Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir

Joe O'Reilly is a wonderful man, and a doting father, but he will often side with mechanical objects over his children. If it comes down to a dispute between one of us and a six-foot metal door panel clunking to the ground in a shower of sparks, he'll take the door's word for it every time.

Sometimes,’ croaked Margaret in a voice bent ragged from two days’ crying, ‘when God sees a particularly pretty flower, He’ll take it up from Earth, and put it in his own garden.’ Margaret held me in the sort of tight, worried grip usually reserved for heaving lambs up a ladder. As she clenched my hand and told me God had specially marked my mother for death, a tear-damp thumb traced small circles on my temple. She stroked my hair. It was nice to think that Mammy was so well-liked by God, since she was a massive fan. She went to all his gigs – Mass, prayer groups, marriage guidance meetings; and had all the action figures – small Infant of Prague statuettes, much larger Infant of Prague statuettes, little blue plastic flasks of holy water in the shape of God’s own Mammy herself.

Ann was as steady as rain and implacable as taxes. The kind of strong rooted Donegal woman you could imagine blithely tutting if her hair caught fire.

When you lost the energy to be sad, anger would tag in for a relief shift.

I sometimes wonder if my impulse to read everything, know everything and broadcast to everyone all of these wonderful everythings I knew, well into my teens, was all about beating the encroaching darkness of things forgotten, about proving that I would and could never let my guard down again.

Elmo showed my father’s softer side, since there’s no greater love than that between a taciturn rural Irishman and the dog he shouts at all day.

It was this story, delivered in Robert's signature south Derry monotone, that had my dad in literal and figurative stitches in the amputation ward. Despite being a Catholic who loved and admired Pope John Paul II, who had even sent two of his daughters to sing for the man, my dad found the whole thing unaccountably hilarious for exactly the same reason I did: so many horrific, depressing and awful things have happened in Northern Ireland in his lifetime that whatever joy can be taken from incidents in which no one was physically harmed will be seized with both hands. Contradictions like this - my extremely Catholic father laughing his head off in a hospital bed at news of Protestant slaughtermen mocking the pope's death - are hard to explain to people who aren't from Northern Ireland. There's a gallows humour that freaks them out, and they don't know how they should react.

It's an infuriating quirk of the brain that I remember my first taste of a banana sandwich but not the moment I was told Mammy had died.

After Crazy Prices merged with Stewart’s, another locally owned supermarket chain, it became West Side Stores. The name fascinated me throughout its tenure on the Strand Road, since it was never clear why it was called West Side Stores. It was known that the merger necessitated a fresh start with a new brand identity, one that didn’t favour either the Stewart’s or the Crazy Prices fraternity. One presumes Stewart’s, who seemed as though they had a bit more sense about them, rejected portmanteaus like Batshit Stewart’s or Big Stew’s Mentally Ill Bargain Bin out of hand.

Crazy Prices, as its name suggests, was a shop whose branding might seem slightly, or perhaps wildly, insensitive nowadays. Its titular conceit was that the store’s contents were so bafflingly discounted, so preposterously inexpensive, that they raised very real questions about the mental health of the proprietors. Their staff, and possibly their customers, were also implicated in this contagion of madness, branded throughout their locations with bulging eyes and outstretched tongues. These prices, they implied, were so dribblesomely inscrutable that even to glance in their direction posed a very real risk of derangement. These prices weren’t merely cheap, you understand, they were crazy, and any attempt to comprehend them was as pointless as considering the chasmic, gnawing depth of infinity itself. ‘You must understand,’ their day-glo ads seemed to say, ‘if you step inside, you may never recover from these prices.

Living under a cloud of bomb threats and extrajudicial murder doesn’t necessarily leave you in a state of constant fear. What can break your spirit is the deadening trudge of small humiliations and the steady expectation of petty inconvenience. It’s life being interrupted by a hundred things outside your control.

How is my mother’s passing even part of the same universe that gave me the simple pleasures of ice cream after swimming lessons in William Street baths, or scenting the sun cream on girls’ skin as they daubed polish on their outstretched, nonchalant nails.

It seems blasphemous that my mother's death even existed in the same reality as those moments that subsequently came to define my youth; taking the long way home from Nixon's Corner so I could listen to Kid A twice, or poring over the lurid covers of horror paperbacks in a newly discovered corner of Foyle Street library. How is my mother's passing even part of the same universe that gave me the simple pleasures of ice cream after swimming lessons in William Street baths, or scenting the sun cream on girls' skin as they daubed polish on their outstretched, nonchalant nails. My life wasn't over from that point on. I'd laugh and cry and scream about borrowed jumpers, school fights, bomb scares, playing Zelda, teenage bands, primary-school crushes and yet more ice cream after yet more swimming lessons. I'd just be doing it without her. To some extent, I'd be doing it without a memory of her. The most dramatic moment of my life wasn't scored by wailing sirens, weeping angels or sad little ukuleles, nimbly plucked on lonely hillsides. Mammy's death was mostly signalled by tea, sandwiches, and an odd little boy in corduroy trousers, announcing it with a smile across his face.

In many ways, my father's grief hit me harder than anything else. It would be from the wreckage of this moment that he would reassemble the universe for us.