Peeling Oranges Read Online Free Page A

ago, Mam?’
    She’s got a half vacant stare. ‘You go to school and you come home, don’t you know? You’re a big boy now.’
    ‘Do you have any secrets, Mam?’
    ‘Lord, secrets, is it secrets?’
    Her eyes light up like a child about to play a game. She starts to sing. ‘L is for the way you look at me…’
    ***
    She did try to abandon me. In one of her letters to Gearóid MacSuibhne she relates that she brought me back from Madrid to Dublin a few weeks after giving birth to me. She was evidently distraught at the time. Patrick records her saying, ‘Moses was abandoned, and there was no rebuke from the pulpit.’
    She brought me to the Coombe Maternity hospital, supposedly for a check-up. The truth was she couldn’t stand the sight of me – they were her actual words. (How insensitive my mother was to discovery. Did she think that such outpourings were covert in Irish?). She left me in the ward of the Holy Angels and walked away. She walked to the end of Dean Street and then turned around and came back. All the time she kept thinking that I had stopped breathing – I had the croup at the time, according to her letter. It kept nagging at my mother. She couldn’t have it on her conscience if I had died. She took me back. And that is why (I know now) right up to the time I went to boarding school, she never went to bed without coming into my room and putting her ear near to my face (without ever touching it) to check that I was still breathing. Sometimes I was awake and, with my eyes closed, I naively entertained the luxurious possibility of receiving a hug or a caress, but the examination was always impersonal, peremptory, a medical check.
    She enquired about adoption:
    There are many women – unmarried mothers – who are leaving their children with the nuns for adoption in America. Imagine, Gearóid, America, so far away. Archbishop McQuaid is insisting that the families have money and strong Catholic morals. They’re going mad for children over there ever since the War. And some of them even in their forties are being allowed to adopt. It’s all to do with money. They are paying one hundred and fifty pounds per child. O’Malley is calling for an enquiry in the Dáil, but it is all covered up. Somebody is making a tidy sum. Perhaps I could consider it, but it would only open up a can of worms, don’t you know? Papers would have to be signed. Things could be found out. Oh, it wasn’t meant to be like this.
    I storm out of the study shouting for my mother, but she has gone hiding behind her dementia cover like a butterfly behind a leaf. I am fearful of upsetting her, of damaging her frail health even further, but I persist. I must persist.
    ‘Why did you send me away, Mam?’
    She has her back to me, putting plates on the dresser.
    ‘Send you away, is it? I will never send you away. We will all go together like leaves in the wind.’
    ‘Could you not stand looking at me, Mam?’
    ‘What’s that? Don’t talk like that.’
    I knew I had said the wrong thing. Her voice breaks down and she starts to cry. Do all mothers cry as much as mine? She is a broken woman. She was always broken ever since I can remember. But I had pushed her too hard. Emotion has made her lucid. She reaches for her Sweet Afton, as if such poison were a lifebuoy, and coughs so violently that I fear her delicate frame could shatter like a shell. She gasps for breath.
    ‘My tablets. Where did I leave them?’
    ***
    Ever since I was small, she tried to condition me not to pry. I remember word for word her cautionary tale of Labhras Loingseach. It was the only night time story she ever told me. I was tucked up in bed and asking her questions, always asking questions about anything that came into my head. It was my way of trying to keep my mother a little longer in my bedroom. I dipped my fingers into her silky curls, but she put my hands under the bedclothes and told me to stop asking questions.
    ‘Stay quiet now and I’ll tell you a