In an extract from her new book, Róisín Ingle recalls the day of her father's suicide in Sandymount, and the days after when life changed forever for her mum and eight children.
It is September 1980. I am eight years old. I sleep in a narrow room with chipboard walls next to my parents. You have to walk through their bedroom to get to mine, where I share bunk beds with my sister Rachael. I don't sleep that particular night. I can't seem to settle. I go into my mother's room, thinking to snuggle up with her and Daddy, but he isn't there, and my mother seems concerned. It is late. "When is Daddy coming home?" I ask. She doesn't know.
I sleep. I am woken in the morning. One of my older sisters is telling me something has happened. "We mustn't look out of the window," I hear someone say. "Whatever you do, don't look out of the window." I ask my sister to confirm something that sounds absurd even as I say it. "Daddy's dead. He's dead, isn't he?" It is more of a statement than a question. She says, "Who told you Daddy is dead?" and I say I just knew.
Downstairs is full of people. Nuns and neighbours and nosy parkers. There is one policeman who looks kindly at me and another who can't meet my eye. The people all have red eyes and white faces and keep saying things like, "He is gone to heaven," as though it makes any kind of difference where he has gone. He's just gone. That's all. I am told I can miss school if I want.
Normally this would be cause for celebration. There would be a race down the road to the chocolate factory, to forage for defective seaside rock, the kind that has a misspelt seaside town running all the way through it. But today I go to school desperate to escape the abnormality at home. The tragic eyes of the sympathetic callers, the dead weight of their stooping shoulders.
Normally I love a fuss, a dramatic occasion, but this one leaves me cold. I feel as though I am looking down on everyone; I can see them and hear them, but none of it is real. I pack my schoolbag and walk to Lakelands, singing to myself all the way along Durham Road until I see the school gates. Usually a source of annoyance. Today they represent sanctuary. Safe at last.
When I get there everything is normal. I feel relieved. An assembly is called; another welcome distraction. I stand in the circle with the rest of the school, grateful for the order that has descended, glad to be away from the disorder at home. Prayers are said. We pray for the departed soul of Peter Ingle, Róisín Ingle's father. We pray for Róisín and her family. Disorder now. Everyone looking.
I feel anger bubble up inside me. Why didn't anyone ask if I wanted them to pray for my father? Why is this happening? Which one of you imagined that I would want your prayers? Dozens of pitying eyes swivel in my direction. A teacher places a hand on my shoulder. A voice asks if I want to go home. "No," I say, not crying, not anything. After assembly a girl comes up to me and says she is sorry. "Why? Did you kill him?" I ask her. The hurt in her eyes is like a victory to me. Punishment for her invasion and for their not leaving me alone.
I leave school early. Escaping again. Miss Roddy in the local shop gives me a free bag of penny sweets. People are nicer to me than usual. The house is packed with people I don't recognise saying things I don't understand. What I do understand immediately, without its being said, is that in this new, post-Daddy climate I can do anything I want. Nobody will give out to me. Nobody will mind.
But all I want is the bit of peace and quiet that I know is not going to come. I can hear my little brother Michael crying in the front room. He is standing by the fireplace my daddy built, stone by stone, before he got sick.
A sweet memory interrupts the sound of Michael's howling. One time when Daddy came back from the hospital he knocked on the front door, and when I opened it I shouted: "Mammy, there's a man at the door." I didn't know who he was, this big bearded man offering me a fizzle stick. But he was my daddy. Everyone laughed and told me he was my daddy. I laughed then too and took his hand and led him into the front room. Now in the front room Michael is screaming and roaring. I think to myself that if Daddy were here he would shout, "Give over, Michael," and Michael would shut up straight away. But nobody tells him to shut up. He can do anything he wants now - we all can.
Michael is gulping and sobbing so hard he can't breathe properly. After a while he calms down enough to ask me something. "Do you know how our daddy died?" he asks, his red face all indignant. I tell him what I have been told and what I haven't been moved to question further. He was sick and then he died. "No," shouts Michael, defiant now, his little blond head shaking from side to side, "that's not true."
He spills it out. That ugly thing he has heard. He was outside when a boy his own age, a boy passing on a bike, taunted him with the news he is telling me now. He can't wait to get the words out. It's as if he desperately needs someone else to know. "It's not true," I say to my mother, who is sitting on the settee beside me. "Tell him it's not true." "It is," she says with a sadness that seems to crush her. "It's true."
The boy on the bike had the story right. My father had killed himself. He suffered for five years with schizophrenia, a mental illness that, after it had been treated with electric-shock therapy and a cocktail of pills, robbed him of his personality. I didn't know him very well, but I know this much: Peter Ingle was not born to sit in zombie mode in front of a television set or nurse a few quiet pints in Sandymount House before ambling home at closing time. Every single day for the last six months of his life, he would tell my mother that she and the rest of us would be better off without him. Without this version of him, anyway. Every single day, loving him whether he was mad or sane or numb to everything, my mother told him not to be so silly. Of course we needed him. Of course we did.
He was a carouser. A crooner. A gambler. A charmer. His dedication to these roles meant he wasn't always a good husband or a good father. Before he got sick he was wildly irresponsible with finances, to the point where he once stole my sister's confirmation money so he could go out drinking.
He was also wildly irresponsible when it came to work, leaving his taxi illegally parked for a couple of days if one of his passengers told him a party was going on. Call him irresponsible and he'd probably sing you a few bars of the song. Maybe you'd smile and maybe you wouldn't. It depended if he'd just found all the money you'd managed to hide from him under the lino in the kitchen, leaving you with eight mouths to feed.
Before he got sick there were days my mother had to keep one of us away from school, to make sure he went to collect and bring home the dole money. I remember one day, when it was my turn to be a mini security guard, he took me for a towering knickerbocker glory ice-cream sundae. I remember the smell of hops from the pub as we walked home. I remember him on his way out the door, smiling as he explained he was going to see a man about a dog, a euphemism for Shelbourne Park greyhound track, over the Ringsend bridge.
That's about as far as my memories stretch. He got sick and spent most of his final four years in psychiatric units in Dublin. Then, one night, he wrote a note. He believed we'd be better off without him. And maybe we were.
I was taken to see my father laid out all in white in the funeral parlour. After his death my mother had donated his eyes to medical science. I remember staring at his eyelids and wondering what the space where his eyes had been a few days ago would look like. I stood and stared and felt nothing for him, this stranger in a shroud.
At eight years old I didn't understand what he had done. I didn't understand anything. The best thing about the funeral was that we got to be minded by the Borzas in their sittingroom at the back of their chip shop. They brought us huge plates of fish and chips, and we could have as much as we liked.
The eldest of the eight of us children was 17 and the youngest barely two when my father died. People say to me: "Your mother must be a wonderful woman." I say, "Yes, she is," but that doesn't do her any kind of justice.
She was 41, she had eight children and her husband had grown virtually unrecognisable from the handsome fellow with the sparkling smile she had fallen in love with. He once had a singing voice to charm birds from trees - and other birds from certain London hostelries. He charmed my mother in Newquay, in Cornwall, in the 1950s, when she was pretending to be a beatnik and he was doing what he always did best, just being himself.
I was four when Daddy got sick. My mother told me that the doctors had thought he was an alcoholic at first. They only diagnosed schizophrenia after the voices in his head grew more insistent and started telling him he was Jesus and that to save the world he had to kill himself, my mother and us children.
Once, when he was lashing out with a knife in the front room, she, and two friends who had called around unexpectedly at a particularly opportune time, sat on a coffee table with him underneath until help arrived. My mother saved my father that day, knowing well she might not be able to save him all the other days of his life. And she was right.
He needed to die, he would tell her often, especially when his delusions were at their worst. "Don't be silly, Peter," she'd say, giving him the medication that would dull him, turn him into a blob in the armchair, where he would doze off in front of the racing and shout "Don't touch that" if we tried to change the channel.
He left a note that night on one of those early-learning Ladybird books. It was one that featured Peter and Jane. He might not have noticed at the time, but he wrote the note on the page where "I like Peter" was printed in easy-to-read lettering. "I loved you the best, Ann. I can't stick it no more, forgive me. God Bless you and all the children, Peter."
As he wrote his Biro must have died, and there is a doodle where he tried to resuscitate the pen. The doodle is in the shape of an eight, and I like to think he saw that. A final goodbye written next to a frustrated eight, the number on the door of the house, the number of children he was leaving behind, the age I was when he decided to go.
I've been thinking lately about how his death affected me. It may sound strange, but it's not something I've thought much about before. For years I used his death only as a way to shock. I don't remember making a decision not to care that my father had killed himself, but I must have, because I derived genuine pleasure from the horrified look on people's faces when I told them how he had died. I delighted in their confusion when I described the tree in the back garden. The branch where we used to hang a tyre swing. The gnarled rope I found that day, resting innocently on the washing machine. These were just macabre details. They didn't move me at all.
Extracted from the introduction to Pieces of Me: A Life-in-Progress, a collection of Róisín Ingle's Irish Times Magazine columns, published by Hodder Headline Ireland, €9.99