Patrick: Chapter 1

This is where I am right now: standing on the fat and slippery railings of Leeds Bridge, gripping loosely-tightly to the short lamppost above the town crest, staring down into the black, swirling waters of the River Aire below me. Leeds Bridge—named as though it was the only bridge in the entire town—dates from 1730 and is Grade II listed. I know this to be true because my head is full of useless facts and significant dates in history. Dates such as 28th July 1914 and 1st September 1939 and 15th March 44BC when Caesar was assassinated in Rome.

Also, a date of significance to me: 17th March 460—when it is believed that St Patrick died. This is exactly 1,520 years before my birth and I like to believe that he died at three minutes past eleven, the same time I was born, screaming my way into the world just as my father was sitting down to a jam sandwich and a flask of lukewarm tea on the top pasture and the ambulance was trying to find the entrance to our family farm on the outskirts of Derry. When the paramedics did turn up, I was already swaddled in a bloodied blanket at the foot of my parents’ bed and my mother was shouting at my older sister to put the kettle on for the nice ambulance men.

It’s interesting that the images going through my mind at this very moment were of my birth. I had heard the story so often that I could accurately picture the scene down to the finest detail. My mother, plump without being overweight, had been pacing the length and breadth of her little bedroom in a floral-print maternity dress, rubbing her child-swollen stomach clockwise with one hand, and her back anticlockwise with the other, looking like she was twisting cogs. Thora, my sister, four years my senior, had been pacing right alongside her in a mimicry of Mammy, copying her every move. When my mother’s waters broke on the worn carpet, my sister stopped pacing, looked at the sodden carpet and said, quite plum-faced, ‘I’m not copying that, I’m wearing my princess pants.’

My mother had refused to let Thora fetch my father until after I was born, Thora waiting in her pink Parka and mud-splattered pink Wellies by the door until the paramedics arrived and, pausing to fill the kettle, ran as fast as she could to the top pasture where my father, not expecting my arrival for another day or two at least, picked her up, flushed and out of breath as she was, and ran the whole way back to the house with Thora jiggling under his arm, forgetting he’d get there quicker if he’d thought to jump in the tractor.

I was both beautiful and healthy, it was declared, even if I did weigh in at a paltry 5.3 lbs—two pounds of which was probably made up of the full head of thick black hair I had inherited from my mother that, to this day, she insisted had tickled her insides before I was born. Thora, at her birth, had been almost eight pounds and had my father’s wispy brown hair and brown eyes. She was the tomboy that every parent dreaded and every little brother adored.

Apparently, true to form for a four year old girl with a brand new sibling, she had taken it upon herself to dress me in her dolls’ clothes and wrap costume-jewellery beads around my neck and wrists. When our mother had put me down for a nap, Thora would invariably creep into the bedroom I shared with my parents, lower the side of my cot, and outfit me in garishly pink and green and lemon-yellow dresses and, once, if she’s to be believed, Mammy had caught her just before she applied some tourmaline-red lipstick to my tiny pink lips.

Da was one of those workaholic dairy farmers well-versed in caring for newborn calves but all thumbs when it came to handling his own children. If it didn’t have four teats and four stomachs, he didn’t know what to do with it. Cows, I must add, don’t actually have four stomachs; they have four digestive compartments within one stomach. This was perhaps one of the first facts I learned and have never once had to repeat until now. I have many other facts swirling around in my head that have been absorbed by my brain and never uttered aloud—I even know the names of the four stomach compartments: the rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum. I am the secret weapon every quiz team wishes they had.

In our early years, Da would often make comical attempts at fathering us, mooing softly into our ears and rubbing our tummies like he was massaging a laden udder until Mammy took us off his hands and he skulked off to the kitchen for a whiskey, safe in the knowledge that he had done his bit of parenting for the evening.

Before I was old enough to follow him around the farm, my Kermit the Frog wellies sloughing in the mud as I watched him mend a fence or chase the Holstein calves across a field, I saw him for little more than twenty minutes in the evenings as my mother paced diagonally across the kitchen, my little sleepy body in one arm, a bottle of warmed milk in her other hand. She would force him, I’ve been told, to kiss me good night and he would dip his little finger in his whiskey and wet my lips with it, ‘For good measure,’ he’d say. These whiskey kisses continued until I was seven years old.

Looking down into the black Aire as it rippled in the light rain, I wondered why I was here—or, more precisely, why I hadn’t stood here before. Suicide is far from painless. I carried with me all the pain of my previous actions, all the baggage I had been hauling around for my entire life. The worry lines on my face were deep scars and my fingers bloodied digits from years of biting.

And I recalled something my mother told me when I was nine years old. ‘Doubt,’ she had said, ‘is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.’ She had been quoting Khalil Gibran, a man whose name sounded, at my tender age, like an alien death threat. I repeated his name in a robotic voice for three days, pointing my laser-gun fingers at father’s cattle and at one-for-sorrow birds and at slugs in the grass, vaporising anything that moved.

Mammy had said this one evening when the stars were bright and we were all out in the front garden, burning off excess energy before bed. It was midsummer and warm out and Thora and I were playing tag, chasing each other around the grass and calling each other names—names suitable to be used in front of our parents.

The quote had come so out of the blue that when she said it I stopped in my tracks and Thora ploughed into my back, knocking me to the grass with a thud. By nine, literature had already become a passion of mine and I was in the advanced reading group in school. If my eyes weren’t deep in a book, they were scanning the shelves of the library for something new to read.

Forgetting all about the game, I asked Mammy to repeat the quote four times until I was able to recite it back to her. ‘Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.’ I had absolutely no interest in its meaning, only in the sound of each word as it led into the next, and the overriding desire to know what having a twin brother would feel like instead of having an older sister who would often bite my arm or creep up behind me and kick the back of my knees to watch me buckle and fall. A twin brother, I was convinced, would be a much better playmate.

As soon as I had committed the phrase to memory and asked my mother to slowly annunciate the author’s name, I grew bored and turned back to my sister, gun-fingers raised, as I said, ‘Khalil Gilbran. Kha-LIL Gib-RAN. You will be killed to the death. Khalil Gibran.’

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

It came back to me now in my mother’s voice, transported more than twenty years through time, and finally its meaning became clear to me. To doubt oneself, you cut yourself off from all truth. Faith in oneself is redemption.

But it was too late for redemption. I no longer doubted myself. I knew exactly what I must do.

I breathed in the thick scent of the River Aire, made sure I had a steady purchase with my feet on the railings, and let go of the lamppost, standing there, arms raised for balance, and I closed my eyes.