"SURE, you're less than two hours away," my mum tells me at the entrance to the Port of Dun Laoghaire. I stand against the driver's door of my two-month-old silver Ford Ka under a blanket of pewter sky, tears tripping me.
"You're just across the water and you can always come back whenever you want." She hugs me in a matter-of-fact sort of way to keep her own tears at bay and reminds me what a great opportunity it is.
I only meant to leave for a short while. I was offered a three-year, fixed-term post at Bangor University in north Wales to set up the Spanish section of the Modern Languages Department. That was 1999 and, while I've always returned home to Belfast every few months (pre- and post-Covid), I never went back to live there.
It came down to time and circumstance – both played their part as new opportunities arose; and in the blink of an eye, I'd lived almost half my life in Wales. Swansea, in south Wales, has been my Welsh home for 17 years – the place where my son was born, where I work, where I have made the most special friendships.
But Belfast always was, and still is, 'home'. Or rather, I should say 'HOME': it's the city that beats inside me through the voices, stories and memories of family and community.
It's the place where my maternal grandparents were my first storytellers – performers in their own right with wild imagination sparked by the everyday (my grandmother) and travels at sea (my grandfather); it's where I swung around a lamppost outside my grandparents' house in a narrow, terraced street in north Belfast on a frayed, greasy rope that had been sat on too many times before.
We played Kribbie outside our own house three streets away, had our own version of hide and seek that involved hiding under cars, and played Queenio with a tennis ball until the Saturday Elvis matinee came on.
And all the while, our house, that of my grandparents, and the homes of aunts and uncles who lived just minutes away, pulsed with the comings and goings of family and friends, not so friendly gossiping neighbours, and boys hedging their bets on whether they'd pass as boyfriend material.
There were times when we had to clear the streets, when army tanks rolled in and soldiers armed with guns jumped into front gardens and disappeared within cloudy swells of ash and smoke. There were days when windows were blown in by explosions; nights when bin lids rattled and woke us up, even when we had school the next day.
It was then, huddled together making brown sauce sandwiches in the scullery, or hunkered down under one of my grandmother's faux fur coats in the living room, or tucked up in bed, that most of the stories came: tales of snow queens and mermaids, of running away with a soldier or finding a bucket of treasure in the yard.
Perhaps being physically distanced from home makes those memories seem more alive; or maybe it comes down to a compulsion to share those recollections with my son as a way to reassert who I am, what I am.
When I began to write The Sandstone City, I knew from the outset that the novel would partly be based in Belfast. And although it begins in 2007 in a contemporary re-creation of the city, I wanted the story to move across different moments in Belfast's history, if only fleetingly.
Who would tell the story of an 88-year-old dead man, Michael Doherty, and his relationship with Spain, the extent of his loss and grief and his re-invention of the self as a protective and coping mechanism? How would his granddaughter, Sarah, herself scarred by the Sandstone City of the title, deal with her own trauma and uncover her grandfather's history?
As I began to write the first draft of the story, an array of those working-class voices I'd grown up with filtered into the narrative – my own fictional versions in the form of Tank, Mary, Annie.
None spoke to me as Michael did, chanting in my head about this and that, crying out to be permitted to breathe on the page, as a dead man. That's how he earned his place in the novel, a spokesperson for himself as the working-class, Spanish Civil War volunteer, reaching out from beyond the grave. I loved every second I spent writing to him; I really did feel like I was just across the water then, even in the darkest moments of Covid.
When I return home now, Belfast feels a little different, and rightly so. Both my maternal grandparents have passed away and their house no longer beats with life and love. There are more cars, fancy ones, in the narrow, terraced streets of north Belfast I once played in, and front gardens have been upgraded with posh patio slabs, planters and the odd home bar.
The city centre, too, has had a facelift, with high end designer shops flaunting themselves in Victoria Square, and new bars sweeping through the Cathedral Quarter where older pubs, like The Duke of York, still nestle.
But the rest, all the rest, remains the same – and that's enough to make you feel like you never left.
:: The Sandstone City by Elaine Canning is published by Aderyn Press and is out now.
