Moving house in another lifetime brought it into our lives.
Our children seemed to love it immediately.
Hefty, a bit graceless, too large for the room, too cumbersome for the previous owners to bother taking it away. The wardrobe that nobody wanted.
Solid in its vastness. The colour of molasses. Wormholes in the flanks of veiny old wood. The mirrors on its doors badly needing re-silvering. A faded brass lock with a tiny silverplate key last turned before you were born. Three leg-stumps shaped like seashells, the fourth stump somehow missing, in its place a volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1931, holding up the burden of the past with crushed dignity.
Inside, mothballs. The smell of cedar. A back panel broken. Drawers lined with 1970s copies of the RTÉ Guide. Judge the Dog. Eugene Lambert. Mícheál Ó hEithir. Bosco. Hall’s Pictorial Weekly. Amuigh Faoin Spéir. A cupped compartment where cufflinks and tiepins might live, or the miraculous medal given to your grandmother a hundred years ago and you don’t want to be rid of it, not yet. Etched around its rim, in letters so minuscule they’re hard to make out any more: “Ô Marie, conçue sans péché, priez pour nous qui avons recours à vous.” The conker you picked up in the car park on your child’s first day in school. Dust you could carve your name in.
Perhaps the wardrobe once housed ballgowns or twinsets and miniskirts, or Borsalino fedoras in sleek boxes. God knows the clothes that ever hung in it. We never used it for that, but for junk and detritus, old duvets, burst basketballs, old books, jars of change, unwanted presents regifted on to us, which one day we might regift, always knowing we wouldn’t, so why keep them? Candles you didn’t like, but there might be a power cut. Stuff you meant to get around to giving to the charity shop but didn’t. They probably wouldn’t take it. Scratched records you couldn’t bear to be parted from.
The clatter of ancient wooden hangers when you opened the wardrobe was beautiful. As though the wardrobe had stories to tell but hadn’t quite found the words so was trying to communicate by percussion.
Our house had no chimney. Questions would be asked around Christmastime.
The wardrobe became the means of entry for You Know Who.
Later it evolved into a place in which to writhe with boredom or to colour in books, on the rain-filled afternoons of Irish childhood. Jigsaws were attempted and abandoned in the wardrobe
The Easter Bunny used it, too, and so did the Tooth Fairy, but these eminences never took to it in quite the same way as Santa Claus. The big phoney loved that wardrobe, and it loved him right back, putting fun in the furniture of early advents. Behind the wardrobe, we hinted, was a magical tunnel that led to no mere Narnia or North Pole but to his actual if unofficial, indeed unpublicised, place of residence: an elfin carnival land of impossible wonders and indescribable glories – Bray, essentially – with its dodgems and stodge and its candyfloss beauty. Why did he live there? Ours was not to ask. Perhaps he liked the whisper of the sea shifting pebbles or the smell of vinegary chips on the breeze. Larger inside than outside, the wardrobe was a portal. A three-legged Tardis. A time-machine.
Later it evolved into a place in which to writhe with boredom or to colour in books, on the rain-filled afternoons of Irish childhood. Jigsaws were attempted and abandoned in the wardrobe. Yu-Gi-Oh! cards got shuffled. Bits of Lego got lost. From time to time, there was war in the wardrobe. Occasionally, during the teen years I found a bottle stowed there. The wardrobe has always been connected to pleasure.
These days, the Christmas decorations are stashed there in January when Nollaig Na mBan is done, and taken out in December after their 11-month sabbatical in the dark. The trash sacks they rest in seem a disrespectful home. One year, the decorations got thrown out with the rubbish and were only spared the bin truck’s jaws by the kind of last-minute realisation you tend to get in short stories but too rarely in life. The wardrobe reaccepted them with relief.
Baubles, strings of tinsel. Fairy lights and tinfoil stars. A cardboard angel we bought on our honeymoon, one of us thinks, but the other thinks we bought it in Dún Laoghaire. A crib in a Clarks shoebox, figures wrapped in newspaper pages so old that, unwrapping them, you see monochrome photographs of people from a country that went away. Black newsprint stains your hands, dusts your fingertips.
Some of the newspapers themselves are no longer with us, alas, but seeing scraps of them brings back street calls you last heard in the previous century, in the winter of the long-gone, sepia-tinted Dublin where people could afford to live.
“Press or Herdld. Herdld or Press.”
At Christmas, the past calls like a newsboy.
Broken lamps. Medals for Irish dancing and the wheelbarrow race. Soccer boots with hardened mud still clinging to their studs
Down the years, figures from the crib got broken or lost. One wise man was decapitated and must have his head Sellotaped back on every December, which is surely a metaphor for something. St Joseph requires a blob of Blu Tack under his base to kneel straight. Among the beings come to worship at our embodiment of the Bethlehem manger have been Ninja turtles and a Star Wars stormtrooper. I remember a cow from a toy farm and a Fisher Price donkey and a shepherd who had retired from Subbuteo. If there was ever a holy infant, as there must have been, he is long gone by now. His mother has aged well, shows no flaws after 25 years of service, is appropriately – I mean no disrespect – immaculate.
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In the box folders on the wardrobe floor are the kindergarten crayonings and St Patrick’s Day rosettes and the home-made Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards. “Daddy, you are a GOD to me,” one offering reads. Boys oh boys. Them was days.
Broken lamps. Medals for Irish dancing and the wheelbarrow race. Soccer boots with hardened mud still clinging to their studs. The souvenir programme from that Christmas Eve night in New York when we went to the WWF wrestling at Madison Square Garden, raising the rafters for Rey Mysterio. Smudged imprints of tiny hands in green and mauve paint. Snow globes. Two Leaving Certs. A papoose.
Biscuit boxes of unsorted photographs, and, even older, slides.
Hold them up to the light, one by one.
Here’s the past.
My grandfather on Christmas night.
My mother in Lourdes.
My sister on the day she was born.
A little curly-haired boy – one of my sons – by a Christmas tree with his daddy. On the table, a toy castle delivered only this morning but already they’ve started to build it. Santa brought it in through the wardrobe.
But no.
Wait a minute.
The child isn’t my son.
He is me, 50 years ago.
What a thought.
If I could speak to that 10-year-old, what would I say?
Eff and bee the darkness. It won’t mind. It’s the darkness. It knows being cursed is what it’s for
When Irish people converse of Christmas and ask how it was for you this year, the answer must always be “quiet”. That is a stipulation of Bunreacht na hÉireann. No other response is permitted. Guns N’ Roses might have dropped into your house for the turkey. You shared a cracker with Axl. It was quiet. Perhaps the parish priest can-canned up the aisle in scant frillies to midnight Mass. Again, it was “quiet” this Christmas. What may be added is limited to “It goes on too long” or, if you must, “It starts too early”, or “There’s nothing on telly I’d be bothered with, to be honest.” But a plain “quiet” is best and will be appreciated.
Some years, there will be losses, great sadnesses, bereavements. There will also be uncountable kindnesses. Even silences can be kind. Often, kinder than words. Words need to mean something, but silences don’t. Silence is a music. Like rain.
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There will be days when you want to get into the wardrobe and stay there. Some of them will even be Christmases. They’ll pass.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds but not all wounds need to be healed.
You will often be told that it is better to light one candle than it is to curse the darkness. But let’s not lose the run of ourselves entirely. It is vital that the darkness be cursed just as often as you can summon up the strength. Curse it repeatedly, sincerely, lavishly. Let rip on the darkness. Blow down its walls. In blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllables if that turns out to be your thing, in demure damns and durns if it isn’t. Eff and bee the darkness. It won’t mind. It’s the darkness. It knows being cursed is what it’s for. Let the asterisks expurgating your curses be the seven stars of Christmas night.
F**k the d*****ss.
It isn’t worth naming.
For if Christmas has a seam of holiness, which for many it always will, all over a world that is broken and warring, it is in gazing out on the bleak midwinter and telling the darkness to be gone. And knowing it will be gone. Morning comes.
A story about a star and the radiance from a cradle, in a shed or a cave, a place of beasts and their dung, where the wise bowed low as the animals chewed and the angels sang love songs to the immensity. There’s a reason that tree has lights.
The things you don’t like doing, do one of them at Christmas. Suffer a fool gladly. It won’t kill you.
Light one candle.
Eat too much.
On Stephen’s Day, walk it off.
A peaceful Christmas.
Curse the darkness.
Love the wardrobe.
Joseph O’Connor’s novel My Father’s House is published by Vintage. It was named a Washington Post Best Book of the Year
