by Hazel Hayes
English was Donal’s favourite subject and it quickly became mine too. Prose and plays and poetry allowed me to escape my own mind and live momentarily in someone else’s. Some of the writers we studied were dark and depressed – like poor old Sylvia Plath, who I, of course, fell instantly in love with – but at least it was their depression and not mine; I could close the book whenever I wanted, and leave it there between the pages.
Once a month, we were tasked with writing an essay based on a random phrase or theme, and I would jump at the chance to write a story of my own, retreating to my room and scribbling furiously for hours, stopping only to shake off a cramp from my wrist. Donal noticed this and signed me up for creative writing classes at the library. Every Wednesday afternoon, he’d stay late after his shift to walk me home, and on the way he’d give me a new book of short stories to read that week.
Saturday nights were for me and my mother; when the others went out to discos or pubs, we’d go to Dunne’s and get a pizza from the deli, then we’d come home and watch the same lineup of family-friendly game shows before switching off the telly and chatting for a while. I was sent to bed before midnight, but I’d stay awake until every one of my siblings was home safe, listening out for the familiar sound of their key in the door and the late-night search for leftover pizza in the fridge. When the house was full and quiet once again I could finally drift off. To this day I struggle to sleep when I’m expecting someone home; some part of me still won’t accept that people who leave will eventually come back.
On Sundays we’d all pile into Donal’s tiny, tinny excuse for a car and he’d drive us to Xtra-Vision to rent a movie. We could never agree on one, so inevitably we’d get an eclectic mix of movies – ranging from Pretty Woman to Terminator to Rear Window – and watch them all back to back.
Rituals and routine became a safety blanket of sorts, something I could wrap around myself when things felt uncertain, which they so often did. Awful as my father was, I had adapted to his presence – my little brain growing around the problem like roots around a rock – and after he left I had to adapt all over again. New neural pathways were thrown up like scaffolding, protecting my mind from collapse, only the scaffolding never came down; it never had a chance to.
My father’s brand of loud, violent chaos was replaced by something quieter and more insidious; a mother who meant well, who tried to give me everything, but failed to see that everything was too much. Boundaries fell away, the lines between parent and child blurred, and along with all her love and care and sacrifice I also got her fear and dread and a false belief that I was somehow responsible for fixing it all.
And so what should have been a temporary measure to cope in a crisis became my way of dealing with everyday life – stay on high alert, push your feelings down and always have a plan. To this day, I have a faulty security system running constantly in the background, sounding the alarm and sending me into fight or flight over every perceived threat. I live life with a proverbial tiger in the room, but I can somehow withstand its presence as long as everything else is in order.
Una understands. She knows why my wardrobe is colour coded and my kitchen is always clean. She knows why my books are arranged alphabetically, why I need to know the route before I start driving, why I panic when people don’t come home on time and why, if one domino falls, they all come crashing down. Rituals and routine. They keep the tiger at bay.
Una talks to me for the whole drive home, nattering on about her job and her family and their upcoming holiday to Greece. She’s passing the time, keeping me company.
I turn the corner onto my street and drive past the field where I spent most of my childhood, kicking half-flattened footballs around or sitting cross-legged in circles talking nonsense with friends. We came of age awkwardly, navigating puberty together as best we could – a gaggle of gangly-limbed, hormone-riddled kids with not a single clue between us. I had my first kiss in that field with a boy named Alan Murphy; all rigid tongues and teeth smashing noisily against one another. I shudder at the thought.
‘Whatever happened to the Murphys from down the street?’ I say, almost to myself.
‘Dunno,’ says Una. ‘Didn’t one of them get arrested for something?’
As I pull into the driveway, Una is listing all the things I might need – toothbrush, hairdryer, warm coat – and asking if I’ve packed them.
‘I’m leaving the country, Una. I’ve packed everything.’
‘Oh yeah,’ she says, as though that’s only now dawning on her. ‘Shit.’
I pull the handbrake and sit for a few minutes, looking in at the house. I can hear Una thinking on the other end of the line.
‘Listen,’ she says, finally, ‘go easy on Mam, will you? I know she’s a fucking basket case but …’ She trails off.
‘But what?’
‘You’re the baby,’ says Una. ‘You’re all she has left.’
‘Fucking hell, Una!’ I say, half laughing, trying to make a joke of it, but Una doesn’t laugh this time.
‘I mean it,’ she says. ‘She did her best.’
I stare ahead at the house, at the front door that she painted blue last winter – it wasn’t quite the shade she expected it to be – and the baskets of yellow flowers that she hung outside ‘to cheer the place up’. The curtains are half drawn in every room and the porch light is on. She always leaves it on till I get home.
‘I know,’ I say.
I step inside and sling my coat across the banister. I’m instantly met with the thick, sweet smell of stew on the boil, and a smile spreads across my face as I head straight to the kitchen where, sure enough, I find a massive pot of bubbling brown liquid on the stove. Thick chunks of carrots and celery and potatoes bob busily about on the surface. Next to the pot, on the counter, a loaf of crusty bread stands cooling.
Steam wafts up from inside the pot, and sticking out of the top I see the shiny silver handle of a ladle. Suddenly, the words of some half-remembered Seamus Heaney poem come swimming up at me. ‘Sunlight’, it was called, and in it Heaney compared love to a tarnished tinsmith’s scoop, discarded in a meal-bin. The poem had always reminded me of my grandmother, standing in a floury apron at the window or sitting by the fireplace, broad-lapped, with whitened nails and measling shins. I loved that poem – I loved the sound of it, the way the rich, warm words seemed to slide across my tongue like syrup.
I remember standing at the top of a muggy classroom in a dowdy grey uniform, reciting those words from a book of poetry clasped firmly between my hands. The poem began with a sunlit absence, but I had never understood that opening line until now. What could possibly be missing from this scene, I wondered, which seemed almost to overflow with light and love?
Standing here, now, I finally understand; the scene itself is absent. It has already come and gone and faded into memory. The moment exists outside of time, as though it’s happening in the present but is already part of the past, and it’s this absence that makes his love for that woman – who baked him scones on hot summer afternoons – so bittersweet and beautiful.
‘There you are,’ says my mother, appearing in the doorway behind me. ‘How was the beach?’
‘It was nice, thanks.’
But there’s so much more I want to say.
I want to tell her that I’ll miss it. I’ll miss the seagulls and the sand. I’ll miss Tayto crisps and Lyons tea and fish and chips from Macari’s and chicken-fillet baguettes from Spar. I’ll miss RTE and 2FM and hearing the accent everywhere I go. I’ll miss strangers talking to each other like old friends. And I’ll miss the DART – the Underground is too bloody reliable, it’s unnerving. I’ll miss places that mean something, like the Gaiety and the GPO. And that one Leaving Cert weekend in May when the weather is nice. I’ll miss people knowing what the fucking Leaving Cert is. And all our other vernacular, for that matter. I don’t want to call presses ‘cupboards’ or explain what an immersion is or ask someone to ‘stall the ball’ and have them look at me like I
’m mad. I’ll miss the odd cúpla focal, and the buskers on Grafton Street, and late-night sessions where someone suddenly gets a bodhrán out. I’ll miss my friends and my car and feeling like I belong. And I’ll miss you, Mam, I really will.
But I don’t say any of this. The words all stop and slip back down my throat and before I can find them again she’s scooping stew into two big bowls and ordering me to cut the bread into slices for dipping.
‘You didn’t have to go to all this trouble,’ I say, as I smear butter on the bread I’ve cut.
‘Of course I did!’ she says, affronted. ‘I couldn’t have my baby emigrating without one last bowl of her mammy’s stew, could I?’
‘Technically, it’s your mammy’s stew,’ I say, and she lets out an easy laugh. I place an arm around her shoulders and squeeze her into me. ‘But thanks all the same.’
‘Why don’t you take some with you?’ she asks.
‘I don’t think they allow that, Mam.’
‘Well, you’ll have to learn how to make it yourself, then,’ she says.
It’s business as usual tonight. We sit to the table together to eat, and talk about everything and nothing at all. My mother tells me she has three funerals to go to next week, two of which fall on the same day, and she can’t decide between them because she knew one of the deceased longer but she reckons the other one will be better craic. I tell her to go to the fun one.
After that I get filled in on the well-being of people I barely know, like Anne From Up the Way, whose bastard-of-a-husband just left her, and Poor Pat Rooney – her official full name – who’s ‘not long for this world now’.
‘That’ll be another funeral I have to go to,’ she says. ‘God forgive me.’
‘I don’t think God cares,’ I say, which is my standard response to any of her God-related comments now; rather than argue with her over God’s existence, I’ve settled for reminding her that if God does exist, he probably has bigger fish to fry.
After dinner we retire to the living room to watch The Late Late Show, me stretched out on the sofa and her in her plush, pink armchair. There’s a tribute to Thin Lizzy at the top of the show, and my mam tells me, not for the first or final time, that she used to know Phil Lynott back in the day. After that, she pours us both some wine, while a panel of priests and politicians argue about abortion.
‘Load of shite,’ says my mother. ‘What do a bunch of fucking men know about it?’ She pauses briefly then adds, ‘Nothing!’ as though that wasn’t implied.
She’s snoring by the final interview and I have to take the wine glass out of her hand and shake her gently awake.
‘Come on now,’ I say, placing the glass back on the table and sliding a coaster underneath it. ‘Time for bed.’
‘What did I miss?’ she asks, half opening her eyes.
‘Nothing. Just some author flogging her latest crappy novel.’
‘Right you be,’ she says, and I help her up out of her chair.
As we climb the stairs she mutters something that I don’t quite catch.
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
‘I said you’ll be on there one day.’
‘On where?’
I assume this is just sleepy, drunken nonsense.
‘The Late Late!’ she says, and I laugh.
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘You will,’ she insists, stopping at the top of the stairs, ‘flogging your latest crappy novel.’ Then she winks at me the way my nana used to and a smile wrinkles the corners of her eyes. I smile back, but suddenly her expression changes. She’s looking at something behind me and I turn to see the two suitcases just outside my bedroom door.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘goodnight so.’
‘Night,’ I say.
‘See you in the morning.’
‘Yeah.’
She hugs me, then goes quickly to her room.
I climb into bed, switch off the light and stare up at my ceiling. It’s covered in glow-in-the-dark stars; I stuck them there when I was twelve years old and every time my mother asks about painting over them I tell her that I can’t be bothered. The truth is I like the little constellations I created, and I’m scared that she’ll get rid of them when I’m gone.
It’s been a busy weekend. My college friends took me to Bray on Saturday – the same friends I told Niamh about – we sat on a cement wall by the strand, shouting and laughing over the loud, biting wind, and ignoring the dark sky, which threatened rain all day. In the evening we ate soggy bags of salt-drenched chips, absolutely soaked in vinegar, then headed to a nearby pub where round after round of drinks seemed to appear by magic on the table in front of me. The inevitable downpour came as we stumbled back to Bray station to catch the last DART home, and we spent the entire train journey damp and shivering but still laughing our heads off. At what, I haven’t the foggiest.
I wouldn’t mind, but I was already hung-over from Friday night; my colleagues had thrown me an impromptu going-away party after my last day at work, and we ended up in Charlie’s at 2 a.m., gobbling down SpiceBoxes, for our sins. My very drunk boss kept reminding me that there’d be a job here for me if I ever changed my mind and decided to come back.
By yesterday, I was thankful for the low-key Sunday dinner my mother put together for the family. I guzzled water all day and helped myself to seconds of both the roast dinner and dessert, collapsing on the sofa afterwards and unashamedly opening the top button on my jeans. All four of my nieces were there, and I spent the whole day pushing through the haze of my hangover, desperately trying to soak up every moment with them, like the last few rays of light before sunset.
As I hugged them goodbye, I held each child in my arms a fraction longer than usual, and I vowed to come back and see them soon, knowing on some level that time would trundle on without me, and I would miss entire chapters in their little lives.
There’s nothing like saying goodbye to a place to make you want to stay. Everywhere I look I see memories I’ve made, good and bad, and it hurts. I feel as though I’ve been afflicted by some rare disease that renders me incapable of seeing an object, place or person for what it is right now, and instead forces me to remember what it has been or wonder what it might become in my absence. It’s like a kind of pre-emptive grief. I told my therapist, Nadia, about it and she said that it was perfectly normal.
I’m sad to be leaving her, too; it’s been almost a year since I first turned up at her office, plagued by anxiety and unable to imagine ever feeling calm again. That version of myself feels distant now, and I haven’t had an episode in months.
I knew my time with Nadia was drawing to an end, but still, it was reassuring to know she was there if I needed her. Just like the horizon, I suppose. She’s encouraged me to see another therapist in London if I need to – and maybe I will – but for now I feel strong and steady, like my feet are bolted to the floor.
*
I’m still staring up at my ceiling when I’m suddenly struck by the sense that this is all a terrible mistake. I’m finally feeling good, I think, my body and brain are both well for once, and my family is here, and my friends, and career. So why uproot all that and move away? It’s madness. This is madness. I’m beginning to spiral when my phone rings loudly beside my head, snapping me out of it. I grab it as quickly as I can so as not to wake my mother.
‘Hello?’ I whisper.
‘Hello, angel,’ whispers Theo in his lovely London accent.
‘Why are you whispering?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ he laughs. ‘I can’t wait to see you tomorrow!’
His excitement is palpable and I feel guilty for not feeling the same.
‘Just called to check what time your flight gets in,’ says Theo.
‘Two o’clock,’ I say. ‘But that’s not really why you called is it?’
‘All right. You got me. I’m calling to make sure haven’t thrown a fit and talked yourself out of moving here.’
‘You know me so well.’
�
��It helps that you’re incredibly predictable.’
We both laugh but there’s an underlying nervousness in each one. I know he’s afraid that I won’t be able to leave. I’m afraid of the same thing.
‘I’m scared,’ I say, finally, as tears roll from the outer edges of my eyes and straight down into my ears. I turn onto my side so they can land on the pillow instead.
‘I know, angel. But you got scared before our first date too and that turned out okay.’
‘It was fine,’ I say, and he laughs again. Talking to him is so easy.
‘Look, of course you’re afraid. This is really big. You’re leaving home.’
‘You weren’t afraid when you moved here,’ I blubber.
‘No, but that was different. I knew it wasn’t permanent. And besides, I don’t feel the same way you do about home. To be totally honest, I’m a little jealous of it sometimes.’
‘Of what?’ I ask, wiping my face and sitting up to listen.
‘You love being Irish. You love telling people you’re Irish. When you’re over here, and we go out, your ears prick up every time you hear an Irish accent. And you smile at them and they smile back. Like you’re all automatically friends because you share this thing that nobody else gets. And the way you talk about … Wentford?’
‘Wexford?’
‘That’s the one. Where you used to go for the summer. It sounds like this magical, idyllic, made-up place. It’s the same when you talk about the beach, or the Liffey, or Temple Bar, for fuck’s sake. Which as we all know is a hive of scum and villainy.’
This makes me laugh.
‘You’re just so proud of where you come from,’ he continues. ‘I have no idea what that’s like. Most people don’t.’
There’s a long silence, which is interrupted by me noisily blowing my nose.
‘Oh shit,’ says Theo. ‘I’m not helping the case for you leaving home, am I?’
‘Not really, no.’
