Shit, I’ve spent most of my pre-work time writing the intro. This is going to be short.
My first real memory is of being left at the side of the road by my mother (Great start, right?). I was stood on a ditch on the corner of some backroad in a place I didn’t know, with no sign of life anywhere nearby, and I was crying my eyes out. I was about three or four years old, and full sure that I’d done something so horrifically bad that she’d decided she didn’t want me anymore, and that I was going to have to live in the ditch, eating berries or foxes or whatever it was that was whirling around my panic-stricken child’s brain. I don’t think I’d ever felt as cosmically lonely in my short life to that point, and it still ranks as one of the most desolate moments I’ve ever known.
What had happened was this: My mother, Eileen (but she’ll be Mam from now on), my two brothers and I were on the way to Mam’s relations in Tipperary. We were travelling in the summer heat in my Dad’s old Escort, which was bottle green (until we painted it Green, White and Gold for the World Cup in 1990), and I was being a cast-iron little PRICK.
I’ve been told that as a baby, I was the only one who was quiet. My older brother, Micheàl, would yell and scream and cry and drive my parents nuts all through his first few years, until Mam would have to get into his face and really give him a talking to to shut him up. Ditto my younger sibling, Cathal. But my Dad’s said on more than one occasion that, when I slept, he had to “poke you to make sure you were still alive”.
Well by the day I was left standing on that ditch out there on the back roads (actually I think it might have been Dublin we were going to, and I was on the outskirts of Moone. That detail is best left to Mam, who remembers this better), all that had changed. I had been gifted with my parents’ imagination, and had conjured up an imaginary friend, that I wouldn’t shut up about. And not just an imaginary friend, but an imaginary SISTER, who I called Deirdre.
I don’t remember what Mam did to set me off, but throughout the whole trip I kept telling her that “Deirdre” was going to take me away where I would be happy, and she’d give me sweets and ice-cream and Cadet Cola and she wouldn’t be mad at me like Mam was. I kept repeating “Deirdre will come and get me and take me away” over and over, while Mam asked, then told me to stop it. But I didn’t. I was so mad, and probably so ungrateful at my young, innocent age, that for the dozens of miles on the trip – this was way before the motorways – I just continued my guilt-tripping barrage, like a just-out-of-nappies tank-gunner, lobbing volleys of petulance at my mother as she tried to keep both the car and her sanity on track. As the miles wore on, my mam lost hold of herself and began to threaten that, if “Deirdre” was going to take me away, then she could come get me on the side of th road and I’d never see them again. When she said that, I remember barely noticing and just reiterating that “Deirdre will come and take me away”. She repeated that she was going to leave me on the road for Deirdre. I went through my speil about sweets and Cadet again.
Suddenly, my mam pulled over, got out of the car, and dared me to get out and wait. Unperturbed, I got out, sure in my innocent defiance that either Deirdre would come or Mam would cave and we could go on, having easily won the argument. Like I said, cast-iron prick.
But no sooner was I out the door than my mam picked me up, placed me on that oh-so-lonesome ditch, and told me that if Deirdre wanted me, she could come get me. With that, she got in the car and drove off!
Little did I know, she was teaching me one of the first life lessons I’d ever need: don’t piss off your mother by talking and berating her non-stop on long trips. You see, while I was stood on that ditch, crushed by the fact that my family had left me and that I’d have to fend for myself like a white Mowgli and blah blah blah, my mother had driven the short distance around the corner of the road and pulled in, waiting for me to get the drift that she was right and I was being a teeny little douchebag in dungarees. Cathal and Micheàl were both clamouring for Mam to go back and get me because I’d starve or die of thirst or meet my end in some other tragic way. But she waited, sure that I’d pick it up (I mean I’d learned to be an asshole in only three years, so this wouldn’t have been difficult to get the gist of!) for what amounted to about fifteen minutes, but to my whinging, sorry ass felt like the entire Jurassic Period.
At the point where my tears were at fever pitch, and I felt like I’d just curl up and die screaming for Mam to come back, I was greeted with the sun-dappled mirage of that Green Escort coming back round the corner. And could that REALLY be Mam at the wheel? It was! My tears dried in an instant as she got out of the car and picked me up by the armpits to put me back in the car with my real family. But instead of a hug and an apology, which I stupidly thought I deserved, she gave me what looked like the world’s biggest scolding look and said “I don’t want to ever hear about Deirdre again, right?!”
Needless to say, I shut my mouth for the rest of the trip.
Well, it’s time to leave for work, so I’ll have to go soon, but just one final thing about this story. Mam, many years later, would tell this tale and point out that, in her annoyance, she never thought of the possibility that someone could have come along and taken me while I was on that ditch crying, either out of sympathy for a lost child or some darker motivation, and that she was lucky it had been at a time when there wasn’t as much traffic on the roads as now, and that it had been a back road and not the main drag that she had finally lost her rag with my annoying shenanigans. She was right, but that still doesn’t stop her laughing every time she tells it. I think it’s one of her favourite stories.
Oh, and for the sake of closure, I never imagined Deirdre again. There would be another Deirdre in the near future, but that’s for the next part of this chapter.
I’ll Leave It There.
