Barefoot Pilgrimage

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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