Mr Lynch’s Holiday

by Catherine O’Flynn

  ‘Anyway, the doctor, Wiley he was called, he examined her stomach and I got a bit of a shock when I saw how swollen she was. After he’d prodded her about she sat back next to me and squeezed my hand and I knew then right enough that she was terrified. She said: “Doctor, is it some sort of growth?”

  ‘He peered at her over the top of his glasses, just like they do on the telly. “Yes. Some sort of growth, Mrs Lynch,” he said. “A baby.”’ Dermot shook his head as if hearing the news again. ‘My first reaction was to hit him. Some stuck-up old bastard having a laugh at the Paddies. But he carried on talking, saying she’d have to have some tests, but assuring us she was pregnant, a good way along. I remember he said: “Given your past history and your age, I’d say it was something of a miracle.” Then he smiled and said: “Congratulations.” I’ll never forget that smile. It was a good one.’

  Eamonn gave a short laugh. ‘What? That was me?’

  ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘That’s a great story. I can’t believe I’ve never heard it before.’

  ‘Your mother didn’t really like to talk about it, to be honest. I think she was embarrassed not to have picked up on the signs. It was such a shock.’

  ‘So was I not planned?’

  ‘You were indeed. Good God, you were planned. You and all the others.’

  ‘What others?’

  ‘The ones that never came. There was never any question that we wanted kids. Jesus, we had you all named before we were married, but it just didn’t happen.

  ‘We were careful for the first year, we just wanted to wait until we’d moved from the flat to a house, that was all. But for years after your mother insisted that us being cautious for a few months had jinxed us for ever. “We sent a message that a baby wasn’t wanted,” she’d say, and I could never understand who she thought we’d sent this message to, who would so deliberately misunderstand our intentions. God, I suppose.

  ‘Anyway, we were married fourteen years and everyone around us was on to their fifth or sixth kid. It was tough, especially on your mother, very tough. All the false alarms and disappointments.’ He paused and lowered his voice. ‘The cycles, you know, all that business, apparently hers had never been regular, so it was awful hard for her to know what was going on and avoid building her hopes up.’ He paused again. ‘It was hard for both of us.’ He looked at Eamonn and grinned. ‘And then you came along. We just couldn’t believe it. It was like a miracle.’

  Eamonn winced at the word. He connected it with uncles and aunts ruffling his hair and pinching his cheeks. He’d never considered the meaning as a child, just thought it was one of the many mystifying or irritating things that relatives came out with.

  ‘I bet you’d got used to just being the two of you.’

  Dermot shook his head. ‘We had not. Not at all. That was never the idea.’

  It was a rare, overcast day. The beach was largely deserted and the wind blustery. They walked along the sand. Dermot marched briskly with his head up, while Eamonn meandered and stopped often to examine the small towers and circles of stones he found on the sand. San José had a vaguely hippy vibe and he wasn’t sure if the stones were some neo-Pagan trimmings or just pretty patterns on the sand. Either way he found them unsettling, reminiscent only of burial mounds. They reminded him of the bodies washed up on San Pedro beach. He tried to imagine what the migrants might have made of the Promised Land had they lived. An unfathomable fantasy world of golf courses, polytunnels and empty streets. He imagined their ghosts, restless spirits roaming the Costa, huddling in sandy bunkers and silent shopping malls.

  His father was waiting for him at the water’s edge. As Eamonn approached, Dermot dropped his Villa bag on the sand and crouched down to look through it. He pulled out a neatly rolled-up towel.

  ‘So. I’d say it’s been long enough since dinner.’ Eamonn was aghast to see, inside the towel, a pair of swimming trunks at least as old as him.

  ‘Are you thinking of going in?’

  ‘Of course I am. Are you not?’

  ‘I hadn’t really planned to.’

  ‘What? Look at it. You’d be mad not to.’

  ‘The water will still be cold, it’s only June.’

  ‘Ah come on. It’ll do you good. Nothing like a plunge in the sea to clear the head.’

  ‘I’ve not brought my stuff.’

  ‘Sure you could swim in your pants, no one’s going to notice.’

  Eamonn ran his hand over his face. ‘Oh God. OK, OK.’

  Dermot grinned and clapped him on the arm.

  Eamonn shook his head. ‘It’s going to be horrible.’

  Dermot got changed quickly and Eamonn watched him stride into the water up to his knees and then stand motionless. His arms and the back of his neck were a deep red, but the skin on his back and legs was a creamy white. It looked newborn set against the dark, weather-beaten extremities. He felt an unexpected tenderness towards his father’s body. A sadness that there was no one but him to see its trueness and beauty. Dermot walked forward and plunged head first into a wave.

  Eamonn’s own entrance into the water was typically protracted and tortuous. He waded gingerly up to his knees and then launched into an ungainly, jumpy kind of run into deeper waters, the cold like a hard kick to his balls. He thrashed about furiously and when the pain finally receded he lay on his back and trod water.

  Looking up at the sky, he wondered for the first time how his and Laura’s childlessness might have seemed to his parents. Did they assume that they wanted children? Did they pity them?

  The question had bobbed up to the surface between him and Laura occasionally over the years. In their twenties they had been baffled by the appeal of parenthood. They looked at every stage, from pregnancy, through childbirth, to the arrival of a baby and saw only pain, terror and hardship. When they thought of a baby they thought only of all the things they would lose.

  After she’d hit thirty Laura became more ambivalent. She still didn’t actively want a baby, but neither could she be certain that she would never want one. She found the finality of the decision unsettling. She shared her doubts with Eamonn:

  ‘What if we change our minds and it’s too late?’

  ‘What if we can’t have children anyway?’

  ‘What if not having kids sends us funny and we start collecting figurines?’

  What she wanted above all else was certainty. She read discussion forums on the Internet of the defiantly child-free and the fervent breeders, each group accusing the other of selfishness. The research, she said, had been inconclusive.

  Eamonn’s position had changed. He had grown to like the idea of children, or at least a child, but still found the prospect daunting.

  ‘Maybe no one is ever certain,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s a big decision.’

  ‘Maybe you have to just jump.’

  ‘Do you think we should?’

  But he didn’t want to persuade her; he wanted her to be completely sure.

  He thought now of Dermot’s words. His parents had not considered themselves complete without children. They seemed to see themselves on the periphery of their own relationship. He found the idea stranger the more he thought about it. It suggested that falling in love created rather than filled an emptiness. He imagined them living in their three-bedroom house for all the years before he came along, waiting. He wondered if he and Laura had been waiting for something all these years and not even known it.

  When he raised his head he saw he had drifted further out than he had realized. He saw his dad, a distant figure on the beach, a towel round his waist, walking away back to the line of prickly pears beyond the sand. Eamonn tried to stand but found he had floated out of his depth.

  His legs were beginning to ache and he decided he too would go back. He started to swim, but seemed to make no progress. He put his head down again and swam harder, thrashing his arms and legs until he was short of breath. He lifted his eyes from the water and felt a small pu
lse of panic as he saw the beach still just as far away and the orange buoy still bobbing out of reach in front of him. He tried once more but was unable to free himself of the current. He turned around to see if there was anything he could drift out to, but instead was hit full in the face by a swell and took in water through his mouth and nose. He tried to float on his back again but the waves rolled over his head. His arms and legs were heavy now and hard to lift out of the water. He felt himself being dragged down and only then considered that he might drown. For a split second he felt not fear but surprise and a kind of disappointment that this is how it would all end. Then another swell washed over him and straightforward terror gripped him. As he came up from the next submersion, he heard a voice calling for help and recognized it as his own.

  It seemed only seconds before he felt his father’s hand clutching him, his other arm encircling his neck and pulling him along. They struggled for a while, the two of them, and he heard Dermot’s ragged breathing as he fought the current with one arm, saying over and over again: ‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’

  When they reached shallow water, Eamonn’s legs were too weak to walk. Dermot dragged him up on to the beach and lay him on the sand. He disappeared from Eamonn’s view for a moment and returned with the towel. He placed it over his son’s body and tucked it in all around. Eamonn wanted to ask if Dermot was OK, but he found it hard to speak.

  ‘I saw you were in trouble. I was on my way back out to you before you started calling.’ He was rubbing Eamonn’s chest, trying to warm him up. ‘What a fecking idiot I am, forcing you in there when you didn’t want to go and then walking off and leaving you. If your mother was alive, she’d murder me.’ He kept on rubbing. ‘I’m sorry, son, I’m sorry. You’re all right now. You’re all right.’

  Eamonn was watching his father’s face close up. A scar on his chin. His wild eyebrows. The blue of his eyes.

  ‘You’re all right, Eamonn. God, I’m sorry. You gave me such a fright.’

  Eamonn pulled his arm out from under the towel and laid a hand on his father’s cheek. Dermot stopped rubbing, kneeled back on his haunches and held his son’s hand to his face.

  34

  He stepped from the warm evening air into the church. He dipped his fingers into the stone font, dabbing holy water on his head, chest and shoulders, and then stood for a moment, unsure where to go, unmoored without Kathleen and Eamonn at his side. They sat in the same pew every Sunday. Eamonn squeezing between his legs and the iron bars of the radiator, seemingly finding the clankings and clicks of the ancient heating system more mysterious and significant than the words of the priest. While Kathleen was deep in prayer, her eyes shut, her lips moving, Dermot would pass sweets to the toddler. A rainbow drop. A Flump. A foam shrimp. Tiny points of colour in the half-light.

  He hadn’t been to confession since he was a boy. Father Cahill had been his priest then, a giant crow of a man. He’d manifest himself in the schoolroom unexpectedly, shoulders hunched, knees cracking, stalking up and down the desks, rapping boys’ heads with his knuckles if they gave a wrong answer to questions of faith.

  Dermot’s father made them attend confession every week.

  ‘What will we say?’ Dominic would whisper to Dermot in a panic on the waiting pew.

  ‘You’ve to confess your sins.’

  ‘But I don’t know what sins I’ve done.’ His brother’s voice high, terrified by what he had failed to do. Dermot would invent sins for them both. Dominic had broken his mother’s teapot and blamed the cat. Dermot had written bad words in the back of the family Bible. Dominic had been gluttonous at table. He invented sins to confirm to the priest that boys were essentially feral creatures and that penance was a blessed and necessary sacrament.

  Most weeks the only bona fide sin he could think of was the previous week’s fabrication of sins. He tried to imagine what the priest would do if he confessed to that. He was sure that lying to a priest was a very bad thing. The kind of thing for which he might go to hell. But hell seemed distant and unconvincing. Like God and Jesus. Cahill, on the other hand, and particularly his right fist, was close and ever present.

  He moved away from the porch and took a pew on the far side of the church where he could watch unseen. Over by the two doors there were quite a few waiting their turn. Five thirty on a fine Saturday evening. He hadn’t known what to expect.

  Back home you’d just had to work out who was ahead of you in the queue and then go in when you saw them come out. Now there were lights above the confessional – one red, one green. They looked festive. Reminiscent of parties or doctors’ waiting rooms.

  He noticed a lag between people leaving the booth and the green light going on. He wondered what the priest was doing in those intervals. Recovering? Praying? Listening to the final score? He imagined Father Walsh, sitting in the dark, preparing his words carefully.

  He had yet to see anyone looking distraught. Cahill had always managed to reduce at least a couple of sinners each week to tears. Dermot and Dominic used to speculate how he did it. Did he refuse them absolution? Rain down hellfire and damnation? Did he pull back the screen and give them a punch?

  Whatever he’d done, Walsh was not doing it. The penitents emerged from the door looking relaxed, serene, often smiling. They made their way over to a pew in front of the altar, kneeled and bowed their heads for a few moments and then left. Two Hail Marys, Dermot estimated, at most.

  But Dermot knew of course that Walsh was no Cahill. He was a modern priest. Kathleen was always telling him so. A friend to all. Feared by none. Guitars in church. Jokes in the sermon. The once-annual parish trip now augmented with prayer retreats, youth weekends and summer camps. Walsh would tell Kathleen of his plans to make the parish more vibrant, to re-energize the whole community in Jesus’s love. ‘Renewal’ was the word Dermot heard her use a lot.

  When Tommy Nolan suffered a heart attack the previous month, it was Pat Quinlon, not Kathleen, who pestered Dermot to step in as driver for the parish trip. Kathleen would know how little relish the prospect held for him. The worst kind of busman’s holiday. He’d planned a day with Eamonn at Dudley Zoo, showing him the sleepy lions and the old castle, but found himself making a pilgrimage to the shrine at Walsingham instead.

  It was a hot day. Four hours there and four hours back. Kathleen sat directly behind Dermot with Eamonn asleep on her lap and Walsh beside her. The priest was in high spirits, very talkative. He told Kathleen all about his time at the seminary, his travels in Africa, the year he spent in France, the books he had read, a quiz he liked on Radio 4. The only time he stopped speaking was to stand up and lead the congregation in a sing-song. Not all hymns. ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, ‘Fernando’. Dermot recognized them from the radio. He was a modern priest.

  Once they got to Walsingham, Dermot learned that there was to be a pilgrim mass. He tried to speak to Kathleen alone.

  ‘It’s not really suitable for Eamonn.’

  ‘Why not? It’s only like going to church on a Sunday.’

  ‘On a Sunday he hasn’t spent four hours on a coach.’

  ‘He was asleep for most of it. Anyway, he enjoyed the songs.’

  ‘There are no other kids on the trip at all. It’s not really been planned with children in mind.’

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘We’re not that far from the coast. Why don’t we slip off for a bit? We can be back in a couple of hours. You can still visit the shrine.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I want to go to the mass, that’s the point of this, Dermot. And anyway, Father needs me to help.’

  ‘Right.’

  She hesitated. ‘Why don’t you take Eamonn off? I don’t suppose you’ll really be too sad to miss the service yourself, will you?’

  She and Walsh were late getting back to the coach. Everyone was waiting. Eamonn tired and teary. They’d been walking the ‘Holy Mile’, they said, Walsh explaining the medieval symbolism of the s
tatue of the Virgin.

  ‘You know how I am when I get going,’ he said by way of apology, and the other pilgrims laughed.

  Dermot was alone in the church, the last penitents having made their reparations to God and left. The green light remained on over the confessional door. The style of the priest might change but the church remained the same – a menacing Victorian pile, the stained-glass windows clogged with dirt, the interior impermeable to sunlight. Dermot looked up at the murky oil paintings on the wall depicting the Stations of the Cross. He read the title under each image, something dogged and awful in their detailing of every humiliation: Jesus falls the first time, Jesus falls the second time, Jesus falls the third time, Jesus is stripped of his garments. Images from a horror film. Muddy renderings of cruelty and pain hovering above Eamonn’s head every Sunday. The nails going on. The spear in the side. The boy was three years old.

  He went in then. Closing the door firmly behind him.

  The priest began automatically, like a coin-operated sideshow: ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.’

  Dermot didn’t join in. He felt too big for the space, as though he were in a Wendy house.

  ‘I’m ready to hear your confession now.’

  He didn’t want to kneel down.

  ‘In your own time.’

  He could smell Imperial Leather soap. He stood against the back wall, looking down at the grille. The silence was longer this time.

  ‘I’m here to listen.’

  He could hear him breathing.

  Walsh cleared his throat. ‘Will you not say what you’ve come here to say?’

  Neither man spoke for minutes. There was a shuffling, the priest moving closer, trying to see, then quietly, as if not wanting to be overheard, he said, ‘Dermot. I know it’s you.’

  Dermot nodded slowly, waiting.

  Walsh tried again: ‘What is it you want to say to me?’ He sounded wary. A long pause and then, almost a whisper: ‘Does Kathleen know you’re here?’

  Dermot scratched his nose.

  ‘Keep speaking, Father. You have a talent for it.’