Dancing in the Dark (28 page)

His father has moved. So what else is new? Over the years there've been so many new addresses, so many steely-eyed landladies all akimbo. But tracking him down is no more than a matter of making his way via the last address he had for him, and following directions to the next. It occurs to him, with surprise, that the man will probably not be much more than in his late fifties. Remembering his best-forgotten years with the Christian Brothers, Fergus wonders where his da had been then. Had he sometimes stood at the school railings and picked out his two sons from the snot-snuffling crowd of wretched boys?

Suppose the man is already gone – but no, he'd have told enough people, landladies, garbage collectors, bus conductors, creditors, every gobshite and fuckwit at the local drinking hole, of his son, the famous novelist, your man on the TV, always knew he'd do well, gets it from me, so he does. Someone would have got in touch.

He comes to the top of the road and stops. Small brick terraces. Trees at the edge of the pavements. Whitened doorsteps. He walks slowly along the street, looking for Number 27. Green-painted front door fitted with brass, Rooms To Let neat in the net-shrouded window, tiny pebbled area in front, surrounded by multicoloured concrete flags, a half barrel set dead centre with a dismal pointy-leafed plant in it. Uncompromising respectability. Surely some mistake. Or has some luckless landlady given the man houseroom and not managed to move him on ever since?

He rings the doorbell, knowing already this is going to be a cliché, or, possibly, a series of them. Money owing, a daughter got in the family way, rage or indifference,
he's away to America these past three years
. Down the passage comes the clack of boots, clip
clop
, clip
clop
, dot-and-carry-one, and Fergus steps back, sweating suddenly, memories swaddling him, holding up his hand as though to ward off the oncoming traffic.

‘Yes?' He is small and stocky, powerfully built, muscles bulging under the short sleeves of his shirt. Lodger turned landlord; how can this be?

‘Yes?' There's the birthmark at the base of his throat, familiar as Fergus's own thumbs, heart-shaped, liver-coloured.

‘Can I help you?' Red face, abundant with the morning's bristles. Eyes of a watered-down blue. Broken boxer's nose.

‘Look, fella, do you want something or shall I be shutting the door and going back to my breakfast?' Lips pursing in annoyance for a moment and then a gawk, a gawp, realization settling into his face, an understanding, the prodigal father with the fatted calf come home. ‘Is it Fergus?' And when there are still no words from the man who uses words for a living, ‘It is!'

Thank the good Lord there's none of that cod-Irish malarkey:
Sure and is it me darlin' bhoy come home again at last?
Dumb as a dustbin, Fergus steps over the threshold, wipes his feet unnecessarily on the spiny WELCOME mat and follows the gimpy limpy knit-one-purl-one of the father's gait. Down the clean, tiled passage they go, between furniture shine and carpet pile. Into the crack-tiled kitchen, dresser against the wall, geraniums on the window sill, scoured pans hanging from butcher's hooks. Cold hum of refrigerator, drip of tap, everything used but scrupulously clean. Books piled on the edge of the dresser,
his
books. Paper folded beside a plate, kettle whispering steam on the stove.

The past years, guzzling off the skewers of hatred and anger, all come down to this, a red-faced man in jeans and trainers, not a whiff of liquor about him, not so much as a hint.

Tea poured, a plate fetched, bacon and eggs, baked beans and a potato cake glistening with lard. And at last, above an empty plate, Fergus finds his voice and says, ‘That was good.'

‘And it's good that you're here.' There is curiosity in those washed-out, Monday-morning eyes. ‘I was reading about you in the paper.'

‘Yes, well . . .'

‘Sounds like you're leading quite a life in London.'

‘Not a life, not really. And you mustn't believe all you read.'

‘Still, that woman, Lady Someone . . .'

Not down that route, please. ‘Do you get a lot of people looking for a bed?' Fergus asks.

‘A fair number. I have my regulars.'

‘So, explain.' Fergus waves a hand at the neat kitchen.

‘Roisín. You didn't meet her but she was the making of me. She rescued me, no more and no less. St Georgina, I used to call her.'

‘Used?'

‘Dead these two years. Pneumonia. Always was a chesty woman.'

Fergus ashamed that he didn't know, didn't offer, at the very least, lip-service comfort. ‘How did you meet her?' How did you meet my mam, for that matter, what farm or village did you charm her away from, what shop or counting house, for the dubious honour of being your wife?

‘I fetched up here one evening, looking for a place to stretch my limbs for what was left of the night, and she took one look, said she had rooms to let but they were for decent folk, no filthy spalpeen like me was going to use them.'

‘Sounds like a woman of strong views and not afraid to air them.'

‘She was that, all right. Anyway, she told me I could sleep in the garden shed, if I was so minded, just as long as I was gone by nine in the morning.'

‘And did you take her up on the offer?'

‘I had no choice.'

‘Were you gone by nine?'

‘One second past, she's whipped open the door where I'm lying in a daze of last night's drink, toes twitching, shoes under me head, mouth on me like a rotten egg, and she's thrown a bucket of water over me. Ah, jasus, it was the coldest water I ever felt in me life, including the day the priest plunged me up to me neck in the font.'

‘And you've been drying out ever since.'

‘Nice way of putting it. Drying out . . . that's good.' The father sucks at his teeth, gathering together the facts of his story. ‘Roisín got me off the booze, d'ye see? Changed my life. I couldn't ever begin to thank her.'

Shaking his head. Slipping into
temps perdu.
‘Ah, Fergus, I hope you'll never know what a grand thing it is to have the drink taken. Roaring through the city, drunk as a fiddler's bitch, the taste of it swilling round behind your eyes, half-seas over and more, ten sheets to the wind. Worth all the shaky hands, I'll tell you, all the next-day headaches and clamouring tongue, the way the floor flies up to greet you when you finally get your head up from the last place you laid it down. The drink may be washing the marrow from your bones, you're falling to pieces in front of your very own eyes, but you can't give it up.'

‘Not even for a sick wife, and two young sons?'

‘Not even for them.' The father fiddles with the brown-bellied teapot. ‘I'm not denying the shame, or the guilt you feel at falling headlong into the arse of the rat. There's plenty of that, I'll tell you. Don't think I haven't been there. Don't think Brendan's not standing in front me eyes whenever I close them. I'm not even going to try to say I did it for the best, showing me heels to the pair of you, but at least I did it from something more than just nothing.'

‘And that would be?'

‘Education. Simple as that. There was I, twenty-six years old on a bright morning, a hundred and six when it rained, two boys needing things I couldn't give them. Caitlín, God rest her soul, gone. I gambled that if I went, too, they'd put you with the holy brothers, who'd do more for the two of you than I ever could.'

Anger flames, roars. ‘Do you have the slightest idea what they—' Fergus breaks off. Tears flooding. Weariness hanging off the end of his tongue, his fingers, his heart. What point in going over it yet again? And the man was right. They'd been given an education, even if, in Brendan's case, he learned things no one needs to know. ‘I saw him dead,' he announces.

‘Brendan, is it?'

‘Dead. My brother. I can't get him out of my head.' He is weeping now, black pain seeping from his pores.

The father wipes a palm across his sweaty brow. ‘I'm not about to excuse meself. What I did was wrong. Me own flesh and blood – and of course that included you – for better or worse, abandoned to . . .' He waves a hand to indicate that for once he can't think of words to express what he wants to say.

But words, unexpressed, are worming their way into Fergus's ear. ‘Included me, you say?'

‘That's right.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning what do you think?'

‘Meaning I've not the slightest idea what you mean.'

‘I took you on when I married her—'

‘Took me on?'

‘The shame of it. The parents not speaking to her for all those years, ever since they found out she . . . Nobody uttering a word in her direction. Dumber than the beasts of the field. She was glad to find a man who didn't ask too many questions. And I was glad to rear you like me own, lively wee thing that you were, four years old and a mouth on you like Mount Etna.'

‘Jesus Christ a-mighty!' explodes Fergus. He rises to his feet and spreads his arms, touching plates and saucers, cactus plants and the BVM framed in gold, salt cellar and honey pot and tea cosy hanging from a hook like an old lady's workaday bonnet. Touching walls, reaching through brick and plaster to the front gate, to the trees along the street and further, long King-Kong arms reaching for planes to pluck from the clouds. ‘After all these years, are you telling me, that you're not my real father?'

‘Didn't you know?' The old boy looks up, a sorry Rustem to Fergus's Sohrab, a flabby Laius to the father-killing Oedipus. ‘Are you t-telling me you d-didn't know?'

‘You silly old codger. Of
course
I didn't.' Reprieve, release, emancipation, thick as cotton in his throat. Restored to life. Edges of the wound cauterized, closing up, a miracle of healing.

‘D-does it make any d-difference?'

‘All the difference.' Fergus throws back his head. ‘All the fecking difference in the world.'

This man is not his father, which is all that matters. Brendan rocks against his side in the quiet sea-swell of the past, creaks, turns slightly,
those are pearls that were his sighs
, loosens. He owes the man nothing, all debts paid by the upward scramble of another man's ovum-seeking sperm, no quarter given, no gifts exchanged.

Or maybe so. Maybe so. The gift of the gab, the way with the words. He looks at the no-longer-father. Who'd had a name, once.

He smiles. ‘Any more tea in the pot, Sean?'

‘You've a fine mouth on you,' Sean says later, tears mopped, shoulders thumped, not friends, never friends, but compatriots, brothers in arms. Nodding at the books on the dresser. ‘I've read all your stuff.'

‘Thank you.'

‘The fourth book, now there you were really moving,' Sean says. ‘Really getting into the heart of the thing.'

‘And will be again.' And here I never even knew he could read, let alone offer comment. Cogent comment, the fourth easily my best book – so far.

Everything is suddenly coming together in the shrubbery of his mind. Into his head she strides, Grace Fargo, grey-eyed and fiercely eyebrowed, maybe even faintly moustachioed, the Frida Kahlo
de nos jours
, Grace stepping through the windows with a whatdoyoucallit in her hand – a trog? A trug? – pannier filled with flowers, to mangled toast and cooling tea, ‘Where are you, Gerard?' and from there swings the whole wild story, Gerard running through the jungle with the woman in pursuit, dragging his own personal marlin-skeleton behind him, the reason he left in the first place, it's all coming clear.

Sean flips a switch and there's an unearthly voice singing on the radio. ‘
I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls, With vassals and serfs at my
side . . .' and Fergus recalls the pitiless Jesuit at the piano, Mahoney drunk as a fart, lifting his narrow serpent's head to the ceiling, cruel eyes oh-too-briefly closed, ‘
But I also dreamt, which pleas'd me most, that you loved me still the same . . .
'

It's all anyone ever wants, to be loved still the same, come hell or high water, no altering when it alteration finds, a steady burn of heat in the heart, Brendan, I've carried you around with me far too long, he's not heavy, he's not even my brother. And he is weeping again, snivelling, I loved you, Brendan and now I let you go, I'm done with sailing on the puddles of the past, go back into your father's arms because I cannot carry you a minute, a second, not even a split second longer, I'm through, I'm free.

He thinks of Theodora, caterpillar-eyebrows above her beautiful arctic eyes, timidity masquerading as briskness, and he's pushing back his chair, ‘Sean, it's time I was away, I have a book to write.' And a life to find.

‘Will I be seeing . . . will you come again, Fergus?'

‘I will.'

‘And you could, if you've a mind, send me your next book, see, with your name written in the front, it would be a grand thing to have.'

Smiles, nods. ‘I'll do that, so I will, Sean, and you can let me know what you think of it.' Another smile. ‘Maybe you'll be in London one of these fine days, we could get together, share a pint and a pie.'

And maybe he won't, but it's good that he asked.

So, finally, ‘It's been . . .' The non-father eyeing the non-son, hesitating as he, faltering, rummaging for the word. Good? Not really. Real? Nearly. Great? Sort of. ‘It's . . . it's been . . .' whatever it's been. Hand out, fingers clasped, a clumsy sidestepping move towards an embrace as civil as a chamberlain's.

He's back in London. A new man, burdens lifted, future clear. Sun beats down as mail thumps and bumps through the letterbox. Invitations to this, requests for that, will you take part in, we would like you to, books to be reviewed, opinions to be given. Ego-plumpers, no doubt about that, shows somebody still values him even if Theo does not . . . oh, what kind of a self-pitying eejit has he turned into?