Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maeve Higgins is a contributing writer for The New York Times and a former comedian who performed all over the world. She starred in the multi-award winning movie Extra Ordinary and hosts a climate justice podcast with Mary Robinson entitled Mothers of Invention.
 

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Lean on Me

My most fervent wish during the COVID-19 pandemic was twofold. One, that it end. Two, that it not impart any damn lessons. I can't stand when horrible and senseless things happen and people insist on finding some neat takeaway to make sense of it all. Despite my resistance to learning anything from this nasty demon of a virus, it did help crystallize one thing for me. You'll snort when you hear, because it's incredibly obvious. My realization was this: I really, really, REALLY need my friends. No man is an island; we all know this. Although for many years of my childhood I thought the expression was "No man is in Ireland" and it confused me greatly, particularly when said by a man in Ireland, but I still nodded wisely when I heard it. So true, no man is in Ireland, I would agree, my little eyes darting around in confusion.

I have one brother and six sisters, you see, and the thing about my siblings is that they count as friends too. I had no idea what that meant for my friendships with people who are not related to me until my friend Claudia told me exactly what it meant. "You don't really need friends because you have your family," she said. "Oh, I doubt that's true," I told her, knowing in an instant it was true. I was worried I'd hurt her feelings if I confirmed it. She smiled, knowing me well enough to spot a lie. "It's fine, Maeve, it's not a bad thing."

I wasn't always best friends with my siblings, certainly not as a child. I had running battles with both my older sister and my closest-in-age younger sister. My older sister was a stealth bomber, quieter and cleverer than I. When my family took a day trip to Midleton, a town thirty minutes' drive away, they accidentally left me behind. That day we spent a long time in a carpet shop. I was about six and I didn't notice the rest of my family leaving, immersed as I was in the swirling floral rugs of the 1980s. When I did notice, I couldn't believe it. I remember walking around the shop, through the long swinging halls of hanging carpet, unable to comprehend that they were all gone. Just like that, all those siblings and both parents had vanished. Because we were in the same classroom in the same school growing up, and we only really went on playdates together to cousins' houses, I'd never been without a family member before in my life. I decided to stand very still and hope nobody noticed me, convinced I would get in trouble with the shop owner for being there alone. Nobody noticed my presence in the shop, or my absence in the car. Well, eventually they did, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this book; I'd be the heiress to a rug fortune, having no doubt been adopted by the Carpet King of Midleton. As my family pulled into the driveway after a successful outing (no money spent, three hours passed, zero fights in the backseat) my mother realized I wasn't there. "Where's Maeve?" she asked. My nine-year-old sister replied, a little too calmly, "Oh, Maeve? She's back at the carpet shop." As if I was her interior designer and she'd left me there with her credit card to pick up a rug she was too busy to select.

As small girls she and I shared a room with our two younger sisters, sleeping in two sets of bunk beds. With an average of two years between us, I seem to remember we were all around the same size and we shared some clothes, like socks and underwear. We would fight about that, but she was always ahead of me in the smarts department. She learned how to spell first, a skill I was insanely jealous of. "G.O.T.O.S.L.E.E.P.," she would hiss when I wouldn't stop talking at nighttime, and I'd beg her to tell me what it meant. "Go to sleep," she'd say, and I'd promise to go to sleep if she'd just tell me what she had spelled. She was a high-achieving and extremely good child, doing everything she could think of to help our mother. This annoyed me, and I annoyed her. I was lazy and funny, like now. While she swept the stairs and looked after whatever baby needed looking after, I'd play outside and make my father laugh as I helped him shape concrete into bricks. It's really not advisable to have children handle concrete, what with the lime and all, but it was really satisfying work.

On Saturday mornings, my parents would go to the market in Cork to get supplies for the week, and it was my older sister's job to cajole us all into cleaning the house. "I'll polish," I'd offer, knowing that meant I could put on the television and half-heartedly wipe the plant pots and our only statue. That statue, inexplicably, was a small bronze figurine of a wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. "No, Maeve, you will clean out the fire." I hated cleaning out the fire; it involved various steps in turn irritating, grimy, and arduous. First the ashes would need to be roughly sieved so all the clinkers could be saved. Clinkers are the little bits of half-burned matter that would do well for the next fire. So, put the clinkers aside in a little pile and shovel out the ashes into a metal bucket. (Sometimes they were still very hot, adding an element of fear to the task.) This would inevitably leave your hands coated in a fine ashy dust that felt so gross to the touch it makes me shudder for a second at the mere memory. Then you'd have to bring the ash outside (yuck, outside!) and toss it into the ash heap, and load up on kippins (little sticks), wooden logs, turf, and coal to build a new fire. I dodged that whole job so often during the week that my sister always insisted it was my turn on Saturday, which it probably was. I'd make a long speech about parity and trust and how she was basically Miss Hannigan, and she would usually end up cleaning the fire.

As teenagers, my older sister and I still shared a room, and the younger ones had their own. This didn't really improve relations because we remained two people with extremely different personalities. If you're wondering what my "personality" was, what I mean is I would get home from school and make white toast, cover it in butter, and eat it lying on my bed, reading Louisa May Alcott books and humming tunelessly. For hours. Until dinner, which was often made by my older sister. Sometimes, when she had turned off the light and was trying to sleep, I'd come up with a plan exclusively to irritate her. I'd say, "I'm just going to say good night to my star," then I'd open the curtain and gaze silently at the sky for a really long time. I don't know how she resisted putting a pillow over my face.

My younger sister was a different type of threat. I resented being responsible for her, having learned early on that I was. I was around five when we visited some family friends and we were playing around in their garden. They had a fat blond dog who, for some reason, took a dislike to Lilly. The dog chased her, and I remember her running past me with her two little braids streaming behind her. I knew it was bad, and I think I went to get an adult. The dog didn't bite her, but she was very frightened. I don't remember much else apart from later that evening, when I was punished for not looking after her. I found this deeply unjust, and complained to my mother that I didn't deserve a smack with the wooden spoon just because my little sister had been chased by a dog. My mother, with tears in her own eyes, was adamant that we must be loyal to one another, and protect and defend one another, and I had failed to do that.

So the loyalty is set, no matter what. I have these six girls, now women, and one boy, now man, that are mine. When it comes to sports teams, provincial rivalries, and even nation-states, I really don't care to identify with one or another, and feel faintly embarrassed for people who do. However, I know that if my brother and sisters needed me to paint my face or chant in a stadium or wave a flag to pledge my allegiance,...