Mr Lynch’s Holiday

by Catherine O’Flynn

  ‘It’s hard work, you know, writing a novel.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve gathered.’

  ‘Historical fiction.’

  ‘That makes it sound a bit grand.’

  ‘That stuff isn’t really my cup of tea.’

  There was a pause. ‘“That stuff”,’ she repeated.

  ‘I’m not being funny. I just mean, I don’t ever read books like that, so I don’t have any knowledge about them. I might not be much good at feedback.’

  ‘Look, Eamonn. You have a gift. You’re the writer. You’re going to write an exceptional novel. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I do. You’re going to write an exceptional novel. I’m not. I’m just going to read some books and try to write a story. It’s not going to be ground-breaking or important and I don’t expect you to read it or like it, so don’t be worried about that. It’s just something to do.’

  He smiled. ‘We’ll be a tiny artistic colony.’

  She nodded. ‘We’ll need absinthe.’

  15

  ‘Have you seen that fella over there?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The big tom, there on the left in the shade.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Well, look at him.’

  ‘I’m looking.’

  They sat on the terrace watching the cats taking their evening paseo round the empty pool.

  ‘Does he not remind you of someone?’

  Silence.

  ‘Tell me now if he isn’t the dead spit of Mr Socks.’

  ‘He isn’t the dead spit of Mr Socks. Mr Socks was a little thing, nimble.’

  ‘Never mind the size, I mean the markings, the white paws, and his face – don’t you think he has a look of him?’

  ‘Maybe. A little.’

  ‘I’d say he’s a long-lost relative. The Iberian branch of the Socks family.’

  ‘You used to tell me we were descended from Spaniards, do you remember?’

  ‘Well, maybe we were.’

  ‘No, not maybe, you relayed this information as fact. I distinctly remember you telling me that we had Spanish blood.’

  ‘The Armada was washed up on the west coast of Ireland. There was all kinds of intermingling. There’s a very good chance.’

  ‘Laura never stopped laughing when I told her. She seems to think it unlikely that I’ve any Mediterranean blood in my veins. She’s always amused by how easily I burn. There’s no compassion there at all.’

  ‘I don’t think poor Mr Socks would have lasted long with these boys.’

  ‘No, they’d have soon sniffed him out for the Little Lord Fauntleroy he was.’

  ‘I used to get into terrible trouble with your mother. She couldn’t stand the creature, didn’t want him anywhere in the house.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well, she didn’t like to hurt your feelings, so she’d put up with him when you were around, but when you were gone the poor cat got an awful shock. She’d be raging at him, shooing him out the back door with the brush.’

  Eamonn was indignant. ‘But he didn’t like it outside. It made him sneeze.’

  ‘I know, you don’t have to tell me that. I made sure he was all right though. I made a nice little bed for him in the shed and I’d take him out treats of tinned salmon or whatever I could find.’

  ‘Didn’t Mom notice?’

  ‘Of course she did. She was always giving out about food going missing. I’d say I’d taken it to work for my lunch and she’d say, “Who takes double cream for their packed lunch?”’

  ‘I can’t believe she didn’t like Mr Socks.’

  ‘No, they didn’t get on at all.’

  Later they took a footpath through the woods around the western edge of the development. They emerged from the pines towards the bottom of Lomaverde. They made their way slowly back up the middle of the road. Dermot was transfixed by the sky. He had never seen anything like it. Billowing trails of cloud in golds, pinks and purples were sliced through with shafts of the dying sun. A Hollywood Technicolor extravaganza above their heads. It was entirely fantastical to him, the sight of Charlton Heston’s face peeping from the clouds could not have astounded him more.

  ‘Will you look at that,’ he said, but when he dragged his eyes from the sky Eamonn was no longer beside him. He looked back down the road and saw him standing still, staring off to the side. He followed his gaze and noticed for the first time a children’s play area, set down in a hollow off to the right. It was a forlorn-looking place, untouched as far as he could see by any child, the primary colours of the swings and roundabout vivid in the setting sun. It reminded him of an advert for something, he wasn’t sure what. At first he saw only the motionless apparatus – the red swings, the yellow see-saw, the pirate-ship climbing frame – and then he looked again. Beneath the slide was a pool of dark liquid, slowly spreading.

  They walked over together. He bent to dip his finger in the liquid and felt a drip upon his neck. It was only then they saw the chicken, strung up beneath the apex of the slide, blood draining slowly from the gash across its throat. They stood side by side taking in the scene. The only sound the buzzing of flies.

  ‘It’s OK.’ They both jumped at the voice. Dermot recognized the Swedish woman from the residents’ meeting. She was struggling down the hill, wearing rubber gloves, carrying a bin bag, brush and large bottle of soapy water. He went over to help her.

  ‘Thank you.’ She handed him the brush to carry. ‘It’s OK,’ she called to Eamonn, ‘I will clear it up.’

  Eamonn looked at her. ‘Have you seen it?’

  She sighed and pushed some hair from her face. ‘Yes, I’ve seen it. It’s Ottoline.’

  ‘Ottoline?’

  ‘My hen.’

  Eamonn looked horrified. ‘Did you do this?’

  ‘No. Of course not. I had two hens. Ottoline and Sonja. They went missing earlier today. I assumed an animal had got them.’

  While they spoke, Dermot cut the bird down and laid it carefully on the ground.

  ‘I was coming down the road, looking for any trace of them, and I heard a commotion – sounds of flapping and squawking. I knew her at once. She had a distinctive noise that she makes. I called her name and then I heard footsteps running. By the time I came round the corner it was too late to save her.’

  ‘What do you think it means?’ asked Eamonn.

  Dermot looked at him. ‘I’d say it means someone fancied chicken for their dinner.’

  ‘But just leaving it here, like a macabre calling card.’

  Inga spoke. ‘I suppose I disturbed them, I don’t suppose they intended to leave it.’

  ‘But still …’ Eamonn seemed intent on finding darker significance.

  Dermot caught the eye of the woman. ‘Can we help you at all? Clean it up for you?’

  ‘That’s very kind, but I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Right.’ They carried on standing, awkwardly, not knowing what to do as she put the chicken in a plastic bag. She turned her head to look at them. ‘Please, it’s OK, you go.’

  As they walked away she called after them. ‘Excuse me!’

  They turned around. ‘Sorry,’ she was looking at Dermot, ‘I’ve forgotten your name.’

  ‘Dermot.’

  ‘Dermot, yes. I’m so sorry about this. What a holiday you are having!’ And she laughed.

  They walked back up the road. Eamonn was unsettled. ‘Odd sense of humour.’

  ‘Did you think so?’

  ‘Well, she was all very jolly at the end, wasn’t she? As she wiped up the innards.’

  ‘Scandinavian did they say she was?’

  ‘Swedish.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Viking blood. It’d take more than a few giblets to upset one of them, I’d bet.’

  Eamonn said nothing.

  ‘Nice bit of halal chicken she has there now anyway. I hope she doesn’t let it go t
o waste.’

  ‘You’re joking, right?’

  ‘What? Why not? Slaughtered very cleanly.’

  Eamonn pulled a face. ‘Did you kill chickens back in Ireland?’

  Dermot turned to him and nodded solemnly. ‘Indeed I did. Chickens. Rabbits. Sheep. Cows.’

  ‘Cows? Jesus Christ.’

  ‘That’s how it was in the country. Up at dawn and out you were with a big knife cutting the throat of anything you could find.’

  ‘Oh, I see. This is humour.’

  ‘Leaving a trail of macabre calling cards behind us. Slaughtering and singing while we did it.’ He began to sing:

  ‘Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by

  My mind being bent on rambling to Ireland I did fly.’

  He carried on walking, leaving Eamonn standing in the road. ‘It was a reasonable question.’

  16

  He knew that he would never turn into his dad, never be one of those sons mistaken for their fathers on the telephone. His parents were Irish, that was what he said. Never that he was Irish. He had grown up in England, he had a Birmingham accent, he was so palpably different to them that it seemed preposterous to him to describe himself as Irish. But to call himself English seemed no better. His name and indeed his physical appearance declared his otherness.

  As a boy, cocooned in the small world of his primary school and parish, where nearly everyone he met was first- or second-generation Irish, his Irishness was largely invisible to him. He sometimes saw comedians on television telling jokes. There was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman. The jokes were the same – the Irishman was always called Paddy and he was always stupid. He found them baffling. He’d hear the audience laugh and he didn’t get it. He thought it was something grown-up, something secret.

  When he passed the exam for King James he found himself in the minority for the first time, but it was not simply the nationality of his parents that made him different, it was their religion, what they did for a living, the area in which they lived, the names they called meals, the places they hadn’t been on holiday and a hundred other tiny details that seemed to place them and him on the outside. Staff would correct him, would reprimand or sometimes belittle him. From Mr Johnson, his geography teacher, he learned about something less tangible than glaciated u-shaped valleys and limestone paving. The taint was there in the way the teacher looked at him, the way he said his name, the way he handed him his work – a faint, but unmistakable odour, a smirk, a tightening.

  In his first year at university he lived in halls with a boy called Kev Callaghan from Bolton. In their second term, while others were discovering their sexuality, Kev came out as an Irishman. Overnight he sprouted Sean O’Casey badges and Brendan Behan quotes, he started playing the Dubliners and Planxty loudly each evening in his room, and calling himself Caoimhín. It was as if, Eamonn thought, Kev had been bitten by a radioactive Celt. Eamonn didn’t know what to make of it. He imagined his own father’s bemusement if he went home wearing an Aran jumper and playing the bodhrán. One night Caoimhín drank too much Guinness and told Eamonn that he was in denial, that he was a self-hating Irishman. Eamonn was happy to concede the self-hatred and the Irishness, but he didn’t see them as connected. They both accused each other of pretending to be something they weren’t and in their drunken state thought that must mean they were in agreement.

  What began as Caoimhín’s own personal identity crisis seemed to become more generalized in the years that followed. Eamonn returned from university to a Birmingham filled with pretend-Irish pubs. Being Irish had somehow become a mainstream leisure pursuit, like eating Thai food and taking salsa classes. To be Irish you just had to like the Corrs and U2, drink Guinness, wear a big hat on St Patrick’s Day and be ceaseless in your quest for ‘the craic’. Eamonn didn’t do any of those things – he was fairly sure his father didn’t either – and so wasn’t sure where that left him. He went along once to a branch of O’Neill’s with some friends. It was like no other Irish pub he’d ever been to either in England or Ireland. The big-eared old boys had been replaced by young men with red cheeks and striped shirts and girls in short skirts. The relaxed atmosphere replaced by a supercharged frenzy. People everywhere were punching the air to ‘The Whole of the Moon’ and on every wall was mention of the fabled craic. At eleven o’clock, when Eamonn thought it could get no stranger, some inaudible signal sent the entire staff clambering on to the bar like weary automatons to perform a lengthy tribute to the Blues Brothers. He drank as much as he could to get through the evening and the next morning found he was unable to separate reality from his dreams.

  17

  They could hear the radio on in the kitchen, Aggie’s high-pitched voice singing along, missing every note. There was a lingering smell of bacon in the hallway, though there’d been none at breakfast. She’d set down a plate of eggs, announcing ‘Ash Wednesday’ as she did, and Dermot’s stomach had rumbled a blasphemous response.

  The lino was loose on the lodging-house stairs and he cursed as he slipped a step. He turned back to Matty, coming down behind him: ‘How is it you never fall?’

  ‘I know which one to miss.’

  ‘Would it hurt them to put in a light bulb?’

  ‘It’s the third from the top.’

  ‘Or, God forbid, nail down the lino?’

  ‘I just step over it.’

  ‘I don’t know what use he is at all. She may as well run the place by herself.’

  ‘There’s no point getting aerated.’ Matty opened the front door. ‘You’ll be gone soon enough.’

  After mass they walked up to the Vaults with the black smudges still on their foreheads.

  ‘So, not long now, is it?’

  ‘No. Three weeks. A gay bachelor no more I’ll be.’

  ‘You’re the lucky one.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Dermot, but he smiled as he said it. ‘The honeymoon itinerary keeps expanding. I tell her we’re only there for a week, but her family seem to have made it a point to scatter as widely as they can across the country. She has an aunt in Donegal and a sister in Cork. I’m to meet them all, apparently.’

  ‘You’ll be kept busy.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I still say you’re the lucky one.’

  ‘I am. I know. I am.’

  ‘She has looks and brains too, so she has.’

  Dermot smiled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You make her sound like a racehorse.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  Matty looked embarrassed and Dermot felt bad for him. ‘No, you’re right. She’s a great girl. I don’t know what she’s doing with me at all.’

  Matty grinned. ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘That’s enough of that. Some of those younger lads chasing her, Brylcreem boys. Flash Harries. They weren’t her style at all.’

  ‘Showering her with diamonds, were they? Now why would she want that?’

  ‘I don’t think there were many diamonds. All talk those boys. The patter, you know? She’d have you screaming, the way she sends them up.’

  ‘Well,’ Matty drained his glass, ‘you’re moving up in the world. Away from the old stamping ground. Soon there’ll be no one left at all.’

  He got the bus into town and waited for her in the Kardomah by Snow Hill. He was always five minutes early and she was always five minutes late. He’d say: ‘You’re not a truly late person. There’s a consistency there. Always five minutes. Why don’t you leave five minutes early?’

  And she’d say: ‘Why don’t you leave ten minutes late?’

  The truth was he liked the wait, the anticipation of her arrival. He’d look out the window and what he saw was a kind of chaos, an abstract pattern of faces and wheels and legs and bags and hats and umbrellas until the moment when it all came together, the split second when she emerged from the crowd and everything snapped into place. The world complete.

  There was something dramatic about her entrances. Her
hair blown from being on the bike, her face glowing, a slight breathlessness as she swept through the café. He always stood to greet a lady, but with Kathleen it was never courtesy or manners, it was an involuntary response. His legs straightening of their own accord, propelling him up to hold her, to catch her somehow. She kissed him on the cheek and he held her close for a moment, before she pushed him gently away.

  ‘People are looking.’

  ‘They should. Good God, we’re a handsome pair.’ He whispered, ‘Can you imagine the children we’ll have? People will weep when they see them.’

  She laughed and they sat down.

  ‘Did you get the train tickets organized?’

  ‘I did, yes. And the boat. And the hotel for the first night. You’ve nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I was having these funny thoughts cycling in.’

  ‘Were they about the hotel? The honeymoon suite? A night of romance and passion?’

  ‘They were not!’

  ‘I don’t know that I’m interested, then.’

  ‘Do you remember Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday?’

  ‘Was that the one with Bogie?’

  ‘No. That was Sabrina. Roman Holiday had Gregory Peck. They were in Rome. On holiday.’

  ‘Oh, I remember!’

  ‘I was just thinking: imagine if we were going on honeymoon to Rome. Could you imagine that? Wouldn’t it be magical?’

  ‘We’re going on honeymoon to Ireland, Kathleen. It’s all booked.’

  ‘I know. I know. And that will be grand. It’ll be great to see everyone. I was just daydreaming. Just the idea of it. Can you imagine being in a place like that?’

  Dermot smiled. ‘Well … it would be something, wouldn’t it? The history of the place.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking. And the glamour. My God. The people there are so good-looking.’

  ‘So, day one, what would we do? I’d say we’d go to the Colosseum, what do you reckon?’

  ‘Oh, Dermot! Ben Hur! Do you remember that? Spartacus! Tony Curtis!’

  ‘I don’t know that we’d see him.’