‘No rain please,’ Darius said to me.
We arrived at the Concannon house and looked up at the boarded opening, everything ahead of us. At seven in the evening that same day, we would stand there and admire the new frame in place. Glass and all. We would look back over the various stages of the job and wonder how we got it all done. A series of stacked-up miracles. All the hold-ups, the re-measuring, the making sure. Moments when it all seemed too good to be true, when things went far too smoothly and you became suspicious or even careless and over confident. Followed by tricky, unforeseen snags that took for ever. Moments where you utterly underestimated the measure of time and how long the small things take. An hour fitting up one corner, chiselling away a few millimetres of concrete, so that we started thinking the whole thing was actually going to take a week. Moments where wood and stone and plaster refused to co-operate, leaving the two of us looking at each other and wondering what to do next. We were obliged to obey the rules laid out by the materials. We had to be creative to get around them. We had to cheat a little and adjust the flaws with dressing. We cursed and complained, affectionately. We asked ourselves why the hell we took on this job in the first place and why we had not taken up something simple like delivering pizza instead. But we carried on, sticking to it solution by solution, until we could see the end in sight.
‘Keep her lit,’ I said, but Darius didn’t understand that phrase. ‘It means keep the fire going or keep the joint passing around. But it really means keep it up, that sort of thing.’
I told him I had heard it down the country once or twice and he repeated the expression again and again, absorbing it into his general talk. ‘Keep her lit, you little whore, don’t do this to me.’
Darius was a brilliant craftsman. His accuracy, his confidence, his perfection. We worked like a team of interchangeable limbs. He knew what my hands were doing as though they were his own. I trusted the holding pressure of his grip on the frame. I saw the tight strain in his arms, on his face. His smoky breath right beside me while I marked the fixing and drilled the holes – the old-fashioned way. They constantly came up with new fixing agents, such as quickdrying cement, with no drilling required. But we did it by the conventional rules, with screws bolted right into the walls. And all through the day, Darius had a way of demonstrating things with physical gestures, swinging his hips like an exotic dancer as he told me to make sure it was not going to move. In other words, we didn’t want this whole frame doing a lap-dance one night when the wind came up.
‘We are a right pair,’ he said to me.
‘Yes, we are. A right pair, all right.’
‘Vid and Darius.’
Things were beginning to fall into place.
Darius sometimes appeared to think the wood was on the same evolutionary level as us humans. And maybe he was right. Wood was female. Screws were male, because the bastards sometimes refused to co-operate. He spoke as if this was a full day spent in bed with a woman with the curtains drawn, shifting her around in different positions. ‘Get your arse up here.’ He held up the side panel to the opening in the wall, then took it down again, saying she needed to lose a bit of weight. He got the electric planer to shave a few millimetres off the top corner. Blonde, girlish ringlets falling to the ground, carried around the front garden on a breath of wind.
‘Come on, sweetheart. Head first.’
I couldn’t help laughing and wondered what Rita would have to say about this if she heard it. Women are not timber. I almost preferred it when Darius switched to Russian for his most obscene fantasies. It was all part of the noise of work that, when things were going well, his analogies turned pornographic, far-fetched, full of desires which could never be satisfied by wood alone.
He’d told me that his wife left him because of his obsession with things being put away in the right place. She accused him of tidying everything before she even got a chance to make a mess. She felt smothered. She said it felt like living with a ghost. He joked about it now, but you could see how it would be hard to live with his kind of perfection. Right and left socks. Herbs in alphabetical order. You should have seen his workshop, everything labelled and tagged and numbered. All the blades in ascending order. Shadows marked out along the wall for all the different hand tools. A million small drawers with screws and dowels and washers. He once dragged me around five different DIY stores looking for a particular brass, round-head screw when he already had dozens of flat-head screws of the same gauge which would have done perfectly well, and after all that trouble it had to be countersunk in any case and couldn’t be seen.
Quite possibly people would say the same about me. While Kevin was briefly living in my place, he left things lying around, reassuring me with his presence. But since he moved into a new apartment, I had to practise some disorder to give myself the illusion of not being alone.
Halfway through the job, Mrs Concannon returned home and we had to stop to let her admire the work. We answered half a dozen questions politely, without trying to rush her, explaining all the precautions we were taking to make sure the window was anchored securely against the wind.
‘Better let you get on with it, so,’ she said finally.
‘Keep her lit,’ Darius said.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, a bit irritated.
‘Keep her lit. You know. Keep up the good work,’ I explained.
She smiled awkwardly, more like a silent sniff, then went down the hallway into the kitchen to read the paper. I told Darius not to start laughing immediately because that would make it look like we were mocking her.
And then the phone call came telling me that I was already dead and should not even be bothering with any of this work, unless I was concerned about my posthumous reputation for finishing things.
‘One of your girlfriends?’ Darius asked.
‘I wish it was.’
We laughed, but there was a crash in my smile. And just to increase the doubt, the sun was blocked out for a moment, casting a shadow across the house. The sea went all goose pimples. Then the street flared up again at the flick of a switch.
I felt alone. For the first time, I wanted to go home, even if that was no longer a place where I belonged. It was more a wish to return to my childhood, before I understood much about the world. I focused on the best moment I could remember. My mother baking. The smell of cake just out of the oven and the way she talked to me, explaining everything she was doing. I remembered her slicing through the cake sideways, twice, in order to make three layers. Two into three, she said, and I always remained confused by that mathematical equation which came out in a beautiful tiered coffee cake in the end. My father too. There were great moments to remember with him, when he taught me woodwork. He was so patient with me, showing me how to do dovetailing and how to bore for dowels and how to measure everything again, one last time, before you went beyond the point of no return. We built kitchen cupboards one summer, to store all the jam and the preserves my mother made.
But even these memories were not enough to make me feel at home. In fact, I felt all the more vulnerable, thinking of the past. It was like descending the stairs backwards and not knowing what I might find when I turned around at the bottom. I was unable to protect myself from my own memory. Not confident enough to be alone.
We carried on working. I was glad to hear the dry sex of Darius’s ongoing fantasies. But even this distraction could not hide the premonition I now had. I could no longer delude myself into thinking that I was making progress here. All the faces in the courtroom came back to haunt me, the hatred in the eyes of the electrician when I was discharged. The rage in his expression when we ran into each other in the supermarket. My acquittal meant nothing. All that guilt was still there, coming after me like delayed justice.
I imagined what it must be like to disappear without leaving any trace behind. I began to feel guilty about all those people who left no trace behind in my own country. Unmarked graves, a thousand miles away. Places where bodies were buried
anonymously. People standing by them years later as they were being excavated, waiting to identify clothes and shoes and watches hanging around limp dead wrists. Women holding scarves up to their faces, forearms across their noses, hands up to their eyes. DNA was perhaps the only trace left by which they could be recognised.
If it wasn’t for the threatening phone calls, I might have wished the day would carry on indefinitely. I was disappointed when it came to an end as we put the double glazing panels in. We pulled the windows up and down, trying to find something wrong, something that still needed to be adjusted. I clapped Darius on the back and told him he was a genius, I could not have done this job with anyone else.
We needed to get drunk together and walk back over all the details of the day in our heads. The work had turned us into fellow achievers. We needed to grab some food and celebrate. Conquer the work and leave it behind, let it slide away with a few pints. All that talk about women and wood. The VIP lounge of our own jokes.
But that was not possible because there was another phone call. This time from Kevin. He had left messages which I ignored, thinking they were further threats. I didn’t want to hear any more announcements about my own premature leaving.
‘In private,’ Kevin said.
Reluctantly, I told Darius that we would go for a drink another night, which was not the same and would never have that immediate buzz and brotherhood of getting drunk at the end of the work day. You might as well tell a child you’re going to postpone Christmas till St Patrick’s Day.
‘It’s OK,’ Darius said with a smile. But I could see his disappointment. He got into his van and drove away with the most important part of the day gone missing, as though, once again, he hadn’t been paid. I felt angry with myself for letting him down. I could imagine him in the local chipper, forking tasteless fish and chips alone, with nobody to share his appetite. Off to drink in solitude.
‘You did a great job,’ Kevin said, but his admiration seemed out of context. Like switching from one movie to another midway.
I washed and got some of the sawdust out of my hair. As we left the house, I took a last look at the casement window.
‘I got this call today,’ I told him. ‘Like, a death threat of some sort.’
He smiled.
‘It’s only a joke,’ he said, playing it down.
I told him that my days were numbered and that they were going to take me out of my misery.
‘Sounds a bit washy to me,’ he said.
‘They told me I was fucking dead.’
‘Empty threats,’ he assured me. ‘Pay no attention to that kind of stuff. Trust me. I’ve heard it all before. Wait till something happens before you worry about things like that.’
He had other things on his mind. He took me to the nearest bar, though I constantly felt I was washing down the dust with the wrong person. Kevin drank fast. He drank to get to a destination, not for the journey. It was not a celebration but more like a gathering rage.
‘Where does he live?’
‘Who?’
‘My father.’
He wanted me to give him the address. I looked at my watch and wondered if his father was already at the yacht club for the night.
‘He might still be at home,’ I said.
He left the car behind. We walked along the street together and though I was leading the way, he still gave the impression of walking ahead of me. We arrived at the house with the shabby façade and I pointed down the granite steps.
My optimism was beginning to return, thinking this could be the great reconciliation happening in front of my eyes at last.
I remembered his father’s handshake. The trace of his life left on my hand. All the things I had been able to verify since then by going to Furbo and seeing the place where he grew up. The homecoming sound of wind through the walls. Rain making its way slowly ashore at walking pace. And the sweet smell of turf in the air. Even the taste of creamy black pints in the pubs was like drinking liquid turf smoke.
I tried to convince myself that Kevin was finally coming around, that he would allow his heart to speak instead of his head, that he would shake his father’s hand and be gripped by the imprint of his friendship.
25
There was no handshake. The face-to-face meeting between father and son was so brief, it might as well not have happened at all. Not much more than five minutes.
‘Kevin,’ his father said, surprised.
He invited us to come inside but the gesture was not taken up. Kevin stood back, well out of human reach, swept his sandy hair back and spoke in a businesslike tone.
‘Where is she?’
He seemed to have no way of addressing his father. Not Dad, or Pa, or Johnny or anything.
‘Ellis, you mean?’
‘I need to talk to my sister.’
‘She’s in trouble, isn’t she?’ his father said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘With drugs. She has an addiction, isn’t that so?’
‘Is she living here with you?’ Kevin asked.
‘No,’ his father replied. ‘But I’d like to help her, if that’s possible.’
‘You stay away from her,’ Kevin said, with strong emotion rising in his voice.
‘I’ve got a right to see my daughter, she’s of age now.’
‘I’m warning you to stay away from my sister. I will do anything within my power to protect her.’
At least they were talking now. Brown eyes looking into brown eyes, reflecting each other in the family mirror. Their strong faces were so alike, distinguished only by the Connemara accent reverberating in his father’s voice. Their foreheads the same. Same paper-clip frown between the eyes. Though his father seemed like the younger of the two, more like a boy, despite his white hair. Kevin more parental, more prosperous and secure, staring back with authority at the failures of his father’s generation.
There was nothing I could do to mediate, so I stood back on the granite steps, trying not to take sides.
His father carried a paralysis with him, in his laughter, in the cynicism and lack of opportunity of his time. He came from a time when people mistrusted success, when they laughed at enterprise, when they could not even trust friendship because emigration spread so fast, like contamination. Every friend he had was like a trapdoor opening up underneath his feet, bound to go away. All that leaving over the years must have changed the way people here thought about friendship, making it more needy and intense, more urgent, more temporary. Something that could be left behind overnight. Something portable that could be taken away in a story and remembered long after.
Kevin stood looking at his father without any compassion. Even the surroundings seemed to offer no hope – the bad light, the snivelling summer dampness, the green moss on the steps. He saw his father only as a bum, a dreamer, unable to take what was available in the world. The only foothold he had was in his songs and stories. A life measured out in vagrant years of aimless conversations repeated over and over in bars, not completely unlike Kevin himself, but without the same level of success and self-confidence.
‘What do you want from us?’ Kevin demanded. He spoke like a lawyer.
‘I want to make it up to you,’ his father said.
‘Bit late now, don’t you think?’
‘She never even opened my letters. She never even passed on any messages to you. My own children.’
‘After what you did?’ Kevin shouted. ‘I saw it myself.’
‘She closed the door on me, Kevin. I know I did wrong and I’ve been in hell all my life over it. I only want to make up for it some way.’
‘The courts have dealt with all this,’ Kevin said.
‘I’ve begged her forgiveness but she won’t even talk to me.’
‘There is no forgiveness for what you did, in front of your own children.’
Kevin was already turning away in disgust.
‘I’m not asking for anything, Kevin.’
‘So.’
‘I just want to apologise to you and Jane and Ellis for what you saw. For me being away. For me not being a father. That’s all I can say.’
‘Fair enough,’ Kevin said. ‘Now I’m advising you to keep away from my mother. And keep away from Ellis.’
It was hard to listen to these words. He gave his father no room to come out of his banishment. He turned and came up the granite steps past me. I was blocking his way and stood aside.
‘He’s a good worker you’ve got there, Kevin.’
His father was left standing alone at the door. What could I do? I felt lousy, walking away down the street after his son.
‘He’s a great friend,’ I heard him shout after us. ‘Don’t lose him.’
That was it, more or less. There was no further talk about his father. Kevin brought me into the city and we drank until we remembered nothing.
I was tired, but the alcohol gave me the energy to forget. We ended up in a night club. I didn’t want to go, but I could not desert my friend at this point. I stuck by him. He met some people he knew from college, including a woman called Samantha. ‘How could you screw a woman with a name like that?’ he said to me. But after an hour of dancing around to music that sounded like a mobile phone, he ended up changing his mind and disappeared with Samantha after all. Then I made my way home on my own.
In the middle of the night I got another call.
‘He tried to burn my mother out.’
His father? An arson attack? The words suggested the high-end of the scale, close to catastrophe.
I got down there as fast as I could. Kevin was already there, pacing up and down with helpless fury in his eyes. His fly was undone. Black tideline marks on his lips. Waiting to get a hold of the person who did this so he could demonstrate exactly how much he loved his mother.
‘Have to get security cameras installed,’ he said.
The Garda officers tried to calm everybody down. They spoke to Mrs Concannon as she stood on the granite steps in her dressing gown, inhaling the bitter fumes of scorched wood after the fire had already been put out. They referred to the people who carried out the attack as ‘right little gurriers’. It was a way of minimising the event in their own minds. Classifying it in terms of severity and police priority. In their estimation, it was a random incident, a drug-fuelled piece of irresponsible madness carried out by passing thugs who picked an easy target. The blue light was flashing across her face, turning her eyes black and her complexion white as a mask. They asked if she knew of any reason for people trying to set fire to her house and she could not think of anything. Bad and all as it looked, they assured her, it was a Saturday night, after all. If somebody was really trying to burn down the house, they would have done it properly, not by setting fire to a wheelie bin outside the front door. It was the work of amateurs, in other words. They were taking the matter very seriously indeed, but still hoping that it was nothing more than a prank.
Hand in the Fire Page 17