Page 4 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

If my mother hears me, she chooses to ignore it. ‘Mrs Bishop told me yesterday. Which reminds me, did you pick up those few items for her? Her hip is giving her awful bother at the moment and I didn’t want to risk her going out in case it iced over. Last thing she needs is a fall right now, not with her lot at the other side of the world.’ Mrs Bishop’s two children live in England, but as far as my mother is concerned, they might as well be in Australia. Anything that requires crossing a body of water is too far away for my mother’s comfort. She wasn’t even terribly happy when I moved to the other side of the River Foyle after I got married.

‘Yes, Mum. I got what you asked for and I’ll drop them in next door when I’m finished with my cup of tea. I’ll need to be heading back soon anyway – work to be done and all that!’ I say, hoping she’ll understand that I don’t have all day to sit and chat.

‘Yes, yes. I understand. You’re very busy.’ She takes another bite of her turnover. She is clearly in no rush to tell me who died. Or show me what it is she has found while Marie Kondo-ing her very existence. I raise an eyebrow at her in the hope she takes the hint.

‘Right, okay,’ she says. ‘Well, Mrs Bishop told me yesterday that she had been down at Mass and the priest – that lovely young fellah with the beard and the Belfast accent – was reading out the deaths and I’m really sorry to be the one to tell you, but Kitty O’Hagan is dead.’

My blood really does run cold this time. My cup clatters as I drop it back onto the saucer.

‘Kitty O’Hagan, as in, Laura’s mammy?’ I ask, my mind instantly flooded with memories of sitting around Laura’s kitchen table having the mad craic before multiple nights out. Kitty O’Hagan giving us a lift into town, never once complaining at how rowdy or annoying we were being. ‘Enjoy your youth, girls. It doesn’t last long,’ she’d say. Laura would roll her eyes and complain that her mum was being a craic killer. But her mum was never a craic killer. She was a bona fide craic bringer.

‘The very same,’ my mother says. ‘Much too young,’ she adds. ‘It just goes to show we never know what’s around the next corner. This is why it’s important to get my affairs in order.’

My mother’s sudden interest in climbing into attics makes more sense now, I suppose, but honestly, I’m still trying to digest the news that Kitty has died.

‘Do you never see Laura any more?’ she asks. ‘I’ve not heard you talk about her in forever. I always thought the pair of you would make friends again. She’s a lovely girl. I always liked her.’

‘What happened?’ I ask, my mind racing.

‘Between you and Laura? Do you not know that yourself?’

‘No. To Kitty. What did she die from?’ I ask.

‘No idea,’ my mum replies. ‘But I thought you should know in case you wanted to go and show your respects. You were always in and out of that woman’s house when you were younger. Do you remember I used to joke we should just take your bed up there and let you move in? Regardless of whether or not you and Laura are speaking, you should go and pay your respects.’

I nod, my head already full of thoughts of Laura and what she must be going through. I know it well. The shock. The disbelief. The exhaustion as you push through the surrealism of it all. People in and out of the house and you just wanting to tell them all to go away – that you are broken and you understand they are sad, and they want to pay their respects but you are only just holding it together and you need to scream until you throw up. That you don’t want people here to gawk at the coffin in the corner. To drink tea and eat sandwiches as if the most catastrophic event of your life isn’t unfolding amid the Mass cards and sympathetic handshakes. ‘We’re sorry for your troubles,’ they say and I’ve no doubt they are but there’s a big part of them that is looking at you, witnessing your grief and thinking, ‘We’re just so thankful these troubles aren’t at our door.’

‘Do you know when the funeral is?’ I ask. I’ll have to call Niamh. She mustn’t know yet. If she did, she’d have called me. She’d have picked up her phone and hit my number and made sure to speak to me. Some things were too important for a WhatsApp message.

‘Well, from what Mrs Bishop said, she died on Wednesday night so I’d hazard a guess the funeral will be tomorrow, unless they’re waiting for people to fly in,’ my mother says.

In Derry we dispatch our dead with remarkable efficiency. There’s a standard of two nights for a wake – where we bring our dead home to be surrounded by friends and family – before a funeral. If someone dies late in the day, those two nights will often extend to three. The same goes if family need to travel from wherever in the world they now live. People tend not to want a Sunday funeral Mass – where the service takes place as part of the ordinary weekly Mass and can feel less personal – so my mother is probably right. It is Friday morning and tomorrow one of the very best friends I have ever had in my life will be laying her mother to rest and I’ve not so much as spoken to her.

‘You should’ve told me!’ I blurt.

‘I tried to tell you last night but you were more concerned with that dog and his business,’ she says, her lips pursed in an expression which wouldn’t look out of place on Maggie Smith playing a blinder as the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey.

‘You should’ve made me listen!’ I say, guilt flooding my system that I didn’t have the time yesterday to hear about Kitty O’Hagan’s death. That I’m such a horrible person I’ve not been there to hug my friend and extend my condolences. She must be utterly devastated. Her brother, Conal, must be devastated too. It was always just the three of them against the world.

‘Made you listen?’ My mother sniffs. ‘Rebecca Louise Burnside, in the almost forty-seven years you have been on this planet, nothing I have ever done has made you listen.’

She has a point, of course, but still. She should’ve tried.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. The last thing I want to do on the day I hear Laura is mourning her mother is to start arguing with mine. ‘It’s just a shock… and I wasn’t expecting it. She’s so young. I just can’t quite believe it.’

‘Ach, I know,’ my mother says, up on her feet without so much as a wince or an expression that her back aches. It’s remarkable really. I’m thirty years her junior and have already reached the random-pain-noises stage of life. ‘She was a lovely woman. A strong woman too. I’d never have thought it would be me who would outlive her…’ She starts to clean up the tea things even though I’m not even finished my first cup yet. That means this whole thing has rattled her too. My mother always goes into super-clean mode when she’s anxious. That she’s decided to sort out her affairs too makes me think that Roisin Burnside is experiencing anxiety on a level she’s not known before. There’s been too much death around this last few years.

But Kitty O’Hagan was young, all things considered. She was ten years younger than my mother. Only sixty-six. Too young to be dead. The news comes at me again in another wave of disbelief. No, I do not like this stage of life where parents start to die and it feels like we’re all on borrowed time.

How do I reassure a seventy-six-year-old woman, and myself for that matter, that she has years left when we’ve just been shown again that life can be so arbitrarily cruel?

My mind races back to all those days spent hanging out in Kitty’s kitchen, or Laura’s bedroom. We got up to so many stupid things – dance routines, applying make-up very badly, trying to learn how to walk in heels, which ended in a sprained ankle and a trip to A&E for Niamh.

And then there were the projects. There was the summer we spent designing our own magazine and fancying ourselves as revolutionary journalists. Of course, this was before computers were the norm, or able to do anything more than act as glorified typewriters, so we hand-wrote our stories, illustrated with our best markers and absolutely ripped off other magazines by sticking their pictures onto our pages. We kept Pritt Stick in business that year.

While other teenagers were out drinking two-litre bottles of cheap cider up on Derry’s City Walls, we were geeking out designing our own range of super-trendy fashion. My daddy had brought a ream of 500 pages of crisp white paper home from his work and we spent a summer drawing as many rah-rah skirts, shell suits and bomber jackets as possible. We watched The Clothes Show each Sunday with the reverence we would have saved for Mass in the past and God love our parents, but they never laughed at us or told us to get a life. Kitty even managed to keep a straight face when the three of us, in our Dunnes Stores jeans, Primark T-shirts and Nicks (not Nike) trainers, described our style as ‘Urban Funk’.

I wish I could remember the name of our fictional magazine or fashion house. I wish we still had those glorious projects to look at again now.

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