My Mother The Werewolf
In her debut memoir Grand, journalist Noelle McCarthy recounts the bittersweet experience of growing up with an alcoholic mother and how the complex strands of their relationship knitted together when her mum became terminally ill.
When I was very small I loved wolves, she told me. I used to go to bed with one under my pillow, couldn’t fall asleep without him. The wolf in my daughter’s Little Red Riding Hood book has a big bushy tail and a tweed jacket with a knife and fork in his top pocket. All the better to eat you with, Madam. We got a different version of the story out of the library recently, a beautifully illustrated one where nobody rescues Red Riding Hood at the end, she stays in the wolf’s belly. My daughter took it in her stride, but I was haunted.
Mammy was a werewolf, it only took one sip of drink to change her. The first mouthful of the first pint of Carling, all the evil came out dancing. Her face would change, but subtly; her eyes would brighten and her nose would lengthen. Everything about her became wilder and sharper and more alert. That was when the barman would need to watch himself. It took some of them a while to realise it. Like the place she got thrown out of on Blarney Street for screaming that her glass was dirty. The miracle was, she never ran out of bars, or taxi drivers, even as she ate up everyone who crossed her. They’d reach their limit sometimes, call in reinforcements, rattled by her savagery. She’d sit in the front seat, us in the back in our school uniforms, parked up outside the Guards station, a glass of bright green in her hand still, like we were at a cocktail party. Vodka and a dash of lime cordial. Even the Guards didn’t know what to do with her; a grandiose drunk baiting her taxi driver, refusing to pay him because he wasn’t deferential enough, insulted her somehow, her children in the back seat, on a Tuesday. The Sergeant would just tell the driver to take us home, ask my father for some money.
She wrote me a card one year. It has a wolf on the front of it, lapping at a silver pool of water, a big moon behind him glowing. That overwrought, romanticised kind of animal portraiture you see on jigsaws, velour blankets and heavy metal T-shirts. She got it in a little hole-in-the-wall she went to on the Coal Quay, a tiny place in one of the old workers’ cottages, full of crystals and candles and similar. My Fairy Shop, she called it. “Look at the wolf,” she wrote in my card, repeating what the witchy owner told her. “He’s looking into the water, seeing everything in it. He’s aware of his surroundings. He’s alone, but he can see himself in the water. He keeps himself company. Wolves are strong, brave and clever.” She wrote all this out carefully on a lined sheet of copybook paper and signed it “Your crazy Momma, Caroline”.
There’s a lipstick kiss near the signature but I don’t remember if she did that or I did. I carry the letter around with me, folded up six times into a square in my wallet, wrapped around a small photo of my mother. It’s a passport photo, black and white. She is very beautiful – dark eyes in a pale oval face, long dark straight hair parted in the centre falling well past her shoulders, very ’60s, early ’70s. She’s wearing some sort of woolly jumper – white, or pink maybe, with a high collar and a thin ribbon tied in a bow around the neckline. She’s not smiling, but she looks completely relaxed, her brow unclouded. You can see her top teeth, her lips are parted, she’s breathing easily.
I could stare at this photo for hours, days maybe – as though by looking hard enough, I could somehow see in this perfect, silent teenager any trace of the woman who gave birth to me. See how she became the person she became later, the woman in the front seat of a Lee Cabs taxi outside the Guards station, with a vodka and lime in her hand and a bellyful of fury. “This was my girlfriend from 1969–1971”, someone has written on the back in pencil, faded but legible. She’d have been 16 years old in 1969. She met my father when she was 14, she always told me. That is not my father’s writing on the back of the photo. He may have been her first boyfriend, but he wasn’t her only one.
I used to look at that photo sometimes and think about asking her who wrote it. But I never had the nerve to. I don’t even remember how I got it – I have a habit of taking things when I am home on holiday, just squirrelling them away, not even asking for permission. When I was a teenager, I sometimes used to wait until she was in bed, getting ready to go to sleep, and I’d run into the room and flash her a picture from one of my film magazines. A two-page spread from An American Werewolf in London. The moment of hairy transformation – man becoming wolf, the snout bursting through his nostrils, teeth elongating. “Ah stop Noelle, stop it, you’ll go to hell for that! Don’t come near me with that – it freaks me!” she’d shriek, horrified and delighted, hiding under the blanket. “Go away with it! May God forgive you.”
……….
““She’d sit in the front seat, us in the back in our school uniforms, parked up outside the Guards station, a glass of bright green in her hand still, like we were at a cocktail party.” ”
“They just don’t stop, you know? Like, I don’t know, werewolves or something. They’re all fucking crazy once they get the drink in them. Don’t go to bed like normal people.” My dad on the phone, many years later, telling me about a night down in Kerry with my mother and her brothers and sister.
I was like that too, obviously. The worst thing was not knowing how it would go on any given night. Would it be two drinks, then home, blameless? Or home two days later, minus a handbag, having spat at a stranger? I had no reliable indicator. It was the same for Carol. Two pints some days, and Daddy picking us up outside the funeral home, no drama. Other days, parked outside the Guards six hours later.
I never noticed at the time, what the moon was doing, but even now, many years since my last drink, at certain times of the month, I can feel the imp within me, an antic demon behind my teeth, using my mouth to make trouble. I want to get barred from places, I want to scream the glass isn’t clean enough. I want to break things. There’s a little police station up by the SuperValue. Some nights I want to be driven into it.
An extract from Grand by Noelle McCarthy, published by Penguin Random House NZ, $32.99.