by Colum McCann
‘Mam, what’s a blowjob?’
The old man suddenly slapped his knees uproariously. ‘Ah, Jaysus, even I’ve forgotten that! Even I’ve forgotten what that is!’ Mam’s face drained slowly, plucked at the tassels on the side of the blanket, ‘I don’t know, m’ijo, ask me later.’
Donnelly and the tinker were down the beach now with two girls on the back of the donkey, another man alongside them with his handkerchief knotted on his head, trying hard to keep up, with a plastic bucket and shovel in his hand. My father grunted and walked down to the water’s edge, pulling lint from his belly button. After a while the beach slowly began to clear. It was Mam’s time – I had seen it before – she was stretching her legs out along the edge of the blanket, her arms moving up to massage the back of her neck. Donnelly and the gypsy moved off from the dune, cigarettes held furtively. Along the length of the beach the other blankets had been lifted, Dunnes Stores bags tumbled, a Fanta can rolled towards the dunes, a cigarette butt bumped into a jellyfish. The sun gave a bow to the sea. Soon there was nobody left on the strand except the tinker, who was pulling his donkey up towards the cross where the life-belt was, red and white. The road curled like a rope away through stone walls built to last an eternity of storms, unlike hers. Not a soul was left save us and a few glad seagulls, bragging with crusts of bread over the sea.
She took off her blouse, unbuttoned it slowly, underneath was her purple swimsuit, like an anemone around her, sea-bound. ‘You come?’ she said. ‘Course I’m coming, Mam.’ The cavernous hollows in around the throat, smokeblue, lines criss-crossing each other moving upwards to a strange smile, aware of her body, tentative, ashamed, and maybe the tinker staring back at us, but she was suddenly cantering ahead of me like a purple tenpence towards the ocean, the old man absorbed by the sight of jellyfish, while her swift skinny arms made butterfly shapes in the shallow edge of the Atlantic, her spraying me with water, leaning in conspiratorially, saying: ‘Conor, I will explain to you that word when you are older.’
That night she stood in the kitchen under the fluorescent lights and pushed her fork through an uneaten plate of food.
I came home from school the next day and she was down by the firepit. She was wearing an apron from Knock shrine, a gift from Mrs O’Leary, the picture of the Madonna with a bit of homemade salsa on her nose. Along the lane on the bicycle, the brakes squeaking, I pulled up to where she was standing.
‘What ya doing, Mam?’
She swung around, a little startled. ‘You are home early,’ she said, wiped her hands on the face of the apron.
‘What’re ya burning, Mam?’
‘Nothing, m’ijo, come on inside, I have something special for you.’
She took my schoolbag from my shoulder as we walked to the front porch. A parcel sat on the table from Dublin, brown and crinkled. She handed me the scissors with long lean fingers – ‘Go on now, hurry quickly.’ The parcel produced a brand-new blue anorak. I laid it on the table but she told me to put it on. It was still hot outside, and I didn’t want to wear it, but I zipped it up quickly to try it on. She was happy then over the salsa pot, looking out the window. I said that I was just going outside for a moment, took the anorak off and left it sitting on the table.
Out in the firepit she had burned herself, made a pyre of her past, a giant cardboard box of books with the ends of flame around it, licking the edge of herself in the same way that the mountain fires did, a wale of fire upridged on the books. I poked around the flamed edges with a stick, around the mosquito net that the walrus man loved so much, around a dozen different bedrooms, around a tumult of skin, a dressing-table photo unburnt, a grove of trees ashy at the edges, a leg prominent from the knee down, a bedsheet disappearing. Suddenly she was shouting at me from the porch, with the coat in her fingers.
‘Come here, come here right now!’
I ran through the farmyard.
‘What are you doing there? You don’t like the coat?’
‘Oh, yeah, I like it, yeah.’
‘You don’t use it?’
‘Don’t want to get it dirty, Mam.’
She nodded her head and beckoned me with a large wooden fork covered in red sauce. ‘Come here and taste my salsa, tell me if it’s good, maybe there are missing peppers.’
But I leaned against the door and placed my muddy foot on the black and white linoleum and said: ‘I hate him, too, Mam. I hate him, too, he’s a bastard! I hate him!’ I had found out in school that day what the word meant – Hey lads, Lyonsy doesn’t know what a blowjob is! Are ya thick, Lyonsy? Everyone knows what a blowjob is! – and I had come home, detesting my father for the enormity of what he had done.
But Mam spun around and pulled me quickly to the chair – with surprising strength – and laid me down over her knee and slapped me, hard, six times on the back of my legs with the fork, sauce splaying around. ‘Don’t say that again never, don’t make me hear it again, don’t say that again never!’ I couldn’t understand her. The back of my legs were stinging, and, afterwards, at the kitchen table, she said: ‘Your Papa should hit you himself, but he never hit anybody in his life, you should be thankful, he never even hit a fly in his life! Your Papa never touched anybody!’ Later that afternoon, with a scarf of dusk coming down over the courtyard, and a smell of slaughter from the meat factory, I saw her as she strode purposefully back out to the firepit, arms swinging down by her side. She finished the job off – burning the books with a small splash of petrol and a match that took ages to light. They were damp and they snapped when she struck them. She didn’t throw much of a shadow anymore.
* * *
He woke up from the lawn chair, unaware I was sitting there, reached into his pocket for his packet of cigarettes. Before he lit up he reamed up from his chest and let a gob out towards the river. It landed near the bank, close to where I was sitting. The spit was strung through with blood. ‘Jaysus,’ he said, noticing me, ‘I must have fallen asleep.’ He saw me looking down. He was silent for a while, then he breathed deeply again through his nose.
‘Too much raspberry jam on me toast this morning.’
I felt a foul revulsion and love for him.
* * *
Us in the kitchen. Her hair thrown back behind her in long rushes of tungsten. She looked up at him as he took a plastic lighter from his shirt pocket, a pack of Major. ‘Living with you is like living with the ashtray!’ she shouted. He rose up from his chair, scooted it along the floor, cigarette between his teeth, pointed at her, shouting: ‘And it’s well you’d know about bloody ashtrays, isn’t it, woman?’
It was the morning after the books had become ash themselves, the wall of the firepit scorched, an aurora of herself amongst it. ‘You and your chip-pans and your books and your fires,’ he said, softer now, ‘would ya ever get a grip on yourself?’
He bravadoed his way out the door, camera bag slung over his shoulder in a motion of boredom – off to take pictures of some cows, corn-fed for the meat factory. He closed the car door, beeped the horn, lifted his finger wearily from the wheel.
Mam stood in the kitchen, awash in thought, by the stove, perhaps recalling fires of such spectacular magnitude that looking at the chip-pan or out at the firepit simply made her shake her head. She wiped her suds on the pocket of the holy apron – ‘Okay, m’ijo, I have been looking at this for a long time,’ staring at the stain above the stove. ‘How do we take it off the wall?’ The car moved away towards the road. Flies landed on the sticky yellow paper hung from the windowpane. I propped myself up on the stove, scrubbed with a Brillo pad. We leaned into the wall, but the mark wouldn’t come off no matter how hard we tried, it had its own stigmata. She stared into space, reached down and twirled the knobs on the radio. After a while I climbed down from the stove, said: ‘Mam, I should go, I’m going to be late for school again.’
She stared at the fire stain for a second. ‘Quitate,’ she said, smiling, ‘I will take care of this myself.’
She wiped a smudge of black
from above my eyebrow, kissed me gently on the cheek. ‘Your new coat looks great.’ She shoved a bar of chocolate into my pocket. I went outside into the spindrifty air, past the mound of ash in the firepit, hopped on the bicycle, pedalled furiously, brown puddlewater skipping up on to the back of my coat. At the meat factory my father was chatting with a man who was leading half a dozen fat cows out to be photographed – later to be butchered and hung on hooks. Two of the cows were simultaneously letting dung out to splatter on their tails. Crows flew in behind the cattle to feed on the disturbed insects in the hoof marks. I watched my father for a moment, leaned my head down to the handlebars and rode over the hump-backed bridge to school.
Later that week the old man was off in Europe again, and Mam was at home waiting for Mrs O’Leary to come in for lunch. It was the first time that Mrs O’Leary had come for a meal. Mam had cut flowers. I thought that she might even eat something substantial that day, she had prepared tortillas. Jittery, she ran long fingers over one another.
At noon, a taxi swanned down the laneway. Mrs O’Leary sallied up to our door, feeling her way with a walking stick. The taxi driver carried tins of paint, and rollers and brightly coloured vases and a host of exotic flowers – ‘A small gift for you, Juanita,’ Mrs O’Leary said. It was all laid down on the floor of the living room. The driver took off, tipping his flat hat to Mrs O’Leary.
‘Right,’ said Mrs O’Leary, ‘let’s decorate.’
The three of us dragged the old furniture from the living room to the farmyard, Mrs O’Leary cursing about her eyes. The yard looking strange to me with its tables and chairs standing lopsided on the rickety stones. Inside, we put old plastic bags, newspapers, and bedsheets on the carpet, painted the living-room walls with a very light pink, like flesh. We stood the vases on the mantelpiece and the flowers were carefully moved from corner to corner. ‘I think we should put the plant on the far corner, don’t you?’ said Mam. Some music erupted from the Victrola. We stopped early in the afternoon for a tea-break and Mrs O’Leary produced a bottle of Guinness from her handbag. She asked Mam if she liked the new look, if it was Mexican enough. Mam said, ‘Yes, it is very real,’ and then she whispered as if in a trance that it was the happiest she had ever been in her life, but her fingers were still rubbing over one another, and talk was sparse at the table, the tortillas having grown cold, Mrs O’Leary wondering how her stand-in was doing at the bar.
Two days later, when the old man came back from France, he gave a generous nod to the room and said, ‘Not bad, not bad at all.’ He laid a box down in the centre of the floor, lit a cigarette. Mam’s cheeks went gaunt in the kitchen as she bit them. He took the box of books from the floor and put them out in the darkroom, padlocked the door. ‘You won’t be burning these,’ he said. He wouldn’t show them to her, but I found out, years later, that it was a different book, a completely different one, using the shots of his early life in Mayo, when he used Loyola. He must have paid a fortune to get the book done. Mam left soon after, and my father made a pariah of himself – with me, and almost everyone else – his only occupation in life being the whisk of a fishing line in the air, Mrs O’Leary avoiding him, O’Shaughnessy gone on to other things, only Mrs McCarthy’s car tires crunching on gravel as she brought the odd Christian meal down to him.
* * *
I felt tense when evening rolled around. We were still sitting in the same spot. He was dozing, hadn’t fished all day, even with the new flies. I noticed a couple of old Spar bags tangled in the gorse, got up, picked them off, and started cleaning around the river. Went down to the footbridge first, the planks loose and rickety, creaking away as I leaned over. Used a stick to drag in the piece of Styrofoam to the bank. The ripples reached out, aspiring to one another. Plucked the Styrofoam out with my fingers and put it in the bag, used the stick to lift the plastic bags from the reeds. The sun was low on the horizon, and the geese had gone from the sky, only a few swifts out. I walked down along the far side of the bank, picking up a sack, a length of rope, some paper.
A drizzle began.
‘What ya doin?’ he asked when he woke, the wind-blown droplets on his face.
‘Just picking up some litter.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Something to do.’
‘I suppose it is.’
He stood up to go to the house. I watched as he went through the bushes and over the stile. He was gone for a long time and I thought he was sheltering from the rain, but he surprised me when he came back carrying a large black plastic bag.
He walked to the edge of the water and stood, the flanges of his hair blowing out, saluting the sky. The drizzle was lighter now. He peeled open the top of the big black plastic bag, shook it up and down to belly air into it, ballooning it outwards. I came across the footbridge and we started picking up more litter from the banks, a crisp bag, a soggy newspaper decaying near the reeds, a giant meat-factory syringe, a paper sack full of nails on the bank, a few small wine bottles shoved into the ground in a circle. He flipped one of the bottles towards me to catch, laughing, shuffled around and stabbed at the litter with his stick, dragged it, leaned down slowly to pick it up, filled the bag half-full, every now and then stopping to hum himself a bit of a tune, or look at the sky, or to run his hands along the side of his face.
I was about twenty yards away from him and he was staring down into the reeds. I drifted over, curious. An unrolled condom was lying in the small brown pool beyond the reeds, and he was staring at it – ‘Fucken litterbugs, the lot of them,’ he said, pointing towards the town, ‘up there.’
He picked up a dead branch from the side of the river which curved at its bottom end in a V, like a divining stick. He stared at the branch for a moment, twirling it in his fingers. A small smile appeared as he nodded down at the condom.
He took a red knife out of his pocket, used the fingernail of the thumb to take out the blade, fumbled to whittle the branch down to a sharp point. ‘What’re ya doing?’ I asked. He shrugged again, let the smile crack some wrinkles around his eyes. I heard a car trundle by on the distant road. Bits from the branch fell down at the side of the river as he carved with slow precision.
‘Ah, Jesus, Dad,’ I said, ‘leave it there.’
He shrugged and bent down to the reeds, holding the stick, balancing himself with it. I took a grip of his arm so he wouldn’t fall in. He leaned further, caught the condom on the sharpened point, where it teetered for a moment, fell again.
‘Ah, fuck it.’
‘Leave it be,’ I said.
He moved his arm out of my grip, put his hand down on the muddy bank, shifted his way down into the water, up to the rim of his wellingtons. He lifted the condom on one of the V ends, and suddenly burst into laughter as he raised it in the air, dangling it absurdly.
‘A million fucken fishes in that thing,’ he said, ‘and I’m not even using me rod!’
He held the condom on the end of the branch, twirled it for a moment, chuckling and coughing at the same time, opened the black bag, shook the condom off inside with the rest of the litter, flung the stick away down the riverbank. I reached down and gave him a hand out. ‘We should get those trousers of yours dry,’ I said. He put his arm around me, told me he was knackered. He hung the bag over his wrist and we came back to the house, the evening sun semaphoring off puddles as he stepped right through them, chuckling to himself. In the house I put on the kettle. He took a seat in the armchair, pulled off his trousers, hung them over the fire grill, sat there in his underwear. ‘Some Goldgrain with the tea!’ he shouted as he picked up the marmalade cat and stroked her. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a flush in his cheeks like that – they were forge-red as if, at last, he had done something spectacular with his life.
‘A million fucken fishes, son,’ he kept saying, until he went upstairs, steam churning from his teacup, feet creaking lightly on the stairs, still in his underpants.
‘Dad,’ I said, at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Can I tell ya someth
ing?’
‘Course ya can.’
‘I’m a bit embarrassed.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Well, I’m heading off tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Yeah?’
‘And I think…’
‘Ya think what?’
‘I mean, the bath.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re a bit ripe, these days.’
‘For crissake, Conor.’
‘I was thinking that maybe I’d run the water for you.’
‘Ah, for crying out loud. Go away out of that. I don’t need a bath. The last thing I need is a fucken bath. What would I need a bath for?’
‘Okay.’
‘The bath can wait.’
‘Whatever you want. Okay. Okay.’
‘Ah, Jaysus,’ he said.
He was switching his weight from one foot to the other. He went to his room, closed the door softly behind him, but popped his head around and looked down at me, lifted his eyes and closed the door again. I felt that it was some sort of invitation. I followed him in. He had one foot in the bottom of his pyjamas.
‘You’re an awful man for barging in.’
‘Yeah, well.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Was only kidding about the bath,’ I said.
‘Fair enough.’
He climbed in under the sheets. He didn’t even reach for his cigarettes, just pulled the sheet up as far as his waist. The tea was growing cold on the bedside table.
‘D’ya remember?’ he said, and then he stopped.
‘Remember what?’
‘Ah, Jaysus,’ he said, ‘I remember nothing at all these days.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked.
‘You’re better off that way. Remembering nothing.’
He reached over to get the cup of tea.
‘You know what someone once said to me, Dad?’
‘What’s that?’