Father's Music

by Dermot Bolger

  Luke lit the cigarette and turned to observe me. ‘I’m tired,’ he conceded. ‘It’s been a long drive.’

  It was as much of an apology as I was likely to get. I walked into the bathroom. The tub in the corner was circular and large enough for two people. There were full length mirrors on both walls and on the ceiling above it. This suite felt like it was meant for someone else. Its ambience spoke of middle-aged people having limp sex in Ann Summers lingerie which hadn’t looked nearly as ridiculous when worn by models half their age in the catalogues. Luke followed me in and stood at the doorway. He seemed to guess my thoughts and shrugged.

  ‘I picked the place,’ he said, ‘I didn’t pick the furnishings.’

  ‘Does this sort of stuff turn you on?’ I asked.

  ‘What answer do you want?’

  ‘It’s a long way from Bundoran,’ I needled, annoyed at having such surroundings landed on me. ‘Does it make you feel you’ve finally arrived?’

  ‘I’m the man I always was,’ he answered surlily.

  ‘With the Dublin accent you always had. I could see it written on that snotty bitch’s face downstairs. When she wasn’t gawking at me she was eyeing you up, afraid you’ll stuff the silver spoons in your inside pocket despite your big car and the trophy mistress.’

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to provoke Luke into doing. But I needed to break through that calm façade he had retreated behind again and reach the man I had glimpsed outside the boarding house in Bundoran. Because I was edgy alone with him here, something didn’t feel right. Maybe I wanted the turmoil of a row which our bodies could make up.

  ‘You’re not a trophy,’ Luke said.

  ‘I don’t belong here. Can’t you see I’m scared to go downstairs? I won’t know what fork to use, I’ve nothing to wear.’

  ‘You’re with me.’ He sounded angry. ‘If you’re good enough for me, you’re good enough for here. I could buy this place in the fucking morning if I wanted to. I’ve nothing to prove to anyone.’

  He tossed the cigarette into the toilet bowl and left. I leaned against the door and pulled down my jeans. The tampon was just damp with sweat. I wasn’t sure what to feel any more. Twice this week I’d dreamt about the release of blood and had woken, bitterly disappointed to find myself still caged by uncertainty. I kept trying not to think of it, but that fear was behind everything I did. I couldn’t allow myself to think badly of the child. I had to love it, no matter how unwelcome it was. If Gran could love her own father’s child, surely I could learn to love Luke’s. But to do that, I couldn’t think badly of Luke either.

  I hunched down and examined the tampon minutely. Stains of blood would free me from Luke. I might even have been tempted to take my bag and hitch alone to search those mountains. But the tampon was unstained and I kicked off my sneakers and removed my jeans. They were crumpled and I’d had no time to wash them before leaving London. I felt uncomfortable here, no matter what Luke said. I heard a match being struck in the bedroom as he lit another cigarette. The taps on the bath transformed into a shower unit. I turned them on and stood under the spray of hot water, wondering if the sound might lure Luke back in.

  I dried myself and puzzled at the various reflections of my body in the maze of mirrors. I looked thin and tired. Somebody else mightn’t have noticed the traces of scars still on my arms. If I stared too long I would lose my confidence. I took the initiative and walked into the bedroom. Luke had booked a double room, taking my compliance for granted. Or had he? I couldn’t feel that this expensive suite was an attempt to buy me. Its opulence made me uncomfortable, but it was a token of appreciation. No matter what private demons lurked within him, it made me feel that I could trust Luke because he genuinely cared.

  He was lying on the bed, smoking and gazing up. He turned to watch me approach and I felt cold, consumed by goosepimples. I lay between the sheets and pulled the quilt over me. Luke waited a moment, then leaned over to kiss me quite roughly. He pulled the quilt back. I think he wanted to see me naked, but I pulled him down between the sheets and drew the quilt around us. Luke stubbed his cigarette out against the gilded edge of a lamp stand and I pulled the quilt even higher above our heads so that we were submerged underneath it, back in the tiny bubble of our private world. Luke worked his hand down my back to cup my buttocks and draw them apart, manoeuvring his fingers inwards towards where I was already drenched. Two birds landed on the roof slates near the window. I could hear their claws scrambling and then lifting off again. There was a hoover in the corridor and the muffled sound of footsteps. I unzipped his suit trousers and managed to pull them down far enough to press my nails into his arse.

  I remembered the story of Christy’s cock getting stuck in Margaret’s zip. But at least they had known the moment when their child was conceived. I had always sworn I would never be stupid enough to get pregnant by mistake. When the need came for a child, whether I was married or single, I had planned to savour her conception. Not the physical pleasure of sex but the miraculous sense of life beginning within me. I wanted to cheat and pretend it was happening now. I knew our affair had run its course, even if Luke didn’t. For all his feelings towards me it was wrong because I didn’t love him. Yet it was for this final act of love-making as much as to find my father that I had agreed to come here.

  His breath was coming faster as he took my breast in his mouth. His back stiffened and then arched. I felt his teeth grip and knew he was about to come. I wrapped my legs around his arse and clasped them high up along his back. I wanted his cock as deep as possible inside me. In years to come this would be the moment of conception I’d choose to remember, the frenzy of his teeth and hands and that spurt as his sperm leapt inside me like a shoal of vaulting salmon. I had chosen my journey to echo theirs, returning to this county where I had been conceived. Luke thrust weakly inside me one last time, then ceased moving, his task done. His back was drenched in deltas of sweat, but I sensed that he shared in the after-taste of vague melancholy which pervaded the room. He rolled off me to rest his head on a pillow.

  ‘You were different,’ he said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like a queen bee watching.’ Luke was still trying to get his breath. ‘You used to make me feel young. Suddenly you’re making me old.’

  ‘You are old, remember,’ I teased, but gently now, almost magnanimously. I felt so much in control that it frightened me. There seemed nothing I couldn’t ask him to do.

  ‘Old isn’t the right word,’ Luke said. ‘Maybe it isn’t even you, maybe it’s me. I feel cut off from everything.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He reached for the cigarettes and lit two. I could feel his stickiness going cold on the sheet between my legs. He pulled the quilt back and walked to the window. His trousers had been pushed off but his shirt was still on. After a moment I realised he was beckoning me. I stood naked beside him and counted the seconds of darkness before the flash of a lighthouse winked out at sea.

  ‘That’s Saint John’s Point,’ Luke said. ‘As isolated a spot as you can get. The lighthouse is automated now, so there’s no one left on that headland. I spent a year there with Christy.’

  ‘On the lighthouse?’

  ‘No. The only other building was Saint Raphael’s Industrial school. It wasn’t as big as Daingan or Letterfrack, but it was just as vicious.’ His voice was curiously bereft of emotion. ‘There was one Christian Brother, I can’t even remember what he was meant to teach us. He’d line us against the wall and invent new reasons to beat us. You could see the cock bulging in his robes when he laid in with the leather. First thing every morning he’d eat an orange and throw the peel in the bin, then spend the whole class coughing up phlegm on top of it. When the bastard finally left you’d see a rush of boys, their hands so bruised they couldn’t straighten their fingers, fighting each other for scraps of peel covered in his spit.’

  ‘How did you survive?’

  ‘Dumb insolence,’ Luke said. ‘I kept
my distance from him and all those bastards. I played stupid, never retaliating, never opening my mouth to anyone. I just stored up old scores to settle.’

  ‘And did you settle them with him afterwards?’

  ‘I only saw him once again,’ Luke said. ‘Down the public toilets in Burgh Quay. Boy prostitutes used to hang around them. He was at the urinal pretending to piss. I saw how agitated he was, trying not to attract attention as he waited for one to come in. I stood at his shoulder and stared into his face. For a moment he hoped I was trying to pick him up, then he got scared even though he’d taken his collar off. I don’t know how often I’d dreamt of beating him into a pulp. Every boy who went through his hands must have. But the way he looked at me stopped me from doing anything. It wasn’t his fear or …’ Luke drew on the cigarette and stared at the distant lighthouse. ‘He didn’t recognise me. He’d beaten my hands raw, yet he didn’t know me from a hole in the ground. I was a nobody. I walked out of the jakes and it felt like his look had robbed me of those memories, like they’d happened to someone else. The older I get, the more I feel that way about everything. It was someone else it all happened to.’

  ‘You’re just older,’ I said. ‘You’ve a different life. Look at you staying here.’

  ‘Then why can’t I shake my old life off?’ Luke drew the heavy drapes to block out the view. ‘I can’t escape the smell of it, the fear of waking up poor.’

  ‘You’re doing well,’ I said, ‘you’ve got shops and all that.’

  ‘None of it matters. Two shops or twenty shops will never be enough to make me feel secure. I can’t bring myself to spend money and I don’t even get pleasure from making it any more.’

  Luke looked so lost that I wanted to rock him back and forth. He walked over to switch on the lamp beside the bed. He stripped off his silk shirt so I could see the scar I had so often played with in London. He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees and cup his head jadedly in his palms.

  ‘Sometimes if I wake suddenly,’ he said, ‘for a moment I feel I’m an old man already or this is a premonition of how I’ll feel when my children have grown into middle-aged people who visit when their conscience pricks them. I just know that no matter what I do with my life I’m going to wind up in a cheap nursing home, hardly able to lift myself from the bed, penniless and alone.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. You’re rich and successful. Even I know that.’

  ‘All the money in the world can’t take away the taste of orange peel covered in spit.’

  ‘Is that what drove Christy?’ I asked.

  ‘Christy was different.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He just was.’ Luke lifted his head and sat back on the bed. ‘Christy never escaped from himself. He was always that same boy standing with the bruised arms against the wall. You could see it in his need for a big house in Howth and the cars and night-clubs. He was acting out that boy’s dreams. Most of the others from Saint Raphael’s are still at it in Dublin, those who haven’t got themselves shot or wiped out with heroin. Christy would have killed the Christian Brother and boasted about it so often that he’d have been caught.’

  ‘What were your dreams back then?’ I asked.

  Luke lay down against the pillows and beckoned for me to hunch down on his legs. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘a party of us would be sent to this house to do His Grace’s garden. I remember thinking it was huge, the woodlands and lawns and walled kitchen garden. We were never allowed into the house itself. We were lucky if someone bothered to bring us out a mug of water. But we could look up at the windows and imagine life in these rooms.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you fancied being a bishop,’ I said, trying to make him laugh.

  ‘No.’ Luke grabbed my hips and pulled me forward until I was sitting astride his chest. ‘But I always knew that one day he’d know something I already knew – that there was no God – and that I’d come back to his house and know something he’d have never known.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘What it feels like to have a young girl sit on your face.’

  Without warning Luke managed to burrow down in the bed, thrusting my arse forward with his hands so that I had to grab the brass bedstead to prevent myself colliding with the wall. I felt his tongue tunnel into me and slop away. He hadn’t shaved and his bristles stung the parted folds of my flesh, but his sudden wantonness made it exciting also. This time it had nothing to do with storing memories. This was sex as I remembered it with Luke in London, rousing, unpredictable and crude. I knew that for him at that moment I could be any woman. But being part of his boyhood fantasy was liberating too, because I didn’t have to think of him. Luke pushed me forward suddenly, gagging for breath.

  ‘Go down,’ he panted, ‘quickly, get me inside you.’

  I turned and clambered down his body, facing away from him as I lowered myself onto his cock. I grasped the end of the bed and rode him for my pleasure only, knowing this was a race and determined I wouldn’t be cheated. I came before him and knew there wouldn’t be a second time. I slumped down exhausted, and let him lift my haunches and pump away into me. He came quickly and I lay like that until I felt his cock slip out. His hand pressed against my hip for me to roll over and release his legs. I lay at the end of the king-sized bed, staring up at the canopy. He nudged at my ear-lobe with his toes.

  ‘I should have been an actor,’ he said, pleased with himself.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My sense of timing is so perfect. Look.’

  I raised my head and saw him push his limp cock to one side to reveal the matted bush of pubic hair circling its base which was lightly smeared with traces of menstrual blood.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I DON’T KNOW how long I stood by the bedroom window, staring at the distant flicker of light. I had my panties on with a tampon in and just a loose jumper thrown over me. I should have felt relief because the last thing I needed was a child, but I felt tricked that my body had deceived me into being here. Luke came out of the bathroom, having changed for dinner.

  ‘You’re quiet in yourself,’ he observed, searching for a tie in his bag. I imagined his voice to be a shade more abrupt. I felt cold. I wanted to be held but not by him. This onslaught of blood had broken that bond between us. Besides, his mind seemed fixed on other matters now. I turned from the window and crossed my arms to hug myself. I wanted to be allowed to sit there and wait for tomorrow when Luke had promised we would begin our search. But I knew he wouldn’t hear of it. He badgered me smoothly into putting on some clothes for dinner. I could imagine him losing his temper with his wife as she kept changing her mind and trawling through her jewellery box and wardrobes full of dresses on a Saturday night. With me he was more circumspect, but perhaps keeping someone late was one of the few privileges given to a mistress. That was all I was again, now the risk of a child had evaporated. I didn’t see how you could mourn something you never had, but I knew that child would have become the missing focus of my life.

  I changed in the bathroom to be away from Luke. Not only had I not brought anything that was fancy enough, I didn’t even own such clothes. But prevarication would only annoy Luke more. I tried on jeans and sweaters, but I couldn’t make my mind up because they were all wrong. Finally Luke walked into the bathroom, with his patience up.

  ‘That’s absolutely fine.’ he announced, barely glancing at my outfit. ‘They’re only stiffs here anyway. You’ll knock them dead.’

  He took my hand leaving the room but our fingers separated as we descended the staircase. Luke looked utterly at home. Any trace of the boy who’d laboured in these gardens was gone. Yet it was impossible to decipher what Luke was feeling in this mode. The owner stood in the hallway to welcome us. She was so overdressed and heavily made-up that she appeared like a madam in a brothel. The five other couples had already come down for dinner and were arrayed around a log fire in the library. They sipped sherry and were being encouraged to mix as they gravely studied the lea
ther bound menus.

  I wanted to get this meal over with and not be forced to sit among them like a sore thumb. But an elderly American couple smiled and leaned forward to list their travel itinerary for me like a mantra. A rich Englishwoman beside them butted in when they mentioned Mayo and started to extol the natural beauty there as if the place was populated solely by lichens, moss and winter birds. Everyone oohed over the menu, except for one cranky middle-aged Dublin couple so determined to be unimpressed that I found it hard not to laugh. They exchanged loud whispers about how the Waterford crystal lamp hadn’t been dusted and how the china dinner service was the same one as they had ‘for everyday usage’ at home.

  Luke said nothing to any of them and hardly spoke to me, except to decode the menu’s flowery language. He seemed neither impressed nor unimpressed by anything, but possessed by a vague indifference which suggested enormous wealth to them. If the owner had seemed unsure of him earlier on, she hovered slavishly now, anxious for his approval. During the meal Luke slotted into the role perfectly, sending back his duck and querying the temperature of the wine, until he had won her complete respect by employing a remote disdain. She never actually spoke to me, even when we were ordering. Occasionally she turned her fixed smile towards me, but her eyes would glare down almost maniacally.

  ‘I have to go out later on,’ Luke said, after the owner had finally moved off to fawn over another table.

  ‘Why can’t I come?’ I was alarmed at the thought of being left alone.

  ‘I need to track these lads down in Killybegs and have a casual drink with them,’ he replied. ‘Give me a couple of hours and I’ll have found out everything we need to know. By this time tomorrow we’ll have tracked your father down.’

  ‘I still don’t see why I can’t come?’

  ‘You’d stand out, Tracey. These are rough pubs in the middle of winter with no tourists about. I’ll be better able to loosen tongues on my own. Besides …’ He paused, trying to conjure a gentle way to phrase it. ‘The lads I’m looking for are musicians when they’re not out fishing. Once or twice when they’ve played in a session in London I’ve given them a bed for the night.’ His voice dropped even lower. ‘They’d know my wife, do you understand?’