Best European Fiction 2013

[SWITZERLAND] BERNARD COMMENT A Son

“Orange juice.” The label in red letters on a white placard seemed decisive, rather too much so for this mixture of concentrate and water. That’s the most deplorable thing about chain and low-scale hotels: breakfast, this simulacrum of luxury divested of any attention for the guest. A flabby croissant, a jar of marmalade, two strips of cheese under plastic, an apple that’s too green and too smooth, sometimes some grapes out of season, looking Botoxed, with thick, flavorless skins, and coffee, there’s a coffee machine, we always have a slightly stupid look before a clipped conversation, especially in the morning when we haven’t slept well.

The notary public saw me first, it’s not charming at all, but you’re close to it all, to the cemetery, to the house, if you took a room that looked out on the courtyard, it wouldn’t be too noisy, the Périphérique is still far away, and in this weather the windows stay shut, he sniggered. It’s been raining for about an hour, with a low sky, everything is gloomy. The ceremony takes place at ten. I would have liked to get an umbrella at the reception desk, the lady looked confused, no, monsieur, we don’t have those, she might as well have said, this isn’t a palace, you’ll have to take care of yourself here, go on and find a store that sells those, I went out into the drizzle, going down side streets whenever I could. When I came to the cemetery entrance, it was early, too early.

I crossed the paths between the graves, thinking about going out the other exit, in this long narrow rectangle between the lanes of the Périphérique and the boulevards des Maréchaux, but the second door, black and solid iron, was shut, I had to retrace my steps and then go around the surrounding wall almost to the Châtillon gate where I finally found some newspapers. I couldn’t start the day without having read the paper, the sports scores, the major political events, that night’s TV shows, like a promise against boredom, but I told myself right away that this wouldn’t be smart, to show up at a father’s funeral with a newspaper in my pocket. I scanned the headlines, the general information predating what I’d heard on the radio this morning, the sports pages were boring, I discreetly threw the folded-up paper in a trash receptacle, one of those green plastic bags fluttering in the wind. I only had to wait ten minutes, we were meeting at the entrance, I hadn’t had any desire to be present for the closing of the coffin, in any case I would be alone, for whatever might happen.

In 1998 he decided to come live here, for the convenience of a ground-floor apartment, the notary public said, he lived entirely on the ground floor, the upper floors were only useful for storing things, this house was a nice setup, and he joked about no longer being in the center of Paris, but he didn’t go there much anymore, the attached garage was how he made his decision, you’ll get a great price for it, the market’s up again, the neighborhood to the south’s getting trendy, there’s a few celebrities in the area. I replied that we were going to bury my father, and as for the rest, we would see to it later, this was without question the first time I’d used the phrase “my father” out loud. The notary public understood, but he kept talking, the layout was simple, everything was ready for us, no possible contestation, there wasn’t anybody left in his family, you’re the last and sole representative. I thought that my mother must have been the last, at the time, she had been the last since her childhood, an orphan at three years old, malnourished, anemic, and graceful, with a fragile beauty, terribly fragile, but he was the one who would know.

The hearse started up, an elegant Mercedes, the red and black gate rose, I followed on foot, the burial plot wasn’t too far to the right. When the notary public came, I had to greet him, we were the only ones there aside from the two funeral home employees, but also because he had a face that matched his voice, and a raincoat on, I told myself. We could have asked for a priest, or an old friend, surgeons always had stories to tell, they thought of themselves as saviors, playing with the line between life and death, but it seems that he hadn’t been in touch with anyone for three or four years, was completely isolated, even from myself, he had stopped sending these pathetic letters that arrived more or less frequently for all five years, the memories, the regrets, how he had loved my mother, and how that love had been stronger than he had been, I remember that about him, he couldn’t sustain it anymore, I had every reason to bear a grudge against him, but he would have loved to see me again, to know more about me, about my studies, about my life now, the last letter must have come in 2002, with forceful handwriting that had pressed down on the paper with a Bic pen, like a prescription, contrary to what somebody might have said to me he didn’t really know the risks, or the seriousness of the risks, she wanted a baby at any cost, only motherhood would give structure to her life, jobs in healthcare were rarely careers, no matter what people claimed, it was just a way to earn some money, or to ward off one’s fears, but for her, it was a full commitment, such determination that life gave her, what destinies followed, he put together sentences like that, an exceptional midwife, who wanted to have that same experience, he doubted that any other baby in the world had been more wanted than I was, this lachrymosity disgusted me, and then, for five years, silence, no more news, not one letter. It’s true that with Carole and her children we had moved abroad in 2003 without any forwarding instructions for the mailman. But I doubt that he wrote. I’m sure he let it pass.

The notary public walked with me to the cemetery exit, he was parked nearby, and when he went his way he told me, you’ve seen that the burial plot is set aside for two people, your father insisted it be like that, I don’t know what your intentions are, and this isn’t the time, but for what it’s worth, the fee’s been paid for a very long time, you know your father, he liked to plan for the long term, not to have to depend on anybody else. I replied curtly that no, I didn’t know my father. I didn’t have any memories of the first four years. Or they were hazy.

I came back to the boulevard Brune, inexplicably calm at this late hour in the morning, in the middle of the week. A tram passed, almost silently, then a few cars, going slow. I walked nonchalantly, aimlessly, in the emptiness of the hours to come. A new tram came toward me, it gave out a little chime. A strange chime, in juxtaposition with the machine’s modernity. It reminded me of the milkman’s van, elsewhere, at my aunt’s, in Switzerland, she who I called my aunt, anyway, by some strange convention, she’s been dead for several years, by a lake, I believe that she was happy at the end of her life, alone, sipping aperitifs and watching television or putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, she wrote me every week, I went to see her three or four times a year, then my kids were born, we moved away from Europe, didn’t get back in touch when we returned, after so much time it would have been too difficult, I learned about her death from a neighbor to whom she always spoke highly of me and my family, her words filled with pride. I took the milk can and went down the stairs whenever the piercing chimes pealed far off so I wouldn’t miss the truck, and I loved the noise of the ladle that brought up milk from the huge boille, that’s the word we used there, the boille, there was a steel footboard at the back of the truck so kids could get up enough to see over the counter, we tipped him, then we put the other coins in our pockets, a secret we all shared, it was a little bit of money for candy, sometimes lollipops, usually chewing gum.

The small Hungarian cemetery was unusually beautiful the day I went, I had just turned eighteen and gotten my driver’s license, it was nearly the end of spring, my aunt had given me access to my bank account, enough in there to keep up my studies, long years of studies according to my father’s instructions, I had taken a bit out for this short trip. There were trees everywhere in there, the forest was beyond, a big forest of slender, leafy trees swaying in the wind, like a sonata of souls. Right below my mother’s name were the two dates, 1953 and 1978, in a big square where other members of my family lay side by side: her parents born in 1934 and 1935, died in 1956; uncles, aunts, grandparents on my father’s side. I thought that I would have liked to be buried there as well, one day, near the one I’d cost so dearly, and with all these people I’d never known, but later, several years ago, with Carole, we discovered the Tadoussac cemetery, close to where we lived, on the left bank of Saint-Laurent, and there as well I thought it would be nice, or peaceful, to spend my afterlife there, with small steles covered in red tiles, as if that mattered in the least. But here at Montrouge, in this tangled earth between rent-controlled apartments and the Périphérique? No, thank you.

The notary public insisted that I had to have the keys to the house, he had a copy just in case. I had to at least stop by, get some idea of the place. The keychain was weighted with an iron ball, which sagged in my vest pocket. I ordered some skate with capers, the pub was nearly empty, a few old women also alone at their tables, or a few possibly illicit couples kissing over their wine glasses, and businessmen, all part of an old world that still exists. My mother couldn’t swallow the smallest bite of meat, it seemed. Those were the only kinds of memories I’d retained. Or, well, not memories, but rather information, picked up here and there. The letters I received didn’t include any concrete details. Once, shortly after my wedding, he sent me a few pictures, including one of my mother, with long black hair, a few gray streaks already, at least this was a problem with the picture, a long and very thin nose, a large mouth with thin lips, she wore a red-and-green-and-yellow-checkered dress, the colors were a bit dated, it was a Polaroid, her shoulders were thin, bony, the bags under her eyes betrayed her sadness, but her body was lively, there was a clear strength, maybe even some happiness, something hidden but joyous, I like this picture that I’ve moved each year into yet another daily planner, maybe this is the reason I don’t want a tablet computer, not even the iPad that Carole pressed on me just before this trip, she had downloaded two or three movies to kill time, and pictures of our kids, from our last vacation, it’s clear we’re happy, tranquil days in store.

He must have known the risks that she was incurring, she’d consulted him because he had a good reputation, he was well-known, a very big deal, in a slightly different field, but he inspired confidence, people talked about him, attributed miracles to him, so she did everything she could to arrange a meeting, and that’s how they met, because she worked in a different department in a different building, there was barely any chance, if any at all, that their paths would cross by accident. He would have to wait months until a decisive meeting. Her overwhelming desire for a child must have touched him, or unexpectedly awakened a similar desire in him, one of those groundless desires that spontaneously appears and stubbornly develops into reality, come hell or high water, her fragility, his age, fifty-three years old, and soon came the wedding, a small ceremony, few friends, mostly colleagues, this mix of professors and nurses that almost seemed like a cliché. A few months later, she became pregnant. Her gift, her fate. I don’t really know how he got by during the three or four years he had me with him, when I was with him, when we were together, nannies I suppose, or babysitters, a few of whom probably ended up in his bed, my aunt always said he was a seductive man, people didn’t say no to him, the surgeon’s charm, both financial and metaphysical, I didn’t understand that word when I was a child and a teenager, I’m not sure I understand it today, it’s a word that inspires a little bit of fear.

As I left the pub, it wasn’t raining anymore, but the clouds were still heavy, very heavy, and a faint fog loomed. I debated about taking the avenue Jean-Moulin, and finally decided on the noisy and chaotic avenue de Général-Leclerc, they said the liberation had come from the south, but the disembarkation happened in the west, even the northwest of Paris, I was lost among my reflections when suddenly I found myself struck by a new calmness. There wasn’t any more traffic around me, men were stopped, seized by fear, and there was nothing but the emergency lights of two ambulances facing each other and two fire trucks across the street. I saw first a motorcycle frame that was still smoking under the fire-fighting foam that glazed it with a drab gray, then the raised stretcher that two firemen were carrying to their truck, without any IVs or other signs that the victim would live. They had just left the scene, clearly, and put aside the body wrapped in a silvery cloth and covered again with a sheet over its legs. Everything was quiet, the nurses had a haggard look in the cold, one of them grimaced, the police took action, assessed the scene around the car that had struck him, and suddenly I felt death, the brutal and sudden weight of death, with sadness, despondency, and some kind of compassion, a deep compassion for this man that they had slid into the back of a fire truck and who was probably my age and had children as well and a stupid move, the wrong decision, a pointless attempt, an accident, bang, it was all over in minutes. I was afraid, standing there on the sidewalk. Afraid to walk, afraid to cross streets, afraid of the noises that returned little by little as I approached the Périphérique. I had wanted to buy a little something for the kids and for Carole, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for something like that, I couldn’t think about anything other than the accident, or that femme fatale named Fate, or that woman who was perhaps getting a phone call right now that would bring about the collapse of her life, of the work she had dedicated so much of her life to. I was almost ready to cry, but it was cold, a cold wind came, followed by rain that was turning to snow, just as they had said this morning in the weather report.

I called Carole on my cell phone, it did me good to hear her voice, our kids in the background, I heard their laughter, their screams, I didn’t really know what to say. I talked about the funeral, about my unease there, the house, she said let it go, don’t worry about the past, it’s okay to give it up, I know it, you can say no, after all you’ve certainly got the right, he’s not going to be bothered, your father, you don’t owe him anything, we don’t need his shit, I was surprised to hear her using that word, not because of the word itself, but because it meant she was annoyed, or even outraged, she who was always so calm, so gracious around people, I told her I would call in the evening, because I needed to lie down now, I hadn’t slept well the night before.

When I walked out of another, lighter drizzle into the hotel, there was a message from the notary public for me to call him back. His secretary told me that he was busy, that she would leave him a note because she had to leave early today to take care of her son. I turned on the television, without paying any attention, I switched from one channel to the next. I almost dozed off, and when the phone rang, when I answered, I could tell from his voice that the notary public was embarrassed, that he didn’t know how to tell me, it’s a secret, there wouldn’t be any red tape, the rooms have never been listed and as such no one else could have any legal claim on them, and anyway none of that changes anything, nobody has any idea, but after all, I thought that I should let you know, you seemed so distant this morning, so closed-off, but listen, your father ran some tests, I don’t know exactly when or why, you were very little, it was when you were still living with him, and these tests, how should I put this, these tests completely changed things, I think he wasn’t able to handle it, it was impossible, you know, in any case, he couldn’t handle it at all, you weren’t there for no reason, of course, but he named you as his heir, his sole heir, as you know, that makes you a pretty rich man, believe me, and so I thought it was important that you knew, now you can do what you want, it’s none of my business anymore. I hung up the phone carefully.

The skate isn’t enough to hold me over. I’m hungry, but it’s too early for dinner. I’ll sleep a bit first, in the darkness of the room, with the tune of rainfall against the window.

[UNITED KINGDOM: WALES] RAY FRENCH Migration

We’re standing on the banks of the Humber river, my father and I, the two of us enjoying the sun, the pleasant breeze. This is a rare outing for him. His loss of memory, a gradual loosening of his grip on the world, making him increasingly reluctant to leave home, where he’s surrounded by things that are familiar, that can be named. But, today, he is coping well with the unfamiliarity all around him, remarkably well in fact. Who knows when there’ll be another day like this—I’m determined we make the most of it.

To our right is the Humber Bridge. He gazes at it admiringly and says, “That must have taken some work, boy.”

The cue to take my notebook from my pocket, flip to the page where I’d scrawled some notes while reading the display about the bridge at the Information Centre. He likes facts, cherishing their lack of ambiguity—clear and solid signposts in a shape-shifting world.

“It took 480,000 tonnes of concrete and 11,000 tonnes of steel wire to build it,” I tell him. When I glance up at him he’s alert, focused; nothing grabs his attention like detailed information about construction. He worked as a labourer all his life, this is his currency, these are things that still bring him satisfaction.

“That’s enough wire,” I continue, “to stretch one and a half times across the world.”

“Fecking hell!”

I knew he’d love that one. He shakes his head and looks back at the bridge.

“That took some work alright.”

It’s good to see him re-engage with the world. There should be more days like this.

“When the winds reach eighty miles an hour,” I say, encouraged by his reaction, “the bridge bends by up to three meters in the middle. That’s close to ten feet—amazing, isn’t it?”

Bad idea. His face grows taut, worried, a nerve begins to jump under his eye. This drags him back to some dark and threatening place.

“Nature is fierce, boy. It doesn’t matter how hard he tries, man will never beat it.” He shakes his head emphatically, “Never.”

I wonder if he’s remembering the pitch and roll of the British navy destroyer on which he served in the Second World War. It must have been a terrifying experience, toiling away as a stoker in the bowels of the ship, knowing that if it went down, he would go down with it.

He looks at the bridge again and says, “I wouldn’t want to be on that on a windy day.”

“You’d be safe,” I say gently, “you wouldn’t actually feel the bridge moving.”

He looks doubtful. When I was young he was brave to the point of recklessness, burning with manic energy, refusing to ever compromise.

I’ll fecking show the lot of ’em.

In fact, while we’re on the subject of bridges, he once got into a scuffle with a Military Policeman while crossing one in Berlin shortly after the war—it ended when my father threw him into the Spree. Oh yes, he was a tough character back then, well able to stand up for himself. But, as he grew older, something lurking inside that he’d kept at bay for so long by sheer willpower, some dark and twisted thing, grew stronger, began to corrode his spirit.

No more talk about bridges bending in high winds, I change the subject.

“Did you know there used to be brickyards all along here?” There’s little evidence of that now, instead a thick band of reeds, standing pale gold in the sun, then mud, beyond that the brown, churning Humber. I make a sweeping gesture with my arm, encompassing the bank from the bridge right up to where we’re standing.

“At one time there were thirteen firms along here making bricks and tiles. In the mid 1930s they were making over a million bricks a year.”

“Is that so? Hard work too, I’ll bet.”

Dad’s expression lightens; he liked hard work, knows what it means. I could have taken him to one of the museums in Hull, but they would never have held his interest. He looks around, picturing this as a place bustling with activity—people digging clay, shaping it into bricks in wooden moulds and stacking them to dry, others firing the kilns. I tell him about Blythe’s Tile Yard, nearer the bridge, about ten minutes walk from where we’re standing, which has been reopened and makes bricks and tiles using the old methods, without using toxic chemicals. From there you can, if you look hard enough, make out the marks where the train lines once ran just below the Humber bank. Further along are the remains of the posts which held up the jetties once dotted along this stretch of the Humber, the river filled with sloops and keels collecting cargoes of bricks, tiles, and rope. It must have been a stirring sight—the Humber was one of the last places in the country you could see working boats under sail. These days Hull is just another desolate northern town, its streets crammed with drunks every weekend.

“Shall we walk down that way a bit?” I ask him.

“Aye, we will—come on.”

Though slow, he’s steady on his feet today. So different to how he is at home, a pale, bent, shuffling figure, head down, arms wavering, as he makes his way painstakingly across the room. Here he’s alert to his surroundings, looking around, noticing things.

“What are those yokes?”

I explain that the broken chunks of bricks and tiles lying in the grass and reeds are the remains of the long gone industry. I pick up a jagged half-brick and hand it to him, watch him turn and examine it, run his thumb along the edge.

“You could build yourself a house out of all the bricks lying around here.”

“You could.”

He weighs it in his hand, enjoying the solidity, the connection with his working life, back when he was young and strong, before so many things frightened him.

He nods approvingly, “They knew what they were doing in those days. They built things to last.”

“They did.”

We walk on another few hundred yards, but I can see he’s beginning to tire a little now. This has been a long day for a man who rarely ventures beyond the circuit of bedroom, living room, bathroom, and kitchen.

“Shall we go back?”

“Aye, I think we will.”

At that moment the sun, obscured by clouds for the last few minutes, emerges again, and he stays where he is and he lifts his head to the sky and closes his eyes. He always loved the sun. When I was a boy he would be brown as a berry all summer from working outdoors, never burning like so many other Irish people. I follow his example and close my eyes too. There’s no sound except the water lapping, the stiff breeze, the occasional cry of a bird. You could be back in Ireland, in Cullenstown, County Wexford, right back there on the strand, on a fine spring day. I wonder if that’s where Dad is thinking of now, back at the beginning of his journey, his life before him, knowing nothing of this country, of what it is to be a husband, or a father, what it feels like to grow old and frail.

As we’re walking back to the Information Centre, I tell him that I’ll show him where I work afterwards, then we’ll get something to eat before driving back home.

“Where is it you work?” he asks sharply, as if I’ve been hiding it from him.

“The University.”

“A university?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Which one?”

“Hull.”

He stops to stare at me, wide-eyed.

“Jayzus, doesn’t that beat all. A university? You’ve done well for yourself, boy.”

I can’t help smiling. If he had any idea of the enormous expectations, the hopes he’d carried on those narrow shoulders. That he still carries, despite everything.

“What do you do there?”

“I teach.”

“A teacher. That’s grand. What is it you teach?”

“Creative Writing.”

I watch him mulling this over, but growing a little impatient now. I get fed up of repeating myself, wanting him to retain some information about my life, for it to have some meaning for him. A smile begins to form on his lips.

“Writing?”

I nod and he laughs scornfully, “You’d think they’d be able to write properly by the time they got to University. Christ, what’s the world coming to?”

I agree that it’s gone to hell in a handcart. When we start walking again, he’s still chuckling to himself, convinced I’ve pulled a fast one—what a way to make a living.

I must try to get him out more often. At home, the house is always overheated, the television on, way too loud, all day long. Sometimes, as he looks around him, I’m sure he’s wondering how he got here, sitting next to this middle-aged man he believes is probably his son, he certainly looks familiar, struggling to make conversation with him. I am careful to call him Dad often, frequently mentioning my mother, reminding him that this woman, this child that I have brought with me are my own family. What I’m trying to do, what I want, so much, is to place him in a familiar network of associations and meanings. Native Americans speak of having a map in the head, a way of knowing where one is in relationship to the land, its history, society, and all living beings. Most days now, my father has no map, all meaning draining away from his surroundings.

Yes, I really must try to get him out more often.

Back at the Information Centre I get two teas from the machine, bring them across to one of the tables. We sip our drinks looking out at a couple of swans gliding across one of the flooded clay pits. Here at Far Ings, they have created a nature reserve reclaimed from an industry based on digging up the land. In fact this visit is partly a reconnaissance mission, I had the idea of bringing my Creative Writing students here for inspiration, getting them away from the seminar room and out into the world. Unlike the quarries that I visited recently, where you could feel the poignant absence of what is no longer there, here a kind of balance has been restored. When I explain how this place came about my father is delighted. It’s a process that chimes with his belief that the land was here before us, and would survive our tenancy, still be here long after we have gone.

“If I had my way,” he says, “I’d turn every factory, every site that I’d ever worked on into a place like this. They’ve done a good job here, a damned good job.”

We sit for quite some time without the need for conversation, at ease in each other’s company.

Before we head off, we look at the display about the various birds it’s possible to see at Far Ings, and the incredible journeys that they make to reach here. The pink-footed geese coming from Arctic Russia, the swallows and sedges from South Africa, the sand martins from Chad.

“Isn’t it amazing?” says Dad, “the journeys these birds make.”

We read the panel informing us that scientists still don’t fully understand why birds migrate.

“What about you, Dad? Why did you migrate?”

I watch him thinking about this for a while, then he says, “Half the people I went to school with left too, sure there was nothing for us at home.” He starts to laugh, “A great flock of Paddies migrating, that’s what we were—thousands of the buggers descending on Britain.”

This a glimpse of his old self re-emerging—irreverent, scornful. It used to get him into trouble sometimes, when people tried to have a serious discussion about the burning issues of the day.

We look through the window, see a man below with a pair of binoculars and a camera strung around his neck.

“Bird watching, aye, there’s plenty of fellas who love it. I never did it meself. It looks a grand hobby, though, very relaxing.”

But he did do it. Sometimes I’d catch him standing utterly still and silent back in Wales, riveted by the flocks of swallows gathering on telegraph poles in September, before wheeling away in formation and heading back to Africa. Hard not to think he was envying them their return to their homeland, while he was stuck here for another year. Unlike the swallows and sedges, the sand martins and pink-footed geese, he never made it back to where he came from.

You move for work or education, for what you think are short-term goals, but before you know it you are putting off your return home for another year, then another. There is a sense of exhilaration whenever I cross the Severn Bridge to Wales and leave England behind. For a few days I feel that I finally belong somewhere—I rediscover my map in the head. So why the surge of relief when I leave again a few days later? I wonder if Dad used to feel something similar when he was departing Ireland, shrugging off myriad obligations, feeling suddenly weightless?

My father asks, “What is it you do again?”

I explain about teaching at Hull University once more.

“Where’s that?”

“Just there, across the river.”

He looks to his right, over the murky water into Yorkshire.

“Does your mother know?”

I tell him she does.

“Has she told them in Ireland?”

“She has. I’ll take you there later, to the University. I’ll show you my office.”

“You have an office?”

The wonder in his voice reminds me how when I got my degree, many years ago now, he said, “Christ, you’re made, boy, bleddy well made. You’ll never have to work outside in the rain and the cold again.”

When we’re back outside and heading for the car park I realise that I’ve left my notebook on one of the tables. I suggest that he waits in the car while I run back and get it.

“Ah no,” he says, “I think I’ll go and sit on that bench over there next to the water.”

For a moment I’m worried about leaving him outside on his own like that. But he looks so happy at the prospect that I dismiss my fears.

“Okay, Dad, alright. If that’s what you want.”

“I think I’ll do a bit of bird watching while I’m here.”

I’m not sure if this is a joke or not.

“Are you going to take it up as a hobby?”

He hesitates, looking across the water into the reeds.

“I think I will.”

He seems serious.

“I’ll get you a pair of binoculars for your birthday then, shall I?”

“Aye, just the job.”

I’ll buy us both a pair, and we’ll come back and look for bitterns and marsh harriers. We’ll stand side by side in one of the hides, I’ll bring a flask of tea, a pack of sandwiches. We’ll make a day of it. I walk over to the bench with him, watch him settle down, stretch out his legs and turn up his face to the late afternoon sun.

“You sure you’re alright?”

“I’m grand,” he replies, “go on, take as long as you want, I’m in no hurry, sure.”

As I walk back up the stairs to the Information Centre I’m humming. If he’s feeling this good then maybe we can go for a drink. Suddenly I have this desire to see him supping a pint of Guinness, a thread of the creamy head coating his lips, him gripping the glass and savouring the aftertaste.

“That’s a grand pint.”

Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We passed a pub on the way, The Sloop Inn, that looked old-fashioned, friendly, unthreatening—we’ll go there, have an early drink and get something to eat while we’re at it.

The notebook is where I left it, lying on the table, I pick it up, pop it in my bag and amble back downstairs and into the car park.

The bench is empty. Of course it is. I look around, just to be sure, but he’s nowhere to be seen. When it’s clear that he’s gone, that our brief time together is over, I feel a hole opening up inside me. For a long time I just stand there in the middle of the car park, slowly getting used to the world without him all over again. It felt so very good to have him back, even for such a short time. We get on much better now he’s dead.

It’s impossible to predict when he’ll return again. The one thing I can be sure of, it won’t be when I expect him to, it’s not something that can be planned. The last time I was back home I walked the length of the road where I grew up, clotted with memories from the railway line at one end to the dock gates at the other. Halfway down I stopped outside the site of the Whitehead Iron and Steel factory, where Dad worked for many years, now a waste ground awaiting development. It was not so difficult to close my eyes and smell, once again, the hot oil and chemical stench, to hear the piercing scream of metal being sliced at high speed. But there was no hint of my father’s presence there. I stood outside our old house until the new owner drew back the curtains and peered at me suspiciously and I turned away and left. No hint of him there either. At the end of the road I turned left, following the map in my head, and walked down Coomassie Street. When I was a boy my father and I found the name thrillingly exotic and mysterious, we would turn it over in our mouths, elongating the vowels. I closed my eyes and strained to hear his voice—nothing. Then on to Mill Parade, with the Transporter Bridge to my right—how many times did Dad and I take that to the far side of the river, leaning over the rail to look down onto the muddy banks of the Usk below? In Church Street I came to a pub where the two us would sometimes go when I was back from University. These were expeditions prompted by my mother—why don’t you two go out for a drink together? These father/son outings were filled with awkward silences, our eyes wandering to the TV perched high on the wall. There, in the nearly empty lounge, I lingered over my drink, sure that this would be the place, but I was wrong again. No, his appearances are just as impossible to predict as that sudden, urgent desire to ring home, before I remember there’s no one there now, both of them gone, the house sold.

But, whenever I think of him, the memories still so alive, his presence still so powerful, it’s impossible to believe that he’s no longer in this world. And I think of him often. I know that I’ll think of him the next time I’m sitting in my office at the University, the rain beating against the window.

[IRELAND: ENGLISH] MIKE MCCORMACK Of One Mind

Sometimes I feel young and sometimes I feel old and sometimes I feel both at the same time. This trick of being in two minds, of weighing things on the one hand and then again on the other, has never been a problem for me. But, while I can hold two warring ideas in my head at the same time, and even retain a clear idea of what it is I am thinking about, I am sometimes less sure of who or what it is that is doing the thinking. This weightlessness takes hold of me, this sense that somehow I am lacking essential ballast. I suspect it’s one of the gifts of my generation, a generation becalmed in adolescence, a generation with nothing in its head or its heart and with too much time on its hands.

Lately however I’m experiencing something new and it has taken me a while to recognise it. Obscured behind amazement and something like awe it has taken me weeks to see it clearly as the thing it really is. When I finally did get it straight in my mind I could hardly believe it. To the best of my knowledge I have never experienced anything like it before, nor, living the type of life I’ve done, is there any reason why I should have.

Take this example, an incident with my eight-year-old son only last week…

It was, on the face of it, a simple enough disappointment involving a school trip to an open farm outside the city. Giddy with anticipation, Jamie had talked about nothing else in the days leading up to it and, when I had met his questions with memories of my own upbringing on a small farm in west Mayo, his expectations had soared; the chance to see something of his Dad’s childhood promised to be a rare treat. But now the trip lay in ruins. Traffic congestion and a radio alarm clock flummoxed in the small hours by a power cut conspired to have us arrive at the school fifteen minutes after the bus had left. Now we stood in the stillness of his classroom, gazing at the neat rows of tables and seats and I thought to myself that surely there was no place in all the world so full of absence as an empty classroom.

And Jamie’s disappointment was huge. I had no need to look down at him to know it—I could feel it rolling off him, deep noxious waves of it. Just to have me in no doubt he told me so himself.

“I’m disappointed,” he said solemnly. “I can feel it here, right here.” He placed his hand low on his chest and rubbed it up and down as if trying to relieve some digestive ache.

“Next week Jamie,” I assured him. “We can all go next week, the three of us. I promise.”

“I’m in pain,” he persisted. “Severe pain.”

“You’ll get over it,” I replied shortly. “Next week I said. Let’s go.”

I took him by the hand and led him out to the car. January light hung low in the sky, oppressive and tightening the muscles across my chest. I hated these winter months, the gloom that rose in my heart; summer seemed an infinity away.

“This isn’t the first disappointment like this,” Jamie said, as I held open the door for him. “They’re beginning to mount up. I can feel the pressure.”

“That bad?”

He nodded and sat in it. “Yes, that bad. I’m only telling you for your own good.”

“Be a man,” I blurted. My own disappointment at letting him down now made me brusque. “Put on your seatbelt.”

There is of course no such thing as a simple disappointment, a small disappointment to an eight-year-old child. I’ve seen enough of fatherhood to know that feelings like these only come man-sized, brutally disproportionate to the job in hand, never calibrated to the dimensions of a child’s world. They come with crushing intent, fully capable of annihilating their fragile universe. The wonder is that any child can survive even the slightest of them.

We drove back towards the city centre, the traffic loosened up now after the early rush hour. Jamie sat silently in the back seat. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed him gazing out the side window, his moon pale face pinched with the effort to hold back the tears.

He happened into my life over eight years ago, waking a dream of fatherhood which took me completely by surprise when it presented itself out of the blue some time before my thirtieth birthday. Before that all my visions of children came with a completeness about them which Jamie’s arrival had totally confounded. Nothing in my idea of fatherhood had warned me against the fact that children do not drop fully formed out of the sky, nor of the ad hoc nature of fatherhood, which is its day-to-day idiom; basically, nothing had warned me against screw-ups like this.

“Someday,” he called suddenly from the back seat, leaving the word hanging in the air.

We had pulled into the first of the two roundabouts on the western edge of the city. Rain was now falling, that resolute early morning drizzle which tells you there will be no let up for the day.

“Someday,” he repeated, eying me in the rear-view mirror. “Someday what Jamie? Speak up, don’t be mumbling back there to yourself.”

“Someday,” he said, “when you’re sitting in the visitors gallery of the criminal court listening to the jury returning a guilty verdict on all charges and hearing the judge hand down the maximum sentence with no recommendation for bail you will probably be asking yourself where did it all go wrong. Well, just to set your mind at rest, you need look no further than this morning.”

“That bad?”

“I’m only telling you for your own peace of mind.”

“Thank you, that’s very kind of you. I’ll remember that when I’m organising your appeal.”

Eight years ago I blundered out of my twenties, a feckless decade of drink and dope smoking, a decade of late nights and videos lived out against a soundtrack of white boy guitar bands, a decade funded by various under the counter jobs and the most gullible welfare system in the whole country. The setting up of the nation’s second-language TV station rescued me, drew me out, pallid and blinking, into the light. Being fluent in Irish scored me a contract subtitling the German and Scandinavian cartoons which bulked out the station’s Irish-language quota in its early days. A month-by-month contract had opened out to a yearly one and all told I had now turned in seven of them. Each year I resolved to find something permanent and each year the relevant deadlines passed me by. This last year the cartoons had given way to captioning the station’s twice-weekly soap opera which now, in its fifth year, was responsible for a big percentage of the station’s advertising revenue. A job which took me all of thirty hours a week left me with more than enough time with which to split the child-minding duties with Martha, Jamie’s mother.

Back then the advent of a new TV station on the outskirts of this city had drawn a new type of female into the light. Upmarket and eager, all short skirts and high boots, they had a radiance about them which gave them allure in a city which till then had seen heavy boots and woolly sweaters as the uniform of bohemian aspirations and left-wing politics. That the majority of these new sirens were merely continuity announcers, weather girls, and bit-part players in soaps did not diminish their glamour one bit; the city was grateful for their new colour and the open optimism they shed about them. This was Martha’s milieu. She too had the looks and the standoffish poise of a young woman with plenty of choices. Therefore, when I met her, it was somewhat gratifying to find that in fact her status was almost as lowly as my own. She too worked temporary contracts, honing scripts for continuity announcers and weather girls, all the time dreaming of an alternate world where she wrote code for video games, specifically tactical world-building games. At the time she was working out the end of her current contract and thinking of moving to London where she hoped to find work in one of the design studios that had sprung up after the launch of the PS2.

Six months after we met a casual affair was brought to its senses by an unbroken blue line running through the window of a pregnancy test kit. Much solemn talking ensued, once more the old weighing of things against each other only this time between two minds equally adroit at seeing both sides of any story without ever necessarily reaching a decision. Finally however we did rent a semi D in one of the new estates on the city’s outskirts and settled down to bringing up a child between us. After three years however we had to face up to the fact that we were hopelessly out of love with each other. With the leaking away of all physical desire, our relationship bottomed out to a colourless haunting of each other, a leaching away of all feeling from our togetherness. We woke up to the conclusion that, were it not for the child between us, we would long ago have gone our separate ways. Some time in Jamie’s third year we sat down and tallied up the cost of our lives together. All things considered it hadn’t been too expensive. One beloved child and the enrichment of sense and soul he had brought to us more than offset any regrets for dreams we had set aside on his account. Speaking for myself it was the kind of balance sheet I could live with. We talked into the night, mapping out the details of an amicable separation, the terms of which would come into effect three years down the road when, we blithely reasoned, Jamie would be more of an age to cope with the trauma. We gave each other the love-you-but-not-in-love-with-you speech, agreed on the you-deserve-better postscript, and then sat there ashamed of ourselves, quietly appalled that in our early thirties and after three years and a child together this was the best we could do by way of a row. How could we have felt so little? Then, in a rush of gratitude toward each other, we made love for the first time in months. The following morning, embarrassed by these faltering intimacies, we renewed the vows of the night before.

When the three years were up we sat Jamie down between us and told him that his family would now be divided between two houses. His reaction was muted, no hysterics or anxious pleading, no face down pummelling of pillows. He walked into his room, pulled the door behind him, and was not seen or heard of for the rest of that day. He came out later that evening and asked for something to eat, his face flushed, his whole being pulsing in a haze of anxiety.

A couple of weeks after that he began wetting the bed.

Lately he’s got this idea, more accurately an obsession. How this idea has taken hold of him I cannot properly say but Martha dates it to the time of our breakup, the weeks and months after I moved out of our semi D and into a two-bedroomed flat in the city centre. Martha speculates that it’s all part of the break-up trauma, a childlike but nonetheless canny ploy with which to win treats and privileges off both of us. I listen to Martha because she is smarter than me and more attuned to the nuances of our child. Also, with her background in game programming, she is always likely to see chains of cause and effect. But just this once I have a feeling she’s wrong. Jamie’s conviction runs deeper than the circumstances of our breakup; it seems to come from the very depths of him, stirring something bleak in his young soul, putting him in the way of words and ideas completely out of scale with his age.

Another example: one day he stepped into the kitchen draped in one of my old T-shirts and wearing a baseball cap back to front. His hands barely poked beyond the cuffs of the short sleeves and the baseball cap threatened to fall down over his eyes. It was a flashback to my grunge past, to a time at the beginning of the caring decade when, paradoxically, serial killers were valorised by a section of my generation as great countercultural heroes, heroic transgressors. The image leaped out in red ink, Michael Rooker in the title role, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“The box.”

“I thought I told you.”

“Yeah, yeah—look at this.” He held up a newspaper and tapped a headline in the middle of the page. Playgrounds designed by SAS, it read.

“Tell me what it says. Sit into the table, this spaghetti is done.”

He pulled out a chair and sat in, spreading the paper out in front of him. “It says that children have become bored with swings and slides, too girly they think, no thrills in them, no danger. They were lying deserted all over Britain. Then someone had the idea of bringing in SAS instructors to design these assault courses and now kids can’t get enough of them.”

I laid the plate on the table and handed him the fork and spoon. “Eat up. Those playgrounds will be closed down in a year. Injuries and litigations, they’ll be lucky to stay open a year.”

Jamie shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. One broken elbow and a concussion—that’s the injury list for a year in one of those playgrounds.” He folded up the newspaper, took off his cap, and fell to eating. “What do you make of that, what does it mean?”

“Not with your mouth full.” I handed him a napkin and he drew it across his mouth, streaking an orange blur halfway to his ears. “What would I know, kids are daft. Who knows what goes on in their heads?”

“That’s true, look at me.”

“Look at you indeed. Do you want to stay the night?”

“Yes.”

“Finish your spaghetti and then call your mam.”

“I already have.”

A couple of weeks after we split up Martha told me that Jamie had begun wetting the bed. Martha took him aside and asked him about it. If fear and disappointment come only in man-size dimensions so too does embarrassment. He bolted from the kitchen and slammed the door on his bedroom. Martha bought a rubber sheet and told me not to mention it to him. A week later he brought the subject up himself.

“I need something,” he said. “I’ll come straight out with it.”

“Yes.”

“No beating around the bush or anything.”

“I’m all ears.”

“A request.”

“Which is?”

“You won’t like it.”

“Jamie!”

“A beating.”

“A what?”

“A beating.”

He was framed in the doorway, a little study in misery. Once more he was the child wrestling with outsize miseries which threatened to engulf him.

“What have you done Jamie? Whatever it is it can’t be that bad.”

“It’s not what I’ve done, it’s what I’m going to do.”

“And what exactly are you going to do that warrants a beating.”

He pulled the chair out from the table and sat in. This is his way of late whenever he has something big to get off his chest. It seems to give him confidence, putting him in a position of strength insofar as a child is ever in such a position. But just then he looked hesitant, teetering on the threshold of a great disclosure but unsure of how to begin.

“What is it you are going to do?” I persisted.

“I come from a broken home,” he began.

“No Jamie, you come from a home divided between two houses, you spend an equal time with each of us. Whoever you want.”

He shook his head, the flaw in the argument too obvious even to him. It was at times like this I had the feeling Jamie was streaking ahead of me, gaining on truths and ideas which by right I should have been handing down to him.

He spoke irritably, “By any definition of the normal family I come from a broken home.”

“Jamie, I’m only guessing but I don’t think this is what you want to talk about.”

“I wet the bed,” he blurted desperately.

“Yes, I know, it’s not a big thing, you’ll get over it.”

“I can’t stop, each night I say my prayers and each morning I wake up covered in wee.”

“God has a lot on his mind Jamie. He’s a busy man, you might have to wait your turn. But wetting the bed is no reason for a beating.”

“I’m going to do something bad, something really bad.”

“We all do something bad at one time or other. What is it you’re going to do?”

“I’m going to kill someone.”

“That is bad,” I conceded. “Do you know who this someone is— it’s not me by any chance.”

He threw up his hands in a gesture of unknowing. “I don’t know,” he said with some exasperation. “You’d want to take this serious because you’ll probably blame yourself later on and I wouldn’t want that.”

“How do you know you’re going to kill someone?”

“There are signs,” he said, “indications.”

“This is that T-shirt. I told you before about going through my stuff.”

“It’s not the T-shirt,” he yelled suddenly, “you’re not listening.”

I held up my hands. “Okay, I’m listening now. What signs?”

“Like I’ve said I come from a broken home and I’ve started wetting the bed.”

“And that’s enough to turn you into a killer?” I felt distinctly odd discussing this with my eight-year-old son. Once more this sense of weightlessness came over me; I felt buoyant, unmoored from myself. From what I remembered none of the parenting manuals Martha showed me had ever covered this kind of situation. However I was certain also I had to see this conversation through to the end. “What has this to do with wanting a beating?”

“The broken home and the bed-wetting are two of the classic signifiers of serial killers in their youth. The third one is parental abuse. In order to have a complete profile I need to have a beating. That is where you come in.”

“Why would you want to kill anyone?”

“It is not that I want to kill anyone—it’s just that that is the way it is going to be.”

“This is ridiculous Jamie. I’m sorry, there are no beatings here today.”

He looked at me sadly and sighed. “You have a responsibility,” he said softly. “Sooner or later the corpses will start turning up. Two with the same MO and signatures might be a coincidence but three points to a serial killer. We have to give the investigation every chance. A full profile would put a halt to me before I get into my stride.”

“This is nonsense Jamie. This conversation is at an end now.” I got up from the table; he grabbed my wrist.

“He was quiet,” he said fervently, “he kept to himself a lot.” He fixed me with a glum stare. “That’s what the neighbours will say when I’m being led away. Of course long before that there will be all the other signs—the low self-esteem, the sexual inadequacies…” His voice trailed away.

“I’m sorry. There’s no beatings here today. Or any other day for that matter.”

He raised his voice. “I’m only telling you, the child is the father of the man.”

I talked to Martha about this the following day. She had finally moved her computer into the small box room I’d used as a workspace when I’d lived there. A couple of personal items around the room claimed the space as her own. One of Picasso’s blue women hung on the wall to her back and a series of little marble Buddhas stood ranked along the windowsill that looked down over the back garden. She knew nothing about Jamie’s big idea.

“He hasn’t mentioned anything to me about it. It sounds like a father and son thing.”

“Does he spend much time on the Internet?”

“Only an hour or two each day, the laptop on the kitchen table where I can keep an eye on him. John, he’s a good boy, I can’t stop him doing everything his friends are doing at the moment. He has it tough enough as it is.”

Every time she talks about Jamie I can see him in her face, the ghost of him flitting through her features: the same wide spacing of her eyes across her nose and the freckles on her forehead which stand out so vividly during these winter months. And it is clear also that if Jamie keeps growing at his present rate he is going to meet the same problems buying clothes as his mother—the narrow hips on which skirts and jeans drape sullenly and the skinny wrists which protrude beyond every sleeve no matter how generous. It pleases me to see these shades of Jamie in her; the sense of continuity gladdens me. Sometimes though I wonder if the causal chain always runs from parent to child; since Jamie’s birth I could have sworn I noticed in Martha a flightiness which lay at odds with her usual downbeat moods. As for myself, while I take it for granted that there is indeed something of myself in my son, I can never quite put a finger on what this something is. If ever I press Martha on the subject she tells me airily that we are both the same age.

“This worries me Martha. You should have heard him, all these technical terms and a rationale as well. And, this beating thing.”

“Did you give it to him.”

“For Christ’s sakes Martha!”

She grinned openly. “I know, I’m winding you up. You’re so easy.”

“Let’s talk to him together, this has me really spooked.”

She pivoted from the chair and kissed me on the cheek. Over her shoulder I could see her computer screen locked in pause, two tiny figures arrested in their progress across some heroic landscape of rolling hills toward a gloomy forest.

“Leave it to me,” she said, “it might need a woman’s touch.”

I nodded to the screen. “What is it this time?”

She waved a narrow wrist. “Orcland. A centuries-long dispute between elves and orcs, border violations, mineral rights, it goes back to the dawn of time. I have to tip the balance of power toward the elves, upgrade their ordnance for the second edition add-on. Market research has shown elves’ approval rating has risen across all demographics. The gaming community has responded badly to seeing them getting their arses kicked so easily. I have to help tip the balance of power for the next add-on.”

“They’re still not going to win, the template is fixed.”

“I know, I can only help them make a better fight of it. Well, fairer at least.”

“What sort of job is that for a grown woman,” I teased.

“The type of job that puts food and rent on the table.”

I sat on her chair and gazed at the screen. Two elves were streaking toward a great forest where they would find refuge and a cache of arms. Tipping the balance of power, squaring the odds, this is the type of thing Martha did.

“Martha, how did we get to be this trivial, elves and subtitles? How did we ever get sidetracked into this shite?”

She shrugged, shook her head. “Don’t ask me. But you show me another job that comes up with rent and crèche at twenty hours a week and I’ll consider it. Till then I’ve got elves to arm.” She giggled suddenly, put her hand on my shoulder. “John,” she said, “don’t worry, his name is Jamie, not Damien.”

“Jesus, Martha.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t help it.”

Whatever way she broached the subject she made no headway with Jamie. And whatever he said to her in reply left her in no doubt that this was something between men. No, there was no drawing him out on the subject—he’d talk it out with Dad he said. So I left him to it, hoping he might put the whole thing behind him, thinking that if he needed to talk about it badly enough he would bring the subject up in his own good time. And sure enough he did. We were sitting together on the couch after a double episode of The Simpsons.

“You haven’t given my request any more thought?”

“No, I can’t say I have, how about you?”

He squirmed round to face me, tucking his feet in under him.

“Yes, I have it all figured out. Yesterday I killed a frog, I wrote it into my diary—that covers the cruelty to animals part. One beating now and I will have a complete profile, every box ticked off. Any investigation would have to be blind not to be able to track me down. But I need that beating. One beating registered with the childcare authorities and the job will be complete.” He rolled up his sleeves revealing his skinny upper arms. “You could confine your work to areas of soft tissue, my thighs and arms, places where the bruising will be obvious but not dangerous. But nothing around the head, I’d like to keep my wits around me.”

“And how’s that going to make me look, a registered child beater?”

“I’ll clear your name. I’ll say it was totally out of character, I pushed you to the end of your tether.”

“You’re a serial killer, who’s going to believe you?”

“I’m under oath, I won’t lie.”

“This profile thing, that’s an American template.”

“So?”

“I’m saying that it may not translate across the Atlantic.”

He shook his head sadly. “Dad, the world is of one mind. That’s the way it is.”

“No, it doesn’t have to be like that. These things aren’t fixed.”

I put my arm round him and drew him into my side. There wasn’t a pick on him, the bones in his shoulders dug into my ribs. “How do you know these things Jamie, where do you get these ideas from?”

“How does anyone know anything? I just pick them up along the way, same as anyone. This is all common knowledge.”

“It’s not common to me. Why don’t you turn yourself in now, before you do any damage?”

“Who would believe an eight year old?” He turned his face up to me. “Would it kill you?”

“I’ll never know.”

He lowered his face. “It’s only for your good,” he said, “you’ll thank me for this later on.”

I sat there long after he’d gone to bed, the TV on mute.

Someone told me once that you know nothing of love till you have a child of your own. You know nothing of its unconditional demands nor the lengths you will go to protect it. And this is what I’ve been feeling these last few weeks, this is what spooks me. I’ve seen enough to know that wherever there is love there are opportunities for guilt also. It has something to do with more laws and prohibitions, more opportunities for transgression and omission.

What spooks me now is that his fear will become my fear, his terror my terror. One day it might spread from him, slip through his narrow boundaries and become mine. And, as ever, being in two minds, that old sense of weightlessness comes over me when I think these things; once more I am at a remove from myself… One night, at the end of your tether, the world really might be of one mind. And because you haven’t the courage to be scared, the courage to take up the full duty of love, you find yourself pitched into a place beyond marvelling that you could be pushed this far. And because this is the age of reasoned hysterics and because you are haunted by his pale arms, you find yourself walking down the hall to his bedroom, to where he is tucked up fast in his dreams. And sitting on the side of his bed, lit by the light streaming in from the hall, you run through your reasons once more, squaring your story against the day when you will stand up and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And then, these things straight in your mind at last, you reach out to touch his shoulder, touch him gently, calling his name in a whisper that barely reaches into his sleep… “Jamie,” you call, “wake up Jamie, wake up, good boy…”

And that you could even think these things, that for these moments you are in two minds and so divided from the better part of yourself leaves you with this question—to whom or where do you turn to now?