All of These People: A Memoir. Fergal Keane

I press my face even closer, loving that coldness. I keep watching the clouds, wondering if they will fall from the sky, what noise they will make when they hit the ground. But the clouds just sit there. Then I hear my name being called.

       ‘Fergal, Fergal.’

      It is my mother’s voice.

      After a while she comes out and leads me back into the house.

      There is silence inside. My father is upstairs. At this age I know nothing. But I can sense things. There is something about this silence that is not like other silences, not like the silence of very early morning, or the silence of a house where people are sleeping. It is the silence after an argument, as if anger has changed the pressure of the air. I have already learned to live inside my head; in my head there are ways to keep the silence at bay. I stand in the room and feel the silence for a moment and then I go deep into my head and start to dream, back to the clouds and the noise of rain, loud enough to fill the world with sound. This is how things have been from the moment I can remember.

      I go to bed and stay awake as late as I can, lying in my room, listening for the sound of his homecoming: footsteps outside the front door, shuffling, a key scratching at the lock, and a voice that sings sometimes, and other times shouts, and other times is muffled, a voice being urged to quietness by my mother.

      Drinking. What do you know about drinking when you are six years of age? More than you should is the quick answer. Drinking is someone changing so that their eyes are staring out from some other world to yours, flashing from happy to angry to sad, sometimes all in the same sentence; eyes that are far from you, as if behind them was a man who had been kidnapped and held prisoner; drinking is a mouth with a voice you know but cannot recognise because it is stretched and squashed, like a record played backwards, or the words falling around like children on ice, banging up against each other, careening across the evening with no direction, nothing making sense except the sound of your own heart pounding so loud you are sure every house in the street can hear it. Boom, boom, boom.

      You imagine the noise travelling out of your bed and knocking on all the doors, waking up those sane, clean-living Irish families and spilling your secret. You are ashamed. Of that one thing you are certain. Shame. It becomes your second skin. You are sure other people know. Someone will have seen him come home, or heard him making a noise. They can read it in your eyes, in your silences and evasions, in the way you twitch and fidget. After nights lying awake for hours you go to school half sick for want of sleep, your mind miles away. The teacher speaks your name in Irish:

       ‘Are you listening, O’Cathain? Are you paying attention? Come up here and explain to the class what you were thinking about.’

       ‘Nothing, Bean Ui Bhanseil. Nothing.’

       ‘Don’t mind your nothing. What was I teaching just now? What did I read?’

       ‘I can’t remember. I’m sorry.’

       Tabhair dom do labh. Give me your hand.

       There. Now go back to your seat and pay attention. Don’t be crying like a mammy’s boy.

      Other kids say that too. Mammy’s boy. They know how to get me going. A boy called Grant, a big fellow, always in trouble with the teachers, shouts at me one day: ‘Your mammy’s a pig.’ I attack him. I have no idea where the strength comes from but I go for the bastard and hurt him, until he gets over the shock and starts to hurt me. Punch, kick, punch. I am left sitting on the ground crying. Grant is right. I am my mother’s boy. I cling to her. I am her confidant.

      As I get older I often sit up late with her. I have learned to make calculations. I know that if teatime passes, and homework time, and there is still no sign of him, there is a chance that my father is drinking. And if the evening news comes and goes without him I know it is a certainty. My mother corrects school homework. I watch the television. We wait. After the national anthem has played on RTE my mother switches off the television.

      I have grown used to this tension and fear. It is my homeland. And here is the hardest thing to admit: I love being this boy who stays up late, this child who imagines himself as his mother’s protector, the boy who can listen to confidences, who is praised for being so mature. That’s me: Little Mr Mature. You could tell him anything.

      My father always smiles when he sees me. He pulls me towards him, always gently, and I smell the smell that is half sweet and half stale, fumes of hot whiskey breath surround me and fill the room. He tells me that he loves me and he hugs me, again and again. If he is in a happy drunk state he tells stories about people he met on the way home – impossibly sentimental stories of kindnesses given and received; but if he’s angry he will curse some enemy of his at work, some actor who is conniving against him, some producer who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. He can rage bitterly. I don’t know why sometimes he is happy and other times angry. My father has never raised his hand to me. Nor can I remember him ever being consciously cruel to me. It is his anger that scares me, the violence that takes over his voice. Through it all I keep an eye on my mother, until she signals that I should go to bed, and reluctantly I climb the stairs.

      Sometimes from upstairs I hear a louder voice. It echoes up the hallway. This voice is beyond control. I keep my eyes on the lights of cars flashing their beams across the ceiling. I put my hands to my ears. Downstairs I hear the sound of my childhood splintering. Only when it is quiet, long after it is quiet, do I sleep.

      It is still a few years to their separation. At this point nothing is determined. I do not sense that a sundering is close. I am not afraid that they will break up. In this Ireland families do not break up because of drink. Families like us stay together. Instead I have this fear that they will both die. It comes to me in dreams. I dream that they are killed in a car crash and I wake up crying.

       CHAPTER TWO Homeland

       Many young men of twenty said goodbye. On that long day, From the break of dawn until the sun was high Many young men of twenty said goodbye.

      ‘Many Young Men Of Twenty’, JOHN B. KEANE

      I had come back to Ireland with my parents in 1961, as thousands of their fellow countrymen were heading the other way. Our people clogged the mail boats to Holyhead with their cardboard suitcases and promises of jobs on the building sites. Éamonn and Maura lived in a succession of flats and boarding houses. They had little money. My father had acting work but if he started drinking there was no money. There were days of plenty and days of nothing. By now my mother was pregnant again. Two more children would follow in the next two years. Saving money for a deposit on a house was out of the question. Eventually they were given a house by the Dublin Corporation in one of the vast new council estates being built to the west of the city, in Finglas. In those days the tenements of inner-city Dublin were being cleared and the residents moved to vast new housing estates on the fringes of the city. One nineteenth-century writer described Finglas as a village where ‘the blue haze of smoke from its cottages softened the dark background of the trees’. But by the time we arrived there there were no cottages or trees. The green fields had been turned into avenue upon avenue of concrete.

      In keeping with the nationalist ethos of the Republic many of the streets on the new estates were named after heroes of rebellions against the British. Go onto any council estate in Ireland and you will find streets named after guerrilla leaders. My parents were given the keys to a two-bedroom terraced house on Casement Green, named after Sir Roger Casement.

      Éamonn and Maura would have stood out among the residents of Finglas. They were neither Dubliners nor working class. Both were well educated. Most of those they lived among had grown up on the hard streets of the inner city and left school at an early age to find work. It was said then of Finglas, and not quite jokingly, that it was so tough even the Alsatians walked around in pairs.

      Our next-door neighbour was Breda Thunder. At dinner time her house smelled of boiled bacon