Chapter 1. 

1995

The thick double door beneath the sign – ‘Parle’s Bar & Grocery’ – is shut. A For Sale board juts from the side wall, with a Sale Agreed banner across it. The blinds are down so it looks as if the house, too, has closed its eyes and died.  That’s all I have time to notice as my taxi whips past. I can’t tell the driver to slow down as I have already given him instructions to hurry. 

I look back as we pass.  Nothing about it has changed, I don’t think, yet it looks different.  Lesser. Then the road swerves and it is gone, disappeared by the bend, as we fly past the post office, and Lambert’s farm and the two-roomed schoolhouse where I learned to read. 

‘That’s it!’ I say, before we pass it. ‘That’s the church there.’

The car screeches to a stop, bidding goodbye to my hopes of a discreet arrival.  From the door, a crowd of heads turn our way.  I should have expected that. Mrs D. was, after all, the proprietor of Parle’s, the village shop and pub. The village hub.  It was always going to be a big funeral, too big for little Mucknamore church. The years peel away and I’m instantly laid bare. 

The driver is already out of the car, taking my suitcase from the trunk, opening my door.  ‘Here we are, so,’ he says, in a strong Wexford accent.  

I will do this well. The vow that seemed so potent and so significant yesterday in my apartment in San Francisco, feels puny now.  Doing it well doesn’t necessarily mean going in to the church, does it? I’m so late. Wouldn’t it be more discreet to  shrink back into the backseat and wait it out, catch Maeve on the way back home? Or, even better, should I go back into Wexford town and stay there for a few days, until all the fuss has died down?

Catch yourself on, I admonish myself, in the local lingo. You’re not a sensitive child now. You’re a  38-year-old woman. A magazine writer. An apartment-owner. A car-driver.  Get in there. Now. As I psyche myself, I’m putting on my sunglasses to protect me from the staring eyes, I’m taking out the clasp that to let my hair fall forward, a veil of sorts, I’m taking a breath so deep it hurts. And yes, I’m stepping out of the car onto Mucknamore soil for the first time in 20 years. 

The heat is unseasonably, ungeographically sultry. Where’s the wind I always associate with here? And surely Ireland is never this hot?  The air feels thick, hardly like air at all, and nausea growls again inside me. I walk through the open gates of the little church yard.  Here I am, folks, the entertainment of the day, the happening that you’ll pass, one to the other, whenever Mrs D’s funeral is recalled.  As I fix my stare beyond their curious eyes, it collides with the door of the black hearse, open like a mouth, and I try not to flinch.  

I draw nearer and people recognize that it’s me.  One says, ‘Hello Jo. Welcome home.’ Another, ‘Sorry for your trouble.’ Then there is a general murmur of greeting and sympathy. I nod acknowledgement. ‘Yes Jo, welcome home,’ says another man, turning the greeting to a snigger.  I know his face, one of the Kennedys, who always used to mock me from his high stool at our bar counter.  Oh yes, here I am. Back where I started. 

Inside, the porch is crammed but they part to let me through and I walk towards words I haven’t heard for a long, long time: ‘Giving thanks to you, His Almighty Father, He broke the bread . . . gave it to His disciples and said . . .’ The priest is a performer, wallowing in emphases and pauses. Two other clerics in purple robes stand behind him and the congregation is on its knees, heads bowed. It is the Consecration, the holiest part of the Mass.  The quietest part of the Mass. Which makes the click of my heels on the tiles sound louder than it should.  

People turn and nudge each other, loosening the holy silence.  As whispers begin to swirl in my wake. Fr. Performer senses the loss of his audience and looks up.  Seeing me, his eyes narrow to specks of stone but I hold his stare. It is, after all, my mother’s coffin sitting there at the top of the aisle between us, polished wood and burnished trimmings and glossy funeral flowers all a-gleam. He stops the ceremony and stands with his hands together in the prayer position, waiting, a column of forbearance. The other two behind him imitate the pose, censuring me with that  loaded, coded silence they must teach at priests’ and nuns’ college.

            I am almost at the top pew, where my family is sitting. I can see Maeve now, looking thin, too thin, almost gaunt. I watch as she follows the eyes of the priest and turns to see what is causing the disruption. When she finds it is me, a look of pure exasperation breaks in her. Now, Jo? her face says, before she turns her elegant neck away from me, back towards the altar. Now? 

I don’t blame her. It must look so careless, so uncaring, to crash in in like this, turning our mother’s funeral into the latest act in the long-running Parle drama.  And my sister will be grieving Mrs D’s  death sorely.  I don’t want to add to that.  At the same time I do blame her.  I blame them all - Maeve, Mrs D, Daddy, even Granny Peg.  These scenes I bring upon the family are never just my doing, though I get the starring role. They all play their part, though they live and die pretending the stage is not even there.

Between Maeve and her husband Donal is a little girl who must be Ria, my eight-year-old niece.  She stares at me with Maeve’s eyes from behind a veil of red hair not unlike my own and with an expression that tells me she has heard all about her Auntie Jo.  She and Donal walk their knees down to make a place for me but Maeve, in one of her childish gestures, kneels firm.  I squeeze into the pew.  The wood is hard against my kneecaps. The smell of incense sends another wave of nausea undulating through me.  The priest begins again: ‘Heavenly Father, you gave your only son . . .’

I kneel and stand and sit through the half forgotten rites waiting, as I have waited out so many a day in Mucknamore, for it to be over.

Why am I here? All the way back - through the black night flight from San Francisco, and in the taxi from Dublin airport to Connolly Railway  Station, and through every chug of the rickety three-hour trip to Wexford, and in the final cab ride from Wexford town to Mucknamore -  the same question: why, when I spent twenty years not making this journey, when I had left it so late that I was unlikely to arrive on time anyway, had I nonetheless organized a last-minute ticket? Why did I feel I had to come?  

And it wasn’t just me. Why did Maeve, who so long ago gave up trying to get me back to Mucknamore while our mother lived, make such frantic efforts to contact me once she began to die. Why does death demand such attentions?

Questions, questions. What would you say, sister of mine, if you knew that I had heard the first words of your first frantic message last Friday?  That I was halfway out my apartment door when stopped by my telephone’s ring-ring and that I stood leaning against the door jamb, letting the answer-machine pick up the call? That as soon as I heard your first words , ‘Hello, Jo, it’s me. It’s about Mammy . . . ’,  I answered aloud. ‘No Maeve, sorry. Not now,’ and slammed the door on the rest of your words as I fled. 

I couldn’t bear it, Maeve.  Not last Friday.  I know how sour and unappreciative that sounds. I know how good it is of you to keep in touch but I had just received news of my own that was blistering my head.  And, in my defense - by the way, another question, why am I always The Defendant in these dealings of ours? - I didn’t know.  

            If I had waited for your next words (‘It’s bad news. I think you should come home. . . ’), or if I had called you back later that evening, or even the following morning, I might have got back to Ireland on Friday instead of Monday. I might have been in time. But in time to what, I ask.  To visit the hospital and be confronted with a new Mrs D: twenty years older, weak and wretched, dying. To snatch a few words from her, maybe even say something myself, then watch her go. What difference would that have made?  Really. I am not being facetious; I would like an answer. What difference, do you think?  I know how you imagine the scene: our mother looking up to see you ushering me in the door, meaningful looks passing between us all, clasping of hands, forgiveness all round, then, reconciliation complete, you and I together watching her die, smiles and tears ushering her out of the world. 

No, Maeve. Too much was left to curdle for too long. No words, not even deathbed words, could hold the mess of it all.  No. It was better the way it happened.  Believe me. 

*

The organ springs into sound for the last time and an elderly voice begins a quavering ‘Ave Maria’. I look up to the balcony: it is Mrs Redmond, my mother’s friend, chins a-wobble. While she struggles with the top notes, an undertaker steps up to release the brake and glides the coffin down the aisle. Maeve is crying, curling her sobs into her husband.

            Outside, the heat crawls over us. Maeve is immediately engulfed by sympathizers, a wall of backs around her. Seeing me alone, Donal steps across and bends to bestow a kiss on my cheek. ‘So,’ he says in that cod-sardonic tone he thinks funny. ‘The prodigal returns.’

            I have met Donal only a handful of times in the many years he has been married to my sister. When they were first engaged, Maeve brought him to meet me in London and that first encounter has always stayed with me: how he enfolded her as they sat opposite me in the restaurant, her hand heavy with his ring.

            ‘How is Maeve doing?’ I ask, ignoring the jibe.

            ‘Wearing herself to a frazzle.  Your mother had very definite ideas about this funeral and Maeve, being Maeve, is carrying them out to the nth degree.’  This time the scorn’s unmistakeable. Maeve always claimed that Donal and Mrs D. were fond of each other but when it comes to family relationships, my sister is prone to whitewash.

            ‘Is she annoyed with me?’

            ‘Your mother wanted to see you and Maeve promised her she’d track you down. When she wasn’t able to . . . Well . . .’

            I can’t give him the response that leaps into my mind and find I can’t think of anything to say instead. Maeve is the single thing we have in common; communication is strained when she is not with us. Just as the silence is stretching towards awkwardness, we are rescued by a loud shriek. 

            ‘Ahhh,’ says Donal. ‘Our keening friends again.’ 

At the church door four young women are - there’s no other word for it - screeching. They are in costume, made up to look old, with black wrinkles painted across their foreheads and around their eyes and shawls drawn up over their grey wigs.  I resist the impulse to cover my ears. ‘Keeners? What the . . . ?’

            ‘Professional mourners, one of your mother’s many special requests.  She left pages of instructions, practically a guidebook.  How To Have A Good Old Irish Sendoff.   We had a wake last night, complete with those four weeping and wailing and flinging themselves on the floor.’

          I look across at my sister, explaining to everybody what the sideshow is about and wonder how she can bear it. Mrs D. would have been imagining her celestial self scrutinizing proceedings from above, watching who did what so she’d know how to treat them when they eventually caught up with her and wouldn’t have thought of Maeve at all. 

            I feel a hand on my back and turn to see Eileen standing there with her husband, Séamus. ‘Jo,’ she says. ‘Jo, I’m so sorry.’ Eileen worked in our shop while we were growing up and lived with us until she married. I let her hold me.  Her hug seems to give the others permission to approach and now people I haven’t seen for years are coming across to grab my hand. Faces I remember, names I’ve forgotten; names I remember, faces I’ve forgotten.  My mother was a great character, they tell me. She is gone to a better place. God would give me comfort. Only one old woman tells me anything that sounds like the truth and she gets herself dragged away by the arm for it. ‘Who are you?’ she says. ‘I never heard Máirín mention you at all.’

            Then, out of the mass of well-wishers comes a particular hand and a particular voice, one I do know. ‘Jo,’ he says, and my heart skips in recognition. I take the proferred hand and a second one comes to encircle mine in warmth and then he is there in front of me. Rory.  Rory O’Donovan.  All of him, looking down on me, our hands conjoined. And everyone else has dissolved away. 

            I had thought about Rory on the journey back, of course I had, and had planned my opening lines and the airy way I would deliver them, but in my imaginings, we met on the beach. Or on the village street. Not here, at my mother’s funeral, the last place I would expect to find him, or any O’Donovan.  Not here, in front of everybody. Not here.

            ‘How are you, Dev?’

            Dev. His old name for me. Extra weight has loosened his jawline. He is still the picture I have held in my head but blurred at the edges, like a photograph out of focus. His hair is gone, his long, black, beautiful hair. It used to flow down his back, soft and shiny as night-water. I used to sink my face in it, loop it through my fingers, knot it around my naked neck. All gone. Shorn and thinning and greying now: any man’s hair. And he wears a suit, any man’s clothes. I look for what I used to know.

            ‘I’m so sorry for your trouble,’ he says, the conventional greeting but in his voice, low and concerned, it sounds so different.  ‘But it is so, so good to see you.’  The keeners choose that moment to raise their wailing to a higher pitch and decibel and he waggles his eyes at them. It is a look to share: amused and confident of my amusement. Just like the old days, us against Mrs D. 

A deep flush begins at the base of my neck and tracks slowly up my face. I panic, point across at the undertaker slamming the hearse door shut. ‘I have to go!’ I say and that’s what I do, almost running from him, decamping back to Donal who stands with Ria near the hearse. It’s the shock, I tell myself as I flee. The suddenness of this new Rory sprung upon me when my mind was on Mrs D. and Maeve and everything else. But I know that’s not it. I know it’s Mucknamore: not even back an hour and already I am regressing, the work of 20 years coming undone.