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.
Five years.
And by everything Siobhan told me on those stairs, my mother was the only adult in that building who ever made that school work for her brother. Not kind. Effective. She rebuilt the timetable. She fought the head of year twice. She got him into a workshop course in 2003 that nobody thought he could do and that he finished.
And on the ninth of November, 2005, she died on the Bellwater road.
And Malachy’s support was covered by three different people over the following eleven weeks and then dropped to eleven hours a week, and he did not finish that year.
Siobhan was seventeen and she watched her brother come apart over a woman she was not related to.
And in the May of 2006, in a corridor, she heard two boys say something about the fat kid whose parents had died.
And she went and found me by the science block.
She has never told me she was repaying anything. I have put that on her.
What she actually said, on my stairs, at about one in the morning, was:
“Your mum got Mal through school. And then you were on your own and everybody was horrible to you. It wasn’t complicated.”
Twenty years.
Twenty years I have carried it as the day a beautiful girl saw something good in me when nobody else did.
And what it actually was is that a seventeen-year-old settled a debt to a dead woman by taking her son to a dance.
And that is better. I want to say that clearly because when I have told people, about half of them look disappointed on my behalf.
It is better, because it means the kindness was going in both directions for six years before I knew anything about it, and because my mother is in it.
