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

She looked like something out of Vogue and she lit up the dank Manchester street. An elderly couple walking their dog stopped and stared as she wafted past like a whiff of expensive perfume. Even though I knew she was up to no good, I was bursting with pride for my beautiful mother.

At about midday I returned from the shop to find a police car parked outside the house. Impulse told me to turn and run but I put the key in the lock. Holding my breath, I entered the living room.

Mikey was playing with his Evel Knievel toys in front of the fire and Tess was sitting on the sofa next to a roly-poly policeman. Strands of her hair were unpinned and her lipstick was smudged. The policeman looked like the TV detective Frank Cannon. He had a receding hairline, a hedge moustache and was scribbling something in his notebook. When I walked in, Tess inched away from him.

He put down his pencil and stared, a pink tongue resting on his lower lip.

He struggled to his feet. “What have we here, then? Another looker, just like her mam.”

Still staring at me, he put his notebook in his jacket pocket and fastened the silver buttons over his enormous belly that protruded like an extra limb. He moved towards me and slowly lifted his hand to stroke my cheek. Tess leapt to her feet and I ran to her. She grabbed Mikey and I could feel the gallop of her heartbeat as she pressed us both to her chest. Frank walked slowly towards us then stopped. Raising a log-like arm, he sent everything flying off the mantelpiece: the Croagh Patrick snow globe, the clay ashtray I’d made in pottery class and the framed photo of Dad that the three of us kissed every night before bed.

“Murdering Paddy bastards!” he said, picking up his helmet and waddling out of the door.

I was too scared to ask Tess what she’d done or who she’d killed. But I found out soon enough when Eileen O’Dowd arrived on our doorstep that evening. Eileen was a popular girl in my class and one of the few other Irish girls at Oakwood High. Most went to the nearby convent school. Eileen’s Omagh-born mother had recently done the unthinkable and left her alcoholic good for-nothing Irish Catholic husband for an English atheist called Jethro whose baby she was carrying. Eileen had been telling us for weeks about her baby brother Carl’s upcoming naming ceremony at the Railway Club. She’d been boring us senseless about the buffet, her new outfit and how her mum and Jethro were going to duet to a Cat Stevens song. She explained that the ceremony was a non-religious event on account of Jethroe not believing in God and her mum turning into a hippy.

That night she stood in the lashing rain on our doorstep with a face of thunder and her arms folded across her chest. I took in the soaking wet rims at the bottom of her new pink jumpsuit, the glittery eyelashes and the strawberry-blonde hair that the rain had flattened against her face.

“I’ve come round to tell you I can’t be friends with you anymore, Carmel Lynch, cos of what your mam did today,” she said.

I swallowed. “OK, Eileen.” My legs weakened and I tried to close the door but she put a wedged heel in the way.

“You have no idea, have you?”

I shook my head.

She glared at me. “Well, I’ll tell you, will I? Your nutcase of a mother ruined our Carl’s special day good and proper. She turned up at his naming ceremony at the club with your brat of a brother and shouted all the way during it. She called us all heathens, she said our Carl would spend his life in limbo and she called him the B word more than once.” She wagged her finger. “And I don’t mean bloody either. Uncle Tony had to get the police and they dragged her away kicking and screaming.”

My chin fell on to my chest and I wanted the world to swallow me up. I tried to close the door again but Eileen was enjoying watching me squirm too much to move her foot.

“And I wouldn’t mind but you lot don’t even go to the Catholic school or to Mass. Who does your mam think she is? My mam says she should be locked up.”

After a few more insults she turned on her heel and walked away.

“Bye-bye, Carmel!” She raised her hand in a wave. “Nice knowing you.”

“She’s not well!” I shouted weakly after her but my words were swallowed up in the battering rain.

I went back inside, went into the living room and turned off the TV. I’d been watching an extended news programme about the Brighton bombing and how they’d nearly killed Mrs Thatcher. But now all I could think about was tomorrow and school. I was going to have to leave. How could I ever face any of my friends again? I could hear Tess moving around in her bedroom. Something inside me snapped and that was when I headed upstairs in a fury. The Brighton bombing wasn’t the only atrocity committed by an Irish person that day.

I stood up from the bed, put the Quiet Man picture into the binbag and looked around my mother’s bedroom one last time. When Mikey and I were growing up Tess’s mental-health issues were shrouded in mystery and shame. Friends and family spoke about her manic episodes in hushed tones, telling us she was “bad with her nerves’” or “a bit delicate”. It was only later in my teens that I learned that the pill bottles piled up in the bathroom cabinet weren’t to ease her arthritis as she claimed, but to contain her dark depression, mood swings and debilitating anxiety.

That morning, when I found her at the foot of the bed, rain was hammering on the windowpane like an impatient God wanting to enter. I didn’t know then that