Mr Lynch’s Holiday

16

He knew that he would never turn into his dad, never be one of those sons mistaken for their fathers on the telephone. His parents were Irish, that was what he said. Never that he was Irish. He had grown up in England, he had a Birmingham accent, he was so palpably different to them that it seemed preposterous to him to describe himself as Irish. But to call himself English seemed no better. His name and indeed his physical appearance declared his otherness.

As a boy, cocooned in the small world of his primary school and parish, where nearly everyone he met was first- or second-generation Irish, his Irishness was largely invisible to him. He sometimes saw comedians on television telling jokes. There was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman. The jokes were the same — the Irishman was always called Paddy and he was always stupid. He found them baffling. He’d hear the audience laugh and he didn’t get it. He thought it was something grown-up, something secret.

When he passed the exam for King James he found himself in the minority for the first time, but it was not simply the nationality of his parents that made him different, it was their religion, what they did for a living, the area in which they lived, the names they called meals, the places they hadn’t been on holiday and a hundred other tiny details that seemed to place them and him on the outside. Staff would correct him, would reprimand or sometimes belittle him. From Mr Johnson, his geography teacher, he learned about something less tangible than glaciated u-shaped valleys and limestone paving. The taint was there in the way the teacher looked at him, the way he said his name, the way he handed him his work — a faint, but unmistakable odour, a smirk, a tightening.

In his first year at university he lived in halls with a boy called Kev Callaghan from Bolton. In their second term, while others were discovering their sexuality, Kev came out as an Irishman. Overnight he sprouted Sean O’Casey badges and Brendan Behan quotes, he started playing the Dubliners and Planxty loudly each evening in his room, and calling himself Caoimhín. It was as if, Eamonn thought, Kev had been bitten by a radioactive Celt. Eamonn didn’t know what to make of it. He imagined his own father’s bemusement if he went home wearing an Aran jumper and playing the bodhrán. One night Caoimhín drank too much Guinness and told Eamonn that he was in denial, that he was a self-hating Irishman. Eamonn was happy to concede the self-hatred and the Irishness, but he didn’t see them as connected. They both accused each other of pretending to be something they weren’t and in their drunken state thought that must mean they were in agreement.

What began as Caoimhín’s own personal identity crisis seemed to become more generalized in the years that followed. Eamonn returned from university to a Birmingham filled with pretend-Irish pubs. Being Irish had somehow become a mainstream leisure pursuit, like eating Thai food and taking salsa classes. To be Irish you just had to like the Corrs and U2, drink Guinness, wear a big hat on St Patrick’s Day and be ceaseless in your quest for ‘the craic’. Eamonn didn’t do any of those things — he was fairly sure his father didn’t either — and so wasn’t sure where that left him. He went along once to a branch of O’Neill’s with some friends. It was like no other Irish pub he’d ever been to either in England or Ireland. The big-eared old boys had been replaced by young men with red cheeks and striped shirts and girls in short skirts. The relaxed atmosphere replaced by a supercharged frenzy. People everywhere were punching the air to ‘The Whole of the Moon’ and on every wall was mention of the fabled craic. At eleven o’clock, when Eamonn thought it could get no stranger, some inaudible signal sent the entire staff clambering on to the bar like weary automatons to perform a lengthy tribute to the Blues Brothers. He drank as much as he could to get through the evening and the next morning found he was unable to separate reality from his dreams.