The Story of Before (2 page)

And Bridie Goggin. What would it please me to believe she was up to that New Year’s Eve? Stripping clean, white sheets from the un-slept-in spare beds she’d made up in anticipation
weeks before Christmas; re-wrapping pink tissue paper round the bone china teacups she’d taken out for the festivities and never used; or maybe clutching the jade-green telephone receiver to
her huge chest, podgy tears dredging paths through her pan-sticked cheeks, so thankful for the two-minute Happy New Year phone call from one of her grown-up children.

Tracey Farrell and Valerie Vaughan: in Valerie’s bedroom, swapping fantasies about pin-up pop stars. Trading exaggerated secrets about boys they pretended they couldn’t stand and
grouping girls into pink-paged, biro-ed lists of ‘Friends’ and ‘Enemies’. In their brushed nylon nightdresses, rolling on the super-soft wool carpet, or lolling on the
lavender satin eiderdown of Valerie’s luxurious double bed, blithely exposing inches of their flesh, imagining that this was how it felt to be grown up. These were the things that made them
happy, that enabled them to exist within the confines of the world their circumstances had created.

And I mustn’t forget David O’Dea, with his slender, smooth-skinned fingers sliding across the keys of his piano. Yes, even at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Eyes half-closed, head
tilted to the left, shoulders faltering over his instrument like waves, unsure of when to crash. His parents probably stood behind him that night, perhaps having popped the champagne Mr O’Dea
won in the local golf club four-ball. It’s likely their gaze fixed on the back of his head, and they reminded themselves of their leniency in allowing his fair hair to curl a whole inch over
his collar. While upstairs their high-achieving twin daughters wrote spiteful entries about each other in their lockable diaries, Mr and Mrs O’Dea wore satisfied smiles on their faces and
sipped their champagne, secure in the knowledge that this would be another good year because they’d always done right by their children.

I can still hear the snow; the absolute, all-concealing silence of it. It rings in my ears and spreads like a virus through my body. Like it did that night. I felt it first in
my feet, creeping up through my veins and capillaries and arteries, making me shiver in a way I never had before.

‘Something bad’s going to happen this year,’ I announced to the others, closing my eyes, afraid I might go snow-blind. They bunched themselves in around me, waiting for me to
elaborate, but that was all I had. It was no more than a feeling, but one I felt I had to share.

The snow continued for days, piling high in six-foot drifts. While our parents moaned and shovelled, we made proper snowmen that survived for almost three weeks. Some dads walked to work, but
most didn’t make it in at all. All over the estate, abandoned Cortinas and Hillmans hibernated, their metal mounds sugared over and decorated with the filigree, fork-like footprints of
starving birds. On the news we watched aerial shots of city traffic chaos, stranded commuters, and helicopter milk-and-bread drops all over our albino country. And it was announced – to our
delirious delight – that the school holidays would be extended by one whole week.

We were snowed-in.

And while those old enough to understand the hardship the snow brought wore worried frowns on their faces when they looked out their windows, we wore hats and gloves and wellies without
complaining, and repeatedly slid our backsides down the sloping entrance to Hillcourt Rise.

And when eventually the blanket melted, and everything went back to the way it had been, we were astonished at how patchy and grubby it looked underneath.

We never saw snow like that again.

The Big Freeze saw us into our final few months in Hillcourt Rise. Mam thought we’d be living there forever. I suppose when we first moved in we all did; the house was
her dream come true. Before that, we’d been living on South Circular Road, a busy stretch of seven hundred houses and shops that ran from Portobello – a stone’s throw from Dublin
city – through Dolphin’s Barn, Rialto and Kilmainham, all the way to the Phoenix Park.

Our house stood on the curving stretch between Griffith Barracks – a former prison building hidden behind thick, grey-stone walls – and the Player Wills cigarette factory. It had
been Gran’s house, the place where our dad had grown up. Gran never got to see me; she went downhill very quickly in the end and died a month before I was born. I often studied photos of her:
plump and rosy and twinkly-eyed with Dad as a baby in her arms; and one with Mel and Sandra on her lap, her withered hands circling their chubby baby bodies, her false-teeth smile stretching the
papery skin of her hollow-cheeked face. And although they hardly remembered her, I still felt a certain pang of jealousy that she’d known them, and I wished she’d hung on long enough to
meet me. She was the last of our grandparents; both sets were dead before I came into the world.

To Mel and Sandra and me, the house was our home. To Mam it was cold, draughty and old-fashioned. In the seventies, to be old-fashioned was a sin. Some of the houses on our road had been
modernized over the years: chequerboard quarry tiles buried under patterned lino; ornate skirtings prised off and replaced with smaller, plainer versions; period fireplaces ripped out to make way
for cement monsters covered in beige and brown tiles. Our house had undergone no such transformation, much to Mam’s disappointment. She dreamed lustfully of semi-detached streamlined living:
double-glazing, a fitted kitchen, crazy-paving patio, built-in wardrobes with louvre doors. Instead, she received the penance of living in the century-old birthplace of the man she married. She
found much to complain about: the sash windows she couldn’t open without Dad’s help; the lack of a ‘proper’ kitchen (it seemed fine to us – she went in and meals came
out); the ten-foot-high ceilings that made the place impossible to heat.

Although Dad was a painter and decorator, he rarely did any painting or decorating in our house. ‘The cobbler’s children always go barefoot,’ Mam would sigh, eyeing the
half-used paint tins stacked in a corner of the backyard. The same faded flock wallpaper that covered the sitting room walls in Dad’s boyhood photos was still hiding damp patches in the
plaster, thirty years later. Mam regularly washed down the woodwork with vinegar, tut-tutting as she went along, but it made little difference to the yellowed gloss. Dad would come whistling
through the door in the evenings in a draught of tobacco and turpentine, his thick black hair, moustache and sideburns salted with paint flecks. He’d take the stairs two at a time, wriggling
out of his petrol blue, button-through overalls on the landing. Twenty minutes later, he’d emerge from the bathroom smelling of Old Spice and he’d flop down in his favourite flowery
armchair, ready to scan the small ads in the
Evening Press
. Once Dad crossed the threshold, he was no longer:
Michael P Lamb, Painter & Decorator – ‘No Job Too
Small’
; he was:
Mick Lamb, Husband & Father – ‘No Jobs At All’.

Mam was a country girl, born in Wicklow in a cottage somewhere out past the Sugarloaf Mountain. She’d spent her childhood roaming fields and meadows, and what she hated most about where we
lived was the fact that we had nowhere to play. Out the back was a tiny concrete yard, completely out of proportion to the size of the house. Gran had sold off more than half the original garden to
a mechanic who’d built an eyesore of a shed on it years before we were born. At the front of the house we did have some outdoor space, but it was only a tiny railed-in patch of grass,
bordered with purple and yellow crocuses in spring, and plump, dark pink roses in summer.

Traffic hummed up and down South Circular Road at all times of the day: dusty, navy double-decker buses; enormous, clanking lorries; and cars in dull shades of grey or brown. Mam often wiped
black carbon dust from the silver-painted railings in the morning, only to find they were filthy again by late afternoon. Not that she was worried about us inhaling it; nobody knew the dangers of
leaded petrol back then. What annoyed her was the dirt, the way it grubbied our fingers so that we left black streaks all along the dado rail in the hall, contributing to her never-ending
housework.

So it came about that Mam’s constant but good-natured nagging won out – the day arrived when we learned we were moving to the suburbs. To a house in an estate called Hillcourt Rise.
Mam’s trump card came in the form of our baby brother, Kevin. At thirty-nine, I guess she’d presumed her child-bearing days were over. But when she discovered she was pregnant with
something we heard her describe as ‘an afterthought’, she decided it was quite definitely time to go. It was going to be hard enough getting used to night feeds and nappies after ten
years, without worrying about keeping an eye on us three.

‘They need somewhere safe to play, Mick,’ I’d strained to hear her saying to Dad one evening after dinner. We were used to hearing whispers between the two of them while they
were washing and drying at the kitchen sink and we were supposed to be doing our homework at the table. I used to imagine they’d won the sweeps, and were desperately trying to keep it from us
for fear we’d demand new bicycles, roller skates, and holidays to Disneyland. Or that one of us was terminally ill (it was always me) and they couldn’t bring themselves to break the
news.

‘And some kids to play with,’ she said, her yellow rubber-gloved hands smoothing over her rounding belly. ‘What do you think?’ It was a question she’d asked him
many times before, and one he usually ignored.

Dad looked out the window, stroking his moustache and breathing hard up his nose. I could tell he was thinking about it this time. And so could Mam. She held her head to one side with her
eyebrows raised and her mouth ready to curve into a smile. Then finally Dad let out a sort of false sigh as he turned and put his arm around her.

‘I think you’ve finally won, Rose,’ he said, pulling her close. Mam let out a little shriek and kissed him noisily on the cheek. Then he whispered something into her ear, and
she hugged him tight around his waist.

I didn’t let on to the others for a while, but the next Friday evening when I saw Dad sorting through tins of paint and brushes out the back, I knew the preparations had begun and we were
in for a weekend of chores. I said as much to the others and, as usual, they were suitably impressed when, the following morning, Dad handed us three brushes and a bucket of magnolia and told us to
get to work brightening up the back wall of the shed.

‘I think we’re moving house,’ I said, as we sloshed paint over the grey concrete.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Mel. He stood back to look at our progress, scrunching up his face. ‘Wish Dad had given us bigger brushes. We’ll be ages. And get a move on,
you two,’ he ordered, mimicking Mam. ‘I’ve done most of it.’

‘Why would we be moving house?’ asked Sandra, absently wiping her brush over and back across the same square foot of wall. ‘Where would we go?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, reaching up as far as I could. ‘Maybe to a house that isn’t so old. With a big back garden.’

‘Hope you’re wrong,’ said Mel from behind us. ‘All that grass to cut. And I’d be the one made to do it.’ He shouldered his way between us, anxious to prove he
could stretch up further towards the top of the wall than Sandra. Mel was finding it hard to accept that his younger sister was the same height as him and he raised himself up on his toes whenever
she stood near. In some seaside photos, his face had a manic, glacial expression as he tried to puff himself up for the duration of the pose while Sandra smiled sweetly, completely unaware of his
desperation. With their similar fair skin and hair, blue eyes and gangly limbs, they were often mistaken for twins. By contrast, my small, slightly chubby build and dark colouring brought about
expressions of surprise that I could even be distantly related to them, let alone be part of the same family.

We nearly killed Shayne Lawless the day we moved into Hillcourt Rise. He ran in front of our car and Dad had to jam on the brakes. He looked in at us – the newcomers
– with his giddy eyes and grinning mouth just inches from the bonnet. Dad cursed under his breath, holding his hairy hands up as if to say sorry, even though it wasn’t his fault. A tiny
stream of sweat ran down his neck, under the loosened collar of his white shirt, and his washed-out eyes in the rear-view mirror implored us not to tell Mam. She wasn’t with us for the actual
move; we’d had to leave her in the hospital with our new baby brother.