Agnes, our first born and that threshold in our lives which brought with it all those demands and responsibilities which pushed myself and Mairead into our older selves, our very own need-bearer whose presence in the world was promised in that blue line and confirmed nine months later when she clocked in shortly before noon, tipping the scales at seven pounds four ounces, slightly jaundiced but otherwise fine with fingers and toes all present and correct, latched onto her mother’s breast within forty minutes of seeing the light of day and who was fully authorised a couple of days later by her birth certificate which
I saw drawn up before my eyes in a little office down the hall from the maternity ward of the county hospital, a single-page document which told me that now my child was completely realised and that
the seal had been set on her identity as an Irish citizen, who, although less than four days old, was nevertheless the point of all the massive overarching state apparatus within which she could live out her life as a free and self-determining individual, the protective structure of a democracy which she in turn would uphold as a voter, a consumer, a patient, a student, a banking customer, a taxpayer and so on while gathering to herself all those ID cards and certificates that would enable her draw down all the benefits of being born a free child of a republic, accessing education and medicine and bank accounts and library books, all of these rights devolving from
her birth certificate, the source document, which was drawn up for her in a small office at the end of the hall, the cramped space shelved to the roof with files and records and lit by a single fluorescent strip which cast down a hard light on the head of the smiling lady with large arms who took down my details and Mairead’s details and then entered them carefully in a newly opened file before she went to a cupboard and took out a blank certificate which we both signed before she entered some final details on it and then, reading it through one last time to ensure it was complete to her satisfaction, took a stamp and pressed the state seal onto it before handing it to me with a smile, where I, affected with a deep sense of occasion, found myself reaching out to shake her hand because this surely was how the moment should be marked and
ten minutes later, sitting in the car with Mairead in the back and Agnes in her arms, I continued to stare at this document
the document scarcely less miraculous than the child in the way
it fixed her within a political structure which undertook to spend a percentage of its GDP on her health and her education and her defence among other things and over twenty years later I can still feel something of that mysterious pride which swept through me as I sat there behind the steering wheel, the uncanny feeling that my child was elevated into something above being my daughter or my own flesh and blood – there was a metaphysical reality to her now – she had stepped into that political index which held a space for her in the state’s mindfulness, a place that was hers alone and could not be occupied by anyone else nor infringed on in any way which might blur her identity or smudge her destiny, this document which did not tag or enumerate her but freed her into her own political space, our citizen daughter who
are we ever going to leave this car park or are you going to sit all day gawping at that certificate
Mairead called from the back seat and
of course all these high ideas passed into oblivion very quickly or, more accurately, were swept away in the messy flesh and blood circumstance of having a child in our lives, the whole drama of night feeds and nappy changes, the terrors of vaccinations and all those developmental markers which infants have to hit, my heart in my mouth every time the district nurse pulled up outside the house and all that was, hard to believe
the last millennium
ancient history
and of course
none of it on my mind twenty-two years later, the first week of March, when Mairead and I attended the opening of Agnes’s first solo exhibition in the Dominic St Gallery in Galway, that exhibition which was her prize for having graduated top of her class in paint two years previously, a gifted artist Mairead assured me whose work in oil had been praised by her tutors as
a sustained attempt to marry the vatic gaze of a hallowed tradition with a technique which strove to find some way out of the redundancy it was so often accused of in a world awash with electronic imagery
or so Mairead told me, as we drove along
recalling the essential feedback points Agnes had received for the degree show which had secured this exhibition while Mairead stressed for me also that this was an important occasion for Agnes not just because it was her first solo show but because it was her first new work since her graduation and as such it would be interesting to see how her themes and technique had progressed in that period of independent experiment, what new paths she had explored and at this point something in me should have been alert to the note of warning in her voice but I ignored it as a coded appeal that I should make a special effort on Agnes’s behalf tonight, that I should be especially convivial or at least shed some of my social awkwardness to do her proud and be supportive but, of course, neither of us should have worried on her account because when we walked into the gallery I saw immediately that this was that occasion when
Agnes was never so essentially herself or so self-contained as she was that evening, and that this was yet another of those times when I’ve looked at her and thought that had Mairead and myself never come together as husband and wife Agnes would still have contrived to exist and be exactly who she was in some other way because she did not appear contingent on anything or anyone and while we might be her parents she was essentially irreducible in the way she was completely at one with herself when I walked into the gallery and saw how, among a fashionable crowd of well-wishers and friends, she still managed to stand alone in the middle of the room with a composite air of being both jilted and the belle-of-the-ball at one and the same time, standing there in the centre of the gallery, hovering above the ground in a black shift, her whole being as Darragh would clarify for me later, an amalgam of witness and pale accuser, exemplary sufferer and Cruella de Vil, a fully achieved study in western gothic, commanding her space with such an impressive aura of quiet disdain that for a moment I was cautious of approaching her for fear of shattering something essential in the exhibition itself, a hesitancy Mairead did not share as she strode across the floor towards her and stood off her at arm’s length for a moment before they moved fully into each other’s embrace from which Agnes eventually unwrapped herself to welcome and kiss me and draw me into the circle of her friends and well-wishers, men and women in their early twenties, all the young women called Emma or Emily, and all the lads Naoise or Oisin or something like that and of course it took me a while to get my bearings as I found myself caught up in a blur of handshakes and introductions with various snatches of conversation and observations whizzing by which acknowledged, among other things, that
yes, it was an important night and
no, we were only up for the night and
yes, I was proud of her and
no, not too bad, we missed the worst of it and
so on and
so forth
till someone handed me a glass of red wine and I took it with the hope that it might grow in my hand to the size of something I might hide behind while I could see already that Mairead was enjoying herself immensely, moving easily among Agnes’s friends, picking up the mood of the evening without having to adjust anything in herself so I took this opportunity to take a step back, literally, to find myself on the edge of the gathering where it was less crowded and a relief to have space and time in which to gather myself before moving away to
