Barefoot Pilgrimage. Andrea Corr
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I did not sit down to write a book. This (whatever this may be) began in the summer of 2017. Two years after Daddy had died. Eighteen years after Mum. An overwhelming need to write it all down because if I died now too, this strange, normal, family, human love story as it really was to me, might also die. And then would it have ever really been?
I did not sit down at all, nor consider a destination. I just obeyed the pictures as they came. The questions. The fleeting moments. The present into the past. The present because of the past and back again with a few human, mad-gene detours along the way.
The first story – in the chalet in Skerries – was truly the first door that opened. That dusty room on top of the mattresses, hiding and pretending I wasn’t there. It persisted and it seems to me now insisted I write it down. Not another one. Not a perhaps ‘better’ one. That memory was the first door. The first room. And it began this barefoot pilgrimage.
I walked fast to summon the pictures. I walked fast to slow them down. To still them ultimately and to merely describe, then, the room that I had returned to in my mind. A sympathetic, non-judgemental voyeur of my own life as I lived it growing up. A narrator with the blessing of hindsight. It is what it is and that is OK.
So many of the rooms I loved. They made me laugh out loud, remembering us as we were. That’s a lucky thing to say. Other rooms of course I was happy to write myself out of as swiftly as possible and scramble in the dark for another door.
I tried not to think of you, dear reader, for I am a singer with a debilitating desire to be liked. I tried not to censor it all, clean and smiling like a pop video.
It came to obsess me in a way, once I began. Images from the past were appearing all the time.
Blinding flashes of you startle me awake.
The outside tap on the wall. The musty earth smell of my cat’s paws. The hanging lamp over the oval glass table that you pull down and change the mood of the kitchen … But most of all, Mum.
In my first draft she was barely there. I thought I had forgotten her. That I had forgotten what it was like to be with her. To blissfully take her for granted. But she came back to me on these walks and I think after all that it may have been she that had me do this. Because this does not feel like it was ever a decision of mine and now that I am sitting down writing to you, I think I may understand this first story. I felt a pain in my heart when I heard her voice looking for me. All this time maybe it is me that has been looking for her. And this is Jean Bell’s engraving in the tree.
Take a picture with words.
Click.
My tanned feet, their nails the colour of the pool before me, the sky above. My naked three-year-old (naked babies I dreamed of) singing while he makes muddy puddles (oh, Peppa Pig and her silly dada, the ‘expert’) with this rented garden’s hose, on this holiday in Portugal.
I’m on my third book and in my head I’m beginning my own story. Maybe I should. Maybe I can do more than the mere minutes of a song, and I can leave it to you to imagine the melody. Catchy pop with more hooks than a what was it …? But I warn you. My weakness is vanity. I want you to like me. So I must picture this unread.
Not all that I remember I am proud of, but when it comes to childhood, I think we can only wonder why, but never blame, and I think there’s a continuous thread that just might explain me, but I still don’t understand. And good God could we just stop analysing ourselves. First-world vocation. And Ireland says, ‘Aye, that’s Catholic guilt.’
The thread. I’m seven, on top of a pile of old mattresses. I can’t even kneel here without touching the ceiling and I’m reading a children’s book I loved, The Wild Swans. It’s a chalet in Skerries, all blue and pink like a playhouse, cardboard walls and perpetual Fisher Price family sound. It’s dusty up here, all close and hidden. I hear Mum in the kitchen and what I’m trying to get at here, Caroline’s voice asking Mum has she seen me. She’s calling my name down the wooden-toy hall but I keep quiet and still and she doesn’t know about here, I don’t think, so I stay hidden. And silent as the breath I won’t exhale. This makes me sad but it’s just what it is and it’s just a story; she runs out calling my name, the cardboard door swinging shut, looking for me.
And this unwinds with life and lots in between to my twenty-six-year-old self, for the first time, watching a camcorder video of our lost mum, Jean, on a boat in California … her voice at my ear so immediate it’s like it rocks me awake:
‘Where’s Pandy?’
And my heart is wrung.
To hear a voice from the dead looking for you. To miss a voice. To miss being looked for. This means something but I don’t know what.
If this is the beginning of the book I warn you, I have to leave lots out and then maybe you can say, ‘Ah, but I want to read the book she didn’t write.’ Or maybe not. Maybe ‘I don’t even want to read that one, thanks very much.’ Now that is the inner chorus of a Dundalk girl who’s come down with a dose of the ‘Who do you think you are?’s.
I have to write this now though. I am scared of people dying. Actually, not people: I am scared of Johnny dying, and he has to read, counsel, manage and sell if he loves it, or not at all. Oh there’s that dishcloth heart again, wrung out and reaching the base of my throat where sobs and yells gather to consider their escape.
Not