The Troubles with Us, page 20
‘Man, when Erin told us she had something to tell us, I was like, give it to me straight, I’m adopted, right?’ Kevin said, mopping up his Bolognese with a piece of garlic bread.
Mummy shot Daddy a disapproving glance. The man never makes enough food.
‘Turns out, Mom did have a secret, but it wasn’t me!’ he laughed, drum-rolling on the table.
There were further revelations. Kevin told them that when Erin had been clearing out her parents’ attic in preparation for the move to Maryland, she found a shoebox containing her mother’s birth certificate. Maggie was ten years older than her children had been led to believe. She’d doctored her passport before moving to America. I’m fucking forty, girls! Age neuroses was another thing that appeared to run in the family.
‘Do you think Mummy liked him?’ I asked Toni, after Kevin’s visit.
‘A lot. We all did. He was funny and easy-going. A bit mad, like, but sure so is Mummy.’
By the end of the night, brother and sister had their arms around each other, singing old Irish ballads, accompanied by Daddy on the guitar. It was 2 a.m. before their visitors left.
‘So there you go,’ Mummy said the next day. ‘I’ve met Kevin, spoken to Liam, Maggie knows I’ve had a happy life. That’s that.’
Erin was next up. First came the emails, then the calls. Would Mummy consider coming out to Maryland to meet Maggie? She’d pay for flights and put my parents up at her place. I assumed my mother would flat out refuse, but she told Erin she’d think about it. A few months later, she agreed. She would pay for her own flights and stay in a nearby hotel. I was surprised. My mother was never this relaxed. She’d always said she had no interest in meeting her biological mother.
‘I’d rather go out there than have them landing on my doorstep,’ Mummy said. ‘You know what Americans are like. You invite them out of politeness and they take you up on it. But mainly, I’m doing it for Erin.’
‘Why? You barely know the woman.’
‘She needs this for her mummy. I’d be the same if it were my parents.’
That filial duty again.
I was thrilled she was going. It would be a good distraction for Mummy. Hil was being off with her, with all of us. We weren’t sure what had happened. It started just before Kevin got in touch in the run-up to Hil’s wedding (she and Uncle Brendan had divorced and Hil was remarrying). Somehow, Hil had got the impression Mummy wasn’t going to go to the wedding if Gogi was invited. (Probably because Mummy said to Bernie, ‘I’m not going to the wedding if Tony is invited.’) She did go in the end, but things had been strained between the sisters ever since.
I was fed up with the drama. The fallouts and the secrets. The avoidance of difficult conversations. What would it be like to have a different family? A normal family. An American family. Everyone knows the yanks are straight shooters. I bet Erin and Kevin and their siblings got their shit out in the open and had a better relationship for it. And think of the holidays! We could visit them every summer and watch baseball games and eat apple pie and go kayaking on Lake Michigan.
‘Allie, Lake Michigan is nowhere near Baltimore and you hate sports,’ Toni said when I called to discuss Mummy’s upcoming trip.
These facts were irrelevant. I needed to meet the Americans. I got off the phone and texted Mummy. You’re going nowhere without me.
8
The Half-Bloods
The last time I went on holiday with my parents, they got drunk on the flight. This time around, we were split up, so I was spared the hilarious jokes and profound insights they felt compelled to share with their fellow passengers. The woman beside Mummy heard all about her Micky’s psoriasis and how we were off to Jordan so he could benefit from the healing Dead Sea mud – and maybe take in a wee trip to Mount Nebo, where Moses saw the Promised Land. Her daddy named his Jack Russell after Moses, you know. Not that he was a religious man. They’d found Moses abandoned in the middle of the road outside Andersonstown leisure centre – it wasn’t quite a basket in the Nile, but the name felt apt. Meanwhile, on discovering his travelling companion was an actor, my father whipped out his business card and told him he was an ad man, and would be more than happy to set him up with some work.
This wasn’t a holiday. This was … duty? Business? (The business of coming face to face with your gene pool for the first time.) Anything but a session, and Mummy had demanded we remain sober and correct on the flight to Baltimore to meet the Half-Bloods, as she’d taken to calling her new American family. That wasn’t going to be difficult for me. I met my parents at the airport that morning, not-so-fresh from a wedding the night before, where my friend reliably informed me I flashed the vicar and passed out in front of the reception desk at the Premier Inn we were staying at.
The flashing started at university. My friend Ruth finally managed to get me into the library, and I suppose I found the juxtaposition of books and breast amusing. Before long, it was my party piece, the half-time entertainment, though if I’m honest, I’m not sure who was entertained by it. Certainly not the vicar. I was tiring of it myself.
We’d been living in London for seven years. From the start, I felt at home in the city, understood. (Not literally – you learn to soften your vowels around the tenth time you’re forced to say ‘seven plus one’ when reciting your phone number.) It’s hard not to get caught up in the energy of the place. During the build-up to the 2012 Olympics, Londoners would smile at strangers, and I don’t recall seeing anyone losing it in the supermarket after their third ‘unexpected item in bagging area’.
Standing in the queue at our local Tesco buying wine for an opening-ceremony party, we saw a guy in his twenties in a shirt and tie not only let a Chinese tourist take his place, he bought him a multipack of Hula Hoops. ‘Here you go, mate. Welcome to London.’ At a dinner party, I used the phrase ‘cool Britannia 2.0’ and no one took the piss. We spent our weekends at gastro pubs and antique shops, swooning over Victorian commodes. Mr G found a local artisan baker, who’d deliver a £3 sourdough loaf, fresh out of the oven, to our door every Saturday morning, keeping us informed on his experiments with various types of grains in his weekly newsletter. Mummy said we’d lost the run of ourselves.
But life was changing in subtle ways. The year after the Olympics, Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to hold an in–out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. It was clear he was trying to appease Eurosceptics in the Conservative Party, who’d been banging on for years about Brussels’ attempts to dictate the shape of Her Majesty’s bananas. Nothing would come of it, obviously, we said at yet another dinner party with all the smug assuredness of the dreaded metropolitan elite. (I had become addicted to dinner parties by this stage. Smug metropolitans can cook, though no almond polenta cake will ever come close to a mint Viennetta.) The UK was too liberal, too evolved, to make such a colossal mistake, we told ourselves. Pulling out of the EU would affect every aspect of British life. Sure, what would happen to Northern Ireland? The implications of reinstating a hard border in Ireland on the fragile peace so many had worked so hard to negotiate would be devastating. Crazy talk. We laughed it off.
Maybe it’s the benefit of hindsight, but I can’t help thinking there was a vague unease even then among my Irish and Northern Irish friends living in London. We all experienced the same jokes – English colleagues wisecracking about the Famine in their best bumbling Irish peasant accent. The ‘it’s just a bit of banter’ was less offensive than the ignorance. A guy I met at a work event genuinely had no idea Ireland was partitioned, with an independent republic in the south and a region of the UK in the north. Someone even asked me if Northern Ireland was in a different time zone. And I’d lost count of the number of times I was told my Bank of Ulster notes – sterling, the same currency as the rest of the UK – were not accepted tender in England.
Admittedly, I was too caught up in an existential crisis to dwell on these grievances. That same year, I turned thirty and had plenty of millennial angst to keep me occupied. All around, friends were having babies and making financially sound decisions. My credit card was rejected buying toilet roll. My plans to become the next Christiane Amanpour/editor of Vogue hadn’t quite panned out – I was working on Beautiful Kitchens magazine. But hey, everyone has to cook somewhere and that somewhere may as well be a beautiful kitchen. So really, this trip to visit the Half-Bloods was a welcome distraction from both impending political doom and the business of sorting my life out.
Unlike her daughter, Mummy was remarkably calm throughout the journey. She did her crossword, played solitaire on her iPad. There was nothing to indicate any trepidation about meeting the woman who’d given her up at birth. Unable to sit still, I started flicking through a magazine with Yer Man Jamie’s face on the cover. He got more than the odd modelling job out of that reality show Nat and I saw him on all those years earlier. Bearded and biceped now, the man had become an international sex god. I last saw him on a 30-foot-tall screen in the cinema, telling his Hollywood co-star he doesn’t ‘make love. I fuck. Hard’ and I have to say, it was kind of hot. Still, Mel and I spent the entire film squirming under her jacket. It was too weird watching someone from Belfast – someone we went to the same pubs with when we were younger, someone I shared a ski lift with, but didn’t appreciate what it meant to share a ski lift with this person because it wasn’t the person I wanted to be sharing a ski lift with – perform S&M acts in front of an audience of millions. Though it did get me thinking that the musical number I composed about Ryan in fifth year was oddly prescient – had I chosen to sing about whipping his friend instead.
As our flight had been delayed, the plan was to meet the Half-Bloods at Erin’s house the next day. She’d arranged a barbecue for the whole family except Maggie, who we were visiting at her care home the day after that. It was late when we landed in Baltimore. But my hangover had gone and I felt buoyant as we made our way through Immigration. This joviality was not shared by the man checking my papers.
‘Business or pleasure?’
‘I’m here to meet my grandma!’
Death stare.
We picked up our bags and wheeled them into an empty arrivals hall, as Daddy scanned the signs for the taxi rank. Suddenly, there was a whoop to our left.
‘There she is! Annie! Over here!’
‘Oh Jesus, Mary and holy Saint Joseph,’ Mummy said under her breath. There they were, our welcoming committee, a group as diminutive in stature as my mother, waving balloons and banners. First at the pass, Liam pulled ‘big sis’ in for an embrace and my mother was gone, passed around the Half-Bloods like a sacrificial lamb. There was nothing Daddy or I could do for her.
‘How was your trip?’
‘I hope you got some sleep on the flight?’
‘It’s sure good to see ya, Annie!’
‘Do you see Mom in her? I see Mom!’
We said goodbye to the others in the car park, then Erin drove us to the hotel she’d booked. A pretty woman in her forties, with gold-red hair and doll-like features, she kept thanking us for coming. Mummy sat in the front seat and smiled and nodded as we joined a queue of giant SUVs bounding past billboards for KFC and gastric bands. Erin dropped us off, asked if we needed anything, and said she’d be back after breakfast. In our rooms, she’d left us baskets stuffed with treats – crisps, wine, Baltimore Orioles T-shirts and packets of Annie’s fruit gums. Mummy grabbed a bottle of chardonnay and flopped on her bed.
The next day, after a breakfast of Cheerios and a vat of coffee, Erin picked us up. She lived in a quintessential, all-American, red-brick house that put me in mind of Kevin McCallister’s place in Home Alone. A home worth defending. By the front door, overlooking an immaculate lawn, was a white wicker rocking chair with a cushion emblazoned with stars and stripes, and they had one of those free-standing post boxes you see in the movies at the end of the drive, the kind of post box that invites neighbourly interaction.
It was here, beside the post box, we uncovered the first family resemblance between Mummy and Maggie.
‘Oh my God!’ Nora, the eldest sister, tugged on Erin’s shirt sleeve. ‘Look!’ She pointed at my mother’s M&S fawn wedges. ‘She’s got Mom’s feet. Annie is Maggie’s identical foot twin!’
Erin and her ten-year-old daughter Amy leaned down to get a closer look. ‘No way! They’re Grandma’s feet!’ Amy squealed in delight.
Mummy grimaced. For years, we’ve teased her mercilessly about her feet. They’re more like golf clubs, really. Her greatest pleasure is a foot rub; however, her lack of podiatry maintenance does little to encourage the offer of one.
After a tour of the house, drinks were poured. The Half-Bloods were easy company. Warm and generous. On a blackboard in the kitchen, someone had written ‘Welcome, Annie, Micky, Alix and everyone. Love you all’. Amy, a sweet girl and straight-A student, showed me around her palatial bedroom and I felt an immediate affinity with Harrison, Erin’s middle son, a fourteen-year-old in oversized shorts with train tracks, thick eyebrows and an afro. It was a bold look for an Irish American, but he owned it, proudly introducing me to his favourite item of clothing, a navy sweatshirt that said ‘Afro Swag’. He reminded me of my teenage self, before my Isaac Hanson years, when I, too, believed I had swag in abundance, fearlessly rocking up to school in my patchwork bell skirt, unfazed by the Adidas button-ups around me. Stay special, Harrison, I urged my cousin, without words, because I sensed we didn’t need them, that my cousin and I might be telepathically connected.
I liked them all. Nora, ebullient, almost childlike in manner. Liam, Maggie’s softly spoken first-born, who used to be a Wall Street hot-shot but decided to ‘stick it to the man’ and is now a stretch therapist in Washington. He had beef with the sugar industry and wouldn’t touch the cake Erin had bought for dessert. Instead, he and his girlfriend Belinda, an ex-Buddhist nun, offered us homemade ice cream, sweetened with stevia. It was not a crowd pleaser. Kevin arrived last, journeying up from Brooklyn that morning. He made a beeline for Mummy. Daddy and Toni were right – the man was Mummy in Steve Martin’s skin. We sat up late in the back garden, drinking and singing Irish songs, everyone wanting to please my mother. She’d eased into the day, enjoying the attention, and I remember thinking how long it had been since I’d seen anyone make a fuss of her.
The next day was the big meet with Maggie. It was all very cloak and dagger, Liam taking charge and instructing everyone to arrive at different times. He would go first and break the news to their father that his wife had a daughter sixty years ago, who was currently en route to meet her.
‘Are you sure you want to tell him?’ Mummy asked Liam.
Maggie’s husband had dementia and Mummy didn’t want her presence to upset him.
‘He needs to know,’ Liam insisted, who took his dad out for a McDonald’s while the reunion took place.
Maggie and her husband lived in a bungalow on a quiet suburban street, more a house than a care home. The other residents must have been in their rooms, because, apart from Kevin, Nora and Erin, there was only one person in the communal living room, which overlooked a dense wood. Maggie sat on a floral-patterned sofa, a black handbag on her lap. She wore a pink top that clashed with dyed red hair.
‘Mom?’ Erin sat beside her mother and took her hand. ‘Mom, Annie’s here.’
Maggie looked up at my mother and nodded. ‘So you’re the one.’
Mummy smiled. ‘I’m the one.’ She sat down beside her, five sets of eyes devouring the picture.
Kevin was filming on his phone. A sniff next to me. Nora passed Erin the box of Kleenex primed on the coffee table, tears pooling in her eyes. This started me off, which started Daddy off. Within three minutes, everyone in the room was crying except Mummy and Maggie.
It wasn’t so much a reunion as a performance, mother and daughter all too aware of their audience. We commented on the similarities between the two women – the same broad nose and thin lips, the shared turn of phrase. Maggie’s manicure – a set of hot-pink, shiny nails on pale fingers – popped against Mummy’s blood-red polish. My mother’s nails have always been her one concession to personal grooming. Someone produced two mugs of tea and Maggie and Mummy posed for pictures, making jokes and playing to the crowd.
Later, I asked Mummy what she made of the experience.
‘Maggie and I were the only two realists in the room,’ she told me.
She went back to see Maggie alone the next day.
Maggie told her she’d prayed for Mummy every day for sixty years.
‘I wanted to call you Annie, you know. After Saint Anne. But the church wouldn’t let me. The priest said I couldn’t name a “child of sin” after Our Lady’s mother.’
My mother saw the resemblance. She recognised, in Maggie, the stubbornness of her own character – ‘thran’, Mummy called it. ‘You had to be tough to do what she did. To give birth on your own and start a new life on the other side of the world.’
I think my mother admired Maggie’s bravery and was happy she was able to put the older woman’s mind at rest, to tell Maggie in person that she’d been ‘blessed’ with the life she’s had. Friends I’ve spoken to about our trip to Baltimore find it hard to believe Mummy wasn’t affected by meeting her birth mother, that she didn’t break down from the emotion of it all. But being adopted was never an issue for my mother. She never felt like a piece of her was missing, or grappled with her identity. She’s always been the full jigsaw puzzle, her sense of self absolute. She agreed to meet Maggie not because she wouldn’t be complete if she hadn’t, but because she felt it was the right thing to do.
