Emerald Germs of Ireland - By Patrick McCabe Page 0,1

would say, “I won’t go, then! I’ll stay here, Mammy! I’ll stay here with you, then, if that’s what you want!” Particularly if he had been doing some reading or practicing his acting skills.

But not without being furious with himself for doing it, for at times his late evening thirsts could be almost unbearable.

A lot of people, if they could gain access to Pat (which, admittedly, can be difficult, for he rarely answers the door now), would probably be hard-pressed not to look him in the eye and say, “Pat, what made you go and do the like of that, clobbering your poor mother, not to mention everything else you got up to, God knows how many unfortunates fertilizing the daisies in your garden? What on earth were you thinking of?” As if to suggest that Pat is some big mysterious psychological puzzle instead of the most ordinary fellow you could ever hope to meet. An ordinary fellow who just happened to want to have a few drinks at night-time and maybe join a band to sing a few songs. Without always having a shadow falling across him and a dumpling-shaped parent snarling “Where do you think you’re going?” every time Pat opened the front door. After all, as Pat often pointed out, he was forty-five years of age.

Still and all, there were times he missed his old mammy, and there is no point in denying it. Times when he would think of her chopping up fingers of toast and coming out with a plateful of them and handing them to him proud as punch, all in a line with the butter running through them. Times when she’d dress him up in his pressed soldier’s uniform and say, “Be my little captain for me, Pat!” as off he’d march up and down the kitchen with his mother beaming, thinking of all the good old days she’d once had with his father.

He would feel lonely whenever he thought of those times, seeing his life stretching out before him like some deserted highway, his bed at night now hopelessly bereft of her big warm rolls of fat and those comforting occasions when she would respond, in answer to his anxious nighttime query, “Are you there, Mammy?” “Yes, yes of course I’m here, son! As I always will be!”

Which was no longer the case and never would be again, for as long as he lived, as Pat knew, the saddest part of it all being, of course, the fact that she had herself been responsible for the situation which had brought so much unhappiness to them both. As indeed had a lot of other people who couldn’t find it within themselves to mind their own business. People who found it difficult to go through life without saying, “Look! There goes McNab! Odd as two left feet, that fellow!”

But there is something special about the relationship we all have with our mothers—and Pat, in moments of reflection, would feel a wave of melancholy sweep through him as he thought how, if he had to live through it all again, he wouldn’t have laid a finger on her. Often, he would wipe a tear from his eye and, seeing her before him large as life with her two eyes twinkling, whisper the words, “Mammy. This time let us do it right, and when I ask you can I join the band or have a bottle of stout, you just say, ‘Yes, Pat, you can. Why, of course you can. You don’t even have to ask.’”

And when in his imagination Pat McNab hears his mother uttering those words, there is no happier man on this earth, and all he can think of is throwing his arms around her neck and giving her a great big “gooser” (their private name for a kiss) on the cheek as he cries, “Do you know what I’ll do, Mammy? I’ll join no band! I’ll say to the band. Go to hell, band, for what do I care about you! And then I’ll stay home all day with you! That’s what I’ll do! For you’re better than any band! Band be damned! I care about no band!”

Obviously, Pat was aware that many people might think it foolish and, to say the very least, inappropriate, for a forty-five-year-old man to seat himself on his mother’s knee, the pair of them singing away as though they were some ridiculous kind of two-headed human jukebox. The truth is, however, that Pat didn’t care, literally