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I can’t remember when the image began to fade. How could I? I was only two and a half for God’s sake, and time has danced on memory’s fragments.

My mammy is carrying God’s gift, a tight white pupa of swaddling clothes across her breast. I can see that right now. That bit is always there. She’s walking towards us, never getting closer, too far away to smile. Sometimes she is away up beside the green gaslamp, and sometimes she has almost reached the first house on our side, the McGoogans.

She’d hardly have been wearing one of her scarves that day; more likely was her proud thicket of auburn catching the August morning’s sun (and kept catching it for years later through my frequent races round to the chemist’s shop for an Auburn Tonerinse). That piece is missing. But I can remember her slenderness and height and poise; her back would still have been straight then.

That’s my daddy behind me on the steps. And that’s me under his belly, one hand on the doorframe to lean my head into the street. Sometimes it’s three and sometimes it’s four of us, but at least one of my two older sisters was there. They are all behind me you see, so I can’t see them. But I can see they are there. We are all leaning into the street, looking up. Sean was coming. That’s him in my mammy’s arms. Getting closer. Never getting closer. McGoogan’s. The lamppost. Halfway in between. Fragments rearranging.

It’s hard now to see how big and open it all was when the wasteground was there. Wasteground – that was its name. You have to say it fast, joined up. It’s just one word, wasteground, not waste ground. She is coming down our side of Eglinton Street between the big blocks of red brick flats. I have to work hard to remove the flats they built there. They weren’t there yet. They shouldn’t be there. The flats weren’t there. I try not to see them; I try to see the wasteground where we played for years. But it’s hard.

And the green gas lampposts with their arms pointing up and down the streets – there was hardly a moment when some urchin wasn’t swinging from a frayed piece of salvaged rope in quickening spirals around them, the whole thing leaning to follow the game like an old man too stiff and tired to play anymore. The lampposts dug their own graves in increasing circles, often in the sickening stench of escaping gas. Why is this not there?

It’s like a picture you see. Like a picture where things change. Never lying, just changing. But it’s definitely Sean there in my mammy’s arms. Getting closer. Never getting closer. Never making a sound. Mammy’s hard heels silent on the concrete paving. Here comes mammy! - one of us must have blurted it. But no one is saying it. No thump from a swinging child against the solid post, nor clunk of straining metal against kerbstone. There’s no time for sound; it’s all just a blink. A broken blink. Silent and still.

It can’t have been the Christening, that’s a family thing; we would all have been there. Mammy must have been on her way home from the Mater Hospital some days after birth’s pains had eased. That was a woman’s thing; so now it was time to go home and there she was walking down our street on her own with the new baby.

She is walking close to the new wall with its parallel layers of red brick, the wall around the flats. But the wall wasn’t there yet. The flats weren’t there yet. Where is the flatness of the wasteground where we stole mammy’s yard brush to push twisting train tracks through the granite beads and raise the summer’s dust in choking clouds?

When I try hard, I can still see how the dust would build invisible layers over the pavements and lie in wait to catch the first overgrown droplet which threatened a summer storm, signalling capture by a creeping inkblot of damp as dark as the sky that sent it. Those first raindrops would throw the warm dust up into a thick miasma that bit at awakening nostrils. In my mind’s eye, why is the first echo benign, odourless, clean?

You can see photographs of our street in Bombs on Belfast. You can see the homes blown to bits, crumpled by errant German bombers, and the hard hatted help scratching through the detritus with no more for tools than the strength of bare hands. But another photograph shows that ample hands cleared it to perfect flatness except for one curiously lumpy knee-high rock that protruded to add a surreal adornment to one corner of the wasteground. The focus of many a head-scratching, ice-cream-licking moment turned out eventually to be nothing more than an excess of concrete dumped for want of further use; it seemed that it didn’t go the whole way through to Australia after all.

There’s my mammy and Sean just across the street from our rock. But I can’t look over to see it. It’s not part of the picture. And there’s us leaning out from the steps to see them coming. That's me under my daddy's belly with one hand on the doorframe and the other supported on the gloss painted render covering the front wall. But it wasn’t rendered yet. Why can’t I see the hoary wash of age bleached into the flaking brickwork and crumbling mortar?

I can see mammy getting closer. Never getting closer. She’s at the gas lamppost. McGoogan’s. Halfway between. Fragments.