Liverpool Lullaby

Molly Hennigan - The Pig’s Back, Issue One

My grandmother never answered to grandmother, or any variation of it. Our kinship was always a step removed due to this lack of an affectionate name, but the distance never felt cold. It provided a clarity as we travelled abreast through different ages. The same people always. The skin of her face was maternal in a removed sense too. Once you touched it, tacky from make-up, it warmed straight away. It was cool only to the initial touch, like the back of your arms above your elbow, how they would get cold on summer evenings and you mightn’t notice until they were touched by a warm hand or your jumper sleeve or the bus seat. That was the nicest warmth for coming so soon after an unnoticed cool breeze. Phil’s was the nicest love for being adjacent to such independence. 

There is a distance of its own making between my mother and Phil though I can’t account for its shape and size. Can’t assume it has birthed a clarity of identity and dependence between them like I have come to know. I wasn’t there for the years when they tried to be a conventional mother and daughter and I haven’t asked for documentary detail, though I have heard snippets of it in natural conversation. In the natural types of conversations that only come up because you live with your mother and because she is your mother, and even then, when you are having them, it doesn’t seem real that you are or ever will again. Conversations without development but just base facts, succinct as she does your roots or drives somewhere with you. “Well I lived at Mae-Mae McLysaght’s nursery for a while when she was sick,” she says. “But they were lovely. They would let me help in the garden. That’s why I love gardening.” It feels strange to hear things like that out of the blue. I think with sadness to the photos of me at six or seven standing in front of her tall rows of sweet pea in the back garden and I think of my view that day too. Her standing behind the camera. Her familiar face proud for a now unfamiliar reason. I think of the days I’ve seen her spend in the garden, catering to her flowers and plants and I try to reconcile that fully happy memory with its root, which I’ve just learned exists in pain.

The concept of caring for a child versus the capacity to was something I mixed up in my value system as a teenager. I only valued the former for a while. Basing it on what one is able for, throws the parameters of success wide open. When I handwrote the affidavit for my mother’s divorce, I discovered that my father, instead of going to get milk for me as a newborn, went instead to an early house to drink, leaving my mother alone with a new child, in an isolated setting. I had to distance myself from that newborn. The news was not of me. I was transcribing the events, had a job to do. I was trying to shape words on a page in a way that meant she would be able to keep the couch we sat on while she told me these stories. “Respondent was due home with urgent supplies for baby but went to an early house leaving both Applicant and newborn baby in need.” I was trying to ape the performative utterance that had gotten us stuck here in the first place: “I do.” To utter the sentence is to do it. I wanted, at the end of it all, for there to be a vow of divorce. A performative utterance of departing, an unsticking. There wasn’t. And so I documented the day, and the days each side of the event instead. 

Two nights before the court date the bottom shelf in a kitchen cupboard broke. Tupperware lids and boxes slid down putting pressure on the cereal boxes on the bottom row. They spilled onto the floor. My mother always kept the cereal on the bottom shelf to encourage independence. So that I could get up early as a young child and feed myself, mind myself. Two mornings later we stepped and crunched on loose cornflakes and porridge oats that no-one had cleaned up to pass the kitchen threshold and head for the court. There was no parting vow and I was empty for words. I photographed everything instead. My photograph of the spilled porridge and loose Tupperware shows the broken oven handle I had forgotten. The specific speckle of the floor tiles and countertops I now, upon reflection, found I despised. I could feel something close heavy in my mind when I looked at the dark wood of the press. Could feel how temporary and collapsible the whole family endeavour was when I zoomed in to find the small screw camouflaged on the speckled kitchen tile whose job it was to prevent the shelf from folding in on itself, knocking cereal onto the floor, crunching under my foot and recalling a bone deep memory of independence only ever being commended. Only ever independence being commended. 

There was also a photo from the morning of the court-date. It shows a navy and green razor in the bathroom sink and a long thick clump of my Mam’s cobalt blue hair that streels slick and thin up the side of the sink bowl and slithers out. Her hair was falling out from stress. The next photo is of her sitting in front of me in a coffeeshop in Naas, directly across the road from the courthouse. Her hair is tied tightly in a black headband and she has grown her roots out so that only a peak of mousy brown hair comes through at the forehead. There was talk, through her solicitor, that bright blue hair would damage her credibility. They didn’t mind telling her this. Even though the barrister had the records in her hands of their years long abusive relationship, she didn’t mind telling my mother, as she repeatedly pulled at her headband, that my father was handsome. That the judge liked handsome men. That the judge would like how handsome he was.

**

When I was a child my mother used to sing the Liverpool Lullaby by Stan Kelly to me, but she always swapped out the word ‘scruffy’ for ‘pretty’.

“You look so pretty lying there,

Strawberry jam tart in your hair,

In all the world you haven’t a care,

And I have got so many”

I knew my Mam had so many cares when I was a kid. My room was the scene of perpetual daytime where, as the youngest child on the estate, I lay in bed listening to the older kids playing into the bright night. The yellow wallpaper was lit up by the late sun setting. There were flecks on the grey curtains that reminded me of sore throats making the room feel like a big heated Lemsip. She would sing this song to me and I knew what some of her concerns were. I knew my father was not good to her. I knew he was an alcoholic. And I knew he could read better than her. In fact, I knew I could read better than her so I knew she was stuck. That was enough to know at that age. More than enough probably. More than other, older kids probably knew about their parents, I thought. My cheeks burned with jealousy listening to the echo of their voices. I could tell who was batting and running in rounders by the direction of the voices. I was angry but their voices ringing in my ears were drowned out by hers singing, calling me a mucky kid and running her fingers through my hair which hadn’t been touched by her hand all day and which now brought me back, drowsy, from where I thought I wanted to be. 

I knew I knew things because she shared them with me, but I still felt like I was keeping a secret from her in understanding them. I don’t think she thought about how much I paid attention to the things she said either. My reception of it all didn’t go any particular direction other that developing into an inherent knowing of my mother and a re-shaping of my love for her into a desire to protect without the resources to. I cried some evenings when she sang the Liverpool Lullaby to me. Sometimes she asked why but I never answered. Sometimes she presumed to know, telling me I’d see my friends tomorrow, and on the rare occasion she would do neither. Just drop her hand from my scalp to my cheek, wipe away a tear and continue singing. You sing to yourself too when you sing aloud and her walls came down sometimes. It was all held in that room, like us. The orange sun setting on yellow walls, the soft singing voice and soft hands running through wisps of white young hair was a refuge for us both. 

I don’t know if she has memories like that, or as warm. And if she does, I don’t know if they were given to her by her Mam. My Mam is fifty-six, Phil is eighty-six and I am twenty-six. I’ve had my run. She hasn’t, I don’t think. But I think she might be getting it now. It is unorthodox and might be a little late to have any shaping effect but the lucidity that Phil has slipped into, for all the pain of reality it brings, the one joy is her recognition of my mother’s care and hard work. People probably think it’s the opposite, that once you begin you are always a mother. I’m not saying this is untrue and I certainly can’t speak from experience, but I do know from my experience of receiving that it can take breaks. Being a daughter can also do both and if my mother did her giving when I was young and is more of a friend now, she has never stopped being a daughter. She is teaching me how and in doing so has never really stopped mothering either. Not even at times in our past when we both thought she had. In turn, being Phil’s daughter in every action makes her more my mother in the same. 

**

In recent times when my Mam did my hair I didn’t let myself fall into appreciating her fingers on my scalp again. My skull was too preoccupied with the pain in my jaw from unclenching my teeth that were grinding all night. My mind was too distracted by the shortness of her nightdress when she absent-mindedly took off her dressing gown and showed parts of her legs I hadn’t known for years. I was sad that no one else knew these parts. Sad that they were so unfamiliar to me yet I was the person who knew them best. My scalp would sting with the bleach so much that drinking tea while waiting for the bleach to lift felt like the hot liquid was being sipped through my enamel-stripped teeth. Like it was my teeth that were being bleached. There was always that sense too, after the haircut, and its bluntness, of a finality or distance. People go to the hairdresser and pay them and leave feeling ready to face the world. There was, more often that not, a sense when my hair was done that I was leaving my world. That my mother was dressing or preparing me to go somewhere she wasn’t coming and that she might put her dressing gown back on again later if she got cold, or the damp crept in, and I wouldn’t know. 

For months leading up to the divorce she would wear her dressing gown in the daytime over her clothes. Sometimes she would have work later or be meeting a friend for coffee so it was always temporary. I read it as something pacifying or self-soothing, shrouding her. Some 2017 St. Brigid’s cloak that was actually a bright red Penney’s dressing gown. It smelled in unequal parts damp from having been take off the radiator too early and sweet from having been sprayed with perfume to try and mask the dampness. It failed mostly. So much so that when I met her in town or she came to my work to see a show in the brown and wine-toned make-up I had been so taken with as a child, I would be arrested, upon hugging her, by the sense that she smelled not of sweet perfume but of a damp, cheap dressing gown. Truthfully, she wore it during the day because there was a stalemate on turning the heating on. Neither her nor my father wanted to pay for the other’s warmth. Both chose to condition the other’s discomfort which kept them strangely tethered to one another. 

**

Narrative gaps in lived experience are down to trauma my therapist tells me as I stare back at her on my laptop screen. The curtain is drawn behind me, hiding remotes, papers, clips, a stereo and mugs on the wide window sill. It is daytime and the brightness bursts through the closed blind, silhouetting my head and obscuring my features. I am in my mother’s apartment. I am here alone. My mother has moved to Liverpool and I stay here sometimes for short stints. It is damp to the core and I seem to spend my days emptying the water from the large plug-in dehumidifier that I drag from room to room. The washing machine is broken and I handwash all my clothes and towels. Deep pools of water slush around different wash baskets that I use for cold rinses after the main wash in the bath. My right wrist weakens quickly from wringing towels dry. I broke it when I was eleven when a boy in my class told me we were playing kiss chasing and that the yard wall was den. I ran full speed into the yard wall. I used my multi-coloured scarf as a sling on the way to the hospital. It was a warm day and I remember sitting on the curb outside Tallaght hospital with her, admiring my new cast and waiting for her to finish speaking to my Dad on the phone. Whenever we were out of the house together, either for a long time or to an unusual place, I always felt at the end of the day, that perhaps we could keep going instead of driving back to the house. Rather than feeling inhibited by the cast, I felt it bestowed a certain agency and maturity on me, a mark, somehow, of endurance. I only ever wanted to be uninhibited and mature for my mother. I never thought that running face first into a wall away from a sweaty bully who was scaring me was an exhibition of agency. Never would’ve seen that act as demonstrating any capacity for independence. Never would’ve thought of myself as on the receiving end of any smart decisions or that I would ever make any of them for myself. 

My mother gets the boat over every few months and replaces all the hanging plastic de-humidifiers in the wardrobes. Everything is buoyed by water in this life in a way that mildew threatens. I like to visit when she has already been here for a few days and dried the place out. She likes to do the same. We mop up sopping damp rooms for each other. We welcome each other into dry spaces, heating each other up. It is comforting at first, warming. Then it dries you out. The liquid in your eyes disappears and your eyelids wrinkle and itch. We suck all the water out of the rooms and life out of each other, not noticing the boundaries we cross from reducing the flood to dragging ourselves across sandy shores. We never see the difference between dehumidifying the apartment and suffocating in dry hot air until our lips chap like little white pieces of tissue paper men stick on cut shaved faces. 

I think about my mother and I mopping up each other’s mess. I think about her saying on the phone the other day that the clothes were possing coming out of the washing machine and I think then about the fact that something lit up in me, attentive and nostalgic, at hearing that word again – possing – in a burst and flare that dissipated into an unremarkable and undefined dis-ease. Only describing our singular relationship with watery language isn’t as threatening. Anything I write about our relationship will be washed away. Anything that bleeds, trickles, gushes. Phil said that giving birth was all water and legs and I wrote it down. It will all become flush, the act and the sentence. Anything that is damp now will be submerged. Any corners where mildew settles will no longer converge. Everything will open up and go. 

**

The camera roll on my phone is peppered with photos of my Mam doing Phil’s hair in hospital. I expect they will trace a visual path of Phil’s health, but more than that they are monotonous, repetitive. Looking at them, I feel there is an intimacy unbound that I can tap into. Intimacy that I don’t know how to approach otherwise, say with language, but that I can feel pulling me. The main intimacy and comfort is in the fact that the repetition exists. The fact that I get to keep taking the same photo of them in different jumpers on different days, at different angles, in different light, doing the same thing. The fact that the hair keeps growing. There was good hair when she was still walking. There was better hair when she was still walking and laughing. There was the best hair when she was still at home and curling some tufts of it into a shape that was quintessentially feminine and elegant. There is bad hair now. Weak and brittle hair now, dry and wispy. But against most in their mid-eighties, it is pretty strong. My mother trims her fringe so that she can see the hospital clearly. 

She does more than cut Phil’s hair. She clips and then paints her toenails red. I hold the bottle of nail polish for my mother to periodically dip into while Phil lies back in her hospital bed, speaking to us. 

“I used to think you had to die to be with the angels, remember that Deirdre, years ago? And I was sitting around saying, ‘I have to die now’.”

“Mm, I remember that,” my mother mutters under her breath, seemingly distant. I can’t tell if it’s because she is concentrating on painting Phil’s nails or because she doesn’t want to recall that memory. Phil laughs as she reminisces. My Mam looks tired. 

“So I said, ‘I know what I’ll do. That girl Gertie what’s her name round at the back road, she threw herself into the sea down in em, Dun Laoghaire. I’ll go down there and I’ll throw myself into the sea.’ And he goes ‘You WON’T.’”

Her laugh rises an octave or two. I almost laugh, expel an extra burst of air through my nostrils as I listen, unaffected.

“Did she do that?” my Mam asks against the grate of nail file on chalked toenail. Phil is still giggling as she answers yes. It is my Mam who is in the real firing line here. Phil and I, in different ways, are removed from the story, its sombre nature. Phil laughs off the memory, residing now for the most part in another realm. I try to piece it together, knowing none of the moving parts. My mother shows most concern. This neighbour is someone she would’ve known as a child. This account of drowning is only coming to her now. 

“Now there was a big question over whether it was an accident or whether she did it on purpose but knowing her husband I’d say she did it on purpose.” 

“Why, was he a bollocks?” my Mam asked.

“Yeah, little bollocks.”

“In what way?”

“Just was, you would know by him. Although I shouldn’t be saying that. She was nice, wasn’t she?”

“She was.”

Mam got a little bit of nail polish on the hard skin of Phil’s toe. Nothing about her prompts it but I can’t help but see her as a little girl in this scene. Can’t help but see all the plummets and shafts of her childhood where there should have been steady ground. Her legs swing off the end of the high hospital bed. The closed bottle of polish I’ve been clutching since she finished is now warming in my hands. Phil’s eyes are closed, almost opening now and then as raised eyebrows lift the lid a little. She is smirking. He is so charming. 

My Mam’s legs keep swinging. Her ankles look cold. It is cold in here today. She seems so settled sitting there at the end of the bed. I wonder how she spent the hours as a child. Like this I imagine. I understand her patience now. Her acceptance of almost anything. Though endearing at times, it is mostly dangerous to be so accepting. Even my advice, though I try to neutralize and flatten it, she takes blindly. That has always petrified me too. 

I think of a letter she found recently, a letter my grandmother sent to her from St. John of Gods. My mother was seven years old at the time. It was written on the 9th of April 1970.

Thursday 

9/4/70

hello Deirdre,

are you being a good girl for Daddy? Are you glad to be back at school? I’ll be home soon to walk to school with you. I hope you’ll have a new poem for me when I get back. You are not to worry about me because I’m having a nice time here. I love you very much. I’ll get you a lovely new pair of shoes when I come home. 

XXXXX Mammy. 

My mother has told me stories of what it was like to be the child of that woman, at that time. Standing on the path outside Trinity College waiting for a bus together when my mother was eight, Phil pointed up to a small window at the top of a building on the street opposite and told her that was the room where she first had sex on her period. She explained what that meant. What that was like. Almost like a child herself my Mam had said.

My memories of being eight are safer. And the memories are true. I was safer. The woman who made my childhood safe is the eight year old whose mother told her some things she shouldn’t and some things she should. Both out of affection, out of closeness. One skewed, misjudged. One painfully normal, maternal. I’ll get you a lovely new pair of shoes when I come home. I cried with my mother when she found that letter. We cried a similar amount. I made myself stop when she did, then I went into the bathroom and cried some more. Once I’d finished I paused the dehumidifier, poured the heavy plastic box of water from it down the toilet, patted my face and went back into the hot, dry sitting room to my mother. The capacity to love is all that matters here. Everything else will wash away. 

Subscribe to The Pig’s Back and receive two issues every 12 months.