The most popular girl in school asked me to prom while everybody else was calling me names — twenty years later she brought a takeaway to my door and did not know who I was.
Then she put her hand flat on her chest and said: “What is this?”
And I said: “You asked me to prom.”
She sat down on my stairs.
And here is where the story people want and the story that happened come apart, so I am going to be precise.
I did not have a room full of things.
There was no reveal. There were no bags, no envelope, no cheque, no cameraman. It is a two-bedroom flat with a bicycle in the hall.
There is one photograph on a wall and it has been there for sixteen years, and the whole of the “reveal” is a six-by-four print that cost me about four dollars.
And she cried for about eleven minutes on my stairs and I sat on the floor and did not touch her and did not say anything, which took some doing.
And then she told me the thing that has reorganised the last twenty years of my life.
She did not ask me to prom because I was a good person.
She asked me because of my mother.
Malachy Doherty is her older brother. He is forty-one now, he was twenty-two in 2006, and he went through mainstream school in Bellwater with support.
And the learning support assistant who worked with him from the year 2000 until the November of 2005 was Nell Renwick.
My mother.
