Peeling Oranges Read Online Free PDF Page B

then the statue got up from the bench and it was a man and he walked away. A man with a hat shadowing his face.
    ***
    My mother did not neglect me materially. I never went hungry. I had the best of clothes. My school fees were always paid on time. Maybe I felt all her money went on me and she had nothing left for the insurance man. But I realise now, looking back, that all those years inside myself I was calling silently for a touch, a caress, a mother’s warmth.
    I never knew my mother’s lap.
    Again when I was small, I remember her addressing an envelope. I put my hand on her shoulder. It was a spontaneous act. I wanted to see what she had written. She had written the word Box. She quickly turned the envelope upside down the minute she felt my hand and shrugged me off, not roughly, just by the raising of her shoulder, enough to make me withdraw.
    ‘Why are you writing to a box, Mam?’
    She sighed. ‘It’s for your Uncle Gus. He moves around a lot.’
    It was her little concession to me. But she wouldn’t tell me any more.
    Every year on my birthday and at Christmas a present arrived by post from England – a Meccano set or a chemistry set that could make bombs, stuff like that.
    From Uncle Gus.
    As a small boy I took all this for granted. I didn’t care who Uncle was or whether he lived in a box or not as long as I got my presents. It is only now that I query my mother about our mysterious relative.
    ‘Why doesn’t Uncle Gus ever come home, Mam? How come I’ve never seen him?’
    ‘He would lose his job. Jobs are scarce.’
    ‘Even for a holiday?’
    ‘He can’t afford a holiday.’
    ‘But he has never seen me, Mam.’
    ‘Run along now, Derek. I’m getting a headache.’
    ***
    I can recall now the first time I heard the insurance man remonstrating with my mother. It was late one Christmas Eve. I was six or seven at the time, waiting in bed for Santa, pressing tightly on my eyes, trying desperately to sleep for fear he would not leave me anything if he caught me awake. The song fading on the wireless below I remember had a relevant poignancy:
    I feel sorry for the laddie…
    He hasn’t got a daddy…
    He’s the little boy that Santa Claus forgot.
    Mr Counihan’s querulous tone rose through waves of drowsiness and my mother’s sobbing.
    But when I asked her about it the next day – Christmas Day – all she said was, ‘What a dreamer you are, Derek.’
    ***
    I keep my own diary up to date. It is like a companion to me or maybe a crutch. Like trying to fill the void in your head with blobs of ink. I write:
    What can be found after an archaeological excavation of the human heart? The only thing I can deduce for sure is that I live in a loveless world. Everything else is uncertain. Uncertainty is a wound one carries inside oneself.
    ***
    Mam’s health continues to deteriorate. I want to confront her about the circumstances of my birth but I am afraid. Afraid of breaking the fine thread that holds her life together.
    Christmas of the my last year in boarding school I am sitting in a church pew. There is carol singing, but I am concentrated on a family, on a baby in a crib. A little boy lights a candle near the crib, his action safely guided by his father’s hand. I contemplate a virgin birth. I think of the decapitated statue of the Virgin that I discovered in the storeroom in boarding school. I saw her insides made of chalk. I try to examine the countenance of Joseph for signs. He is holding a lily-branch in his hand. His face of plaster shows no emotion as he looks on the child that he did not beget. I think of the absurdity of the situation. I think of Patrick Foley and wonder how he looked at me as a baby in a cradle. I think of his painting on his study wall. I was the burden carried through the storm, the heavy package that weighted down the earth.

Part II
Driftwood
Ireland & Spain 1932 - 1947

    Patrick Foley met my mother for the first time formally at Nelson’s Pillar in May, 1932.
    He had