by Des Bishop
My mother knew about all this and had met Valerie. They should have never got married in the first place. There was a lot of booze involved in their relationship, and Valerie died of alcoholism in the 1990s. Her sister had called our house to let my dad know when she died. Her parents were Irish and my father had gotten along very well with them.
We had no idea about this. Not even at the end, when I thought my dad had got everything off his chest, did he tell us about this. I would like to think that this was not really on his mind, but he repeated to my mother in those final weeks what they had agreed throughout their whole life, that even after he died he did not want his boys to know that he had once been married and had got a divorce. I don’t know why he did not want us to know. My dad was funny like that sometimes, and would worry about things that were really quite trivial.
I guess my mother decided to tell me after the letter and also because I had been trying to piece together parts of my dad’s story that were hard to figure out based on the fragmented timelines and his desire to embellish everything. I don’t think she felt bad about telling me. I thought it was funny that even in the end when my dad had called his musical Secrets he would still hold on to one more. And even though he wrote a song called ‘Redeem Me’, he still felt a little shame about something.
I have spoken to Vass since I received that letter and he has a razor-sharp memory for his age. He not only remembers Valerie well but recalls the night they had the official opening of the beauty salon. He told me it was a very exciting affair and many celebrities of the time were there. He told me Valerie was really into being part of the trendy London scene of that time, that she was quite a pushy woman and he was not surprised to find out that my dad lost out over the shop. ‘I am not surprised, being who she was, that she ran business rings around him,’ he said.
It all makes sense, because I think my dad was quite sore all his life about getting screwed out of that business. It explains why he would get irrationally annoyed when talking about what could have been. I don’t know all the details, but I assume he must have put quite a lot of what he had made up until that point into the shop, and it all disappeared. That is quite an understandable thing to find difficult to get over.
My mother also told me that she was pretty sure that Valerie ended up having an affair with the manager of the salon and that is why they broke up before he went to New York. It may be one of the motivations for why he left. I found out all of this after he died, so I will never know.
Trying to piece together my dad’s story has been sort of like trying to figure out a password. Trying to do it justice has been like doing sudoku. When you think you finally have a handle on what is real and what is a rewrite, you find out another massive piece of drama. For instance, another thing we discovered in the last few months of my dad’s life was that his father Stanley was born out of wedlock and never knew his father. I mention this because my father lived his whole life believing his grandfather died in the Battle of the Somme. He also grew up believing that Bishop was his grandfather’s name, whereas it was actually his grandmother’s name. It is amazing how such massive bits of information that are so intimately connected to you can be kept from you for so long. Not that it was a terrible deception, but it was a final injustice in a traumatic family story. These are big revelations. This story is epic. Some might not even believe all this happened to one man. The joke of it all is, I used to make fun of him for trying to write the great epic musical spanning three generations. I used to call him Leon Uris with a banjo. I can’t see why he did not look to his own life, because what is more epic than the many lives he had and the dramas he survived?
45
JOURNAL, 29 MAY 2011. FLUSHING, QUEENS
Coming home for the first time since my dad’s funeral has been hard. I rented a car for this trip because I was going to head out to Westhampton to finish off this very book I am writing right now. So I was on my own, driving down Union Turnpike towards 188th Street. It was such a familiar journey home from JFK airport. It was the sights of coming home from Ireland I was looking at. Driving in that direction on Union Turnpike always meant I was just about to see my brothers and my father again. It was always my mother driving.
I had to drive past the chemo place. I stared at it in the late May heat and I could see the piles of dirty snow on the kerb at the bus stop and me holding my dad’s hand as he navigated through a gap and waddled to the doorway.
We had three dogs in our lives, but two of them had a very strong presence. The first was Scruffy (in the picture above) and he was the most loving dog ever. Our second dog was Mistress and she was wild, but she matured into the most dynamic animal. She barked a lot, though. Mistress used to bark like crazy when she realized I was home. She would jump all over me and then I would go and hug Scruffy, who was more like my brother than a dog.
Scruffy died after we put him to sleep in the Easter of 1992. He had gotten very old and we decided to do it as a family while I was back from school. We stayed in the room while the injection was administered and I will never forget the difference between his body only seconds before and his lifeless head. He was gone immediately and I found it very profound. It was my first real encounter with death.
Mistress lived on for years after that and did not die until a few years ago. I happened to be home then also, as she seemed to be dying before our eyes. The night before we had her put down she was in so much pain that every time she fell asleep she would jerk awake from the pain of her body lying down. I slid my body in between her legs so that when she fell asleep she would not drop and the pain in her hips would ease. That night she slept on me for ages, and I fell asleep myself. When she woke up she kept going into corners and I later read that was a sign she was ready to die.
She was so light, I carried her to the vet with my dad that morning. I could not wait anymore as I had spent much of the night pondering a way to end her misery myself, but I did not know how to do it. She was so calm as I held her and I could feel that she had given up. She was really only hair and bones. She weighed twenty-six pounds and was riddled with cancer.
The vet told us we were doing the right thing, and once again I stayed with her as she said goodbye. My brother Michael John was angry with me because I did not wait for him to be there, but he was working and both myself and my dad felt we had to do it there and then.
It was one of the saddest things to come home that first time from Ireland after that and not hear the barks. It was terrible not to be welcomed home by crazy Mistress and be covered in her white hair. It almost seemed strange that the first thing I had to do when I came home was not to wipe dog hair off my jeans. I still hear her bark every time I come home, despite all the years that have passed.
I thought of her bark when I got home a few days ago. I knew that for the first time I was not going to walk into the living room and see my dad get up from his chair and hug me. I knew I was not going to go up to the room, as had been my more recent habit, and see how he was doing. It was a grief I have never known before.
Before I walked into the house on my own I listened because it was that quiet time of the day. The Aer Lingus flight gets you in so that you get back to the house around two o’clock in the afternoon. There was no one around and it was quiet. The leaves were back on the trees and the late spring brightness had returned to what was barren and grey when I had left, a few months before. I could hear the leaves from the same trees that had soothed me my whole life and I could see the clothes hanging in the same empty alleyways.
Acknowledgements
There have many people involved in the journey of telling my dad’s story. I would like to thank my editor Patricia Deevy, Michael McLoughlin and all in Penguin for making this happen, and Faith O’Grady for always asking me when I was going to write a book. Richard and all in Lisa Richards and all at Off the Kerb for the UK tour, Pat Comer for making an awesome documentary, Mick Burke for keeping the live show g
oing, Cathal Murray for coming along for the ride, Conal Morrison for directing the live show. Big thanks to Aunt Mary, Uncle Jack and Aunt Peg for sharing their lives too, and my Aunt Joan in particular. Thanks to the fourteen other grandkids of Flushing. Always thanks to the Gibneys for being a home away from home. Pete Venetis for filming in church. Thanks to all at the Assembly Rooms for making my dad feel like a star, Flee, Eddie, Joss, Aoife, Kelan, Ruth and Liz for putting Edinburgh together. Thanks to the Bexhill Observer, Vass Anderson, Terry Maidment (Come on, the Blues!). Thanks to all my cousins in Midleton for all the stories. Ed Torres for the funeral especially, Jim Kearney for being my dad’s best friend. Thanks to Bill and Bob for all the advice. Thanks to Jason Byrne, John Bishop, Maeve Higgins, Dave O’Doherty, Shappi Korsandi, Michael Mee, Adam Hilils and all the comedians who championed the live show and Steve Bennett for the advising review and Richard Bacon for his public praise. Also Bec And Aillie for helping me through the early shows in Oz. Thanks to Brian Quinn for the graphics. Mugsy for being Black Bob. Thanks to Kieran and Conor who will one day be old enough to think it’s cool to be thanked. Thanks to Jenny Lee Masterson for being so chilled in the chaos. David Simon for the escape. Willy and PJ and all the neighbours who were so awesome with the food and the well-wishing. Thanks to all the Westhampton crew. Thanks to Tom Brick, and to the Sullivans I say football is being discussed in the sky. To Ian Dorgan and Pat Kiernan for the Paradise. Thanks to little Jenny for her card. Thanks to Mary Morrogh for being my personal cancer adviser and Nicky for texting me her number every time I lost it. Finally, to Dr Fulman and all at Queens medical for buying us some time. Sweet!
* Central Applications Office – the Irish clearing organization for third-level education courses
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First published 2011
Copyright © Des Bishop, 2011
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