I drove out to see her every week or so. I would ring beforehand, my stomach cramping I often put the phone down, half way through dialling. But then I would work up my courage again, knowing that if I was lucky I'd get her in the interval between her being too sick to talk and too drunk to talk. If she seemed loud enough on the phone, I would hurry out to the flat.
Sometimes she was ready for me, sitting on her chair in her crumpled coat, her handbag clutched to her chest with pallid, shaky fingers. In my relief my heart would open to the pathos of her. The lipstick swiped on with unforgotten expertise. The blobs of mascara. The dabs of pink powder. When under the make up her skin was grey, and bristles were breaking through on her upper lip.
If you fed her the cues for one of her little reminiscences going along in the car, and if you linked her up the steps into the library, and the librarian quickly got her four or five books she would like, and if you sat her then at a sunny window in some hotel lounge with a double gin, she would radiate happiness. She would take on the mannerisms of a pampered, pretty woman. She would beam, in a blurred kind of way, at any people around. The flowering might last half an hour. An hour.
One Sunday I phoned before going out to her. She seemed all right. But she didn't pick her way to the door to unlock it when I rang the bell. I stood on the doorstep, afraid she was dead. I went around to the window and peered through the slats of the blind. She was sprawled on the floor. Her legs were wide. She seemed to be snoring. She had her coat on, so she had been ready for me, but she had overdone whatever drink it was she had glugged down or whatever pills she had gobbled from her palm. I stood outside and banged and banged on the window and shouted at her to get up, get up, raging with grief and anger, and furious with a lifetime's fury at herb doing this to me.
Soon after that, I was driving to the west, and as usual I was writing her a letter in my head. You did this, you did that, you didn't do that ... And suddenly I felt a single sharp sensation: the vibration of a single heavy twang. And it was the parting from her. It was completely an expected. Breaking point. From that moment on I was at a little distance from her. So when a few years later she intimated to me that she was going to die soon - though there was nothing particularly wrong with her looking up at me as I stood at the end of her bed, and giving me a wonderfully frank smile - when she said "Nuala, this can't go on," I just said, "That's right." I admired her from the bottom of my heart at that moment, looking down on her poor face, all discoloured by falls. She was at her stoic best. She wasn't looking for sympathy, or even comment. She was merely remarking - in quite good humour - that she was finished.
When they rang me a few weeks later and told me she was dead - that she had died in the bathroom, and they had found her on the floor, I was almost prepared. I had seen her sprawled on a floor. Her dead body was only the same as the body that had shut me out, that day I shouted at her through the window.
I remember her through windows. Standing at her bedroom window when she was young, a sheet wrapped hurriedly under her ivory shoulders, in the bungalow we lived in then. She was shouting at us children to go and play, to stay out, not to come in till we were called, then she turned back in to the bedroom, where my father would have been waiting.
She left her clothes, a wedding ring, and an estate which totalled £1,000. She left the biscuit tin, with her scribbled, book reviews in it, and the letter from my father, from Donegal. And she left us nine people, her children. None of us had mattered very much to her. Once, when we all happened to be in Dublin, six of us adults got together and took our courage in our hands to go and see her and ask her to allow us to get help for her. She threw us out of the flat with a few venomous words. We were only "the children".
One of my younger sisters lives in a town down the country, and not long ago the women there organised a "Woman's Day" and I went down to report on it. "I'll have to go to a workshop for the morning," I said to my sister when I bumped into her in the crowded hall. And my sister gave me a glimpse of herself - I hardly know her - when she said, "Well, I'm going to one called `Adult Children of an Alcoholic'". It was extraordinary to sit beside this sister in a circle of women in a small room, with Mammy back from the dead between us, in all her power.
AT one point, the woman running the workshop asked everyone to draw the floor plan of the house they had grown up in. I drew the flat instead, that our mother died in. Two little boxes of rooms, and the bathroom where liquid gushed into her lungs, and the breath was choked out of her, and weightbore down and down onto her heart until the last bent could not labour on, and life emptied out of the empty thing on the floor.
In the workshop my sister and I said almost nothing. The most terrible stories were being told by some of the others. When we came out after the morning I said to my sister, "She wasn't that bad, was she? Compared to what some of those in there had to put with, we had it easy. Didn't we?" But my sister just looked at me and turned away, and left me to hear for myself the eagerness in my voice. And the falseness.