Mr Lynch’s Holiday

36

Dermot was awake again. Something about the heat had him waking and dozing, waking and dozing all night long. He drifted in and out of dreams. Each time he woke, the same breathless struggle to work out where he was. No sound or shape to give him a clue. He wondered at the time, his watch useless in the dark. He closed his eyes and saw a different shade of black.

He remembered another summer’s evening, sitting in golden light watching shadows lengthen on the floor. His mother in the bed. Her black hair unfurled upon the pillow, as if she were underwater.

‘Are you still there?’

‘I am.’

‘Come over and talk to me.’

‘I thought you were sleeping.’

‘I am and then I’m not. I don’t know if I’m dreaming or awake. Let me hold your hand.’

He walked over to the bed and took her hand. Her fingers were dry twigs in his palm.

There was too much to be said, so they remained in silence. He sat on the bed and listened to the ticking of the clock, the rhythm of her breaths, the crows outside. After a while he laid his head on the pillow and she stroked him as if he were a little boy once more. He closed his eyes and felt that God was nowhere.

After her death they all sought to escape. An unseemly scramble to get away: first from their father, useless in grief, self-pitying and mean-tempered, and then from his new wife. There was nothing especially malign about Teresa and perhaps they should have been glad of someone to look after the old man, to cook and clean for all of them. But she was not their mother and her presence served only to deepen the fathomless hole left by the absence. Two of Dermot’s older sisters became nuns. One brother left for Dublin, another for Liverpool. At fourteen, Dermot had finished school but was too young to leave home. He was sent to live with his grandmother over in Liscannor, who had room enough for one, leaving behind his baby sister, Eva, and his younger brother, Dominic.

Something buzzed past his head. He waved his hand and made brief contact, pushing the creature onwards through the darkness. A moment later it was back again.

When he thought of Liscannor now the memories were vivid but fragmentary: tearing down the road on Donal’s motorbike; chasing Delia Byrne through the dunes; diving into giant waves under purple skies. He remembered exactly the hit of steam and vinegar from finger holes in chip wrappers, the lustre of Mary Fallon’s lipstick, and the taste of his first Capstan.

The mosquito dived again and Dermot batted the air.

‘If you had any sense you’d lay low.’

It wasn’t so strange. Families dispersed, children scattered, homes were abandoned. It was the way things were. He kept in touch with Dominic. Postcards, visits at Christmas. But his own new life in Liscannor was full of incident. Eighteen months of tiptoeing about the house, of speaking in whispers, of feeling an unbearable heaviness pressing down on him were blasted away by the Atlantic. He had little interest in looking back, scant time or space for reflection on the way life had changed.

But when he contemplated those years now, it was not the hijinks and antics in Liscannor that absorbed him, it was the thought of Dominic back at home with his father, Teresa and their new baby. He tried to imagine what his younger brother had done during gaunt winter afternoons and the long dusks of summer nights. Who had he gone gallivanting with? Who did he wake with frozen hands in the middle of the night when he was scared?

A sudden vibration by his ear and he sat up swinging his hand through the thick black air, missing over and over again.

If Dominic bore any bitterness or sadness at being left behind, he never let it show. It was, after all, the way things were. He got out himself soon enough. Leaving home at sixteen and heading to the States. Dermot had always thought that Dominic would follow him to England and he had often worried that America had been a kind of rebuke. A statement that Dominic was his own man, the little brother no more.

When he heard the whine again, he reached for the switch, flooding the room with light, revealing the insect on the wall. He got up and delivered a close blow, his open hand bursting the mosquito’s swollen body on to the white plaster. He sat back on the bed, the room too bright, a trace of blood on his palm.

Young and careless. Stupid and preoccupied. He had let go of his brother’s hand and he had lost him.