Mr Lynch’s Holiday

by Catherine O’Flynn

  35

  Eamonn left Rosemary and Gill’s air-conditioned lobby and stepped out into the clammy night. He was a little woozy with whiskey. He had felt an aching kind of emptiness in his chest since being dragged from the sea, as if something had come out of him. Scotch had seemed a good remedy, the heat somehow masking the hollowness.

  They’d been pulling into the development when the two women had flagged them down. They had insisted he and Dermot join them for the evening. His dad hit it off with the two of them instantly and they in turn seemed to find him a scream.

  Eamonn was aware that he policed his father’s attitudes. There was really no evidence that Dermot was racist or sexist or homophobic, but that hadn’t stopped Eamonn charging both his parents with these crimes over the years. He picked them up on the things that they said. They might not hold hatred in their hearts for a gay couple, but that wouldn’t stop his parents referring to them as ‘that funny pair’. They might love Fats Domino but still refer to him as ‘coloured’. It was what you said, not just what you felt, Eamonn tried to explain. Maybe it was a generational thing, but he had always thought it should be monitored, addressed, fixed.

  ‘It’s strange that none of my mates have ever corrected me,’ Dermot once said in a rare moment of frustration. ‘And they come from Trinidad and Jamaica and Pakistan and Bangladesh. You’re always telling me what I should call them, but I never see you with a friend that isn’t white.’

  And Eamonn had tried to brush that away, insisting it was an exaggeration and moreover an irrelevance. But it lingered between them, an inconvenient truth.

  Dermot had of course said nothing remotely questionable all evening. He had been in high spirits. Possibly, Eamonn reflected, a reaction to the earlier drama and shock. They had not been at Rosemary and Gill’s long when his father spotted the pack of cards.

  ‘Do you like to play a hand or two?’

  ‘We do,’ said Gill. ‘How about you? Could we persuade you to a few rounds of Whist? And Eamonn? Could you bear it? Would you humour us?’

  ‘What do you say, son? Shall we have a go?’ Dermot said. ‘Now, Whist?’ He turned to Eamonn and winked. ‘Which one is that?’

  They had played for hours and Eamonn had grown tired. He decided to leave as his father was setting about teaching the two women the many idiosyncrasies of the game of Twenty-Five. It wasn’t until Eamonn walked away from their building that he realized how dark it was. The sky was cloudy and the streets black without the benefit of moonlight. He held out his mobile phone as a torch.

  He remembered nights on holiday in Ireland. Walking back to the caravan site, after similarly interminable evenings of cards with relatives, the air thick with cigarette smoke, the atmosphere serious, the games impenetrable. His father holding his hand as they walked between towering black hedgerows. The air smelling sweet and strange. One time they walked straight into a donkey wandering the empty road in the moonless night. Eamonn screamed, the donkey brayed and his parents giggled. The memory felt like a dream.

  He stopped and looked around him. He didn’t know where he was. It was possible that lost in thought and muddled by alcohol he had strayed off course, or maybe it was simply that the familiar looked strange in the darkness. He stood still to try to get his bearings. The light from the phone was faint and he could see little more than a few feet in front of him. He had no idea how long he had been walking. It felt a long time, long enough certainly to have reached his own door. He peered into the blackness and had no inkling which way to go.

  He continued a few steps in the same direction, hoping that his subconscious had been successfully navigating all along. But after just a few yards he stopped. There it was again: the sense he had had outside the half-built house. He was not alone.

  He attempted cat speak. ‘Psss wsss wssss wssss.’ But no cat emerged. Squinting into the darkness he saw nothing. He started to walk again before remembering that he was lost. He was tired and uneasy and wanted very much to be home in his bed. He could think of no other option but to phone for help. Calling his father to rescue him for the second time in a day. As he dialled the number for Gill and Rosemary, he heard movement nearby.

  ‘Dad? Is that you?’ he called out.

  Then, up close, a voice on the phone: ‘Hello?’

  ‘Gill.’ His own voice too loud.

  ‘Hello? Who’s this?’

  ‘Gill. It’s me. I’ve got a bit lost. I can’t see a thing out here.’ He spoke more quietly, tried to sound light-hearted; it came out wrong.

  ‘Eamonn, is that you?’ There was laughter.

  ‘Gill, listen, can you put my dad on …’ The phone slipped from his hand and clattered on to the road, leaving him in total darkness.

  ‘Fuck. Fuck.’

  He dropped to his hands and knees, patting the ground around him. He had his arm outstretched. One moment the phone was nowhere, the next he felt the corner of the plastic casing pushing against his fingertips. He reached to grab it and as he did he felt something else touch his hand. Warm, light, gone in an instant. He yelped.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  He stood up and turned in a circle, his arms out straight.

  ‘What do you want?’ There was nothing. Silence. Blackness. Suddenly he felt a disturbance of air behind him and he fled, no longer wanting to know who or what it was. He ran blindly, his breath ragged, until he saw a light bobbing in the distance and heard his father’s voice.

  ‘Eamonn? Eamonn? What are you up to?’

  Eamonn ran right up to him.

  ‘What’s going on? Are you drunk?’

  ‘There’s someone out there. I dropped my phone and I felt someone touch my hand.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Dermot shone his torch around and then back at Eamonn.

  ‘Are you drunk?’ he asked again.

  ‘It happened the other day. Someone hiding. Watching me.’

  Dermot looked around again. The street was empty and silent.

  ‘Where did it happen the other time?’

  ‘Over by the building site.’

  ‘All right, then. You stay here and keep a lookout. I’ll head down there, find out if someone’s messing around.’

  ‘No … let’s just go home.’

  ‘What? Why would we do that?’ He shone the light in Eamonn’s face. ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Yes! A bit. Of course. It’s scary.’

  ‘There’s no need to be scared. I’ll leave you with the torch.’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Eamonn tried to laugh. ‘You don’t watch horror films, you don’t understand. You don’t split up.’

  ‘For the love of God. It’s not a horror film, son.’ Dermot handed over the torch and started to go but Eamonn’s hand shot out and held his father’s arm tight. He turned and looked at Eamonn’s face.

  ‘OK, son. We’ll head home.’

  Back in the apartment he made him some sugary tea, which Eamonn found undrinkable.

  ‘Some people pick up on these things,’ said Dermot.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Oh, ghosts and atmospheres and all that. I never did.’

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  ‘I don’t reckon believing’s anything to do with it. Just a sense. There are just some that have it and some that don’t.’

  He was quiet for a while and then said: ‘Dominic and I were always out exploring old abandoned houses. Most of the time we were like wild animals running about the place, but every now and then something would scare him. He’d say he didn’t want to go in a particular room, or didn’t want to play in certain places. It drove me mad. I was forever trying to convince him there was nothing there, it was all in his imagination.’

  ‘Not everyone shares your love of crumbling old ruins.’

  ‘I remember one time, in the old Dempsey cottage, I asked him to look in one of the rooms for any old furniture or bits of wood we c
ould try and burn. He just dithered about next to me until I shouted at him: “Will you go in the other room like I told you!” and he turned and said: “But, Dermot, I should wait till the man’s finished fixing the door.”’

  He laughed. ‘He wasn’t even scared. Very matter-of-fact. He could see the funny side though. After that whenever we’d go anywhere I’d tease him. “Is that phantom carpenter doing any work here today?”’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m making him sound cracked. He wasn’t. He was great company.’

  Eamonn smiled.

  Dermot looked at him. ‘You’re very like him sometimes.’

  36

  Dermot was awake again. Something about the heat had him waking and dozing, waking and dozing all night long. He drifted in and out of dreams. Each time he woke, the same breathless struggle to work out where he was. No sound or shape to give him a clue. He wondered at the time, his watch useless in the dark. He closed his eyes and saw a different shade of black.

  He remembered another summer’s evening, sitting in golden light watching shadows lengthen on the floor. His mother in the bed. Her black hair unfurled upon the pillow, as if she were underwater.

  ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Come over and talk to me.’

  ‘I thought you were sleeping.’

  ‘I am and then I’m not. I don’t know if I’m dreaming or awake. Let me hold your hand.’

  He walked over to the bed and took her hand. Her fingers were dry twigs in his palm.

  There was too much to be said, so they remained in silence. He sat on the bed and listened to the ticking of the clock, the rhythm of her breaths, the crows outside. After a while he laid his head on the pillow and she stroked him as if he were a little boy once more. He closed his eyes and felt that God was nowhere.

  After her death they all sought to escape. An unseemly scramble to get away: first from their father, useless in grief, self-pitying and mean-tempered, and then from his new wife. There was nothing especially malign about Teresa and perhaps they should have been glad of someone to look after the old man, to cook and clean for all of them. But she was not their mother and her presence served only to deepen the fathomless hole left by the absence. Two of Dermot’s older sisters became nuns. One brother left for Dublin, another for Liverpool. At fourteen, Dermot had finished school but was too young to leave home. He was sent to live with his grandmother over in Liscannor, who had room enough for one, leaving behind his baby sister, Eva, and his younger brother, Dominic.

  Something buzzed past his head. He waved his hand and made brief contact, pushing the creature onwards through the darkness. A moment later it was back again.

  When he thought of Liscannor now the memories were vivid but fragmentary: tearing down the road on Donal’s motorbike; chasing Delia Byrne through the dunes; diving into giant waves under purple skies. He remembered exactly the hit of steam and vinegar from finger holes in chip wrappers, the lustre of Mary Fallon’s lipstick, and the taste of his first Capstan.

  The mosquito dived again and Dermot batted the air.

  ‘If you had any sense you’d lay low.’

  It wasn’t so strange. Families dispersed, children scattered, homes were abandoned. It was the way things were. He kept in touch with Dominic. Postcards, visits at Christmas. But his own new life in Liscannor was full of incident. Eighteen months of tiptoeing about the house, of speaking in whispers, of feeling an unbearable heaviness pressing down on him were blasted away by the Atlantic. He had little interest in looking back, scant time or space for reflection on the way life had changed.

  But when he contemplated those years now, it was not the hijinks and antics in Liscannor that absorbed him, it was the thought of Dominic back at home with his father, Teresa and their new baby. He tried to imagine what his younger brother had done during gaunt winter afternoons and the long dusks of summer nights. Who had he gone gallivanting with? Who did he wake with frozen hands in the middle of the night when he was scared?

  A sudden vibration by his ear and he sat up swinging his hand through the thick black air, missing over and over again.

  If Dominic bore any bitterness or sadness at being left behind, he never let it show. It was, after all, the way things were. He got out himself soon enough. Leaving home at sixteen and heading to the States. Dermot had always thought that Dominic would follow him to England and he had often worried that America had been a kind of rebuke. A statement that Dominic was his own man, the little brother no more.

  When he heard the whine again, he reached for the switch, flooding the room with light, revealing the insect on the wall. He got up and delivered a close blow, his open hand bursting the mosquito’s swollen body on to the white plaster. He sat back on the bed, the room too bright, a trace of blood on his palm.

  Young and careless. Stupid and preoccupied. He had let go of his brother’s hand and he had lost him.

  37

  In the morning he wandered back down to the building site to investigate what he thought he’d seen the other day. His father now apparently thought he had a sixth sense. There were things Eamonn had to accept about his recent low state. Being single, being unemployed, being a poor swimmer – all these things he had no choice but to acknowledge as true, but possessing supernatural abilities was, he felt, overstretching his role.

  Zigzagging down the winding roads, it was easy to lose track of where one was – each swathe of development looking the same as the one above it. Eamonn had learned to pick out small details of decay as landmarks on the many uninhabited stretches – a rust-coloured stain on a wall, a particular grouping of weeds, cables poking from the front of a lamp post.

  The failure of Lomaverde was an excuse he could give for his own disillusionment with life there, but he feared the real reasons lay within himself. He had never been any good at fitting in. He was wary of people who didn’t look like him, and contemptuous of those who did. He noticed things he did not want to notice, judged things he did not want to judge. A commentary always running somewhere in his head. He had really believed that away from England, away from the familiar, tedious triggers and his own tedious responses to them, he would be a better person. He would be his true self.

  But on arriving in Spain he quickly discovered a terrible longing for all the things he’d thought he wanted to leave behind: lifestyle supplements, late-night bookies, teeming Poundshops, television programmes about food, fluttering balloons outside flooring outlets, John Humphrys, Pudsey Bear, smug young men with beards, angry young boys with Rottweilers, the sounds that weathermen made. Without them all he flailed. What was there for him on the side of a hill in Spain? A view. An unwritten novel. His own shortcomings. Laura.

  And Laura knew all this, she knew it long before he worked it out for himself. And she knew too that he thought it was something he could master. He would not be defined by what he was not. He would stay there on the side of a hill in Spain and try, by force of will, to evolve into a better, more complete human being. And he would fail.

  He was down now at the building site and he made his way over to the half-built house. He lifted the plastic sheeting and stepped inside, unsure what he was expecting to find. What he did find was unspectacular – empty plastic tubs of sealant, broken breeze blocks, a plastic chair on its side. Nothing clandestine or eerie. He pulled back the blue polytarp across the doorway to leave and released a high-pitch scream as he came face to face with someone.

  ‘Fuck. Jesus. Fuck. Esteban! What are you doing here? You almost killed me.’

  ‘Eamonn. My God. Sorry. What’s the matter?’

  ‘You! That’s what the matter is. Creeping about.’

  ‘I was on patrol. I see someone is in here. I check.’

  ‘Right. Well, it gave me a shock.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I was just having a look.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I thought I saw someone. The other day.’

  �
�I think no one comes here.’

  ‘No. Probably not.’

  ‘It’s not safe here. Building places are dangerous. Your mother never tell you?’

  ‘I’m sure she did.’

  ‘Something could fall on your head.’

  They were back on the road now and Eamonn noticed another, older man waiting there. He raised his hand and the man nodded in his direction.

  ‘That’s my uncle. He brought me some melon.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He grows them.’

  ‘Oh. Nice.’

  ‘Would you like some? I have it up in the cabin.’

  ‘Maybe later.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Esteban?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You haven’t seen anything funny around the place recently, have you?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anyone who shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Who?’

  Eamonn felt foolish. ‘I don’t know. Just a couple of times recently I’ve thought someone was hiding from me.’

  ‘Maybe it’s Laura, hahahahahaha. “Surprise, Eamonn! I am here all along.”’

  Eamonn looked at Esteban until he stopped laughing and collected himself.

  ‘My God, Eamonn. I’m sorry. This was bad taste. I heard you had problems and I’m sorry for them, really. What were you saying?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, Eamonn. Don’t be that way. I’m sorry. Really.’

  ‘I was just wondering if you’d seen anything strange. You know someone stole Inga’s chickens?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. This I know. She tell me.’

  ‘Well, someone must have done that.’

  ‘Yes. I have theory about that.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I think Inga did it.’

  ‘That’s an interesting theory.’

  ‘It sounds crazy, but some people … Women. Some women. They find killing animals difficult.’

  ‘Some men too.’

  ‘Maybe. I think she wanted to do it away from her house. Somewhere she could have a distance. You know’ – he tapped his head – ‘mentally.’