Then there’s my Grace Kelly connection – as it is, I’m still hanging out inside that dream. She might have been miscast initially as Gracie Fields, but I knew it was her, and I knew that long-gone church hall not too far from where I was born. Half of dead Hollywood was there sat around the dusty chairs and tables. And young too. James Stewart in particular. I read yesterday in the Irish Independent about his sealed service history. How he changed, pre to post war. How after, he began playing harder edged rolls, rather than the soft fools he’d made his name with. 

​

It’s not that long since I watched Rear Window. I was trying to introduce the kids to the idea of the McGuffin, but like them, soon enough, was too lost in the plot. 

​

The thing that got them the most, alongside spotting Hitchcock, was the murderer’s cigarette burning in the dark apartment opposite. You know it’s supposed to be empty. Then (as it’s inhaled) you see the tip glow bright out of nowhere. Suspended in mid-air. You can imagine the rest. It killed them. 

In the article, there were others mentioned as well as never coming back. Not as they were. Not as they went. I forget their names, but it said they all left something of themselves out there. James Stewart’s biographer was quoted as saying it might have been Dresden where whatever happened, happened. Of course, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the general essence. 

​

And then, there they were, in my dream only minutes ago, a lifetime later, so far back I watched it on the ancient Rediffusion we had on the avenue we left when I was eight I barely remember. 

​

My dad knew all the film stars by association because he’d worked at Newport House Hotel when Grace Kelly stayed there when she came looking for her Mayo roots. He had to explain who she was. How she became a princess. I took it onboard. He was away a lot then. London. Scotland. Or worked late. And didn’t talk much. Not about his past. About who he was. So I took what I could and it stuck. 

​

I used to watch those black and white films they showed on holiday afternoons (when there was nothing else left and it was raining outside and it was a choice between that and the test-card) half-expecting him to turn up in the background. He could have the moody-broodiness about him of a stand-out bit-part player who under-acts. Who gets shot first and carried off. Tries to carry on from the sidelines. I can see it now, though, working it out, as I am, as it is right now, as the storm’s disappeared behind my thoughts, the landscape dark, no more than a guide to an outline, I suppose it would be about then – when Grace Kelly was over – that was the last time he went home. Really home. When they still had a place. It won’t have been long after his parents died. Ten days apart. January 1961. And what was my father? Twenty-one? 

From the few snippets I’ve pieced together, it was his sisters – my aunts – who were the last ones there. They must have gone back from London to hand the keys onto whoever. There’s no one available to confirm or deny this. They’re either dead or can’t remember. But before they left for the very last time, legend has it, not knowing what to do with my father’s childhood marbles he’d left at home when he first came to Manchester at eighteen, they buried them behind the house – they couldn’t just throw them out or give them away. 

​

Sometimes, I go past when I’m over in summer. I always drive that way to Westport Quay, round to the coast road and on to Old Head or Silver Strand, rather than taking the sign-posted route that bypasses the place. 

I’ve never been in. Like the grandparents I never knew, it was gone twelve years before I arrived. I’ve never hung my coat behind the door. Never put turf on the fire. 

​

Of us twelve grandchildren – cousins spread out now across England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland – only two arrived soon enough to go inside and the oldest of them was only four the last time he was there. 

He does have brief and definite vague memories – a black range burning; the sound of birds opposite before the hotel was built. He remembers my grandfather digging in the back, saying ‘If you want to catch a blackbird put salt on its tail’. Nothing else. But if we say ‘the house’ we know where we mean. 

​

I always arch my neck at the nondescript place I’d know anywhere. And I remember there’s something of my father buried there. Maybe everything of who he was. Hidden. Kept underground. The way he always kept everything close to his heart. 

​

We take the house with us everywhere. That something we can’t talk about that’s left us changed. That somewhere we can’t go anymore but spend nights roaming. A heartbreak that turned us from child to adult. And who knows what it is takes us back there? The drift of a passing perfume taking our breath away? A song that leaves a taste in our throat we can’t put into words? And when asked what that sudden glazed look in our eyes is – with a vague smile, a shake of the head – we deny it’s anything. Laugh it off. Move on as best we can to somewhere safe where it’s easy to reinvent ourselves missing out that backstory; a place, no doubt in turn, we’ll leave some more of ourselves behind in as well, forever. 

​

That’s what we see when we’re looking at a dark window at the back of a house, woken by a noiseless storm that’s always been brewing, that everyone else sleeps through no trouble. The light shining in from the hall, through a door left open, leaves us one and one with our reflections. So we tell another story to ourselves – more palatable, barely audible – to take our mind off things as we drift between dreams, squint a little, seeing if there’s anything out there as we catch a bright glow appearing out of nowhere from a past we can’t imagine or explain, let alone live over, though it’s all we live; something that stops us from being the soft fools we’re afraid we always are, still burning inside, suspended in our strange empty dark.