by Cathal Kelly
What I really needed was space of my own.
If you are cut a certain way, most of your childhood is spent in search of a corner of the world you can have to yourself. When I was young, children were never alone at home. We’d eat with other people, watch TV with them, sleep with them. The only time we had to ourselves was in the bathroom, which is why mothers were always yelling at us through the door to get out of there. The assumption is that a child on his own is in the process of killing himself by accident.
In order for us to be alone, we had to go outside. Where it was often cold or hot, and occasionally rained. You know who spends most of their time outside? Hobos. That’s what children used to be—unwilling vagrants.
Some friends and I constructed a fort in the midst of a thicket on the grounds of a palliative-care hospital a few blocks from our house. “Constructed” is a bit ambitious. We’d wedged ourselves in there one day, found a hollow at the centre of a large bush and dug the floor down a foot. It was cramped and filthy. You couldn’t stand up. With three of us in there, there was nothing to do but sit cross-legged in a tight circle staring at each other.
But we went there often. After a while, we stopped going together. It became a sort of pied-à-terre for the grade-school set north of St. Johns Road. It was a place to unwind. Read Spider-Man. Have a nap. Through gaps in the foliage, watch patients being pushed around the lawn in wheelchairs.
If another friend was in there when you arrived, he’d leave. We understood that none of us had any personal space at home and it was rude to bogart the fort all to yourself. Solitude was something we could share evenly.
We lived in a tight, two-bedroom bungalow. My brother and I shared quarters in a room so small you had to climb over one bed to get to the other. I tried to institute the same sharing economy that operated at the fort. At certain times, he could be in the room alone, and at others it would just be me. He wouldn’t go for that.
That room became an occupied space, with a thin DMZ down the middle. Most of our fights had to do with something of his touching something of mine. He thought it was unfair that in order to enter and exit the room I had to cross over his territory. My mother suggested we tape a border onto the floor of the room, with an understanding that all crossings of the frontier would be negotiated beforehand. That led to further civil unrest and a deeper retrenching of our positions. Peace talks ended in punch-ups. Neither of us would leave the bedroom, not even to watch television in the living room. It was principled masochism.
The only time my brother was not in that room was on Saturday mornings. He had some class or lesson or swimming or I don’t know what it was to go to. That was my special time. I’d close the door and rearrange my stuff. I couldn’t just lie there. My mother had a deep aversion to sloth. She hated naps and would not allow one to take place in her presence. Woe to you if she got home at 6 p.m. and found you dozing on the couch. There would be consequences.
She had a theory that no one could sleep if both their feet were planted on the ground. She would leave you like that in the morning—half-in, half-out, in a tortured yoga pose—lest you drift off and miss the bell. We learned to sleep with our legs hanging off the side of a bed, soles squarely on the ground. Eventually, I could do it for hours. It was a hard-won skill that has not repaid the effort it took to learn.
My mother would sometimes say, “If you want to sleep, you can do it in the yard.”
She caught me out there once, spread-eagled and face down in the grass. After that, the yard was no longer available as a sleeping option.
Buried deep in our lizard brain, each of us has a phrase we remember our mothers saying that caused instant panic. If you think of it now, it still has that power. In my case, it was, “Are you sleeping in there?”
There was also the way she said my name in the morning when she was losing her temper because I wasn’t yet up. She had a particular way of emphasizing the first syllable—“CA-thal? CA-thal?? CA-thal??!”—that allowed me to gauge just how bad it was getting.
My name wasn’t her idea. It was my father’s. He was less “Irish” than my mother, in the sense that his family moved to Canada when he was nine years old. He didn’t have the accent. He couldn’t speak the Irish language. My mother arrived in her mid-twenties and had both of those advantages. My father was always trying to close the authenticity gap that separated them. He made a big show of listening to Irish music and going to Irish events and hanging around at the Irish Centre. Giving me a weird, non-phonetic, unpronounceable name was part of his effort at ethnic advertising. My mother let him have the first kid. When he tried slapping the name Pádraig on my brother, she revolted.
I hated my name as a child because it often made me the excruciating centre of attention. Teachers were especially poor at understanding that the way to figure out how to say a kid’s name is by taking him/her to the side and asking, not standing up in front of the class and turning it around in their mouths like they were being asked to speak Klingon.
When I changed high schools, the teacher in my first class asked me to get up and tell everyone what it was like to live in Ireland. I told him I was Canadian. He began to argue with me about it.
“But you told me you were from Ireland.”
I had done no such thing. He’d asked where my name was from, and I said, “It’s Irish.”
“Why would you tell me that if it’s not true?”
“I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. You told me that.”
Oh, for the love of God.
When I think of my name now, it creates a thought chain—the word, the way my mother said the word, trying to sleep as she said the word, lying in bed, knowing I could not be asleep, reading.
Reading was the way I walled in my Saturday morning castle. My mother couldn’t argue with that. What was she going to say—“Stop being so lazy. Go into the living room and watch TV”? I didn’t read because I liked reading. I read because I wanted to be left alone.
Someone had given me a Hardy Boys novel that looked short and simple. One day, I took it into bed and lay there with it. In the movie of my life, a string section would launch as I opened to the first page. Those books were as much a formula as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They were always the same. Every plot had the same twists, in the same order, on the same beats.
These kids had cracked, like, two dozen jewellery heists and a couple of murders, and yet in the middle of every second act, no one in town would believe they were telling the truth.
“The body’s hidden in the old copper mineshaft. I saw Mr. Jenkins put it there.”
“I don’t know, Frank. Sounds pretty crazy to me. Do you have any proof?”
“Well, there are those hundreds of career criminals Joe and I put into prison in our spare time between 4-H and football practice. We stand on our record as the most successful and prolific detectives in human history.”
“I see your point, but still…”
That was what I liked about the Hardy Boys—you knew exactly what you were getting. There was a comfort in that.
The allowance that had once gone entirely to comics was being diverted to the Hardy Boys. I bought a new one each week. There are a kajillion of them and I could read an entire adventure in a single morning. Start it around eight, get to the end around noon.
That’s something you could be proud of. You’d finished a book. You could devote a whole lifetime to getting through the Hardy Boys canon and, like raking a Zen garden, it would not be a wasted life.
All of us hope that at some early point in our lives, we will find the thing we are meant to do. Paleontology or paddle boarding or nuclear physics. In the best-case scenario, it’s something we can eventually do for a living. At the least, it should be something you aren’t ashamed to tell people about at parties—“Serial killing, that’s my passion. I work as a clown on the weekends, and that’s great. The kids and all. But serial killing’s where my heart’s at.”
Many people
will be disappointed on this score. They can do all sorts of things, have jobs and friends, are fully functional, but they don’t have a thing that they are driven to do.
I was lucky. I found my thing early. It’s reading in bed. Not just reading, but reading in bed. Admittedly, it’s just barely an activity. If you called it slothful, I would find it hard to argue. But I have spent more time doing that than anything else. It gives me an abiding pleasure that has never flagged.
Long before I went out into the world, books had given me some idea of how it worked. I consumed them. I’ve read thousands. They introduced me to a cross-section of human experience. They gave me the foundation upon which to construct an identity. If you read widely and with an open heart, you have been tutored by the most searching minds in human history—either the writers themselves or the people they are writing about.
You will never know everything about how this all works and what it all means, but if you read, you can get close.
A room of my own, a bed and a book. That’s all I need now and all I craved as a child.
The land squabble with my brother was solved, Solomonlike, when my mother bought us a bunkbed. By the ancient and immutable rights of first-born, I should have got the top bunk. But my brother wheedled it out of her.
It was a pyrrhic victory. Now if he wanted to be in the room, he had to be constantly climbing up and down a ladder. He abandoned his perch soon after and it feels as if I never really saw him again. I was always in the bedroom, and he was always somewhere else.
I had a little spotlight in there and would spend half the nights reading. I remember being tucked into that burrow with Stephen King’s The Shining and scaring myself so badly that I had to take the book and put it another room.
My memory for timelines and events has always been poor, but if you hand me a book, I can recall where I was when I read it, what I was doing, how things were going and how I felt. Books and the rooms I read them in are the key signposts of my life. They have been my profoundest consolation.
Years ago, I went to see the Italian author Umberto Eco in conversation. He told a story about his library, which contained ten thousand volumes. Someone had visited his house and marvelled at the number of books. They asked if he’d read all of them, the implication being that someone who’d done that was a person of immense accomplishment. To the visitor, the library was a trophy, the visible evidence of learning.
“Of course I haven’t read them all,” Eco said he’d told the man. “If I had, why would I keep them?”
That line hit me like a lightning bolt. That was the purpose of life.
Not accumulating knowledge, or rounding out an area of expertise or building a collection.
But recognizing that for some people who come to it early and without being forced, life is a long search for the next great book.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS
NO ONE IN MY FAMILY WAS INTERESTING, at least not in any showy way. They hadn’t been anywhere or done anything notable. They were carpenters, miners, tellers and construction workers. They didn’t vacation overseas or go to the theatre. Beyond the occasional alcoholic, they had no compulsions or intense interests. Though now in the city, they all tended toward the melancholic rhythm of rural life.
“Did you hear that your man Michael lost his job?”
“Did he now?”
“Sure, he did.”
“And what happened there?”
“Couldn’t say. Bad luck, I suppose.”
“Well, God bless him. I’m sure he’ll set himself right soon enough.”
There was a lot of that in the kitchen of a Sunday night. It wasn’t exactly the Algonquin Table.
We were—and I say this with no small amount of little-guy pride—peasants. My family was one generation removed from serfdom. We’ve come a ways, but it’s still going to take a few iterations to find even a little hint of cosmopolitanism.
There was one person in my extended family who had an adventurous spirit—my mother’s elder sister, Sheila. Sheila was the only one of my mother’s or father’s siblings who didn’t emigrate from Ireland (its own sort of adventure, I suppose, but one taken with more fear than joy). That alone made her exotic to me. The one who wouldn’t give in. The one who stayed.
Like all the sisters, Sheila was small and wiry. She had a way of looking through you and saying things she oughtn’t. She treated children as she did adults—with scorn. Most people disappointed her in their aimlessness and lack of conviction.
She’d had a good job as a civil servant in Dublin, but left it to follow her passion—alternative medicine. She was a hippie without the clothes or calm. She ate macrobiotically—as best I could tell, this meant nothing but a wretched brown rice stew that seemed to be constantly cooking. It smelled awful and would stink up the house for days.
You will never again be as politically open as you are in that gestational period between learning to read and having to first pay taxes, but even I thought Sheila was a bit out there. There was a lot of ranting about the state of the world and retreating to the country for meditation. (It has always struck me that the people who are most enthusiastic about meditation feel the need to constantly talk about it, which is rather contrary to the point.)
On one occasion, Sheila offered to demonstrate a massage technique she’d picked up somewhere. This involved badgering me to get down on the floor of our kitchen while she walked on my back. She didn’t weigh much more than a child, but I could feel my ribs cracking with each step.
This did not dissuade her in the least as the pain was meant to release tension. The situation devolved from there. She clutched my back like a deranged chimpanzee as I rolled around screaming for mercy. It is one of the very few times I can remember my mother really laughing. She rocked back and forth so hard that she slipped off her chair, crying at the sight of it.
When I started to shriek, “GET HER OFF OF ME!” my mother laughed harder.
From then on, I made sure to keep Sheila in front of me at all times.
Sheila had remained in Ireland to take care of her own mother. By all accounts, my grandmother was a handful. Well into her thirties, she’d been given to my grandfather (neither of them particularly willing) in an arranged marriage so that the farm her family owned could be passed on.
It wasn’t a good match. My grandfather had wanted to be a teacher. Now he was a farmer, and not much good at it. In large part, he rented the land out to people better suited to make money from it.
My mother’s parents had five children—the first, a daughter, died young of disease—and lived together in a wary truce. She was very much the boss of him and he spent a lot of time out in the fields pretending to work but actually just hiding from his wife. My mother likes to tell a story about her mother finding her father tucked up against a stone wall, reading when he was supposed to be tilling, and beating him with a broom for his laziness.
My mother took me to meet her once. She wasn’t impressed by me. She sat there on the stool by the fireplace in a long, formless black smock, like a priest’s habit, legs splayed, hands propped on knees, regarding me without much interest. When my mother tried to push me toward her, I backed away instinctively and nearly into the fire. My sweater briefly lit up.
“Not too clever, is he?” my grandmother said.
I spent the rest of that visit out in the front yard chasing chickens. There was another boy about my age living down the road (it was a two-house town). His name was Bob. His only hobby was taking a bicycle up to the top of the hill that led down to his family’s stucco cottage, riding it as fast as he could down the slope, slamming it into the front wall of his house, meticulously repairing the damage and starting the process over again.
Country life. It’s not for me.
My grandmother had been particularly hard on Sheila, and in the unfair way of things, it was Sheila who ended up taking care of her as she lay dying. When she passed and it came time to divide up the meagre possessions, Sheila was
jobbed out of her inheritance. This set the entire family to fighting. Eventually, the home place was sold to an American hobbyist looking to get back to his roots. The cottage was levelled. How long had it been there? A hundred years? More? Nothing ever stays the same.
She’d whip over to Canada from time to time to preach at us at the highest possible volume. She had her opinions and was one of those people who assumed at the outset that you disagreed with them. Whether you did or not was immaterial. What Sheila wanted was the opportunity to hector you about her ideas. She was forever talking.
We had a great many enjoyable interactions that involved her jabbing a finger at me while I stood there woodenly having no idea what she was on about. Genetically engineered crops or the evils of the medical—industrial complex. She would’ve made a wonderful cadre during the Cultural Revolution. This was someone who could see you burned for your sins and feel forever that it was the right thing to do.
After quitting the good government job, she took work as a maid in Boston, where she studied something in the field we might now call “wellness.” She was my first model of a person living exactly as they wanted to—which is perhaps why I am leery of the concept. I’d eventually decide it’s better to throw yourself in life’s river and let the current take you where it will, with minor course corrections achieved through panicked flailing.
She was the closest we ever came in my family to a Marlon Brando figure—someone stitched together from their passions. Someone uncivil and magnetic.
The one tangible thing I have remaining of Sheila is a book.
On one of her swannings through town, she gave me a single bound copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I may have been nine or ten at the time. I’d never owned a volume that was so heavy. That was what struck me first. The thing was huge—1,077 pages of tight script on rice paper. It was my first experience of being daunted by literature.
I asked what it was about.
“Just read it,” Sheila said.
