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

in the downstairs rooms. Strips of light flooded through the slats and dust motes danced on the shabby pieces of furniture: a cheap plywood coffee table, a saggy floral sofa, a scratched dining set dating back to the seventies. Imprints of her lingered everywhere – a yellowing smoke cloud on the ceiling above her armchair, a crescent-shaped coffee stain on the kitchen worktop, a cushion with an impression of her tiny backside. Cold seeped through the walls as I walked around emptying drawers and filling binbags with the leftovers of her life: half-empty pill packets, old cigarette boxes and the unused nail-varnish bottles and lipsticks she used to pilfer from Boots Chemists. In the kitchen I found an entire drawer of Ireland’s Own magazines and at the back of another a bunch of articles from the Irish newspapers. She had a wicked habit of tearing them out of the copies in the reading room in Chorlton Library. She’d been told off a number of times and banned twice but they always let her back in.

I pulled a pile of her knitting from under the sofa cushions. As it unravelled in my hands, I could see her in front of me in the armchair as clear as day. A manic episode could keep her up all night knitting. Sometimes it was jumpers for Mikey and me but often it was baby clothes, cardigans or jumpers with matching booties in pastel colours. I’d find a pile stacked neatly on the armchair the next morning. She’d take them to the New Mothers group in the Methodist Church Hall and hand them out.

Margaret, the kindly lady with large hands who ran the group, took me by the elbow at the funeral. “Your mother was a lovely kind woman,” she said. “The new mothers loved her baby clothes. Nobody knits like that anymore. We used to call her ‘The Baby Lady’. She loved to hold the new-borns and sing to them. It made her very happy.”

There were baking all-nighters, too. A mountain of soda bread would appear on the kitchen table the next morning and I’d have to clean up the surrounding snowstorm before going to school.

Upstairs, I paused on the landing outside her bedroom. I’d found her lying at the foot of the bed the previous November on a morning of near-tropical rain. I’d rung and rung but she wasn’t answering the phone. I knew something was wrong. She rarely left the house since Mikey’s death six months before.

I entered, tightening the grip on my binbag. Most of her clothes and belongings had gone to the Heart Foundation shop so there was very little left in the room: a scattering of cheap pearls from a broken necklace, an empty bottle of Yardley’s Lavender perfume and a gnarled Maeve Binchy novel. I picked up the bottle, closed my eyes and sprayed, longing for her smell one last time. But it was empty. First her voice and now her smell had gone from me.

Under the bed I found an old picture that used to hang on the far wall. It was a still from her favourite film, The Quiet Man starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. In the top right-hand corner, the glass was cracked. As I stared down at it, guilt grabbed me by the shoulders, forced me to sit down on the bed and remember.

“I hate you. You are not my mother.”

She was sitting on the stool in front of the dressing-table mirror, frenetically brushing out her blonde locks. The table was piled high with jars of Nivea and perfumes and lipsticks, heated rollers and hairnets. Philomena Begley was singing “Blanket on the Ground” on the cassette player on the bedside table and Mikey had fallen asleep in his clothes on Dad’s side of the bed. It had been a hell of a day.

“None of my friends will ever speak to me again after what you did!” I hissed, stepping towards her. My ten-year-old hand grabbed the hairbrush and managed to wrestle it from her. I hurled it against the wall. It struck the picture which fell inches from Mikey’s face. The murderous look on her face was enough to propel me downstairs and out of the front door into the evening drizzle. I knew I’d be in for a belting later but a thousand lashes would never compare to the humiliation I knew I’d suffer at school the next day.

I’d noticed the signs the previous evening: the agitation, the talking and smoking at twice her normal speed. She’d circled a date on the kitchen calendar in red pen and kept doing it again and again. Dad had only been gone six months and I assumed it was something to do with him, maybe an anniversary of some kind. I plucked up the courage to ask and her face crumpled. She burst into tears, pushed me to one side and left the room. Later that evening I found her in the back yard on her hands and knees surrounded by suds and a bucket. She was scrubbing at the concrete with a wire brush, mumbling to herself.

I lay awake that night, worry gnawing at my insides. I knew something bad was about to happen. My world had changed since Dad died. It was full of danger and unpredictability now that he was no longer there. There was no one to shield me and Mikey from Tess’s episodes and mood swings. But at least the next day was Sunday and I wouldn’t have to get my brother to school when it all kicked off.

I woke late to the sound of the front door slamming. Out of my bedroom window I could see her sweeping down the street, dragging Mikey behind her. He was in his Sunday suit complete with dickie bow and waistcoat, his unruly mop plastered to his head. She was wearing a royal-blue skirt suit that hugged her slender figure, with yellow heels and a matching Monaco-style headscarf that trailed in the breeze.