Considering Derry spent the latter half of the twentieth century beholden to the tremors of large, loud explosions, its inhabitants’ fondness for fireworks is greater than you might imagine. None in the city are bigger or louder than those that come in late October, when Derry throws the biggest Halloween celebration on Earth. The entire city goes for it full-strength, with a whole weekend of parties and events, all of which are fully costumed. Office workers, postmen, supermarket cashiers, your bus driver, all taking part in the broad spectacle of public japery that takes over the entire city for at least a few days, and often a week or two beforehand.
Something in the region of 100,000 fancy-dressed people flood the streets for outdoor events, and this in a city with a population of 110,000. Ordinarily, Derry folk are stoical and dismissive, and have earned something of a reputation for being wary of grandstanding. There’s an unspoken distrust of anyone attracting too much attention to themselves. It’s likely a survival tactic, from a time when people in Derry felt slightly less safe than they do now. There’s a caginess to the city’s older inhabitants likely baked in from the bad old days, when cultivating a healthy fear of outside attention was probably quite wise. One legacy of the Troubles for people my age is that we can’t even attack our elders for being grumpy and churlish, since back when they were kids, they were all being stopped by police four times a day or dragged out of their homes by soldiers at 4 a.m. for having the wrong surname. I came into my teens when the worst of the Troubles was finally receding, but that queasy paranoia was still everywhere around. And I mean everywhere. I once called the library on Foyle Street, looking for a book of ghost stories.
‘Hello, is this the Central Library?’ I asked.
‘Depends,’ came the inscrutable and suspicious reply some moments later. ‘Who’s asking?’
On balance, Halloween was not an ideal time to return to school after Mammy died, since for the teacher it meant explaining the nature of death to twenty small children in a room that was dressed like a haunted house. Like the lustre of those new corduroy trousers – long since dulled by mud and sick – the frenetic activity in our home had faded. As the heaviest traffic of well-wishers abated, we had been left to grieve in peace, but now we had to go out into the world again. God knows how my dad fared at work, having to negotiate his colleagues’ well-meaning but gormless attempts at consoling a man who’d lost his wife and the mother of his eleven children. Although I’d say it’s likely they weren’t in a room filled with novelty cobwebs. If the question I had asked all those distraught mourners at my mother’s wake sought a literal answer, I was to receive it many times over the coming months. Everyone would hear that Mammy died, and in case they hadn’t, my teacher Mrs Devlin would be good enough to remind them.
Other than its being Halloween, the main thing I remember about that day was the kindness of a boy named Philo McGahern. I don’t know that Philo and I ever had two conversations in all the time we knew each other, but he made such an impression that, three decades later, his name and face remain embedded in my memory. Philo was an unfortunate-looking child: drooping mouth, strangely large eyes and brittle, blond bristles that emerged from his head where hair should have been. He had a shiny face, which must have been due to an ointment or balm that gave off a medicinal, mentholated smell like an old lady’s handbag. I presume it was for the skin condition that caused the steady fall of transparent flakes from his cheeks and chin. These settled on his school jumper in such volume that he had the permanent look of someone who’d just eaten a croissant lying down.
The teachers in my school all dressed up for Halloween itself, even the nuns. Witches and banshees were popular among the sisters, but I seem to remember Sister Francistine coming as the Bride of Frankenstein, complete with stacked black bouffant threaded with a shock stripe of purest white. This is still par for the course in Derry at Halloween. Novelty costume shops spring from nowhere to dominate the local high streets, fulfilling demand for bottom-tier dressing-up supplies. Sometimes existing premises will alter their entire business model in October, since it makes better financial sense for them to sell witches’ hats and Donald Trump masks in those few weeks than, say, pets or insulin. You can’t throw a tiny plastic pumpkin without hitting a sign advertising ‘ice scream’ or ‘2-for-1 Squeals’, prices ‘slashed’, and long-gestating discounts being ‘back from the dead’. At some point in the nineties, restaurants hit upon gravey as a pun, and it’s one they still ride pretty hard. For the lazier proprietor, there’s a near-ubiquitous emphasis on the fear that might be induced by special offers, and practically every storefront in town is daubed with a slogan like ‘deals so good they’re scary’, which even by the standard of such things has always struck me as a dubious claim. My father is the only person I know regularly frightened by prices, and those only on the higher end.
There are, of course, those who go above and beyond the call of witches, ghouls and topical celebrities, and instead strike out on their own. More abstract variants of fancy dress became a highly sought-after niche within the circle of true believers, and a cult developed around increasingly outré and involved rig-outs. My sister Caoimhe was one such person. The year she dressed as a road was probably my own personal favourite; a long black dress with road markings down its length, flecked with toy cars, street signs and roadside shrubs. My little brother Conall once dressed as Jack Woltz from The Godfather, contriving an absurdly uncomfortable backpack that worked as a vertical bed, pillow, and bloody horse’s head, in which he walked around all night. My friend Paudie spent weeks making a shower, complete with rectangular frame festooned with a plastic curtain and soap dish, his skin-tone bodysuit adorned with strategically placed artisanal lather he’d made from cotton balls. Even more alarming was the fact we bumped into two other people who’d made their own shower that evening.
I think my all-time favourite was the man I encountered wearing a long-haired wig, sandals and a kaftan. The kaftan was overlaid with a lacy bra, on to which he had crudely stapled two white bread rolls, or baps, to use the local parlance. I stopped him to ask what he was; Burger Christ? Breadroll Shepherd Boobs? He took a dramatic swig from his bottle of Buckfast, arcing it to his lips to prolong the moment with the cocksure swagger of a hair metal guitar solo. ‘John the Bap Tits,’ he said.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been so impressed in my entire life.
Thankfully, Mrs Devlin wasn’t costumed for her announcement, which came a few days before Halloween itself. She stood at the front of the class, and I beside her like a solemn little urchin, fumbling with my sleeves. Mrs Devlin had a commanding aura, one of those indomitable older women that you could imagine spending her bank holidays in a small static caravan in Donegal, doing thousand-piece jigsaws of Pádraig Pearse, or knitting balaclavas for the Provisional IRA. In appearance, she was effectively Little Old Lady #6 from a Central Casting extras catalogue, with a solid, shiny hive of nut-brown hair, a sharp, dropped mouth and am-dram whiskers on her pointed chin. Standing in heels, she was roughly 4’ 11”, and weighed about six stone soaking wet, perhaps five, discounting brooches and hairpins. If you picked her up and shook her by the boots, your carpet would shortly be littered with hankies, rosary beads and those minty sweets that smelled of Philo. She wore tortoiseshell glasses that were fixed about her neck with a chain, as if selected by a hungover costume supervisor who’d been given five seconds to dress a sketch in which an old lady complains about the soup in a three-star hotel. She rarely smiled or showed affection, but she’d spent the entire morning doing both as she held my hand.
She stalled for time. Growing up, I was fascinated by that moment you often see in American sitcoms, when popular characters would appear on stage but were unable to deliver their lines until the laughter caused by their arrival had died down. I’d always watch what they did as they stood there, silently vamping as they patted down their clothes or adjusted their hair, riding the wave of noise with eight or nine seconds of odd gestures that would have immediately marked you out as a psychopath had you acted that way in real life. I saw something of this in Mrs Devlin, who was choosing not to speak over the usual din, but waited until actual, real silence had prevailed. When it finally did, she fumbled and strained. Her mouth went slanted and she kept starting and stopping, as if her throat was a leaf-blower she couldn’t get going.
‘Class. This – Boys and girls. Séamas – This morning, Séamas has returned to class.’
She now alternated between clasping her hands in front of her and returning them to my scalp for nervous pats. I was still very much unenthused by physical affection, but had been effectively passed around like a stress toy for the preceding two weeks. Only now do I realise how hard my mother’s death had been on these adults themselves, since they obviously cared about my welfare but were also extremely fond of my mother, who had died so young and left such tragedy behind her.
‘Now, as some of you might know,’ Mrs Devlin said, ‘Séamas’s mammy has just died, and he’s very sad.’ I had been smiling nervously, but now frowned, as if I was in a school play about a sad little boy. ‘Everyone should be extra nice to him, because you wouldn’t like it if your mammy died, would you?’ I held the frown, concentrating hard on the pose, the way you do while waiting for a photograph to be taken.
I don’t know that I should have even been present for this, and wonder if they do things differently now. The whole thing felt rigid and strange. Maybe they had gone over it during the fortnight in which I was absent, and this was merely a reminder. Maybe repetition was necessary. Perhaps this public airing was itself a humane approach, a way of avoiding my mother’s death becoming one of those half-known-but-unmentioned tragedies that were common currency among kids, and Northern Irish kids in particular. ‘To save confusion in future, the following tragedies have occurred’, that sort of thing. The alternative led to misunderstandings, and having to spell it out again and again to people who weren’t aware.
‘You wouldn’t like it if your mammy died, would you?’ seemed an odd sort of a way of putting it. It would, I argue, have been preferable for this not to have been phrased as a question, one with a somewhat flimsy, glib connotation, suggesting a debate could be had on the subject. Luckily, the mood of the room seemed clear: my classmates would not like it if their mammies died.
My memories are mostly of blank, gawping faces staring back at Mrs Devlin, but also, amid the glum silence, of slowly registering the artwork that adorned every wall: painted pumpkin handprints and gory blood-effect names rendered in red acrylic paints. The room was festooned with whimsical skeletons, tombstones and wispy joke-shop cobwebs emerging from the filing cabinet beside Mrs Devlin’s desk, terminating eventually behind the long, thin poster of the alphabet that stretched just below the ceiling, at the other end of the room. Guys, you shouldn’t have, I might have thought to myself upon seeing the entire room decked out with macabre tokens of death and horror. But I didn’t, because I was five.
As I stood in front of my classmates, it occurred to me that they’d done all this decorating while I was away, and I felt that pang of melancholy one feels upon realising time has not stood still for others when it has done for you. My friends hadn’t been at chilly gravesides, or home vigils, bouncing from one relative’s knee to another while priests spoke low Latin in sing-song tones. They’d been drawing and cutting out jaunty pumpkins with their names on. This moment of transcendent solemnity, watched over by a dozen melted Homers Simpson, and malformed Sonics the Hedgehog, was broken only by heavy breathing from Philo, who then raised his hand. ‘My granny died,’ he said, in a rather touching show of solidarity-cum-one-upmanship. ‘His granny died,’ said Aoife, nodding to the room in agreement, as if this extraordinary claim required someone to vouch for it. She also said this while pointing at Philo, as if telling on him.
The room considered this exchange, and several classmates shared that their grannies had also died. Their grandas too, in some cases. Paul had suffered the loss of a turtle, some fish and three dogs, a litany of tragedy that had clearly been as painful for him as it was suspicious to us. It’s odd to recall such earnest ruminations on death and grief being carried out among small children for whom the words meant little, and who would, in roughly twenty minutes, be wearing waterproof bibs and smacking jugs around sandpits. Handed a little red car, many of us could not yet be relied upon to sort it with all the other little red cars, but here, in that moment, the garishly coloured environs of 2B of Nazareth House Primary became the unlikely setting for a seminar on grief, and the first ever conversation for many of us about bereavement and how to handle it. I became a special correspondent from grief’s remotest outpost, returning from uncharted land to tell everyone what I’d seen. Once a few questions had been asked, it was hard to stem the tide. My classmates began with solemn commiserations but, quite soon, graduated to slightly more probing queries.
‘Did she go to heaven?’
‘Do you get to visit her in heaven?’
‘Will she bring back presents?’
‘Like a Toblerone?’
‘My uncle got one in Florida.’
‘Is heaven in Florida?’
‘Is there a Disneyland in heaven?’
‘Does heaven have Toblerones?’
I answered each like a hurried politician on courthouse steps, unused to this degree of interest in my life. I was soon experiencing that first weird rush from the publicity that came with having ‘the big news’ in class. Being one of eleven had starved me of attention, and here it was being offered up to me in an undiluted and gravely significant form. My years of self-loathing were a long way away, so for now I rode that wave of attention like a piebald pony. Lacking the tact to package it any other way, my friends made it clear that my bereavement was to be rewarded.
‘Would you like my milk, because your mum died?’ offered Philo, rather sweetly. ‘Yes,’ I must have answered, because I certainly drank that milk. I also got to feed the fish, use the crap little robot no one had ever really figured out how to work and generally do all the best things before everyone else.
It’s easy to say the sadness I felt was incomprehensible, but I suppose that this was true in its most literal sense. I was incapable of comprehending what had changed, or that it had changed for ever. Death itself was too huge for me to grapple with, and my mother’s death was, to me, only questionably permanent. Just recently, she wasn’t dead; she held my hand and told me to play out in the trees by the hospital. Now she was dead, which meant she was happy and healthy, and therefore alive, but in heaven. Who knew what came next? Apart from anything else, the whole heaven thing seemed like a great deal for the time being. I have no memory of the specifics of what I imagined, I just knew that heaven was a real, physical place, and I couldn’t visit her there. I was used to her being away, since she’d previously spent time in Belfast, where I could visit her, but it was made clear to me Belfast and heaven were different in that respect and several others.
Heaven became a source of fascination for me. I was ready to believe in heaven, since it seemed like a great place, and it made sense Mammy would end up there. If even eighty people in all time had made the grade, then my mother would have been one of them. The confusing thing was that people would tell me it was great that Mammy had gone there, but in a voice that didn’t seem to suggest it was great at all, and was actually very sad. People would be fighting back tears while telling me the good news, the way people now might tell you how proud they are that their child does improv comedy, or that their husband is getting his old band back together. It seemed as though these adults didn’t realise that I could see them as they spoke, since their words were so at odds with their facial expressions. As a concept, heaven always seemed to lead to conversational cul-de-sacs that were uniquely unsatisfying for any five-year-old, let alone a boy genius like myself, famed for his interrogative skills. Heaven was great news, clearly, but so much more information was needed, and it stunned me that it wasn’t forthcoming. When it comes to most positive news, people usually can’t shut up about it, and will do anything to add more detail. It’s a facile truth about people, that we like to rave about even mediocre experiences other people haven’t yet been made aware of, like when people tell you that you should watch Billions, and you think of just how many other shows you would have to watch first to justify it, or that time you tried almond milk for a week and ended up, drunk, singing its praises to your taxi driver, before never drinking it again. Yet here I was being presented with what, on the face of it, seemed like the most incredible news of all time, the literal Good News that Christians love so much – death is not the end – delivered as if it was a terrible blow.
What makes it weirder is this was not just a convenient thing to say to a child, like Santa Claus being real or eating carrots being good for my eyesight. This was, and is, Catholic dogma, something these people professed to believe. Heaven is canon, it exists. And yet adults were being strangely evasive when it came to answering my numerous questions.
‘What does she do there?’ I’d ask. ‘Does she teach?’ I still have questions about what this version of heaven comprises to this day. What would Mammy look like there: her current self, thinner and scarred but alive? Or her younger self? Does she get to pick, like can she just opt for when she felt happiest or most attractive? If you’re blind or deaf in life, can you see and hear in heaven? Wouldn’t that be confusing? What do you wear in heaven? Do you have to wear the clothes you died in for all eternity? If John the Bap Tits was run over would he have to walk around in heaven for all time dressed in a bra with burger buns on? Or can you change your clothes up there? Are there shops? If so, who works in them? Do some people live a good enough life to get to heaven, only to arrive there and end up working in a shop? Other people playing harps all day on clouds and you end up working 9 to 5 in a Primark in heaven? Does heaven have countries and cities and buildings and cars? Can all people of all languages communicate? Are there people there from Neanderthal times? Can you have pets? Or does every living thing have to have had a soul? Do dogs make it there? If you die as a child do you stay that age in heaven for ever? Can you die in heaven and go to another, further heaven? Does Mammy get to watch us? How could she be happy if she knew we were suffering? Or if she watched us die and then saw that we didn’t make it up there to see her?
People were kind to me, but couldn’t answer any of these questions, and just the fact I’d asked these things appeared to be upsetting for them, as if they’d done something wrong in telling me about heaven in the first place. It was a lot like other times I’d ask awkward questions, like when I heard negligible nineties UK RnB hit ‘Horny’ by Mark Morrison and kept asking my dad – a man who may never have said the word out loud in his life – what horny meant, and whether he was himself horny. Another time I followed our housekeeper Anne around and asked her why someone would become a prostitute – a question I’d just heard Richard Madeley ask a guest on This Morning. Because I was just copying his vocal inflections, she took it for granted that I, despite being four, knew what I was asking, and tried her best to walk me through it.
Before long, though, I went back to my usual conversational fare: long-winded descriptions of dinosaurs, or the differences between various types of trees. At the end of my first full day back at school, Philo presented me with a picture of his granny and my mother in heaven together, surrounded by clouds. I thought it was great, and his inclusion of Paul’s menagerie of expired pets was a beautiful touch.
I don’t have very many memories of my mother. I do know that I dreamt about her a lot after she died. And those dreams were of us in heaven. The dreams were all the same, pretty much. They always took the form of a mundane visitation; she wouldn’t be bathed in light or descending from the clouds. She would be normal, unheralded and domestic. In the dreams, she was never just there, in heaven; I would have to find her. I would know that she was gone, but hear her voice and know that she’d returned. This was never a big fanfare, but rather a commonplace discovery; hearing her voice speaking quietly from the kitchen, in the facsimile of our house that God had arranged for us to live in. Following her voice from the utility room into the back hall to turn the door and find her there, sitting at the table.
In the dream, she looks up but doesn’t look at me, as if there will be plenty of time to look at me for ever now that we’re reunited, and anyway she’s doing something, mending a shirt or wetting a cloth to wipe away a smudge on a tiny little trouser leg. She’s listening to something on the radio that I can’t quite make out, but which she is enjoying because she’s smiling, or perhaps humming along. They get BBC Radio Ulster in heaven. Of course they do. She, too, is hard to make out, since she is there and not there, as if seen through a fluttering sheet, and the room is swimming with the disjointed, various noise of dreams: the radio and the dishwasher; the dog just below us, where hot pipes warm the cold floor under our kitchen table. I can hear slow breathing, from the dog not my mother, and the light scrape of nails on linoleum. There might be other people in the room, but I can’t see them through the fluttering sheet, and in any case they’re not taking much notice of her. She just is, and I can tell she’s in no hurry, because she’s so busy with what she’s doing. She’s humming and mending and fiddling with ordinary things. She’s not bestowed with cosmic grace and ready to give me koans from the afterlife. She’s reading a magazine, or putting some Mass cards in a box, or sticking her tongue out ever so slightly as she threads a needle. She’s doing the sorts of things that living people, living mammies, do.
Sometimes the dream ends with me deciding to go to some other room and fetch her something, something to get her attention, something that will make her remember me. The second I leave, the second even that I look away, she’s gone. I’ve torn my mother from myself by taking my eye off her. By taking her for granted, again. I threw her away, and it’s my fault. Other times, dream logic is suspended and I’m fully aware of the precariousness of my situation. I must steadfastly keep her in sight without breaking concentration. And these times, something else, some ineffable paralysis, still manages to get in the way. I’m not scared, I know that everything is fine, but I also know that she’s dead, and this moment is finite. I know and I don’t know. As I come closer it’s as if the sheet in front of my face flutters even more frantically, as if my brain is buffering from the emotional load of gazing at her head-on. My mother is no longer someone I can look at directly, but peripherally only, like the sun, or one of those fences that have backward slats so you can only see through into the garden beyond if you’re walking past quite quickly.
From what I can see of her, she’s happy, and I can tell that getting to see me again is a kindness to her. She speaks, but the things she says are too quiet for me to hear above the radio and the dog and the dishwasher. I strain my ears and try to focus on her lips, but I can’t hear her properly and I can’t go to her, I can’t be with her, because there’s something holding me back, as if I’m wading, shin-height, through fruitcake mix. I decide I don’t even need to hear her speak; I just want to reach her so I can be held, and so I can tell her I wish she was back, whether she hears me or not, whether she’s real or not; I want to tell her that I’m sad and I don’t understand, and that none of this makes any sense. I want to tell her how sad we all are, and how sad it makes each of us to know how sad the rest of us are. We don’t know what to do, and we don’t even know if we’re making each other worse.
But I also don’t want to say a thing, I don’t want her to be sad, I don’t even want her to know that she’s dead and how sad that makes me. I just want her to hold me in the normal way of living people. The sheet is fluttering, and the noise continues, and my feet are moving so slowly, too slowly, I’m just trying to get to her, trying to make it to the point where she can pick me up, where I can sit on her lap and feel her close and know again how it is to be held by someone whose heart isn’t breaking.