“I will speak with your sister,” Mr. Levy says. And so away he toddled to her usual haunt, a rats arse of a wobble known as “Dobbies‘.
Well, when Bridget came home, she was fit to be tied.
Away to flip out of it and rot!“ she tellt me. ”What am I supposed to do while you’re lying around some auld scuts mansion? Leave me and see what happens, I’ll flipping CRUCIFY you!“
I was crestfallen to say the least. I spent the rest of the night sulking. But in the end, she let me go for my Mr. Levy came back next day and persuaded her. He gave her a purse of money up front and agreed that his lawyer would provide a weekly sum (I don’t know how much but it must have been a good deal more than I would have made in the normal run of things).
After he left, Bridget sat staring out the window, stroking the purse. She had a thick smile on her face and her eyes were glazed over, I think she was trying to calculate how many pints of Dutch gin she could now afford to buy.
Not much of a sister, you might think. And you would be right.
But that is hardly the worst of it. For you see, Bridget was not really my sister. Not my sister at all. As it happens, the truth of it is,
she was my mother.
But perhaps now that I am at it I should say something more of my early life, what I know of it. Till this day, my fathers identity remains something of a mystery. According to my mother and a few that knew her from the old days back across the water, he was a sailor from the north that went by the name Whacker McPartland, not his real name of course, that was Dan, but apparently he
preferred
to be called Whacker.
According to my mother there was never a couple so devoted as herself and himself, Bridget O’Toole and Whacker, they were “loves young dream‘. Whacker was as handsome as the day is long and a marvellous dancer to boot, the jig his favourite and he only had eyes for my mother so he did and guarded her most jealously. Indeed on one occasion that my mother would often proudly recount, Whacker having drunk too much at a penny reel was overcome with nausea in the middle of a dance but would not leave the hall to vomit as that would have meant abandoning her to be spun around by RIVALS so instead what did he do but cleverly boke up his own sleeve, button the cuff and continue the jig, only thereafter with one arm held casually aloft.
If you listened to my mother, this man my father wanted but two things in life. One to be dancing and two to have her pinned to the wall by his jack upon which organ by her account you could have slung a packsaddle. Strange to say, as soon as old Whacker discovered that “the love of his life‘ was carrying a child, away off he jigged out of town taking his jack with him, never to be seen nor heard again, well I don’t suppose his jack made a sound. Mind you perhaps it nickered.
As for my mother Bridget, due to a fondness for Dutch gin and various knocks to the head, her recollection of the past was shocking and in her time she claimed variously that I was born on a Tuesday or perhaps a Thursday in April or more likely May. It was the middle of the night, or just before teatime, this was in the year “47, ”48 or ‘49 and the birth took place in
either
Dundalk or Drogheda, or possibly somewhere else altogether. “How am I supposed to remember all that!” my mother would cry if ever I asked about the circumstances. “I was in PAIN! I was GIVING
BIRTH!! It
began with a ”D’! D something! Was it Donaghadee?“
But wherever we were and whenever it was, she was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN of one detail and that was that she was in the middle of a fight when I came out. In her melancholy cups, when I was only small, she’d fix me with a watery gaze and declare, “Look at you! You were born with wigs on the green!” a notion that caused me a certain amount of confusion at the time.
One other thing she does remember is that while she was carrying me she took a powerful notion to smoke a pipe. Any time I asked about my birth it was this first pipe that my mother went on about claiming that it was only the very
final
puff of the very
last
little ember in the bowl that gave her
any
pleasure whatsoever. Jesus Murphy the pounds of tobacco she had to smoke her way through with dogged determination in order every time to get down to that final glowing little coal. “It was a wonder,” she used to say, “that when I came to term I had a child at all and not a flipping fall of soot.”
My first memory is of light, pretty dappled patches of light playing across the dusty floorboards of a strange house where my mother had took me, this was back in Ireland. A gentleman lived in the house, he had straw-coloured moustachios and blue eyes like chips of sky. My mother had went into the next room with him and they had closed the door, telling me to stay put and amuse myself with a wooden clothes peg. I soon got bored and so drank off the dregs of the strange mans glass (my mother had left none) and went to listen at the door. It seemed that my mother and he were dancing in there, at any rate they was out of breath and I could hear the creak of the boards, which stopped when the man made a terrible sound like his throat had been cut and moments later my mother hurried out the room counting coins then bundled me from the house and up the road. She has killt him and took his purse! I thought, until we saw the very same gent the very next day, not a mark on him! He was in the street, walking arm-in-arm with a fine lady. I was most glad he was alive and my mother not a murderer (though I did not doubt she was capable of it, she was forever threatening to kill
me).
I waved to the gent and gave him good afternoon, for he had been kind and chucked my chin and made me a present of the clothes peg, but he just frowned and steered his lady away across the square and then sure did my mother not practically yank the arm off me as she dragged me up an alley. Christ the Night I had put her in a foul temper, you knew that because of the way her eyes flashed and her nostrils flared. When you got her in a rage you were never sure exactly what she would do but you knew she was bound to lash out. This time she spat at me through her teeth, “DON’T-YOU-EVER-DO-THAT-AGAIN!” each word accompanied by a blow to my head or backside. “Else I’ll THROTTLE YOU!”
From that day forth I never in public acknowledged a man I recognised unless he had greeted me first, and I did this even if a man was a frequent visitor to our home and even if the last time I seen him my mother had—let’s say for instance—been sat on his knee and letting him like a big baby suck on her titty, excuse me but such is an example of how I viewed the confusing and disturbing scenes I witnessed from an early age.
My mother always used to claim she worked in a shop that sold umbrellas, a notion I never questioned until I got a bit older and then could not understand why the umbrella shop was open only at night instead of like other shops in the daytime. When I asked my mother about this she told me don’t be daft she didn’t sell the umbrellas, not at all, what she did, she had to be up all night fabricating them for to be sold the next morning. Fabricating them. Her very words. It took me a long time to realise that whatever she was fabricating it was not umbrellas.
By the time I was 8 or 9 (or 10, she didn’t know), we had settled in Dublin and lodged next door to a pie shop, in a room at the very top of a dark narrow stair. More often than not I would wake up in the morning and my mother would be back from “work‘ and there would be some man or other dossed down in the bed recess or on occasion just crumpled in a heap in the middle of the floor as if overnight he had fell from the ceiling. All shapes and sizes and sorts of men were to be discovered in the mornings, sometimes two or 3 of them were laid out on the floor and snoring in a row. The smell of drink would knock you down and when my mother woke up she would glare at whoever was there like she hated them and demonstrate shocking bad form until they gave her the money they owed her for the lodging and went away. Whereupon she would take her sore head straight back to bed.
Unless of course they was a young handsome man and she was in love with them, in which case it was a different story altogether, Jesus Murphy she would be fastened onto their coat tails and trying to drag them back between the sheets if they even so much as glanced at the door. There was always this one or that one that she made a fool of herself over, chief I remember among these was a piece of work named Joe Dimpsey and a more slippery article never pulled on an elastic sided boot. It was said that Joe Dimpsey came originally from good stock and had rich relations over in Scratchland and that he had even attended the Queens college for a while before he had to sell his textbooks to pay off a debt. Thereafter things didn’t go too well for Joe and by the time my mother met him he was working odd jobs at the racetrack but he soon gave up that profession in order to lay about our hearth
1/2
clad, his main tasks seemed to be to flex his muscles while flicking through the racing pages until the early hours when my mother would return from the so-called umbrella shop with more money or another bottle.
Right enough, Joe Dimpsey was very good-looking, he had dark curls and an insolent grin and when he thought that nobody was listening he would stand in front of the glass and tell himself, “Flip me out you are one handsome scut.”
My mother would not hear a bad word said about Joe Dimpsey, as far as she was concerned he was the Angel Gabriel and had a great future ahead of him as a learned Man of Science just as soon as he took it into his head to resume his studies. After some months, when he showed no signs of taking anything into his head apart from liquor (indeed it was his party trick to suck a measure of gin up his nose), my mother bought him the necessary textbooks herself but he barely opened them and preferred instead to while away the time when she was not at home by catching the gas of his farts in his hand and trying to make you smell them, that was the nearest thing to Science that passed in our house while Joe Dimpsey was in residence.
One afternoon, Joe came back from the track looking very down in the mouth and early next morning away out he went with the textbooks under his arm. He returned an hour later, empty-handed and looking rather shifty. Even I could guess that he must have sold the books. I watched him from my little tick on the floor as he tried gently to wake my mother, never an easy proposition, you might as well have danced a jig at a milestone. Finally, he gave her a shake. She opened one eye a crack and looked at him crossly.
“I’m going,” he told her and jerked a thumb at the wall, behind which lay nought but the attic of the pie shop, I did not know much but I didn’t think that was where he was headed.
“What?” says my mother, a bit groggy and also probably 1/2 drunk, she still had her frock on if I remember right. “Where to?”
Joe glanced over his shoulder, out the little window and after a pause he said, “Over the water. I’ve bought the ticket. I’m away today”
My mother leapt out the bed recess and grabbed his arm. “What?” she squawked. “You can’t! You can’t leave me here on my own! On my ownnn!!!”
It seemed, not for the first time, that she had forgot she had a child, even though I was sat on the floor, right in front of her! sucking on my breakfast, a lollipop. Joe shrugged her off. “I have to,” he says. “It’s that or stay here and decide which arm gets broke, the right or the left and I can’t decide, so I’m going before they come to get me.”
My mother wept and pleaded as she dipped slyly into his pockets, looking to pinch the boat ticket and destroy it but Dimpsey had been with us long enough to have her measure and I reckon the ticket was tucked well down his boot or hid in some other private orifice, at any rate she didn’t find it. She tellt him she’d pay what he owed but no matter how much she begged he would neither change his mind nor reveal his destination—which was, he claimed, “for her own safety” in case excuse me ‘the bastards’ came after her. At this, my mother prostrated herself on the bed, calling him some names and when he tried to pat her shoulder she screamed at him, “Flip off you SCUT!” and lashed out a series of vicious kicks at his tallywags.
I think Joe seen this as reason enough to leave. My mother clung to his legs and screamed at me to help restrain him but I knew better than to get involved in disagreements between Bridget and her men, I had done so once before and got a bruise on my arse the size of Canada for my trouble. So I stayed where I was and took only the twin precautions of removing my lollipop from my mouth (as in those days you were always hearing of terrible accidents involving lollipops) and of lifting aside a glass of ale I had found and planned to drink later. Just in time, for Joe dragged my mother by the hair right over the spot where the glass had been, then threw her on the bed like a sack of coal. Before she could sit up he’d slipped out the room and turned the key in the lock from the outside.
It took an hour before any scut responded to our cries for help but at last we attracted the attention of the pieman who had stepped out the back of his shop in order to relieve himself into a drain as was his habit. He had to bust the lock, for Joe had took the key with him. As the door came in my mother turned to me and said, “You stay put until I come back or I’ll skin you alive.” And with that she flew down the stairs and out into the street. I was fond of my skin and had no wish to be parted from it so I did not budge.
My mother returned in the late afternoon, long-lippit and alone. I was highly delighted to see that Joe was not with her but knew better than to show it so I sat on my smile and kept quiet. That night, before she went to work she seemed very thoughtful, chewing the stem of her pipe as she stared at the cinders in the grate and every so often throwing me a dirty look. I had no idea what I had done wrong. This set of circumstances was not uncommon but in hindsight I believe I know exactly what was going on in her mind. After numerous scowls and sighs and shakings of her head she seemed to cheer up and come to some kind of decision.
“You’ll be all right now, won’t you?” she said.
I did not like the sound of this, not one bit, and so was cautious in my reply.