Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O'Reilly

Author:Séamas O'Reilly [O’Reilly, Séamas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316424271
Publisher: Little,Brown
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

My mother’s birthplace is a little different from when she knew it. I pop into the yoga centre to grab the keys and find that morning’s class of chakra-centred septuagenarians sipping juice and coffee on the sun-drenched porch overlooking Lough Erne. A woman named Hope approaches, squinting meaningfully at my face as though I’m an eye chart that’s slightly too far away.

‘Oh my gosh, you’re like her,’ she says, meaning my mother, who, it turns out, she used to catch the bus to school with as a child. ‘I can see her reflection in you,’ she reiterates, and as we talk I catch faint ripples of amazement in her eyes, struck by that uncanny sense of seeing the face of one long gone in someone else.

‘So, you’re digging up the roots?’ she says as I describe my trip.

‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘I guess I am.’

We are shown inside my mother’s house, which is between renovations. I’m struck by how big it is really, since I had probably internalised a little too much of my own spiel and was expecting to find somewhere the size of a spice rack, not this two-storey cottage which, though likely a tight fit for eight, is considerably larger than my flat. My dad tells me how it looked when he last saw it in the early seventies, gesturing to long-gone fittings and appliances, rearranging the floorplan with points and waves. ‘I was never allowed upstairs, of course,’ he reminds us, since his last visits would have been before they were married, and he a good Catholic boy. It’s my wife who has the presence of mind to discreetly challenge him on this point once we ascend the staircase and find that he is miraculously able to show us how the top floor looked as well. ‘I suppose you’ll be putting that in the book,’ he says, not unjustly, for about the eightieth time that afternoon.

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