Barefoot Pilgrimage Read online

  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 t
he 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?’