Many of you will know what it is like to wake
up the morning after a serious drinking session, when the only thought in your
head is ‘Death please come and take me now.’
I couldn’t believe the pillows in Ireland could be so vicious. In your own home, if you wake up with a
hangover, you know that you can take your time, usually you have to because the
water is too loud, and when you get downstairs help yourself to some comfort
food. Normally I would go for liquid and
sugar, Irn Bru for those of you not yet professional drinkers, followed by tomatoes.
Of course at the back of your head is the suggestion that a little nip of vodka
will straighten you out. I’ve never done
that, had the urge to many times, but never actually taken the hair of the dog,
I think. It didn’t matter anyway as we were
in mother number one’s house and she didn’t have any alcohol. She had made toast, which was sort of
miraculous, as not only did she not have any alcohol she didn’t have any bread either.
Don’t ask me how or even why but I had brought home
some garlic bread from the previous evening, all neatly and nicely wrapped in
tin foil. Mother number one correctly identified
this as a bread related product and when hearing us getting up had put it in
the oven to heat it up. Not only had she
heated it up but she had dried it out, so rather than the satisfaction of soft,
quiet and easy to chew, comfort food I was faced with a cup of tea and lumps of
dried out garlic bread. It was like
eating supersized croutons. The noise
was horrendous and the overall sensation somewhat strange. I was tempted to put some strawberry jam on
my garlic croutons but decided that might be a culinary step too far even for
my advanced palate. Funny how you pride
yourself on never having the hair of the dog but how you would keep checking
your watch, seeing how long it was before they opened so that you could get a
quick half pint of shandy down your neck to help you see the day through.
That day we decided to shoot up and see Nora in
Glenarm, mother number one decided to stay in Warrenpoint, which was fine with
us. I had so much that I wanted to show
Irene we would need to be pretty mobile and truthfully mother number one wasn’t
really up to it. I stuck with the main
roads until I reached the outskirts of Larne and then took to the back roads. It must have been a good twenty five years
since I had been on these roads but I seemed to remember them as if I had only
been on them the previous day. Rather than come in to Glenarm along the coast
road, which is a heavenly drive in itself, I wanted to come in from the mountainside
so that I could show Irene the family grave.
It is at a very remote location known as Feystown, above Glenarm, a very
wild and bleak place, where I spent many Sunday afternoons cleaning and tidying
graves.
I’m not sure why I showed such respect to these
graves, it was as if I understood the concept of family and the
responsibilities it brought, but there was no reciprocation, the family didn’t want
to know me, and who could blame them. I
showed Irene the grave and realised that there was a week’s work there so I
left it to the elements and drove down in to Glenarm. I know my world can be a strange place at
times but as I came past the forest entrance I saw myself already parked
outside the house in Glenarm. I had a
large, green, automatic Ford Mondeo and that’s what was sitting outside the
house. I pulled up behind it and wondered
who on earth could have such good taste, or make dolls houses?
The Americans had landed, well Auntie Claire
and Uncle Ashton. Claire was a surgeon
and Ashton some sort of cancer research expert.
Nora was sat sitting in the dining room by the fire, where she always sat. We sat with her and I noticed the collection
of empty gin bottles under her chair.
Nora had been in medicine too and had also been in the British Army
during the war, she seemed to be the only member of the family who knew about
real life and who you could have a proper conversation with. Nora was always straight to the point and
told me to get in to the kitchen and make a cup of tea. Like the rest of the house the kitchen hadn’t
changed and I don’t mean in the thirty or forty years that I had known it, I mean
since they had moved in to the house.
The sink, table and fittings were so old they were coming back in to
fashion.
I felt so comfortable standing there waiting
for the kettle to boil. I could still see
Nora out of the corner of my eye and wondered why she was calling Irene
over. A chill went through me when I
heard Nora ask Irene, while pointing at me, “Who’s that in there?” The four of us went in to the front room, leaving
Nora alone and it was explained to me that she would be moving in to a home
soon so that she could receive the care and attention she needed. I had to go, I had to get out of there, I was
so embarrassed that I should have been home, I should have been there helping
to look after Nora and Billie, but I wasn’t wanted. It was a confusing time for me. Mother number one always told a story about
Claire to me, saying that on our birthday, if you remember my sister Carol and
myself shared the same birthday, even through Carol was five years older than
me and came from a different biological family.
Irene thinks that we were bought on the same day and that the day we consider
to be our birthday is nothing of the sort.
We were in Glenarm and Claire came in, it was
our birthday and she made a big fuss of presenting Carol with a birthday
present but ignoring me. Since that day,
or being reminded of it, I knew Claire had no time for me. So as we made our excuses and began to leave,
I was surprised to have Claire present me with a gift. Now I know that you lot are a bunch of old
romantics, otherwise why would you be reading this? And you are probably thinking when I mention
present, a nice box, wrapped in gift paper with ribbons and a card. It was more like she grabbed a couple of sheets
of newspaper and took two ornaments off the mantelpiece, wrapped them in the
newspaper and handed it to me. But it
was the way she handed it to me, as if it were a holy relic, it wasn’t, it was
a pair of Staffordshire figurines, the fisherman and his wife. We set them on the rear seat of the car and
drove off. Irene was excited as it was
obvious that they were antiques but to me they were a pair of figures that I
had known all my life and all I wanted to do was set them on a shelf so that we
could spend the remainder of our life together.
Mother number one was as interested in the figurines
as Irene, I just felt sad as I knew that both Nora and Billie were on their way
out and for some reason these people were keeping me away from what I saw as my
duty. Mother number one then asked me if
I could help her make some more room in one of the bedrooms upstairs. I went up with her and she pointed at all the
books, asking if I could take them away, if I wanted them, or take them to the
town dump. I had always thought that I
was a switched on type of guy, that I hadn’t allowed myself to put any real
worth on to possessions. It was the old
rule of being able to carry whatever was important, or necessary, to you and
move on. Suddenly I was faced with a
dilemma. There were hundreds of books
and each one was hugely important to me, these were my religious relics.
Many were from around the turn of the century
and had been presented as prizes for academic achievement through the school
years. Each book would have been signed
and awarded to one member of the family usually by the Earl of Antrim. The oldest book was the History of the Irish
Insurrection of 1798, by Edward Hay, published in 1862. A small, green, book with a curve on the hard
back cover where, I think, some rodents had been chewing on it. Apart from the stories and information
contained in the books we had this weird family tradition of placing photographs
and letters in books. I have no idea why
we did it, and I still do, but it does provide some nice surprises now and again
when flicking through books. Irene wasn’t
impressed as she began to question where I was going to store these books.
It was interesting to see the difference
between Irene and myself concerning the books, to her they were things, books,
nothing more or less than something that might have to be dusted once a month. To me they were connections stretching back
hundreds of years, what was even more important was the personal connection between
the family members who had owned the books before me. What I could never get my head around was the
fact that I cared so much about these connections despite the fact that these
people didn’t want to know me, perhaps one of you lot, the Illuminati, will be
clever enough to work it out. Although I
have to say that there were certain members of the family I didn’t want to associate
with. Mother number one informed us that Sunday lunch would be late, mid-afternoon,
so that Seamus the pervert priest could come and join us. Sadly something happened, a slurry trailer jack-knifed
at high speed on the main Dublin road so we would have to leave early, and miss
Seamus, imagine that. We lunched at the actual
battle of the Boyne battle site. I said
it was out of respect for auntie Billie but in reality it was because by the river
down there it is such a beautiful spot and I needed to sit and drink it all in,
for I knew I was slowly losing Ireland and all my connections.
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