I knew the events I saw re-enacted on my little TV screen were real on some level, but they weren’t my reality. This was Ireland at the turn of the millennium. Our police force didn’t carry guns. We’d never had a confirmed serial killer, defined by the FBI as a person who commits at least three murders over the span of a month or more, allowing time for a distinct ‘cooling off’ period between them. When murder made the news here, it was nearly always terrorism or gangland related. Your risk of being the random target of a murderous stranger was exceptionally low, if not practically non-existent. (In the popular podcast West Cork, which centres around one of Ireland’s most famous unsolved murders, the death in 1996 of Frenchwoman Sophie Toscan du Plantier, hosts Jennifer Forde and Sam Bungey describe how the locals refer to it as ‘the murder’ because there hasn’t been another one in the area since.) Besides, I knew how to avoid the bad men. The same lessons were repeated in every movie. Don’t walk home alone in the dark. Don’t accept lifts from strangers. Be a good girl.
I was a good girl and I was at home with my family. The doors were locked and the curtains were closed. I was safe.
How do you know what you know about your parents? Lately, I’ve been putting this question to friends of mine. Their answers generally fit into one of two categories: either they found out things from other people, like relatives or their parents’ friends, or their parents shared stories with them directly. The second one happened more and more as time went on, as in, they were told more the older they got. I should also say that these friends have adult siblings, uncles and aunts and, like all good Irish Catholic families, cousins to spare. They’ve been collecting friends all their lives and so too have their parents, dotting their social orbits with figures like the girl who lived next door to their childhood home and the guy they worked with in that place that time. One friend told me that, after thinking about it, most of what she knows about her parents’ initial meeting and pre-married life comes from snide comments her maternal grandmother, who never liked her father, would make during family get-togethers when she’d had one too many G&Ts.
But both of my parents were only children, and they and my only sibling died when I was twelve, an age when you have zero interest in who your parents are or ever were outside of their being your parents. After that I was left with just one familial link, Nannie, and in our remaining years together I didn’t dare question her about them. The sad truth is I know very little about who my parents were as people.
My mother’s name was Deirdre. She was short and slight; physically, Anna took after her. She had worn her hair the same way since before she’d got married, in a bob that stopped just above her shoulders in her natural light brown. She worked as an illustrator, adding images to a series of French and German textbooks aimed at the Junior Cert cycle and also, during term time, as a waitress in a café in Carrigaline. She would drive us to school on her way to work and pick us up on our way back, by which time a box of something from the café – creamy cakes, demi baguettes, fruit scones – would have appeared in the passenger-side footwell. She worshipped the sun and would be out the back garden on a sunlounger, oiled up and skin bare, at the merest suggestion of light peeking out from behind the clouds. She’d been born in a town called Killorglin in Co. Kerry, hadn’t been to college and spoke little of her own parents, who had died when she was just a teen. In secondary school she had been a competitive rower and was always saying she was going to get back into it, somehow, just for exercise, but we all knew the talking about it was the start and end of her efforts.
My mother was very easy-going, relaxed and unfussy. If Anna or I acted up, she would award us a bemused expression and then leave us to burn ourselves out – which, without a reaction to fuel our temper-tantrum or an audience to perform it to, we would quickly do. Her best friend was a woman called Joan who she’d known since secondary school. Joan owned the café where Mam worked. I don’t really remember her spending time with people without my dad. When they left us on an odd Saturday night in the care of Nannie, it was to go somewhere together, usually to another couple’s house for dinner or out to a work do.
She could be very funny, always there with a witty remark or devastating comeback, which made her an odd match for my serious dad. She took a lot of photographs and got them developed but stopped there, her grand plans to organise them into volumes of albums remaining just that. She left me with boxes and boxes of bulging envelopes thick with glossy 4x6 prints, none of which have names or dates or places to go along with them, and now my plans to do something with them are so far failing to materialise too. Nearly all the photos are of Anna or me or the two of us together.
My father’s name was Ross. He was from a place called Sunday’s Well on the north side of Cork City, where large houses backed on to the river and the families who owned them were well-to-do. After he’d moved out and got married, Nannie had sold up and moved to Blackrock. His father had died of heart failure before I was born and had been, as Nannie muttered occasionally, ‘fond of the drink’. My father had met my mother in a pub in the city and within eighteen months they were married. They’d only ever lived together in the house in Passage West.
My father was tall, over six foot, and, according to my mam’s photos, had been balding since his twenties. I understood little about his job, which involved chemicals and a big factory in Ringaskiddy. He worked long hours and was missing from most of our home life. The one rule both Anna and I knew to observe was to never go into his office on the ground floor of our house. When I think of my dad I think of the cards Hallmark make and the unimaginative gift guides department stores put out at Christmas. He could’ve been their model for A Typical Dad. He took a briefcase to work. He carried handkerchiefs with his initials on them. He liked whiskey and watched golf and kept classical music CDs in the car, and everything he wore came from the same palette of dull brown tweeds and knit navy blues.
A few weeks after my article came out, I received an email from a woman I’ll call Michelle, who said she had worked with my father for many years and that they had been great friends. She spent nearly a thousand words sharing her memories of a man I had never met, a version of my father who was funny and spontaneous and good at giving advice, who gave Michelle carefully chosen books as gifts and left journal articles on her desk that he thought she’d find interesting. Michelle still missed him terribly and wanted to meet me. Starved of information on my parents, I should’ve jumped at the chance. But there was something lingering between the lines of her email, something delicate and treacherous, that I didn’t dare unpack. I had never heard her name. I ignored the message and she didn’t contact me again, but she left my father standing in a light I’d never seen him in before, and I didn’t know what to make of it.
From what I witnessed, my parents’ marriage was a solid partnership. They bickered but never fought, although this might have been because my mother just couldn’t get herself worked up enough over anything to have an argument. Before it could get heated, she’d shrug her shoulders and back down. They didn’t act like the couples you saw on TV, the ones who were always kissing and hugging and flirting like teenagers, but when I grew up I would discover that hardly anyone did. My father did hold my mother’s hand when they’d walk together in public, and I often heard them talking softly to each other late into the night through the wall our bedrooms shared.