A Story of May

I was born in October, and I always knew my name was chosen as a political statement. My Dad was a member of the International Marxist Group back then. They were big in the seventies. 

Well.  Big in our household.   

Our surname was Day, so Dad wanted May, and Mum said she gave in because otherwise I might have been October Revolution. Anyway, she said, I was pink and beautiful, like a May Day.

By the time my sister was born two years later, Dad had fallen out with International Marxism, so she was called Holly (she was born on Christmas Eve). Eighteen months after that our brother was called Brian, for no reason whatsoever.

It was shit being called May Day. At school I got christened Walking Disaster, Plane Crash and, thanks to Larry Grayson, Gay Day. My sister had it worse as we got older, with nudge-nudge wink-wink boys going on about having a Holly Day, or going to work on a Holly Day, or calling her, more simplistically, Bank. Brian was no help. He just used to laugh with the rest of them, safe behind his normality.

When I was fifteen and she was thirteen, my sister and I decided to change our names. I chose Christina, and she chose Eloise. We initially went for Brooke as our new surname, after Rupert, but we were sensitive to all possibilities of corruption, and knew that Babbling would be too great a temptation for many. So we chose Carmichael, because it was the surname of the heroine in a book we both liked.   

When we told Mum we were changing our names, she said she didn’t care about the surname, because that was just an accident of patriarchy, but the other names had been chosen specially for us, with love if not a lot of common sense, and she would be upset if we changed them. So we decided to keep the first names and just change the surname. May and Holly Carmichael sounded all right.

We told Dad we were dumping the accident of patriarchy, and he got very annoyed. He couldn’t say he was supporting the patriarchy, of course, because even though he wasn’t still an International Marxist he still had Leanings, and anyway Mum was within earshot, her wimmin’s earrings, clenched fist enclosed in the circle of the female symbol, dangling with intent. He told us we couldn’t change our names until we were eighteen. Then Mum stepped in and said, it’s a matter of self-identity, if they choose to identify as Carmichael rather than Day, that’s their free choice. And then Dad said, bollocks, this isn’t really about them is it, this is about you trying to indoctrinate them. And Mum said, don’t talk to me about indoctrination, I didn’t call her May Day. Dad said, I know, you should have married Dennis from the fucking International Socialists, he’s a bloody accountant now, didn’t he do well. And Mum said, right, and you should have married that American girl, Peggy Sue or whatever she was called, with the dad with the oilfields. Dad said, Rina Mae, actually, and her dad owned supermarkets, and she was working to bring down the system from within. And Mum said, yeah, I heard she got within lots of systems while she was over here, yours included. Then they both remembered we were there, and a scratchy blanket of silence descended from a great height.

They quite often had conversations like this, that sprang out of nowhere, went from nought to sixty in three seconds, and roared off down a road we couldn’t follow. I think they both kind of missed them after the divorce. Dad never has that kind of conversation with Shona, who says things like, I hear what you’re saying and we’re going to take time out for each of us to visualise what it’s like for the other. And Mitch just says to Mum, if you say so hon. 

Mum went to see the school about whether we could be called Carmichael instead of Day, but the head said it wouldn’t matter what we called ourselves, as far as the other kids were concerned we would always be Day. Mum told us maybe there were lessons to be learned about How to Cope With What You Can’t Change. When we pointed out she’d said we could change our names if we wanted to, she got snappy and said, there are people who put up with a lot worse, like Thalidomide victims or polio cases or gingers. 

Reluctantly, we accepted we were not going to be Carmichaels, although we did call each other Christina and Eloise for a while, until we got bored with having to remember. 

The Christmas after we didn’t change our names, Granny Day died on the 24^th, thus ruining both Holly’s and Jesus’s birthdays. We barely knew her. She was Liverpool Irish Catholic, she’d had a couple of uncles who were Martyrs Of The Easter Rising, and she couldn’t stand our mother, who took her youngest son from his destiny in the priesthood and filled his head with atheist blasphemy so that he never baptised his children. We weren’t supposed to know that, of course, but the thing about Liverpool Irish relatives is that they’re Liverpool, and they’re Irish, so things get said. Our Uncle Dermot used to remind her, at our rare family gatherings, that Dad first joined the heathen socialists while he was still at school, long before he met Mum, but by the time Dermot had plucked up courage to do that the Guinness had been flowing for a while and Granny Day was singing The Bold Fenian Men and demanding money with menaces for our boys in the IRA.

Her funeral was full bells and whistles Catholic mass, following a procession with plumes and horses and an enormous construction of flowers that read MAM. Mum didn’t want to go, and she certainly didn’t want us there, and there’d been another nought to sixty conversation which we had no trouble hearing from upstairs. Dad said, she was my mother after all, the family will expect you to go.Mum said, she hated my guts, and I don’t think I could stomach listening to Dermot giving some sort of bloody eulogy after what she’s done to him all these years. (Uncle Dermot was Not The Marrying Kind, and Granny Day never forgave him for it, something else we weren’t supposed to know.) Dad said, I came to your mother’s funeral and she didn’t like me. Mum said, my mother didn’t ask a picture of the Virgin Mary for advice on how to deal with the harlot who ripped her child from the bosom of a God fearing family. Dad said, she didn’t call you a harlot. After a moment Mum said, no, you’re right, it was a strumpet.

In the end Mum gave in and we all went. The entire tribe was there. As well as Uncle Dermot there was our Uncle Pat and our Aunties Sheila, Maureen and Rosemary, plus cousins, second cousins, cousins at various stages of remove, cousins by marriage, and an undefined posh contingent from Southport. When the plate came round for the collection in the name of our dear sister Lilian Veronica now departed, Mum hissed to Dad, don’t put anything in there, you know where it’ll go.  Dad hissed, it’s my mother’s collection, and anyway you support Troops Out. Mum hissed, I support Troops Out, not kneecapping. By now they were getting looks, and the father of the Southport clan shuffled his feet, put away his twenty pound note and gave a fiver instead.

So Lilian Veronica Day was buried with more or less due reverence, and we adjourned to the wake at Riordan Road Community Hall.  Given the occasion Dad said Holly and I could have a Snowball to drink, with a maraschino cherry on a plastic spear. Brian complained because he wasn’t allowed a shandy. 

Mum was just freezing herself into disapproval at the first strains of The Bold Fenian Men when one of the myriad cousins slapped Dad on the back and said, sad day, sad day, she was one of the old school. Dad nodded and Mum set her lips very firmly together. The cousin said, I see she stuck with Lilian Veronica then, wouldn’t go back to her original name. Mum unset her lips and said, her original name, what do you mean? The cousin chuckled and said, Lilian was her second name, and Veronica was her confirmation name, she dropped her first name when she got married. Mum asked, what was her first name?  The cousin said, May, May McCartney as was, but she never fancied being May Day, well, who would?   

The cousin wandered off to the bar and Mum said, you named our daughter after your mother, you named our daughter after a woman who hated me. Dad said, I didn’t, that had nothing to do with it.  Mum said, you hypocrite, you bloody hypocrite, all that political bullshit, and you named her after a woman who once told me if I ever set foot in Ireland she would personally tell the IRA. Dad said, this isn’t the time. Mum said, oh, it’s time, it’s high time, high bloody time I came to my senses, Dermot wasn’t the only one the old cow did her work on. 

And I knew this time was different from all the other times, because there was no nought to sixty roar. Mum said, we’re leaving, and she walked away, with Holly and Brian and I trailing behind her, and Dad standing alone in the middle of the crowded hall, while the bodhran thrummed the heartbeat for The Bold Fenian Men.

 

Rewrite of an old story that's been sitting in a file since it was deleted from ABC some years ago for (unsuccessful) submission.  Thought I'd dust it off, give it a tweak and let it see the light of day again. 

Picture:  Pixabay Creative Commons