Sins of the Mother (6 page)

My mother had never been happy with me, not from the very moment I’d been born. She never tired of telling me that she went into labour with me on Good Friday, and the pain made her cut
herself with the breadknife. Bad luck, she said. I was nothing but bad luck – and my three older siblings were forced to agree. She was a cruel woman, my mother, but I loved her. So while I
ducked her blows I still did my best to make her happy, helping her out with the cleaning and making tea for her. Anything to make her love me.

Today the cubbyhole hadn’t felt like it was far enough away to be safe so I had retreated to the top of the stairs in our tenement block and hidden myself behind the tall black railings.
My legs were so thin I could slot them between the railings and dangle them in the air beneath me, pressing my face into the wrought-iron bars. No one ever looked up from the hallway so I felt
secure up here as long as I didn’t make a lot of noise. Now I hummed softly to myself as I rocked back and forth on the palms of my hands, admiring my shiny black patent shoes. I loved my
shoes; they were the nicest pair of shoes I’d ever seen in my life. I smiled at them now as I pointed my feet one at a time.

‘Would yous stop mucking around now?’ Frances called out from downstairs, pacing about in the courtyard outside. ‘Just come back inside, would ya?’

Frances was the eldest out of the six of us – I was five years old and she was ten. Then there was Agatha, nine, Peter, seven, and Martin was a year younger than me at four. Cecily was
still just a babe in arms. Our eldest brother Aidan lived with my granny on my father’s side and we rarely saw him.

I held my breath as I waited for Frances to give up hollering and go back inside. She wandered around the bottom of the stairwell, called for me a little more, then finally shrugged and returned
to the flat where I could hear my mother screaming. As the door banged shut I breathed a sigh of relief – I was tired of all their name-calling and their bullying. There were times I just
needed to get away and be on my own.

‘My name is Irene,’ I whispered to myself. ‘It’s not Monkey Face or Skinny Malinky or Cry Baby. Or Bad Luck Girl. It’s not any of those. It’s
Irene.’

It was my mother who had started up with all the names – she always used to say I was such an ugly child I belonged in the zoo. It hadn’t taken long for the names to catch on and
somehow the name Monkey Face stuck. Other times she said I was so skinny that if you lost your key you could fit me in the keyhole. They all laughed – I just wished she knew how much it
hurt.

My mother Vera was actually a very beautiful woman herself – at thirty years old she was tall and slim with large blue eyes, high cheekbones and bleach blonde hair that hung to her tiny
waist. She always dressed in tiny miniskirts that showed off her lovely figure. Today she had hit me again. I didn’t understand it – she never seemed to hit my siblings as much as she
hit me. And I never knew what I’d done to deserve it – it came from nowhere and seemed to have no reason for it. She pulled my hair, slapped me and threw things at me. She did it with
the others too but nowhere near as much. And they were never called horrible names. For some reason Mammy always saved up her really savage attacks for me. Today she had whacked me on the side of
my cheek, leaving a stinging red handprint on my face. I put my hand up – it still felt warm.

‘You stupid feckin child!’ she’d erupted. She had struck me so hard the force actually sent me spinning on the spot. Immediately I started crying.

‘Oh, what are you bloody crying for now? Jesus! You’re such a cry baby!’

At that, Frances and Peter, who were sat at her feet, started to chant: ‘Cry baby! Cry baby!’

‘I’m not a cry baby!’ I stammered, wiping my tears with the back of my sleeve.

‘You are too!’ Peter said and blew a raspberry in my direction. ‘You’re a stupid eejit cry baby!’

Aye, he’s right,’ said Mammy, swigging on her bottle of Guinness. ‘You’re a bloody cry baby and I regret the day you were born.’

Her words hurt me more than her hand ever could. My stomach shrivelled inside me and I turned cold with horror. I ran out of the flat and up the stairs to my hiding place.

Now, an hour later, and I was still up here. I’d calmed down a little but not all that much. At least the tears had stopped. I shifted my weight around – the cold
stone floor had numbed my bum. I was far too thin – I knew that – but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Food was hard to come by in our house and it was a daily struggle to
ignore the constant hunger that clawed at my insides. Tonight was a good night; there was bread and dripping for tea. On a bad day there was nothing and if Peter didn’t steal something we
went to bed hungry. The stairwell of the block was very dark now with just a little light shining out of the windows of each flat onto each landing. I heard my stomach growl but I wasn’t
ready to go back downstairs.

We all lived in a small, sparse flat with just the two rooms, both with bare walls. The first room was the biggest; on the right-hand side was the window that overlooked the Liffey and
underneath it was the settee. Past that was the fire and past that was the cooker. In the same room was a double bed where all us children slept. My mother slept in a small room at the back of the
flat.

They’re not your real family
, I told myself for the hundredth time that day.
She’s not your real mammy. One day your real mammy and daddy will come and get you and take
you away
. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my reed-thin arms round my legs now. I didn’t even know my daddy – Mammy said that he was working away in England but I never
saw him. And according to what she said he never sent money home to us either. At night when she’d had enough drink and pills to soothe her violent temper she’d lie sprawled on the bed
and curse him out.

‘Never sends money back for us!’ she’d spit viciously. ‘What does he expect me to do? How does he think I’m supposed to feed you all?’

I wanted to go to her then and put my arms round her. I wanted to do something to make her feel better but it seemed I couldn’t do anything right. One time I tried to hug her and she threw
me off her as if I was a cockroach that had crawled onto her body.

‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ she’d shrieked, disgusted.

‘I just want to help, Mammy.’ My voice trembled with fear.

‘Help? HELP?’ she’d erupted. ‘You can start feckin helping by cleaning up around here. Go on! Do the feckin washing-up!’

My eyes filled with tears as I slunk off to the large ceramic sink filled with dirty dishes.
Don’t cry,
I told myself over and over.
Don’t cry.

And don’t bloody start your feckin weeping again!’

Mammy groaned. ‘Jesus, you drive me mad, you really do!’

I tried my best but the tears wouldn’t listen and I started to cry again. All I wanted was to love her and for her to love me. But she didn’t love me. She really didn’t and she
didn’t make any attempt to hide it.

Now I sighed and got to my feet – I knew I’d have to go back inside to say the rosary at 6 p.m. or I’d be in really big trouble. So I dusted my dress down and walked back into
the flat. Luckily, nobody seemed to notice me as I came in that evening. They were sitting on the bed, talking. There was Frances with her thick, curly chestnut hair which hung down her back. She
was the pretty one. Next to her on the bed was Agatha, who was well built with wiry, strawberry blonde hair and on the end, Peter with his mop of dark brown hair. He was a handsome lad but he had a
quick temper and was always ready to defend our mother. I was hoping they might have left some bread and dripping for me and luckily there was a slice left on the chopping board. I looked around
before I took the hard hunk of bread and started gnawing on it.

At 6 p.m. on the dot Mammy made us kneel to say the rosary with her – she’d been brought up by the nuns in the convent so she was very religious, making us say our prayers every
night. It always made my knees sore but I never complained – none of us ever complained. We just got on with it, racing through the words as quickly as possible in order to get up off the
cold floor and into bed: ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord . . .’

Afterwards, I crawled under the covers of the bed with the rest of my siblings, all of us huddled under a big pile of coats for warmth, and fell asleep to the sound of their soft breathing.
Sometimes, after a long day, my arms would ache. It was something I’d had all my life though I didn’t know why they ached. Mammy always joked that I was lucky to be alive and
she’d tried to throw me out of the window when I was a baby. The way she said it, it was to make other people laugh, but deep down I could never really tell if she was joking or not. That
nasty little laugh at the end.
Did she really try and throw me out of the window?
I tried not to think about it. Instead, I closed my eyes and told myself: ‘Tomorrow will be better.
Tomorrow my real mammy and daddy will come and get me. And they’ll never call me names.’ I smiled to myself then and let the fantasy take me completely.

A couple of months later, just after my sixth birthday, we were given a new house in a council estate on the outskirts of town, again just opposite the River Liffey Moving day
was frantic – lots of the local families helped us put our furniture on a cart to get it across town. Compared to the tenement block, our new home was paradise. It was very clean and enormous
– there was a living room, scullery, a separate toilet, bathroom, and upstairs there were three bedrooms. The front bedroom had two double beds and a single bed in it – that’s
where all us children slept – the middle room had a double bed and a wardrobe for my mother and the smaller room also had a double bed in it. The place wasn’t decorated but it was
large, clean and, best of all, there was a big back garden which led onto farmland.

On that first day I spent hours wandering through the fields at the back of the house, exploring my new environment. I loved being out there in nature, listening to the sounds of the birds and
the frogs. Out in the open air, away from the clamour of the house and the constant shouting and thumps, I felt free and happy. Here I could talk to myself, sing to myself and just be myself. It
was wonderful.

At home, Mammy didn’t like us making a lot of noise – she said it drove her mad – so she made us sit on the sofa with our fingers on our lips for hours on end. And if we
accidentally spoke or laughed then we were sent to our room with no supper. We had to be especially quiet when Mammy had one of her ‘soldier friends’ round. There was one soldier friend
in particular who came to visit her a lot and then she would push us all out of the house and lock the door, saying we weren’t allowed back into the house until later that day. I didn’t
mind being locked out all that much – I could spend hours sitting at the side of the river, throwing stones and watching the water speed by. Sitting there, I could get lost in my fantasy
world – the world of my ‘real’ family, my soft, kind mammy and handsome daddy who loved me so much. I knew them so well in my imagination that I could summon them at will,
picturing every detail of how they looked from their smart, colourful clothes to their beautiful, shiny hair. In my daydreams, they would dote on me, bringing me all sorts of delicious treats and
sweets. They would dress me in pretty dresses, hug me lots and tell me how much they loved me all the time. They would say kind things to me, never tease me or call me names. And never ever hit
me.

During the week we went to school on a bus – me, Frances, Agatha and Peter. The best thing was that we passed by a bakery every morning and they gave us warm, freshly baked crusts of bread
as our breakfast. It made me happy. I liked school – it was a huge place, every room had dozens of children, and I kept up quite well with the lessons.

When we first moved in to the new house we had all our furniture from the old flat – beds, table, chairs, sofa, drawers – but as the months passed I noticed the
furniture disappearing. When my older sister Frances asked Mammy where the table went one day she told her she had to sell it to buy food. That night I was careful to eat all of my stew because I
knew our old table had paid for it – but I also noticed that Mammy had a couple more bottles of vodka than she had the day before.

We never had new clothes. I always wore my sisters’ hand-me-downs, but they were so well worn that by the time they reached me they were completely threadbare. Kindly neighbours sometimes
left bags of old clothes outside our door and we’d fall on these offerings, rooting around for something decent to wear. But often they were too big for my skinny frame or had been washed so
many times they were falling apart. I adored my patent black shoes so much but soon they too were falling off me and eventually I had to tie elastic bands round them to keep the soles on.

One night we were sat around the fire when Mammy suddenly ordered us to shut up and listen because she had something important to say.

‘Come here, you lot!’ she slurred. She’d already drunk a couple of bottles of Guinness that night and her head bobbed unsteadily as she waved her arms at us to come closer.
‘Come to your mammy now and watch – I’m going to take an overdose.’

‘No, Mammy!’ Frances cried. Martin and I just looked at each other, a little concerned but mostly confused.
What is happening?

‘Please don’t, Mammy!’ Agatha was in tears.

I didn’t quite understand what she meant but I didn’t want to upset my mammy so I just sat quietly. Carefully, Mammy opened all of the bottles of pills she’d been given by the
doctor then emptied the contents onto the table. There must have been twenty or thirty tablets there – some were just plain white but others were little coloured capsules with tiny beads
inside.

I didn’t know what they were but Mammy always said they were for her nerves.

Now she rolled her fingers over them, almost lovingly, spreading them out on the table. She seemed to be deciding which ones she wanted to take as we sat there in complete silence, watching her.
None of us dared to stop her as she picked one up, stuck it on her tongue and took a swig of Guinness, throwing her head back to make sure the pill went down properly. She did this again and again
and again. Agatha cried silently while Frances and Peter just looked at Mammy with dismay.