Mr Lynch’s Holiday

33

The toll motorway was abandoned. Signage in every tunnel warned them to keep their distance from other vehicles. They had driven over ten kilometres and were yet to see another car. He had been up and out early that morning, managing to recharge the car’s battery with David’s help, and that had felt like an ambitious and successful start to the day. But now, as he sped along the empty road, he could think of few experiences that could engender such a sense of loneliness.

The trip was his way of an apology after the incident with the paint. His father had seemed surprised and pleased by the suggestion and Eamonn hoped their argument was forgotten. It was a rare and unsettling thing to see Dermot angry.

In the early days he and Laura had often taken daytrips and excursions to places near and far. But, contrary to expectation or logic, as he had grown disenchanted with Lomaverde he had also grown increasingly reluctant to leave it. Laura would suggest escapes to cities, the distraction of other human beings, of bars and museums, even of traffic, but Eamonn knew that they would have to return, and in that way seemed to drag Lomaverde and its attendant atmosphere of failure and despair with him wherever he went.

Sometimes, sitting on the terrace, he’d see a distant plane passing mutely overhead and he would be filled with the urge to spell out SOS in patio furniture. The sense that they were stranded — isolated but also captive — was at times overpowering. He would try to remind himself of all the people who would give a great deal to be where he was at that moment, to remember that he was free to come and go as he wished and could rejoin the wider population by just walking to the nearest town, but it rarely convinced. And now, the silent motorway seemed to confirm his worst fears, leaving the troubling impression that the wider population had fled. The passing landscape provided no comfort. Arid hills flattened out into vast agricultural planes encased in plastic, interrupted only by the occasional bright green, intensively irrigated golf course. Everywhere were sun-bleached advertising hoardings for new towns and developments just like Lomaverde, and the horizon was scattered with motionless cranes.

Dermot broke the silence. ‘It’s a lovely bit of road, eh? I wish there were more like this back in Brum.’

Eamonn smiled weakly in agreement.

‘Did you hear they wanted to put cycle lanes along the Stratford Road?’

‘No.’

Dermot nodded, his eyes wide with incredulity. ‘Yes. The Stratford Road. Did you ever hear anything like it?’

Eamonn was unsure what response was required.

‘I said to Sammy, “Sure there’s not enough room for the cars let alone the bikes!”’

Eamonn turned his head briefly. ‘I think that’s the idea. Prioritize bikes … and buses.’

‘Jesus, you wouldn’t want more of those lunatics weaving in and out of the traffic.’

‘But they wouldn’t have to weave in and out because they’d have their own lane.’

‘Everything has to be green now, doesn’t it? That’s the latest fad.’

‘It’s not really a fad, is it?’

‘Like the last thing, what was it? “Nouvelle cuisine”.’

Eamonn stared ahead. His father had read an article about nouvelle cuisine at some point in the 1980s and had never really gotten over it.

They drove to the small town of San José and found somewhere for lunch. When Eamonn had visited the restaurant before with Laura the place had been bustling, but now, on an early-season Tuesday lunchtime, the only other diners were a nervous-looking German family sat in the corner. He couldn’t think of a single other occasion on which he and his father had eaten in a restaurant together.

‘They’ve got all kinds of fish, or they do chicken if you’d prefer; it says with chips, but I’m sure they could do it with boiled potatoes if you want.’

Dermot pointed to the menu: ‘Doesn’t that say “paella”?’

‘Yes it does.’

Dermot closed the menu. ‘I’ll have that.’

Eamonn looked at him. He had never seen his father venture as far as a hamburger, much less anything more exotic.

‘Paella? Do you know what it is?’

Dermot tutted. ‘I’m not a complete ignoramus. Of course I know what it is.’

‘But you don’t eat seafood.’

‘There’s me thinking I grew up eating mussels and whelks and seaweed.’

Eamonn looked at him doubtfully. ‘What about the rice, it’ll have stuff in it. Mom was always careful to never give you spicy food.’

‘That’s because she couldn’t stand the smell. I worked alongside men from Pakistan and the West Indies all my life, do you think I never ate anything spicy?’

Afterwards, they walked over towards Playa de los Genoveses. He had noticed that his father had developed a habit of launching into anecdotes halfway through, as if the story had been running in his head for some time before he started to speak.

‘She kept saying she was getting fat. Her skirts didn’t fit her any more. She’d give out about it, asking me why she was putting on weight when she wanted to lose it. As if I had any idea. To be honest I’d barely noticed. I thought anyway that just happened to women as they got older, got a bit thicker round the middle. I knew better though than to say a word. It would have been bad enough agreeing she was putting on a few pounds without telling her it was because of her age. I knew to keep my mouth shut.’

‘You’re talking about Mom, right?’

Dermot looked at him as if he were simple. ‘Of course. Anyway, then she got ill. A tummy upset of some sort that wouldn’t go away. She’d always been terrible for avoiding doctors, said she saw enough of them at work. She told me it would clear up by itself.’

‘What was it?’

‘I had no idea. One day I got home from my shift and there she was lying on the bathroom floor. Her face green. I’d had enough. I took her up to the surgery myself, her protesting all the way.

‘I’d never set foot in the place before. I felt like her gaoler dragging her in to see the doctor. Left to her own devices though I knew she’d say nothing.

‘Anyway, the doctor, Wiley he was called, he examined her stomach and I got a bit of a shock when I saw how swollen she was. After he’d prodded her about she sat back next to me and squeezed my hand and I knew then right enough that she was terrified. She said: “Doctor, is it some sort of growth?”

‘He peered at her over the top of his glasses, just like they do on the telly. “Yes. Some sort of growth, Mrs Lynch,” he said. “A baby.”’ Dermot shook his head as if hearing the news again. ‘My first reaction was to hit him. Some stuck-up old bastard having a laugh at the Paddies. But he carried on talking, saying she’d have to have some tests, but assuring us she was pregnant, a good way along. I remember he said: “Given your past history and your age, I’d say it was something of a miracle.” Then he smiled and said: “Congratulations.” I’ll never forget that smile. It was a good one.’

Eamonn gave a short laugh. ‘What? That was me?’

‘Who else would it be?’

‘That’s a great story. I can’t believe I’ve never heard it before.’

‘Your mother didn’t really like to talk about it, to be honest. I think she was embarrassed not to have picked up on the signs. It was such a shock.’

‘So was I not planned?’

‘You were indeed. Good God, you were planned. You and all the others.’

‘What others?’

‘The ones that never came. There was never any question that we wanted kids. Jesus, we had you all named before we were married, but it just didn’t happen.

‘We were careful for the first year, we just wanted to wait until we’d moved from the flat to a house, that was all. But for years after your mother insisted that us being cautious for a few months had jinxed us for ever. “We sent a message that a baby wasn’t wanted,” she’d say, and I could never understand who she thought we’d sent this message to, who would so deliberately misunderstand our intentions. God, I suppose.

‘Anyway, we were married fourteen years and everyone around us was on to their fifth or sixth kid. It was tough, especially on your mother, very tough. All the false alarms and disappointments.’ He paused and lowered his voice. ‘The cycles, you know, all that business, apparently hers had never been regular, so it was awful hard for her to know what was going on and avoid building her hopes up.’ He paused again. ‘It was hard for both of us.’ He looked at Eamonn and grinned. ‘And then you came along. We just couldn’t believe it. It was like a miracle.’

Eamonn winced at the word. He connected it with uncles and aunts ruffling his hair and pinching his cheeks. He’d never considered the meaning as a child, just thought it was one of the many mystifying or irritating things that relatives came out with.

‘I bet you’d got used to just being the two of you.’

Dermot shook his head. ‘We had not. Not at all. That was never the idea.’

It was a rare, overcast day. The beach was largely deserted and the wind blustery. They walked along the sand. Dermot marched briskly with his head up, while Eamonn meandered and stopped often to examine the small towers and circles of stones he found on the sand. San José had a vaguely hippy vibe and he wasn’t sure if the stones were some neo-Pagan trimmings or just pretty patterns on the sand. Either way he found them unsettling, reminiscent only of burial mounds. They reminded him of the bodies washed up on San Pedro beach. He tried to imagine what the migrants might have made of the Promised Land had they lived. An unfathomable fantasy world of golf courses, polytunnels and empty streets. He imagined their ghosts, restless spirits roaming the Costa, huddling in sandy bunkers and silent shopping malls.

His father was waiting for him at the water’s edge. As Eamonn approached, Dermot dropped his Villa bag on the sand and crouched down to look through it. He pulled out a neatly rolled-up towel.

‘So. I’d say it’s been long enough since dinner.’ Eamonn was aghast to see, inside the towel, a pair of swimming trunks at least as old as him.

‘Are you thinking of going in?’

‘Of course I am. Are you not?’

‘I hadn’t really planned to.’

‘What? Look at it. You’d be mad not to.’

‘The water will still be cold, it’s only June.’

‘Ah come on. It’ll do you good. Nothing like a plunge in the sea to clear the head.’

‘I’ve not brought my stuff.’

‘Sure you could swim in your pants, no one’s going to notice.’

Eamonn ran his hand over his face. ‘Oh God. OK, OK.’

Dermot grinned and clapped him on the arm.

Eamonn shook his head. ‘It’s going to be horrible.’

Dermot got changed quickly and Eamonn watched him stride into the water up to his knees and then stand motionless. His arms and the back of his neck were a deep red, but the skin on his back and legs was a creamy white. It looked newborn set against the dark, weather-beaten extremities. He felt an unexpected tenderness towards his father’s body. A sadness that there was no one but him to see its trueness and beauty. Dermot walked forward and plunged head first into a wave.

Eamonn’s own entrance into the water was typically protracted and tortuous. He waded gingerly up to his knees and then launched into an ungainly, jumpy kind of run into deeper waters, the cold like a hard kick to his balls. He thrashed about furiously and when the pain finally receded he lay on his back and trod water.

Looking up at the sky, he wondered for the first time how his and Laura’s childlessness might have seemed to his parents. Did they assume that they wanted children? Did they pity them?

The question had bobbed up to the surface between him and Laura occasionally over the years. In their twenties they had been baffled by the appeal of parenthood. They looked at every stage, from pregnancy, through childbirth, to the arrival of a baby and saw only pain, terror and hardship. When they thought of a baby they thought only of all the things they would lose.

After she’d hit thirty Laura became more ambivalent. She still didn’t actively want a baby, but neither could she be certain that she would never want one. She found the finality of the decision unsettling. She shared her doubts with Eamonn:

‘What if we change our minds and it’s too late?’

‘What if we can’t have children anyway?’

‘What if not having kids sends us funny and we start collecting figurines?’

What she wanted above all else was certainty. She read discussion forums on the Internet of the defiantly child-free and the fervent breeders, each group accusing the other of selfishness. The research, she said, had been inconclusive.

Eamonn’s position had changed. He had grown to like the idea of children, or at least a child, but still found the prospect daunting.

‘Maybe no one is ever certain,’ he said.

‘But it’s a big decision.’

‘Maybe you have to just jump.’

‘Do you think we should?’

But he didn’t want to persuade her; he wanted her to be completely sure.

He thought now of Dermot’s words. His parents had not considered themselves complete without children. They seemed to see themselves on the periphery of their own relationship. He found the idea stranger the more he thought about it. It suggested that falling in love created rather than filled an emptiness. He imagined them living in their three-bedroom house for all the years before he came along, waiting. He wondered if he and Laura had been waiting for something all these years and not even known it.

When he raised his head he saw he had drifted further out than he had realized. He saw his dad, a distant figure on the beach, a towel round his waist, walking away back to the line of prickly pears beyond the sand. Eamonn tried to stand but found he had floated out of his depth.

His legs were beginning to ache and he decided he too would go back. He started to swim, but seemed to make no progress. He put his head down again and swam harder, thrashing his arms and legs until he was short of breath. He lifted his eyes from the water and felt a small pulse of panic as he saw the beach still just as far away and the orange buoy still bobbing out of reach in front of him. He tried once more but was unable to free himself of the current. He turned around to see if there was anything he could drift out to, but instead was hit full in the face by a swell and took in water through his mouth and nose. He tried to float on his back again but the waves rolled over his head. His arms and legs were heavy now and hard to lift out of the water. He felt himself being dragged down and only then considered that he might drown. For a split second he felt not fear but surprise and a kind of disappointment that this is how it would all end. Then another swell washed over him and straightforward terror gripped him. As he came up from the next submersion, he heard a voice calling for help and recognized it as his own.

It seemed only seconds before he felt his father’s hand clutching him, his other arm encircling his neck and pulling him along. They struggled for a while, the two of them, and he heard Dermot’s ragged breathing as he fought the current with one arm, saying over and over again: ‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’

When they reached shallow water, Eamonn’s legs were too weak to walk. Dermot dragged him up on to the beach and lay him on the sand. He disappeared from Eamonn’s view for a moment and returned with the towel. He placed it over his son’s body and tucked it in all around. Eamonn wanted to ask if Dermot was OK, but he found it hard to speak.

‘I saw you were in trouble. I was on my way back out to you before you started calling.’ He was rubbing Eamonn’s chest, trying to warm him up. ‘What a fecking idiot I am, forcing you in there when you didn’t want to go and then walking off and leaving you. If your mother was alive, she’d murder me.’ He kept on rubbing. ‘I’m sorry, son, I’m sorry. You’re all right now. You’re all right.’

Eamonn was watching his father’s face close up. A scar on his chin. His wild eyebrows. The blue of his eyes.

‘You’re all right, Eamonn. God, I’m sorry. You gave me such a fright.’

Eamonn pulled his arm out from under the towel and laid a hand on his father’s cheek. Dermot stopped rubbing, kneeled back on his haunches and held his son’s hand to his face.