Heaven became a source of fascination for me. I was ready to believe in heaven, since it seemed like a great place, and it made sense Mammy would end up there. If even eighty people in all time had made the grade, then my mother would have been one of them. The confusing thing was that people would tell me it was great that Mammy had gone there, but in a voice that didn’t seem to suggest it was great at all, and was actually very sad. People would be fighting back tears while telling me the good news, the way people now might tell you how proud they are that their child does improv comedy, or that their husband is getting his old band back together. It seemed as though these adults didn’t realise that I could see them as they spoke, since their words were so at odds with their facial expressions. As a concept, heaven always seemed to lead to conversational cul-de-sacs that were uniquely unsatisfying for any five-year-old, let alone a boy genius like myself, famed for his interrogative skills. Heaven was great news, clearly, but so much more information was needed, and it stunned me that it wasn’t forthcoming. When it comes to most positive news, people usually can’t shut up about it, and will do anything to add more detail. It’s a facile truth about people, that we like to rave about even mediocre experiences other people haven’t yet been made aware of, like when people tell you that you should watch Billions, and you think of just how many other shows you would have to watch first to justify it, or that time you tried almond milk for a week and ended up, drunk, singing its praises to your taxi driver, before never drinking it again. Yet here I was being presented with what, on the face of it, seemed like the most incredible news of all time, the literal Good News that Christians love so much – death is not the end – delivered as if it was a terrible blow.
What makes it weirder is this was not just a convenient thing to say to a child, like Santa Claus being real or eating carrots being good for my eyesight. This was, and is, Catholic dogma, something these people professed to believe. Heaven is canon, it exists. And yet adults were being strangely evasive when it came to answering my numerous questions.
‘What does she do there?’ I’d ask. ‘Does she teach?’ I still have questions about what this version of heaven comprises to this day. What would Mammy look like there: her current self, thinner and scarred but alive? Or her younger self? Does she get to pick, like can she just opt for when she felt happiest or most attractive? If you’re blind or deaf in life, can you see and hear in heaven? Wouldn’t that be confusing? What do you wear in heaven? Do you have to wear the clothes you died in for all eternity? If John the Bap Tits was run over would he have to walk around in heaven for all time dressed in a bra with burger buns on? Or can you change your clothes up there? Are there shops? If so, who works in them? Do some people live a good enough life to get to heaven, only to arrive there and end up working in a shop? Other people playing harps all day on clouds and you end up working 9 to 5 in a Primark in heaven? Does heaven have countries and cities and buildings and cars? Can all people of all languages communicate? Are there people there from Neanderthal times? Can you have pets? Or does every living thing have to have had a soul? Do dogs make it there? If you die as a child do you stay that age in heaven for ever? Can you die in heaven and go to another, further heaven? Does Mammy get to watch us? How could she be happy if she knew we were suffering? Or if she watched us die and then saw that we didn’t make it up there to see her?
People were kind to me, but couldn’t answer any of these questions, and just the fact I’d asked these things appeared to be upsetting for them, as if they’d done something wrong in telling me about heaven in the first place. It was a lot like other times I’d ask awkward questions, like when I heard negligible nineties UK RnB hit ‘Horny’ by Mark Morrison and kept asking my dad – a man who may never have said the word out loud in his life – what horny meant, and whether he was himself horny. Another time I followed our housekeeper Anne around and asked her why someone would become a prostitute – a question I’d just heard Richard Madeley ask a guest on This Morning. Because I was just copying his vocal inflections, she took it for granted that I, despite being four, knew what I was asking, and tried her best to walk me through it.
Before long, though, I went back to my usual conversational fare: long-winded descriptions of dinosaurs, or the differences between various types of trees. At the end of my first full day back at school, Philo presented me with a picture of his granny and my mother in heaven together, surrounded by clouds. I thought it was great, and his inclusion of Paul’s menagerie of expired pets was a beautiful touch.
I don’t have very many memories of my mother. I do know that I dreamt about her a lot after she died. And those dreams were of us in heaven. The dreams were all the same, pretty much. They always took the form of a mundane visitation; she wouldn’t be bathed in light or descending from the clouds. She would be normal, unheralded and domestic. In the dreams, she was never just there, in heaven; I would have to find her. I would know that she was gone, but hear her voice and know that she’d returned. This was never a big fanfare, but rather a commonplace discovery; hearing her voice speaking quietly from the kitchen, in the facsimile of our house that God had arranged for us to live in. Following her voice from the utility room into the back hall to turn the door and find her there, sitting at the table.
In the dream, she looks up but doesn’t look at me, as if there will be plenty of time to look at me for ever now that we’re reunited, and anyway she’s doing something, mending a shirt or wetting a cloth to wipe away a smudge on a tiny little trouser leg. She’s listening to something on the radio that I can’t quite make out, but which she is enjoying because she’s smiling, or perhaps humming along. They get BBC Radio Ulster in heaven. Of course they do. She, too, is hard to make out, since she is there and not there, as if seen through a fluttering sheet, and the room is swimming with the disjointed, various noise of dreams: the radio and the dishwasher; the dog just below us, where hot pipes warm the cold floor under our kitchen table. I can hear slow breathing, from the dog not my mother, and the light scrape of nails on linoleum. There might be other people in the room, but I can’t see them through the fluttering sheet, and in any case they’re not taking much notice of her. She just is, and I can tell she’s in no hurry, because she’s so busy with what she’s doing. She’s humming and mending and fiddling with ordinary things. She’s not bestowed with cosmic grace and ready to give me koans from the afterlife. She’s reading a magazine, or putting some Mass cards in a box, or sticking her tongue out ever so slightly as she threads a needle. She’s doing the sorts of things that living people, living mammies, do.
Sometimes the dream ends with me deciding to go to some other room and fetch her something, something to get her attention, something that will make her remember me. The second I leave, the second even that I look away, she’s gone. I’ve torn my mother from myself by taking my eye off her. By taking her for granted, again. I threw her away, and it’s my fault. Other times, dream logic is suspended and I’m fully aware of the precariousness of my situation. I must steadfastly keep her in sight without breaking concentration. And these times, something else, some ineffable paralysis, still manages to get in the way. I’m not scared, I know that everything is fine, but I also know that she’s dead, and this moment is finite. I know and I don’t know. As I come closer it’s as if the sheet in front of my face flutters even more frantically, as if my brain is buffering from the emotional load of gazing at her head-on. My mother is no longer someone I can look at directly, but peripherally only, like the sun, or one of those fences that have backward slats so you can only see through into the garden beyond if you’re walking past quite quickly.
From what I can see of her, she’s happy, and I can tell that getting to see me again is a kindness to her. She speaks, but the things she says are too quiet for me to hear above the radio and the dog and the dishwasher. I strain my ears and try to focus on her lips, but I can’t hear her properly and I can’t go to her, I can’t be with her, because there’s something holding me back, as if I’m wading, shin-height, through fruitcake mix. I decide I don’t even need to hear her speak; I just want to reach her so I can be held, and so I can tell her I wish she was back, whether she hears me or not, whether she’s real or not; I want to tell her that I’m sad and I don’t understand, and that none of this makes any sense. I want to tell her how sad we all are, and how sad it makes each of us to know how sad the rest of us are. We don’t know what to do, and we don’t even know if we’re making each other worse.
But I also don’t want to say a thing, I don’t want her to be sad, I don’t even want her to know that she’s dead and how sad that makes me. I just want her to hold me in the normal way of living people. The sheet is fluttering, and the noise continues, and my feet are moving so slowly, too slowly, I’m just trying to get to her, trying to make it to the point where she can pick me up, where I can sit on her lap and feel her close and know again how it is to be held by someone whose heart isn’t breaking.
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Mother’s Day