My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. Annette Sills (free e books to read online txt) 📖

disappear into the crowd feeling both immense relief and self-loathing. When she’d gone Joe pulled me on to his knee, kissing me long and hard and telling me how happy he was to see me.

I hated myself. Why oh why did I always imagine the worst? Just minutes earlier I was about to walk away from him forever without even questioning what was going on. It was only later that I came to understand why I did things like that. Losing a parent early on in childhood often leaves you with an irrational fear of losing other loved ones, such as a partner or a child. Joe was my first real love and when I saw him that night on the bench with his cousin I automatically assumed I’d lost him. I came to the realisation that it was probably the same fear that had held me back from having a child for so long.

I smiled and held Joe’s face in my hands under the clear moonlit sky.

“Was she my surprise?” I asked.

He shook his head and reached into the pocket of his suit jacket on the bench next to him. Smiling nervously he took out a small box and placed it on my bare thigh. A boat full of revellers sounded its horn on the other side of the river then he asked me to marry him. I said yes and he slipped the traditional Irish Claddagh ring on to my finger. It had a small emerald in the crown.

We married shortly after. Looking back we were so young, maybe too young.

As I walked up the steps onto the Albert Bridge, trying hard to hold on to that moment, to clutch on to all the love I’d felt for him in the intervening years. But his and Karen’s betrayal got in the way. It was still there every day when I woke up, a dull ache that never went away.

The Albert Bridge was my favourite of all the London Bridges. That night her chains fanned out from her towers like a necklace shimmering against a black satin sky. I plodded on, arriving at Battersea Arts Centre just after seven.

Posters for Martin McDonagh’s play, The Beauty Queen of Linanne lined the walls. ‘Unmissable,’ said the Evening Standard. The Telegraph described it as “Gloriously funny”. That evening’s performance advertised a Q&A session with the play’s award-winning director, Timothy Dempsey.

I collected my ticket from the box office then hurried to the bar where I downed a large glass of red wine. My heart pounding, I made my way to my seat.

Chapter 33

My seat was three rows from the front of the stage. It had cost twice the price of my train fare but I wanted to make sure I had a good view of Timothy Dempsey. Digging my fingers nervously into the red velvet of my seat arm, I looked up at the ornate domed ceiling and noted the neutered accents and fine wool coats of the wealthy London Irish making their way to their seats. I could have been wrong but I guessed Dempsey had never frequented the pubs of Kilburn or danced in The Galtymore in his younger days. All of this was all a far cry from the Mayo backwater where he and Tess were raised. I scanned the heads around me for the fecund mop of white hair I’d seen in the photograph but I couldn’t see my uncle anywhere.

I forgot all about him the minute the play started. Set in an isolated cottage in Connemara in the nineties, it told the story of a vicious war between a bitter widow Mags and her forty-year-old virginal daughter Maureen. The simmering violence, explosive outbursts and doses of insanity made me feel very much at home. The play spoke about emigration. Those who stayed behind in rural communities often ended up living embittered lives and those who left sometimes found it hard to cope with upheaval and change. The daughter Maureen suffered a breakdown in London after racist bullying by her English co-workers.

I immediately thought of Tess. Had running away from Ireland helped or hindered her mental health? After Dad died she’d become very unwell and had been abandoned by a lot of her friends in the Irish community. The stigma of mental illness sent them running and like a beautiful cracked porcelain doll she’d been left behind in the back room of a toy shop. Would she have been abandoned in the same way if she’d been living in a tightknit community like Mags and Maureen? Would there have been more kindness? Who knows? The play threw up many questions I’d been asking myself for years and I loved every minute. At the curtain call I was on my feet applauding with the rest of the audience. I’d almost forgotten my reason for being there. Then the lights dimmed, a hushed silence fell over the auditorium and Timothy Dempsey walked on stage.

He sat at the hewn-wood kitchen table that had been the centrepiece of the set. He was slighter and older than in the photo. Seeing him in such a typical Irish setting, surrounded by pictures of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin and a backdrop of the Connemara mountains, unnerved me. A thin blonde with horn-rimmed glasses sat next to him and introduced herself as the theatre’s artistic director. As she read out his bio, he lowered his eyes and crossed his legs, circling his right foot nervously in the air. Tanned, in an impeccable navy suit and pink shirt, everything about him suggested good taste.

He answered the director’s questions in a quiet considered manner with a finely tuned sense of humour. In contrast to Tess, there wasn’t a hint of Mayo in his accent. Both Tess and Dad had little desire to assimilate outside the Manchester Irish community and they’d never altered their accents to fit in. Dempsey on the other hand, could easily have been mistaken for an English country