Mr Lynch’s Holiday

by Catherine O’Flynn

  Once Dermot turned sixty-five the funerals started coming as thick and fast as the weddings had done in his twenties. He had attended both wedding and funeral of more friends than he cared to remember. It seemed to him now that a wedding was an IOU, a funeral the debt collected. Hidden amid the high spirits and cheers of the wedding day was the sobering truth buried in the heart of the vows: ‘Until death do us part.’

  Standing at the graveside looking at the newly widowed, Dermot would remember the newlywed. Glancing around he’d see others who had crowded into group shots in front of the church doors a lifetime ago. At least two of the old crowd – Paddy Mahoney and Johnny Begley – were still wearing the suits they got married in to the funerals of friends fifty years later.

  He did not find the comfort in religion that Kathleen had. He mouthed the liturgy but it struck no chord within him. He found himself empty of any great insights or thoughts. As he attended one requiem mass after another, he felt like a man standing on a beach, paralysed in thought and action as the tidal wave approached.

  He had always known that one day it would be Kathleen’s funeral he was attending. Save an accident of some kind, it was never really in doubt that she would go first. He would make himself remember this sometimes when they were short with each other, the atmosphere curdled. But those good intentions were short-lived. Perhaps in the end it wasn’t right to keep someone’s eventual death constantly in mind, to frame each remark in the context of the graveside. Life had to be lived in denial of death, and with the right to be sometimes aggrieved, sometimes ill-tempered, sometimes disappointed.

  When Kathleen’s turn came, there were all the usual crowd and more. Some faces Dermot hadn’t seen in over fifty years. Old girlfriends of hers: giggling, teasing mouths and darting eyes last seen in dance halls and crowded bars, now old grannies with thick ankles squeezed into patent-leather shoes.

  ‘Do you not remember me, Dermot? You asked me out to the cinema and, when I turned you down, you asked Kathleen instead.’

  Dermot remembered her well enough. He remembered too that it was she who had made a play for him, not the other way around, even though everyone had known by then that he was going with Kathleen. He recalled a red two-piece she used to wear. Kathleen said it made her look like a pillar box. He couldn’t wait to tell Kathleen what she’d said, knowing how much it would tickle her. The realization that Kathleen wasn’t around to tell came with weary acceptance. This, he knew, was only the first of many such lapses.

  He had yet to feel the sustained impact of grief. At the hospital bedside, he had seen her face change at the point of death. A transition at once almost imperceptible and yet unmistakable. In that moment he had felt a pure blast of horror, calling out to the God he did not believe in and causing the nurse to hurriedly return. Since then, though, he had been busy with arrangements and phone calls and visits to the bank and other places. He felt only a strange lightness. He ate as much as he ever had, but feared a sudden gust of wind could blow him away.

  He disliked the priest. He knew this was in part to do with Kathleen’s devotion to the Church, but he couldn’t help it. He tried to listen to his words about Kathleen’s life without rancour. The priest banged on about her great faith, the consolation she had found in the Church, her struggle with ill health. He seemed gleeful to Dermot. His lips wet, his face shiny and pink, flushed with victory. It felt as if a long unspoken battle had come to an end and the priest had won. They had claimed her as their prize.

  He was still there in the function room afterwards, sipping his pint of shandy. Dermot avoided the priest’s corner of the room. He made his way around everyone else, thanking them for coming, accepting their condolences, listening to stories of Kathleen, some familiar, some new. Some cousin of hers from Cork waxing lyrical about Kathleen’s abilities with a violin as a ten-year-old. Nurses from the General reminiscing about her sense of humour. Cronies from the church on her flower-arranging skills. He nodded and smiled and kept moving, his head jangling with faces and snatches of conversation. He had a powerful longing to be home, in the back room, gas fire on, glass of beer in one hand, cheese sandwich in the other, watching University Challenge. The thought of the programme, the banks of enviably clever and assured young people, always brought Eamonn to mind and Dermot realized he had forgotten all about him in the confusion of the gathering.

  He cast about the room and eventually saw him hovering with an empty plate in hand at the end of the buffet table. Laura sat with a group of Eamonn’s cousins at a nearby table, drinking and chatting with an ease Eamonn had never possessed. Eamonn stood on his own peering suspiciously at some chicken wings and Dermot wondered what crime they had committed. His son had been home for three days and it had been odd to have him back in the house, sleeping in his old room. He’d offered to help with arrangements but Dermot had preferred to do it all himself. In the end, purely to give him something to do, he asked him to sort through all the old photos. He’d only wanted them gathered together neatly in a box, but Eamonn had covered the living-room floor to sort them in some kind of order and driven Dermot half-mad, getting under his feet, spreading the job over two days and insisting on laboriously explaining the different piles to Dermot as he was hurrying to get dressed for the funeral that morning.

  Eamonn had now reached the end of the buffet table, having taken nothing, as far as Dermot could see, but a tomato and a bread roll. He hesitated, plate in hand, deciding where to sit. He looked vulnerable and uncertain and Dermot saw him for a moment as a little boy again, waiting for him at the entrance to the garage. Eamonn looked across the room and met his father’s eyes. Standing on opposite sides of the crowded room, they raised a hand at one another and then each went off to find somewhere to be.

  10

  Eamonn paused in the doorway for a moment to watch him, registering as he did the familiarity of the posture. It was almost matronly – back straight, arms folded on chest, feet tucked under and crossed. This curiously attentive pose was how his father relaxed, whether in a pub or in front of the television, leaning slightly forward, head inclined to one side. As a gentle snoring struck up, Eamonn realized with some surprise that it was also how he took his naps. He moved quietly to the other side of the room to check Dermot was actually asleep. He frowned at the image – his father sleeping like a budgerigar. There was a strange novelty in the sight. He had very rarely seen him asleep. Occasionally, when sharing a room with his parents on holidays, he had woken in the night and listened to the intricate counterpoint of their snoring. His father’s high and wheezy, his mother’s deep and rumbling. The longer he listened the harder he found it to connect the sounds – simultaneously animal and mechanical – to the people. He would sneak over to their bed to look at their faces, to reassure himself that they were still his parents and that he should not be scared.

  The intimacy of sharing a space with his father once more was unsettling. He found his gaze constantly zooming in and refocusing on certain details at once both mysterious and mundane. He was assailed by things that as a boy were so everyday as to be invisible, and as an adult he had not been around to see. The way his father read a newspaper, folded up into a neat square and held close to his face. The manner in which he ate: a bit of everything on the fork, peas carefully halved to avoid imbalance. The sound of his razor scraping his chin, the smell of his soap. All these things Eamonn had forgotten and each one triggered a complex mix of recognition and distance, a nostalgia for something still there. His father both alive and dead.

  He couldn’t recall Dermot ever taking a nap before. He had noticed a few small signs of age since his arrival. Nocturnal trips to the toilet, the occasional effortful noise when standing or sitting. He remained, Eamonn was sure, fitter and healthier than himself, but there was a change nonetheless. Eamonn didn’t know whether his father had aged a little in the months since his mother had died, or whether he had just seemed younger and more vital next to her.

  He would one day become auth
entically frail and need someone to care for him, and, as his only child, it would be Eamonn’s responsibility. This was something he had known for many years, but still he found it impossible to believe. Strength was one of his father’s defining features, never something he had made a show of, but his sheer physical presence made it clear. There was a power within him, a manifest capability. At Kathleen’s funeral Eamonn had offered to return from Spain, to rent out the apartment when such a thing was remotely possible, and to live nearby, but the offer was gestural. He didn’t believe that his father needed or wanted him around and he knew moreover that he would never accept such an offer.

  Beyond an assumption of some kind of standardized grief, he had not considered how the loss of his mother had affected his father. In some ways, neither had he considered how her loss had affected him. Living in Lomaverde, at such a remove, he was not confronted by her absence every day. It wasn’t that he pictured her still alive, but neither did he always remember that she was gone, or consider the reality of Dermot’s day-to-day life on his own. It was easy to not think too much about it, to half-imagine things essentially unchanged.

  Laura had encouraged him to ring home more often, but Eamonn felt she didn’t understand how self-sufficient his father was, didn’t really get the nature of his relationship with his father at all. ‘We don’t live in each other’s pockets,’ he’d say. ‘We don’t need to be talking to one another all the time.’ Besides, Dermot was surrounded by Kathleen’s relatives back in Birmingham. That was part of it, though Eamonn tried not to admit it, even to himself. A long-held suspicion that his dad was easier in the company of some of his nephews than his son. Eamonn’s cousin Brendan, for example. A man of few words who knew how to strip an engine and place an accumulator bet. Dermot saw him a lot. They seemed able to communicate in a language Eamonn had never learned.

  The snoring built slowly to a peak with the loud finale inevitably rousing the sleeper.

  ‘Oh …’ His eyes opened and focused on Eamonn. Dermot smiled, embarrassed. ‘I was asleep.’

  Eamonn nodded.

  ‘I wasn’t the driver.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I was dreaming I was stuck in traffic on College Road, but I wasn’t the driver. I was sat upstairs with all the bloody kids.’

  ‘You must have been glad to wake up.’

  ‘I don’t know who was driving the bus.’ He said this as if he should have known.

  ‘Maybe there was no driver.’

  Dermot looked at him as if he were an idiot. ‘Someone was driving the bus, son. They don’t drive themselves.’

  Eamonn scratched his head. ‘Went OK at Jean and David’s, did it?’

  ‘Yes. Very nice. They were advocating being a grandparent.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Did I tell you about Keiron, Brendan’s eldest?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s gone and got his girlfriend pregnant. Fifteen years old, the pair of them. At the same school. So Brendan’s going to be a granddad.’

  ‘Christ.’ Eamonn felt the familiar mixture of awe and horror. He remembered seeing his cousin nonchalantly smoking in the park when they were children. Brendan seemed grown up when he was eight. He had left school at sixteen while Eamonn went on to university, the only one in the family to do so. He imagined that, to Brendan, his other cousins and perhaps his own father, he would forever be thought of as a student – a pejorative label meaning someone daft, lazy and essentially childish.

  ‘He was asking me the other day what you did out here, job-wise. And to be honest I couldn’t tell him. Was it something to do with computers? I can’t remember now what your mother said.’

  ‘It was the same job I had back home.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dermot uncertainly, ‘they have an office out here, do they?’

  ‘I didn’t need an office, I was editing computer books. I worked from home.’

  ‘Oh, right. So that’s going well, is it?’

  Eamonn hesitated. ‘Well, no, I was doing it for the first few months, but the company went bust.’ It pained him to admit this. He could imagine his father thinking there was something fundamentally unreal about the idea of working so remotely, so abstractly. He would assume the collapse of the company was a consequence of the intangibility of the work involved.

  Dermot, however, looked merely concerned. ‘So are you having to look for work?’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I’m sorted. I got a new job teaching English.’

  ‘Oh, teaching. Well, Eamonn, your mother would be very proud. I had the impression that teaching wasn’t your cup of tea.’

  The impression was correct, but Eamonn shrugged it off.

  ‘Well, now, I’d say your Spanish must be tip-top to be able to teach.’

  Eamonn found it irksome that people assumed that living abroad somehow magically endowed you with a facility for language-learning. As if rewiring your brain and having to say a different word to the word you naturally wanted to say every time you wanted to speak wasn’t incredibly, almost impossibly, hard, regardless of where you happened to live or what words the people nearby happened to be hurling around, with near-violent rapidity. The assumption was no less irritating for being one that he himself had held, and one that made his apparent inability to rise above the bajo-intermedio standard of Spanish very hard to accept.

  ‘I’m teaching them English, Dad.’

  ‘Sure I know that, but obviously you need to explain the grammar and so on in Spanish. You need to provide the translation.’

  ‘That’s not how it’s done. It’s all done in English. It’s immersive. They pick it up.’

  Dermot considered this. ‘Immersive. I suppose you can communicate a lot with what they call “body language”, can you? Hand signals and so on?’

  Eamonn rubbed his face. ‘I don’t use hand signals, Dad. They can’t see me, for one thing.’

  Dermot looked at him, an expression of dawning realization on his face.

  ‘Oh … but, that’s great work to be doing. I’m sorry now – I didn’t get you at all at first. What do they call them these days? “Visually impaired”, is it? “Sight-challenged”?’

  Eamonn found himself doing something that he hated. It was a noise he made only when talking to one or both of his parents. A kind of impatient sigh, bordering on a grunt. An adolescent habit that he knew was ridiculous in a thirty-three-year-old man.

  ‘I’m not teaching blind kids. I’m teaching civil servants. It’s all done online or over the phone.’ He paused and then added: ‘No hand signals!’

  Dermot was quiet for a few moments and then said: ‘“Er bekommt keine Luft.”’

  Eamonn looked around the room.

  ‘Oh, yes, I remember that one all right. Linguaphone it was. Like you’re doing. On the tape.’

  Eamonn was minded to explain that what he was doing was nothing like Linguaphone, but his father continued.

  ‘“Er bekommt keine Luft.” “He can’t breathe.” I took the tapes out of the library, thought I could listen to them on the job, but it never really worked. You’d get very absorbed in that stuff. I remember sailing past a stop full of passengers. I saw them there, but just forgot I was supposed to pull in. Raging they were, but I was listening to a conversation in a restaurant. Can’t remember any of it now.’ He shook his head. ‘Only bit of German I have is, “He can’t breathe.” Funny to remember just that.’

  He fell silent again for a few moments before adding, ‘I’m not sure you’d ever really need to say it. You’d think the facial coloration would tell the story well enough.’

  11

  When he awoke from the dream he had forgotten where he was. The room was pitch black and for a moment Dermot thought he was back in the bed he’d slept in as a boy. He reached out instinctively for a lamp he hadn’t thought of in over sixty years and as his hand flailed in the dark he remembered everything. He lay there still, trying to control his breathing and contain his sense of loss.


  Finding the door eventually, he walked through the darkened apartment to the kitchen. He had gone for a glass of water, but found himself getting instead a beer from the fridge.

  He slid open the door to the terrace and sat on a plastic chair. The air was warm and filled with the sound of night creatures vibrating invisibly in the bushes around him. He turned his gaze upwards. He’d become accustomed to city night skies, a meagre scattering of greyish pinpricks in the strip of hazy orange above the streetlights. Here he felt himself pushed back in his chair by the spectacle of the limitless stars and constellations covering every part of the sky above him. He remembered another night, lying on his back in Hamilton’s field, his younger brother by his side. Dominic had woken up scared by noises coming from the kitchen and Dermot had taken him downstairs to show him there were no ghosts or banshees and told him that even if there were, they would certainly flee at the sight of such brave boys. Afterwards Dominic wanted to go out to the field. They lay on their backs, Dominic taking Dermot’s hand and pointing up at the sky. He told Dermot the names of the stars, or at least the names he had given them, which were their own names and those of people and places and things they knew – their whole world mirrored in the night sky above them. He pointed out Sam the cat and old Hamilton’s mad dog Blackie, he pointed out the constellations of their father, their brothers and their sisters, of the biscuit tin and the bar of chocolate hidden in Peggy’s pillow, he pointed out their father’s wife, Teresa, and somewhere further back in the sky at some infinite depth of space and time he showed Dermot the star that was their mother. Dermot scoured the sky now for any trace of these things, but found they had gone.