Songdogs

SUNDAY, lord, i remember

He woke early this morning, rummaging around before the sun rose. Heard him as he opened up his window, spat down into the grass, went to the bathroom and pissed in the sink. I went downstairs after him and he gave me a nod.

‘How ya feeling?’

‘Like a million dollars,’ he said. ‘Look.’

He had the tray out open on the kitchen table and he was admiring one of the flies in particular. ‘Isn’t that a beauty?’

Jazz bucked from the radio and he moved over to fiddle with the dial, fine-tuning it. He pecked rhythmically at the air with his head. Hair stuck out where he had been sleeping on it. He ate a little cereal, some toast with jam, said he felt great for fishing today. Reached for the fly once more, held it up. ‘You and me both,’ he said. I thought he was asking me if I wanted to go fishing with him, but then I realised he wasn’t talking to me at all, that he wanted to be on his own, him and his fly, so I let him be.

He wore a baggy green crew-neck jumper and a fat red tie knotted up to his neck, mashing up over the top of the sweater. His head looked skeletal above it.

‘All dressed up?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

He gave me a shrug.

Before he left for the river I asked him — for a bit of a joke really — if he was going to go to mass, that Mrs McCarthy might be expecting him, down there in her rosary beads and headscarf. But he shook his head sharply and all he said was: ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I shall not want him.’

We stood at the door and I told him that I’ve never been much of a man for mass, either. A bit too much like a spiritual suppository. He cocked his head sideways in agreement, opened the door handle, turned around to face me, looked at the rods, switched them back and forth, touched the inside lining of his jacket where he had placed one or two of the new flies. He reached out to shake my hand, then drew it away quietly before I had a chance to shake. I was going to ask him why he wanted to do that, but he just turned away. He picked up the rods and left, shuffling slowly through the yard.

It was strange the way he walked, stopping every few yards to catch his breath, hitching the back of his grey trousers, shuffling along, contemplating the sky as if he might try to reach up and shake its hand, too. I just went outside and sat on Mam’s wall and celebrated the lack of rain — it was a beautiful bright morning.

* * *

Lord, I remember. Mornings back then, in the mid-seventies, before it all tumbled down around them.

Mam was building the low stone wall along the lane. She wore a yellow rain jacket, her silver hair woven back into a braid that touched the small of her back. She would kneel down at the half-built wall as if in prayer, sometimes singing a bit of a Mexican song. The wall wasn’t very well built, but it broke the land in a splendid way. Holes in it like rheumy eyes staring out at the fields. It threatened with topple — because she was always failing in one way or another, making it too high in places, too low in others, a little lopsided, a touch drunk. But she loved the building of it. She would start work when breakfast was finished, shortly after the morning swim. She stood and watched as my father and I fought the current, but even then you could tell she was itching to get started. Long thin fingers cracked against one another. As soon as we emerged from the water, she’d put her hand on my lower back and hustle me up to the kitchen, jogging alongside me, leaving the old man there. As I ate she pulled on her blue garden gloves and, just before my father breezed his way into the kitchen with his head wrapped in a towel, she’d lean to me and whisper: ‘Now, m’ijo, I will begin.’

The wall ran two hundred yards from the house to the main road. It was anywhere from two to four feet high, serpentine, almost coiling by the time it reached the road, as if she wanted to extend it further and further, but could only make it loop into itself. It looked like an ancient set of grey teeth. Birds sometimes nestled in the gaps between the stones. Mam was forever dismantling sections, putting it back together again, replacing larger stones with smaller ones, juggling, shuffling. Men rode past on bicycles and hailed her with a giant ‘Senorita,’ and she quickly corrected them. ‘Señora!’ she’d shout. They’d wink: ‘Whatever you say, Missus Lyons.’ She’d bend down to the wall again, cramming in a flat rock, or chiselling the side of a sharp stone. She covered her eyes with a brown arm so sparks didn’t jump up at her when she worked. At lunchtime the men would stop again, and instruct her on the building of the wall. She’d make them cups of tea in large white mugs, listen closely, nod her head, braids swinging, then wave them off and continue as before, stubbornly, steadfastly. It was her wall. It belonged solely to her. She made it the way she saw fit.

She spat when working — a continuation of the habit she had picked up working with the chickens in Mexico, when dust got in every pore.

The wall made some sort of crease in her boredom — there wasn’t much else for her to do, the washing fluttering out over the bog, dishes piling up in the sink, ham and cheese sandwiches to be made for my school lunchbox. She was in her late forties by then. The world was growing older. The wall helped her whittle away the days until she could return to Mexico. They argued a lot, she and the old man. They stood in the kitchen and waved their arms, pointing fingers at each other. Shouts rang around the house. Sometimes he thumped a fist into the cupboard — a little row of indentations appeared like puckered stabwounds in the wood. He saw no use for the wall — except as a place to crouch down to light a cigarette, or to take a quick clandestine piss. Maybe they were still in love, but it was a different quality of love than I imagine they had in the beginning — a pathic love, a brusque love, no magic there. When he was away on photographic jobs, a great grey silence descended around the house, and Mam sat me down and told me things. If she began in her native tongue, which I didn’t understand, she’d reach up to her grey hair and sweep it back, begin again in English. Bits and pieces of stories that began to mesh and merge for me, stories told to a child in a childish way, and Mexico became a country just down the road.

In the kitchen she scrubbed pots and pans, watched the passing of the world through the window. Cars trundled by, women in headscarfs on their way to coffee mornings, the postman’s van eddying past without stopping, herds of cattle driven along with sticks.

Her only friend was Mrs O’Leary. Mam went to her pub a few afternoons a week — it was a ship-pictured pub, old and creaky at the joints, much like its customers. Sometimes, in the summer months, she took me along. Mrs O’Leary kept chickens out the back, about a dozen of them pecking around. And Mrs O’Leary was not unlike an old chicken herself — with a great red face, a long beak of a chin and a wizened wattle abandoned underneath it. She must have been eighty years to heaven at that stage, a gigantic woman in chalcedony-coloured dresses, huge billows of breasts, a deep voice, always on the verge of a laugh. But her eyes were giving way, so that she could hardly recognise the labels of bottles anymore, sometimes mistaking Jameson’s for Paddy’s, Bushmills for Irish Mist, causing an uproar of universal sorrow among the men who stuck to whiskeys like limpets to sea-rocks. She couldn’t see the clock moving on the wall, walked into doorframes, could only read the headlines of the Irish Press, which served well for moppinig up brown spills on the concrete floor. What devastated Mrs O’Leary most was that she could hardly tell the sex of a newborn chicken anymore — a skill that required the eyes of a hawk, the patience of years, an awareness of the whimsical vicissitudes of nature. She sauntered up to our house one summer afternoon and said to Mam: ‘I hear you have a way with the nether regions,’ and, after a moment’s explanation, they both burst out laughing.

Mam said: ‘Of course, I will look at the chickens.’

Mam filled in for Mrs O’Leary, examined the undersides of the chicks. They would sit together on wooden stools at the back of the pub, feet swinging beneath them, chatting, laughing. Their cackle rose up and swung its way through the bar, where the men pounded their fists every half an hour to the chime of the headless cuckoo on the wall: ‘Another glass there, Alice, make it snappy.’ She sold the eggs to the men, who lay like dormant rags on the bar counter all day long, staring at the dusty mirrors, a musty smell pluming up from their jackets, handkerchiefs peeping from trouser pockets. But Mam and Mrs O’Leary ignored the men most of the time, sat out the back and whiled the time away, swapping bits and pieces of their lives, José with the Sewn Lip, Rolando, Miguel, fires in that far-off place, the peculiar Cici, the chicken opera that had developed in my grandmother’s yard in Mexico.

After a while Mam and Mrs O’Leary began to invent their own opera, using the men in the bar as their actors.

They were a curious bunch — men scared of living, even more scared of dying, afraid of ghosts that rose up and tiptoed through their kidneys. One sported a walrus moustache and wore shiny grey trousers, and he often slid off the end barstool, finishing his Guinness while sitting on the floor, a hedge of white cream above his lip. There was a misanthrope with a face like an oven-fresh roll, taking tenpenny pieces from behind his own ear. One man smelled of vinegar when he sweated. Another slumbered in the slop-house of his own giant Smithwick’s stains. All of them seemed to cough together in a choir, blowing their noses into the palms of their hands, bleary-eyed over newspapers, exhausted over whiskeys. ‘Who in the name of Jaysus stole the racing page?’ ‘Give us another jar there, Alice.’ ‘How about a lift home?’ ‘Well, there’s cars in the family but they’re all in America.’

From what I can figure out, they treated Mam fairly well at first — the odd swoop of the hat when she walked in, the shadowy wink, the quiet suggestion of lechery with dentures moving up and down in their mouths, a hailing of her new dress, a compliment on the shade of lipstick. But there were whispers of curiosity as well, and soon rumours abounded like storms. Storms, too, brought in strange birds — hadn’t a peregrine falcon arrived all the way from Nova Scotia once? She was a former lover of Che Guevara. She was Jack Dempsey’s girl. She was an orphan from the slums of Central America. She had failed in Hollywood. She was a daughter of Franco. She was in flight from a revolution. She had once owned a hacienda in southern Mexico, lost it all in a game of bridge. Or maybe she was a model for the old man’s camera, perhaps even posed for him, nude. The latter rumour — the one they eventually embraced — may have caused a peculiar quickness in their dentures, the shaky lifting of a glass to the mouth.

I came to the pub late afternoons, after school, swinging my satchel. Mam’s eyes were decked out, rocking back and forth in a curious sort of happiness that I didn’t recognise from home. Looking back, I can see that they could have been sisters, she and Alice O’Leary. They could have been in love with one another — sometimes sitting with a hand laid on the back of a hand, Mam’s mud-coloured fingers on Easter-lily white. Mrs O’Leary would run her fingers over my face. ‘He’s the spit of you, Juanita, feel the head of hair on him.’ Occasionally a gargantuan bottle of stout passed between them as the chickens pecked around in the garden. Mrs O’Leary would miss her lips with the drink, and a necklace of black would spill down the front of her apron, ‘Ah, Jaysus now, I couldn’t hit a barn door, used to be I could pee through a wedding ring, and now I couldn’t even hit a bucket!’

The Angelus was always Mam’s cue to go home and make dinner for my father. When it sounded out in the pub smoke, a rat-faced comedian began a recitation: ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us drunkards now and at the hour of eleven, amen.’ We walked home along the narrow roads together, Mam and I, seagulls over the bog, rainbows, winter stars rising early in the first darkness of the east. She was always wondering what to cook for him, and she’d stop by the wall, lodge in a few more rocks before she went to the kitchen, sometimes muttering quietly to herself.

The old man was freelancing for some agricultural magazines. His life had whittled down to fields of barley, gleaming red combine harvesters, cows with splatterings of shit on their tails, formal committee meetings, product launches, brand-new packages of bacon, shots of serious men in grey suits shaking hands at conventions. Banality at its finest, it meant little or nothing to him, it had no art, but it held him here. He took the sort of shots that appeared in the unread sections of newspapers. Or the type of images so indistinct that a byline underneath them embarrassed him. The world had come down to this — he was a father growing middle-aged and bored in a grey Mayo farmyard, patient as a draft-horse for a new season of grass. His wife built walls and spent afternoons in a strange pub. She talked and dreamt constantly of her homeland. He would slump his way through the front door in the evenings, smelling of old milk and cigarettes, sigh, kiss her brusquely on the cheek, ask her how much stout she had drunk in O’Leary’s. He’d wander around the table, put a hand to the back of my head, rub my hair: ‘How’s my young fella today?’ I’d tell him that I’d scored a hat-trick in a schoolyard football match. He’d put his hands into the pocket of his waistcoat and say: ‘Good on ya, lad, good on ya,’ and then lean his head down to his plate of food, every now and then looking up and winking at me, saying, ‘Hat-trick, huh?’ Moments like that, I loved him hugely, admired his bigness, but Mam sat at the end of the table and said nothing, all the time knowing that I hadn’t played football after school at all.

He kept a notebook with him, wrote the accounts in it. Sometimes he read the financial situation aloud at the dinner table, promised that soon there would be enough for us to make our great trip to the Chihuahuan desert. ‘Yes,’ he’d say, ‘just a few more months and another big job, we’ll be on the pig’s back.’ Mam’s lips would give a small twitch as if Mexico was sitting there, at the edge of her mouth, as if she might just be able to taste it.

But instead he built his own darkroom. He wanted to use the old cow shed, but it let in too much light, so he created it from scratch. Hired a JCB and dug out the foundations, sat me in the plastic swivel seat, pretended to let me steer the huge yellow digger. He drained the foundation holes with an industrial hose-pump and put in pipes, dropped the cement in by himself, let me draw my initials in it. He contracted a couple of men to help him on odd days. They called him ‘Boss,’ in an almost derisory way, and they went into exaggerated raptures when Mam brought out tea and slices of fruitcake. ‘Missus Lyons, ya make the best cup of tea in the county.’ ‘Jaysus, Missus Lyons, I’d put some of this on me head and beat me brains with me tongue trying to get at it.’

Once, when the old man was gone to town for sand, I heard a wolf-whistle as Mam bent down to work at her stone wall. She stood up and smiled, waved at them, and the men hung their heads and went back to work.

Out there with his shirt off in the cool drizzling summer, my father strutted around. His chest had begun to sag just a little so that he would sometimes pinch at his nipple to make it look hard. I remember now that he sucked in his belly and put his hands over the side of his love handles to seem slim. There was still a drama to him. Up on the roof the hammer was raised high, an arm cocked histrionically to show a muscle. Flamboyant with the electric drill, his finger wagged when he showed me how it worked. He had begun to comb his hair across, to cover up the large bald spot, but it was still impossible to control. It was long enough that it sometimes blew out and fell to his shoulder. He licked his fingers and pasted it back.

The building was modular and neat, made of cinder blocks, with two rooms separated by wood panelling, no windows, a flat roof, carefully insulated, mindfully monitored so that no light leaked in under the doors. He drilled bolts into the wall for file cabinets and shelves, ran in electricity and water, jerryrigged a phone line. He called it ‘The Gulag,’ a nickname that could have been a premonition. He had a string on the knob of the second door, which he kept locked, so that, when he pulled it, it would flip the lock and open the door. I would go out at dinnertime to call him in. Some shuffling around before he opened the door, a sound of papers moving, drawers closing, lids going down on boxes. Then he’d pull the string to expose the small banalities of his world. Rows of photos hung under a string of red bulbs, a contact sheet of Friesians or an advertisement for cheese. He’d wipe his hands on a piece of red towelling and ask me: ‘Is it chips she’s cooking again, tonight?’

It was a familiar phrase.

Early one morning I heard the old man thunder down the stairs. I followed him. A fire in the kitchen, the chip-pan ablaze. Mam stood in the middle of the floor, staring at it, eyes effulgent above her gorse-coloured dressing gown. She didn’t even look at him, kept staring at the fire as it leaped. ‘I only wanted to cook something,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t sleep, you see that I cannot sleep lately.’ The old man wrapped the flap of his string vest around the handle of the pan. He moved through the kitchen, muttering some surreptitious obscenity, stormed outside to the yard, where he threw the pan into long grass for the night dew to seal it. The last few sparks were spectral in the grass. He came back inside, a burn on the inside of his palm, licked at it, chopped an orange in half to soothe the wound.

‘Are ya off your fucken rocker, woman, who wants chips at this hour of night?’

She was by the stove, still motionless beside the tea kettle, not unlike a tea kettle herself, one hand bent out spout-like, her face silver, slowly beginning to move on the balls of her feet, but lucid, a whistle in the voice — ‘It was just a little mistake, Michael, we all make mistakes’. He looked at me, his eye-whites slashed through with twigs of redcurrant, fingered at a bit of sleep in one of the corners, then scratched at the cavern of his belly button, looked like he was trying hard to remember something that wasn’t important anyway. He moved the tongue around his lips: ‘And you, young fella, isn’t it time for all good children to be in bed?’

He guided me to the hallway, kissed me on the forehead. I hugged him, ascended the stairs in a confusion of love and hatred. Don’t worry about it, son,’ he said, ‘your Mam’s just a little tired.’

That night I heard them arguing downstairs, and after that, when I called him in from the darkroom for dinner, he’d say: ‘Is it chips she’s cooking again, tonight?’

On television there were programmes where men came up behind women at stoves, wrapped their arms around their waists, even helped them stir whatever was in a pot — and I wondered why the old man didn’t do that with Mam. Slumbering in their own solitude, they didn’t even saunter to mass together, as other parents did. On Saint Valentine’s Day I gave them identical holy crosses made from reeds, left over from Saint Brigid’s Day. They came up to my bed at separate times and thanked me, my father with a pound note, my mother with a cup of hot chocolate. They were in different worlds, impossible to bridge. I imagined them swaying through the house, the open jacket of my father’s pyjamas not even touching against the jumpers that Mam wore over her nightdress, the two crosses placed in different windows at opposite ends of the house.

Weeds grew around the bottom of his darkroom. I tried to break in, but he had locked it tight and there were no windows to get through. Once, when he was travelling for a week, I tried to dig a tunnel for myself at the back. I imagined myself as some gaunt-faced prisoner breaking into his gulag, war ribbons dangling from the holy medal at my chest, using a trowel to scrabble away at the mucky mess, him high above me in a watchtower with a rifle. All I hit was foundation stone. When he came back he asked me about the hole. I told him I’d seen a dog back there, digging. ‘You chase him off with a big stick next time you see him, right, son?’ I gave up after that, though there were still times I rifled through the pockets of his trousers, unsuccessfully looking for the key.

The old man made friends with a big-shot who owned a meat-processing company in Swinford. O’Shaughnessy was the sort of man who had bottles jangling in the pockets of granite-grey suits. He had a bulbous nose and a huge belly, drove expensive cars that rolled down our lane late at night and beeped very loud for the old man to come out drinking. Mam hated O’Shaughnessy, avoided him when he came to the house — he was always trying to touch the sleeves of her blouses, planting Continental-style kisses on her cheeks. Sometimes, when he visted, she went out and did a few bits and pieces of work on her wall, even at night, in the dark. The old man and O’Shaughnessy would come home when the pubs closed and they would sit in the living room together, loud guffaws rising up through the house.

Once or twice Mam came into my room and sat by the window while they were downstairs. She said nothing, just looked out the window, watched the pattern of weather outside. The thing that got her most was the cold, the more or less constant lack of sun, the way it would seep downward into her marrow. She often wore two or three jumpers over one another. In the morning, while she got the fire ready in the living room, she kept the tea kettle beside her, warming her hands over the steam, even wearing gloves while she cooked breakfast, teeth chattering. Still amazed by snow, in winter she would watch my snowmen dribble down to a carrot and eye-pebbles, hugging herself into a coat, stamping her feet on the ground, watching the clouds made from our breath. The whips of winds shook her to the core — she was a watcher of storms. Huge billows lashed in from the Atlantic, carrying spindrift, causing the river trees to kowtow to the ground, litter to animate itself. One storm was a peculiar blessing for her — a sandstorm from the Sahara, carrying dust, red dust, all the way from North Africa, depositing it on the land so that tiny particles covered the windshields of cars, the roofs of houses, gates, walls, boots, the leaves of flowers by the front door. She didn’t wash the windows for weeks, enthralled by the revisit of red dust to her life. She ran her finger along the window ledge and held it up for me to see, ‘Isn’t it nice, m’ijo? A red wind.’

O’Shaughnessy and my father began to take trips abroad, mostly Belgium and France, something to do with EEC beef deals. Pictures were taken of O’Shaughnessy at conventions, wearing his fat gaudy ties. They’d be gone for a fortnight at a time, and Mam would fall asleep in a wicker chair by my bedroom window, three blankets pulled around her.

And then one evening the old man arrived home from France with two cardboard boxes. It had been a particularly cold day, frost on the ground, all the windows of the house locked tight, robins frantic over bits of bread in the yard. O’Shaughnessy dropped my father off at the front of the house, blew my mother a kiss as she stood at the window in her jumpers. She turned away. The old man lumbered the boxes and his suitcase out on to the porch, shuffling his feet precisely over the ice. He sat there for a while, the boxes at his feet. Mam asked me to call him in for dinner — this time he said nothing about chips. He breezed his way into the house, threw off his coat, just a white shirt underneath, combed his hair across his pate, pasted it down with spittle, and put his suitcase down against the kitchen table. Mam was bent over some eggs with salsa sauce, rubbing her gloved hands together.

‘Two shakes of a lamb’s tail,’ my father said, and he stroked her tenderly on the side of the face.

She looked up, surprised. He went back outside and lifted the cardboard boxes from the porch. Despite the chill, two large ovals of sweat formed on his underarms. He laid the two boxes on the kitchen table and nodded up and down, turned and told me it was time for me to take my swim. ‘He will be frozen,’ said Mum. My father winked: ‘Nah, he’ll be fine, he’s a big man now.’ There was a strange look in the old man’s eye. I went upstairs and got the two sets of togs. At the front door I waited for him to come with me. I held the togs up, but he motioned me away with his hand, told me to go on my own. He took out a knife and began cutting the string from the cardboard boxes. I waited at the window.

‘This is a present for your Mam,’ he said, ‘you go on down and I’ll join ya later, take your coat, wrap up well when ya get out.’

We had often swum in the cold before, but always in the morning, the initial shock of climbing in disappearing, a feeling that another skin had developed over my body. I had become better at going against the current, didn’t have to hang on to the poplar roots any more. I swam for maybe ten minutes, let the water push me backwards, went to the pool at the side of the river and pulled a hollow reed, went underwater, breathed through it. It was a strange green world down there, immense and fascinating and slimy, until I was so far down in it that water poured through the reed and I let it go, and my breath left me at the same time, bubbles rising up, and I sank, felt like I was swimming blind, the pressure thumping my chest, pushing arms outwards. I sat on some riverbottom stones until the pain became almost peaceful, a barrage of it in my lungs, and I shunted myself up, resurfaced.

The meat factory had only just been set up and none of the offal floated in the water yet, although I had begun to notice a little bit of a smell. I paddled around the river for a while, saluted a duck, got out and pulled my anorak around me — the zip was broken — put a towel around my neck. When I came back up from the riverbank Mam was at her wall in her big coat and three sweaters, and the old man was nowhere to be seen. I walked up and stood beside her, my hair dripping wet, a chatter in my teeth, wanting to tell her about my swim, but she told me to go into the house and towel myself off. She was looking down at a place where her wall had given through, one of the teeth fallen from the grey gum of it. She looked at it long and hard, knelt down, picked up a field rock, tried to wedge it back in, tried very hard but couldn’t, broke a fingernail, said something in Spanish I didn’t understand. It sounded as if there was custard in her mouth. I thought she was just cold. Her body began to tremble, quietly at first. ‘I thought it would support,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s so easy thing to do.’ She tried to wedge another rock in, but it jutted out and her fingers shook. She pushed her knee against the rock, but it still didn’t budge. She stood up, shivering.

‘I always thought it will be better than this, m’ijo,’ she said suddenly. ‘I always told myself it will be better than this.’

And I — ten years old — thought she was talking about the hole in the wall, and said: ‘It’ll be all right, Mam, we’ll give it another shot in the morning.’

* * *

The ancestry of act — every moment leading up to haunt that one particular moment. Instead of Mam’s own body breaking itself down in the slow natural entropy of motherhood and age, it became something else altogether — destroyed for her in a strange sort of way. It wasn’t even a vagarious thing, or a whim, or an impulse on the old man’s part — it might have been easier that way. But he had planned it for a long time, I suppose. He wanted a memorial of some sort, an epitaph for himself, a packet of light to emerge and print itself indelibly on his life, to say: I was once great, look at these great photos I took, look how perfect they are, look how I once lived, I was alive! Maybe he laboured over that book, maybe he pored over all his contact sheets with a singular intensity, maybe he truly believed that it would reinvent things, or maybe he thought it was a gesture of love — that she could look in its pages and remember herself. Or some vision of herself.

But something other than her life was on display — it was the moments of her body. Her neck and breasts and stomach and legs and spine and moles and pubic hair and ankles and eyes and raven-dark hair under mosquito nets, near fire towers, in a pine-pole camp, in a dark Bronx bedroom, screaming out for some sense of place, lost between the cheap covers of a book.

* * *

The night of the carnival in Castlebar. Eleven years old. The old man was still broad and big-boned, but heavier. A summer evening, and a gulf of men stood around under a marquee of lightbulbs, in white shirts, grey waistcoats, and gigantic red ties, chatting. They ran their fingers through wild emigrating hair. Some of them gazed longingly at a girl in a chartreuse jumper and blossoming lipstick who was selling toffee apples at a stall. Other men stood by and played darts at another stall, keen on the ace of hearts, which might have won them a tiny bottle of Paddy or an ashtray leaping with flowers. Their wives roamed around with plastic bags full of goldfish about to suffocate. From the big wheel — which, in retrospect, wasn’t very big — boys my age were sending down jets of saliva through the gaps in their front teeth on to the onlookers below. I wanted to be up there with them, but Mam had told me to stay with her. She and the old man had been arguing again. He was walking around, fulminating under a flat hat, taking pictures. But after a while he came up to us, camera across his shoulder, and asked Mam if she wanted to go for a spin on the chairoplanes. She nodded and smiled. I was stunned by the smile. There’d been a long period of silence in our house. Mam had stopped eating at the table with him. She was sleeping in the guest room. When they talked, the old man would give a shrug of the shoulders, like a twitch. She spent most of her time at the wall. The huge dark bags had filled out under her eyes, and I suppose they just kept up a semblance of themselves, for my sake, nothing else tying them to one another.

Mam gave me a few pence to get a toffee apple. The girl at the stand had cheeks white as Styrofoam. I watched as the old man launched Mam on the chair, rocking and twirling the seat every time she came around, leaning into her, saying something. For a while she was actually laughing, I couldn’t believe it. Her skirt was flying upwards in the air. A chiffon scarf leaped backwards from her neck, a few silver strands of hair were in view from the scarf, a gasp of teeth all caesium-white. The chairoplane was moving in a circle, faster and faster, a spinning top. Each time she went past, Mam leaned out and said something to him, smiling. He was chuckling as he pushed her. But suddenly she didn’t lean out anymore.

A group of older boys was gathered down by one of the tents, pointing at Mam. Her skirt was billowing and her thin legs were licking outwards under the billow, exposing her underpants. She blanched and shoved her fists down into the skirt to stop it from blowing upwards. As she went around she leaned outwards from the chair, towards the old man, and perhaps there was a bouquet of bile from her lips — ¡Vete al diablo Michael Lyons! — and the old man suddenly moved away, the chairoplane bringing Mam outwards towards a malachite night, around again to a muskrat-muddy ground where footprints ranged, around, around, around, gradually slowing, her skirt tucked and held between her knees now. The boys moved off, laughing, and my old man went down by the strongarm machine, with a cigarette stooping like a ladder down to his chin, the long sideways swish of his hair Brylcreemed down.

Mam climbed off the chairoplane, smoothing the back of her skirt, hitching up some pantyhose at the knees, her voice a loom, interweaving with carnival notes, spinning out once again. ‘Come, Conor,’ she said to me. I pretended that I didn’t hear and tucked the toffee apple under my jacket so the lads on the wheel couldn’t spit down into it. The moths flared away under carnival lights beneath a massive burlesque of stars.

I saw the old man walking towards the strongarm machine, a giant loping stride as if he’d just stepped out of an advertisement for very strong cigarettes, like he always walked — even when I hated him I loved him for the gigantic way he walked — shoulders swinging, everything in a loop around him. Mam went the other way, moving through the tents and the broken brown bottles. I stood there between them, by the toffee-apple stall, listening to a man play a concertina. I walked towards her as she moved through the sea of shirts and gypsy-fed eyes and faces lacquered with alcohol and — even before I was beside her — the hand, brown and slender, reached out backwards to take mine, a well used reflex. I took her fingers. The spindrift of carnival seeped outwards to further-strung lights of the town. Behind my back the old man was standing by the machine with the giant hammer in the air, against the backdrop of a red and white tent. The carnival clamour wilted as Mam and I moved towards the edge of the car park, and I was wondering if my father was the one sounding out the trilly muscleman bell as we tramped down weeds at the side of a field, Mam and I, circling around, waiting for him to drive us home. From the tents I could still see the boys peeping.

She was famous by then.

The books were censored in Ireland, of course — at first they couldn’t be found anywhere except in his darkroom, although O’Shaughnessy probably had some, too. Maybe it was O’Shaughnessy who showed them to people. Or perhaps they were found by emigrants in obscure European bookstores, sent back home in envelopes with fabulous stamps, young men stumbling across them in the corner of a Parisian stall, tentatively peeling back a cover, feeling the heart thump, looking over a thin shoulder, lifting the page higher. Maybe there were drunken miscreants in the backstreets of Liège who recognised his name on the shabby front cover — men with holes in overcoat pockets so they could reach all the way down to their articulate penises. Or curly-haired artists crazed against the sunsets of a plaza in Rome, denizens of vivacious dreams who loved the photos for what they were, sent them home, wrapped in brown paper to beat the censors.

I had seen a copy. The door of the darkroom had been left open, the old man was gone for the day, and twenty or so were stacked in a corner. At first I didn’t understand that it was her. I just kept flicking the pages. A huge feeling of sickness rose up in me. I scoured quickly through it again, hands shaking. I remember feeling as if a big vacuum was sucking the air from me, dry-retching, a world churning in me, slamming the door, afraid to go home. I had a dream that night. The book was on the coffee table and my schoolteachers were in the house. They picked up the book and smiled, comparing different shots, bits of chalk circling around the pages, one teacher constantly circling her breasts. I kept grabbing the book and tucking it behind the pail of peat near the fireplace so that they wouldn’t see a leg leap from the glass of the coffee table, or a nipple emerge from under a plate of biscuits, or a belly button give an eye from beneath a teacup. But the teachers kept tut-tutting at me, taking it back, some of them holding it up in the air. A giant bamboo cane was raised by the headmaster and I woke, tremulous, walked out into the landing and hunched down, inventing ways of killing my father: make him swallow his chemicals, thump him to a black and white pulp.

Copies got through to people in town, or the rumour of the book did, so that the whole place swivelled and the postman was famous and the telephone operator was abuzz. Father Herlihy flapped in his vestments and made a veiled threat, saying, ‘Blessed be those who know the reasons for things, we must fling all filth out! Fling it out, I say!’ Men in peatbogs who had heard about the photos hailed the heroic eye of my father, caps raised up over centuried soil. Workers from the abattoir, blood-splattered, shit-splattered, passed by our house, looking up at the bedroom windows for a glance which would never come. And the women in their coffee mornings surely set about whispering, lipstick on their teeth, slapping their tongues against the news.

‘Listen up now, I heard they took photos in the bath.’

‘Go away out of that.’

‘Swear to God.’

‘You’re having me on.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Well, the water bill must be something fierce.’

There wasn’t a whole lot of money in our house anymore — the old man had obviously paid to get the book published, and he never read from his notebook anymore. The silence at our dinner table doubled and redoubled itself. The idea of our trip to Mexico had vanished.

Mrs O’Leary still supported Mam. She still went to the pub as often as she could — slinking through the bar quickly with her head down as barstools shifted and swivelled, out to the back garden where the chickens were. There were probably jokes made — ‘There she goes, Mrs Public Hair,’ the rat-faced comedian might have said, ‘would ya look at the swish of her!’ I figure that much, because Mrs O’Leary banned him from the pub. Over the bar counter she declared with a flourish of a fleshy hand: ‘Leave her bloody well alone! I’d do it myself, go bloody starkers, only they’d laugh at me best and whistle for more.’

I continued to meet Mam at the pub after school, until one afternoon when birds were beating blackwinged against the sky and hay was on the wind and rain was dolloping through chestnut trees. I pulled the heavy door open, was met with curls of smoke. The man with the walrus moustache was sliding off his barstool, drunk. He looked at me as if surprised by my existence, curved his index finger towards me, ‘Come here a second, you,’ he said, ‘come here,’ leaning into me with a wink. His breath was stale with Woodbine, his eyes like apples just bitten into and discoloured, his moustache hairy over his teeth. He shifted himself on the barstool, looked around, reached forward, and out of his lunchbox on the counter, suddenly, like a rabbit pulled from a hat, came a picture of Mam which he held in the air and examined for a moment. He licked the hedge of Guinness off his moustache, rotated the photo between his fingers. He sighed, smiled at me, saying, ‘Look at this, look at this, would you have a look at this,’ and I looked, and she was there, staring out with sepia eyes from a bed overhung by a white mosquito net, beside an old lantern, beside a painting of flowers, beside a crack in the wall — Mexico — and the walrus man was twirling her in his fingers, incanting a low whistle over his lunchbox, and I stared at Mam, her breasts all soggy from lettuce and tomato sandwiches.

Mrs O’Leary broke out from the bar counter, a greyhound from a trap, slapped the man with the walrus moustache, slapped him twice, so hard that his head moved, a wooden doll, side to side, the sound of it around the bar, ‘Get the fucken bejesus outa here!’ she shouted, then blessed herself for the blasphemy. ‘Sorry, Father,’ she said to the ceiling. She gathered me to her immense chest, held me there, turned to Mam, who had come in from the yard, and said: ‘I suppose you’d be best off leaving the young fella at home.’

Mrs O’Leary wiped the topaz sleeves of her billowy dress across my face. She reached for a bottle of Guinness at the same time, took a slurp that dribbled down the front of her dress. Mam was fumbling at my anorak — trying to hold the steel teeth of the zip together to close it, hands shaking. Mam looked up and said sadly: ‘Yes, Alice, I suppose I should leave the child at home, should’t I?’

* * *

Geese out over the land, heading towards the sea. Long necks stretched, gunnelling their wings against the sky. They made a curious sound with their wings as they went overhead, like rifle fire. Spread their wings out to hover, settled down somewhere distant. Quite gorgeous.

I got up off the wall and went back to the house to make a pot of tea, then went down to the river to see if he was doing all right. By the time I got to the river some of the tea had spilled down on to the tray and soaked into one or two of the biscuits. I picked one up and ate it. It felt like a strange Sunday communion melting on my tongue. He was sleeping in the red and white lawn chair and the rods had fallen down by his feet. All the rubbish still lay unmoving in the water, the same piece of Styrofoam that was there last week, stuck in the reeds. I thought that maybe I should clean the river up for him before I leave tomorrow — but instead I just sat down and watched its colours change as clouds passed through the sky.

The old man was smacking his lips together — like Cici had once said, maybe he was eating his dreams.

But his breathing was somewhat irregular and I moved up close to him, felt his breath against my cheek to make sure he was all right. It came loud and patchy through his nostrils. For a moment I moved to wake him up, shake his shoulder, decided against it. I sat and sipped at the tea, ate a few more biscuits, had a bizarre and hopelessly ridiculous notion — maybe I would feed him a damp biscuit while he slept.

* * *

Mam started buttoning up everything very high, even when we went to the beach, especially when we went to the beach. A long stretch of clean yellow sand, edged by rocks, studded on the ten good days of summer with deckchairs and bathtowels and coloured balls floating on the air. Men with farmers’ tans shoved the top end of matches into the ground, exhaling smoke generously to the sky. Older boys stood with binoculars on the dunes, itchy with lust for the sight of a porpoise, or a ghost ship, or a drowning, or a daring bikini.

Along the hard edge of the beach a middle-aged gypsy whom I had seen in town was guiding a donkey. Beside him, on a motorbike, was Jimmy Donnelly from secondary school, older than me, going very slowly, no helmet on. Donnelly and the tinker nodded to one another, weaving in and out, hoof marks in a strange language amid the tyre tracks. A young girl stared at them, vanilla stream from an ice cream runnelling down the front of her chin. Dogs were unleashed and curious, and urinating by seaweed. A woman with toffee-coloured shoulders, wrapped in a towel, piled herself into a swimsuit, ballooning her breasts up with one hand. Mam sat on the blanket, wearing a white linen blouse buttoned up to the neck, a neck so thin and strained that when she took a cup of tea from the red flask and drank — sandflies jumping around on the rim of the cup — it looked as if it might be very painful to take it down, the striations furrowing down towards her bony chest. She rubbed cream on the smooth curve of her calf muscles where her skirt was hitched up, to the knee, never any further, not anymore.

The old man was walking along the strand in his poppy-red togs, his belly plopping out over the drawstring, lifting up a jellyfish with a small piece of driftwood, turning the bell-shaped body over and over, leaning down to stare at it, his stomach creasing. Mam took a kitchen knife, from the plastic bag because we couldn’t find the hamper in the morning — he had stood by the door, shouting ‘Are yez coming or what?’, her fumbling, ‘Of course we are coming,’ him ringing the doorbell over and over, ‘Well, so’s bloody Christmas!’ — and she held the knife and unscrewed the lid from the honey jar, smearing it very slowly, precisely, over some slices of bread. She smoothed it out to the edges as if everything somehow depended on it, long slow rolls of her hand, stopping only to whip the stalks of hair back from her eyes. She wiped her fingers on the edge of the blanket. The motorbike beeped and Donnelly raised his arm in a gesture of glory, left a plume of smoke around the donkey. But the wheel got stuck in the soft sand. He toppled, looked up ignominiously from the ground. The tinker, riding bareback, reared in laughter. Donnelly suddenly started laughing, too, and pushed the bike through heavy sand to the applause of some old ladies.

Donnelly and the gypsy started shouting, so that everyone looked up and listened, ‘Fivepence for a trot, ten for a canter, come and get it!’

I moved down to the hard edge of the strand. Donnelly’s companion smelled like campfire and cider. He held the rope in brown fingers, leaned across, eyes green as silage, looked at me and said, ‘Are ya right, so? Where’s your money?’ ‘I don’t have any money,’ I said. ‘Well, fuck off, so.’ Donnelly started whispering something in the tinker’s ear. The man whipped his head back with laughter. ‘Come here,’ he said to me, ‘d’ya want a go on the donkey?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Fair enough, get your old dear down here to give us a blowjob.’ ‘What?’ ‘Your old dear, she gives us a blowjob, we’ll give ya a trot.’ Donnelly began laughing. I edged away from the donkey, and the tinker started whispering something in the animal’s ear, giving it some form of benediction. Is that what he means? I thought. I was eleven years old.

I ran up the strand to where Mam was headbent staring at the ground, and the old man was standing with his arms stretched out, like Jesus crucified, arguing about no butter on the sandwiches — ‘Ya want me to eat these fucken things dry?’ — so I sat on the edge of the blanket and watched Donnelly and the tinker roll down along the beach again. A sandwich was laid in my lap.

‘Mam, what’s a blowjob?’

The old man suddenly slapped his knees uproariously. ‘Ah, Jaysus, even I’ve forgotten that! Even I’ve forgotten what that is!’ Mam’s face drained slowly, plucked at the tassels on the side of the blanket, ‘I don’t know, m’ijo, ask me later.’

Donnelly and the tinker were down the beach now with two girls on the back of the donkey, another man alongside them with his handkerchief knotted on his head, trying hard to keep up, with a plastic bucket and shovel in his hand. My father grunted and walked down to the water’s edge, pulling lint from his belly button. After a while the beach slowly began to clear. It was Mam’s time — I had seen it before — she was stretching her legs out along the edge of the blanket, her arms moving up to massage the back of her neck. Donnelly and the gypsy moved off from the dune, cigarettes held furtively. Along the length of the beach the other blankets had been lifted, Dunnes Stores bags tumbled, a Fanta can rolled towards the dunes, a cigarette butt bumped into a jellyfish. The sun gave a bow to the sea. Soon there was nobody left on the strand except the tinker, who was pulling his donkey up towards the cross where the life-belt was, red and white. The road curled like a rope away through stone walls built to last an eternity of storms, unlike hers. Not a soul was left save us and a few glad seagulls, bragging with crusts of bread over the sea.

She took off her blouse, unbuttoned it slowly, underneath was her purple swimsuit, like an anemone around her, sea-bound. ‘You come?’ she said. ‘Course I’m coming, Mam.’ The cavernous hollows in around the throat, smokeblue, lines criss-crossing each other moving upwards to a strange smile, aware of her body, tentative, ashamed, and maybe the tinker staring back at us, but she was suddenly cantering ahead of me like a purple tenpence towards the ocean, the old man absorbed by the sight of jellyfish, while her swift skinny arms made butterfly shapes in the shallow edge of the Atlantic, her spraying me with water, leaning in conspiratorially, saying: ‘Conor, I will explain to you that word when you are older.’

That night she stood in the kitchen under the fluorescent lights and pushed her fork through an uneaten plate of food.

I came home from school the next day and she was down by the firepit. She was wearing an apron from Knock shrine, a gift from Mrs O’Leary, the picture of the Madonna with a bit of homemade salsa on her nose. Along the lane on the bicycle, the brakes squeaking, I pulled up to where she was standing.

‘What ya doing, Mam?’

She swung around, a little startled. ‘You are home early,’ she said, wiped her hands on the face of the apron.

‘What’re ya burning, Mam?’

‘Nothing, m’ijo, come on inside, I have something special for you.’

She took my schoolbag from my shoulder as we walked to the front porch. A parcel sat on the table from Dublin, brown and crinkled. She handed me the scissors with long lean fingers — ‘Go on now, hurry quickly.’ The parcel produced a brand-new blue anorak. I laid it on the table but she told me to put it on. It was still hot outside, and I didn’t want to wear it, but I zipped it up quickly to try it on. She was happy then over the salsa pot, looking out the window. I said that I was just going outside for a moment, took the anorak off and left it sitting on the table.

Out in the firepit she had burned herself, made a pyre of her past, a giant cardboard box of books with the ends of flame around it, licking the edge of herself in the same way that the mountain fires did, a wale of fire upridged on the books. I poked around the flamed edges with a stick, around the mosquito net that the walrus man loved so much, around a dozen different bedrooms, around a tumult of skin, a dressing-table photo unburnt, a grove of trees ashy at the edges, a leg prominent from the knee down, a bedsheet disappearing. Suddenly she was shouting at me from the porch, with the coat in her fingers.

‘Come here, come here right now!’

I ran through the farmyard.

‘What are you doing there? You don’t like the coat?’

‘Oh, yeah, I like it, yeah.’

‘You don’t use it?’

‘Don’t want to get it dirty, Mam.’

She nodded her head and beckoned me with a large wooden fork covered in red sauce. ‘Come here and taste my salsa, tell me if it’s good, maybe there are missing peppers.’

But I leaned against the door and placed my muddy foot on the black and white linoleum and said: ‘I hate him, too, Mam. I hate him, too, he’s a bastard! I hate him!’ I had found out in school that day what the word meant — Hey lads, Lyonsy doesn’t know what a blowjob is! Are ya thick, Lyonsy? Everyone knows what a blowjob is! — and I had come home, detesting my father for the enormity of what he had done.

But Mam spun around and pulled me quickly to the chair — with surprising strength — and laid me down over her knee and slapped me, hard, six times on the back of my legs with the fork, sauce splaying around. ‘Don’t say that again never, don’t make me hear it again, don’t say that again never!’ I couldn’t understand her. The back of my legs were stinging, and, afterwards, at the kitchen table, she said: ‘Your Papa should hit you himself, but he never hit anybody in his life, you should be thankful, he never even hit a fly in his life! Your Papa never touched anybody!’ Later that afternoon, with a scarf of dusk coming down over the courtyard, and a smell of slaughter from the meat factory, I saw her as she strode purposefully back out to the firepit, arms swinging down by her side. She finished the job off — burning the books with a small splash of petrol and a match that took ages to light. They were damp and they snapped when she struck them. She didn’t throw much of a shadow anymore.

* * *

He woke up from the lawn chair, unaware I was sitting there, reached into his pocket for his packet of cigarettes. Before he lit up he reamed up from his chest and let a gob out towards the river. It landed near the bank, close to where I was sitting. The spit was strung through with blood. ‘Jaysus,’ he said, noticing me, ‘I must have fallen asleep.’ He saw me looking down. He was silent for a while, then he breathed deeply again through his nose.

‘Too much raspberry jam on me toast this morning.’

I felt a foul revulsion and love for him.

* * *

Us in the kitchen. Her hair thrown back behind her in long rushes of tungsten. She looked up at him as he took a plastic lighter from his shirt pocket, a pack of Major. ‘Living with you is like living with the ashtray!’ she shouted. He rose up from his chair, scooted it along the floor, cigarette between his teeth, pointed at her, shouting: ‘And it’s well you’d know about bloody ashtrays, isn’t it, woman?’

It was the morning after the books had become ash themselves, the wall of the firepit scorched, an aurora of herself amongst it. ‘You and your chip-pans and your books and your fires,’ he said, softer now, ‘would ya ever get a grip on yourself?’

He bravadoed his way out the door, camera bag slung over his shoulder in a motion of boredom — off to take pictures of some cows, corn-fed for the meat factory. He closed the car door, beeped the horn, lifted his finger wearily from the wheel.

Mam stood in the kitchen, awash in thought, by the stove, perhaps recalling fires of such spectacular magnitude that looking at the chip-pan or out at the firepit simply made her shake her head. She wiped her suds on the pocket of the holy apron — ‘Okay, m’ijo, I have been looking at this for a long time,’ staring at the stain above the stove. ‘How do we take it off the wall?’ The car moved away towards the road. Flies landed on the sticky yellow paper hung from the windowpane. I propped myself up on the stove, scrubbed with a Brillo pad. We leaned into the wall, but the mark wouldn’t come off no matter how hard we tried, it had its own stigmata. She stared into space, reached down and twirled the knobs on the radio. After a while I climbed down from the stove, said: ‘Mam, I should go, I’m going to be late for school again.’

She stared at the fire stain for a second. ‘Quitate,’ she said, smiling, ‘I will take care of this myself.’

She wiped a smudge of black from above my eyebrow, kissed me gently on the cheek. ‘Your new coat looks great.’ She shoved a bar of chocolate into my pocket. I went outside into the spindrifty air, past the mound of ash in the firepit, hopped on the bicycle, pedalled furiously, brown puddlewater skipping up on to the back of my coat. At the meat factory my father was chatting with a man who was leading half a dozen fat cows out to be photographed — later to be butchered and hung on hooks. Two of the cows were simultaneously letting dung out to splatter on their tails. Crows flew in behind the cattle to feed on the disturbed insects in the hoof marks. I watched my father for a moment, leaned my head down to the handlebars and rode over the hump-backed bridge to school.

Later that week the old man was off in Europe again, and Mam was at home waiting for Mrs O’Leary to come in for lunch. It was the first time that Mrs O’Leary had come for a meal. Mam had cut flowers. I thought that she might even eat something substantial that day, she had prepared tortillas. Jittery, she ran long fingers over one another.

At noon, a taxi swanned down the laneway. Mrs O’Leary sallied up to our door, feeling her way with a walking stick. The taxi driver carried tins of paint, and rollers and brightly coloured vases and a host of exotic flowers — ‘A small gift for you, Juanita,’ Mrs O’Leary said. It was all laid down on the floor of the living room. The driver took off, tipping his flat hat to Mrs O’Leary.

‘Right,’ said Mrs O’Leary, ‘let’s decorate.’

The three of us dragged the old furniture from the living room to the farmyard, Mrs O’Leary cursing about her eyes. The yard looking strange to me with its tables and chairs standing lopsided on the rickety stones. Inside, we put old plastic bags, newspapers, and bedsheets on the carpet, painted the living-room walls with a very light pink, like flesh. We stood the vases on the mantelpiece and the flowers were carefully moved from corner to corner. ‘I think we should put the plant on the far corner, don’t you?’ said Mam. Some music erupted from the Victrola. We stopped early in the afternoon for a tea-break and Mrs O’Leary produced a bottle of Guinness from her handbag. She asked Mam if she liked the new look, if it was Mexican enough. Mam said, ‘Yes, it is very real,’ and then she whispered as if in a trance that it was the happiest she had ever been in her life, but her fingers were still rubbing over one another, and talk was sparse at the table, the tortillas having grown cold, Mrs O’Leary wondering how her stand-in was doing at the bar.

Two days later, when the old man came back from France, he gave a generous nod to the room and said, ‘Not bad, not bad at all.’ He laid a box down in the centre of the floor, lit a cigarette. Mam’s cheeks went gaunt in the kitchen as she bit them. He took the box of books from the floor and put them out in the darkroom, padlocked the door. ‘You won’t be burning these,’ he said. He wouldn’t show them to her, but I found out, years later, that it was a different book, a completely different one, using the shots of his early life in Mayo, when he used Loyola. He must have paid a fortune to get the book done. Mam left soon after, and my father made a pariah of himself — with me, and almost everyone else — his only occupation in life being the whisk of a fishing line in the air, Mrs O’Leary avoiding him, O’Shaughnessy gone on to other things, only Mrs McCarthy’s car tires crunching on gravel as she brought the odd Christian meal down to him.

* * *

I felt tense when evening rolled around. We were still sitting in the same spot. He was dozing, hadn’t fished all day, even with the new flies. I noticed a couple of old Spar bags tangled in the gorse, got up, picked them off, and started cleaning around the river. Went down to the footbridge first, the planks loose and rickety, creaking away as I leaned over. Used a stick to drag in the piece of Styrofoam to the bank. The ripples reached out, aspiring to one another. Plucked the Styrofoam out with my fingers and put it in the bag, used the stick to lift the plastic bags from the reeds. The sun was low on the horizon, and the geese had gone from the sky, only a few swifts out. I walked down along the far side of the bank, picking up a sack, a length of rope, some paper.

A drizzle began.

‘What ya doin?’ he asked when he woke, the wind-blown droplets on his face.

‘Just picking up some litter.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Something to do.’

‘I suppose it is.’

He stood up to go to the house. I watched as he went through the bushes and over the stile. He was gone for a long time and I thought he was sheltering from the rain, but he surprised me when he came back carrying a large black plastic bag.

He walked to the edge of the water and stood, the flanges of his hair blowing out, saluting the sky. The drizzle was lighter now. He peeled open the top of the big black plastic bag, shook it up and down to belly air into it, ballooning it outwards. I came across the footbridge and we started picking up more litter from the banks, a crisp bag, a soggy newspaper decaying near the reeds, a giant meat-factory syringe, a paper sack full of nails on the bank, a few small wine bottles shoved into the ground in a circle. He flipped one of the bottles towards me to catch, laughing, shuffled around and stabbed at the litter with his stick, dragged it, leaned down slowly to pick it up, filled the bag half-full, every now and then stopping to hum himself a bit of a tune, or look at the sky, or to run his hands along the side of his face.

I was about twenty yards away from him and he was staring down into the reeds. I drifted over, curious. An unrolled condom was lying in the small brown pool beyond the reeds, and he was staring at it — ‘Fucken litterbugs, the lot of them,’ he said, pointing towards the town, ‘up there.’

He picked up a dead branch from the side of the river which curved at its bottom end in a V, like a divining stick. He stared at the branch for a moment, twirling it in his fingers. A small smile appeared as he nodded down at the condom.

He took a red knife out of his pocket, used the fingernail of the thumb to take out the blade, fumbled to whittle the branch down to a sharp point. ‘What’re ya doing?’ I asked. He shrugged again, let the smile crack some wrinkles around his eyes. I heard a car trundle by on the distant road. Bits from the branch fell down at the side of the river as he carved with slow precision.

‘Ah, Jesus, Dad,’ I said, ‘leave it there.’

He shrugged and bent down to the reeds, holding the stick, balancing himself with it. I took a grip of his arm so he wouldn’t fall in. He leaned further, caught the condom on the sharpened point, where it teetered for a moment, fell again.

‘Ah, fuck it.’

‘Leave it be,’ I said.

He moved his arm out of my grip, put his hand down on the muddy bank, shifted his way down into the water, up to the rim of his wellingtons. He lifted the condom on one of the V ends, and suddenly burst into laughter as he raised it in the air, dangling it absurdly.

‘A million fucken fishes in that thing,’ he said, ‘and I’m not even using me rod!’

He held the condom on the end of the branch, twirled it for a moment, chuckling and coughing at the same time, opened the black bag, shook the condom off inside with the rest of the litter, flung the stick away down the riverbank. I reached down and gave him a hand out. ‘We should get those trousers of yours dry,’ I said. He put his arm around me, told me he was knackered. He hung the bag over his wrist and we came back to the house, the evening sun semaphoring off puddles as he stepped right through them, chuckling to himself. In the house I put on the kettle. He took a seat in the armchair, pulled off his trousers, hung them over the fire grill, sat there in his underwear. ‘Some Goldgrain with the tea!’ he shouted as he picked up the marmalade cat and stroked her. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a flush in his cheeks like that — they were forge-red as if, at last, he had done something spectacular with his life.

‘A million fucken fishes, son,’ he kept saying, until he went upstairs, steam churning from his teacup, feet creaking lightly on the stairs, still in his underpants.

‘Dad,’ I said, at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Can I tell ya something?’

‘Course ya can.’

‘I’m a bit embarrassed.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, I’m heading off tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Yeah?’

‘And I think…’

‘Ya think what?’

‘I mean, the bath.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re a bit ripe, these days.’

‘For crissake, Conor.’

‘I was thinking that maybe I’d run the water for you.’

‘Ah, for crying out loud. Go away out of that. I don’t need a bath. The last thing I need is a fucken bath. What would I need a bath for?’

‘Okay.’

‘The bath can wait.’

‘Whatever you want. Okay. Okay.’

‘Ah, Jaysus,’ he said.

He was switching his weight from one foot to the other. He went to his room, closed the door softly behind him, but popped his head around and looked down at me, lifted his eyes and closed the door again. I felt that it was some sort of invitation. I followed him in. He had one foot in the bottom of his pyjamas.

‘You’re an awful man for barging in.’

‘Yeah, well.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Was only kidding about the bath,’ I said.

‘Fair enough.’

He climbed in under the sheets. He didn’t even reach for his cigarettes, just pulled the sheet up as far as his waist. The tea was growing cold on the bedside table.

‘D’ya remember?’ he said, and then he stopped.

‘Remember what?’

‘Ah, Jaysus,’ he said, ‘I remember nothing at all these days.’

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

‘You’re better off that way. Remembering nothing.’

He reached over to get the cup of tea.

‘You know what someone once said to me, Dad?’

‘What’s that?’

‘They said memory is three-quarters imagination and all the rest is lies.’

‘That’s a load of codswallop, that is. That’s horseshit taught by flies. Who said that?’

‘Just a friend.’

‘Talking through his arse.’

I sat on the edge of the bed. I surprised myself when I just summoned it up. ‘Listen, Dad, why did ya do that to Mam?’

‘What?’

‘You know.’

‘What?’ he said. He moved a little.

‘Why did ya let that happen?’ I said. ‘With the photos.’

‘Ah, Jaysus, is that what this is all about?’

‘I’m just asking. Why did ya…?’

‘Can’t a man forget?’

‘Don’t think so.’

He was quiet for a moment, looking at his teacup. ‘And ya know what someone once said to me?’ he said, pointing his forefinger at me. ‘Don’t know who the fuck it was, but he had it right — he said that, when you come into a rich man’s house, the only place to spit is in his face.’

He ran his hands over his face, waiting for a reply, then said: ‘So what the fuck happens when ya come into an old man’s house, huh?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ah, bollocks,’ he said. ‘All I’m looking for is a bit of peace and quiet. Go away. Let me sleep.’

He turned his head towards his pillow.

‘You know where I was, Dad? Those first few years when I was away? You know where I was?’

‘Where?’

‘I was looking for Mam.’

He sat up and stared at me with one eye closed, and the life drained away from his face, came down to whiteness. ‘What were you doing a stupid thing like that for?’ he asked.

‘Just because.’

‘Just because what?’

‘Because.’

‘Ah, Jaysus.’

‘Couldn’t find a trace.’

Silence slinked its way around the room. The tea was almost finished but he was draining the last drops of it, holding it up in the air and waiting for something to come out, watching the brown runnel form along the side, licking the drop from the rim of the cup. He held it out in front of him, ran his fingers in amongst the leaves. He started flicking the tea leaves off the end of his forefinger.

‘For Jaysus sake, Conor.’

‘I’m in Wyoming now,’ I said.

‘What the hell are ya doing in Wyoming? Nothing but trees there.’

‘That’s not what you used to say.’

‘Ah, to hell what I used to say.’

I told him about cleaning the swimming pools, the ski lifts, Kutch and Eliza, the fist on the tower, about how, every now and then, I take off on foot, go wandering. ‘I like it there,’ I told him. He gave me a nod and started humming ‘Hit the Road, Jack’ — I couldn’t tell if he was asking me to leave the room, or if he was just lost in his own little world. He said nothing more about Mam, just kept on humming and I was left there on the side of his bed, thinking of those words, hit the road Jack don’t you come back no more no more no more no more. I wanted him to say something more, anything, anything at all, and I stared at his face as if I could carve an answer out of that, but I suppose what he was suggesting to me is that you don’t spit any differently in an old man’s house than you do in a rich man’s house, that it all comes down to the very same thing.