Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

Text © Andrea Corr 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover photographs © Jill Ferry/Trevillion Images (drawer); authors own (additional photographs)

Photographs courtesy of the author except where indicated

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Andrea Corr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008321307

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008321321

Version: 2019-09-10

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Dedication

For Brett and especially for our two great blessings, Brett Jr and Jeanie. This baton passes to you.

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Dedication

6  Contents

7  Dear Reader

8  Barefoot Pilgrimage

9  Acknowledgements

10  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Dear Reader

I did not sit down to write a book. This (whatever this may be) began in the summer of 2017. Two years after Daddy had died. Eighteen years after Mum. An overwhelming need to write it all down because if I died now too, this strange, normal, family, human love story as it really was to me, might also die. And then would it have ever really been?

I did not sit down at all, nor consider a destination. I just obeyed the pictures as they came. The questions. The fleeting moments. The present into the past. The present because of the past and back again with a few human, mad-gene detours along the way.

The first story – in the chalet in Skerries – was truly the first door that opened. That dusty room on top of the mattresses, hiding and pretending I wasn’t there. It persisted and it seems to me now insisted I write it down. Not another one. Not a perhaps ‘better’ one. That memory was the first door. The first room. And it began this barefoot pilgrimage.

I walked fast to summon the pictures. I walked fast to slow them down. To still them ultimately and to merely describe, then, the room that I had returned to in my mind. A sympathetic, non-judgemental voyeur of my own life as I lived it growing up. A narrator with the blessing of hindsight. It is what it is and that is OK.

So many of the rooms I loved. They made me laugh out loud, remembering us as we were. That’s a lucky thing to say. Other rooms of course I was happy to write myself out of as swiftly as possible and scramble in the dark for another door.

I tried not to think of you, dear reader, for I am a singer with a debilitating desire to be liked. I tried not to censor it all, clean and smiling like a pop video.

It came to obsess me in a way, once I began. Images from the past were appearing all the time.

Blinding flashes of you startle me awake.

The outside tap on the wall. The musty earth smell of my cat’s paws. The hanging lamp over the oval glass table that you pull down and change the mood of the kitchen … But most of all, Mum.

In my first draft she was barely there. I thought I had forgotten her. That I had forgotten what it was like to be with her. To blissfully take her for granted. But she came back to me on these walks and I think after all that it may have been she that had me do this. Because this does not feel like it was ever a decision of mine and now that I am sitting down writing to you, I think I may understand this first story. I felt a pain in my heart when I heard her voice looking for me. All this time maybe it is me that has been looking for her. And this is Jean Bell’s engraving in the tree.

Barefoot Pilgrimage

Take a picture with words.

Click.

My tanned feet, their nails the colour of the pool before me, the sky above. My naked three-year-old (naked babies I dreamed of) singing while he makes muddy puddles (oh, Peppa Pig and her silly dada, the ‘expert’) with this rented garden’s hose, on this holiday in Portugal.

I’m on my third book and in my head I’m beginning my own story. Maybe I should. Maybe I can do more than the mere minutes of a song, and I can leave it to you to imagine the melody. Catchy pop with more hooks than a what was it …? But I warn you. My weakness is vanity. I want you to like me. So I must picture this unread.

Not all that I remember I am proud of, but when it comes to childhood, I think we can only wonder why, but never blame, and I think there’s a continuous thread that just might explain me, but I still don’t understand. And good God could we just stop analysing ourselves. First-world vocation. And Ireland says, ‘Aye, that’s Catholic guilt.’

The thread. I’m seven, on top of a pile of old mattresses. I can’t even kneel here without touching the ceiling and I’m reading a children’s book I loved, The Wild Swans. It’s a chalet in Skerries, all blue and pink like a playhouse, cardboard walls and perpetual Fisher Price family sound. It’s dusty up here, all close and hidden. I hear Mum in the kitchen and what I’m trying to get at here, Caroline’s voice asking Mum has she seen me. She’s calling my name down the wooden-toy hall but I keep quiet and still and she doesn’t know about here, I don’t think, so I stay hidden. And silent as the breath I won’t exhale. This makes me sad but it’s just what it is and it’s just a story; she runs out calling my name, the cardboard door swinging shut, looking for me.

And this unwinds with life and lots in between to my twenty-six-year-old self, for the first time, watching a camcorder video of our lost mum, Jean, on a boat in California … her voice at my ear so immediate it’s like it rocks me awake:

‘Where’s Pandy?’

And my heart is wrung.

To hear a voice from the dead looking for you. To miss a voice. To miss being looked for. This means something but I don’t know what.

If this is the beginning of the book I warn you, I have to leave lots out and then maybe you can say, ‘Ah, but I want to read the book she didn’t write.’ Or maybe not. Maybe ‘I don’t even want to read that one, thanks very much.’ Now that is the inner chorus of a Dundalk girl who’s come down with a dose of the ‘Who do you think you are?’s.

I have to write this now though. I am scared of people dying. Actually, not people: I am scared of Johnny dying, and he has to read, counsel, manage and sell if he loves it, or not at all. Oh there’s that dishcloth heart again, wrung out and reaching the base of my throat where sobs and yells gather to consider their escape.

Not now.

I’d like to say I always wrote but I’d be lying. There were girls like that in my class, writing poetry because they couldn’t help it and getting published, albeit in our school magazine. I got my first A in honours English in my Leaving Cert. Believe me, it wasn’t coming and it was a shock, but I did know I wrote my best story, that hot June day in the exam hall (why was it always hot for exams and not for holidays?). I actually laughed out loud writing it (shhhh … sorry) and enjoyed it more than anything before. And the world went quiet, as it does now.

‘Soap Opera: Suds or something more significant?’ The latter of course.

And I’d like to thank that boiled egg Mammy made me and the bottle of Lucozade I had with my friend Conor before I went in.

These are bewildering times I find my forty-three-year-old self in. And I can give you my views, though they’re just the conversation you had last night. We’re about to release our T Bone Burnett record, Jupiter Calling. I did think we should consider calling it Love in a Time of Terror, but let’s let music and words do what they will to you personally. Bring you where you uniquely want and here is a place you may not wish to be reminded of …

That other title, though, is the truth of what this record means. Where hate is incited from the most powerful pulpits, we cry ‘Bulletproof Love’. You hear, ‘Go home, you’re not getting in’; we drown it out with ‘SOS’.

Love in a time of profound disappointment and degradation. I think of words, meaning and evolution. Humankind. I’m only human. When did ‘kind’ slip out and ‘only’ skulk in? We’ve swapped aspiration for resignation. Our humanity now, a mere excuse.

And our small failings posed, posted and applauded. A million likes in one hour for a cosmetically altered sixteen-year-old pout (surely that’s not right, Doctor? Mother?). I don’t blame the girl (childhood, remember?) but what will we become?

Darwin, wait – we’re going the wrong way!

But also I might die and Daddy wrote his memoir and his daddy before him. He, James Corr, lived through two world wars. (‘Why am I reading this? Where can I get his?’ Voce piena, chorus to fade …)

You see, my life is permanently passing before my very eyes these days. It’s all near death.

The inhalations! The cold and present breath and the memory in my lungs. Earthly light. Moment. Isness. Human love. Meaning. Here. The body. The swirl and the electricity of the heart, beating away by itself on the eco cycle in a night light while you sleep … even … Sleep. So worthy of a mention here, though so often looked down upon …

Sleep is beautiful …

That’s the thing when you wake up a forty-year-old orphan … fear of that loss, of time running out, of ending, knowingly repeating the same stories, ‘memory lane’ as Daddy called them, just to have them in the room again … and I suppose that means I love life, I love human beings, I love strangers so much sometimes I get a pain in my heart … You lovely lady on the crutch that I came to from my thoughts to realise I hadn’t held the door open for … I went back; ‘Sorry!’ I said, and held it, only for the buggy with my boy in it to topple over.

‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ you smiled into my eyes.

And therein may lie the poetry of human existence, I think. The reach of another someone, someone you didn’t see before and may never see again. However, it’s not all beautiful. I just passed a man bulling his way down the Fulham Road, banging into a woman, all Him and His Rucksack … and their head-nodding verbal exchange thereafter …

Anyway, that said, I still love you, stranger. Fellow human, sharing this faulty planet at the same time.

Mum, a Donegal girl, and Dad, Dundalk born and bred, met at a dance hall in Blackrock: The Pavilion, it was called. She was twenty-one and he thirty … He fixed an eeny-meeny-miny-moe to land on her to dance, and wrote a poem about the destiny and the ‘what if’s involved.

Booze bored

Winter woed

Bed beckoning

Did angels convene

To bring me to Jean

Of wraparound eyes

In passion of pink

First dance

Last dance

We dance forever …

And they did. I’m not saying it was uninterrupted bliss, kiss and laughter … oh they could fight too, but isn’t the fight, in reality, just a different step?

They talked of a pivotal moment. They were at the pictures on a date, when ‘Strangers on the Shore’ played and there it was: recognition, a mutual love of music.

And their shared life rolled out before them.

The other day I found a letter he wrote her, folded up in a box in his bedroom in Dundalk. He is funny throughout, as always he was, and quotes her – ‘you’re very bold, Gerry’, admonishing his wicked sense of humour but also loving it and sharing it, all at the same time. But in the last paragraph he writes:

I find it difficult, Jean, to communicate on paper my feelings for you. True love like great music is beyond the reach of words. Suffice it to say then, that I wish to spend the rest of my life being good to you, to you my love, today tomorrow and always. Ps write soon please?

They had five children. Our brother Gerard, born next after Jim, was killed on the road in front of our house, in the very first days after they had brought the new baby, Sharon, home from hospital. While Mum showed her off to our aunt Maureen, he avoided the locked gates by hopping over our neighbour’s wall and ran out after a ball. The car stopped, but it hit him while moving off once again, presuming he would wait and wouldn’t run back. He was three years old.

Now that I have two children of my own, I find I have no eloquence here … it is too unbearable. So this will be short.

Throughout their lives our parents could not exceed three minutes talking of him. The pain would arrest them all too soon. Therefore I don’t have many stories, but what I do know I will tell you.

Gerard was funny, the image of Dad, and, it would seem to me, clever beyond his years. On being told, one day, that his shoes were on the wrong feet, he crossed his legs and smiled up at them … ‘They’re on the right feet now,’ he said. He would sit on his chair in the kitchen and ask for more toast, more tea (he liked tea) and, feeling Daddy’s impatience, he would repeat, ‘More tea, more toast,’ in a convincing sing-song voice, only to respond to Daddy’s disbelieving ‘Och’ with an ‘Only joking!’

He was also a great singer and now it has me thinking of the destiny and the what ifs … Would he have been the lead singer of a band … A family trio … Jim, Gerard and Sharon …

Caroline and myself, a dream they never had.

‘April 3 1970’

Set me free

Why would I want to hurt you

When I love you

When your blood is mine?

Why would I want to be the thorn in your side

Hold you back from your life

Be the shadow in your light?

I am in the state of bliss

And I am love

That’s all I am in you

I am your purest love

Set me free

Would you want that for me

Would you haunt a child on his journey to man

Would you blame a little boy

Would you wish you were alive?

Set me free brother

My love is your light

It’s in your fingers on the keys

In your song, your melody

I am you and you are me

And we will see eternity

Set me free

And you’ll be free

April 3 1970

There is much that winks and sparkles in a Monet light. And I am Thumbelina tripping across the lily pads … The Children of Lir, the Salmon of Knowledge. The washing blowing on the line, hiding my face in the honeyed pink light of the sheets. Or am I lying on the sheets, cradled in summer smells. Looking up at my mum and the floating white in the blue.

Pocket money for the carefully chosen penny sweets and the ‘Och’ that escapes the wicked shopkeeper as the bell tolls our arrival after Sunday Mass. For time is money and time is just 30p today.

Swingball, the paddling pool, breathe in Daddy’s face, all petrol and grass after he’s mown the lawn in straight lines. Hopscotch hop over the fence to my next-door neighbour and early-childhood best friend Paul, don’t let the wire catch, fish-hooked in your bottom lip like poor twister Caroline did and knock knock knock … Spilled milk and a drowning fly for the cats by the door … The sound of Violet’s radio – ‘wireless’ – within, she aproned and singing along, keeping her country with Big Tom … Paul’s heavy flip-flop-flap-slap running free down the hall while a dishwater Mammy hand proffers a sunken queen cake, ‘Ye wee pet’. Make a mental note to disappear before the same loving hand spoons out the cod liver oil. And out the door we run to play to …

‘Paul, your coooaaaaaaaaaaaat …’

… the cement mixer and the delicious slop for our cookery kitchen.

‘Here’s one I made earlier’ – Paul’s best Delia voice as our culinary mud and dandelion creation appears behind the tile door of the brick fridge. Oh, the joys of having a best friend as your next-door neighbour and a dad that is not Bob, but is Tom the builder. The see-saw, a seven-foot, smooth, splinter-free beam of wood on a barrel with more solid grey bricks for brakes, lets you bump your bum happy and he’s lifting off sky high into seventh heaven … Walk-run, (but not too fast coz it will go all cartoon Road Runner on you), scuff-toed, Clarks sturdy shoes on those barrels now for the barrel race and circus time. Kick the can, hide-and-seek, blind man’s buff, climb the trees, night fern smells on my blackened palms and at home later I am still a part of my friend’s life. I hear the slate shovel dragging and slurping in the coal and slack for the fire now, because their house is always kept warm, even in the summer. Always a fire lit. Sure she sunbathes her white talcum puff skin beneath a hat and a wool plaid blanket. While our black Irish, Spanish-invasion mammy next door is brown as a berry and sleek, smelling of Ambre Solaire.

And the doors are closing, night night … Stories, memories and pictures merge and spring vivid, only to dissipate … But there is a shadow. I see it. Yes, of course.

Because I realise now that all that time there was a ghost in our house. And there was one next door, too. Another missing boy named Brian who gets caught in Violet’s throat telling Paul to put on his coat and pull up his hood. ‘Ah Paul, you’ll catch your death,’ as if death really was catching … Don’t allow your first glance at the full moon to accidentally fall through your pane of glass. We are on our knobbly knees holding on to the bursting dam of a laugh through the Angelus and the rosary at six o’clock. A revolving, weary-go-round string of prayers and endless blessing of oneself, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, hand wings flutter swift over heart, Father Son Holy Spirit, bowing heads and pray for us, Father Son Holy Spirit, beads to lips, three holy trinity kisses, bless lips, bless forehead, bless heart, again, again, again as if asking, pleading, ‘How many times will keep us safe and here, tell me, Father Son Holy Spirit, so I can seal us all in for the evening, sacred and sound, Amen.’

Our very own beautiful and beloved ghost, our own missing one behind Mammy’s brown eyes benign. A little boy standing next to Jim. Two little boys had two little toys. In her squeezing-tighter hand crossing the road. In her pause before the tunnel bridge, yielding right of way to the train about to thunder overhead.

Out of your mind with grief: it’s a good line. I hear that many relationships do not survive the death of their child. I’d say survive remains the one right word in this brutal sentence for at least a very long time. Condemned to life … missing … It makes sense really. Maybe you could pretend you’re still the happy, naive and untouched by the darkness twenty-eight-year-old you were a matter of days before, if you don’t look the loss in the eyes any more. But no … You couldn’t even … The wrench in your chest and the yearning … No, I won’t go there now. I’ll close that door. But they had no choice. Door always blowing open; a wailing, crying mouth and a cot in the echoing emptiness within. A foot for every year …

Gerard Corr, 12 August 1966 – 3 April 1970

‘Jean and Gerard’ by Gerry Corr

Last night you cried

Remembering him

Your tears pierced the ice

Of numbed remembrance

And I fled

Like always

I wish I could stay

And essay his perfection

On the faltering steps of love

Like before

Tear-racked morning eyes

Watch new buds leap

From dead clematis

As new essays

In lost perfection

Assuage the pain

Once again

I inhale September deeper than any other month. I hold its breath and repeat, ‘I love this time of year’ as surely as I’ll say ‘Merry Christmas’ in December. The happiest sound is a playground swarm on the bell. The fallen leaves and the conkers. And with the outside foggy cold on my own children’s cheeks, I breathe into my first days at school.

The Redeemer School was a five-minute walk from our house. Árd Easmuinn, the area in which we lived, shared a primary school with what was a council estate called Cox’s Demesne. It was a sprawling rectangular bungalow of classrooms off corridors and right angles on corners. Every turn an afterthought. I see blue walls, maps of Ireland, stripy straws spilled on the linoleum floor, coloured crucifix links, sycamore leaf rubbings and my Moses project. I smell márla – our play-dough – the thick red and yellow gloop of paint, newsprint, fat crayons and a cloakroom at the back of the class.

‘An bhfuil cead agam dul go dti an leitreas, más é do thoil é?’

The, till now, unsolved mystery of the puddle beneath the chair.

‘Ní raibh cead agam …’

And something sacred to me then, that I cannot grasp now: a rectangular box. What did it house? It swam to the top when I watched Krapp’s Last Tape. Something intangible but fantastic to me.

There are triangular cartons of milk on a shelf and lessons that don’t include spellings or times tables. Firstly I realised that I was a short-haired girl here and not a boy. It dawned on me at around the same time as I discovered that my desk mate, Julie, with corduroy trousers beneath a skirt, was a girl.

I met my best friend Niamh on my first day and our lives have walked down parallel hawthorn-hedged lanes ever since. Our unrequited and disappointing loves engraved on the seen-it-all-before, though bent in sympathy, secret-keeping trees. Our hands reach out every now and then, and back we go to the field after the drinks cabinet and the Dolly Mixtures, the stone wall and a song about a green puppet called …

Orville?

Yes?

Who is your very best friend?

You are!

I’m gonna help you mend …

Rice Krispies in the bowl but didn’t you eat cornflakes …?

We both call each other Bosom, as in bosom buddies from Anne of Green Gables, and we still do. We grew differently however … Well, let’s just say that she alone grew into our name.

All grown up, we lose each other one day around Grafton Street in Dublin and then simultaneously find each other. She is outside Davy Byrnes. I’m outside The Bailey.

‘BOSOM!!’ we shout and the doorman beside me gives us both a good look over as she crosses to my side.

He says to me with his mobile eyes unblinking, ‘I can understand why she’s called Bosom, but why the hell are you called Bosom?!’

Ah, she’s had her ups and downs, my Bosom. A newspaper got a detail wrong once (it happens sometimes) and gave the ecstatic news that my best friend ‘Busty’ was to be my fourth bridesmaid.

Up the Town

‘Well!’ is how we said hello in Dundalk: an exclamation rather than a question.

An oddly hopeful ‘How are ye?’ when the auto-response was more often than not: ‘Strugglin’.’

Or Dad’s and my favourite: ‘Ah, same ole shit, another day.’

We would later abbreviate this to ‘SOS’.

‘How are you, Daddy?’

‘Ah, SOS, Pandy. How are you?’

And one day, my hand in his, walking up the town, he said to a man going by, ‘How’s the form?’

And I looked up and asked, ‘Has that man got a farm, Daddy?’

We would walk on the dark, cold early evenings, frost steaming from our talk, and do a crawl of the churches to see the baby Jesus in the manger. New born in the hay, in a red glow of light.

And there was the weekly scram to twelve o’clock Mass, for Daddy’s above at the organ, you see, looking through the mirror for our heads bent in prayer. His dark wee angels. If he didn’t spot your head you could allay his suspicion later, with the mention of a bum note peeking cheeky out of Bach. Well, it was bound to be true.

Mammy eventually stopped attending Mass. She said sitting there made her panic.

But now I look back and realise that a lot of people were, in truth, struggling at this time in Dundalk. This was the late 70s, early 80s. The milk at the back of the classroom was necessary. There were a lot of single-parent households with dads away, peacekeeping in the Lebanon. Of course I was a child. I had no real notion, then, of any household being different to our own. One mum at home plus one dad at work until he returned to do the peacekeeping you just couldn’t mute the way you could hers. And to give you a piano lesson.

But it must have been very hard. Years later, I met a girl I’d known at that school who told me of a time when they literally ran out of food and that milk was all they had. I remember a friend of Sharon’s who put me on a stool beside him by our cooker and turned making ‘the thickest ever pancakes!’ into a game.

Pride, it seems, can be the last casualty of poverty. It hurts my heart to think of it now. I didn’t know he was hungry.

Dundalk became a refuge for Catholics who had been burned out of their homes in 1969. The burning of Bombay Street. One of the council estates, Muirhevnamor, became known locally as Little Belfast and it was understood that there were places you did not go, unless you ‘sympathised’.

And then of course the border, the soldiers, and Daddy’s wicked sense of humour. Jim in the back of the car as it slowed … Mum complaining to Dad, ‘Oh Gerry, I hate seeing these men with guns.’

And Daddy responding, ‘Don’t worry, Jean. They only want little boys.’

Poor Jim. That was too bold, Gerry.

Although I can still see the H-block graffiti glaring and desperate on the grey, ominous brick of the tunnel bridge, beneath the train track, generally I was as oblivious to the ongoing conflict as I was to the hunger. Not surprising, really … I was a full and happy child.

But no matter what, you still grow in the soil you’ve been planted in and here, I discovered that morality, right and wrong, can be complicated and confusing.

The Baddies and the Goodies

For some reason, Caroline and myself would often be early for school and we would play with the caretaker, who we loved. Then one day he wasn’t there any more and the Redeemer School was on the news. They had discovered weapons hidden in the roof of the assembly room.

‘But that was a goodie doing the work of a baddie?’

I happened to be born in Dundalk on the day of the deadliest attack of the Troubles in the Republic.

On 17 May 1974, four car bombs exploded at rush hour in Dublin and Monaghan, killing thirty-three people and a full-term unborn child. I have discovered since that my father-in-law, Dermot, just missed being in Talbot Street the moment the bomb exploded. He was to buy a bottle of shampoo for his young wife, Pat, in a pharmacy on North Earl Street, just a hundred yards from where the bomb would go off. But it being a beautiful day, he decided to keep on walking and buy it closer to home. As he turned off Talbot Street on to Amiens Street his ears rang deaf and the ground shook beneath his feet.

Bold Gerry, Baa and the Outstretched Contrite Hand

Once upon a time there lived a husband and a father who had a wicked sense of humour. He was possessed of many gifts, not least of all being sporty as a youth. However, one day, his curious, rebellious soul led his fit but mortal coil into his dying sister’s forbidden Victorian sick room. She, Eileen, a dark-haired white form, lay on the bed with a bleeding cough and a fire in each cheek. Some time later, Eileen having departed, Gerry (for that was the name of the young man) found himself chronically tired and not at all able for his Gaelic football or his tennis. When his new friend Dolphin Cough, Eileen’s old bestie, started pulling red flags from his mouth, he was quickly dispatched to the sanitarium for eleven months wherein he made his living, not dying, as a bookie and had a romance with a nurse. And luckily for all of us (or was it?) was just in time for Waksman’s cure: streptomycin.

In the meantime, a shy girl was begotten and born to William and Lizzy. When she turned fifteen William would depart, his time-bomb heart tick-tocking him into the Great Unknown. And Lizzy would out-linger, though her brain would depart on the early train to beyond, long before her body would follow. She, clad in shoes, a skirt and a blouse beneath a cross-your-heart, Father Son Holy Spirit, bra.

Jean (for that was the young maiden’s name) was beautifully unaware of her growing beauty, gap-toothed and lost as she was in the cloud of testosterone she and her three sisters predominantly inhaled.

6 hungry boys + 4 potatoes each makes 7 million peelings old …

‘What happened to your hands, Nanna?’

‘I put them in the fire, Caroline.’

‘Did you put your face in the fire, too?’

… and only the girls paying keep … Well I think I’ll just go and boil a head of lettuce and get it over with. Inhalations were deeper on McSwiney Street than elsewhere, and exhalations late.

You see, when God looked up from Jean’s incisors, he got transfixed by her eyes and He threw in an infinity of love. Teeth could only mull over this wonder while enjoying a cocktail stick. But they, hard as they were, could never know this love.

Love me just a little bit and I’ll cast such love on you, but I won’t smile in photos. That’s something I won’t do.

She wore a pink dress with the velvet dusk of the Irish rose and led love into a ballroom wherein she was tricked into a dance with a charming rebel. Her jilted girlfriend left, thinking she may have in fact won, and her mouth saying, on receipt of the news from her up-down eyes:

‘He has a very good-looking face but he is a bit short in the leg.’

But Jean thought that the way this beautiful man-face was looking at her more than made up for the deficit in the leg. And so they courted, he picking her up in his racing green Fiat 500 and stopping not far from McSwiney Street where they kissed and she told him that she loved his face.

‘So do ye think ye might marry me someday?’ he said, and she laughed at the irony of the man with all the words, having so few.

‘Shelling Hill’ by Gerry Corr

You’d be blessed to find it; down tortuous track

Hardly the breadth of Cooley’s fabled hero,

Not to mention Maeve’s brown bull.

From the beginning it was our private place

Our little car, almost without bidding,

Bringing us there each Sunday

One day a cow came by,

Drawn not by the scent of forbidden fruit

But by blameless apple,

Mooing an end to our caresses

Passion and laughter not a good mix.

Poor bedfellows, you might say.

We laughed again on another day

When words unbidden dropped in on us

‘Do you think you might marry me one day?’

I swear a passing dog smiled,

The ocean roared, of course,

And the Lord of sky beamed a blessing.

My lady trembled a little

As in girlish excitement

Until a giggle breached it’s frantic confine

And we took refuge in each other’s arms.

‘Who said that?’ I said, and we laughed

And laughed, and laughed.

Cupid’s cheeky chariot joined in later

Rocking and rolling us

Home to Dundalk …

22 February 2000

And all would be content ever after but for Gerry having a penchant for revealing the gap teeth.

He thought that if God, when pouring in lashings of love, had not mixed in equal measures of hope and fear, then it might not have been so delicious to go to such wicked measures. But then again, if easily won, would it have been so rewarding?

Years passed as they do in Grimm fairytales. Jean’s tummy grew and grew, again and again and again, and out came Jim Gerard Sharon Caroline and Andrea. A family band.

‘This is PG’ Grimm thought for the very first time, and hoped they’d forget the second boy Gerard. And so …

Hope, Fear and the Beetroot

One day a guttural and terrifying scream did interrupt the fledglings at their various offices above and had them racing down the stairs to see …

… their father doubled over by the open door of the fridge, coughing into a pool of blood! With mouths open and poised to join their petrified mother in this primitive and tribal chorus, they observed that the cough had morphed into a laugh … For one could not miss opportunities when they presented themselves so beautifully, he thought … We don’t cry over spilled milk … but poor Mammy does … All over the spilled juice from a jar of pickled beetroot.

Baa.

Sorry, Jean.

The Cross Pen

It must be acknowledged that the father, though terribly cuddly, was betimes a grumpy daddy.

‘You’re in a bad mood again, Daddy.’

‘I AM NOT IN A BAD MOOD!!!’

Various sounds and head-jerks alerted us to his internal weather system. Grumbles and groans, muted thunder and bolts, and the head jolting twice, three times to the left with the assumed objective of loosening an invisible suffocating collar and tie. Or a noose, perhaps.

He appeared home from work this day with the aspect of a man whose inner sky has clouded over an oppressive grey.

‘Have any of you seen my Cross pen?’

One can only imagine now the afflicted individual who, on opening his bag at work earlier, discovered to his chagrin the aforesaid missing biro. And therein the brew began …

‘No, Daddy.’

And so it was daily for approximately eight bewildered days, with the question gathering variants in meaning and expression, such as:

‘Did any of you take my Cross pen?’

And punctuated with ‘Ach’s’ galore.

‘Ach!’

On perhaps the sixth day I had found myself deeply fatigued with the Cross pen, so I decided to say:

‘No, I haven’t seen your Cross pen,’ just when he had begun the refrain, ‘Did any o—’

‘No.’

On the eighth day we duetted again, according to the scripture, except this was different.

‘Lo, what’s this?’ I remarked to myself. ‘My longest exhausted noooooooooooooo has failed to put an end to today’s song?’

‘Everyone, I want you to check your school bags for my Cross pen.’

‘Tssk, Daddy, it’s not in my school bag! I didn’t take your stupid [inner voice … as that, I am not] Cross pen!’

‘Just check it, Andrea.’ (Weather warning: Pandy when cuddly, Andrea when not.)

So poor wee me drags my school bag in with my own weather. My ochs and huffs and blows and I start to pull stuff out of my bag. I really am above all this carry-on now, when … wait … what is that shine of silver peeping out of Bran, my riveting reading book?

Oh …

I just could not understand it. I ran off crying.

‘I still feel bad about that one, Pandy. That one took a while.’

Baa.

Inherited Wickedness

And so we did it too, to each other, and admittedly I fear I was the worst because:

‘You’re boring me now, Andrea,’ was as regular as the Angelus.

Oh, the Angelus always makes me think funny thoughts. You know the visual montage they play on the TV to the sound of the dong-dongs? Random people in various jobs putting down tools, if they have any, and pausing to reflect on God (as ye do at six o’clock every day)?

The farmer turning off the tractor, looking up to the right at … I presume God, but we don’t actually see Him (oh that’s something to reflect on right there … it’s working!).

The mammy (there she is again) resting on her hoover to look out the window at the tweety birds circling … (or are they above her head, haha).

Nature, nature, glorious nature. It’s everywhere!

Babbling brooks, migrating swallows, potatoes being picked with earthy, black, return-of-the-native nails.

And when Ireland recognised that God loves all his children and got the chance to see many of them in real life (long live the one hundred thousand welcomes, and when faced with this chance to give thanks, may we never forget the céad mile fáiltes a million of our own starving refugees needed), as Ireland grew and changed, so too did the montage …

Now we have a Chinese lady looking up from her office desk (killed two isms with the one stone there) and I’m not even on the funny thoughts yet but you have them too, don’t you?

The man pausing his unrolling of the toilet roll to look up and ponder …

What are you supposed to do if the Angelus strikes then, tell me?

Eh, hold on a second now, God.

(He made me like this … God, I mean.

Hi, have I been introduced yet? No – ye left me out, of course ye did.

I’m Guilt.)

… Toes mid-curl at bottom of dishevelled, silken and moving, two-headed monster.

Baa.

Sorry, God.

Ahhhh! Air traffic control!!

Hmm. For some, the pause for the Angelus should most definitely not be observed.

‘Ellis Island’

On the second Sunday

Annie be my guide

Liberty’s a welcome

To an aching eye

We’ll grow up together

Far away from home

Crossed the sea and ocean

To the land of hope

Kingstown to Liverpool

Crossing the Irish Sea

You gotta keep your wits on you

Where you lay your head

Six minute medical

Leaving no chalk on me

Goodbye Ellis Island

Hello land of free

Every man and woman

Every boy and girl

Sing out Ellis Island

Sing a song of hope

Sing for us together

Sing we’re not alone

Sing we’ll go back someday

Sing we will belong

When the leaves are falling

And the sky is on the ground

We will come together

And sing of Ireland

Thanking Ellis Island

Thank you USA

You gave us a home here

Crying a brand new day

Queenstown to New York Bay

Wild Atlantic Ocean

You gotta keep your wits on you

Where you lay your head

Six minute medical

Leaving no chalk on me

Goodbye Ellis Island

Hello land of free …

Did they really do it to me, though?

If I’m honest, my only memorable humiliation was thinking we were all still playing hide-and-seek when they’d forgotten me, a thumb-sucking curl that Jim had manoeuvred into the top of the hot press … Ahhh, cradled in winter smells … Yum yum.

They didn’t even pronounce me missing.

I was likely found following another ‘Where’s Pandy?’

Thank you, Mammy.

But I had a nose for under your skin that wasn’t natural in a child.

Poor Mammy, she must have been going through the Change (distant screaming far off), because she screamed at every little thing.

‘Ahhhh!!!!’ was to be heard at regular intervals, and a few petrified, hair-raising:

‘Gerry!!!!!!’s

‘Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!’

‘Gerry!!!!!!’ … I’m actually doing it again …

… I’d fall down on the ground and writhe in agony for her …

‘Gerry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’

‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!’ Fighting the invisible bogeymen away from my twisting, turning, don’t-touch-me! head …

‘Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!’

What could it be? I needed to be prepared for all eventualities …

So what if it was just that she saw Caroline’s scrambled egg pot from earlier still sitting yellow and curdled in the sink … She’d told the bitch to CLEAN IT NOW fifteen minutes ago. But to me, then, life was like a disowned rucksack in a train station … You never know.

Baa.

Sorry, Mammy.

Comeuppance imminent, Pandy

And Jim was … How can I put it? Addictive. Yes, that’s it.

He was packing shelves in Tesco, on parole for not sitting his Leaving Cert. You see, he actually stood it up.

(I’d tripped over his school bag too many times, on my way to Paul’s, to not understand what they were roaring about inside. And to understand why he was grounded. Then I worked out that the grounding must be elsewhere because we can’t find Jim in his room and a window is open.)

And he had a TASCAM 244 studio in his purple bedroom with all of the manuals just waiting for him to feast on and get to know intimately.

It was a very difficult time. The artist’s Tesco blue period, I could say.

I honestly can hear a violin!

Oh, forget it. That’s just Sharon in her room.

How embarrassing.

Jim was ‘not in a good place right now’, as they say, and every day he awoke to find his nightmare was reality.

Now I love everyone here, you know that? It’s just a twitch.

I’m just as God made me.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh …

There was a hand gesture (no, not what you’re thinking, but).

A hand gesture, unique. (If you have interactive, press red now.)

It didn’t have sound, mostly; for mostly, it didn’t need it. And you wouldn’t want to be relying on that, when sometimes he is already on his way, in his prison blue overall, to pack the shelves (Andrex Quilted today) and he thinks it’s over and that he has won and that I couldn’t possibly be at the window now … but look!

I’m there.

I start with a serene, otherworldly smile, as if one has passed but is at peace. I am sublime and I am prophetic.

And then one discerns a subtle hand gesture emerging from my sleeve. A gesture that wouldn’t make sense to most and was a method of tortuous teasing unique to us. Like the ghost of the bird that is cupped in one’s hand, being ever so gently rocked to sleep. And then my face, all sad, ever so sad, like it’s a raindropped window through to the deep compassion and pity for my poor brother that was filling my very being …

Baa.

Sorry, Jim.

Oh, I think I have to stop now … This is turning into confession.

Oh no … Don’t think about it … no.

Bless me, reader, for I have …

I am back in Dundalk, that choppy-haired, blood-lipped, slip, red bra and Doc Marten boots time, and (though you didn’t know it … or is that what I did to make you love me?) … I was troubled. The pain of a pop star … you’re breaking my heart.

Bosom, when she refers to it, says things like:

‘Do you remember the time you drank tea, Bosom?’

Mammy must have been really worried because she came into the front room, stole my teapot, replaced it with a bottle of wine and practically locked us in.

Anyway, it’s like my ears are on inside out and I’m so sick of myself that I rarely see, but the times that I do see, I take for a sign. For instance …

I raise my coal worn eyes from my feet and realise they have opened on the Friary Church and I think I must go in … I am supposed to go in. And then lo and behold, I just happen to sit in the pew queue for confession … So …

I’m in.

The dragging wood and my heartbeat reveals the spectre behind the grid. Bowed, white-furred head, not looking, but I’m looking and I feel just awful about having to say – to lie! – ‘It’s been three years, Father.’

And before he could get the most gentle ‘Why, my child?’ out of his still-quivering-in-the-wake-of-so-many-prayers lips, I blamed him for the whole lot of it. (God … was I going through the Change?)

‘I find it difficult, Father, as a woman [I had to verify that coz even if he was looking, it would still be hard to tell] to hold my head up high in this church.’

‘Oh no,’ he said.

Yes I do. My grandmother Alice was preached at to bear all the children God thought fit to bless her with … She had number ten at the ripe young age of forty-seven and if there was a break of more than a year between children, which apparently in Alice’s story there was not, a mortified woman could be asked why she was not bringing more baby Catholics into the world and was everything all right at home, so to speak.

But back to Alice (who would later take to her bed for two years, and who needed electric shock treatment to jolt the bloodless depression out of her, once and for all) … Not once did Daddy see her sit at the table with them and eat the food she had made. She waited. A benevolent and loving servant. A womb with no view.

I wish I could read your memoirs, Alice … I want to hear of some blessed sunshine days … There must have been some? Episodes of light beyond the low-hanging dusty grey of the honeymoon you spent cleaning Corr’s Grocery before it opened in Dundalk. And the extraordinary sign-off in the postcard from James Corr, your then betrothed:

Lough Derg, 1926

Dear Alice

Having a grand time here. Came yesterday and going back tomorrow. Big crowd on the Island.

Goodbye

James

Ah, maybe I’m not being fair though, James. Maybe it’s because everyone can read a postcard.

Daddy did make his mammy laugh, though. I know that. Because her love would shine out of her kind, blue Irish eyes. I remember that.

Father …!

Are you still listening to me?

When God smiled on one such as Alice, and blessed her with a new baby Catholic, she was not permitted to receive the Eucharist (take Holy Communion) before she was ‘churched’, a baptism of sorts, to cleanse her of ‘the sin of concupiscence’.

Oh no …

Do you mean that that did not happen, Father?

Oh nooooo …

And something stopped me and I felt … I feel so bad for raining on the old man’s parade. He’d likely given sixty of his eighty years to his church.

I am sorry for that.

And now that I’m on this, I’m sorry for the Irish men of that time, too. Having to confess their ‘impure thoughts’.

The origin of thought is pure, surely? Pure as love. Until it is corrupted and manipulated by guilt and oppression.

And we see how religion can give God a bad name.

Inherited Wickedness continued …

I think I’ll begin this one with:

Sorry, Caroline.

Baa.

Poor Caroline, Caddles the Waddles, was just too close for her own comfort (never mine). We two being quasi-Siamese, if you plee-ease …

We shared a double bed. We wore the same clothes. A different colour (she blue and me red) sufficing to express our individualities.

We shared a name when being called:.

‘Children!’

Because that in itself would bring us both, of course, having been together. And Mammy had read that book about the economising housewife (a real page-turner, apparently).

We had a secret language in which we invariably communicated through pursed-lip hums …

MmMmMm (happily, stands for both ‘Caroline’ and ‘Andrea’)

Mm (yes)

M Mm Mm Mm m (Are you asleep? Almost a double syllable given to the ‘eep’ – all authentic languages having their exception to the rule.)

She cried when I was late for school. Worried face and high, uptight stance above me, still pulling my socks on, happy, at the hot press.

I, to my shame, did not react the same way to Caroline’s everyday childhood troubles.

I can only excuse myself now by saying that I had no experience in worrying. She literally worried for me. She, being fourteen months older and ‘the youngest mammy ever born’, as they called her, took the instinct and personal need away. She did enough worrying for both of us.

This tale comprises two parts, which make up the one wicked whole. But they should demonstrate what it is I am expunging here …

A tale of two sisters (if you like).

Part 1

At the doctor’s one day, myself and my twin twister Caroline were arrested in our play to realise that we hadn’t just come on this errand for the ride and must not be going shopping, which meant that we wouldn’t be joining forces in breaking Mammy down into getting us a Chester cake (I have not eaten one in over thirty years, but I can taste it now …)

Before we knew it, Caroline was up ye get, hop-upping onto the bed and taking her shoes off, wherein Dr O’Reilly examined the wee worried feet. He diagnosed:

‘Fallen arches.’

‘I’m worrying for two, Doctor, what do you expect?’ she said.

No, that didn’t happen. I think I just don’t want to say this one …

Now his diagnosis wasn’t so bad in itself, obviously, but it was the remedy that got me … The cure.

‘So what do we do, Doctor?’ Mammy asked.

‘She will have to wear built-up shoes, Jean.’

That’s all it took … A sudden flash of an image in my brain of Caroline wearing Daddy’s 70s platform shoes to school. The shoes that the itinerants, collecting, had rejected and thrown out of the black plastic sack in the baby’s pram, onto the road, right in front of our house … They couldn’t even wait till they got home.

‘Get them out of my sight now!’

I exploded with laughter.

‘Well now, that’s the bitch,’ the doctor said.

Part 2

I have told you that we shared a bed. So with that in mind I will move swiftly on away from my shameful but helpless laughter in Frank O’Reilly’s smoke-filled surgery to …

(Thumbelina is sinking now)

… this.

I awoke one morning, I stretched and proceeded to look at my sleeping twister beside me. But it was not my twister … She was in there, definitely – they were her eyes and nose, yes – but she was peeping out of the biggest human moon face you’ve ever imagined, sleep-crying, ‘Help! Let me out!!’

‘Caroline! Wake up! Your face!’

So we run to the mirror and I see her horrified eyes find themselves stuck in the moon of the mumps and I cannot help but explode. There was peeing of pants again and:

‘Andrea, go to the toilet!’ That ‘basic human function’, as Daddy described it in his wedding speech, that I could never manage to ‘make time for’.

I have to admit it, because it will take them a bit to tell their side, and that was something Caroline said often. A few times a day, in fact.

But it is only right that I give something back in advance …

A credit note float. Ha.

Oh, I feel exorcised right now.

Night night.

This morning, the door to Sharon’s Baa sorry is locked like her teenage bedroom. I’m right outside and can hear the needle gently resting on ‘Save a Prayer’ … not like when I do it to visions of a band scrambling to a terrified start, crashing, screeching and breaking into the song like a road accident … And I couldn’t look up to her more if she were the Eiffel Tower. She lets me in sometimes and I love it there. Perfumes and slip-on, red polka-dot shoes, and bras. And she talks to me like we are the same and not like I am just an awed spectator. Naturally hers. She sometimes puts the make-up on me from her Naturally Yours make-up case because she sells this to women in their homes these days … Your local Avon lady.

Oh Sharon, you are my redeemer! My absolution after the remorse of confession!

I helped you!

No Baa Sha!

Running ahead of Mum, Dad and Caroline on Skerries Beach to pre-warn her of their hastening approach. So she could put out her cigarette and cram a mouthful of cinnamon Dentyne. Never ever telling when she had friends over and continued Jim’s weekend ‘party at the Corrs’ house’ tradition. When they were out playing, ‘at sing’. Or when she came home one day and just couldn’t stop laughing. She might have died so I helped her retire to her room, like a smuggler avoiding the customs. So they wouldn’t worry, of course.

I was her alibi and her ally and she was mine.

She sent her boyfriend to MJ’s, the pub I was in, to get me out of it … To come home early, at least, (and soften the ‘deal with you later’ landing …) from ‘wherever’ I was, when I was not babysitting the two kids Dad had just said hello to, contentedly eating JR ice pops with their mother.

Confidences, consolation and ‘you are not alone’s in her room.

No Baa Sha is my sister-friend.

And when we tickled her on the kitchen floor she was the one with the kicking ‘piranha legs’ …

God knows.

Gerry Was a Holy Joe

Daddy considered being a priest, apparently. Stories of their parish priest coming to visit them and of having tea in the good china in ‘the good room’ (the room, and indeed the china, reserved for holy priest visits and the like) with his mother, Alice, who was – remarkably to me – very religious still. (Before falling in love with James, it was thought that she would become a nun.) She and James walked to six o’clock Mass every morning in the Redemptorist Church, before they opened the shop and even the year before she died they both made their annual Lough Derg pilgrimage … But with Daddy it was a kind of courtship, I hear. And to have a priest in the family was seen as a great blessing. It didn’t, of course, come to pass, but he remained the holiest Joe in our house of God and the odd sermon he gave us, including Mammy the girl, was indeed priestlike … He played the organ every Sunday in the Redeemer Church. Jesu, joy of man’s desiring, Awake … Sharon, when being reprimanded for being late for Mass one Sunday, called him ‘a religious fanatic’ (he was ahead of his time) and Mammy burst out laughing at her wee face putting him in his place. One December, when I was singing ‘Oh Holy Night’ with him playing the organ in our living room, he suggested, ‘Why don’t you sing it with me at Mass, Pandy?’ and we got excited about it and practised every day. When Christmas morning arrived, though, I was suddenly crying scared. So close to the reality of it now … Envisaging myself by him on the organ above the whole church, floating exposed on the balcony and all of the parish below listening … Neighbours and friends and Christmas dolls … The turning heads, the ears, the coughing in the echoing quiet … The solemn pause of the bent and listening priest … I couldn’t do it. I have a vague recollection of being comforted by Mammy before she broke the news to Daddy. There was no real persuasion. I was ever so gently let off the hook. But I knew he was disappointed. It would have been a beautiful moment for him, I think now, when I imagine myself someday with my own child, and he did express that lovingly in a Baa way, over the years.

He went ahead of us to prepare and we followed on and joined the congregation.

When he began to play the introductory notes of ‘Oh Holy Night’, then by himself up there and me sitting below in a pew with Mammy, Jim, Sharon and Caroline, my heart started to beat as if there was yet another me up there with him, inhaling before I sing. But no voice, of course. It came and it went. And I was the only one that heard my heart beat for what might have been. I regretted it. And I am sorry now, today, because it would have been beautiful for me too, to sing with my daddy.

If a place is given such solemnity and gravity as the church is … if it’s a very serious place, then it is near impossible for me not to laugh, to this day. But that was a gift from Mammy, too.

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