Weir Wall, Athlone, Ireland
Yesterday I received a letter, which triggered off a memory deeply hidden. The small-mindedness of the letter astonished me – the kind of thing that usually makes me laugh – but the aftertaste of its spitefulness lingered. I was having a cup of coffee when I became aware of anger, rising from the depths, almost choking me.
This anger obliterated everything else. Normal functioning became impossible. I felt obliged to sit down and try to ‘process’ what was happening. For me, this means ‘letting everything inside go quiet’, and letting what I was experiencing ‘come up on my internal screen’. This is what I saw: I was back in my childhood – Ireland of the 1950s. We lived in a very large old house in the centre of town. There were two enclosed yards behind, with several sheds, and my older brother and I were in one of these sheds one summer’s day when we started a fight. It was a long, and terrible, and bloody fight – I know that I will never forget it – yet I can’t remember exactly how, or why it started. I know it had something to do with my brother’s announcing a ‘territorial claim’ over that particular shed. That didn’t matter to me. What mattered to me was something that I once again recognised in my brother, and which no one else seemed to see – his complete and dedicated selfishness. It wasn’t easy to see this. He was a charming and very popular boy – the best footballer in the school. He was also my mother’s favourite, who could do no wrong.
This wasn’t a case of simple jealousy, although jealousy was present. It was more complex than that. He belonged to my mother’s side of the family, in every way – in looks, in character, in temperament. Even in basic attitudes, he mirrored my mother and her three sisters – who all lived near – and their children, our cousins, who ganged up on my younger sister and me, who belonged to ‘the other side’.
I was about ten years old at the time- my brother about twelve. We were both big for our age, although he was bigger than I was. I realised I was in a real fight when I received a stinging blow to the side of the head. The pain, and the violence astonished me, but suddenly anger welled up in me such as I had never known, and I threw myself at my brother, with a ferocity that must have astonished him. It was a primordial anger, which rendered me impervious to pain, and indifferent to danger.
There were tins of paint on shelves that came crashing down, stacks of old glazed windows my father was keeping for something that I heard splintering. Locked together, we crashed to the floor, rolling and snorting, wet sticky paint oozing through the back of my shirt, splinters of glass going into my knees and elbows and arms and back. I merely noticed, felt nothing.
I was vaguely aware of a door opening, then suddenly being suspended in mid-air. There was my father’s face above me, grim and terrible. He was a large and very violent man, but I looked him straight in the face, completely unafraid. He held us both by the scruffs of our necks, like a pair of young pups. He put me down – none too gently – raised a large finger slowly, in his deadly manner, and fixed those eyes on me,‘…You stay here!’ he grated. I stared back. I would have faced death at that moment. He turned, crunching over his precious glass, and carried my brother out. Even he had seemed taken aback.
I had no illusions about him. Several weeks before this, he had beaten me so badly that I should have been hospitalised – I overheard the women in the house say so. For the best part of a week, I couldn’t eat or go to the toilet. I could hardly sit down. My jaw was probably fractured, and I have trouble with my sinuses to this day. I understood from the same conversation that my mother was too ashamed to take me to the hospital, much less to the snotty Protestant doctor down the street. She was middle class to the marrow of her bones, and she considered the doctor’s family to be the epitome of sophistication. It’s somewhat ironic that his son later became my best friend.
In the town, my parents were considered to be hardworking, prosperous, up-and-coming. They had their own businesses, which took up all their time. There was also a pub and a farm, which I don’t remember. I had two brothers and four sisters. My mother had another house, on the other side of town. Both houses always seemed to be full of ‘country girls’ – two of them, cousins of my father’s, fought like cats – who acted as shop-assistants, bar-maids, maids, and an older countrywoman who was our ‘housekeeper’.
There was also a ‘boy’ – about 30 years old – who used to work on the farm, but who worked at this time in the bar, or doing odd jobs. He was seen one day – about six months before the fight – trying to sexually abuse my older brother.
My father took the ‘boy’ into a shed for a ‘talk’, and had beaten him senseless to the floor before the ‘Guards’ – called by my mother – arrived. This further infuriated him, and it took three of them some time to pull him to the ground and restrain him. The sergeant was a great big man, who looked like a boxer. He was a quiet-spoken man, who knew my father well. He had the sense to hold onto my father, talking to him quietly and reasonably, and quite quickly he calmed down. My father could go through agonies of regret later for what he had done, and the sergeant knew this. This time, things were more serious. One of the Guards had sustained a broken jaw, and the other two, broken fingers. A report had to be written, and against the advice of their sergeant, they insisted on a court case.
My mother was in some way related to a local ‘political’ family, a member of which was a government minister at the time. In short, the whole thing was hushed up. It was part of the complex, dark relationship between my parents.
It seemed like forever since my father had carried my brother out the shed door. I sat, perfectly still, on an upturned paint-tin. My mind was empty. I had no feelings left. Blood had caked on my face, and almost everywhere else on my body. Viscous paint was wet and cold on my back. I hadn’t bothered to remove the two splinters of glass from the palm of my right hand. I just kept staring at them, as if the hand were some kind of inanimate object. I was getting colder and colder, but I would not move. I heard footsteps coming. I knew it was my mother, but I didn’t look around. I didn’t need to. I knew she was staring at me steadily, as if assessing my state.
I had heard people say how beautiful she had been when she was young. I turned, and stared back. The slightly aquiline features came from her mother. I always thought the nose too long, and when she looked at me like that, it was as if it was down along that nose. Something was going on behind her eyes, ‘You’d better come in now, or your dinner will get cold!’ I listened intently to what she said. Inside the words were other words, which said,‘You’d better do as I say, or you’ll be sorry!’
I knew that look. That’s how she looked at my father. It meant ‘Men have to be managed, and I know just how to manage them!’ It infuriated him. She was looking at me with that look now, as if I were some dangerous, unpredictable animal in a cage.
I was intelligent. Of that I was sure. I knew what was going on. I shook my head and turned away from her.There was a momentary silence, and I heard her quick steps walking away. She turned at the door:‘There’ll be nothing else to eat tonight!’, and she went in.
It was getting dark when I heard Annie come out. I hadn’t moved.Annie always wore thick shoes, and I never saw her without her apron. Her steps came out, evenly and calmly, like everything else about her. She never raised her voice, or got excited. She had a low, steady voice, which was husky and strong. She stood behind me in silence a moment, smelling as always of apples and flour and cooking.‘I made some soup for you, a-graw!’, she said.
She didn’t touch me, or try to persuade me, or manipulate me, or shame me. It was a flat statement of fact, allowing me free choice. Annie always played fair. She was just, and she was kind, without a trace of sentimentality. She was the one consistent human being I knew. I rose, and without a word, followed her into the kitchen.
John Killeen 2005
