“Don’t be dirty,” Ma snapped. “I’m not a smart-arse like you, I don’t know all the ins and outs, but I know this much: Father Vincent wouldn’t give you Communion. In the church where you were baptized.” She jabbed a triumphant finger at me. Apparently this counted as a win.
I reminded myself that I needed a chat more than I needed the last word. I said meekly, “You’re probably right.”
“I am, of course.”
“At least I’m not raising Holly to be a heathen too. She goes to Mass.”
I thought the mention of Holly would smooth Ma down again, but this time it just put her back up further; you never can tell. “She might as well be a heathen, for all the good it’s done me. I missed her First Communion! My first granddaughter!”
“Ma, she’s your third granddaughter. Carmel’s got two girls older than her.”
“The first one with our name. And the last, by the looks of it. I don’t know what Shay’s playing at, at all-he could have a dozen girls on the go and we’d never know, he’s never brought one to meet us in his life, I swear to God I’m ready to give up on him altogether. Your da and meself thought Kevin would be the one who…”
She bit down on her lips and upped the volume on the tea-making clatter, bashing cups onto saucers and biscuits onto a plate. After a while she said, “And now I suppose that’s the last we’ll see of Holly.”
“Here,” I said, holding up a fork. “Is that clean enough?”
Ma threw it a half glance. “It is not. Get between the prongs.” She brought the tea things over to the table, poured me a cup and pushed milk and sugar towards me. She said, “I’m after buying Holly her Christmas presents. Lovely little velvet dress, I got her.”
“That’s a couple of weeks away,” I said. “Let’s see how we go.”
Ma gave me a sideways look that told me nothing, but she left it. She found another cloth, sat down opposite me and picked up something silver that could have been a bottle stopper. “Drink that tea,” she said.
The tea was strong enough to reach out of the pot and give you a punch. Everyone was out at work and the street was very quiet, just the soft even pattering of the rain and the far-off rush of traffic. Ma worked her way through various undefined silver widgets; I finished the cutlery and moved on to a photo frame-it was covered in fancy flowers that I would never get clean to Ma’s standards, but at least I knew what it was. When the room felt like it had settled enough, I said, “Tell me something. Is it true Da was doing a line with Theresa Daly, before you came on the scene?”
Ma’s head snapped up and she stared at me. Her face didn’t change, but an awful lot of things were zipping across her eyes. “Where’d you hear that?” she demanded.
“So he was with her.”
“Your da’s a fecking eejit. You knew that already, or you’re as bad.”
“I did, yeah. I just didn’t know that was one of the specific ways he was a fecking eejit.”
“She was always trouble, that one. Always drawing attention to herself, wiggling down the road, screaming and carrying on with her friends.”
“And Da fell for it.”
“They all fell for it! The fellas are stupid; they go mad for all that. Your da, and Matt Daly, and half the fellas in the Liberties, all hanging out of Tessie O’Byrne’s arse. She lapped it up: kept three or four of them dangling at once, broke it off with them every other week when they weren’t giving her enough attention. They just came crawling back for more.”
“We don’t know what’s good for us,” I said. “Specially when we’re young. Da would’ve been only a young fella back then, wouldn’t he?”
Ma sniffed. “Old enough to know better. I was three years younger, sure, and I could’ve told him it would end in tears.”
I said, “You’d already spotted him, yeah?”
“I had, yeah. God, yeah. You wouldn’t think…” Her fingers had slowed on the widget. “You wouldn’t think it now, but he was only gorgeous, your da was, back then. A load of curly hair on him, and those blue eyes, and the laugh; he’d a great laugh.”
We both glanced involuntarily out the kitchen door, towards the bedroom. Ma said, and you could still hear that the name used to taste like superfancy ice cream in her mouth, “Jimmy Mackey could’ve had his pick of any girl around.”
I gave her a little smile. “And he didn’t go straight for you?”
“I was a child, sure. I was fifteen when he started chasing after Tessie O’Byrne, and I wasn’t like these young ones nowadays that look twenty before they’re twelve; I’d no figure on me, no makeup, I hadn’t a clue… I used to try and catch his eye when I’d see him on my way to work in the morning, but he’d never look twice. He was mad on Tessie. And she liked him best of the lot.”
I had never heard any of this before, and I was willing to bet that Jackie hadn’t either, or she would have passed it on. Ma isn’t the let’s-all-share-our-feelings type; if I had asked her about this story a week earlier or later, I would have got nowhere. Kevin had left her fractured and peeled raw. You use what you’ve got. “So why did they break up?” I asked.
