Barefoot Pilgrimage. Andrea Corr
love is your light
It’s in your fingers on the keys
In your song, your melody
I am you and you are me
And we will see eternity
Set me free
And you’ll be free
April 3 1970
There is much that winks and sparkles in a Monet light. And I am Thumbelina tripping across the lily pads … The Children of Lir, the Salmon of Knowledge. The washing blowing on the line, hiding my face in the honeyed pink light of the sheets. Or am I lying on the sheets, cradled in summer smells. Looking up at my mum and the floating white in the blue.
Pocket money for the carefully chosen penny sweets and the ‘Och’ that escapes the wicked shopkeeper as the bell tolls our arrival after Sunday Mass. For time is money and time is just 30p today.
Swingball, the paddling pool, breathe in Daddy’s face, all petrol and grass after he’s mown the lawn in straight lines. Hopscotch hop over the fence to my next-door neighbour and early-childhood best friend Paul, don’t let the wire catch, fish-hooked in your bottom lip like poor twister Caroline did and knock knock knock … Spilled milk and a drowning fly for the cats by the door … The sound of Violet’s radio – ‘wireless’ – within, she aproned and singing along, keeping her country with Big Tom … Paul’s heavy flip-flop-flap-slap running free down the hall while a dishwater Mammy hand proffers a sunken queen cake, ‘Ye wee pet’. Make a mental note to disappear before the same loving hand spoons out the cod liver oil. And out the door we run to play to …
‘Paul, your coooaaaaaaaaaaaat …’
… the cement mixer and the delicious slop for our cookery kitchen.
‘Here’s one I made earlier’ – Paul’s best Delia voice as our culinary mud and dandelion creation appears behind the tile door of the brick fridge. Oh, the joys of having a best friend as your next-door neighbour and a dad that is not Bob, but is Tom the builder. The see-saw, a seven-foot, smooth, splinter-free beam of wood on a barrel with more solid grey bricks for brakes, lets you bump your bum happy and he’s lifting off sky high into seventh heaven … Walk-run, (but not too fast coz it will go all cartoon Road Runner on you), scuff-toed, Clarks sturdy shoes on those barrels now for the barrel race and circus time. Kick the can, hide-and-seek, blind man’s buff, climb the trees, night fern smells on my blackened palms and at home later I am still a part of my friend’s life. I hear the slate shovel dragging and slurping in the coal and slack for the fire now, because their house is always kept warm, even in the summer. Always a fire lit. Sure she sunbathes her white talcum puff skin beneath a hat and a wool plaid blanket. While our black Irish, Spanish-invasion mammy next door is brown as a berry and sleek, smelling of Ambre Solaire.
And the doors are closing, night night … Stories, memories and pictures merge and spring vivid, only to dissipate … But there is a shadow. I see it. Yes, of course.
Because I realise now that all that time there was a ghost in our house. And there was one next door, too. Another missing boy named Brian who gets caught in Violet’s throat telling Paul to put on his coat and pull up his hood. ‘Ah Paul, you’ll catch your death,’ as if death really was catching … Don’t allow your first glance at the full moon to accidentally fall through your pane of glass. We are on our knobbly knees holding on to the bursting dam of a laugh through the Angelus and the rosary at six o’clock. A revolving, weary-go-round string of prayers and endless blessing of oneself, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, hand wings flutter swift over heart, Father Son Holy Spirit, bowing heads and pray for us, Father Son Holy Spirit, beads to lips, three holy trinity kisses, bless lips, bless forehead, bless heart, again, again, again as if asking, pleading, ‘How many times will keep us safe and here, tell me, Father Son Holy Spirit, so I can seal us all in for the evening, sacred and sound, Amen.’
Our very own beautiful and beloved ghost, our own missing one behind Mammy’s brown eyes benign. A little boy standing next to Jim. Two little boys had two little toys. In her squeezing-tighter hand crossing the road. In her pause before the tunnel bridge, yielding right of way to the train about to thunder overhead.
Out of your mind with grief: it’s a good line. I hear that many relationships do not survive the death of their child. I’d say survive remains the one right word in this brutal sentence for at least a very long time. Condemned to life … missing … It makes sense really. Maybe you could pretend you’re still the happy, naive and untouched by the darkness twenty-eight-year-old you were a matter of days before, if you don’t look the loss in the eyes any more. But no … You couldn’t even … The wrench in your chest and the yearning … No, I won’t go there now. I’ll close that door. But they had no choice. Door always blowing open; a wailing, crying mouth and a cot in the echoing emptiness within. A foot for every year …
Gerard Corr, 12 August 1966 – 3 April 1970
‘Jean and Gerard’ by Gerry Corr
Last night you cried
Remembering him
Your tears pierced the ice
Of numbed remembrance
And I fled
Like always
I wish I could stay
And essay his perfection
On the faltering steps of love
Like before
Tear-racked morning eyes
Watch new buds leap
From dead clematis
As new essays
In lost perfection
Assuage the pain
Once again
I inhale September deeper than any other month. I hold its breath and repeat, ‘I love this time of year’ as surely as I’ll say ‘Merry Christmas’ in December. The happiest sound is a playground swarm on the bell. The fallen leaves and the conkers. And with the outside foggy cold on my own children’s cheeks, I breathe into my first days at school.
The Redeemer School was a five-minute walk from our house. Árd Easmuinn, the area in which we lived, shared a primary school with what was a council estate called Cox’s Demesne. It was a sprawling rectangular bungalow of classrooms off corridors and right angles on corners. Every turn an afterthought. I see blue walls, maps of Ireland, stripy straws spilled on the linoleum floor, coloured crucifix links, sycamore leaf rubbings and my Moses project. I smell márla – our play-dough – the thick red and yellow gloop of paint, newsprint, fat crayons and a cloakroom at the back of the class.
‘An bhfuil cead agam dul go dti an leitreas, más é do thoil é?’
The, till now, unsolved mystery of the puddle beneath the chair.
‘Ní raibh cead agam …’
And something sacred to me then, that I cannot grasp now: a rectangular box. What did it house? It swam to the top when I watched Krapp’s Last Tape. Something intangible but fantastic to me.
There are triangular cartons of milk on a shelf and lessons that don’t include spellings or times tables. Firstly I realised that I was a short-haired girl here and not a boy. It dawned on me at around the same time as I discovered that my desk mate, Julie, with corduroy trousers beneath a skirt, was a girl.
I met my best friend Niamh on my first day and our lives have walked down parallel hawthorn-hedged lanes ever since. Our unrequited and disappointing loves engraved on the seen-it-all-before, though bent in sympathy, secret-keeping trees. Our hands reach out every now and