Christ, what the fuck was I thinking about? You risk something one time and get caught. The condoms – he had found them under his bed back at the hotel. Should have fucking known when she didn’t demand that he use a rubber … should have ….
His mates asked him if he had a problem. He said he hadn’t. They said he looked like a man with a problem. If he wanted to talk, you know. Talk! The army wanted their soldiers to open up to each other as they believed that talking about problems cut down on suicide. If he had talked, they’d have listened, and either slagged him off or called him a sad bastard and said he was the complete fucking idiot. At home, it’d do the rounds in the barracks and married quarters. Flaherty poked a Yid and got himself the pox, and his old doll, eh, wants him to use Viagra because she thinks he’s a floppy.
In the end, Moira would find out.
If he had AIDS, he would have to tell her. If it was just the pox, he might be able to keep her at bay until he was cured. Anything else … fuck, a couple of screws had screwed up his life.
*
She was not at The Scotsman, and the apartment she had brought him to did not belong to her parents – he did not know who it belonged to, because the two middle-aged women who stood at the door hadn’t got too many words of English.
‘Tabitha,’ he repeated.
They shook their heads and looked at each other.
‘Tabitha?’
They shook their heads again, then closed the door in his face.
The next day, he met her. Earlier he had trawled through jewellery shops, hoping to see her behind the counter, knowing she would not have wanted a scene in the shop and would have had to talk to him. Had she lied to him the way he had lied to her? Probably. He was no kibbutz worker.
And he had no dead wife. What man would leave a child who had lost his mother?
It was at the beach bar. He had decided to go there for a beer, to get in under the bamboo roof and escape the midday sun. She sat at a table with a young guy, and he guessed he was the tie-in for the apartment: it was his parents who owned it. She wore the same clothes she had worn when she met him. When she saw him, the blood drained from her face. He sat in beside her on the form, and told the young guy to give them a few minutes alone. He looked hard at Mike, but he left after she’d said something to him in Hebrew. She blew cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth.
‘Thanks,’ he said sarcastically.
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘It was a shit thing to do.’
‘You guys are all the same.’
‘What have you got?’
‘VD.’
‘No AIDS?’
‘No.’
‘Why the fuck didn’t you say?’
‘Why?’
‘Just fucking tell me,’ he said, his voice rising an octave, drawing glances from a barman cleaning the tables. The young man stood under the eaves, kicking his heels in the sand.
‘I want to give men something to remember me by.’
He resisted the urge to punch her. Instead, he said, ‘I told you that I had a son … that my wife was dead.’
She looked at him sidelong and said, ‘Bullshit.’
He could not contradict her, not with her eyes burning into the back of his skull.
‘You know what I have. That’s it … this time next month I might have worse, so count yourself lucky we didn’t meet then,’ she said.
He sighed, smoothed his hair, helped himself to one of her cigarettes.
‘Are you going to buy me a drink?’ she said. ‘Do I tell my friend to go away?’
‘Yeah, yeah’ he said half dejectedly, half wearily, ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’
She said something to the young man, and he walked away.
‘You’ve fucked me up,’ he said, ‘I’m deep in shit …’.
‘Don’t be crazy with me … be crazy at yourself. Me, you can screw later; the harm is done.’
‘Are you for fucking real?’
‘It’s my way of saying sorry.’
‘I’ll stick with the beer.’
But he knew it wasn’t in his nature to, and that was the real problem – it stared at him from the honey liquid in his glass.
Prairies
We heard the doctor say on the radio that if men wanted to avoid getting cancer of the prostate then they should eat tomatoes and red peppers. If they were over 50, they should have themselves medically examined. ‘Prostate cancer is a silent killer,’ the doctor warned.
Dad turned his head to the window, and looked through the glass at our cairn terrier crapping on the lawn he had me cut earlier that morning. He worked me for my pocket money, unlike other fathers, who gave their kids money just to keep out of their hair.
When Dad turned 50, we had a bit of a bash in a pub. Low-key. He said he wanted a low-key affair, but I think he was disappointed with that arrangement. He wanted people to read his mind, but no one could because he was never of the same mind about anything for too long. That night, he got a few beers into him and sang ‘Raglan Road’, the only song he knew the words to. He toasted all his dead friends and relatives with tears in his eyes. This made me want to vomit the glass of Heineken I’d stolen to my lips when people were too busy looking at him to notice me. He was crying over people he was always giving out stink about, like Nana, who left her house to Dad’s sister and a site to his brother, and a fart in the wind to Dad, because they’d a falling out over nothing much. They never made up. I never met Nana. Mam says I was born lucky.
I was about to make for my room, when something applied a brake to the idea. Dad looked so pathetic, standing at the sink with the leaky tap he’d been meaning to fix for over a year. He had on a blue short-sleeve T-shirt that he kept outside the waist of his jeans to disguise the mound of his belly. His thick, hairy forearm carried a tattoo of a red heart with an arrow piercing it. Faded. Every so often he liked to tell me that he was a hippy in his younger days, and used to tour the country in a camper van. That he had long hair and wore psychedelic clothes and sang a duet with Bob Dylan in Chicago, which I thought was pure bull. Maybe he’d sang with a Bob Dylan lookalike, or in his mind when he was stoned on hash or tripping on LSD or whatever in his psychedelic raggies.
‘Remind me to buy in some tomatoes,’ he said, ‘and peppers, red ones.’
‘Okay.’
‘Lots of tomatoes,’ he said.
‘For the cancer,’ I said.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he ran the tap till the water turned cold, and then he poured himself a cup and drank it thirstily. He faced me, mopping his lips with the back of his hand, and said, ‘He’s coming next week.’
This was probably the most infuriating old man thing that he did: saying something out of the blue about something he had mentioned hours previously – so maddening – you know; it’s like a train stopping at its final destination and then, without warning, you’re back on the tracks, going only God knows where.
He explained, ‘The Virginian, are you bothered, Tony?’
He used to read cowboy books and watch western films and an old western series TG4 repeated in the afternoons. Maybe he should’ve quit working nights and got a daytime job. That way he wouldn’t have had the time to be watching fogey old ghosts.
‘The man with no name,’ he said.
‘Clint Eastwood, yeah?’ I said.
‘No, James Drury … he’s the original man with no name.’
‘He’s coming here?’
‘No, not to this town. Claremorris.’
He rubbed his lips, and I could tell he was thinking of going to see his hero. As far as I was concerned, a real hippie, even a reformed sort, would still have had enough of that in him just to go there without thinking about it.
‘Why don’t you b
ring Mam?’ I said.
His expression changed. He and Mam went nowhere together. She had her mates and he had his.
He called into my bedroom an hour later, and asked me to look up The Virginian on the web, just to see if there was anything on it about the show. There was more trivia than anyone could possibly care to digest. Except for Dad. He played the theme tune over and over, and ran a couple of clips from the series that were available on YouTube. He said he must get himself a laptop like mine for Christmas. ‘Dead handy yokes,’ he said.
He talked about The Virginian and Trampas and Judge Garth and stuff, doing my head in. He said it was the first adult TV programme he was allowed to stay up and see. If it were not for the show, things would have been totally dark in his house. Then he said, ‘We’ll go see him … the two of us.’ No asking. I was going, like it or not, to see an old cowboy who meant nothing to me, whose shows were nearly fifty years old, and who probably looked only a little like he used to – a ghost of himself before he’d even died.
I told Mam the next morning, and suggested that she should go with him instead. Well, you’d have thought I was after asking her to jump from the roof of the shopping mall. ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘no, Son … ah, no. Thanks.’ I nodded. Well, what do you actually say when you’re told that your parents’ marriage is over in the most roundabout way imaginable? You nod, even if you don’t fully understand why the hell you’re nodding.
We stopped outside the church at a stop sign. He said someone was squeezing a cat, his way of telling me about the skirl of bagpipes in the church grounds. I was trying to read. I read a lot, but I had to stop reading because I sometimes got sick from a combination of shaky words and car motion. If he had to pull over and let me out to vomit he would flip, but there was no guarantee he could pull over in time, and I didn’t want to risk vomiting in the car. Or on him, as I’d have had to listen to him moaning for hours, and worse, I’d be sitting in my emptyings with the window rolled down to the last, the slip breeze drying the sick into me.
‘Is Claremorris a long drive?’ I asked.
‘It’s way out west, pardner.’
Oh God, spare me, I thought.
In Moate we pulled over to eat breakfast. The café was quiet, and we sat at a table by the window. I asked him straight out if Mam and he were still living together because of me. He said that was partly the reason, and partly till I got started out on life, and partly because it had to do with finance. I said about Cosmic Jones, and if Mam was going with him, and he said they were friends. I asked him if he had a friend, and he said we should eat breakfast.
He usually took care not to speak when he was eating, so we ate in silence. When he was finished eating, he asked if I knew the cowboy philosophy. I said no, tell me.
‘If it’s not yours don’t take it; if it’s not true don’t say it; if it’s not right don’t do it.’
‘Simple commandments,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but still hard to keep, son, very hard.’
We moseyed on, and then all of a sudden we stopped moseying. The car broke down: the most reliable car he had ever owned, as he was so fond of saying. We got out and pushed it over to the hard shoulder. He turned the key, and swore when he got no response. He opened the bonnet and decorated the engine with foul language; I guess if he’d had a six gun he’d have pumped bullets into it.
He said, ‘Give me your phone for a minute.’
‘I’ve no credit.’
‘Tony, for the love of …. You’re a bleddy eejit, Jesus, Mary and Joseph … what class of a bleddy moron are you at all?’
‘Where’s yours?’
‘The battery’s down,’ he mumbled.
‘Yeah, Dad, so don’t be getting on to me.’
He was sorry then, but didn’t say so.
‘And I didn’t call you names,’ I said.
He sighed, then apologised, and I said it was okay because I knew that saying sorry was a hard thing to do, for reasons I’m still not sure of. I used to hear him say he was sorry to Mam, and she’d ignore him and he’d get bull-thick and say he wasn’t really sorry; he’d only said so for the sake of peace.
He waved down a passing car, and borrowed a phone from the driver for a few minutes to ring the AA. Then he smoked a cigarette in the drizzle and walked up and down the road, climbed a three-bar gate into a field to pee, and then got back in the car and said he was sorry for calling me names. But saying this didn’t appear to be enough for him, for he kept talking, as if these new words might retract those he had said earlier. Maybe he softened their effect, but what he couldn’t lessen was how he had said them: with bitterness and a desperate despair. I’d been hurt, but I knew he was hurting too. It was temper talk, he said, that’s all.
It took an hour for a mechanic to arrive and work his magic. Within a few minutes he had us on our way. Thirty minutes later it broke down again, and then again, and by the time we reached the hotel where The Virginian was to appear, he had well and truly vamoosed.
Later he rang Mam, and said we were staying over that night as the car was acting up and it was being looked at in the morning. She didn’t sound too disappointed when I was on to her to say goodnight. Dad hung around the bar for the evening while I watched TV in the bedroom. He came in late, jarred and sad, and said he’d met The Virginian in the lobby. I doubted him.
‘What did he say?’
‘Howdy.’
‘Howdy?’
‘Well, he was in a hurry.’
In the darkness I heard his gentle breathing in the other bed, the toss and turn of thoughts that wouldn’t settle.
‘Dad?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Did you really get to see him?’
‘No.’
I had news for him. But he didn’t get excited about The Virginian appearing at the horse show the next day.
‘Well?’ I said.
Nothing else was said for moments.
He sighed out loud and said, ‘No. None of that; it’s all gone.’
I’d already a small idea that something was wrong with Dad; yesterday he’d eaten those peppers and tomatoes, but in the hotel room I sort of grew a little more to the fact. But I didn’t know it back then, and neither did I suspect that things would get much worse for him, and consequently for those who loved and thought well of him. His was a sentence on which one could have hung many meanings, and walked across many prairies without ever finding a single grain of truth in the sands.
Ritual
I spread the newspaper on the kitchen table, knowing for certain that he would be there to stare at me with his murderer’s eyes, as he is on every anniversary of Alex’s death. Every year the newspapers pick up on the quadruple killer, and every year for the last few there is increasing speculation in the media about his release from prison, or a transfer to accommodate those who don’t want to travel too far to visit son or brother scum.
My pink Nokia did a little jig on the wooden surface, between the red-and-white salt and pepper cellars. I picked it up, and saw Nano’s number in the caller display.
‘Vicky,’ she said.
‘I know. I’m looking at the bastard.’
Silence.
Nano said, ‘I’ll call round later, okay?’
‘Okay.’
I needed to think, to clear my head, to prepare for the annual ritual, the cleansing …. Two days after our first big row over money, Alex came home and told me that he’d volunteered for the Leb. I went crazy because I wanted him to be around when our baby was born. But then he said he’d only put his name forward to push him further up the list for the next trip. It made sense to me when he said it like that, and when I calmed down I realised that he was right: we needed the money. I said I wouldn’t mind if he went after our baby was born. I often wonder if he’d pushed th
at news at me to break part of the storm, that he knew he was going all along ….
We hadn’t got married quarters yet because I wouldn’t take the one the quartermaster wanted to issue us with: it was some dive, the walls rank with damp and peeling wallpaper and an outdoor toilet with the shit backed up in it, and of course Alex wanted the kip as he didn’t want to pay rent for the flat. And even though the rent for the quarters cost next to nothing, I refused to move in there. People bank on other people being desperate enough to accept anything that’s thrown at them, and what’s more, to be grateful for it.
‘Ah Vicky,’ he said.
‘Ah Vicky my arse. Jesus, get me out of here. If my Ma saw the state of the gaff you wanted to move me into she’d be after yere blood, Alex …’.
‘I’ll get it cleaned up.’
‘Why bother cleaning something that should have been knocked down a hundred years ago?’
So, we went back to the bottom of the waiting list. Then Alex started talking about buying our own place. He said they were building a rake of new houses out in Tallaght, and he kept this up for a couple of weeks, and then he said, when he’d brought home a takeaway from the Chinese, that he had some news. I’d known he was building up to something, but hadn’t been too sure what it was. His oul’ one was always full of mad schemes, like wanting us to buy a mobile home and park it in her backyard.
‘I will in my hole,’ I’d said to Alex at the time.
If he couldn’t see why not, then there was no sense in telling him. I wouldn’t be under an obligation to anyone, especially not his mother – there’d be payback with her. Besides, I wouldn’t like to owe her the favour; it wouldn’t sit right with me.
I was watching Top of the Pops on the telly, and he thought I was just going to fall over him. He forgot that when he was watching Match of the Day he pretended not to hear me asking him to get me a bar of Aero; starving for it, I was. Anyhow, I loved that song ‘Fame’, and even with the small rise in me I could dance as well as what’s-her-name.
Deadly Confederacies Page 17