Barefoot Pilgrimage Read online

  ‘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 s
moke-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.