by John Boyne
‘For shame, in front of the children,’ she said, taken aback by the depth of his anger.
‘Are they even mine?’ he asked. ‘Is it a hoor I’m married to, do you think?’
Which led to her running up the stairs in tears while the rest of us sat crying on the sofa.
He wouldn’t allow a television in the house, even though the neighbours all had sets, because he said the actors in the shows were all fellas who couldn’t get jobs on the stage or in the films. He said he’d rather be on the dole than work in television, but I knew that wasn’t true, for he’d written to RTÉ for a part in Tolka Row and never received so much as a reply.
In the end, he was left with no choice, for the man needed money for his own food and drink, and he went crawling back to Mr Benjamin, cap in hand, who agreed to give him a job but on a lesser wage, as if he was just a young apprentice starting out. The other men took great pleasure in his downfall, of course, for he had taken equal delight in saying goodbye to them. Dad never fought back, but he went into himself; he went into himself something terrible.
Five became three later that year, in the closing days of the summer of 1964.
He was still drinking a fierce amount and he and Mam fought all the time about money, about what was the point of earning it if it was just going to end up in the tills at Davy Byrne’s or pissed up against a porcelain wall in Mulligan’s on Poolbeg Street? Mam was rough on him, there’s no denying it, and he stopped trying to defend himself. Perhaps the fight just went out of him.
It was Mam, then, who organized the Big Surprise, a week’s holiday in Blackwater village in the county of Wexford, paid for with money she’d been setting aside for just such a moment. We rented a chalet from a widow woman named Mrs Hardy who lived in a bungalow next door with her son, a strange boy who spoke in riddles and who I realize now was probably touched in the head, and three spaniels, each one yappier than the last.
Hannah, Cathal and I could not believe our luck when we got to ride in a train all the way from Connolly station through Bray and Glendalough, onwards to Arklow, Gorey and Enniscorthy, until we arrived at Wexford itself, where we took a horse and trap, all five of us and our suitcases, to that mythological place, our holiday home. It was fairly basic accommodation, as I recall, but we were beside ourselves with excitement, especially at the fact that there were fields to run in, dogs to chase and chickens to feed every morning outside Mrs Hardy’s back door.
‘Do the dogs not take an interest in the chickens?’ I asked Mrs Hardy one afternoon and she shook her head.
‘They know what would happen to them if they did,’ she told me, and I didn’t doubt it for she was a woman with a temper.
There were two bedrooms in the chalet; Mam and Dad took the smaller one with the double bed, while we three children took the larger one with two singles standing parallel to each other on either side of the room, Hannah in one and Cathal and I bunking together in the second, unconcerned by the squash, giggling at the fun of it, kicking each other with our bare feet. At the time, I thought I had never been happier to be alive.
During the day we would entertain ourselves in the fields or take a village taxi to Courtown for an afternoon at the two carnivals, riding on the dodgem cars, sliding down the helter-skelter and throwing our ha’pennies away in the one-armed bandits. I had developed a passion for comics and it was a difficult choice between the summer specials of The Beano, featuring Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids, and The Beezer, with its Banana Bunch and Colonel Blink. We would eat candy floss and buy inflatable toys. Dad took me to see Dracula one afternoon at a local cinema and I upended a carton of popcorn over both of us when I started screaming at the vampire and had to be carried out of the cinema and into the brightness of the afternoon before I would calm down again. Some days we would all make a trip down to Curracloe beach, Dad carrying a picnic box in his hands, and run in and out of the sea, building castles and moats, and afterwards sitting with sand-crunchy Calvita cheese sandwiches, bags of Tayto cheese and onion and warm cans of Fanta and Cidona, feeling for all the world like gods descended from the heavens.
Did I see Tom Cardle on the beach one of those days, I wonder. There were families everywhere and Tom’s farm was not far from the place where we climbed over the dunes to catch our first sight of the blue water sparkling like an earth-bound rainbow ahead of us. Was he out there, that tenth child, whose destiny was written down for him on the back of a Bible at birth and who would never know what it was to love another human being? Did I share a joke with him when I joined a group of local lads as they kicked a ball around the beach? Is it possible that we have a shared innocence somewhere in the past? It is; of course it is. But what does any of that matter now? It’s all washed away with the tides.
The argument that destroyed my family’s life took place on our fifth night in Wexford. Hannah and I were trying to teach Cathal to play Ludo, while all he wanted to do was chase one of Mrs Hardy’s spaniels who had wandered in to see was there any news with us, when Mam made the innocuous comment that a holiday like this was just what she’d needed. ‘We should do this every year,’ she added.
‘Holidays cost money,’ said Dad.
‘And so does drink.’
‘Ah, would you ever go fuck yourself, you oul’ bitch.’
We three children looked up in surprise. For all of the anger that was bottled up inside himself, Dad had somehow stopped expressing it aloud, and even when he did, he almost never used language like this. It wasn’t that he had allowed himself to become walked upon, it was just that whenever Mam had a go at him he seemed to sink inside himself instead, sometimes for days at a time. He was a victim of depression, I can see that now as I look back. His life was not the one he had hoped for.
Words were exchanged between my mother and father, words that are difficult to recount and even harder to forget. Mam had the heartlessness to quote verbatim the words of the newspaper critic who had threatened arson if there was a chance of William Yates appearing on the stage again. Dad asked her what she knew of the acting world anyway, sure wasn’t she nothing but a jumped-up little nobody who’d seen her chance and taken it.
‘My chance?’ she roared. ‘Sure didn’t I already have my chance and I was too blind to see it? I might have been a transatlantic stewardess by now. I might have been running Aer Lingus! Instead of a doormat to you.’
‘It was all I wanted,’ he cried, bending over in his chair, his fury and venom turning to bitter self-pity and recrimination; he buried his face in his hands, the snot running down from his nose, and little Cathal and I started to cry to see how much pain he was in while Hannah simply grew pale and stared, her tongue sticking out of her mouth in shock. ‘And you took it from me,’ he added, looking around at us. ‘You all took it from me.’
‘We took nothing,’ shouted my mother, who had had enough of this by now. She picked up a heavy saucepan and banged its base time and again against the wooden table in a fury, and it made a horrible sound that left Cathal with his hands over his ears and Hannah running from the room in fright. ‘We took nothing off you, you miserable man. You miserable, good-for-nothing sad pathetic excuse for a man and a husband and a father. We took nothing from you!’ she screamed.
‘You took what I loved,’ he cried, rocking back and forth. ‘You took the only thing I loved. What if I took something from you that you loved? How would you like that?’
‘Take it!’ she roared, throwing the saucepan away from her now; it clattered across the floor as she stormed off to the bedroom. ‘Take it all, William Yates. I don’t care a jot for another bit of it!’
Little Cathal was sent in to sleep with Mam that night while Dad took the other side of the bed to me, and there was no giggling then and no kicking each other with our bare feet. Instead, I lay there, anxious and alert as I heard a sound that terrified and appalled me in equal parts: the sound of my father, a grown man, muttering incoherently like a madman into his pillow. Years later, I would hear
something similar come from Tom Cardle’s bed on our first night in Clonliffe College.
I don’t know what time I woke the next morning, but it was bright when I stepped into the living room and, to my surprise, my father was standing there in fine fettle, overflowing with good cheer, pouring my Alpen out for me into the red see-through bowls that I loved – Alpen was kept as a special treat for the holidays and never permitted at home – as Mam sat in a deckchair in the garden with her book, completely separated from him. She was reading The Country Girls, just for devilment, because she knew that the sight of that beautiful woman on the back jacket drove my poor father to distraction. He said she had a mouth on her and that she should have been brought to heel long ago.
‘There you are, son,’ he said, grinning at me as if none of the events of the night before had ever taken place. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Not really.’
‘Oh no? Is it a guilty conscience you have?’
I stared at him. I had no answer to this.
‘I’m going for a swim in a few minutes,’ he told me then. ‘Will you come down to the beach with me?’
I didn’t fancy it and said so.
‘Ah, of course you’ll come,’ said Dad. ‘We’ll have a great time, just the two of us.’
But I shook my head and said that I was too tired. The truth was that after all the trauma of the night before, the thought of dragging myself down to Curracloe beach and into the cold waves was, for once, an unappealing one. I could still see him rocking back and forth, blaming all of us for his own failures; I could still hear the sound of Mam banging that saucepan against the table. I wanted nothing to do with any of them.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked, standing before me now, a hand on both my shoulders. ‘I won’t ask you again.’
‘I’m sure,’ I said and he seemed to sigh a little in disappointment as he turned away from me and looked over towards the four-year-old boy playing in the corner. ‘It’ll have to be you then, Cathal,’ he said. ‘Go along there now and get your togs.’
And like a dog who never refuses a walk, my younger brother jumped up from whatever he was doing and ran to the bedroom to get changed for the beach, scampering back out with his bucket and spade in hand.
‘You won’t need them,’ said Dad, taking them off him and laying them down on the floor. ‘We’re swimming, that’s all. Just the two of us. No playing of games.’
Off the pair of them went a few minutes later, before Hannah had even risen from her bed, and I watched them as they wandered down the path and turned left, disappearing behind the trees in the direction of Curracloe, and thought not another thing about it, but wondered instead whether the donkey in the next field along might be out for his morning amble, and if he was, wouldn’t he think me the best lad alive if I brought him a few cubes of sugar and maybe an apple, if I could find one, for his breakfast?
It was a Garda with a Mayo accent, I remember, who arrived at the house a couple of hours later with the news. He must have been stationed in Wexford in the way that they always send them to a county that isn’t their own, where they don’t know the people they have to arrest or to whom they have to break bad news. I was out in the front garden, running around; Mam was in the kitchen preparing a late lunch, but she stepped out on to the porch when she saw the Garda car pulling in and coming to a halt.
‘Odran, go inside,’ she said as she came out, the dish towel still in her hands, and I stared at her but didn’t move and she didn’t ask me twice. ‘Are you lost, Garda?’ she asked, smiling brightly as if this was a great joke.
‘Ah no,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders and looking around with an expression on his face that said he would rather be anywhere else in the world than standing there. I remember thinking that he had the look of John Wayne. ‘Fine day, all the same.’
‘It is,’ agreed Mam. ‘Will it rain later, do you think?’
‘It can be changeable,’ said the Garda, looking at me for a moment, frowning, his forehead crinkling up something terrible.
‘Where’s that accent of yours from?’ asked Mam, and even in my childishness I thought that this was a strange conversation for the pair of them to be having. Gardaí didn’t show up at the house to make small talk. They surely had better things to be doing with their time than that.
‘Westport,’ he replied.
‘I knew a girl from Westport once,’ said Mam. ‘She worked with me in Aer Lingus. She had a fear of heights, so never looked out the windows of the planes. I wondered why she’d bothered getting a job there at all.’
The Garda laughed, then seemed to think better of it and turned it into a cough. ‘It’s Mrs Yates, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘It is.’
‘Sure we’ll go inside, will we? And sit down for a minute?’
I looked at Mam and saw her close her eyes for what felt like a very long time, and to this day I think it was the guts of half a minute before she opened them again and nodded, turning away and opening the door to lead him in, and even in those thirty seconds I would swear that she aged a decade.
Now here is what is known: a family on the Curracloe beach, a mother and father with twin boys, were setting up a wind protector when they saw William Yates and Cathal out there in the waves, apparently having a great time altogether, splashing away to their hearts’ content. The mother said she thought that the boy was very young to be out so far and the father took a notion that they were in difficulties and so threw himself out into the water to help. But he was not a strong swimmer and it wasn’t long before he began to struggle in the waves, and afterwards he said that it looked to him as if the man was trying to drown the boy, for he was pushing down on his head and every time the little lad came up for air the man pushed him down again and held him there until he rose to the surface no more. He swam further on then, away from the beach, out into the ocean, further than any sensible person would ever swim, and the boy floated back towards the shore, his face down, his arms outstretched. The father from the beach dragged him back in but there was nothing that could be done to save him, for little Cathal was drowned, and by the time Dad’s body was washed back in with the tide a couple of hours later, half the local Gardaí were on the scene, and an ambulance from Wexford town, and what could be done but bring them to Courtown hospital, where the candy floss was still on sale in the streets outside, where the dodgems still bumped up against each other in the afternoon sunshine, and write up the death certificates and call the funeral parlour?
And here is what is unknown: what was it that happened out there? Was it a suicide on my father’s part? Depressed, rejected by the world, packing cigarettes at the Player’s factory on Merchants Quay when he wanted to be Alas-poor-Yoricking on the stage of the Abbey or tutoring Eliza Doolittle in her elocution lessons in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Was it a suicide, I’m asking. It was, I am sure of it now. And was it a murder? Yes, to that question too. But why did he choose to take one of his own children with him? First me, who turned down the offer, then little Cathal. Why did he want to take one of us with him? What was the sense of that? What good did it serve? Would it take away the words of the critic from The Evening Press or give him access to Seán O’Casey’s house on the North Circular Road? Would it put him in front of Caitlín Ní Bhearáin or Elizabeth Taylor as they looked into his eyes and said their lines?
I have thought of this a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times over the years between then and now and have resolved it in my mind by saying that this man, my father, was not in his right head at the time, that he was ill, that he did something that he would never have dreamed of doing if the world had treated him with a little more kindness. What if I took something from you that you loved? he had asked my mother the night before, and only a man who was suffering and not in his proper senses could ever have considered such a plan. I tell myself this because to think otherwise would open up a sea of pain that would swallow me as easily as the Irish Sea swallowed my younger br
other.
What a world it is that we live in and what injuries we do to children.
I think of little Cathal struggling in the sea, feeling the sandy base disappearing from beneath his feet, crying out as his father’s hands pushed him down, wondering was this a new game of some sort. Terrified but obedient, trusting that whatever was happening was supposed to be happening, but then realizing that no, this was something peculiar, this was something he would not survive, this was the moment of his death and he would never get to play with Mrs Hardy’s spaniels again. And I imagine the water filling his lungs and the dizziness he would have felt as he gasped for air. And they say that drowning is a painless way to go, but why should I believe this, for who has ever succumbed to such an ending and returned to tell the tale? And I have an idea that my father came to his senses when he saw his youngest child giving up his struggle, his body going limp, and realized the terrible thing that he had done, and sure what could he do then but make wide-angled strides off in the direction of the horizon, knowing that it was only a matter of time before his arms gave out and his breath closed down and his legs stopped kicking and he sank beneath the water where he might find some peace at last.
That’s what I believe anyway. I have no way of knowing.
And so we began as three, then became four, then five, and one day without warning we were three again.
We came home to Dublin and Mam was no longer a married woman, she was a widow instead, and the loss of her youngest child changed her in ways that I never would have imagined. She turned to God, and in Him she hoped to find her relief and her comfort. She began taking Hannah and me to Mass in the Good Shepherd church early every morning before school, where previously we had only sat on those pews for the ten o’clock Mass on a Sunday, which was a notoriously short one, and made us say our prayers for little Cathal, although never for our father, for once the funerals were over she never spoke his name again in her entire life. And in the evenings, when the Angelus came on the television, she would order Hannah and me to sink to our knees to say all five decades of the rosary and the Hail Holy Queen, which we tried to do without laughing, but, may God forgive us, that was a struggle at times. She brought me across to see Father Haughton and said that I had expressed an interest in being an altar boy, which I had never done in my life, and before I knew it I was being measured up for my surplice and soutane. Statues of Our Lady were placed around the house. Pictures of the Sacred Heart, which I used to call the Scared Heart until she clipped me round the ear for my insolence, were pinned to the walls. Mrs Rathley from next door went to Lourdes to take the cure and brought us back a clear plastic bottle in the shape of Jesus on the cross, filled with holy water, and we were made to bless ourselves with it every morning and every night as we rose from or went to our beds, and we would ask God to take care of little Cathal and keep him safe and warm until we were able to join him in our reward. Our house, which until then had been peculiarly secular for the times, became a house of religion, and it was on my next birthday, as I turned ten, that she ran into my bedroom in the middle of the night, switched on the light, rousing me from my fanciful dreams, and looked at me with an expression of wonder on her face, before declaring that she had just had a great epiphany, one for which we should all be grateful. It had come to her while she was watching The Late Late Show, she said, and she had leaped from her chair and run up the stairs to rouse me and look into my eyes, and now that she did, she knew that she was right. She could see it in my face. She could tell it from the way I held myself in her arms.