Read That's Another Story: The Autobiography for Free Online

innocence, regarded them as simply an expression of absolute confirmation. You can therefore imagine my surprise when, around the same time as this odd little conversation, I came across my brothers playing about in the bedroom before getting dressed one morning. They were in fits of laughter, having put elastic bands on their willies. In complete confusion, I could only deduce from this that the willy detached itself and fell off at some point before boys grew into men and that perhaps the elastic band had something to do with it. This conundrum took a while to clear up; in fact, I remember fiercely debating and defending this theory with several of my contemporaries, thinking how out of the loop and uninformed they were.
    It was under my parents’ bed, aged about eight, that I found what looked like a kind of greasy, deflated balloon. I could see from its colour that it wasn’t a festive balloon, one that you might hang on a gatepost to indicate the location of a person’s birthday party, and that it might possibly have some sort of medical connection. I sat on the floor to examine it further; first stretching it this way and that, then finally blowing it up and holding it up to the light. Inside it was a kind of gloopy liquid. I stared at it and, piece by piece, snippets of overheard remarks and conversations that I had hitherto no understanding of, began to connect. The realisation of what it was that I had only seconds before held to my mouth and tasted sent me rushing downstairs, the thing held away from me at arm’s length, rudely deflating and spitting globules of the liquid as it did so. Once out in the garden, I couldn’t when it came to it jettison the thing into the wilderness behind the rockery, as had been my intention. Instead I held on to it for a few seconds more and the revulsion that I had felt just moments before melded in with something else, something like a sadness I couldn’t quite place.
    I could spend a whole afternoon in this room, going through the bottom drawer of my mother’s dressing table, leafing through the personal things of her past with frozen fingers. In my memory it was always arctic in there, the big faded rug cold and slightly damp underneath me. It was where I felt I could find her, touch on her history, discover clues to her, like a detective: clues to the girl she once was before we came along and disappointed her, before she became anxious and tired, when she was excited by life, optimistic, when the world was her oyster. It was full of old photographs of her as a young woman: dark and handsome. It is said that a lot of people living along the west coast of Ireland have dark complexions and this is attributed to the fact that the Spanish Armada crashed on the rocks there. My mother, with her dark hair and eyes and olive skin, could easily have passed for Spanish, but when questioned about this she was mildly outraged, claiming that ‘The Irish met them with pitchforks!’ To which my father replied, ‘I think the Irish met them with something else, Mary!’
    In these photographs her dark, strong features were set in an unsmiling, no-nonsense face, against an alien, sepia background that looked more like the moon than anywhere on earth. The images were peopled by worn, dusty-looking folk, staring pale eyed at the camera with a self-consciousness that now touches me but then enthralled me and drew me in. There was a shabby leather handbag full of letters and postcards, from close friends and distant relatives long ago, from California and Australia and, of course, Ireland: friendly, chatty, intimate letters to a girl we never knew, who didn’t yet know us. I couldn’t get enough; I would read the same letters over and over again, and stare at the same photographs, at the same faces, often employing a magnifying glass, as if that would take me closer into them, into their eyes and through into their heads, hoping against hope that I would discover a vital secret. Also in the