We present an extract from The Language of Remembering, the debut novel by Patrick Holloway.
Returning from Brazil with his wife and daughter, Oisìn is looking to rebuild a life in Ireland and reconnect with his mother, Brigid, who has early onset Alzheimer's. As her condition deteriorates she starts to speak Irish, the language of her youth, and reflect on her childhood dreams and aspirations. Mother and son embark on a journey of personal discovery, and as past traumas are exposed they begin to understand what has shaped them and who they really are.
In this extract, Oisin tries to learn Irish to connect to his mother again...
You are one of the first to arrive and the seats are in a circle and there is a ball in the middle and the teacher, Seán, walks to meet you and puts out his hand and says, conas atá tú inniu, Oisín? You smile and feel awkward and say táim ceart go leor, táim ceart go leor. Even though you are not, even though the word for what you are is cemented somewhere inside of you. You imagine whatever it is being pulled out and you hear it clatter into a metal, surgical tray, echoing.
As you sit down you remember getting your deviated septum fixed, how on the first visit to the doctor after the surgery, he lay you back on his chair and shoved the cotton on the end of the forceps into each nostril, pushing them inwards and upwards until you felt them by your eye sockets. Then he cut at hardened things inside your nostrils and used the forceps again to pull the soggy, crimson cotton free. It was such an invasion you thought you’d pass out. Then afterwards he asked you to breathe through your nose and you felt clogs of blood squirm down the back of your throat. Then there was so much air. You would like to be able to breathe like that again.
The game begins when the rest of the students arrive. The objective is to say three things about yourself, two of them are true and one of them is false. Then you throw the ball to someone and they have to guess which one is false. You are nervous because you cannot think of what to say and really want to use these classes to find the words you have to say, but it is week seven and still you haven’t said máthair, cuimhne, bás.
There is a woman with a pointy face who starts, you cannot say what exactly it is that makes it pointy because when you focus on her nose or her chin, they do not look overly pronged, but the umbrella of all of her features makes her look indignant and aciculate. She throws the ball to you and you can only understand one of the things she said, which is she lived abroad for a year, and even though you think it’s true you say it’s false, but can’t remember the word for false so just say it in English, and then she answers no, that it is not bréagach, and that she actually lived in France and speaks four languages. What was false about her was that she had once owned a bakery. You didn’t know the word for that, bácús.
It is your turn and your heart thickens. The sensation reminds you of being a teenager, afraid your voice would break while having to read Heaney’s Digging aloud in assembly one morning. It had been a punishment for something and you had read the poem a hundred times before having to stand up and read it aloud, and each time you read it you thought of your father, his pen scrawling letters in leather bound notebooks. You wonder where they could be now and think of asking your mother again, and even though you know the word for notebook you do not know if you could put it in a question. Anois, bain triail as, Seán says and smiles at you.
Well, you say. Well, you say again and for the life of you, you cannot think of any truth you feel like sharing. The only lie that comes to you is that your father is still alive but that doesn’t seem appropriate. Sometimes it feels like a truth. You think he is alive somewhere for his death is a memory that is not complete and therefore not completely real. At so many moments through your life you have imagined him just too far away, and when you, on the rare occasion say, I wish my dad could be here, in your head you imagine him alive, elsewhere, wishing too that he could be there. Tá iníon amháin agam, you say and picture your daughter’s face, probably getting impatient already, refusing to go to bed without you. You have one daughter, which is the truth, but seems like a lie.
You think of the stillbirth, your baby boy, who had the name of your father. They all look at you, waiting for the next truth or lie but your mind will not sit still. You try to stop yourself but start looking at each of them, making shot-fire stories up in your head. The large man who wears a vested jacket is a farmer, his brothers are at familiar war over the land and speak about him in Irish in the darkness of night. That kind, teapot-looking lady is a recent widow who finds ways to forget. The guy who is around the same age as you, who can grow a full, feathery beard needs Irish for a government job, one he will spend years at until finally he is able to retire. He will look back on the days like ripples that never rippled. You stand up and kind of smile. You cough a little and go to say something but nothing comes. You feel language float away. It is like letting go of a kite – it is not the weight that you cannot feel but the sense of holding on.
The Language of Remembering is published by Epoque Press
