Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  Yes, I really must try to get him out more often.

  Back at the Information Centre I get two teas from the machine, bring them across to one of the tables. We sip our drinks looking out at a couple of swans gliding across one of the flooded clay pits. Here at Far Ings, they have created a nature reserve reclaimed from an industry based on digging up the land. In fact this visit is partly a reconnaissance mission, I had the idea of bringing my Creative Writing students here for inspiration, getting them away from the seminar room and out into the world. Unlike the quarries that I visited recently, where you could feel the poignant absence of what is no longer there, here a kind of balance has been restored. When I explain how this place came about my father is delighted. It’s a process that chimes with his belief that the land was here before us, and would survive our tenancy, still be here long after we have gone.

  “If I had my way,” he says, “I’d turn every factory, every site that I’d ever worked on into a place like this. They’ve done a good job here, a damned good job.”

  We sit for quite some time without the need for conversation, at ease in each other’s company.

  Before we head off, we look at the display about the various birds it’s possible to see at Far Ings, and the incredible journeys that they make to reach here. The pink-footed geese coming from Arctic Russia, the swallows and sedges from South Africa, the sand martins from Chad.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” says Dad, “the journeys these birds make.”

  We read the panel informing us that scientists still don’t fully understand why birds migrate.

  “What about you, Dad? Why did you migrate?”

  I watch him thinking about this for a while, then he says, “Half the people I went to school with left too, sure there was nothing for us at home.” He starts to laugh, “A great flock of Paddies migrating, that’s what we were—thousands of the buggers descending on Britain.”

  This a glimpse of his old self re-emerging—irreverent, scornful. It used to get him into trouble sometimes, when people tried to have a serious discussion about the burning issues of the day.

  We look through the window, see a man below with a pair of binoculars and a camera strung around his neck.

  “Bird watching, aye, there’s plenty of fellas who love it. I never did it meself. It looks a grand hobby, though, very relaxing.”

  But he did do it. Sometimes I’d catch him standing utterly still and silent back in Wales, riveted by the flocks of swallows gathering on telegraph poles in September, before wheeling away in formation and heading back to Africa. Hard not to think he was envying them their return to their homeland, while he was stuck here for another year. Unlike the swallows and sedges, the sand martins and pink-footed geese, he never made it back to where he came from.

  You move for work or education, for what you think are short-term goals, but before you know it you are putting off your return home for another year, then another. There is a sense of exhilaration whenever I cross the Severn Bridge to Wales and leave England behind. For a few days I feel that I finally belong somewhere—I rediscover my map in the head. So why the surge of relief when I leave again a few days later? I wonder if Dad used to feel something similar when he was departing Ireland, shrugging off myriad obligations, feeling suddenly weightless?

  My father asks, “What is it you do again?”

  I explain about teaching at Hull University once more.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Just there, across the river.”

  He looks to his right, over the murky water into Yorkshire.

  “Does your mother know?”

  I tell him she does.

  “Has she told them in Ireland?”

  “She has. I’ll take you there later, to the University. I’ll show you my office.”

  “You have an office?”

  The wonder in his voice reminds me how when I got my degree, many years ago now, he said, “Christ, you’re made, boy, bleddy well made. You’ll never have to work outside in the rain and the cold again.”

  When we’re back outside and heading for the car park I realise that I’ve left my notebook on one of the tables. I suggest that he waits in the car while I run back and get it.

  “Ah no,” he says, “I think I’ll go and sit on that bench over there next to the water.”

  For a moment I’m worried about leaving him outside on his own like that. But he looks so happy at the prospect that I dismiss my fears.

  “Okay, Dad, alright. If that’s what you want.”

  “I think I’ll do a bit of bird watching while I’m here.”

  I’m not sure if this is a joke or not.

  “Are you going to take it up as a hobby?”

  He hesitates, looking across the water into the reeds.

  “I think I will.”

  He seems serious.

  “I’ll get you a pair of binoculars for your birthday then, shall I?”

  “Aye, just the job.”

  I’ll buy us both a pair, and we’ll come back and look for bitterns and marsh harriers. We’ll stand side by side in one of the hides, I’ll bring a flask of tea, a pack of sandwiches. We’ll make a day of it. I walk over to the bench with him, watch him settle down, stretch out his legs and turn up his face to the late afternoon sun.

  “You sure you’re alright?”

  “I’m grand,” he replies, “go on, take as long as you want, I’m in no hurry, sure.”

  As I walk back up the stairs to the Information Centre I’m humming. If he’s feeling this good then maybe we can go for a drink. Suddenly I have this desire to see him supping a pint of Guinness, a thread of the creamy head coating his lips, him gripping the glass and savouring the aftertaste.

  “That’s a grand pint.”

  Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We passed a pub on the way, The Sloop Inn, that looked old-fashioned, friendly, unthreatening—we’ll go there, have an early drink and get something to eat while we’re at it.

  The notebook is where I left it, lying on the table, I pick it up, pop it in my bag and amble back downstairs and into the car park.

  The bench is empty. Of course it is. I look around, just to be sure, but he’s nowhere to be seen. When it’s clear that he’s gone, that our brief time together is over, I feel a hole opening up inside me. For a long time I just stand there in the middle of the car park, slowly getting used to the world without him all over again. It felt so very good to have him back, even for such a short time. We get on much better now he’s dead.

  It’s impossible to predict when he’ll return again. The one thing I can be sure of, it won’t be when I expect him to, it’s not something that can be planned. The last time I was back home I walked the length of the road where I grew up, clotted with memories from the railway line at one end to the dock gates at the other. Halfway down I stopped outside the site of the Whitehead Iron and Steel factory, where Dad worked for many years, now a waste ground awaiting development. It was not so difficult to close my eyes and smell, once again, the hot oil and chemical stench, to hear the piercing scream of metal being sliced at high speed. But there was no hint of my father’s presence there. I stood outside our old house until the new owner drew back the curtains and peered at me suspiciously and I turned away and left. No hint of him there either. At the end of the road I turned left, following the map in my head, and walked down Coomassie Street. When I was a boy my father and I found the name thrillingly exotic and mysterious, we would turn it over in our mouths, elongating the vowels. I closed my eyes and strained to hear his voice—nothing. Then on to Mill Parade, with the Transporter Bridge to my right—how many times did Dad and I take that to the far side of the river, leaning over the rail to look down onto the muddy banks of the Usk below? In Church Street I came to a pub where the two us would sometimes go when I was back from University. These were expeditions prompted by my mother—why don’t you two go out for a drink together? These father/son outings were filled with awkward silences, our eyes wa
ndering to the TV perched high on the wall. There, in the nearly empty lounge, I lingered over my drink, sure that this would be the place, but I was wrong again. No, his appearances are just as impossible to predict as that sudden, urgent desire to ring home, before I remember there’s no one there now, both of them gone, the house sold.

  But, whenever I think of him, the memories still so alive, his presence still so powerful, it’s impossible to believe that he’s no longer in this world. And I think of him often. I know that I’ll think of him the next time I’m sitting in my office at the University, the rain beating against the window.

  [IRELAND: ENGLISH]

  MIKE MCCORMACK

  Of One Mind

  Sometimes I feel young and sometimes I feel old and sometimes I feel both at the same time. This trick of being in two minds, of weighing things on the one hand and then again on the other, has never been a problem for me. But, while I can hold two warring ideas in my head at the same time, and even retain a clear idea of what it is I am thinking about, I am sometimes less sure of who or what it is that is doing the thinking. This weightlessness takes hold of me, this sense that somehow I am lacking essential ballast. I suspect it’s one of the gifts of my generation, a generation becalmed in adolescence, a generation with nothing in its head or its heart and with too much time on its hands.

  Lately however I’m experiencing something new and it has taken me a while to recognise it. Obscured behind amazement and something like awe it has taken me weeks to see it clearly as the thing it really is. When I finally did get it straight in my mind I could hardly believe it. To the best of my knowledge I have never experienced anything like it before, nor, living the type of life I’ve done, is there any reason why I should have.

  Take this example, an incident with my eight-year-old son only last week …

  It was, on the face of it, a simple enough disappointment involving a school trip to an open farm outside the city. Giddy with anticipation, Jamie had talked about nothing else in the days leading up to it and, when I had met his questions with memories of my own upbringing on a small farm in west Mayo, his expectations had soared; the chance to see something of his Dad’s childhood promised to be a rare treat. But now the trip lay in ruins. Traffic congestion and a radio alarm clock flummoxed in the small hours by a power cut conspired to have us arrive at the school fifteen minutes after the bus had left. Now we stood in the stillness of his classroom, gazing at the neat rows of tables and seats and I thought to myself that surely there was no place in all the world so full of absence as an empty classroom.

  And Jamie’s disappointment was huge. I had no need to look down at him to know it—I could feel it rolling off him, deep noxious waves of it. Just to have me in no doubt he told me so himself.

  “I’m disappointed,” he said solemnly. “I can feel it here, right here.” He placed his hand low on his chest and rubbed it up and down as if trying to relieve some digestive ache.

  “Next week Jamie,” I assured him. “We can all go next week, the three of us. I promise.”

  “I’m in pain,” he persisted. “Severe pain.”

  “You’ll get over it,” I replied shortly. “Next week I said. Let’s go.”

  I took him by the hand and led him out to the car. January light hung low in the sky, oppressive and tightening the muscles across my chest. I hated these winter months, the gloom that rose in my heart; summer seemed an infinity away.

  “This isn’t the first disappointment like this,” Jamie said, as I held open the door for him. “They’re beginning to mount up. I can feel the pressure.”

  “That bad?”

  He nodded and sat in it. “Yes, that bad. I’m only telling you for your own good.”

  “Be a man,” I blurted. My own disappointment at letting him down now made me brusque. “Put on your seatbelt.”

  There is of course no such thing as a simple disappointment, a small disappointment to an eight-year-old child. I’ve seen enough of fatherhood to know that feelings like these only come man-sized, brutally disproportionate to the job in hand, never calibrated to the dimensions of a child’s world. They come with crushing intent, fully capable of annihilating their fragile universe. The wonder is that any child can survive even the slightest of them.

  We drove back towards the city centre, the traffic loosened up now after the early rush hour. Jamie sat silently in the back seat. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed him gazing out the side window, his moon pale face pinched with the effort to hold back the tears.

  He happened into my life over eight years ago, waking a dream of fatherhood which took me completely by surprise when it presented itself out of the blue some time before my thirtieth birthday. Before that all my visions of children came with a completeness about them which Jamie’s arrival had totally confounded. Nothing in my idea of fatherhood had warned me against the fact that children do not drop fully formed out of the sky, nor of the ad hoc nature of fatherhood, which is its day-to-day idiom; basically, nothing had warned me against screw-ups like this.

  “Someday,” he called suddenly from the back seat, leaving the word hanging in the air.

  We had pulled into the first of the two roundabouts on the western edge of the city. Rain was now falling, that resolute early morning drizzle which tells you there will be no let up for the day.

  “Someday,” he repeated, eying me in the rear-view mirror. “Someday what Jamie? Speak up, don’t be mumbling back there to yourself.”

  “Someday,” he said, “when you’re sitting in the visitors gallery of the criminal court listening to the jury returning a guilty verdict on all charges and hearing the judge hand down the maximum sentence with no recommendation for bail you will probably be asking yourself where did it all go wrong. Well, just to set your mind at rest, you need look no further than this morning.”

  “That bad?”

  “I’m only telling you for your own peace of mind.”

  “Thank you, that’s very kind of you. I’ll remember that when I’m organising your appeal.”

  Eight years ago I blundered out of my twenties, a feckless decade of drink and dope smoking, a decade of late nights and videos lived out against a soundtrack of white boy guitar bands, a decade funded by various under the counter jobs and the most gullible welfare system in the whole country. The setting up of the nation’s second-language TV station rescued me, drew me out, pallid and blinking, into the light. Being fluent in Irish scored me a contract subtitling the German and Scandinavian cartoons which bulked out the station’s Irish-language quota in its early days. A month-by-month contract had opened out to a yearly one and all told I had now turned in seven of them. Each year I resolved to find something permanent and each year the relevant deadlines passed me by. This last year the cartoons had given way to captioning the station’s twice-weekly soap opera which now, in its fifth year, was responsible for a big percentage of the station’s advertising revenue. A job which took me all of thirty hours a week left me with more than enough time with which to split the child-minding duties with Martha, Jamie’s mother.

  Back then the advent of a new TV station on the outskirts of this city had drawn a new type of female into the light. Upmarket and eager, all short skirts and high boots, they had a radiance about them which gave them allure in a city which till then had seen heavy boots and woolly sweaters as the uniform of bohemian aspirations and left-wing politics. That the majority of these new sirens were merely continuity announcers, weather girls, and bit-part players in soaps did not diminish their glamour one bit; the city was grateful for their new colour and the open optimism they shed about them. This was Martha’s milieu. She too had the looks and the standoffish poise of a young woman with plenty of choices. Therefore, when I met her, it was somewhat gratifying to find that in fact her status was almost as lowly as my own. She too worked temporary contracts, honing scripts for continuity announcers and weather girls, all the time dreaming of an alternate world where she wrote code for video games,
specifically tactical world-building games. At the time she was working out the end of her current contract and thinking of moving to London where she hoped to find work in one of the design studios that had sprung up after the launch of the PS2.

  Six months after we met a casual affair was brought to its senses by an unbroken blue line running through the window of a pregnancy test kit. Much solemn talking ensued, once more the old weighing of things against each other only this time between two minds equally adroit at seeing both sides of any story without ever necessarily reaching a decision. Finally however we did rent a semi D in one of the new estates on the city’s outskirts and settled down to bringing up a child between us. After three years however we had to face up to the fact that we were hopelessly out of love with each other. With the leaking away of all physical desire, our relationship bottomed out to a colourless haunting of each other, a leaching away of all feeling from our togetherness. We woke up to the conclusion that, were it not for the child between us, we would long ago have gone our separate ways. Some time in Jamie’s third year we sat down and tallied up the cost of our lives together. All things considered it hadn’t been too expensive. One beloved child and the enrichment of sense and soul he had brought to us more than offset any regrets for dreams we had set aside on his account. Speaking for myself it was the kind of balance sheet I could live with. We talked into the night, mapping out the details of an amicable separation, the terms of which would come into effect three years down the road when, we blithely reasoned, Jamie would be more of an age to cope with the trauma. We gave each other the love-you-but-not-in-love-with-you speech, agreed on the you-deserve-better postscript, and then sat there ashamed of ourselves, quietly appalled that in our early thirties and after three years and a child together this was the best we could do by way of a row. How could we have felt so little? Then, in a rush of gratitude toward each other, we made love for the first time in months. The following morning, embarrassed by these faltering intimacies, we renewed the vows of the night before.