By the time I got back from Number 42 with Rose, Tess was on all fours roaring and shouting.
Rose ran the Souvenir of Knock tea towel under the tap and dabbed her forehead.
“What a wonderful day for a child to come into the world,” she said breezily. “If it’s a boy, you’ll have to call him Paddy.”
“Shut your fucking hole, Rose!” Tess banged a fist on the lino. “I’ll do no such thing! I may as well put a ball and chain around his leg!”
Rose laughed then I looked away in horror as she knelt down behind Tess and lifted up the back of her housecoat.
“Not long at all,” she said with a worried expression.
Tess let out another roar that sent me scuttling into the hallway in terror. Rose yelled at me to go back over the road and tell Conor, her eldest, to take me to school.
Walking to school with Conor O’Grady was only slightly less terrifying than watching my mother give birth. Fifteen and sullen with a jet-black widow’s peak, deep-set eyes and a collection of Motorhead T-shirts, Conor had a slanty way of looking at you that sent a shudder down my young spine. A decade later at his sister’s eighteenth birthday party, he asked me for a dance. He was home on leave from the army. His head was shaven, making the widow’s peak more scarily prominent, but he looked impressive in his uniform so I said yes. He told me he and his father weren’t speaking at the time. Tommy, a fervent Republican whose grandfather had fought in the 1916 Easter Rising, was appalled at his son’s decision to join the British Army. But, to be fair to Conor, Thatcher’s Britain in the eighties was hardly bursting with career opportunities so it was probably a choice between the army or the dole. Anyway, Conor shuffled me round the dance floor at Chorlton Irish like he was shifting a wardrobe then plied me with Pernod and Black. Later on, we ended up outside in the ginnel by the car park where he yanked up my skirt, grabbed my knickers and stuck his fingers inside me, calling me all manner of filthy names. I bit and kicked and managed to get away. I was ashamed and blamed myself afterwards. I never told a soul apart from Karen. Conor was later posted to Belfast where he lost both legs in an IRA ambush. Tommy wept for days at the cruel irony of his son’s fate and Conor ended up living back with his parents in Brantingham Road. I saw him now and again on his mobility scooter with a huge St George’s flag flying off the back. He was morbidly obese with a long grey ZZ Top beard. Conor O’Grady was obviously not right in the head from very early on. But I never imagined he’d end up on the front page of the Manchester Evening News doing the terrible thing he did. I was just glad his lovely mother wasn’t around to witness it.
Mikey was an enormous baby with hamster cheeks and white-blonde curls. He fed off Tess like a suckling pig. As the years went by, friends and family said his reckless nature was at the root of some of her mental-health issues. He sucked her dry and worsened her condition, they said. But I knew otherwise. Mikey was her reason for getting up every day. She loved him feverishly and shamelessly and he could do no wrong in her eyes. And yet I can’t remember ever resenting their closeness. I adored my brother. It was impossible not to.
Mikey was a risktaker and a cheeky chappie with an irresistible smile. Throughout his childhood he leapt off roofs, fell out of trees, performed Evel Knievel stunts on his bike and did all kinds of risky stuff that landed him in the children’s A&E at the Infirmary on a regular basis. The staff were constantly amazed that he avoided serious injury. Sporting injuries followed in his teens. He was good at all sports and a keen City fan. But it was on the rugby field he shone. With his ham-shank thighs and shoulders the width of a van, he dodged his opponents on the field with the same skill he dodged danger off it. He won a sporting scholarship to St Bede’s, a Catholic fee-paying school in Whalley Range, while I languished in mediocrity at Oakwood High, the local comprehensive. Oakwood was a non-denominational school as was Priory Road, our primary. Tess avoided the local Catholic schools which was unusual for an Irish family at that time. But she made the exception for St Bede’s as she knew Mikey desperately wanted to go there.
He flourished and, despite his working-class background, became the golden boy at the school due to his sporting talents and roguish charm. But, by the time he got to sixth form, Tess and I sensed he was moving away from us. Semi-pro by then, he’d started to frequent the posh wine bars of Altringham and Hale with his wealthy peers. He spoke a lot about his goals and ambitions at that time. He wanted to go to London University and study something sports-related. But his big dream for as long as I could remember was to put on the white jersey and play for England.
One filthy winter morning in 1998, the three of us were having breakfast in the kitchen at Brantingham Road. Tess was standing by the sink in a pink housecoat and curlers, a bunch of letters in one hand, cigarette in the other. Mikey was wolfing down Weetabix from a mixing bowl at the table, his long hair hanging down the sides of his handsome face like dog-ears. He rolled his eyes and tutted as I put the Pogues’ “Thousands Are Sailing” on the CD player for the hundredth time.
I danced around the kitchen, toast in hand. “Pure
