Father's Music

by Dermot Bolger

  The place smelt of cigarettes and discount lacquer. The faded wallpaper had patterns of old china plates. I couldn’t believe that even Luke could have brought me here for sex. Al looked back and for the first time it struck me that there was no resemblance to Shane in his face. He could actually be anyone who had tricked me here. He opened the door at the top of the stairs and stepped aside, so that I had to enter first. I was standing in no bedroom, but the saloon itself. There was no sign of Luke. A grey-haired man turned from the window where he had obviously watched me arrive. He studied me quizzically, tapping long glinting scissors against his palm.

  ‘Isn’t she just perfect for it,’ he addressed the young man who claimed to be Al and who now blocked the doorway. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make sure not even her own mother would recognise her.’

  ‘Please,’ I begged, but I wasn’t sure if he could hear me. My throat was so dry the word wouldn’t seem to come out. The man took a step closer, then stopped and studied my face.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘We know exactly what you’re after. I’m just amazed nobody has done it to you before.’ He gently twirled a wisp of my hair between his fingers. ‘I mean, your hair is so fine, it’s just crying out to be dyed blonde.’

  I said nothing and never spoke during all the time he worked at my hair, even when they re-opened after lunch and other customers came in. Al stood by the window, keeping an eye on his car. The hairdresser fussed nervously, anxious that a good report would go back to the Duggans.

  ‘You’ll want it looking well for the funeral,’ he kept whispering. ‘I knew your father, Johnny Kavanagh. I remember the day he married Clare Duggan. I know Christy and Johnny haven’t spoken in twenty years, but it’s great that one of his children came home for the funeral.’

  I kept nodding and let him do as instructed. I felt numb and violated. I’d always hated the fantasy of blonde hair, yet I found I couldn’t argue because I couldn’t explain who I was. He stood back at last, anxious that I approve his work. I stared at myself and wanted to scream. It wasn’t just my hair but my whole face which seemed different. I stood up and went to pay him. He shock his head and gripped my hand tight.

  ‘I heard how upset you were at your uncle’s murder,’ he said. ‘Sure you were pale as a ghost when you came in. But a new hair style is a fresh start, eh? You tell the Duggans that Smiley did a good job.’

  I walked downstairs with Al and got into the car, still without speaking.

  ‘Is it all right?’ he asked. ‘I mean is that exactly how you wanted it?’ He twisted the rear-view around so that I could stare again at the blonde stranger looking back at me.

  ‘Don’t mind Smiley thinking you’re Johnny Kavanagh’s daughter,’ Al said, twisting the mirror around and starting the battered car. ‘We knew he’d do it on the spot if he thought you were family, and we could hardly tell him who you really were. But from now on, if anyone asks, you’re my girl-friend and I met you in the Pod night-club, okay?’

  His words hardly registered as I stared out at the boarded-up houses and the litter blowing against the kerb. Al looked concerned.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘I won’t try anything. Anyway, I hardly could with you being who you are. But it was the only way Luke could think of to get you into Christy’s house for the funeral. With your new hair no one’s going to look too close. But, of course, I know who you really are.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Well, I saw you in the Irish Centre in London,’ Al said, concerned by the tone of my voice. ‘I wasn’t sitting with my family, I was trying to chat some girl up and getting the cold shoulder. But I saw you talking to him at the bar. I was surprised when Uncle Luke told me. I know it’s hard on you, but it’s probably for the best that Auntie Carmel doesn’t know. At least not yet. I mean yous have only actually met up fairly recently. Let him drop a few hints first and see if she comes around to the idea.’

  ‘I don’t want her to know,’ I said. ‘Or anyone.’

  Al braked at the main road and looked at me. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said, treading carefully. ‘I mean, how much do you know about him?’

  ‘That’s my business,’ I said. ‘He asked me to come to Dublin. He was upset. I can’t believe now that I agreed.’

  Two passing youths stared in, eyeing me up in a different way than anyone had ever done before. This was life as a blonde. Al patted my knee very gently.

  ‘You were right to come,’ he said. ‘Christy was your uncle too. I mean, just because you’re illegitimate doesn’t mean you’re not part of the family. He was always a dark horse, Uncle Luke. I never even knew he had a grown-up daughter.’

  I turned away. It should have been the final outrage but instead I had to suppress hysterical nervous laughter. Only someone as utterly devious as Luke could have the audacity to believe he could away get with this. Al drove on, concerned that he had insulted me. I stared out at the derelict streets. I must have been down this way once before with my mother but I recognised nothing. I lowered the window to twist the wing mirror right around but I found that I didn’t even recognise myself.

  TEN

  IT WAS HARD to think of Al as a Duggan. He dressed casually for a start, as did the three mates who rented a terraced house with him. I spent the afternoon there, locked in the bathroom at first, mutely staring at my hair in a mirror. I felt maimed, as if someone had branded me. I had never chosen my clothes to impress men. I loved jeans, sweat-shirts, loose jumpers that kept eyes at bay. This hair belonged to someone else and there was no way I was letting Luke get away with it. Al came up to knock on the door, concerned for me and bearing tea and chocolate biscuits. ‘You didn’t know about the hairdresser’s, did you?’ he asked, except that it wasn’t phrased as a question. I stared into the mirror again. ‘Still it suits you,’ he said with such an utter lack of conviction that he made me laugh for the first time.

  The front room of the house was ablaze with dusty Christmas decorations. I was surprised by such frills until Al explained that the previous tenant had done a runner the Christmas before and the lads had never got around to taking the streamers down when they moved in. The wall to wall bookcase contained every conceivable type of bottle, all empty and layered with dust. The only furniture was a battered sofa, two chairs, a video and a sound system rigged with massive speakers. Yet I liked it there and, during the afternoon, slowly learnt to relax with Al. I liked his house-mates too, who drifted in from work or from being on the doss. They accepted my presence with a friendly nod, including me in jokes before they even had their coats off. They slagged Al mercilessly about where he had produced me from, claiming I must have appeared after he rubbed the dust off an empty Chianti bottle on the shelf.

  It was taken for granted that I was travelling with them to the funeral home. Al placed his arm around my shoulder as soon as we entered it. It had originally been a grocery shop, he told me, ruled over by a sour woman with a Welsh accent and a voice to frighten children. Christy, Luke and Shane were often turned away by her and denied tick when their father was looking for work in England. Christy had robbed the shop on the day before the woman retired and stopped the car half a mile down the road to stuff the takings into a church poor-box. Al said it was the only act in Christy’s life which had ever been done as a matter of principle.

  I couldn’t help but like Luke’s father. I imagined his face would always wear the same bemused expression, resigned to whatever life threw at him and yet puzzled by how it came to pass. He moved around the funeral home, anxious to make people welcome. He accepted condolences on behalf of the family with a quiet shake of his head, yet I felt that it would never occur to him to think of his own grief. He reminded me of Grandad Pete. I could imagine him later making sandwiches for neighbours and filling up glasses to ensure that every visitor left with the melancholic bonhomie of a good funeral. Only then, when the house was set to rights, would he allow himself to bow his head and weep.

  Al’s mates kept up a quiet ba
nter between themselves. They had known Christy and known when to be wary of him. Six men with cropped hair stood apart, circling the top of the open coffin like a colour guard, silently chain-smoking and watching everyone who came and went. Nobody needed to explain their presence to me. They had been a different sort of family to Christy, but a family who seemed just as confident of their place at his funeral. Soon they would join rival gangs. Some might kill or be killed if this feud spilled over. But for now they stood together, defying the world and each other. They were the only people whom Luke’s father avoided greeting. He came towards us instead and embraced his grandson with warmth and sadness, smiling as Al kissed his bald forehead.

  ‘You all right there, Al?’

  ‘I’m grand, Grandad.’

  ‘Who’s this wee girl with you now?’

  ‘This is an English friend of mine.’

  ‘You’re very welcome, love.’ Luke’s father squeezed my hand, anxious that I feel at home. ‘It’s a sad day for us. You come back to the house for something to eat afterwards, you hear me now?’

  He shook hands with Al’s mates as more of the immediate family arrived. I noticed again how blonde hair was standard issue for the Duggan women, with even girls of nine and ten bleached to their roots. Shane arrived with his wife and then the conversation dipped as Luke entered in a mourning coat with one arm around his wife and the other around his daughter who was crying. He glared at the crew-cut men near the coffin, as if claiming back possession of Christy. The room filled with unspoken tension. After a moment the men looked at each other and then, with a shrug, stepped back to lean against a wall and eye Luke up.

  The prayers began with Al’s mates surprising me by quietly joining in. Luke led the prayers with the throng taking their cue from him. I couldn’t stop staring at those lips which had French kissed and nipped and greedily lapped up my body’s juices, and were now mouthing the words of some Catholic chant. It was yet another Luke, the head of his family. I noticed how since his arrival his father seemed diminished. Luke was definitely the centre of attention, more so even than Christy’s widow and children.

  Luke must have been aware that I was there, yet he never glanced in my direction. Neither did his wife or anyone else I recognised from the Irish Centre, except for the black haired girl I had drunkenly eyed up and who had stared at me when I ran from the hotel. Now, from the way people addressed her, I realised she was Christy’s daughter. Several times during the prayers she glanced across, trying to place me. I looked away and took Al’s hand for security. He glanced down, giving my fingers the slightest squeeze. This was the first role Luke had ever invented which suited me. The funny thing was that, just then, I felt nothing for Luke, not even anger. I watched him out of curiosity, like somebody I’d vaguely heard of. Nothing of our time together seemed real. He looked older than usual and his hair greyer as Al squeezed my hand again, his fingers smooth and warm.

  Shane’s head was bowed and he also never glanced in my direction. His wife looked as though she spent most of her days turning brown and wrinkled under a sunbed. She wore the sort of hat Jackie Kennedy wore in newsreels and which had been out of fashion even then. Luke’s wife stood beside her, the only woman there who didn’t look obsessed with her weight or with trying to be something she wasn’t. Under a mop of curly black hair she looked chubby and content with middle age. She looked up, taking in my gaze and I had to glance away. I couldn’t dislike her. I felt guilty at being here. Maybe this was a torture which Luke had devised to ensure that my self-esteem remained low. I knew I was being hypocritical, but I hated him suddenly for cheating on her.

  The prayers finished and Luke took the arm of Christy’s widow, helping her to come forward and kiss the body. She looked like a blockier version of Shane’s wife, her movements slightly vague as if assisted by tranquillisers. A procession of relatives and friends formed to follow suit, with Luke watching to make sure that the gang members stayed in the background. Al stepped forward. For a moment I thought he was trying to bring me up to the coffin. But he let go my hand and walked across to kiss the corpse as people filed from the room prior to the lid being screwed down. More wreaths were brought in, each one more grandiose and tacky than the last, with cut flowers bent into the shapes of sports cars or arranged to spell PAL or DAD.

  It was as if permission had been given for people to cry. The grief inside the room was suddenly naked and so was the anger. During the prayers and rituals, it had been possible to forget that Christy had been shot. Now, as the undertakers waited with the lid, his children left without a father hugged the corpse and had to be helped away. Christy’s mother stood at the head of the coffin, beyond tears as she combed his hair over and over with her fingers. I glanced at the huddle of tough-looking men, wondering if one of them had betrayed him. The newspaper had said that Christy’s was the fifteenth gangland killing in Dublin this year. Would one of them be next? They watched Luke with undisguised hostility but he stared back, until, eventually and reluctantly, they left, with only one of them pausing to touch the coffin’s polished rim.

  My mother’s funeral had been as subdued and solemn as an inquest. I thought of her again and found that tears, which I had wanted to shed sixteen months ago, were suddenly making everything blurred. Carl, one of Al’s house-mates, noticed my distress and thought I was crying for Christy. He put an arm around my shoulder and nodded towards the coffin.

  ‘You didn’t know him,’ Carl whispered. ‘I’ll not speak bad of the dead, but Saint Peter better watch his fucking wallet.’

  They were dangerous words to say for my sake. I smiled and dried my eyes.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I lied, ‘all funerals do this to me.’

  ‘Listen,’ Carl whispered, ‘I don’t know how long you’ve known Al, but don’t worry, he stays well clear of all this. Hang in there, and we’ll go into town afterwards and get seriously drunk.’

  Al returned to lead me out into the night air. It was cold with flecks of rain turning amber in the security lights above the doors. Al had warned that there might be a television crew and photographers at the church, but one photographer had got ahead of the posse and was waiting in the driveway. Mourners fanned out on either side of where the hearse waited to receive the coffin. A squad car was parked outside the gates of the funeral home, the policemen inside watching, or gloating, as Al muttered with sudden bitterness. The photographer edged closer until he was at the edge of the waiting crowd where Christy’s gang were standing. He looked young and inexperienced. I could sense the tension his presence caused. Luke’s parents came out and then Luke appeared, this time with his arms around Christy’s widow and daughter. The coffin was being wheeled out behind them.

  The photographer stepped forward to kneel with his camera raised. I saw the gang form a shield between him and the squad car. One man turned and with a casual flick of his heel smashed the camera from the photographer’s hands and buried his shoe in his face. As the photographer fell back, another man grabbed him by the hair and punched him, with the gang’s pent-up fury finding its release. The camera was kicked along the ground, with the high-powered lens falling off and being trodden underfoot.

  The squad car doors opened and two policemen charged into the mêlée, followed by a plain clothes detective. Women screamed angrily at the photographer while others shouted for calm. Luke reached the photographer at the same moment as the detective. There was a clash of shoulders as they both stood over him. The photographer was about twenty years of age. He knelt with a space cleared around him. Blood ran down his face which he kept covered. The uniformed policemen looked around, not sure who had committed the actual assault. Even those among the crowd who were disgusted by the attack closed ranks, as the police tried to push their way through and catch sight of the vanishing gang members. I felt suffocated by the crammed bodies, yet curiously part of them, staring back at the police with that collective mute hostility. I sensed movement behind me as a crouching body brushed past and then all was s
till. Luke knelt beside the photographer and handed him a starched white handkerchief.

  ‘We are not animals,’ Luke told him quietly, ‘and this is not a circus. Your newspaper helped to set up my brother’s murder, printing rumours you could never prove. Go to the church if that’s your job, but this is private property. My family are grieving, so keep your distance and let us do so in peace.’

  He helped the young man up and pressed the handkerchief against his bloodied nose. ‘Hold it like this,’ he said, ‘and squeeze hard. It’s just a spot of blood, it’s not broken.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ the detective warned, pushing Luke aside as if trying to provoke him. The photographer looked dazed and angry. For a moment I thought he was about to strike Luke, but Luke continued staring into his face, cutting the detective out. The mood around me was sour, yet I sensed people taking their cue from Luke.

  ‘I’m not touching you, am I?’ Luke informed the photographer. ‘None of my family touched you. Nobody who was invited here by my family touched you. That’s the way it is in Dublin now. You can’t trust the police to protect innocent people going about their business. The proof is lying dead in that coffin.’

  ‘Don’t be intimidated by anything this scumbag says,’ the detective told the photographer. ‘You were assaulted. Somebody here can do time for this.’

  The young photographer held the handkerchief to his face and stared at Luke, who ignored the detective.