The Guards

“Top of the world, Ma!”

James Cagney, White Heat

To keep the account balanced, I should mention my mother, Ann had said,

“You talk about your father a lot. I know you think about him all the time, but you never say anything about your mother.”

“Let’s keep it that way.”

Terse.

My father highly rated Henry James. It was an unlikely choice. A man, working on the railway in the West of Ireland reading an American from a totally different world. He said,

“James seems so polished and stylish, but beneath there lurks...”

He didn’t finish. That “lurks” was enticement enough to a child of darkness.

In What Maisie Knew, the nine-year-old child says,

“I don’t think my mother cares much for me.”

I knew my mother didn’t have a lot of grá... for anyone. Least of all me. She is the very worst of things, a snob, and she’s from Leitrim! Nothing and nobody ever measured up. Probably not even herself. Deep down, I might understand she’s a desperately unhappy person, but I could care less.

A mouth on her.

Not a nag, a demolition expert.

Chip

Chip

Chip

away at you. Slowly eroding confidence and esteem. Her rant to me,

“You’ll come to nothing like your father.”

“How the mighty have fallen.”

This! From Leitrim.

No wonder I drank.

“Your father’s a small man, in a small uniform, with a small job.”

As a child, I was afraid of her. Later, I hated her. In my twenties I despised her and now, I ignore her.

Over the past five years, I’d seen her maybe twice. Both disasters.

At some stage, she fell over Valium, and for a time she simply fell over. Took the edge offa that mouth. After that, it was a tonic wine. Mugs of the stuff. So, she’d always a buzz going.

She loved priests.

I’m going to put it on her headstone. Tells all you’d need to know. Nuns, of course, also like priests but it’s mandatory. Built into their contract.

My mother always had a tame cleric in tow. Word was, the most current was Fr Malachy. He, of the Major cigarettes. She was, too, a regular churchgoer, sodality supporter, novena groupie. Times I’d seen her wear a brown scapular outside a blouse. A heavy hitter.

Odd moments, I have sought for her redeeming features.

There are none.

In later life, I was exactly what she needed. A wayward son who helped her to public martyrdom. How could she lose? After I was booted from the gardai, she leaked piety from every pore. Her theme song:

“Never darken my door again.”

She carried on scandalously at my father’s funeral. Collapsing at the grave, wailing in the street, huge wreath of vulgar proportion.

Like that.

Course, she leapt into widow’s weeds and wore black ever since. If anything, her church attendance increased. Never a kind word during his lifetime, she belied him in his death.

He had said to me,

“Your mother means well.”

She didn’t.

Not then, not ever.

Her type thrive on the goodness of others. The “mean well” credo excuses every despicable act of their calculated lives. I like to see photos of dictators, tyrants, warlords. Somewhere towards the back, you’ll find “Mama” with a face of stone and eyes of pure granite. They are the banality of evil that people discuss and so rarely recognise.

Sean had always spoken well of her, tried to change my attitude, had said,

“She loves you, Jack, in her own way.”

She stayed in touch with him, I believe, as a means of keeping tabs on me. I said to him,

“Don’t, and I mean don’t tell her anything about me... ever.”

“Jack, she’s your mother.”

“I mean it, Sean.”

“Arrah, you’re only saying that.”

After I hit the gin, I went into free-fall. I don’t remember anything else till I came to in my mother’s house. No wonder they call it mother’s ruin.