Legacy (20 page)

Chapter Fifty

A month into life in Belfast we all had plans or knew what we were intending to do. I was now in school and Maxine and Alison were looking for work. Alison quickly found an office job and Maxine a place in the local technical college. Mum too found work, for it seemed the city was littered with nursing homes; it wasn't long before she was once again buried in rigorous 24-hour shifts alternating her weeks between day and night duties.

I could see little difference in our daily life in Belfast but Mum had wanted to move here so much I decided to give it more of a chance, I was sure that the city must have some merits. Very quickly it emerged that Belfast wasn't what Mum had thought it would be either. The people she encountered in Belfast were not what she had remembered. She didn't approach her old friends; she had lost touch with them when we had been moved back to Strabane. When I asked her why she wouldn't contact them she would say she couldn't let any of them see her living like this. Rather than give up though she tried to make contact with the locals, Mum wanted friends, she had lacked them for so long, yet no matter how friendly she was they clearly weren't interested in befriending her.

I feared she would reach out for her old friend Misery again but luckily enough Mum had found a new GP in Belfast. This doctor seemed more promising than Strabane's doctor when Mum explained her symptoms he had Mum assessed by a psychiatrist and even secured a diagnosis. Mum had severe depression a result of two factors; nursing carnage victims of the troubles and of course Dad's killer. Mum had been experiencing flashbacks for many years along with extreme depression and suicidal thoughts. She could never function normally with such a condition. Unfortunately, no treatment existed and the doctor believed that counselling at this stage, 12 years after the bomb would be futile. Instead based on the psychiatrists' recommendations Mum was started on a new course of drugs. These would help her; they would keep Misery away I thought.

When Mum received her first pay cheque, I was a little shocked to see how little the private nursing homes paid, I didn't voice my thoughts but I can remember panicking a little wondering how we would cope on it. I knew what had happened before in the absence of savings and I worried about a repeat performance. I worried so much that I began to become introverted as my mind ran over all the possible scenarios. I remember going to schools friends' houses and being acutely aware of how differently they lived of how their Mum's were so
normal
, of how they stayed awake all day and of how they had fathers. My response was to stop eating. It gave me a chance to concentrate on something other than our current predicament, on my Mum who even then I knew was just not right.

My overwhelming memory of the time was being so unhappy. I had been swept up by Mum's enthusiasm to move, yet the city was now an unknown entity. We had gone for a walk around on our first weekend here and every road we walked on was scarred, the Antrim Road, the Limestone Road, Cliftonville Road, Oldpark Road and the Shore road. It didn't matter which for as we walked along them Mum listed the atrocities that had occurred on them. A shooting on this one, a bombing on the other, the streets of this city she had said are like little memorials, each one had its own part to play in the troubles.

That was the day when she said: “How could any place be good when all this bloodshed has occurred?”

My stomach plunged as I knew Mum hadn't moved any further forward. In fact Belfast seemed to take her right back. The move hadn't made everything okay like I had thought, that was when I had a shiver of dread, of knowing. What if moving back to Belfast had make things worse? What if the move was an even bigger mistake than I had initially thought? I was slowly realising that by moving Mum had simply been chasing a past. A past that like my Dad was dead.

I really looked forward to our first trip to the city centre Mum had said that we all deserved a day out and that she would give us a tour. In the absence of our fiesta, or the ‘brown bomber' as I had dubbed it (it had fallen apart before the move) we got a taxi into the city centre rather than brave the buses. I sat quietly in the back seat looking around me, Belfast then seemed so huge, the buildings were taller and the streets wider than anything I had been used to. We got out of the taxi when we reached the back of Castlecourt, the flagship shopping centre of Belfast. Alison and I rushed ahead eager to experience the thrill of the big shops that the ‘Clothes Show' and ‘Mizz' magazine ranted on about. It was a great day at first; everything was so new, glossy and modern. We were so busy taking in the sights that it was only when we were walking along the upstairs of the shopping centre that I noticed all eyes were on us.

“Mum look” I said feeling my face reddening under the harsh lights.

Mum looked around for what I saw and could clearly find nothing out of the ordinary. It was then she noticed that things were very ordinary, too ordinary. She saw what we always saw when we were out. People were staring, heads whirled around as we passed, eyes directed towards us, taking us up and down. It was horrendous, I stared back, hoping they would avert their eyes but they continued to gawp. It was then that I looked at the scene surrounding us and noted that yet again, my sisters and I were the solitary black faces in the whole centre.

I wanted to cry. Mum had promised that things would be different here, that city life was perfect for us; instead my sisters and I were the subject of curiosity, oddities once again. People believed they could stare openly at us if because our skin was brown, as if it wouldn't hurt us. Our shopping trip ended quickly that day and I became resigned that in Northern Ireland, the place where I was born and bred, that my sisters and I would always stand out like sore thumbs.

Chapter Fifty One

After three months, 12 long weeks in the damp miserable dwelling the landlord hadn't darkened the door. We were wasting our money even phoning him. I knew that the promised repairs were never going to be carried out. I could see Mum's eyes becoming vague, she was seeing but not seeing. I knew Misery was approaching. My sisters and I managed to block her just in time before she sunk her claws into Mum. We had Mum seen by her friendly GP who topped up her medication again. It is only now that I am older that I can definitively say that Mum's condition was to worsen in my teens because she had more time to think about her past.

The only treatment offered by any doctor Mum had ever seen was more drugs, she became like a walking pharmacy yet they kept prescribing more. I used to tell her that she would rattle if shook. A link with post-traumatic stress and victims of the troubles was an abstract tentative notion back then. I think it was assumed that physical injuries or death were the results of being involved (willingly or otherwise) in the troubles. The mental and physiological traumas experienced weren't even considered. Post Traumatic Stress for example was something Americans got, it was associated with Vietnam vets, even gulf war soldiers, but not people in Northern Ireland.

Unfortunately it has only recently been discovered as a valid illness for people in Northern Ireland. The late link between the illness and victims meant destruction for Mum and the bulk of her adult life and as a direct result the lives of her children.

However at 15 I found Mum's doctor a God send, I knew little about mental illness back then. All I knew was that Mum's doctors willingly dispensed her any drug she felt would be of use. It was easier for them, easier to ignore the root of her problems. For me it meant that the drugs kept Misery away or at least held her back a little, it meant I had my Mum back.

Having Mum's full attention was crucial in that house; with no success with the household repairs it was time for us to move again. We were fortunate in that we found a little home that was clean and fresh and in an area that was wonderfully friendly. We all liked the house and after living in such a hovel the basic little terrace felt palatial. We didn't get our deposit back from our old landlord but no one complained, not even Mum who had to work on her days off to build a new deposit, and instead we were just relieved to be on the move.

Not that I saw much of my sisters in those days. Alison at the time had become engaged to a man she had met in her beauty queen days. She was constantly accompanied by her new fiancée. Maxine had become even more withdrawn and independent than ever and took advantage of Mum's working patterns.

Much to my annoyance my abnormal eating patterns began to get noticed. I had thought I had hid my new slim-lined self well, obviously not well enough. My baggy tee-shirts and jeans failed to conceal the bones that now poked through my skin. I was skeletal. Soon my Mum and sisters were constantly ranting and wailing at me. One day they would be cross, the next sympathetic but on all days they tried to make me eat.

“Let them try” I remember thinking, no one would be around long enough to see if I ate anyway.

In the meantime I continued making the dinners, cleaning, cooking and looking after the household bills. It took my sudden collapse before the doctor who had tired of getting dragged to make a diagnosis. I had developed anorexia and bulimia. A lethal combination one that I would carry with me into early adulthood, any time the going got tough from that point on my eating patterns became peculiar. Some of my teenage years were spent avoiding everything to do with food. Mum had Misery and I had my eating disorder, everyone had their coping mechanisms I would reason, mine was just more noticeable than others.

Now Mum tells me that she was so desperate for me to get well that she began praying again, she would pray to my Dad imploring him to help. She knew she needed to spend time with me but she also needed to work if we were to have a roof over our heads.

She said she needed him for so many things, to give her the okay on Alison's fiancée. Yet Mum faced the problems alone.

I was taken to the Mater hospitals A&E after a further collapse; they could do little but recommended some sort of counselling. Mum remembers leaving the hospital that day feeling totally useless. She blamed herself she spent what little free time she had monitoring me and gradually I gained weight, although even now I can say that I never fully recovered.

The feelings and the old way of using food to mask whatever predicament I was in would surface in times of stress. If I concentrated on dieting, on my weight then everything else became secondary. In a perverse way it helped. It made the outside world less immediate and as such I found myself able to cope with any situation. Racism, poverty, the troubles, Mum's illness and everything negative that had ever happened all became manageable. After all I had something much more important to consume me. More important than my hated of myself, my muddled identity and my fear of where life was taking us was my fear of fat. In my mid-twenties when we were again plunged into disorder as a family I reached five stone and thought I was too fat. I felt so ill, I was dizzy, I was unsteady on my feet, my heart pounded constantly even in times of inactivity and I had a constant headache. Yet all of these symptoms were easier to face than the illness that spawned them;
our situation.
I was in my thirties when I was able to finally face up to my warped eating habits, when I became comfortable with food and when I could sit back and realise that my eating disorder was my way of coping. I am angry that the disorder ever took hold of me but what if it hadn't? Would I be facing severe mental illness now? I often wonder if what nearly killed me, in some way saved me. No help existed for families like mine, in its absence I believe I had to try and forget, to live in the moment and evade the past. Bulimia made me concentrate on the here and now, for a long time it made me blot out the world that surrounded me. Do I regret my eating disorder? Yes of course, one never fully recovers and I am saddened that it took hold of me at all. However it was my way of coping and in those days that's what it was all about. Coping.

Meanwhile life went on as it tends to do and the public holidays were approaching. This particular holiday, was celebrated nowhere in the world but Northern Ireland. As the glorious July 12 loomed our friendly little street soon was a little less friendly. It became littered in red white and blue bunting, additional murals, flags and hastily displayed graffiti all with stark sectarian connotations. Even the kerb stones were painted to match the flags. We never had to deal with this particular holiday in Strabane so watched the spectacle with interest.

On the night before the holiday, the festivities began. Revellers lit a huge bonfire and partied around it until the small hours. The bonfire was stacked high. I was ashamed to admit that Mum had contributed to it. In a bid to get rid of some pieces of old rickety furniture that had come with our house, we had given it to children who collected wood from the doors in the weeks before the twelfth. I remember how delighted Mum was; giving them the wardrobes saved us the hassle of getting rid of them ourselves.

On the top of the bonfire stood an effigy of a famous IRA politician, Mum laughed when she saw it and decided then and there that she was born into the wrong side of the fence. If only the effigy were real she thought. That night I listened to them condemn the IRA, show their strength by shooting bullets into the air. It was their final actions that sent a chill through my core, they condemned each and every Catholic and they tarred all Catholics with the terrorist brush. I think Mum was taken aback by the levels of hatred they showed as well and she told me to come away from the window and go to bed. It became clear that neither side of the divide in Northern Ireland was appealing.

The bitterness emanating from their words presented Mum with another side to Northern Ireland, a side just as bitter as the side she hated. This place was poisoned she would say, one sides as bad as the other, there will never be peace here. Now in adulthood I understand her reasoning. I see it all the time, the parents of the embittered and entrenched on both sides continue to infect their children, without some kind of intervention on and on it will go. To Mum hatred and suspicion would always remain and with it other families would be shattered like mine, sometimes on pessimistic days I can't help but agree with her.

It didn't take long for the locals to discover that they had Catholics in their midst, I really believe they smelled us! Little threats came through the letter box and once again we were on the move.

This time we choose a Catholic area, again in North Belfast. Yet soon IRA supporters discovered; they always had their ways, exactly who we were. A few years later we were to try living in North Belfast again, we got a reasonably priced rental on Alliance Avenue. We didn't stay there long.