Mr Lynch’s Holiday

by Catherine O’Flynn

  ‘Well, yes, there’s that.’

  ‘He just goes on a bit.’

  ‘Maybe the sun doesn’t suit him.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  They rested on a bench on one of the overgrown grass verges.

  ‘It never suited your mother. I remember we went to Weston once, before you were born. A beautiful weekend and she got terribly burned and sick. Awful journey home it was.’

  ‘Dad, he doesn’t have sunstroke.’

  Dermot nodded. ‘Well. You know what they say.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen.’

  ‘What does that make you, then?’

  Dermot shrugged. ‘A “proper Paddy”, I believe.’

  6

  On his first morning in Birmingham he sweated his way along Digbeth in a heavy woollen suit, dragging a suitcase behind him. He asked a man leaning against the wall outside a pub for directions. The man glanced at the scrap of paper and said in a Dublin accent, ‘Aggie Kelly’s?’

  ‘Do you know her?’ replied Dermot.

  ‘She’s Michael’s missus. Everyone knows Michael Kelly.’

  ‘Good lodgings, is it?’

  ‘It’ll do you.’ He pulled a short pencil from behind his ear and sketched a map on the back of Dermot’s paper. He looked at Dermot as he handed it back. ‘Box?’

  Dermot hesitated. ‘I think I’m grand with the suitcase.’

  The Dubliner hissed. ‘I’m not here giving you luggage recommendations. I was asking if you box. Do you spar? Are ye a pugilist?’

  Dermot shook his head, embarrassed. ‘I never have, no.’

  Someone called out ‘Jack’ and the Dubliner walked towards the voice. He glanced back at Dermot. ‘You should go see John Joe Riley.’

  When Dermot got to Kelly’s the landlady gave him a mug of tea and a narrow bed in a tiny room shared with a boy from Sligo called Matty Keegan. Matty was a big lad like Dermot and a few months older than him at nineteen. On their first evening together Dermot questioned him about the Kellys, their fellow lodgers, Brummies, and the English in general and received nothing much more than ‘yes’, ‘no’ or a shrug. He was inclined to think Matty simple. It took him a while to appreciate his care with words and his shyness.

  In time he learned that Matty had been in England for a year, starting off in London before coming up to Birmingham. While Dermot had got his Corporation job at the recruitment office back in Dublin, Matty had emigrated with no arrangements in place. He ended up labouring, picking up work in the pubs and getting paid there too. It turned out that he boxed at the place the Dubliner had mentioned. Dermot would tag along sometimes to Riley’s, but while he was powerful he lacked Matty’s agility.

  Kelly’s house was a three-storey terrace with a lingering smell of bacon. The other lodgers were older men: Devlin from Cork, who was a know-all; Aloysius Dempsey, who shook and smelled of TCP; a man named Liam Corgan, who had a budgerigar he had trained to peck crumbs from his lips; Aggie’s own brother Eddie, and countless unnamed others who stayed only days or weeks before moving on to the promise of better opportunities or lodgings elsewhere. One bed on the first floor was shared between Bernard Feeney, who worked a night shift at Lucas, and Gerry Byrne, who was a labourer.

  Some nights a group of them would play cards down in the kitchen with Aggie’s husband, Michael. They played hand after hand of Twenty-Five. The stakes, at Aggie’s insistence, were just matchsticks, but Michael took it deadly seriously, lambasting anyone he felt had played poorly, blaming them for his losses. ‘You gave me a bad lead!’ he’d shout and rage, employing all manner of theatrics. No one paid much attention, except, Dermot noticed, Matty. He saw how his room-mate jumped when Michael banged the table, and caught him trembling sometimes when Michael was giving out, despite the fact he could have flattened the landlord with one lazy swipe.

  Other times Dermot would go out with Matty and some of his gang to the local pubs in Sparkhill. The following day Dermot’s memories of the night before were always fragmentary, stray images lacking context – Mick Conroy with a lampshade on his head, Tim Murphy reciting a poem to nobody, someone singing a song about a lost dog, Matty sitting quietly and smiling at it all.

  Dermot persuaded Matty out to a dance at St Catherine’s once, the two of them dressed up in their best clothes. They stood by the bar and looked at the women.

  ‘There’s a conductor I know, Brummie fella, name of Garrett. You should hear the lines he comes out with to the girls on the buses. He’s got all the chat.’

  ‘A loudmouth, is he?’ asked Matty.

  ‘A smooth talker I suppose you’d call him. Very confident, like. He’d come to a place like this on his own, wouldn’t bother him at all, he’d pick a girl he liked the look of and walk straight up to her.’

  ‘And what would he say?’

  ‘He has a line. He goes up to the girl and he says: “Would you mind pretending you know me for a moment? I have an old flame here tonight looking for me and the only way she’ll leave me alone is if I’m with a pretty girl like you.”’

  Matty looked at him. ‘What about when the old flame catches up with him?’

  ‘There is no old flame. It’s a just a line to get the girl’s attention, make her think another girl’s interested in him.’

  ‘So it’s a lie.’

  ‘It’s a line, Matty. Just to meet someone.’

  They were silent for a long time, sipping their pints.

  ‘So the idea is that this girl believes him and likes him?’

  Dermot sighed. ‘Ah, forget about it. It was just a story about a fella from work.’

  ‘I know, I know, but I don’t understand.’

  ‘What don’t you understand?’

  ‘So the girl likes him and he likes the girl and they start going together, is that the idea?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘And say then they get engaged and get married and maybe they go on and have six kids and grandkids and they have a long old life together and one day, the girl’s an old woman now, and she’s lying on her deathbed and she turns to the fella, this conductor, though he’s retired now too, and she says: “Whatever happened to that old flame?” What does he say to her then? How does he answer her? Does he lie again, as she’s there about to meet God?’

  Dermot stared at him. Matty shook his head and returned to his pint. ‘He sounds a gobshite to me.’

  Dermot was made a driver soon enough. He was teamed up with a conductor from St Kitts called Leonard Blythe. They worked the 43 route.

  ‘But it’s an ugly town,’ said Leonard quite frequently. ‘The people are nice enough, but the setting is inelegant. Grimy and besmirched,’ he’d gesture at the industry around them. ‘What must Mother Nature, in all her majesty, think of such abominations?’

  But Dermot thought there was something wonderful about it all. The hissing and clanking of the GKN factory, the rise and fall of the gasometers, the silhouetted towers of the coke works. He’d sit at the terminus each evening, watching the sun set behind the power station. He’d think about Saturday’s dance at St Catherine’s, the next coach trip with the Irish Citizens League, the new suit he was saving for and other things beyond as he watched the white plumes above the cooling towers billow and rise up into the orange sky.

  7

  They had worked for the same company back in England. Laura edited Web-design manuals with pretensions to being coffee-table books. She spent her days clarifying the meaning of words written by men who wore shorts to work, most of whom, she discovered, collected dolls of one sort or another. Eamonn worked on computer-programming titles with astonishingly ugly covers. He once queried a jacket design and learned that the move from restrained typographic covers to large, brutal, greyscale portraits of the author’s face had single-handedly driven up sales by 200 per cent. Programmers were reassured by the faces of other programmers.

  He and Laura used to debate whether programmers or designers had the more abysmal
prose style. They would email each other passages of clogged, impenetrable text, a competition between them. Laura began to suspect that her own literacy was being eroded by spending each day laboriously disentangling knotted jumbles of words and punctuation marks. She worried the shattered sentences, orphaned subclauses and teetering conjunctions would start to colonize her brain and a viscous fog descend over all meaning.

  As time went on there was less and less need for either of them to go in to the office, until eventually they realized that they could work remotely and live wherever they chose. They were not tempted by the quaint seaside towns of Suffolk that seemed to attract many of their colleagues, or the self-regarding buzz of Shoreditch or Brighton. Laura was drawn to the sun. Her ideal scenario was their existing life minus the nine interminable months of greyness and damp. For his part, Eamonn had no qualms about leaving England – overfamiliar and cloying, unsurprising and pleased with itself. He felt the lure of somewhere different, the promise of renewal.

  Their original plan had been for one of the big cities – Barcelona or Madrid or Bilbao. They had no interest in joining the hordes of expats clustered along the Costas in vast apartment complexes and chintzy hillside developments. Eamonn saw the majority of British settlers in Spain as an amorphous mass of Daily Express readers riddled with hypocrisy: railing against benefit cheats at home while happy to avoid Spanish tax; indignant at immigration levels in the UK, but oblivious to their own immigrant status. These were people for whom Spain’s greatest cultural achievement was its tireless dedication to polished floors and gleaming kitchen worktops.

  But escape was more difficult than they had anticipated. The competition for decent apartments in the overcrowded cities was fierce, and as a couple of clueless guiris, with barely any Spanish, they had no contacts or resources to call upon. It soon became clear that buying or even renting an apartment in such places was far more complicated and expensive than they had imagined. They spent a depressing two weeks in Barcelona looking at a succession of tiny apartments, with increasingly inventive layouts. Mildewed shower cubicles in the corner of bedrooms, toilets on balconies, a mezzanine bed platform suspended above the kitchen, and everywhere perky Ikea accents to mask the squalor.

  Laura first saw Lomaverde mentioned in an article in the kind of decor magazine that Eamonn insisted he hated but surreptitiously read nonetheless. The houses and apartments were described as minimalist cube-structures with a nod to the principles and aesthetics of Bauhaus. Lomaverde claimed to offer all of the style and sophistication of city living but without the bureaucratic wranglings and complexity. Where Barcelona had been difficult and impenetrable, Lomaverde was easy and welcoming.

  Nieves, the sales manager, spoke perfect English and carefully explained every step of the purchasing process. She understood what they’d been through trying to deal with private landlords and vendors, she knew how baffling the red tape could be and, true to her word, she shouldered the burden of much of the paperwork herself. In her startling zebra-print glasses, she painted a picture of Lomaverde as a creative and vibrant community – a haven for designers, artists, writers and programmers sick of city life in Spain and abroad. Her description sounded somewhat hellish to Eamonn and Laura, but they liked Lomaverde in spite of it. They knew the location, in Almería, was remote, far from the bars and culture they had thought were their target, but it was easy to devalue such attractions, to imagine themselves self-sufficient: working from home, free to travel to cities when they chose, masters of their own destinies with a spacious apartment and sea view for the same amount as a dingy, interior box in Barcelona.

  They moved in the March of 2007. For the first few weeks their only neighbours were Roger and Cheryl and Raimund and Simon. The vacancy then had a certain other-worldly charm, rendering everyday life somewhat ethereal. They used to imagine themselves on a different planet – the buzzing of the electricity substation, the tinny echoes of the empty streets, the sci-fi sunsets. They feigned indignation at the idea of other buyers moving in and spoiling it all.

  They quickly settled into a routine, working from early morning until mid-afternoon and then over to the pool. Their budget hadn’t stretched to a private pool, but their terrace overlooked the communal one and they found this made it curiously difficult to relax. Even when they had no urge to swim or lounge it was impossible to simply look upon it all; the desire to be in the view too seductive to resist.

  It was called an infinity pool, but they never really understood why. It was like a normal pool, but instead of a visible wall at the far end, the water fell away to a smaller, lower pool. This didn’t, as far as they could see, make the length of the pool appear infinite. It made it appear like a fifteen-metre pool with no rear wall. Laura started to refer to any short distance as ‘infinity’ and anything longer as ‘beyond infinity’. They would lean against the wall of the shallow end and see only blue: the surface of the pool, the distant sea beyond it and the sky above.

  Lying on a lounger, sipping a beer, one of them would look at their watch and ask: ‘What are the workers doing now?’ And they’d try to outdo each other in their lurid imaginings of friends and colleagues. Rob dying on his feet as he pitched a book to the sales team in the US. Tony Daly standing on a chair just to be seen, shouting insanely about eating competitors’ breakfasts. Endless grotesque fantasies about the mysterious yachting accident that had left Viv Crawford with a bald spot above his right ear and an inability to pronounce, though a compulsion to employ, the word ‘segmentation’. They laughed, giddy at the improbability of their life, feeling as if they had pulled off a great victory.

  Over a year on and Eamonn still experienced a small shock every time he opened the door or looked out from his terrace. A sense of disbelief that he lived in such a place. He used to imagine that it was a good thing, this palpable sense of ‘wow’ each time he stepped outside and was confronted by deep blue sky, gleaming white cubes and glistening sea. Now though he felt that a permanent state of wonder was not right, that a more profound or complicated relationship with the environment should have evolved over time.

  It was a stark contrast to the cluttered, choked environment they had left behind in England. They’d lived in a Victorian terrace on a tiny road with constant friction over parking. The compensations were an apparently nuclear-powered central-heating system that meant the house was never cold or damp, and an incomprehensible rear garden, stretching sixty feet back before turning a corner and running another fifty behind the other houses. Twice a year they would run howling into the long grass, crazed survivors of a forgotten jungle war, wielding machetes and hacking back bindweed and laurel, but largely they let it be, their L-shaped wilderness. It was much loved by their limping cat, Werner. Eamonn would stalk him through the long grass, mimicking his every move, attempting to infuriate the implacable animal with a bad German accent. In summer they had barbecues with Laura’s caipirinhas and their friend Dave’s boxes of charity-shop vinyl. In winter they curled up inside with boxsets and books, Eamonn terrorizing Laura with his frozen feet.

  He wondered now if maybe there had never been anything wrong with any of it.

  Dwelling on the past was perilous but still his mind went back. The more he tried to fight them, the harder the memories pressed in. He thought back to the early days, his caution with Laura in the beginning. It had seemed too easy and perhaps it was some vestige of Catholicism that made him believe that suffering had to be involved. He thought there must be a virtue in the customary awkwardness, the minor misunderstandings and endless adjustments normally necessary to get aligned with another human being. The ease and instantaneity of their attraction made him suspicious; he thought of catchy songs whose appeal proved thin and short-lived.

  A chance remark about a particularly egregious type of trouser briefly popular in 1988 led to the discovery that they had attended many of the same parties as teenagers. When she realized this, Laura suggested that they had simply worn each other down, that their attra
ction was subliminal and attritional. Her friend had gone to a nearby girls’ school and Laura had apparently formed part of the haze of hairspray, Thunderbird and Impulse that he had seen huddled in corners of darkened suburban sitting rooms over several years. Neither of them remembered the other, though when he first visited her parents’ house, he had a distinct sense that he had been there before.

  She had honey-blonde hair, green eyes and a faded tan even in winter. He was gangly and pale with black hair and pale blue eyes. Even in his early twenties he had a tendency towards misanthropy, as opposed to Laura’s generally sunny disposition. She thought him smart and funny and honest, and found the difficulty he experienced enjoying himself endearing. For his part he loved her openness, her generosity of spirit. He mocked her for it, labelled it as confidence born of privilege, but he marvelled at it. In his darker moments he would characterize their relationship as one long failed attempt by him to contaminate her good nature.

  If they went to a restaurant, Laura would blithely eat her food and enjoy the change of scenery. Eamonn though would look at the people around them, people superficially just like themselves, and he would have bad thoughts about them, their hats, their haircuts, their shoes, their conversations, an itchy kind of contempt spreading over his skin like a rash. It seemed to him that the key achievement of his education had been to alienate him from both the people he had mixed with as a child and the people he went on to mix with as an adult. In both worlds he felt adrift, bobbing erratically between feelings of inadequacy and contempt.

  By the time he reached thirty, comfortable in his job and in his life, he was bored by his own incessant commentary, sick of beating himself up about every lifestyle choice he made. That was at the heart of his willingness to move abroad: to live in a place where he was unaware of the secret signs, for such things to be invisible or unreadable to him, where he might imagine the best of everyone. He hadn’t been lured to Spain by the sand and the sea and endless re-runs of A Place in the Sun on daytime television, but rather by the promise of sitting in a bar and not being able to extrapolate an entire way of life from someone’s choice of shoe.