Mr Lynch’s Holiday

10

Eamonn paused in the doorway for a moment to watch him, registering as he did the familiarity of the posture. It was almost matronly — back straight, arms folded on chest, feet tucked under and crossed. This curiously attentive pose was how his father relaxed, whether in a pub or in front of the television, leaning slightly forward, head inclined to one side. As a gentle snoring struck up, Eamonn realized with some surprise that it was also how he took his naps. He moved quietly to the other side of the room to check Dermot was actually asleep. He frowned at the image — his father sleeping like a budgerigar. There was a strange novelty in the sight. He had very rarely seen him asleep. Occasionally, when sharing a room with his parents on holidays, he had woken in the night and listened to the intricate counterpoint of their snoring. His father’s high and wheezy, his mother’s deep and rumbling. The longer he listened the harder he found it to connect the sounds — simultaneously animal and mechanical — to the people. He would sneak over to their bed to look at their faces, to reassure himself that they were still his parents and that he should not be scared.

The intimacy of sharing a space with his father once more was unsettling. He found his gaze constantly zooming in and refocusing on certain details at once both mysterious and mundane. He was assailed by things that as a boy were so everyday as to be invisible, and as an adult he had not been around to see. The way his father read a newspaper, folded up into a neat square and held close to his face. The manner in which he ate: a bit of everything on the fork, peas carefully halved to avoid imbalance. The sound of his razor scraping his chin, the smell of his soap. All these things Eamonn had forgotten and each one triggered a complex mix of recognition and distance, a nostalgia for something still there. His father both alive and dead.

He couldn’t recall Dermot ever taking a nap before. He had noticed a few small signs of age since his arrival. Nocturnal trips to the toilet, the occasional effortful noise when standing or sitting. He remained, Eamonn was sure, fitter and healthier than himself, but there was a change nonetheless. Eamonn didn’t know whether his father had aged a little in the months since his mother had died, or whether he had just seemed younger and more vital next to her.

He would one day become authentically frail and need someone to care for him, and, as his only child, it would be Eamonn’s responsibility. This was something he had known for many years, but still he found it impossible to believe. Strength was one of his father’s defining features, never something he had made a show of, but his sheer physical presence made it clear. There was a power within him, a manifest capability. At Kathleen’s funeral Eamonn had offered to return from Spain, to rent out the apartment when such a thing was remotely possible, and to live nearby, but the offer was gestural. He didn’t believe that his father needed or wanted him around and he knew moreover that he would never accept such an offer.

Beyond an assumption of some kind of standardized grief, he had not considered how the loss of his mother had affected his father. In some ways, neither had he considered how her loss had affected him. Living in Lomaverde, at such a remove, he was not confronted by her absence every day. It wasn’t that he pictured her still alive, but neither did he always remember that she was gone, or consider the reality of Dermot’s day-to-day life on his own. It was easy to not think too much about it, to half-imagine things essentially unchanged.

Laura had encouraged him to ring home more often, but Eamonn felt she didn’t understand how self-sufficient his father was, didn’t really get the nature of his relationship with his father at all. ‘We don’t live in each other’s pockets,’ he’d say. ‘We don’t need to be talking to one another all the time.’ Besides, Dermot was surrounded by Kathleen’s relatives back in Birmingham. That was part of it, though Eamonn tried not to admit it, even to himself. A long-held suspicion that his dad was easier in the company of some of his nephews than his son. Eamonn’s cousin Brendan, for example. A man of few words who knew how to strip an engine and place an accumulator bet. Dermot saw him a lot. They seemed able to communicate in a language Eamonn had never learned.

The snoring built slowly to a peak with the loud finale inevitably rousing the sleeper.

‘Oh …’ His eyes opened and focused on Eamonn. Dermot smiled, embarrassed. ‘I was asleep.’

Eamonn nodded.

‘I wasn’t the driver.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I was dreaming I was stuck in traffic on College Road, but I wasn’t the driver. I was sat upstairs with all the bloody kids.’

‘You must have been glad to wake up.’

‘I don’t know who was driving the bus.’ He said this as if he should have known.

‘Maybe there was no driver.’

Dermot looked at him as if he were an idiot. ‘Someone was driving the bus, son. They don’t drive themselves.’

Eamonn scratched his head. ‘Went OK at Jean and David’s, did it?’

‘Yes. Very nice. They were advocating being a grandparent.’

‘Right.’

‘Did I tell you about Keiron, Brendan’s eldest?’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s gone and got his girlfriend pregnant. Fifteen years old, the pair of them. At the same school. So Brendan’s going to be a granddad.’

‘Christ.’ Eamonn felt the familiar mixture of awe and horror. He remembered seeing his cousin nonchalantly smoking in the park when they were children. Brendan seemed grown up when he was eight. He had left school at sixteen while Eamonn went on to university, the only one in the family to do so. He imagined that, to Brendan, his other cousins and perhaps his own father, he would forever be thought of as a student — a pejorative label meaning someone daft, lazy and essentially childish.

‘He was asking me the other day what you did out here, job-wise. And to be honest I couldn’t tell him. Was it something to do with computers? I can’t remember now what your mother said.’

‘It was the same job I had back home.’

‘Oh,’ said Dermot uncertainly, ‘they have an office out here, do they?’

‘I didn’t need an office, I was editing computer books. I worked from home.’

‘Oh, right. So that’s going well, is it?’

Eamonn hesitated. ‘Well, no, I was doing it for the first few months, but the company went bust.’ It pained him to admit this. He could imagine his father thinking there was something fundamentally unreal about the idea of working so remotely, so abstractly. He would assume the collapse of the company was a consequence of the intangibility of the work involved.

Dermot, however, looked merely concerned. ‘So are you having to look for work?’

‘No, it’s fine. I’m sorted. I got a new job teaching English.’

‘Oh, teaching. Well, Eamonn, your mother would be very proud. I had the impression that teaching wasn’t your cup of tea.’

The impression was correct, but Eamonn shrugged it off.

‘Well, now, I’d say your Spanish must be tip-top to be able to teach.’

Eamonn found it irksome that people assumed that living abroad somehow magically endowed you with a facility for language-learning. As if rewiring your brain and having to say a different word to the word you naturally wanted to say every time you wanted to speak wasn’t incredibly, almost impossibly, hard, regardless of where you happened to live or what words the people nearby happened to be hurling around, with near-violent rapidity. The assumption was no less irritating for being one that he himself had held, and one that made his apparent inability to rise above the bajo-intermedio standard of Spanish very hard to accept.

‘I’m teaching them English, Dad.’

‘Sure I know that, but obviously you need to explain the grammar and so on in Spanish. You need to provide the translation.’

‘That’s not how it’s done. It’s all done in English. It’s immersive. They pick it up.’

Dermot considered this. ‘Immersive. I suppose you can communicate a lot with what they call “body language”, can you? Hand signals and so on?’

Eamonn rubbed his face. ‘I don’t use hand signals, Dad. They can’t see me, for one thing.’

Dermot looked at him, an expression of dawning realization on his face.

‘Oh … but, that’s great work to be doing. I’m sorry now — I didn’t get you at all at first. What do they call them these days? “Visually impaired”, is it? “Sight-challenged”?’

Eamonn found himself doing something that he hated. It was a noise he made only when talking to one or both of his parents. A kind of impatient sigh, bordering on a grunt. An adolescent habit that he knew was ridiculous in a thirty-three-year-old man.

‘I’m not teaching blind kids. I’m teaching civil servants. It’s all done online or over the phone.’ He paused and then added: ‘No hand signals!’

Dermot was quiet for a few moments and then said: ‘“Er bekommt keine Luft.”’

Eamonn looked around the room.

‘Oh, yes, I remember that one all right. Linguaphone it was. Like you’re doing. On the tape.’

Eamonn was minded to explain that what he was doing was nothing like Linguaphone, but his father continued.

‘“Er bekommt keine Luft.” “He can’t breathe.” I took the tapes out of the library, thought I could listen to them on the job, but it never really worked. You’d get very absorbed in that stuff. I remember sailing past a stop full of passengers. I saw them there, but just forgot I was supposed to pull in. Raging they were, but I was listening to a conversation in a restaurant. Can’t remember any of it now.’ He shook his head. ‘Only bit of German I have is, “He can’t breathe.” Funny to remember just that.’

He fell silent again for a few moments before adding, ‘I’m not sure you’d ever really need to say it. You’d think the facial coloration would tell the story well enough.’