We walk between all of them, and all over the brick walls are stains of darker grey, like weeping sores. The only colour comes from peeling green paint on windowsills, and black and red graffiti on the ground-floor walls. The concrete balconies are strung across with damp washing, and the long corridors and stairwells are full of the broken things that people have thrown away.
There are no trees, and only one narrow stretch of grass at the back of the flats. Along the edge of the grass, a tall barbed-wire fence separates the flats from the council houses in the blocks behind.
There are so many people making so much noise, more noise than I have ever known, and people everywhere with plastic bags of shopping, up and down the dark passageways or on the darkened stairs.
‘Everybody here is ugly compared to Mammy,’ I say.
She stops walking. ‘That’s not a very charitable thing to say.’
My father keeps walking and, when he is a few feet ahead of us, he stops and looks back at her. ‘You’re right, John. Your mother is very beautiful. She makes them all look ugly.’
She puts her head down and we keep walking. We walk across the car park towards the school, which my father wants me to see, and we pass a pub. The smell of frying chips makes my mouth water. ‘I’m starving to death,’ I say.
‘Hold your horses,’ says my father. ‘Let’s finish looking.’
‘No,’ says my mother. ‘We need to eat.’
We go into The Slipper, which is one of three pubs within two minutes of the towers. It is noisy inside, with music and men and women talking, and the walls are covered with pictures of aeroplanes. I ask my father how many engines a Jumbo 747 has and he says, ‘Enough,’ and we laugh with him.
25
Our first day is spent putting things in drawers and cupboards and deciding where the furniture should go. The second day we shop for groceries. We must buy everything from scratch; salt and pepper and custard powder and semolina; saucepans, lightbulbs, batteries and tools for repairing some of the broken things people have given us.
In the supermarket my father drops a bottle of tomato sauce on the floor and it breaks; some of the sauce splashes onto my mother’s white trousers.
‘Michael!’ she shouts. ‘If I didn’t know better I’d say you did that on purpose.’
‘Well,’ says my father as he walks away from the smashed bottle, ‘you don’t know better, and that’s no surprise to anybody.’
‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that!’ she shouts at him, not bothered at all that two old women by the frozen food section are staring at her.
‘I’ll talk as I want to talk,’ says my father.
My mother folds her arms across her chest and looks squarely at him. ‘I’m at the end of my rope, Michael, and it wasn’t a long piece of rope to start with. So I’d be grateful if you’d find a damp cloth to wipe this mess off my britches.’
My father smiles at her then, a warm smile, and she smiles back at him as though all is forgiven. I don’t know why she does this. What is it that passes between them? What way of knowing each other do they have? Why does my mother look at him so warmly?
My father goes away in search of a damp cloth, and when he comes back to clean her trousers, she is no longer cross with him. They kiss on the lips for a long time and then we pay for our groceries.
On the morning of our third day in Ballymun, I wake with a sore tooth. The pain is very bad and it pierces like cut glass into the left side of my jaw every time I take a breath.
My mother tells me to get dressed. ‘Let’s get you to the dentist,’ she says. ‘I’ll take you to the community centre.’
The community centre is around the corner, next door to the shopping centre. We walk through the arcade with its walls painted with blue and red stripes. It is bright and clean and, compared to the flats where there is no sun, no light, not inside or between them or behind them or within a hundred feet of them, the shopping centre is like another country. Even though my tooth beats at me, I feel like I’ve gone on holiday. Inside the shopping centre, there is light and the good smell of doughnuts from the bakery.
Inside the community centre, there’s a doctor, a dentist, and a chemist, and the waiting room is full of people reading magazines.
My mother tells the woman at the desk that I am in agony and we wait for only five minutes.
The dentist’s name is Dr O’Connor. He is tall, with broad shoulders, and wears a dark suit with a red handkerchief sticking out of his top pocket.
I tell him about my tooth and he takes a look in my mouth with a stick that has a mirror on its end. Then, without warning, he pulls my lip down and sticks a needle in my gum.
‘That will stop the pain. Now, relax here in the chair a minute while I pull this tooth out,’ he says.
There is a big painting on his ceiling that I look at while he is removing my tooth. He tells me the painting is by Bruegel. I will remember. I memorise the faces of the peasants, women and children dressed in brown, picking potatoes in the snow. No gloves or hats or scarves.
‘There’s no point staring at a white ceiling,’ says Dr O’Connor. ‘Better to see somebody worse off than you are.’
‘I didn’t feel a thing,’ I say when he has finished, and he shakes my hand and smiles at me for a long time.
‘Good lad. I was worried you might need an extra shot.’
I like him and I wonder what I would be like if I had a different father.
At home, I lie on the couch. My mother is busy in the kitchen. I don’t know where my father is.
As soon as I can eat again, my mother makes a fry-up with mushrooms and sausages and we eat while we listen to the radio turned up loud enough to cover the sound of slamming doors and an argument in the neighbouring flat.
At half four my father walks in. ‘I start work in two days,’ he says.
My mother pats him on the arm, and he looks at her hand.
‘I’m not dying,’ he says. ‘It’s not all over yet.’
‘What work?’ I ask. ‘Have you got into Trinity?’
‘No. I’ve got a scholarship in a metalworks factory.’
‘But will you still sit the exams at Trinity?’ I ask.
‘Not just now,’ he says. ‘Right now I have to win some bread.’
‘What?’ I say.
‘Oh, figure it out,’ he says, ‘and while you’re at it, go to the shop and get some milk and a pack of purple Silk Cut.’
‘How much money will you get paid every week?’ I ask.
‘Go and get the fags and I might tell you when you come back.’
I stand up and, as though my mother can read my mind, she says, ‘Why don’t we go into town tomorrow? Let’s be tourists for a day.’
My father takes my mother’s hands and kisses each in turn, then gives them back to her as though they were something he had on loan and, as she returns her hands to her apron pockets, I notice that they are shaking.
I go to the shop to buy my father’s cigarettes and when I come back the lift has broken again. I take the stairs that smell of urine.
The sun is out over Dublin and it is warm. My father is wearing sunglasses that make him look like a car windscreen and my mother is wearing a knee-length pink dress and white boots. They look like movie stars again.
We walk slowly along the wide footpaths of O’Connell Street to Grafton Street, which curves and ends at Stephen’s Green and the Dandelion market. The streets are busy with people shopping and eating and there are hundreds of buses, one behind the other, like tin elephants, with dozens of small eyes inside, each one keeping watch on the world.
There are people wearing good clothes getting in and out of taxis and people with suitcases coming and going from hotel foyers. Everybody is busy with something to do.