Father’s Music. Dermot Bolger

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?’

       NINE

      BUT ACTUALLY IT WASN’T the first time I’d ever been in Dublin. I remember, one night, watching a programme about the miracle of migration, how the tiniest of birds can instinctively plot a flight path across oceans and continents back to the nondescript cluster of trees where they had pecked their shells asunder. A camera hidden above the nest had shown the chicks with their beaks open, awaiting their mother’s return. Their luminous eyes had never ceased gazing up, scanning the constellations and logging the precise configuration of the Plough and Orion and Seven Sisters at that fixed point of their birth, so that no matter how far they scattered, they could perpetually track a course back home.

      There had been no stars on the ceiling of that hotel near Dublin’s bus station when I was eleven years of age. Instead there had been tributaries and deltas of cracks, pencil-thin veins that clenched themselves up into shapes of staring eyes and demonic heads. I had lain alone beneath them, both longing for and dreading my mother’s return. There were footsteps on the ceiling above me, the creaking of a bed gathering meaning and pace. Part of the adjoining room jutted out into ours, a plywood alcove where water sporadically gushed from a tap to cloak the СКАЧАТЬ