Father’s Music. Dermot Bolger
among the crowd of boys as McKenna made his choice so that all three appeared to be strong, hardened workers. Luke and Christy had covered up for him when his back ached and his hands blistered during the endless day of picking until finally his tally of baskets began to drop. There was a row and Shane had broken down in tears as McKenna threw a handful of coins on the ground and spat on them.
‘Was McKenna mean?’ I asked Shane.
He snorted. ‘As mean as the back of his balls that only ever knew shite.’ He glanced back, apologetic for his language. It was thirty years since those events but they still rankled. We eyed each other openly.
‘How do I measure up to the others?’ I asked him.
‘There have been no others.’ Shane re-started the car and I believed him and beneath my show of toughness I felt better. Luke ignored our exchange. I wondered what Shane thought of me and was it contempt for his opinion or a bond between brothers which allowed Luke to display his mistress so openly. For the next two days I would have to remain invisible and I sensed that this journey was perhaps Luke’s only way to give some acknowledgement to my presence. Shane would never mention me, not even to his own wife. I suspected there were more dangerous secrets locked away in Shane’s head that would always stay there with a younger brother’s unquestioning loyalty.
We had reached the fringe of the city where back gardens of shabby houses petered out into overgrown fields. Children stood about on corners, with hoods over their heads.
‘What happened to McKenna?’ I asked.
‘He died years ago,’ Shane said. ‘The last time I saw him he was screaming like a madman up at our house when I was ten. He claimed Christy blinded two of his cattle because he’d cheated me out of a day’s pay.’
‘How do you mean blinded?’
‘The police said it was done with sticks,’ Shane replied. ‘They cleared us of involvement, but McKenna wouldn’t believe it. He was ranting, threatening our Ma who was trying to raise us without a penny the time Da had to go to England for work.’
The thought of such cruelty sickened me. Christy had a reputation for violence, but this was too extreme even for a twelve year old like him.
‘Did Christy do it?’ I asked.
‘Are you joking?’ Shane laughed, coming to a supermarket and turning left. ‘Poor Christy go up to the fields by himself in the dark and do the likes of that? He liked animals, Christy did, well dogs and pigeons anyway. Cows gave him the creeps. He was a city kid. He might have done McKenna himself, but cows? No way. That wouldn’t have been Christy’s style.’
We stopped at traffic lights. Horses stood motionless on a green, tied with lengths of rope. In the darkness beside them dozens of Christmas trees were propped up as if a forest had dropped from the sky. Two boys in over-sized duffel coats hunched down waiting for buyers. The lights changed.
‘It was a typical job by your man beside you,’ Shane said as he moved off. ‘Luke goaded the other kids about being chicken until they went up the fields while the three of us sat at home with alibis watching The Man from Uncle.’
Luke laughed and looked at me. ‘Don’t believe a word that fellow says,’ he said, almost absentmindedly. ‘It’s what Shane does best, wind people up.’
I laughed too, but the problem was that I did believe Shane or, at least, I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. True or false, two images stuck in my mind. One was of cows bellowing in agony as blood streamed down their faces and a circle of boys dropped their sticks and ran off with their bravado replaced by a realisation that they had been used. The second image was almost as chilling: an eleven year old calmly standing at his front door during the ad breaks on television where he would be seen by passing neighbours.
As if sensing my unease, Luke took my hand again. Suddenly I wanted to return to my life in London. I felt used as well, manipulated into thinking he needed me here. A suspicion came back even as I tried to dismiss it. Could Luke have known of Christy’s death all along, but had come to the hotel for sex anyway, not thinking that I could know? Might he have turned my knowledge to his advantage, sensing a need which he could exploit? Or did my own secretive nature make me suspect him? I wasn’t being fully honest with him about my reasons for agreeing to travel to Dublin. I knew nobody here. I would have to walk around alone or wait in some hotel bedroom until Luke found time to come. The unintended irony of the phrase made me feel cheap. I closed my eyes and the image of blinded cattle returned. I wondered again if Luke’s wife knew of my existence and, if she discovered I was here, what might be her measure of revenge?
We turned down a side road with a high wall, beyond which I could glimpse the roofs of unlit school buildings. A notice warned of guard dogs, but Shane turned through the gate and across a cattle grid to park with his headlights shining over a panoramic view of streets beyond the dark playing pitches. Luke seemed momentarily disorientated as Shane glanced back, awaiting some response.
‘Christy drove by here six months ago and almost crashed,’ Shane said.
‘I believe it,’ Luke said quietly. ‘It’s thirty years since I’ve seen that view.’
‘The pre-fab was levelled last year,’ Shane told him. ‘They finally built a permanent extension, out where the sheds used to be. Take a look.’
They both got out, caught up in memories I didn’t know, and walked into the glare of the headlights. I watched them bend their heads to talk. Their brother had been one of Dublin’s most notorious criminals. I hadn’t asked Luke who had killed him or what could happen next. As long as he kept me ignorant I had felt I wasn’t involved. Now that we were actually in Dublin I was scared. I didn’t know how much of this fear was bound up with Luke or how much stemmed from a terror of confronting ghosts I had spent half my life running from. Yet I knew those spectres had to be banished before I might begin to see some value in myself. It was because I regarded myself so cheaply that I never trusted anyone who reached out to me. Luke’s grief in the hotel was real because he had cried like I never could. He wouldn’t risk bringing me here unless his need was also genuine.
The two brothers cast out vast shadows in the headlights. I got out to see what they were examining. It was a flat expanse of floor tiles left behind after a pre-fabricated building had been demolished. I could decipher shapes of classrooms from the different styles of tiling. I sensed Luke visualising the building as it had once stood. He climbed up and followed the route of a vanished corridor, retracing his steps to the spot where Christy and he had first shared a desk. We had moved beyond the headlights so that we were now shadows in the dark. If I’d believe in spirits I would have said that Christy’s was there at that moment, along with the younger Luke and Shane, hungry for the lives ahead of them.
‘If Christy was older why were you in the same class?’ I asked, to break the atmosphere. Luke looked back, momentarily drawn into the present.
‘Holy communion,’ he explained. ‘Ma had to put him back a class when he was seven. She couldn’t afford the clothes that year.’
He walked to where the classroom wall had once stood and looked across at the lights from neighbouring streets. The main school stood in darkness to our right while there was ugly security fencing around the graceful old building on our left.
‘That was a fever convalescent hospital once,’ Shane said, motioning me to leave Luke alone. ‘When our folks came here first there were still old people in bath chairs coughing up blood under the trees. When TB died out the Christian Brothers opened a school instead. Not for corporation tenants like us, more for the private houses. But the place kept growing until one summer he was home from England, Da got a job sticking this prefab up to cope with the over-crowding.’
Luke had walked further away with his head bowed.
‘I can remember being given jam sambos and sent down to watch Da working,’ Shane said. ‘Ma kept badgering Da to have a word with the Brothers about us getting in here. Luke and Christy were steeped, free secondary education had just arrived. Before then it would have