Miss You (5 page)

Course, I said other things too, like, ‘You mustn’t worry about us, because we will cope.’

To which Mum replied, ‘I know you will.’

We never really talked about what that coping would entail, because I didn’t want it to sound like
I
was the one with the problem.

On one occasion, Mum held my hand and said, staring me out to show she meant it, ‘You must go to university.’

‘I will, don’t worry.’ Leaving it vague meant that neither of us had to confront the glaring question of how.

I helped Mum make a memory box for Hope. It was a shoebox that we covered with pink gingham offcuts from the curtains Mum had made when the boys’ bedroom was turned into Hope’s. Mum
embroidered ‘Hope’ on the rectangle we cut for the top with yellow silk thread from her sewing box. I pasted and stapled the fabric on. The box looked really good; the difficulty was
knowing what to put into it. There wasn’t a lot of physical evidence of Mum’s time with Hope. Parents take a lot of pictures of their firstborn, but the novelty seems to wear off with
the subsequent children. We did find a lovely photo of her with Hope as a smiling baby. And Mum dictated her recipe for Hope’s favourite trifle. Using the microphone and Hope’s Fisher
Price cassette recorder, Mum recorded a message for her. Finally, she took off the gold cross she always wore and asked me to put that in.

‘You wouldn’t want it, would you, Tess?’

I wasn’t sure whether it would make her happier if I said yes, or if she had the consolation of it going to Hope. The cross went in the box. But then Hope noticed Mum wasn’t wearing
it and Mum wasn’t going to tell her why before she needed to know, so the cross came out again, and the box went back in its hiding place under the bed. On a couple of occasions, Mum said,
‘Can we think of anything more for the box? How about a CD? ABBA’s
Greatest Hits
? She loves that one with the children singing . . .’

I wished in a way that we’d never started on it, or chosen a smaller box, because the few items rattling around were such inadequate tokens of Mum’s love.

One of the questions I did ask, while we were stitching and stapling – like Victorian ladies, Mum said – when it was easier to talk because we were both engaged in another activity,
was this: if there was an afterlife, could Mum please find a way of giving me some kind of sign, so I’d know.

That made her laugh.

‘I can’t give you faith, Tess,’ she said. ‘It’s a step you have to take yourself, and then everything follows.’

‘But could you try, please? Just a little sign?’

‘If you’d put the imagination you spend doubting into believing . . .’ she said, in that mildly exasperated way she had that made criticism sound like a compliment.

Brendan and Kevin arrived from different ends of the world in suits. Brendan, hefty with success and lurching between the show-off swagger of a prodigal son and the crumpling
confusion of imminent disaster; Kevin, toned and dapper, in light brown pointy brogues and tight grey trousers showing his calf muscles through the slightly shiny fabric, and a lot of talk about
issues – his own that is, not Mum’s.

After visiting Mum at the hospice, Dad took them down the pub, and there was something strangely jolly about the three of them rolling back home late and smelling of beer.

‘Like the old days,’ Dad said, with an arm draped around each son, recalling a happy tradition that he’d have enjoyed, but had never actually happened.

It was just me by the bed with Mum at the end. I don’t know if she wanted it like that, or if she ran out of time to do all the individual goodbyes. It was almost like
she’d waited to see all her children, then was in a hurry to go. Perhaps she was thinking about the boys’ needing to get back to their jobs. Mum always put others before herself.

The curtains around the bed gave a false sense of privacy and we could hear everything the others were saying just on the other side.

Brendan’s ‘Have I time for a coffee, do you think?’

I should probably be grateful to him for the gift of her last flash of smile, conspiratorial – would you listen to him!

One moment she was there, then the light in her eyes went out.

I thought I was prepared for her leaving, but when I realized she was dead, I felt as shocked as if it had happened without warning. I sat holding her hand until it no longer seemed right not to
share her with the others.

The men cried immediately. I did not. All their hungover heaving and blubbing felt like blows against my shell of numbness.

Hope didn’t like it either and shouted at them to stop.

‘Sssh!’ she said, finger to her lips. ‘Mum trying to sleep!’

I told her to give Mum a kiss, and then I took her to the hospice cafe for sausage and chips, and, to her astonishment, a whole bag of Haribo.

When I put Hope to bed that night, she asked what time we were seeing Mum the next day (we were doing telling the time in Reception class), and I told her that Mum had gone to
heaven.

‘Why?’

‘To see the angels,’ I improvised.

‘And Jesus,’ said Hope.

‘Yes.’

‘And Nana and Granda and Lady Di and Mother Teresa . . .’ Hope listed all the people they’d recently prayed for together.

I had never seen the point of heaven but now I could. Was that a sign?

I waited for the lull that told me Hope was asleep, then began to creep towards the door.

‘Tree?’

‘Yes?’

‘When Mum coming back?’

What was I supposed to say?

‘She’s not, Hope. She still loves us though.’

‘She’ll never stop loving us,’ said Hope.

Even though it was dark in the room, I could tell she wasn’t crying. For Hope, it was a simple statement of fact because Mum had said it, and would say it again and again on the cassette
tape.

A lot of the relations made the journey from Ireland that they’d never made while Mum was alive. Her leaving for England with Dad in the seventies had been resented by
her siblings because, as the older sister, she was supposed to be the one who looked after their father after their own mother had died young. I knew my uncles, aunt and cousins only vaguely from
sitting in chilly front rooms drinking tea from the good china that was brought out for guests, on the boring part of childhood holidays in Ireland that Mum and Dad had called ‘Doing the
rounds’. None of them had met Hope before, but still they claimed the right to pat her on the head with tear-filled eyes, or scoop her up in great hugs, which she didn’t like at
all.

‘That enough kissy stuff!’ she shouted, making herself all stiff.

‘She’s a character, isn’t she?’ said my mother’s sister, Catriona, adding, in a loud, doom-laden whisper, ‘You’ll have to watch her, now, Teresa, and
yourself as well, because they say it runs in families. It’s a terrible thing for us all to have hanging over us.’

Even with Mum dead, I felt she was still trying to blame her.

I didn’t think Hope should go to the funeral, but Dad and Brendan wanted her to and Kev said nobody ever took any notice of his opinion anyway, which was a good way to
get out of giving one. So that was a kind of majority. Except I was sure that Mum wouldn’t have wanted it either.

‘Did she tell you that?’ my father demanded.

‘No.’

It was one of the many things I should have asked her. It was so stupid. All that time we’d had and I’d never dared ask what she wanted for her funeral.

‘Well, then,’ said Dad.

Hope was fine, swaying along to the organist’s slightly slow and tentative interpretation of ABBA’s ‘I Have a Dream’, as we walked in. She stood between
Dad and me as we sang ‘How Great Thou Art’ which was Mum’s favourite hymn. We all said the Lord’s Prayer and Hope said that too, with Dad glancing over the top of her head
at me as if to say,
Told you!

I don’t think she even noticed the coffin until Brendan got up to read his poem.

With hindsight, Kev or I should have stopped him. I think we were both so shocked by the idea of Brendan, of all people, writing a poem, that neither of us thought to ask if we could read it
first. In fact, we both probably felt a little bit ashamed for not writing one ourselves.

If you look in the local newspaper at the memorial section, you’ll see that just because something rhymes, doesn’t make it profound, except to the author. It was Brendan’s
couplet that had ‘Always there to wash my socks’ with ‘Now, you’re lying in a box’ that caught Hope’s attention.

‘In a box?’ she echoed, her voice ringing through the hush.

‘Sssh!’ said Dad.

‘Tree, is Mum in that box?’

‘You have to be quiet now, Hope, we’re in church.’

It used to work when Mum said it, but there wasn’t enough conviction in my voice.

‘Mum is in heaven with Jesus!’ Hope declared.

Father Michael came creeping across to us.

‘Your mother’s body is in the box, Hope, but her soul is gone to heaven,’ he whispered, breathing his halitosis over her.

The screaming was piercingly loud as I carried Hope flailing from the church. How could such a little person possibly understand about the separation of the body and the soul? I should have
trusted my instincts. A funeral was no place for a child. I’d known it. Worst of all, I felt I’d let Mum down.

It was one of those breezy late-September days, with a few white clouds racing across a blue sky and the trees just beginning to turn copper, too beautiful a day for something so sad. Hope
stopped screaming as soon as we were out of the church and started struggling to get down from my arms. The tarmac path had little bits of confetti trodden onto it, pink horseshoes, white
butterflies, lemon hearts. Hope skipped away from the church, chasing occasional falling leaves. I stood watching her, thinking that if she caught one, it would most definitely be a sign. Of course
she didn’t. Autumn leaves have a habit of darting away when you think you’re on to them and Hope’s coordination was never the best. Before frustration could turn to fury, I took
her down the road for a McFlurry.

So we missed whatever trite words Father Michael had to say about Mum being a dutiful mother and wife, and Charlotte Church singing ‘Pie Jesu’ on the CD player, and the coffin going
into the ground, which you’re supposed to see for closure. I wonder whether that’s why Mum still sometimes appears in my dreams, and I wake up with this lovely moment of relief –
I
knew
it couldn’t be true! – before my brain cells reorder themselves back to reality.

Mum was a popular member of the community and her friends took it upon themselves to organize the wake in the church hall. The small kitchen beside the stage was a production line of women in
aprons turning out platters of sandwiches and mini quiches, scones and home-made cakes, great plastic bowls of crisps and trays of piping-hot sausage rolls, while others wielded the big metal pots
of tea they used at the Christmas Fayre and poured glasses of sherry for the women and whiskey for the men.

It wasn’t long before the atmosphere shifted from sombre to animated, and people started telling their stories. Mum’s sister Catriona talked about how when she’d heard Mum had
passed away she went to the room in the house that had been hers and she’d smelled a powerful scent. Didn’t they say that when people returned, they sometimes brought a fragrance with
them? She’d been sure for a moment that Mary was there, before she remembered that she’d put an Autumn Breeze air-freshener plug in the room because it was a bit musty from lack of
use.

Dad regaled anyone who’d listen with the anecdote about how they’d met. He’d gone back to his home town in Ireland for his grannie’s funeral and he’d spotted my
mother across a crowded room and the light of love was in her eyes.

That phrase, ‘the light of love’, made me think of Mum’s eyes just before the end. It was a good description. Dad could surprise you like that. You’d be looking at him
and wondering what it was that had drawn someone as gentle and intelligent as Mum to him, and then you’d get a glimpse.

‘We met at a wake, and now we’re saying goodbye at one!’

His closing line became more tearily indulgent as the evening went on, and people clutched his arm and said wise words like ‘The cycle of life, Jim,’ or ‘You’ve a lot of
happy memories to see you through.’

‘Ach, she was a wonderful wife to me!’ he told them, which was true, although I’d never heard him say it to her.

I didn’t think he’d been nearly a wonderful enough husband to her, but Mum had never complained.

‘Your father’s got a lot on his mind,’ or ‘Your father works very hard to put food on the table,’ were the usual excuses for why he was more often at the
bookie’s or down the pub than at home. Not that any of us hankered for his presence because there was always an aura of threat hanging around Dad.

‘It’s the drink, not the man,’ Mum had even defended him after the terrible night it came out that she had secretly been paying for Kev’s ballet classes with the
housekeeping money, and Brendan had to leap on Dad’s back, kicking his calves to hold him back, and I’d run down the street shouting at the neighbours to call the police because I
thought he was going to kill them.

By the time it got dark outside, there was quite a party atmosphere, with that fug of alcohol and exaggerated emotion that you often get at weddings with family members who
haven’t seen each other in a while.

Kev pushed the piano out on the stage, and played his party piece, ‘Danny Boy’, which he’d probably sung a few times in New York on St Patrick’s Day because it’s an
even bigger deal there than it is in Ireland. Kev’s singing was never as good as his dancing, but he could hold a tune well enough and the performance brought a stunned silence to the room
before people started clapping and telling him how proud his mother would have been.

‘Will you give us a song, Jim?’ someone called.

After only a moment of protest, my father said, ‘Ach, go on then,’ and made his way to the stage, where he stood, leaning against the piano, and, with Kev accompanying him, sang the
Fureys’ ‘I Will Love You’.