8

CALL MOTHER A LONELY FIELD

In loving memory of Jackie Leven 1950–2011

In the nursing home, my mother loses her connection to memory. Her rituals of mass, pottering in the garden, tea with my father, familiar furniture, the knowledge of where everything is—these anchors to the present vanish. The past and the present melt into one another. She is in a place where her brain is fogged—parts of it work but don’t link up to make sense of the images they are producing. So she tells Caitlín that she can see me. I’m there in the garden, ‘Don’t be silly, there he is,’ hanging out the washing. I am as real to her as Caitlín and Pat and the rest of them in the room are. The actual Liam, the 38-year-old man living in Dublin, does not exist in her world, whilst the twelve-year-old boy who helps with the chores never dies. Inside the lulls in the snowstorm of her mind, hidden valleys of the past are glimpsed anew. Another time she is a little girl, not a hunched-up old woman in a nursing home. She is afraid to go to school. Why? ‘Because the other girls all laugh and make fun of me.’ Why’s that? ‘Because of Papa. Because he’s always drunk.’

More frightening is a story my brother Pat told me only recently. He recalled visiting her in the nursing home. When he arrived, the Ma was in her bedroom, and there she was curled up in a ball on the bed, weeping like a little girl, repeating, ‘Where am I? Where am I?’ again and again.

December 1999, and my mother is dying. ‘You won’t recognise her, she’s like a shrivelled-up little blackbird, her mouth is like a wee puckered-up cat’s hole. Don’t expect to see her looking like she did the last time you saw her,’ Pat tells me when I arrive at the nursing home. My Mammy’s arms are hooked like talons, her skin hanging loose. Her mouth is dry, furry. It looks sore. Her eyes are a million miles away, a swirling grey fog. Her breathing is a rasp. She can’t speak. I don’t know how much she sees, how much she hears, how much she knows. Does she know she’s dying? We sit with her—Pat, Breandán, Caitlín, her daughter Róisín, myself. She drifts in and out of sleep. Breandán is talking to her, loud. ‘Are ye alright there, Mammy? Do you want to go to sleep?’ She awakes with a jolt. Caitlín says, ‘God, he’s a big eejit, isn’t he, always roaring?’ My mother bursts out laughing. It is the last laugh she’ll have.

It is three or so in the morning, and I am walking down the loanen from Caitlín’s house, heading for the nursing home. I plan to take over the sitting from Caitlín. It is pitch black, and I carry a torch to light my way. The wind whips my face. It is howling, keening, moaning. Trees shake, creak, leaves are a host of rustling. I can only make out the immediate road ahead of me. I float through the darkness of the fields, through the primal, fearful midwinter dark. My mother is dying as the light fades from the world, as it hurtles towards the shortest day. I lean into the wind, not awake, not asleep.

Caitlín has been up for hours, but decides to stay with me. We sit by my mother, watching every rise and fall of her fragile body. It is strange, this watching death being enacted in life. Each breath, each sigh. Each twitch of her shoulder. Each blink. ‘Look, her hand moved.’ Her breathing stops and starts. We are on a helter-skelter ride that never seems to end. The Ma’s mouth is utterly parched; a nurse comes in now and again to give her a little water. I look at the nurse’s records—it is nearly a week now since my mother ate anything remotely solid. Ice cream once in a while. Her eyes seem to open, but we don’t know if she’s still there in any conscious sense. The nurse speaks to her as I hold my Ma’s hand. ‘Mary, Mary, are you still in there? Can you hear us? If you’re there, give us a wee sign. There’s your Liam there, give his hand a squeeze to say hello.’ She squeezes my hand. This is the last touch at the threshold of here today and gone tomorrow.

Hours later, Ciaran comes to take over. Caitlín and I go back to the house to sleep. I don’t know if I actually do sleep or not. I drift through dreamscapes, I hear voices, and then the voice is real. It’s Ciaran; he’s rushed back up to tell us the moment is here. ‘She’s going.’ We go back to the home, and my mother’s room is crowded with nursing staff. A crucifix. A burning candle. Her eyes shut, her breathing imperceptibly shallow, minuscule little inhalations. Her skin appears to pulse with waves of colour, blood trying to pump up to her cheeks, waves of pink, purple, yellow and white. Light is seeping through her skin. She finally lets go, she folds. The breathing sinking more and more, each fall and rise slighter and slighter. Then it stops. ‘She’s gone.’ It is only a short time—seconds—and the prayer begins, and we join in. ‘Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee…’

The afternoon of the day we bury the Ma. I’ve just left the Gravediggers, had enough drink, not up for more talk, my eyes swollen and heavy. I’ve hardly slept for a week. I collapse onto the camp bed in the parlour. This was my space for years, where I did my homework, where I had coffee and fags with Noel Burke, listened to Captain Beefheart; where I did The Guardian crossword when I was on the dole; where I sat with friends sharing teenage angst. This was where the stereo was. I have a letter from my mother—‘The house is quite lonely now without the stereo going but I suppose you will make up for that when you come home…’ I fall asleep.

I awake to an aching loneliness. Here I am in Mooreland on my own, with nobody to talk to. There aren’t even any ghosts, the ghosts left a long time ago. The walls have shrunk; the dimensions of everything—the walls, the stairs, the hallway—have shrivelled into smallness. This void is not home. I leave for the Dublin train.

Another letter from my mother, in 1987.

Now she is gone, my father is gone. My childhood is gone.

I collect all the letters from my parents that I still have, and put them in chronological order, using my various addresses as a rough guide. Dublin—Balally Drive, Raglan Road, Mountjoy Square, South Circular Road; London—Brixton, Stockwell, Elephant and Castle, Peckham, Kennington; Israel—the Negev Desert, the Golan Heights. The message is always the same—We were glad to get your letter, and to hear you were well; we were worried that you were sick or had moved again.

Here I am on the long journey from Belfast to London. The train to Larne, the boat to Stranraer. The ferry’s bar full of drunken loyalists, the slow haul through Scotland and England, the train crawling down the densely built-up backbone of urban Britain. Stuck in Crewe in the wee small hours. Arriving in the morning rush hour in a cold, cold London. Brixton under snow, huddling around a battered electric heater to keep warm. Here I am in Israel, it’s 1986.

I get glimpses of what is happening back home, full of an unintentional black humour:

Throughout the winter of 1986, she describes loyalist protests against the Anglo-Irish Agreement. On 17 October, she tells me she is writing by candlelight; the electricity has been off since tea-time, and there is only a supply for five or six hours a day. The nights are getting darker. She mentions that my cousin Ann Mooney is dying of cancer, she is praying for her. On 14 October, she wonders if I have a television, and if I have seen the news that ‘tomorrow the town will be taken over by the loyalists, so God knows what will happen after that’.

One band I listened to in the parlour in Mooreland was Doll By Doll. They appeared in the early 1980s, the aftermath of punk. Their dramatic fusion of heavy rock, psychedelia and pop threw listeners, as did their lyrical use of work by e.e. cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Anna Akhmatova, Louis MacNeice and others. Nobody quite got where they were coming from, and after a few years they vanished into oblivion. Some ten years later, after rescuing himself from failure, heroin addiction and destitution, their lead singer, Jackie Leven, released ‘Call Mother a Lonely Field’.

Jackie Leven tells me where the inspiration for this song came from. He was walking one very cold winter morning by the river Thames, near Maidenhead, with the sun blazing down.