to go. Back to school because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to send me. If I could make a living, his responsibility for me would be over and, anyway, in a matter of a few short years all of our children would be grown and gone, no need for a mother then and my days as a wife were numbered.
– Come on, Mammy! Northern Ireland is going to need all sorts of people! Tony Blair is going to be throwing money at us!
– I’ll certainly think about it, says I to my daughter.
I’d not an ounce of intention of thinking about it! Imagine me trying to sit in a classroom when I was her age the last time I’d studied. I would look and feel ridiculous! She didn’t need to know that and she would report back to her father that I was considering a change in my circumstances. I must be such a disappointment to him after Catherine. He’d likely dance a jig in the street if he came home to find I’d flown away. The only thing weighing me down was my heart so all I had to do was find a way of cutting it out and leaving it behind. I’d have no use for it.