{"id":1530,"date":"2011-06-28T23:45:25","date_gmt":"2011-06-29T05:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=1530"},"modified":"2011-06-29T11:43:35","modified_gmt":"2011-06-29T17:43:35","slug":"mammy%e2%80%99d-give-me-minds-to-eat","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=1530","title":{"rendered":"Mammy\u2019d Give Me Minds To Eat"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Graham Tugwell
\n
<\/br>
\nI\u2019d be told that there was something gone wrong with my mouth or my hands again or that the light out there was far too hot for me or that it just wasn\u2019t a good<\/em> day after all and so I was to stay in, go down to the Cowboy or play with my train in the corner and not<\/em>, I\u2019d be told, not go anywhere near the windows.<\/em><\/p>\n

Not when the light was on outside<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Not when the lights were on inside<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the corner with my train, that\u2019s where I was to be.<\/p>\n

Round and round and round and round the train would go, and there would be no stops and no passengers because there would be no people.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s wrong with me today, Mammy?<\/em> I\u2019d ask, looking up past her knees at the glow of her cigarette.<\/p>\n

And she\u2019d look down at me and say\u2014she\u2019d say your neck\u2019s gone crooked<\/em>. Or wrists shouldn\u2019t work like that.<\/em> Or your hands are too silver.<\/em> Or the skin is growing down your lips again<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And some days she\u2019d look at me close and say your shadow is showing a different shape.<\/em><\/p>\n

And I\u2019d look behind to see my strangeness crawling up the walls.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t scare them<\/em>, she\u2019d say, pushing me into the corner, pushing me down the stairs, you must never scare people.<\/em><\/p>\n

They wouldn\u2019t understand.<\/em><\/p>\n

Or she\u2019d just look up from the table and say softly: not today.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tomorrow<\/em>, she\u2019d say. Maybe tomorrow.<\/em><\/p>\n

And I\u2019d watch the train go round and round and go nowhere at all.<\/p>\n

Babies had no ideas in them and always left me hungry.<\/p>\n

Old people had more but were so full of memories crackling and thin like the pages of the golden pages. Sometimes they would make me so sick it\u2019d seem as if I\u2019d never eaten at all.<\/p>\n

And she\u2019d have to go out into the other rooms again.<\/p>\n

BLANCHARDSTOWN 15<\/p>\n

Or\u2014<\/p>\n

ASHBOURNE IND EST ASHBOURNE<\/p>\n

She\u2019d have to get me more of them.<\/p>\n

But if it was someone who was the same size as me, I\u2019d smell the ideas and the mind coming off them, even across the room, even before Mammy broke their heads open on the edge of the sink.<\/p>\n

It would all come out\u2014 lovely minds, lovely ideas, lovely tastes.<\/p>\n

And then I\u2019d get fat and happy, for a short while at least, and by then she\u2019d have stopped crying, stopped washing her hands over and over again.<\/p>\n

Full now! <\/em>I\u2019d say and I\u2019d do my best to smile for her.<\/p>\n

Rubbing my belly and smiling for her.<\/p>\n

In my basement when water flooded in from other rooms, some nights I\u2019d wake to find my cot had been carried across the room to softly bump against the hips of the Cowboy painted on the wall there.<\/p>\n

The Cowboy\u2019d be smiling down at me from the dark, plaster face cracked in half, dust making his teeth black, hand in a fist with his thumb sticking up and I\u2019d put my hands on the smoothness of his yellow shirt and lay my face against him and I\u2019d smell the sour sweetness of his damp.<\/p>\n

He understood. He smiled at me and he understood.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s okay, <\/em>I\u2019d think he\u2019d tell me, It\u2019s all okay.<\/em><\/p>\n

He was never scared of the shape I\u2019d be.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re wrong,<\/em> she\u2019d shout, you\u2019re wrong, nothing but wrong,<\/em> and the cord of the kettle would come whipping down again and though I\u2019d try to curl into a ball, she\u2019d always find the spots that hurt the most.<\/p>\n

What did I ever do to deserve you?<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019d try to say I love you<\/em> but she\u2019d beat the words down with every stroke.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019d sit cross legged if legs allowed me, there in my corner, and I\u2019d go through the golden pages again and again and again\u2014all the names all in just one book.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d hold the weight of it, smell the soft and golden pages.<\/p>\n

Such secret mysteries\u2014other rooms with such strange names: BATTERSTOWN and KELLS and MONASTERY RD CLONDALKIN and CR\u00c8CHE & MONTESSORI.<\/p>\n

And sometimes I would check to see if my name was in there somewhere.<\/p>\n

Check if I\u2019d appeared on the list of rooms yet, if I was known, if I could find the name for this place I was in.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019d never see it written there in that maze of black on yellow.<\/p>\n

Just the room called BEAUPARC.<\/p>\n

Called PAROCHIAL HOUSE.<\/p>\n

Called CHILDCARE \u2013 COUNTY CHILDCARE COMMITTEES.<\/p>\n

She\u2019d come down to me in my room and wake me, tell me jokes sometimes: What did the Mammy say to her baby?<\/em><\/p>\n

I dunno, <\/em>I\u2019d say, with sleep in my eyes, What did the Mammy say to her baby?<\/em><\/p>\n

And she\u2019d say, We shouldn\u2019t have been born.<\/em><\/p>\n

And she\u2019d laugh and laugh.<\/p>\n

We shouldn\u2019t have been born.<\/em><\/p>\n

And I\u2019d laugh Ha ha, Mammy, <\/em>and she\u2019d laugh Ha ha ha ha, <\/em>and she\u2019d hug me too, Ha ha ha<\/em>, so tight every time I thought she\u2019d break me into bits.<\/p>\n

This is what I\u2019d see from my corner: the brown carpet, the cream wallpaper, the wood panels along the breakfast counter, the chairs and table, the couch, the light stand , the door into the hallway and there the door to the room Mammy called Outside.<\/p>\n

Every now and again I\u2019d get a chance to look into the Outside.<\/p>\n

It was a very big room, bigger than the kitchen and the basement combined. The carpet was a dark green with a grey stripe down the middle and in the distance, like a big skirting board, was a black stripe. Along the wall opposite was a painting, like the Cowboy, but not as nice, just white and brown boxes and triangles and things.<\/p>\n

But there was special wallpaper above that called sky and that could be blue or white depending.<\/p>\n

Outside was another room that I wasn\u2019t supposed to go into, like her room or up in the attic where she put the people to lie down for a while when I was finished with them.<\/p>\n

And so I didn\u2019t ever go into the Outside, not even when she stopped waking up and not even when I\u2019d get so hungry parts of me would come away.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019d sit in the corner and watch Outside through the hole in the boards that covered the windows.<\/p>\n

And there was that thing like in the shower that she\u2019d called the rain.<\/p>\n

And there were things out there I had no words for, moving things and noisy things and once it sounded like the walls were splitting, that everything was coming down on top of me and someone kept flashing the lights on and off and even the Cowboy couldn\u2019t calm me down.<\/p>\n

And there were people.<\/p>\n

Travelling through Outside, on their way to MILESTOWN DUNBOYNE, on their way to OVERNIGHT & SAME DAY DELIVERIES & COLLECTIONS.<\/p>\n

There were strange people in that other room…<\/p>\n

Sometimes she\u2019d come down to me and sit with me for a while and tell me stories.<\/p>\n

About the lanes where I was found and why there was nothing anyone could do for me and why she wasn\u2019t to blame, she wasn\u2019t to blame for any of it, how she had wanted a different wish.<\/p>\n

But hadn\u2019t the wish been made for her?<\/p>\n

And I wanted, oh how I wanted to know what she was talking about.<\/p>\n

What all those words in sequence meant.<\/p>\n

And she\u2019d smile, and she\u2019d feel so much better and I\u2019d feel so much worse when she left, blowing the candle out.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s wrong with me today, Mammy? <\/em>I\u2019d say and she\u2019d breathe a curl of smelly smoke out over the carpet towards my corner and she\u2019d look at me<\/p>\n

Shoulders should be level,<\/em> she\u2019d say.<\/p>\n

Your knees should bend the other way.<\/em><\/p>\n

Your feet don\u2019t match.<\/em><\/p>\n

You shouldn\u2019t ever look at me that way<\/em>, she\u2019d scream.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019d say to myself: Why? <\/em><\/p>\n

Why do I keep getting everything wrong?<\/em><\/p>\n

And the heads would lie opened on the draining board.<\/p>\n

Eat it,<\/em> she\u2019d say to me, pointing with the dirty hammer, eat it\u2014I\u2019m not going out again, I\u2019m not going out again\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

I won\u2019t keep doing this for you.<\/em><\/p>\n

I won\u2019t keep doing this.<\/em><\/p>\n

I won\u2019t. I won\u2019t.<\/em><\/p>\n

I won\u2019t.<\/em><\/p>\n

And some nights, some nights that were far apart and few between, for no reason, no reason that I could think of, she\u2019d sing.<\/p>\n

Sing for me, and sing for herself\u2014<\/p>\n

And she\u2019d be beautiful then\u2014<\/p>\n

And the words, the beautiful words\u2014<\/p>\n

Come by the lanes and by the fields,<\/em><\/p>\n

And walk no more the world alone,<\/em><\/p>\n

And seek no more the heart of home,<\/em><\/p>\n

Come by the lanes and take the gift of love so ever changing.<\/em><\/p>\n

And listening, listening in the corner, feeling the warmth of it, I\u2019d be happy. I\u2019d be so<\/em> happy.<\/p>\n

As if all I had in that moment would be all that I would ever need.
\n
<\/br>
\n
<\/br>
\nGRAHAM TUGWELL<\/strong> is a PhD student with the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches Popular and Modernist Fiction. The recipient of the College Green Literary Prize 2010, his work has appeared in Kerouac\u2019s Dog magazine. Visit his website at grahamtugwell.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Graham Tugwell I\u2019d be told that there was something gone wrong with my mouth or my hands again or that the light out there was far too hot for me or that it just wasn\u2019t a good day after … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":1519,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1530","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-oG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1530"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1554,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1530\/revisions\/1554"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}