Читать книгу Father’s Music - Dermot Bolger - Страница 15

LUKE’S WIFE AND CHILDREN would be arriving from London on a later flight. It was a fact Luke simply had to live with, he explained, normally you got hassled by the police at Dublin airport. The family name was enough, it just took one detective trying to get himself a reputation. This was why Luke had deliberately raised his children in England. Now he wanted them kept away from all that. I was discovering that Luke had an excuse for everything, even taking his mistress with him on a flight to Dublin while his wife and children travelled alone.

Security at Dublin Airport was non-existent. The terminal was like a cathedral of homecoming, with Christmas trees and clock-work Santa Clauses in the centre of each luggage conveyor belt. People collected their luggage, then drifted through the blue channel where nobody was on duty. No official paid Luke the slightest heed. Crowds thronged the arrivals hall, greeting returning family members. Luke’s younger brother, Shane, had arranged to meet him. I could see him trying to place my face.

‘Who’s she?’ he asked suspiciously as Luke put the bags down.

‘Stick around for Carmel and the kids, Shane,’ Luke replied, ignoring the question. ‘They’re on the next plane. We’ll get a taxi.’

But Shane still stared at me. He had an open, innocent face. In soft light he would still pass for someone in their twenties. I remembered him acting as a peace-maker in the Irish Centre. ‘Ah, for Jaysus sake, Luke,’ he cottoned on, more exasperated than annoyed.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘Luke’s just some cheap lay I picked up on the flight over.’

Shane threw his eyes to heaven, then picked up the cases and led the way to the car park. Luke’s wife could make her own way into Dublin. There was an uneasiness between them, with my presence preventing Shane from discussing family matters. I felt Luke had placed me there like a shield. At the car Luke asked to drive and Shane mumbled about him not being covered by insurance before grudgingly handing the keys over.

Shane sat beside him in silence as we drove on to the motorway. I noticed that Luke didn’t turn for Dublin, but drove in the opposite direction to where it petered out into an ordinary road again. The unease I’d known on the flight returned. It had gnawed at me since driving with Luke to the corner of his street in London and watching from the shadows as he reversed past his neighbour’s ornate pillars up to his front door where figures rushed out to claim him back.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘The scenic route,’ he replied shortly. We reached a small roundabout and Luke turned left on to a smaller country road which was ploughed up, with pipes and machinery parked on what was once a grass verge. Luke seemed to be trying to track back to Dublin along a network of lanes crisscrossing the countryside between the airport and the city. But there were half finished roads and diversions everywhere. Shane remained silent, slotted into his role as a younger brother, yet I sensed his satisfaction as it became obvious that Luke was lost. I had expected tears at the airport or angry promises of revenge, but instead a web of tension and distrust hung between them. Christy had not yet been mentioned.

‘Where the fuck am I?’ Luke was forced to mutter at last.

‘It’s structural funds from Brussels, that Maastricht shite we got bribed into voting for a couple of years back. You’d know about it if your Government across the water allowed people a say in anything.’

‘What do you mean, my Government?’ Luke said.

‘Well, you’re not exactly queueing up to vote here.’

‘Dublin is still my town and you know it,’ Luke said, suddenly bitter.

I thought neither was going to back down, then Shane said quietly: ‘I know, but if you want to convince people it might be wiser to come home more than once every five years.’

Luke stared ahead, trying to recognise some landmark.

‘I hardly know this way myself,’ Shane added, soothingly. ‘The Government’s gone mad for building roads.’

‘So everybody can emigrate quicker.’ The bitterness in Luke’s voice seemed tempered as he admitted to himself he was lost. ‘I wanted to slip in by the back of Ballymun.’

‘You’re miles away,’ Shane said. ‘Half the old roads are closed. They’re ringing the whole city by a motorway.’

‘You could have said something.’

Shane shrugged and Luke pulled in among a line of JCBs and earthmovers parked beside a half constructed flyover. Below us, an encampment of gypsy caravans had already laid claim to an unopened stretch of motorway. Luke got out to change places. The brothers passed each other in the headlights of the car. Shane got back in, but Luke stood for a moment, caught in those lights, staring down at the caravans.

The fields beyond were littered with upturned cars, where men moved about, dismantling vehicles for spare parts in the half light. Cars were pulled in as motorists negotiated deals at the open door of a caravan. Children in ragged coats played hide and seek among the smashed bonnets and rusting car doors. A dog vanished into a pile of tyres. Smoke was rising and although the windows were closed I was convinced I could smell burning rubber. I wondered again what my life would have been like if Mammy hadn’t persuaded Frank Sweeney to move to Harrow three months before I was born. I stared at the mucky children careering through the wrecked cars. This was what I had been saved from. As a child I’d had romantic visions about what it might be like, but now it felt as if Gran was beside me, smugly witnessing the justification of everything she had done. What would Luke feel if he knew that his mistress was an Irish tinker’s daughter?

‘Are you English?’ Shane asked quietly.

‘Yeah,’ I said, looking away from the children.

‘Just don’t come to the house or the funeral, please.’

There was no animosity in his tone. I didn’t know if he saw my nod in reply, but he flicked the lights for Luke to get back in. Instead of sitting next to him, Luke climbed into the back seat beside me. I had never known him to display affection but now he reached for my hand and I sensed Shane tracking the movement in the rear-view mirror. Shane started the car.

‘Does Carmel know?’ he asked after a moment.

‘Neither do you,’ was Luke’s terse reply. The tension between them was only partly to do with me. Luke stared out at the December twilight and I could only guess at his thoughts. Five minutes later we pulled in at the entrance to an exclusive golf course. Shane cut off the engine and the brothers stared up the long curving driveway.

‘The back of McKenna’s farm,’ Luke said eventually.

‘I didn’t know if you’d recognise it.’

‘I’m not likely to forget the shape of that blasted hill, am I?’

A BMW came down the driveway and accelerated away. Shane watched the tail lights disappear.

‘I said it to Christy,’ Shane said, ‘the week before they shot him. There was no need for all this aggravation for years. He should have just bought McKenna’s land and built a golf course. You sit on your arse all day and they queue up to hand their money over.’

It was the first time Christy was mentioned and although nothing else was said it seemed to ease the reserve between them. Perhaps their shared memories were so engrained that they couldn’t speak of them. But, from stories Luke had told me after love-making, I began to understand the need he had felt to drive out here. It was a need Shane must have understood. Soon Luke would be swamped by his extended family, with public rituals and duties to perform. But here in the gathering dark, the space existed to come to terms with death.

On the flight over I had told him for the first time about my mother’s death and my visits to Northwick hospital as she grew weaker and more withdrawn until she had just stared back at me. I had grown to hate those visits and to hate myself for resenting the way she used silence like an accusation. I had avoided being there when my grandparents visited, but once I met an old school friend of hers, Jennifer, who called me out into the corridor. ‘She’s dying,’ she said. ‘So what are you doing to contact him?’ I had stared back, uncomprehendingly. ‘Your father,’ Jennifer said angrily. ‘Surely at least the man has a right to know his wife is dying.’

It was the first time I’d ever had to think of him as flesh and blood. He had been an abstraction before, a shameful bogey-man. Frank Sweeney would be eighty if still alive. But because no one spoke of him, I’d presumed him long dead. I had read in a magazine that the average life-span of Irish travellers was under fifty. Even if he were alive, I had told Jennifer, I could hardly chase around every campsite in Ireland. He’d had twenty years to contact us. Besides, after what he’d done, my mother would hardly want to see him now.

Jennifer had a large house in Belgravia, a husband working in the City, children who passed through private schools and emerged polished as porcelain. All the things Gran had wanted for her daughter. Yet although Gran spoke of Jennifer glowingly, I’d never known her to set foot inside our house. Now she glared at me in the hospital corridor. ‘Did you ask her?’ she had snapped, momentarily furious. ‘You’re not a child any more, Tracey. You’ve caused your mother nothing but grief with your silly games and yet you’ve never bothered to find out the least thing.’

Jennifer was right and I knew it. At a certain level I had always withdrawn from other people’s pain into my interior world. After she left I went back to my mother’s ward and asked nothing that might require an awkward response. I had matched her silence with silence and, later, Gran’s grief with flight. This was partly why it had felt important to come to Dublin and to just once be there when somebody needed me.

Luke stared up at the lights of the clubhouse and I squeezed his palm. The curved lake, lit by spotlights beside the final green, had to be man-made. I glanced at Luke’s face, feeling I was in the way, but also that he wanted me here. I could imagine all three brothers here as boys of twelve, eleven and ten, with those extra years providing a hierarchical chain of command. These roads would have been smaller as they walked out among similar bands of boys at dawn. One night Luke had described McKenna, a burly countryman wrapped in the same greatcoat in all weathers, who would eye up the swarms of boys to decide who might have the honour of filling his baskets with fruit and who would walk the two miles back to the city disappointed.

I remembered how Luke pronouced McKenna’s name with quiet contempt, but also a faint echo of childhood awe which I could imagine no adult adversary ever meriting. I couldn’t remember the full story, except that it was the first time I’d heard Shane mentioned in detail. He would have been sandwiched between Luke and Christy among the crowd of boys as McKenna made his choice so that all three appeared to be strong, hardened workers. Luke and Christy had covered up for him when his back ached and his hands blistered during the endless day of picking until finally his tally of baskets began to drop. There was a row and Shane had broken down in tears as McKenna threw a handful of coins on the ground and spat on them.

‘Was McKenna mean?’ I asked Shane.

He snorted. ‘As mean as the back of his balls that only ever knew shite.’ He glanced back, apologetic for his language. It was thirty years since those events but they still rankled. We eyed each other openly.

‘How do I measure up to the others?’ I asked him.

‘There have been no others.’ Shane re-started the car and I believed him and beneath my show of toughness I felt better. Luke ignored our exchange. I wondered what Shane thought of me and was it contempt for his opinion or a bond between brothers which allowed Luke to display his mistress so openly. For the next two days I would have to remain invisible and I sensed that this journey was perhaps Luke’s only way to give some acknowledgement to my presence. Shane would never mention me, not even to his own wife. I suspected there were more dangerous secrets locked away in Shane’s head that would always stay there with a younger brother’s unquestioning loyalty.

We had reached the fringe of the city where back gardens of shabby houses petered out into overgrown fields. Children stood about on corners, with hoods over their heads.

‘What happened to McKenna?’ I asked.

‘He died years ago,’ Shane said. ‘The last time I saw him he was screaming like a madman up at our house when I was ten. He claimed Christy blinded two of his cattle because he’d cheated me out of a day’s pay.’

‘How do you mean blinded?’

‘The police said it was done with sticks,’ Shane replied. ‘They cleared us of involvement, but McKenna wouldn’t believe it. He was ranting, threatening our Ma who was trying to raise us without a penny the time Da had to go to England for work.’

The thought of such cruelty sickened me. Christy had a reputation for violence, but this was too extreme even for a twelve year old like him.

‘Did Christy do it?’ I asked.

‘Are you joking?’ Shane laughed, coming to a supermarket and turning left. ‘Poor Christy go up to the fields by himself in the dark and do the likes of that? He liked animals, Christy did, well dogs and pigeons anyway. Cows gave him the creeps. He was a city kid. He might have done McKenna himself, but cows? No way. That wouldn’t have been Christy’s style.’

We stopped at traffic lights. Horses stood motionless on a green, tied with lengths of rope. In the darkness beside them dozens of Christmas trees were propped up as if a forest had dropped from the sky. Two boys in over-sized duffel coats hunched down waiting for buyers. The lights changed.

‘It was a typical job by your man beside you,’ Shane said as he moved off. ‘Luke goaded the other kids about being chicken until they went up the fields while the three of us sat at home with alibis watching The Man from Uncle.’

Luke laughed and looked at me. ‘Don’t believe a word that fellow says,’ he said, almost absentmindedly. ‘It’s what Shane does best, wind people up.’

I laughed too, but the problem was that I did believe Shane or, at least, I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. True or false, two images stuck in my mind. One was of cows bellowing in agony as blood streamed down their faces and a circle of boys dropped their sticks and ran off with their bravado replaced by a realisation that they had been used. The second image was almost as chilling: an eleven year old calmly standing at his front door during the ad breaks on television where he would be seen by passing neighbours.

As if sensing my unease, Luke took my hand again. Suddenly I wanted to return to my life in London. I felt used as well, manipulated into thinking he needed me here. A suspicion came back even as I tried to dismiss it. Could Luke have known of Christy’s death all along, but had come to the hotel for sex anyway, not thinking that I could know? Might he have turned my knowledge to his advantage, sensing a need which he could exploit? Or did my own secretive nature make me suspect him? I wasn’t being fully honest with him about my reasons for agreeing to travel to Dublin. I knew nobody here. I would have to walk around alone or wait in some hotel bedroom until Luke found time to come. The unintended irony of the phrase made me feel cheap. I closed my eyes and the image of blinded cattle returned. I wondered again if Luke’s wife knew of my existence and, if she discovered I was here, what might be her measure of revenge?

We turned down a side road with a high wall, beyond which I could glimpse the roofs of unlit school buildings. A notice warned of guard dogs, but Shane turned through the gate and across a cattle grid to park with his headlights shining over a panoramic view of streets beyond the dark playing pitches. Luke seemed momentarily disorientated as Shane glanced back, awaiting some response.

‘Christy drove by here six months ago and almost crashed,’ Shane said.

‘I believe it,’ Luke said quietly. ‘It’s thirty years since I’ve seen that view.’

‘The pre-fab was levelled last year,’ Shane told him. ‘They finally built a permanent extension, out where the sheds used to be. Take a look.’

They both got out, caught up in memories I didn’t know, and walked into the glare of the headlights. I watched them bend their heads to talk. Their brother had been one of Dublin’s most notorious criminals. I hadn’t asked Luke who had killed him or what could happen next. As long as he kept me ignorant I had felt I wasn’t involved. Now that we were actually in Dublin I was scared. I didn’t know how much of this fear was bound up with Luke or how much stemmed from a terror of confronting ghosts I had spent half my life running from. Yet I knew those spectres had to be banished before I might begin to see some value in myself. It was because I regarded myself so cheaply that I never trusted anyone who reached out to me. Luke’s grief in the hotel was real because he had cried like I never could. He wouldn’t risk bringing me here unless his need was also genuine.

The two brothers cast out vast shadows in the headlights. I got out to see what they were examining. It was a flat expanse of floor tiles left behind after a pre-fabricated building had been demolished. I could decipher shapes of classrooms from the different styles of tiling. I sensed Luke visualising the building as it had once stood. He climbed up and followed the route of a vanished corridor, retracing his steps to the spot where Christy and he had first shared a desk. We had moved beyond the headlights so that we were now shadows in the dark. If I’d believe in spirits I would have said that Christy’s was there at that moment, along with the younger Luke and Shane, hungry for the lives ahead of them.

‘If Christy was older why were you in the same class?’ I asked, to break the atmosphere. Luke looked back, momentarily drawn into the present.

‘Holy communion,’ he explained. ‘Ma had to put him back a class when he was seven. She couldn’t afford the clothes that year.’

He walked to where the classroom wall had once stood and looked across at the lights from neighbouring streets. The main school stood in darkness to our right while there was ugly security fencing around the graceful old building on our left.

‘That was a fever convalescent hospital once,’ Shane said, motioning me to leave Luke alone. ‘When our folks came here first there were still old people in bath chairs coughing up blood under the trees. When TB died out the Christian Brothers opened a school instead. Not for corporation tenants like us, more for the private houses. But the place kept growing until one summer he was home from England, Da got a job sticking this prefab up to cope with the over-crowding.’

Luke had walked further away with his head bowed.

‘I can remember being given jam sambos and sent down to watch Da working,’ Shane said. ‘Ma kept badgering Da to have a word with the Brothers about us getting in here. Luke and Christy were steeped, free secondary education had just arrived. Before then it would have been the Tech or looking for whatever work we could find at fourteen.’

Luke turned. Although it was dark I sensed he’d been crying, or had come as close to tears as he ever would in public. ‘You stupid poor bastard, Christy,’ he said, almost to himself. He looked at Shane. ‘Somebody set him up, didn’t they?’

‘Somebody did,’ Shane agreed carefully, aware of my presence.

‘I don’t want to know who it was, you understand? Tell your son that. Half-arsed revenge won’t bring him back.’

‘Al never took any part …’

‘I know,’ Luke said. ‘Al’s a good kid, so this isn’t the time to start.’ He looked around. ‘I remember trying to drag Christy here every morning. Ma always said it was my job to keep him out of trouble.’

‘Christy liked trouble,’ Shane replied. Luke walked towards us and Shane put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You could have done nothing, Luke.’

‘Come on.’ Luke replied. ‘This place makes me feel old.’

‘You are old,’ Shane joked, but Luke just grunted and walked towards the car headlights, stepping on all the cracks now, deliberately walking through invisible walls. We followed.

‘I didn’t want to come,’ I told Shane. ‘I just felt I couldn’t refuse him.’

‘Everything will work out fine,’ Shane said, more to himself than me.

‘How long did Christy last here?’

‘Eighteen months of hassle till he got expelled and found a job on the milk floats,’ Shane said. ‘Luke was different. The Brothers hated him and he hated them. The year he got put away in Saint Raphael’s Industrial School they thought they’d seen the back of him, but he came back, put his head down and got first in the school in the Leaving Cert. I think he did it to spite them.’

Back in the car I knew the tour of the past was over. Luke sat beside Shane and they discussed practical arrangements, with Luke rechecking each detail of the funeral. There was something chilling in his tone, as if the business of burying his brother was like another shipment of tiles. I felt in the way. Mentally Luke was back among his family, a different person from the man I’d known in London or even the one who had cried in those school ruins moments before.

He had booked a single room for me in a hotel among a maze of tree-lined streets in Glasnevin. When we pulled up outside it I felt he was anxious to be gone. Shane took my case from the boot. The three of us stood there awkwardly. A handshake would have been ludicrous but I knew Luke wouldn’t display any token of affection. It was Shane who reached across to kiss my cheek. He smiled and opened the car door for Luke.

‘Don’t mind him,’ he said. ‘Your first time in Dublin, eh? You have a good time, you hear me?’