Mr Lynch’s Holiday (7 page)

Jean turned to him. ‘We’re hoping to get back for Christmas though, aren’t we?’

David chose not to answer and said instead, ‘It’s not so bad though, is it? Have you told Dermot about the Skype?’

Jean brightened. ‘Do you use Skype to call Eamonn?’

Dermot had no idea what she meant and shook his head.

‘Oh, you must, it’s free, you can chat as long as you like and it doesn’t matter. Better still, it’s on the Internet, so you can see each other. We see the kids on our computer screen and they can see us on theirs.’

‘Oh?’

David nodded. ‘Actually, Dermot, it’s virtually the same as being there. Isn’t it, love?’

‘Oh, it’s funny. We Skype them all the time now, often we haven’t any news for each other, but it’s just nice to see them, to be there … almost.’

‘That’s right,’ said David, ‘it’s not a big deal any more, we do it so often. No need for everyone to gather around the computer and have a big, formal conversation. Now it’s often just a quick “Hi” to Rachel or Jonathan, and then they take the laptop and put it in the room where the kids are.’

Jean laughed. ‘George, he’s the little one, only four, he might trundle over and say, “Hello, Granny and Grandpa,” and tell us what new toy he has, or what he did that day at nursery, and then Olivia will come and chat for a minute or two, but then they just get on with whatever they were doing and we can just sit and watch them as if we’re in the room with them. It’s so lovely, just natural and relaxed, sometimes they completely forget we’re there.’

‘Yes!’ said David. ‘Last week they went out and didn’t even say goodbye, just left us there in the playroom, wondering where they all were.’ He laughed.

Jean shook her head. ‘Well, we’re no better, we sometimes fall asleep in front of the screen. It’s just so soothing, hearing their voices. You know, sometimes, when we’ve felt a bit anxious about things here, we can just open the computer and straight away you feel that sadness lift. If we’ve had difficulty sleeping at night, we’ll find we nod off the next day when we’re there listening to them. It’s odd though, isn’t it,
David, waking up an hour or two later and seeing the empty room?’

‘Yes, it can be. If they see we’re asleep, they don’t wake us, they just leave us and go off doing whatever it is they need to do.’

She nodded. ‘You see the empty room and you say, “Is anybody there?” and it’s a bit like a seance. I’m not sure who the ghosts are, them or us.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘I suppose it must be odd for the kids.’

They sat in silence for a while, Dermot looking at his hands. Eventually Jean turned to him and smiled.

‘And do you like word searches, Dermot?’

The same faces at every funeral. The same but fewer. It reminded Dermot of the game Eamonn and the other kids used to play at birthday parties. When the music stopped – the desperate craning of necks to see who didn’t have a seat, who had been banished from the contest. It was the same thing now. Every few months a phone call and then a funeral, each of them wondering whose turn was next. Some deaths were shocking, others expected, others still felt long overdue. The florid, thickset ones were the first to go – stomachs pushing out their shirts, bacon every morning, beer every night, yellow spots in their eyes, they knew well themselves they would never live to see their kids married. Mick Fitzsimmons went at forty-two, collapsed in the car park of the Cash & Carry, a massive coronary. Others clung on despite all the odds. Nell Gahan, with her pills and her sticks and half her life spent in the doctor’s waiting room, was still scuttling about like a Dannimaced cockroach, whispering prayers at every graveside.

Their promises to keep in touch and plans for future get-togethers ‘in happier circumstances’ never came to anything. There was an acceptance: they saw each other only when someone died. Long, bitter-sweet afternoons, sitting in the orange sunlight of a back lounge or function room. Recalling faded capers and well-worn one-liners. Half-hearted gossip still about long-ago scandals and comeuppances. Confiding small tragedies of estranged siblings and nervous illnesses. Endless ham sandwiches and double measures of Jameson’s. Joe Fahey still failing to get his round in, Jim Scanlon as full of it as ever.
At funerals, sitting with old friends, they felt their true selves, but later, in living rooms with televisions on and grandkids racing around the sofa, they would be tired and irritable and wonder why they’d wasted the afternoon with a bunch of relics.

Once Dermot turned sixty-five the funerals started coming as thick and fast as the weddings had done in his twenties. He had attended both wedding and funeral of more friends than he cared to remember. It seemed to him now that a wedding was an IOU, a funeral the debt collected. Hidden amid the high spirits and cheers of the wedding day was the sobering truth buried in the heart of the vows: ‘Until death do us part.’

Standing at the graveside looking at the newly widowed, Dermot would remember the newlywed. Glancing around he’d see others who had crowded into group shots in front of the church doors a lifetime ago. At least two of the old crowd – Paddy Mahoney and Johnny Begley – were still wearing the suits they got married in to the funerals of friends fifty years later.

He did not find the comfort in religion that Kathleen had. He mouthed the liturgy but it struck no chord within him. He found himself empty of any great insights or thoughts. As he attended one requiem mass after another, he felt like a man standing on a beach, paralysed in thought and action as the tidal wave approached.

He had always known that one day it would be Kathleen’s funeral he was attending. Save an accident of some kind, it was never really in doubt that she would go first. He would make himself remember this sometimes when they were short with each other, the atmosphere curdled. But those good intentions were short-lived. Perhaps in the end it wasn’t right to keep someone’s eventual death constantly in mind, to frame each remark in the context of the graveside. Life had to be lived in
denial of death, and with the right to be sometimes aggrieved, sometimes ill-tempered, sometimes disappointed.

When Kathleen’s turn came, there were all the usual crowd and more. Some faces Dermot hadn’t seen in over fifty years. Old girlfriends of hers: giggling, teasing mouths and darting eyes last seen in dance halls and crowded bars, now old grannies with thick ankles squeezed into patent-leather shoes.

‘Do you not remember me, Dermot? You asked me out to the cinema and, when I turned you down, you asked Kathleen instead.’

Dermot remembered her well enough. He remembered too that it was she who had made a play for him, not the other way around, even though everyone had known by then that he was going with Kathleen. He recalled a red two-piece she used to wear. Kathleen said it made her look like a pillar box. He couldn’t wait to tell Kathleen what she’d said, knowing how much it would tickle her. The realization that Kathleen wasn’t around to tell came with weary acceptance. This, he knew, was only the first of many such lapses.

He had yet to feel the sustained impact of grief. At the hospital bedside, he had seen her face change at the point of death. A transition at once almost imperceptible and yet unmistakable. In that moment he had felt a pure blast of horror, calling out to the God he did not believe in and causing the nurse to hurriedly return. Since then, though, he had been busy with arrangements and phone calls and visits to the bank and other places. He felt only a strange lightness. He ate as much as he ever had, but feared a sudden gust of wind could blow him away.

He disliked the priest. He knew this was in part to do with Kathleen’s devotion to the Church, but he couldn’t help it. He tried to listen to his words about Kathleen’s life without rancour. The priest banged on about her great faith, the consolation
she had found in the Church, her struggle with ill health. He seemed gleeful to Dermot. His lips wet, his face shiny and pink, flushed with victory. It felt as if a long unspoken battle had come to an end and the priest had won. They had claimed her as their prize.

He was still there in the function room afterwards, sipping his pint of shandy. Dermot avoided the priest’s corner of the room. He made his way around everyone else, thanking them for coming, accepting their condolences, listening to stories of Kathleen, some familiar, some new. Some cousin of hers from Cork waxing lyrical about Kathleen’s abilities with a violin as a ten-year-old. Nurses from the General reminiscing about her sense of humour. Cronies from the church on her flower-arranging skills. He nodded and smiled and kept moving, his head jangling with faces and snatches of conversation. He had a powerful longing to be home, in the back room, gas fire on, glass of beer in one hand, cheese sandwich in the other, watching
University Challenge
. The thought of the programme, the banks of enviably clever and assured young people, always brought Eamonn to mind and Dermot realized he had forgotten all about him in the confusion of the gathering.

He cast about the room and eventually saw him hovering with an empty plate in hand at the end of the buffet table. Laura sat with a group of Eamonn’s cousins at a nearby table, drinking and chatting with an ease Eamonn had never possessed. Eamonn stood on his own peering suspiciously at some chicken wings and Dermot wondered what crime they had committed. His son had been home for three days and it had been odd to have him back in the house, sleeping in his old room. He’d offered to help with arrangements but Dermot had preferred to do it all himself. In the end, purely to give him something to do, he asked him to sort through all the old photos. He’d only wanted them gathered together neatly in a
box, but Eamonn had covered the living-room floor to sort them in some kind of order and driven Dermot half-mad, getting under his feet, spreading the job over two days and insisting on laboriously explaining the different piles to Dermot as he was hurrying to get dressed for the funeral that morning.

Eamonn had now reached the end of the buffet table, having taken nothing, as far as Dermot could see, but a tomato and a bread roll. He hesitated, plate in hand, deciding where to sit. He looked vulnerable and uncertain and Dermot saw him for a moment as a little boy again, waiting for him at the entrance to the garage. Eamonn looked across the room and met his father’s eyes. Standing on opposite sides of the crowded room, they raised a hand at one another and then each went off to find somewhere to be.

Eamonn paused in the doorway for a moment to watch him, registering as he did the familiarity of the posture. It was almost matronly – back straight, arms folded on chest, feet tucked under and crossed. This curiously attentive pose was how his father relaxed, whether in a pub or in front of the television, leaning slightly forward, head inclined to one side. As a gentle snoring struck up, Eamonn realized with some surprise that it was also how he took his naps. He moved quietly to the other side of the room to check Dermot was actually asleep. He frowned at the image – his father sleeping like a budgerigar. There was a strange novelty in the sight. He had very rarely seen him asleep. Occasionally, when sharing a room with his parents on holidays, he had woken in the night and listened to the intricate counterpoint of their snoring. His father’s high and wheezy, his mother’s deep and rumbling. The longer he listened the harder he found it to connect the sounds – simultaneously animal and mechanical – to the people. He would sneak over to their bed to look at their faces, to reassure himself that they were still his parents and that he should not be scared.

The intimacy of sharing a space with his father once more was unsettling. He found his gaze constantly zooming in and refocusing on certain details at once both mysterious and mundane. He was assailed by things that as a boy were so everyday as to be invisible, and as an adult he had not been around to see. The way his father read a newspaper, folded up into a neat square and held close to his face. The manner in which he ate:
a bit of everything on the fork, peas carefully halved to avoid imbalance. The sound of his razor scraping his chin, the smell of his soap. All these things Eamonn had forgotten and each one triggered a complex mix of recognition and distance, a nostalgia for something still there. His father both alive and dead.

He couldn’t recall Dermot ever taking a nap before. He had noticed a few small signs of age since his arrival. Nocturnal trips to the toilet, the occasional effortful noise when standing or sitting. He remained, Eamonn was sure, fitter and healthier than himself, but there was a change nonetheless. Eamonn didn’t know whether his father had aged a little in the months since his mother had died, or whether he had just seemed younger and more vital next to her.

He would one day become authentically frail and need someone to care for him, and, as his only child, it would be Eamonn’s responsibility. This was something he had known for many years, but still he found it impossible to believe. Strength was one of his father’s defining features, never something he had made a show of, but his sheer physical presence made it clear. There was a power within him, a manifest capability. At Kathleen’s funeral Eamonn had offered to return from Spain, to rent out the apartment when such a thing was remotely possible, and to live nearby, but the offer was gestural. He didn’t believe that his father needed or wanted him around and he knew moreover that he would never accept such an offer.

Beyond an assumption of some kind of standardized grief, he had not considered how the loss of his mother had affected his father. In some ways, neither had he considered how her loss had affected him. Living in Lomaverde, at such a remove, he was not confronted by her absence every day. It wasn’t that he pictured her still alive, but neither did he always remember
that she was gone, or consider the reality of Dermot’s day-to-day life on his own. It was easy to not think too much about it, to half-imagine things essentially unchanged.

Laura had encouraged him to ring home more often, but Eamonn felt she didn’t understand how self-sufficient his father was, didn’t really get the nature of his relationship with his father at all. ‘We don’t live in each other’s pockets,’ he’d say. ‘We don’t need to be talking to one another all the time.’ Besides, Dermot was surrounded by Kathleen’s relatives back in Birmingham. That was part of it, though Eamonn tried not to admit it, even to himself. A long-held suspicion that his dad was easier in the company of some of his nephews than his son. Eamonn’s cousin Brendan, for example. A man of few words who knew how to strip an engine and place an accumulator bet. Dermot saw him a lot. They seemed able to communicate in a language Eamonn had never learned.

The snoring built slowly to a peak with the loud finale inevitably rousing the sleeper.

‘Oh …’ His eyes opened and focused on Eamonn. Dermot smiled, embarrassed. ‘I was asleep.’

Eamonn nodded.

‘I wasn’t the driver.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I was dreaming I was stuck in traffic on College Road, but I wasn’t the driver. I was sat upstairs with all the bloody kids.’

‘You must have been glad to wake up.’

‘I don’t know who was driving the bus.’ He said this as if he should have known.

‘Maybe there was no driver.’

Dermot looked at him as if he were an idiot. ‘Someone was driving the bus, son. They don’t drive themselves.’

Eamonn scratched his head. ‘Went OK at Jean and David’s, did it?’

‘Yes. Very nice. They were advocating being a grandparent.’

‘Right.’

‘Did I tell you about Keiron, Brendan’s eldest?’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s gone and got his girlfriend pregnant. Fifteen years old, the pair of them. At the same school. So Brendan’s going to be a granddad.’

‘Christ.’ Eamonn felt the familiar mixture of awe and horror. He remembered seeing his cousin nonchalantly smoking in the park when they were children. Brendan seemed grown up when he was eight. He had left school at sixteen while Eamonn went on to university, the only one in the family to do so. He imagined that, to Brendan, his other cousins and perhaps his own father, he would forever be thought of as a student – a pejorative label meaning someone daft, lazy and essentially childish.

‘He was asking me the other day what you did out here, job-wise. And to be honest I couldn’t tell him. Was it something to do with computers? I can’t remember now what your mother said.’

‘It was the same job I had back home.’

‘Oh,’ said Dermot uncertainly, ‘they have an office out here, do they?’

‘I didn’t need an office, I was editing computer books. I worked from home.’

‘Oh, right. So that’s going well, is it?’

Eamonn hesitated. ‘Well, no, I was doing it for the first few months, but the company went bust.’ It pained him to admit this. He could imagine his father thinking there was something fundamentally unreal about the idea of working so remotely, so abstractly. He would assume the collapse of the company was a consequence of the intangibility of the work involved.

Dermot, however, looked merely concerned. ‘So are you having to look for work?’

‘No, it’s fine. I’m sorted. I got a new job teaching English.’

‘Oh, teaching. Well, Eamonn, your mother would be very proud. I had the impression that teaching wasn’t your cup of tea.’

The impression was correct, but Eamonn shrugged it off.

‘Well, now, I’d say your Spanish must be tip-top to be able to teach.’

Eamonn found it irksome that people assumed that living abroad somehow magically endowed you with a facility for language-learning. As if rewiring your brain and having to say a different word to the word you naturally wanted to say every time you wanted to speak wasn’t incredibly, almost impossibly, hard, regardless of where you happened to live or what words the people nearby happened to be hurling around, with near-violent rapidity. The assumption was no less irritating for being one that he himself had held, and one that made his apparent inability to rise above the
bajo-intermedio
standard of Spanish very hard to accept.

‘I’m teaching them English, Dad.’

‘Sure I know that, but obviously you need to explain the grammar and so on in Spanish. You need to provide the translation.’

‘That’s not how it’s done. It’s all done in English. It’s immersive. They pick it up.’

Dermot considered this. ‘Immersive. I suppose you can communicate a lot with what they call “body language”, can you? Hand signals and so on?’

Eamonn rubbed his face. ‘I don’t use hand signals, Dad. They can’t see me, for one thing.’

Dermot looked at him, an expression of dawning realization on his face.

‘Oh … but, that’s great work to be doing. I’m sorry now – I didn’t get you at all at first. What do they call them these days? “Visually impaired”, is it? “Sight-challenged”?’

Eamonn found himself doing something that he hated. It was a noise he made only when talking to one or both of his parents. A kind of impatient sigh, bordering on a grunt. An adolescent habit that he knew was ridiculous in a thirty-three-year-old man.

‘I’m not teaching blind kids. I’m teaching civil servants. It’s all done online or over the phone.’ He paused and then added: ‘No hand signals!’

Dermot was quiet for a few moments and then said: ‘“
Er bekommt keine Luft
.”’

Eamonn looked around the room.

‘Oh, yes, I remember that one all right. Linguaphone it was. Like you’re doing. On the tape.’

Eamonn was minded to explain that what he was doing was nothing like Linguaphone, but his father continued.

‘“
Er bekommt keine Luft
.” “He can’t breathe.” I took the tapes out of the library, thought I could listen to them on the job, but it never really worked. You’d get very absorbed in that stuff. I remember sailing past a stop full of passengers. I saw them there, but just forgot I was supposed to pull in. Raging they were, but I was listening to a conversation in a restaurant. Can’t remember any of it now.’ He shook his head. ‘Only bit of German I have is, “He can’t breathe.” Funny to remember just that.’

He fell silent again for a few moments before adding, ‘I’m not sure you’d ever really need to say it. You’d think the facial coloration would tell the story well enough.’