The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy

by Robert Power

  ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ I say, holding her at arm’s length. ‘It’s so lovely to see you.’

  At sixteen she looks more like a young woman than ever. She wears a soft lilac roll-neck pullover and blue jeans. She lets go of me and drops her black leather jacket onto a chair.

  ‘How are you, Dad?’ she asks nervously.

  ‘I’m great. The Friary has been really good for me. There’ll be no more nonsense. I’ve finished with all that.’

  ‘No more drinking?’

  ‘Juices and mineral water from now on. And tea. I think I’ll drown in tea.’

  She smiles, her broad easy smile this time, and I laugh.

  ‘It’s a lovely day, shall we go up on the Heath?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, that would be fun.’

  ‘Tea at Kenwood?’

  ‘And kite-flying on Parliament Hill.’

  ‘Great idea. I’ll get it from the loft.’

  ‘Like the old days, Dad.’

  ‘Like the new days,’ I say, as I head off upstairs to rouse the purple and green kite from its semi-retirement.

  The sky is a blue you want to take home in your pocket. Standing on top of Parliament Hill, the city of London is laid out below us like a glorious model. All the familiar landmarks are in clear relief. Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Canary Wharf, and glimpses of the river as it cuts the city into north and south. In the distance the Sussex Downs stand out like folds in a blanket. I look at Lottie as she flies the kite. She clings to the handles, every twist and turn reverberating through her young body. She is absorbed in the moment, hypnotised by the sense and feel of it. The kite dances on the currents, swooping and diving, its string cutting a jigsaw through the air. An old man stops on the pathway, shields his eyes with his hand, and watches the kite as it loops and buzzes through the sky.

  Later, we sit on a bench and look down at the panorama before us.

  ‘I wish Grandpa and Grandma were still here. To hear me play, I mean. I used to love it when I was little. Grandpa used to sing those old songs and I played my recorder. I can still remember them.’

  ‘So can I,’ I say, though with different memories.

  Lottie goes quiet for a moment. She looks at me to see if I know, opens her mouth, says nothing, turns and then says, ‘It’s the anniversary next week, Dad, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, it is. Next Tuesday. It’ll be six years.’

  ‘Can we do something? Something special. To remember.’

  ‘Of course we can, Lottie. We’ll do something special to remember.’

  As if I could ever forget.

  He wanted to go back to Ireland, he announced one Melbourne Cup Day. To join the cause, to push the British and their Protestant lackeys back across the sea to their miserable little island. It came as a surprise as he’d always hated the bigotry of the Irish at large, their small-mindedness, the appalling weather. So after decades in Melbourne never really joining in but giving it a fair go, my father decided he must return. And where he went my mother went too. First to London, where they stayed a year or so, and then off on the well-trodden path to Holyhead and the ferry across the Irish Sea. When they finally died, after all the false starts, after all the bodged attempts, it was ignominious. Not as my father boasted it would be, cut down by a British bullet as he fought on Irish soil for the Republican cause. Not death in the line of fire.

  Their last trip across the Irish Sea took them to Bray, on the coast just south of Dublin. My father, drawn by the early opening hours of the bars in Ireland and the rent outstanding on the tiny flat they’d moved to in Kentish Town, not to mention money due to a nasty loan shark, decided late one night that now was the right time to return to the land of their birthright. The old Cortina was loaded with clothes and a few blankets. Before heading north to Holyhead they made a fire in the garden and burnt any incriminating documents, mainly unpaid bills. The only stop on their moonlight flit was at the all-night Indian shop at the end of the road, to stock up on essentials for the journey: eighty John Player untipped cigarettes, a dozen bottles of Guinness stout and a bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. When they arrived in Dun Laoghaire it was ten past seven in the morning and the bars had just opened. After spending the remains of their money on real Irish Guinness in a real Irish bar, they drove on to Bray, where my father’s youngest brother lived. The exhausted Cortina spluttered to a stop on the esplanade outside Colm’s house. All the banging on the door, all my father’s shouts through the letterbox, could not alter the fact that Colm, Theresa and their five freckledfaced, ginger-haired boys were sleeping peacefully in a caravan on their annual holiday in Youghal in County Cork.

  ‘What’s all the commotion?’ enquired a woman who had poked her head out of an upstairs window next door.

  ‘Where’s Colm?’ shouted my father.

  ‘They’re off on their holidays.’

  ‘Holy Jesus.’

  ‘I’d mind you to hold your language,’ replied the woman, horrified.

  ‘Mind your business, missus,’ said my father, kicking the door and going back to the car.

  He sat in the driver’s seat, sucking the last drops from an empty bottle of Guinness as my mother slept comatose on the piles of clothes and blankets over the back seats.

  He looked out on the cold, slate-grey Irish Sea as it crashed on the pebbly beach. For a moment he was reminded of his childhood and the sunny days out from Dublin when the esplanade was packed with promenaders. Back then, the bandstand, now empty and vandalised, was alive with music on Sunday afternoons. As his wife snored a drunken sleep behind him, he looked over to the cliffs rising from the far end of the beach. Forty years previous, as young lovers, they had walked up over Bray Head, past Sugar Loaf Mountain and on along the coastal path to Greystones. In those days Bray was a thriving seaside town, popular with families and young people from Northern Ireland. The Troubles had put an end to that, and the Bray he now looked out on was a sad and weary town. He put his hand in his pockets and counted the sum total of their collective wealth. Barely enough for a night in a dosshouse; barely the price of a couple of bottles of cheap cider or barley wine.

  The result of the inquest and police enquiries were inconclusive and the verdict left open. As far as my daughter Lottie was concerned, and for most people for that matter, they died in a tragic car accident. The police were alerted to a burnt-out car found smouldering on the seafront, not far from the once illustrious Bray Head Hotel where, in times gone by, Joseph Locke sang in the ballroom and the bedrooms were brimming with American tourists digging for their roots. When two charred bodies were found inside the car all sorts of alarm bells rang with the local Garda. Talk of sectarian killings or vendettas between rival Dublin drug gangs over heroin-dealing turf quickly circulated around the small town. But the number plates were still decipherable, and when details came though from the registration documents, foul play was ruled out.

  When the police turned up at my door to tell me what had happened I told them I’d been awakened in the night by a call from my father. The earnest young policeman asked me to remember how he was and what he had said. I told them he’d asked me to send him some money, as they were penniless and sleeping in the car for the night. I didn’t say he was drunk and I didn’t tell the whole story.

  What really happened was this. I’d been asleep next to Matilda. Lottie had been sent home from school with a temperature and was in the bed with us that night. So when the phone rang I was in that space between sleep and dozing. I managed to get to it before the others woke and closed the kitchen door behind me with my foot.

  ‘This is the operator. Will you take a reversed charge call from Mr Patrick Malloy?’

  ‘Umm,’ I hesitated. Through the kitchen window I could see the garden covered in frost and I made a mental note to bring in Lottie’s bike left on the lawn.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘put him through.’

  There was a delay as the connection was made and then I could hear the sharp dr
ag on a cigarette.

  ‘Anthony. Is that you, Anthony?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me,’ I said, slumping down on a chair, ‘where are you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter where we are. We’re here, we’re skint, we’re finished. I’ve got enough for another drink and that’s it.’

  ‘Where are you, Dad? Where are you? Tell me where you are and I’ll send you some money.’

  ‘Too late for that. Too late for everything.’

  And then the phone went dead.

  It never made the papers in Britain, so Lottie was spared the real facts, but it was all over the Irish press. However the fire had started – a dropped cigarette was suggested – it was soon an inferno. The petrol tank had exploded and the doors had been locked. The occupants died quickly.

  I travelled over with Caitlin. We asked to see the coroner’s photos. He told us we might be shocked and distressed. I looked at Caitlin and we both knew there was nothing left about our family to surprise us. And there they were, two scorched bodies, locked and sealed together in an eternal embrace like a couple in love in Pompeii. They looked peaceful. This was the man who ran away to sea at fifteen, then at twenty joined the army to fight the invading Chinese in Malaya. This was the woman who once wrote plays and poetry and dreamed of being a dancer. This was the couple that queued for opera tickets at the Rotunda and spent nights on the Abbey Theatre steps to see Beckett and Ibsen. This was my father and mother, who as teenagers one sunny Sunday had walked out from Bray to Greystones along the cliff path, the sea swelling to their left, their lives unfurling before them like a freshly mown meadow. Who married and took the ferry across the Irish Sea as soon as the wedding cake was cut. And then, on a whim and the promise of sunshine, bought a ten-pound ticket to the lucky country and the banks of the Yarra.

  ‘Dad, I’ve been thinking,’ says Lottie. ‘It would be nice if you came to dinner with me and Mum next Tuesday. I think Grandpa and Grandma would want that. So we can all be together.’

  She stares at me hopefully, wishing, like I always did, for the elusive happy family.

  ‘Yes, of course, sweetheart, whatever you want.’

  From the top of Parliament Hill I look out over the city and make a mental note to myself to light a candle in the Catholic Westminster Cathedral. They’d enjoy the joke. Because whatever else I might say about my parents, they both had a great sense of humour.

  3

  Bank managers, pharmacists and Goths

  Everyone seems to know about my incident with the swan. I’m still asked after my health, even though the attack was over a week ago and the wound has all but healed. The swans are still on the Pond, their nest is in the far corner and all the swimmers are being extra cautious. On the noticeboard is a note reminding swimmers to beware the nesting swans.

  ‘Give the male a wide berth,’ it concludes, ‘as he is likely to be aggressive while the cygnets are young. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.’

  Next to me in the changing compound is Nial. He’s an ex-boxer who hates it when springtime sunshine even hints at a promise of summer and the gay men return after a winter of hibernation.

  ‘I see the nancy boys are back,’ he says, frowning at a new sign. It reads, ‘Costumes to be worn at all times in this part of the compound.’ He glances over his shoulder at the sign leading to the ‘nude sunbathing’ area and the small wall dividing what he sees as ‘us’ from ‘them’.

  ‘Eddie was telling me you know a bit about this AIDS thing. Is that the truth?’ he asks, drying himself on nothing more than a face flannel.

  I nod, waiting for the next predictable question. An aeroplane roars overhead. It is followed by a flock of Canada Geese en route to the other set of ponds over by South End Green.

  ‘You can’t be catching it by the swan bite?’ he jokes, a glint in his eye, his finger to his forehead.

  ‘No, I think you’re right there,’ I reply.

  A couple of Hasidic Jewish men enter the compound in black hats and coats, despite the warm weather. They greet us in English and then carry on their conversation in Hebrew.

  ‘I was wondering if you can get the illness if a woman gives you a blow job?’ asks Nial in a subdued voice. ‘I was on one of those holidays in Thailand a few years back. With some of the lads from back home. And one night I was after getting a blow job from a young girl.’

  ‘Did you use a condom?’ I ask.

  He has one leg into his greyish, baggy underpants and nearly stumbles in his incredulity.

  ‘A condom for a blow job? Whatever will they think of next?’

  Across the tarmac compound, under the corrugated roof covering the perimeter, the two Jewish men struggle out of their prayer vests to reveal white blubbery flesh.

  ‘So can you?’ asks Nial, carefully rearranging his tackle inside his Y-fronts.

  ‘It’s not very likely, unless you had cuts on your old boy or she had sores in her mouth.’

  By the look on his face I’m not sure if he’s horrified or reassured.

  ‘Maybe you should get a test, Nial, if you’re worried. I can tell you where to go.’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ he says, eyes averted. ‘Have you ever seen … I mean … been with someone when they got a result? You know, a result that they had the AIDS?’

  ‘To be precise, the test doesn’t tell you you have AIDS. It shows if you have the HIV virus or not and that can lead to AIDS.’

  ‘But how do they react, when they find out?’

  ‘I’m not involved in that side of things. But from what I know, what I’ve read, people respond in lots of different ways. Much like with a bereavement. Shock, then magnanimity, then anger, then sadness. Depends on the person.’

  ‘I suppose so, on the person. We’re all different.’

  He packs away his wet swimming things and sits back down on the bench. A couple of toned and groomed young men come by from the nude sunbathing zone and head for the open door to the Ponds. I tie the lace on my swimming trunks and follow them to the springboard.

  ‘See you later, Nial.’

  He waves and says nothing, lost in thought.

  I walk to the end of the diving board, look out to the swimmers carving their way around the perimeter of the pond. This is paradise enough. For now. The gently rippling green water. The soft breeze. Over to my right a couple stop outside the fence and watch me as I prepare to dive. They marvel at these Spartan men who brave the elements. I stretch to my full height. Remember: gratitude, trust and acceptance. And, above all, live in the moment, savour the now: it’s all you’ve got. I curve my back and plunge into the cold embrace of the glistening waters, not a care in the world, not a thought of anything other than the leaves on the breeze, the sunlight on the jetty and the warning of a swan on patrol.

  ‘I am Spartacus,’ I say as I emerge to the kiss of the sun and the hoot of the moorhens.

  Mr Morse, the bank manager, reclines in his soft leather chair and checks his diary. He is of advanced middle age, immaculately dressed, and there is not a paperclip out of place on his large desk. He traces his finger along the calendar at the top of the page and calculates there are thirty-nine days to go before his retirement. Forty-eight years in the same branch, he thinks to himself with satisfaction. Boy and man, messenger, teller, clerk and manager. There is not a single job he has not done. Not one task he has not mastered, no seat he has not occupied. He surveys the room and is content. Framed certificates of his accomplishments hang in a neat row on one wall, photographs of his favourite aeroplanes on another. He straightens his tie and tugs at his cufflinks. Then he picks up his phone and speaks to his secretary in the outer office.

  ‘Hilda, tell Dr Malloy I am ready for him now. You can send him in.’

  ‘You can go in now,’ says the starchy woman, without turning from her typewriter.

  I stand up and knock at the heavy-wooded door.

  ‘Come in,’ says the voice from beyond. I clear my throat and enter the room.

  Behind a l
arge highly polished desk is a little man with a bald head that shines as brightly as the tabletop. When he stands up he is smaller than I imagine a bank manager to be. When he reaches over to shake my hand I notice he wears gold-plated cufflinks in the shape of aeroplanes.

  ‘Dr Malloy,’ he says, with a smile I might distrust, ‘my name is Geoffrey Morse. I manage this bank.’ He smiles again, obviously never tiring of hearing himself make that statement. ‘I don’t think we have met before. Maybe there was no need to up until now.’

  ‘No,’ I say, for his obsequiousness is something I would have remembered, ‘I’ve always dealt with Mr Opal.’

  ‘Ah, one of my deputies. A good man. I’m grooming him for greater things,’ replies the bank manager with a conspiratorial wink.

  When Geoffrey Morse first got wind of Dr Anthony Malloy’s financial mess he made a point of taking on the case himself. Along with flying, he gets a special thrill and pleasure from humiliating the educated. He might have been the sort of child who tortured small animals. Instead, he tortured numbers. While other boys were outside playing sports, he stayed indoors, forcing confessions from equations, striking out numbers and strangling formulae. His one regret in life is his lack of a higher education, and the people he feels most inferior to are those in possession of one. Therefore (or the triangle of three dots, as he prefers), to balance the equation in his head he needs to divide something into them, to take something away. Like this man now sitting in front of him. A tall slim man with strong features and greyish, unkempt hair. He has intelligent eyes and a soft mouth. There is a small scar at his temple and his skin is of that Celtic hue that fares badly in the sun. His voice has a hint of an accent, but the bank manager cannot quite locate it.

  ‘So, Dr Malloy,’ he says, as an opening gambit, ‘it seems you are not managing your finances as well as we might hope of a man of your standing, of your education.’

  I look at this smug little man and wonder what makes him tick. I feel like a naughty schoolboy hauled before the headmaster.