She picked up a pot from the cooker and carried it to the sink. Pouring out the scalding water, she was lost in a cloud of steam. A lump of bacon and wilted cabbage leaf dropped into a sieve, and she put them on a plate.
“Has the house in the state it’s in. He’s a nothing,” she
says under her breath. “Tell your father his dinner is ready,”
she says. The plate sat spewing steam.
It used to be different, but you were too young to remember that. Now the boys were older, stronger. You wondered sometimes if your father understood what went wrong, why his family had closed themselves off to him, shutting him out. Occasionally he would rear up on his hind legs and scatter the brothers, and the air would be clean for a while but then by degrees thicken.
You pushed yourself away from the table and stood. You could never pick a side. He sat in his chair, his head still; you saw his eyes look away from the TV. His cigarette burned close to the filter in his thumbless hand.
“Dad,” you say, but it was too soft. You tried to fix it. “Dinner’s ready.”
You went back into the kitchen and out the back door into the shed attached to the house. “Where are you going?” says your mother.
“Shed,” you say. She seemed disappointed.
The shed had a single lightbulb and some of your father’s old tools. Somebody was going to finish off the walls and the roof, but they hadn’t. Scattered across the concrete floor were your used bicycle parts, salvaged and stolen, but mostly stolen. There were nearly enough parts to make up a whole bike.
You closed the door, and your family faded away. They didn’t come out there, it was too cold; after an hour or so, you couldn’t feel your toes and your hands stopped working. The bastard sound of the telly bled through, and you suddenly flung the spanner at the wall. It barely made a sound. They’d sit like that for hours, save a trip or two to the kettle, and then one by one they’d disappear off to bed, leaving your father alone.
Every night he checked your mother’s ashtray for anything she’d not smoked fully. You tried not to catch him. After midnight, you were drawn back inside, when you knew it was just him and you heard the opening music of some old black-and-white. You warmed yourself in front of him at what little was left of the fire.
“This is a good one,” he says. His eyes brightened a bit, and he lit the end of a charred cigarette. His face was different when they were sleeping.
“Yeah?” you say, and ran up the stairs, the way you’d learned to do without a sound, your feet to the sides of the step where wood didn’t cry out.
You went into the bathroom, where the lock on the door was half painted over and could only be half closed, crouching down behind the sink to remove a loose tile. This was where all your secrets were stored, in a cavity behind the sink. You felt the old tin pencil case that held the money that would someday take you away from there, a silver lighter that wasn’t always yours, and then the new plastic of the ten Sweet Aftons you’d put there when you’d come up to piss.
You went back downstairs and found your father’s seat empty. The compressed cushion took a breath. The boiled kettle clicked to a halt as you balanced the packet of cigarettes on the arm of his chair and quickly sat close by.
You heard his flat-footed shuffle before he appeared in the doorway carrying a mug and a slice of folded-over bread in his good hand. The tea lapped from the cup with his unsteady movements, staining the white bread and falling to the carpet. Your chest tightened, and you wondered if you should have given the smokes to your mother.
“That kettle’s boiled,” he says into the room, and then stopped. He nodded toward the packet and turned to you. His face was hard, and his dark brown eyes had you.
“What’s this?” he says, like it might be a trick you were playing.
“Found ’em,” you say. He looked back at the smokes, and a sound like “oh” came from his chest. He blinked a couple of times and made the same sound again, but this time the tightness left his face and he looked old. He raised his mug high and backed himself into the chair, careful his elbow didn’t disturb the packet. It was later, when you were nearly lost inside the film, that you saw him open the Sweet Aftons.
You were sleepy when the film ended. Your father stood and turned on the lights. He emptied his ashtray into the cooling fire; the butts only smoldered, and you knew they’d stay in the grate until the fire was lit again the next afternoon. You shifted your weight on the sofa as if you were preparing to move. He turned off the TV and says, “We’ll be leaving at eight.” Then he says, “Right,” on his way out of the room.
You listened to his every footstep up the stairs, his full piss, and then the final two steps of the landing. A door opened and closed.
You collected the cups around the room and left them in the kitchen sink. You would have washed them, but you didn’t want to make any noise. You turned out the lights and stood in the blackness, listening. A tap dripped in a tired way, and the rafters could be heard upstairs, bracing against the low wind. Your body shuddered with a chill, but you didn’t move, not until you were sure they were all sleeping and the house was still.
Feeling around the chair, you dropped to your knees and rubbed at your prick till it hardened, while you stoked the embers of your memory. Miss Gill, when she bent over to pick up her shopping. That ad on TV with the girl in the bathing suit. Finally you settled on Sharon Burke, where her brown legs met at the base of her miniskirt. There was only the sound of your breathing as her hand roughly took your prick. Her eyes were as remote as the pictures in a magazine. You lifted her skirt and held her so tight it hurt you both. Her breath labored like yours, and in a final shudder you felt the warmth spill across your hand, your fingers slow and strong as you held on as long as you could before it was gone and you were in the dark.
You lumbered up the stairs to bed, exhausted. The temperature dipped with each step. You undressed quickly. The sheets cold. You could hear the half a dozen lungs that surrounded you, all pulling at the same air. You asked God to bless them all, but it was mostly out of habit now. You looked about the room, the tall bunk beds, the shape of the bodies under the layers of blankets and coats. You could see the dead face of Mr. Cosgrove, and closed your eyes tight, but it wouldn’t go away. You wondered where his body was now. You thought about the big fridge at the butcher shop before you turned toward the wall.
3
The sun had shown great promise earlier in the morning, resting just behind the thin clouds, but as your father’s white Ford van pulled closer to the grand Georgian terrace of Montpelier Parade, it had yet to show itself. Your father’s hands fell across the steering wheel like a riverboat captain’s.
He was a countryman, your father. He came to Dublin young and had not felt at home since. Still, when he threw the steel of a shovel into the earth, his whole body moved with a single purpose: there in the physical landscape he became himself, and finally he made sense. It was true that men decades younger would try to keep pace and fall aside, silently watching. Even your brothers would give that much.
It was just nine o’clock, and you felt sick from the heavy lifting. You carried the tools from the car through a narrow laneway that went around the back of the house and into the garden. Everything you touched was wet and cold and refused to surrender last night’s weather. You wanted to rest, close your eyes a moment, and feel warm. You were worried you might faint and imagined your father, mortified, standing over you, pushing your body with the heel of his boot.
“Get a mix on,” he says as you rounded the corner holding the final bag of Portland cement, straining not to seem strained. He stood looking over the broken garden wall. Red bricks littered the grass, and a cast-iron gate hung to one side, knocked by the high winds some weeks back. A fisherman and his son had been drowned off Dalkey Bay when their boat capsized, their bodies lost, washed out to sea. It had been in all the papers.
The shovel