Mr Lynch’s Holiday (19 page)

When he raised his head he saw he had drifted further out than he had realized. He saw his dad, a distant figure on the beach, a towel round his waist, walking away back to the line of prickly pears beyond the sand. Eamonn tried to stand but found he had floated out of his depth.

His legs were beginning to ache and he decided he too would go back. He started to swim, but seemed to make no progress. He put his head down again and swam harder, thrashing his arms and legs until he was short of breath. He lifted his eyes from the water and felt a small pulse of panic as he saw the beach still just as far away and the orange buoy still bobbing out of reach in front of him. He tried once more but was unable to free himself of the current. He turned around to see if there was anything he could drift out to, but instead was hit full in the face by a swell and took in water through his mouth and nose. He tried to float on his back again but the waves rolled over his head. His arms and legs were heavy now and hard to lift out of the water. He felt himself being dragged down and only then considered that he might drown. For a split second he felt not fear but surprise and a kind of disappointment that this is how it would all end. Then another swell washed over him and straightforward terror gripped him. As he came up from the next submersion, he heard a voice calling for help and recognized it as his own.

It seemed only seconds before he felt his father’s hand clutching him, his other arm encircling his neck and pulling him along. They struggled for a while, the two of them, and he heard Dermot’s ragged breathing as he fought the current with one arm, saying over and over again: ‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’

When they reached shallow water, Eamonn’s legs were too weak to walk. Dermot dragged him up on to the beach and lay him on the sand. He disappeared from Eamonn’s view for a moment and returned with the towel. He placed it over his son’s body and tucked it in all around. Eamonn wanted to ask if Dermot was OK, but he found it hard to speak.

‘I saw you were in trouble. I was on my way back out to you before you started calling.’ He was rubbing Eamonn’s chest, trying to warm him up. ‘What a fecking idiot I am, forcing you in there when you didn’t want to go and then walking off and leaving you. If your mother was alive, she’d murder me.’ He kept on rubbing. ‘I’m sorry, son, I’m sorry. You’re all right now. You’re all right.’

Eamonn was watching his father’s face close up. A scar on his chin. His wild eyebrows. The blue of his eyes.

‘You’re all right, Eamonn. God, I’m sorry. You gave me such a fright.’

Eamonn pulled his arm out from under the towel and laid a hand on his father’s cheek. Dermot stopped rubbing, kneeled back on his haunches and held his son’s hand to his face.

He stepped from the warm evening air into the church. He dipped his fingers into the stone font, dabbing holy water on his head, chest and shoulders, and then stood for a moment, unsure where to go, unmoored without Kathleen and Eamonn at his side. They sat in the same pew every Sunday. Eamonn squeezing between his legs and the iron bars of the radiator, seemingly finding the clankings and clicks of the ancient heating system more mysterious and significant than the words of the priest. While Kathleen was deep in prayer, her eyes shut, her lips moving, Dermot would pass sweets to the toddler. A rainbow drop. A Flump. A foam shrimp. Tiny points of colour in the half-light.

He hadn’t been to confession since he was a boy. Father Cahill had been his priest then, a giant crow of a man. He’d manifest himself in the schoolroom unexpectedly, shoulders hunched, knees cracking, stalking up and down the desks, rapping boys’ heads with his knuckles if they gave a wrong answer to questions of faith.

Dermot’s father made them attend confession every week.

‘What will we say?’ Dominic would whisper to Dermot in a panic on the waiting pew.

‘You’ve to confess your sins.’

‘But I don’t know what sins I’ve done.’ His brother’s voice high, terrified by what he had failed to do. Dermot would invent sins for them both. Dominic had broken his mother’s teapot and blamed the cat. Dermot had written bad words in the back of the family Bible. Dominic had been gluttonous at
table. He invented sins to confirm to the priest that boys were essentially feral creatures and that penance was a blessed and necessary sacrament.

Most weeks the only bona fide sin he could think of was the previous week’s fabrication of sins. He tried to imagine what the priest would do if he confessed to that. He was sure that lying to a priest was a very bad thing. The kind of thing for which he might go to hell. But hell seemed distant and unconvincing. Like God and Jesus. Cahill, on the other hand, and particularly his right fist, was close and ever present.

He moved away from the porch and took a pew on the far side of the church where he could watch unseen. Over by the two doors there were quite a few waiting their turn. Five thirty on a fine Saturday evening. He hadn’t known what to expect.

Back home you’d just had to work out who was ahead of you in the queue and then go in when you saw them come out. Now there were lights above the confessional – one red, one green. They looked festive. Reminiscent of parties or doctors’ waiting rooms.

He noticed a lag between people leaving the booth and the green light going on. He wondered what the priest was doing in those intervals. Recovering? Praying? Listening to the final score? He imagined Father Walsh, sitting in the dark, preparing his words carefully.

He had yet to see anyone looking distraught. Cahill had always managed to reduce at least a couple of sinners each week to tears. Dermot and Dominic used to speculate how he did it. Did he refuse them absolution? Rain down hellfire and damnation? Did he pull back the screen and give them a punch?

Whatever he’d done, Walsh was not doing it. The penitents emerged from the door looking relaxed, serene, often smiling. They made their way over to a pew in front of the altar, kneeled
and bowed their heads for a few moments and then left. Two Hail Marys, Dermot estimated, at most.

But Dermot knew of course that Walsh was no Cahill. He was a modern priest. Kathleen was always telling him so. A friend to all. Feared by none. Guitars in church. Jokes in the sermon. The once-annual parish trip now augmented with prayer retreats, youth weekends and summer camps. Walsh would tell Kathleen of his plans to make the parish more vibrant, to re-energize the whole community in Jesus’s love. ‘Renewal’ was the word Dermot heard her use a lot.

When Tommy Nolan suffered a heart attack the previous month, it was Pat Quinlon, not Kathleen, who pestered Dermot to step in as driver for the parish trip. Kathleen would know how little relish the prospect held for him. The worst kind of busman’s holiday. He’d planned a day with Eamonn at Dudley Zoo, showing him the sleepy lions and the old castle, but found himself making a pilgrimage to the shrine at Walsingham instead.

It was a hot day. Four hours there and four hours back. Kathleen sat directly behind Dermot with Eamonn asleep on her lap and Walsh beside her. The priest was in high spirits, very talkative. He told Kathleen all about his time at the seminary, his travels in Africa, the year he spent in France, the books he had read, a quiz he liked on Radio 4. The only time he stopped speaking was to stand up and lead the congregation in a sing-song. Not all hymns. ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, ‘Fernando’. Dermot recognized them from the radio. He was a modern priest.

Once they got to Walsingham, Dermot learned that there was to be a pilgrim mass. He tried to speak to Kathleen alone.

‘It’s not really suitable for Eamonn.’

‘Why not? It’s only like going to church on a Sunday.’

‘On a Sunday he hasn’t spent four hours on a coach.’

‘He was asleep for most of it. Anyway, he enjoyed the songs.’

‘There are no other kids on the trip at all. It’s not really been planned with children in mind.’

‘He’s fine.’

‘We’re not that far from the coast. Why don’t we slip off for a bit? We can be back in a couple of hours. You can still visit the shrine.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘I want to go to the mass, that’s the point of this, Dermot. And anyway, Father needs me to help.’

‘Right.’

She hesitated. ‘Why don’t you take Eamonn off? I don’t suppose you’ll really be too sad to miss the service yourself, will you?’

She and Walsh were late getting back to the coach. Everyone was waiting. Eamonn tired and teary. They’d been walking the ‘Holy Mile’, they said, Walsh explaining the medieval symbolism of the statue of the Virgin.

‘You know how I am when I get going,’ he said by way of apology, and the other pilgrims laughed.

Dermot was alone in the church, the last penitents having made their reparations to God and left. The green light remained on over the confessional door. The style of the priest might change but the church remained the same – a menacing Victorian pile, the stained-glass windows clogged with dirt, the interior impermeable to sunlight. Dermot looked up at the murky oil paintings on the wall depicting the Stations of the Cross. He read the title under each image, something dogged and awful in their detailing of every humiliation: Jesus falls the first time, Jesus falls the second time, Jesus falls the
third time, Jesus is stripped of his garments. Images from a horror film. Muddy renderings of cruelty and pain hovering above Eamonn’s head every Sunday. The nails going on. The spear in the side. The boy was three years old.

He went in then. Closing the door firmly behind him.

The priest began automatically, like a coin-operated sideshow: ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.’

Dermot didn’t join in. He felt too big for the space, as though he were in a Wendy house.

‘I’m ready to hear your confession now.’

He didn’t want to kneel down.

‘In your own time.’

He could smell Imperial Leather soap. He stood against the back wall, looking down at the grille. The silence was longer this time.

‘I’m here to listen.’

He could hear him breathing.

Walsh cleared his throat. ‘Will you not say what you’ve come here to say?’

Neither man spoke for minutes. There was a shuffling, the priest moving closer, trying to see, then quietly, as if not wanting to be overheard, he said, ‘Dermot. I know it’s you.’

Dermot nodded slowly, waiting.

Walsh tried again: ‘What is it you want to say to me?’ He sounded wary. A long pause and then, almost a whisper: ‘Does Kathleen know you’re here?’

Dermot scratched his nose.

‘Keep speaking, Father. You have a talent for it.’

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 could 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.’