You can predict the expression on your mother’s face: there is no need to look at her.
‘A-babba, a-babba,’ Theresa says as the baby starts to scream. ‘I’ll have to talk to yous later. No rest for the bleeding wicked.’
‘Stop, sure I know,’ says your mother, who has no other children. ‘I worry about her,’ she says, when Theresa has gone. ‘And that worthless lout of a husband …’
She is still speaking but the buzz of the strimmer drowns her out. Apply yourself to your work: give the lawn a nice clean edge.
Take a shower, take a shit, shave, change your shirt. Check your watch and wonder how much longer you can leave off calling Henno and the lads. Find your father in the hallway tying his walking boots. Ask if you can come and watch him search for an answer as though the question is outrageous.
‘Sure,’ he decides. ‘The company’d be nice. The company I suppose’d be a pleasant change.’
Follow your father out the door and down the street. Match your pace to his. Smile at the neighbours to whom he waves and wait whenever he stops to talk. Study your father: the purple flesh of his jowls, the grey in his beard, the hair in his ears. Listen to the ease of his conversation. Envy his comfort in the company of other men. Follow him through the lane.
Ask, ‘So, how’ve you been keeping?’
‘Sure, I’m walking, amn’t I?’
Stop at the shop to buy cigarettes but tell your father you are planning to quit.
‘How does it feel to be turning twenty-five?’ he asks.
‘Old.’
‘It only gets worse.’
Follow your father to the coast, down the stone steps and out over the tidal plane where the sky soars heavenward and the town disappears. Feel the sand give beneath your feet and taste the salt on the wind. Stop into the Lifeboat where the barman is an old classmate of your father’s. Answer his questions about London. Laugh at his jokes. Predict tomorrow’s football scores.
‘Birthdays is lucky,’ the barman says. ‘And I’ll split the winnings with you.’
‘See that you do,’ your father says.
‘I will. Sure, I said I will.’
‘And I said see that you do.’
Thank your father as he stands you drinks. Tell him: ‘I’ll get the next one.’
‘Get your hand out of your bleeding pocket,’ he snarls, foam spraying from his lip.
Stay too long with your father in the pub. Watch daylight stretch itself thin above the harbour beyond the window. Field a phone call from your mother. Fill her in on your progress.
‘If the doctors told him once —’ she says.
‘I know.’
‘I won’t wait on yous, so.’
Order whiskey after stout after stout after whiskey. Order toasted cheese sandwiches, peanuts and crisps. Feel the pub fill up around you, its heat and its conversation.
‘Why is a woman like a tornado?’ someone asks, and answers, ‘ ’Cause when she comes she screams blue murder and when she goes she takes the house.’
Go outside for a cigarette but tell your father you are trying to cut down. Listen to the regular clink of tacking against masts.
Sway.
Lean against the pub window ledge and look out over the harbour to the falling hills where a red sun dwindles to a flat line.
Shiver.
A girl is walking the beach, the wind in her hair and her jacket sailing. Watch her pick her way around puddles, over stones, up the slipway and out on to the road. Wallow in the sorrowful distance between you. Remember her with your every sense. Wave at her.
She is gone.
Take out your phone.
‘Is it you?’ Henno slurs when he answers. ‘We were starting to think you’d forgotten about us.’
Tell him, ‘Small hope.’
Find yourself in a smoking garden with Henno, Kellier and three nineteen-year-old girls.
‘We’re all going back to my gaff after,’ Henno says. ‘My Ma’s away. We’re having a session.’
‘Your Ma?’ one of the girls, a brunette, asks. ‘How old are you, like, thirty?’
‘I am not!’ Henno laughs. ‘I’m twenty-four years of age and not a day older. Ah no, it’s just … Sure, she has no one else to look after her.’ He leans over the girl’s shoulder and flashes you a wolfish smile.
Kellier rolls his eyes and elbows you in the ribs. ‘But would you not even do a half though, no? It’s your birthday like, your birthday. Still and all I bet you get good pills in the clubs over there, yeah? What are they like? Mad, yeah? I bet they’re mad.’
‘So, Henno was saying you live in England?’ the girl nearest you says. She has small features, wet eyes. She holds her glass with two hands and gazes up at you as though you might be in possession of some great secret.
Tell her, ‘London.’
Kellier’s eyebrows climb his forehead as he turns away. Henno mouths a filthy vowel of encouragement.
‘I’ve always wanted to live there.’
‘Well, why don’t you go, then?’
Stagger down the harbour road, the world tilting in your bleary vision. Steady yourself against a telephone pole outside the sailing club and vomit on the wheel of a Land Rover. Feel your phone vibrate. Read Henno’s name. Turn your phone off.
Let the sea wall lead you home through a wind that pulls at the corners of your eyes. Look out towards the islands, their flat shapes black against darkness. Watch the beacon of the lighthouse flicker on and off.
Make your way back through the lane, back along your silent street. Wrestle with your key in the lock and kick off your shoes in the kitchen. Creep up the stairs. Crawl into bed fully dressed. Listen through the wall to your father’s troubled breathing as your ceiling starts to spin.
Fall asleep in the room where once you sheltered countless childish wishes. Sleep longer than you have in weeks. Sleep better than you have in months. Dream of long-forgotten futures that will come to haunt your waking hours.
Your mother is screaming.
Open your eyes.
The Navigator
When we dropped below the cloud, Dani’s hand fell on my wrist. I leaned across her and looked out the window at a slab of iron sea, corrugated with waves and scratched with the small white V’s of dissipating ship wakes.
‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that the Gaelic peoples descend from the Scythian Goídel Glas and an Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter?’
‘Is that a fact?’ I said.
‘And did you know that an Irish monk, St Brendan, discovered America centuries before Columbus?’
‘The Navigator,’ I said. ‘Yes. That one, I knew.’
The wing dipped. Squares of green land gleamed and vanished northward into haze. I felt my breath catch. Dani squeezed my thumb and smiled.
‘Are you okay?’ she said.
When Dani was born, I’d made noises to Elaine, with all the well-meaning arrogance available to the immigrant father, that we must do everything we could to provide our daughter with a transatlantic childhood: Fourth of July fireworks and the Paddy’s Day parade, a month each summer at camp in the Adirondacks and two weeks in the Gaeltacht. But after Mam died, and I’d sold the house in Coolock, it was easy to put things off, to make excuses. Easy too to stay away from the Queensboro Irish Center, where a circle of blotchy-armed women, name of Colleen or Shannon or Erin, compared genealogies over mugs of milky tea. But one evening as we crossed the bridge on our way home from late study hall, Dani announced:
‘I think, Daddy, I’d like to be a better Irishwoman.’
I let the ‘woman’ slide, though she was just shy of her fifteenth birthday, and downloaded The Táin to her iPad as soon as we got home. Before long, she was dragging me on school nights to uillean pipe recitals up in Yonkers and through the rain on Sunday mornings to Seán O’Casey matinees at the Irish Rep. Friday nights, while her classmates went in pairs to movies, she borrowed her mother’s credentials and went alone to lectures on Roger Casement or Ernie O’Malley at Ireland House on Washington Square. And finally, one night as we waited for pizza, she brought out a binder stuffed with admissions information from Ireland’s various universities, which she must have been assembling for months, and made her pitch.