‘You’re a dangerous man, Billy. I can see that about you now. You’ve some lovely qualities but you’re dangerous. You should do something about it. You’re going to cause a lot of hurt otherwise, to people who don’t deserve it.’
She got up and left. I sat by myself in the pub until closing time, drinking, smoking, drinking more, watching everyone around me be happy.
Chapter Eight
On 28 October 1968, my twenty-fourth birthday, Father Seán Ronan married your mother and me in the University Chapel on Stephen’s Green. We were his first wedding, he nervously told the congregation, and he hoped the same was true for the happy couple.
Your mother insisted that we get married in the Catholic Church. I had expected bitter arguments with her parents about it, but they never materialised. Not that I would have given a damn where the ceremony took place myself; by then I had lost any last shred of religious feeling. But I think your mother saw it as some kind of fresh start. Also, she was probably the most emotionally generous and spiritually wise person I have ever met; she knew it would have been important to my own parents for their grandchildren to be brought up Catholic.
Lizzie was your mother’s flower girl. You have seen the photographs, you know how beautiful she looked as she tottered up the aisle in crinoline and lace. Although I stayed sober enough, for some reason I do not remember very many details of the day. There were police in the streets outside the chapel because of a protest march about the North. Our reception was in the Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street. Your Uncle Jimmy was best man. The hems of his bell-bottom trousers were so large that they completely covered his platform shoes. Late in the evening he almost caused a punch-up when he told my father that he had to go and pay ‘the priest and the other entertainers.’
As the gift of Grace’s parents we went to Barcelona for our honeymoon. It was the first time either of us had been on an aeroplane. I did not like the city much, so full of shadowy, narrow streets and the incessant sound of metal shutters slamming. But I loved the bars and the wonderful Latin music. One night we went dancing in an battered old dancehall where the tango band played until dawn. Your mother had on a very short green dress. She looked magnificent. We drank sweet white wine – it was only a few shillings a bottle – and walked back to the hotel at seven in the morning, hand in hand, exhausted, our feet raw and sore from dancing.
When we came home we moved into the small basement flat we had rented in Rathmines, just beside the canal. It was dark and a little damp, but it was cheap and clean and owned by a landlord who did not mind Lizzie being there. We liked the feel of the house. In the attic was a group of country girls who were nursing students. Below them lived an elderly woman who had spent time in Chicago and Boston and was full of stories. A couple of the other flats seemed to be inhabited by whole gangs of labourers, and these were sometimes noisy at night, but mostly your mother seemed to find that reassuring, or even amusing.
I was finishing my studies and teaching a few hours in a school in Ranelagh as part of my qualification. Your mother continued working part-time at the Abbey, writing press releases, organising interviews with the actors, compiling first-night invitation lists. We ate a lot of tins of beans. Lizzie did not get brought out much. I suppose we must have thought that things would get better somehow. Thinking that things would get better somehow had replaced hurling as the national sport in Ireland around that time, and after a while your mother and I got to be champions.
You were born on 20 September 1970, which my father pointed out to us was the anniversary of the execution of Robert Emmet by the English. Had you been a boy I would have quite liked to call you Emmet Sweeney, because that was the kind of fucking rubbish I believed in back then, just like everyone else in the country. It was just before the North really got going again.
It was a hard and long labour, and in the end you were breech born, which my mother used to say was one of the reasons that you and Grace were so close. The obstetrician who delivered you was some kind of relation of Éamon de Valera. I remember him once telling me proudly that his hands and surgical instruments had been blessed by the Pope.
As you grew up I noticed several strange things about you. Where Lizzie was gregarious and mischievously funny and used to bounce around the flat like a ball-bearing in a pinball machine, you seemed serious, almost solemn. I saw it in the curl of your mouth, the way you held yourself, the shockingly dark shapes and muddy colours in your drawings, the words you sometimes cried out in your dreams. Thinking back now, I suppose that your seriousness should not have been a surprise. Serious things were beginning to go on around you.
In 1971 I got a job teaching English in Dun Laoghaire Senior College. A year later, just before seven in the evening of your second birthday, I was arrested on the way home and charged with drink-driving. Shortly after this I was lifted again, on Talbot Street in town, not drunk this time but badly in the horrors, gibbering, seeing visions and swaying all over the road. I had three children from the school in the back of the car; I had been driving them home from a music lesson. I lost my job and was hospitalised for the first time.
I only ended up at St Ronan Finn’s because the Dublin hospitals were all full. A riot had broken out after a demonstration at the British Embassy and the casualty departments around the whole city were crammed. Despite the horrendous state of mind I was in, some small details of the long journey down to County Carlow have stayed with me. At one point the ambulance took a wrong turn and got lost down a side road; I remember still how the sound of the low branches tapping on the roof filled me with utter screaming dread.
I believe that things have changed a great deal in St Ronan Finn’s since my first stay there. It was, as you know only too well, the first of many such stays; in those days, once an addict had attended a particular hospital for addiction treatment he had to continue to attend the same one in future. What the neighbours referred to as your Daddy’s business trips down the country were to become regular events. Sometimes I think that I only became a travelling salesman in order to publicly justify and legitimise such absences. In any case, Ronan Finn’s now has a separate section for the specific treatment of alcoholism. An enlightened, humane woman professor runs the department, the staff in the unit are well trained, the therapeutic regime is designed to help patients reconstruct something of their lives. I have been told by people in AA that these days St Ronan Finn’s is considered the Ritz Hotel of addiction treatment. Twenty years ago things were different.
For a start, the alcoholics were simply lumped in with everyone else in the mental ward. This was not a great idea. You can imagine, I am sure, how it felt to go out on a binge on a Friday night and wake up Monday morning with your arm in a sling, your nerves in shreds, your veins full of liquid tranquillizers and a Carlow schizophrenic in the next bed shrieking about his seemingly gentle grey-haired Mammy actually being the devil incarnate. Half the patients seemed to have delusions of grandeur, half the psychiatrists far more worrying delusions of adequacy. Their approach was to smash what was left of your personality to minuscule fragments and build it again in their own image. If you were not a chronic alcoholic already, St Ronan Finn’s, in those days, would have turned you into one pretty damn quick.
The treatment was harsh and sometimes even cruel. During various stays there over the years I heard stories of patients being force-fed alcohol until they vomited as a crude form of aversion therapy. There were tales of long-term residents – the Happy Gang, we occasional visitors called them – receiving regular electric-shock therapy without anaesthetic. The nuns who ran the place were mostly decent enough, but there were two or three sadistic hatchet-faced bitches who specialised in humiliation and the exacerbation of guilt. I can still recall the plangent cheer that went up in the day-room the morning a young idealistic Indian psychiatrist threatened to have the Mother Superior slapped into a strait-jacket and committed.
When I was released from my first stay I was very relieved to find your mothe
r and you two still at home when I got there. I was grateful, too, and full of the best intentions, but it was a terrible time. I was on social security for almost six months. Finding another teaching job seemed to be absolutely out of the question. Even after one of the nuns from Ronan Finn’s wrote me a good reference, it was a useless struggle. Sometimes I would get as far as the interview, but then the full truth about how I had lost my first job would emerge and there would follow embarrassed euphemisms, bowed heads, evasions, worst of all, long silences.
Things were not easy at home. Money was short, bills went unpaid, more than once we could not even afford a coin for the electricity meter; if it were not for Grace’s parents I do not know what we would have done. There was endless talk about moving down the country, or even emigrating to London, but somehow we never got around to it. Still, the talking was something; it filled in the space that was growing between your mother and me, a torrent of words, aspirations, promises I think we must have known even then would never be fulfilled. In films and novels, I have noticed that those drifting apart are often shown in silent scenes. But it is my experience that when people are in trouble they talk with a kind of frantic and restless energy.
After some time I found work doing grinds, correcting the Inter and Leaving Cert exam papers, teaching English to foreign students. I even wrote a few articles for newspapers about the poets and novelists on the different school courses. Money came in slowly but at least it came. Your mother and I began to put together the pieces of a shared life.
Central to that effort were Lizzie and you. You were the absolute hub of that life, the force you exerted to keep us together felt stronger than gravity. There were times when I thought that it would be better and more merciful to leave, but I simply could not do it. Eventually, without my noticing, leaving simply ceased to be an option, and when that was accepted, consolation came, as it often does, I have learned, when your choices become limited. I felt healed by you. The expression on your face when you came in from school once and found your mother and me in an embrace, the sound of a stifled laugh from your room late at night, the heart-stopping excitement of watching you run in a school sports-day race or listening to you sing as I walked you to the bus in the mornings: these would fill me with a bubbling ebb of miraculous joy which I simply could not explain.
You were the most just child I ever saw. You could not pass a beggar in the street without giving him money, if you had it. We had to be careful about what you watched on the television: if you saw people hungry or lonely, refugees in Africa, or victims of the violence that was by then part of the everyday in Belfast and Derry, it would distress you in some fundamental way for hours at a time. One night I found you in tears on your bedroom floor. You had heard a radio interview with an elderly Derry woman who had been burnt out of her home by a drunken Loyalist mob. You clung to me, shaking with grief, asked me why the world was like this. I buried my face in your hair and tried to think of something to say.
I think that you were about ten when you first got into trouble at school. There was a plan for the girls from Mill Hill to put on a play with some of the boys from Blackrock College. You told the head nun that you would not take part. The South African rugby team were about to tour Ireland that year, and most of the players on the Irish team were members of the Blackrock College senior club. You had thought this over and decided that you would not have anything to do with Blackrock College.
The head nun was furious about this. There were letters and phone calls home to say that these plays had been produced and performed for years; you were embarassing the whole school with your over-idealistic nonsense, you were confusing the other girls and fomenting dissension. I tried for a while to talk you into it, but your mother was adamant that we should not force you. She insisted that I come with her to the school to discuss the situation.
‘I admire Maeve for taking a stand,’ your mother told the old nun. ‘There’s very serious things going on in South Africa, sister.’
‘I’ve lived in Africa, Mrs Sweeney,’ the nun sighed. ‘I don’t need lectures about Africans, let me assure you. I was seven years in Africa on the missions.’
‘Well then,’ Grace said, ‘all the more reason you should support the child. There’s terrible oppression going on over there, after all. Those poor people are being walked on. Don’t you ever open a newspaper?’
The nun laughed here, which was always a big mistake with your mother. ‘And what would a child that age know about oppression, as you call it? And really and truly, what would we here in Ireland know about it either? Especially those of us who haven’t been there to see for ourselves.’
‘Maeve’s great-grandfather died in Auschwitz, sister. I never met my own grandfather because he was murdered by the Nazis in the gas chamber. Emmanuel Michael Lorenz was his name, if you want to remember him next time you’re saying a prayer. He and two of his brothers. One of them was fourteen years old. So I think I know what I’m talking about, thank you. And so does Maeve.’
The nun was silent for a while. ‘Well, God bless us,’ she said, then. ‘I don’t know why a person would tell an impressionable child an awful thing like that.’
‘I don’t know why a person wouldn’t,’ Grace said. ‘So we’ll just agree to differ there.’
‘Mrs Sweeney, you listen to me now. Maeve is looking for attention. Mark my words, you’ll rue the day you gave that girl her own way. It’s a stage girls go through, I’ve seen it before, I know girls. They can be an awful handful.’
‘Like Africans,’ Grace said.
The nun peered at Grace in an odd sidelong way. ‘I’m sure you know very well what I mean. The things that can happen to girls that age when they’re given too much attention.’
‘And she can have all the attention she wants from me, let me tell you that. I’m her mother. That’s my job, isn’t it, to give her love and attention?’
Dots of dark red appeared on the nun’s cheeks. ‘It wouldn’t be up to me to tell you what your job is, of course. You’d know a lot more about motherhood, now, than I would.’
‘That’s right, sister, I damn well would. And I’ll thank you to remember that in future.’
‘Yes. Some of us would know quite a lot about motherhood, right enough. A little more than we’d like to know, maybe. And some of it learnt the hard way.’
Grace stood up, breathing through her nose. ‘My God, sister, do you know what it is you need?’
‘No, Mrs Sweeney. What do I need?’
‘A bloody good session in bed with a man,’ she said. ‘It might shift that dried-up old scowl off your face.’
After that, Grace and I agreed not to force you. The night of the school play you sat at home in the flat watching the television with us. When you were going to bed your mother told you how proud of you we were and said you were always to do what you felt was right, no matter what anyone else felt about it. You rushed over and hugged us both hard. A few weeks later, on the afternoon of the rugby international, you and Lizzie took the bus into town and went on the anti-apartheid picket outside Landsdown Road. You came home in a T-shirt that said: ‘No Scrum with the Racist Scum’. This had been given to you by a boy at the demonstration, you explained, a very nice boy called Leper, who had leather bondage trousers and three steel rings through his nose.
‘Look here, Miss,’ Grace said. ‘I hope you’re not telling me you took off your blouse and changed into that thing in front of any boy, never mind a boy with a ring through his nose.’
‘Oh I did, Ma,’ you said. ‘I gave him a good try-out. He was only great. Then Lizzie hopped on this other one and rid him till his eyes crossed, didn’t you, Lee? He was a fine thing, Ma.’
You and Lizzie laughed. Grace turned to me.
‘Don’t we have two lovely daughters, Sweeney?’ she said.
I wish I could stop thinking about you in the past tense.
Around that time I received a letter from the Department of Education telling me that they ha
d considered my case and reached the decision that I could never teach in Ireland again. I wrote back and appealed for them to change their minds but they said no, they had sympathy for me and wished me all the best with what they called my difficulty, but there was absolutely nothing that they could do about the situation. I continued for a while with the grinds and the private English lessons but soon it became clear that I would have to find something else. We were flat broke. Very simply, we needed to make more money.
So I became a salesman, a job for which no qualifications are needed except a willingness to work hard and some ability to talk, a way of life which in many ways suits a man with a past. My first job was selling bibles and encyclopedias door to door around the housing estates of Dublin. Then I moved to electrical goods, transistor radios, tape recorders, small kitchen items, vacuum cleaners. This was a little better, there was a small basic salary as well as a commission, the job involved visiting shops around the city, there was no dry calling around the corporation schemes to busy housewives and furious unemployed men. I did well at this work and was soon offered promotion. My employers wrote several times to the garda traffic department and the court to say that I needed my driving licence back. When I got it, they provided me with a car and I began to travel the country.
I remember one incident around that time when I was down in Galway on a selling trip – you can imagine, I am sure, just how much I looked forward to overnight stays. I had spent most of the afternoon browsing in Kenny’s bookshop and the whole night drinking in a rough bar down on the docks. It was long after closing time when I left the pub and I was badly drunk. Everything down by the sea seemed to be muddy and dark blue. I must have had what is known as a blackout, because I remember absolutely nothing from the time I was standing on the quayside looking into the swirling water to a good few hours later. God knows what I did. In the middle of the night, anyway, I found myself in the centre of the town, outside a shop that sold religious articles. The window was full of plaster saints and rosary beads and holy water bottles shaped like the Virgin Mary. I stared in at this stuff trying to sober myself up, but after a while I began to imagine that the statues were coming to life, that the tiny martyrs were actually bleeding before my eyes, that the foot-high St Francis was beckoning to the miniature nightingales painted on the canopy behind him. I stepped back from the window feeling nauseous with horror. The picture of Christ seemed to close and then open its eyes. I thought I was going insane, although, of course, I could not have really thought that, because you do not think in those terms when you have an attack of delirium. You think you are functioning normally. That’s what is so frightening about it.