Free My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress by Christina McKenna

reasons for dalliance – Jamie Frank, Mary Catherine, old Rose – as jerky images on an old-fashioned cinema screen. I hear the sluggish whirr of the reel and see the blend of motes and smoke in the steady beam of the projector’s light. In my imagination Jamie becomes the silent poisoner, carrying the guilty evidence of his crime to the dump in that lidless teapot. Mary Catherine is the breathless angel gliding up that hill to enfold us in her wings, and Great-aunt Rose is the wicked witch hobbling out to censure us with her arid heart and accusing eye.
    They’re all gone now, to another place: all those mysterious people, the ones who passed their days largely ignored, trapped in those desolate shacks, flooded with loneliness, with only the ticking clock and crackling fire for company.
    I did not understand loneliness then. These people were regarded as misfits to be feared, but now I realisethat at some point in their lives they had, for whatever reason, taken the wrong turn, had wandered off that main road which buzzed with life, where maidens sang and children danced, where the birds and banter flew – and had somehow lost their way. The saddest part, however, is that no one in the community made the effort to go in search of them and gently guide them back to that sun-filled road.

L IPSTICK , G LAMOUR AND D EATH
    I n 1968 our house underwent a renaissance. An extension was added, giving us the luxury of another toilet, kitchen and bedroom. This last was an important development for me. At night-time I no longer was the filling in the sandwich; we had an extra bed.
    My mother turned my old bedroom into what she termed ‘the parlour’. She even managed to prise a carpet (brown; it wouldn’t show the dirt) and a vinyl, three-piece suite out of my father. For him it was a bold extravagance; for her it was a victory.
    The ‘good room’, as it was called, was only used on very special occasions, and one of those occasions was when the ‘Yankees’ came visiting.
    Isa was the sister of a neighbour. She lived in Canada and, faithfully every summer, she and her daughter Regina travelled those thousands of miles to visit her brother Sam and his infirm wife in Draperstown. They were always referred to as the Yankees, my parents believing that Canada and the United States were one and the same.
    The only time our house got a real seeing-to was several weeks before their arrival. Windows were painted and walls papered; my mother scrubbed, and shouted with more vigour than ever, bellowing out commands that nearly shook the house. In the interests of parsimony and peace, the job of painting fell to my sister Rosaleen and me. Mother knew from past experience not to askLipstick, Glamour and Death father, since anything he did inside the house was ‘dear bought’, as she put it. This meant that he complained so much before, during and after the execution of a given task that he nearly drove her ‘mental’.
    So we girls would go into action with the white gloss, tackling it with all the precision of a drunk in a lavatory. We strayed madly onto windowpanes, dribbled onto skirtings and floors, even coating the odd cockroach or insect that had the misfortune to blunder into the path of our reckless brushes. Mother seemed not to notice these mishaps; in fact she was so proud of our efforts that she’d send us to a straitened neighbour or myopic uncle to wreak the same havoc there.
    We sang and slobbered away with our brushes in those other houses, knowing that no matter how careless our application was it probably wouldn’t be noticed. We also reasoned that our results would definitely be an improvement on what was there before. But perhaps the greatest incentive for our insouciance was that the stingy relative never paid us in coin; the paltry reward was often a mug of tepid tea and a stale bun.
    There was exuberance in the air at the thought of the Yankees’ arrival,