A grand chime welcomes me to my father’s humble home. It’s a sound far more than deserving of the two up-two down, but then, so is my father.
The sound teleports me back to my life within these walls and how I’d identified visitors by the sound of their call at the door. As a child, short piercing sounds told me that friends, too short to reach, were hopping up to punch the button. Fast and weak snippets of sound alerted me to boyfriends cowering outside, terrified of announcing their very existence, never mind their arrival, to my father. Late night unsteady, uncountable rings sang Dad’s homecoming from the pub without his keys. Joyful, playful rhythms were family calls on occasions, and short, loud, continuous bursts like machine-gun fire warned us of door-to-door salespeople. I press the bell again, but not just because at ten a.m. the house is quiet and nothing stirs; I want to know what my call sounds like.
Apologetic, short and clipped. Almost doesn’t want to be heard but needs to be. It says, sorry, Dad, sorry to disturb you. Sorry the thirty-three-year-old daughter you thought you were long ago rid of is back home after her marriage has fallen apart.
Finally I hear sounds inside and I see Dad’s seesaw movement coming closer, shadowlike and eerie, in the distorted glass.
‘Sorry, love,’ he opens the door, ‘I didn’t hear you the first time.’
‘If you didn’t hear me then how did you know I rang?’
He looks at me blankly and then down at the suitcases around my feet. ‘What’s this?’
‘You … you told me I could stay for a while.’
‘I thought you meant till the end of Countdown.’
‘Oh … well, I was hoping to stay for a bit longer than that.’
‘Long after I’m gone, by the looks of it.’ He surveys his doorstep. ‘Come in, come in. Where’s Conor? Something happen to the house? You haven’t mice again, have you? It’s the time of the year for them all right, so you should have kept the windows and doors closed. Block up all the openings, that’s what I do. I’ll show you when we’re inside and settled. Conor should know.’
‘Dad, I’ve never called around to stay here because of mice.’
‘There’s a first time for everything. Your mother used to do that. Hated the things. Used to stay at your grandmother’s for the few days while I ran around here like that cartoon cat trying to catch them. Tom or Jerry, was it?’ He squeezes his eyes closed tight to think, then opens them again, none the wiser. ‘I never knew the difference but by God they knew it when I was after them.’ He raises a fist, looks feisty for a moment while captured in the thought and then he stops suddenly and carries my suitcases into the hall.
‘Dad?’ I say, frustrated. ‘I thought you understood me on the phone. Conor and I have separated.’
‘Separated what?’
‘Ourselves.’
‘From what?’
‘From each other!’
‘What on earth are you talking about, Gracie?’
‘Joyce. We’re not together any more. We’ve split up.’
He puts the bags down by the hall’s wall of photographs, there to provide any visitor who crosses the threshold with a crash course of the Conway family history. Dad as a boy, Mum as a girl, Dad and Mum courting, married, my christening, communion, débutant ball and wedding. Capture it, frame it, display it; Mum and Dad’s school of thought. It’s funny how people mark their lives, the benchmarks they choose to decide when a moment is more of a moment than any other. For life is made of them. I like to think the best ones of all are in my mind, that they run through my blood in their own memory bank for no one else but me to see.
Dad doesn’t pause for a moment at the revelations of my failed marriage and instead works his way into the kitchen. ‘Cuppa?’
I stay in the hall looking around at the photos and breathe in that smell. The smell that’s carried around everyday on every stitch of Dad’s back, like a snail carries its home. I always thought it was the smell of Mum’s cooking that drifted around the rooms and seeped into every fibre, including the wallpaper, but it’s ten years since Mum has passed away. Perhaps the scent was her; perhaps it’s still her.
‘What are you doin’ sniffin’ the walls?’
I jump, startled and embarrassed at being caught, and make my way into the kitchen. It hasn’t changed since I lived here and it’s as spotless as the day Mum left it, nothing moved, not even for convenience’s sake. I watch Dad move slowly about, resting on his left foot to access the cupboards below, and then using the extra inches of his right leg as his own personal footstool to reach above. The kettle boils too loudly for us to have a conversation and I’m glad of that because Dad grips the handle so tightly his knuckles are white. A teaspoon is cupped in his left hand, which rests on his hip, and it reminds me of how he used to stand with his cigarette, shielded in his cupped hand that’d be stained yellow from nicotine. He looks out to his immaculate garden and grinds his teeth. He’s angry and I feel like a teenager once again, awaiting my talking-down.
‘What are you thinking about, Dad?’ I finally ask as soon as the kettle stops hopping about like a crammed Hill 16 in Croke Park during an All-Ireland Final.
‘The garden,’ he replies, his jaw tightening once again.
‘The garden?’
‘That bloody cat from next door keeps pissing on your mother’s roses.’ He shakes his head angrily. ‘Fluffy,’ he throws his hands up, ‘that’s what she calls him. Well, Fluffy won’t be so fluffy when I get my hands on him. I’ll be wearin’ one of them fine furry hats the Russians wear and I’ll dance the hopak outside Mrs Henderson’s front garden while she wraps a shiverin’ Baldy up in a blanket inside.’
‘Is that what you’re really thinking about?’ I ask incredulously.
‘Well, not really, love,’ he confesses, calming down. ‘That and the daffodils. Not far off from planting season for spring. And some crocuses. I’ll have to get some bulbs.’
Good to know my marriage breakdown isn’t my dad’s main priority. Nor his second. On the list after crocuses.
‘Snowdrops too,’ he adds.
It’s rare I’m around the area so early on in the day. Usually I’d be at work showing property around the city. It’s so quiet now with everyone at work, I wonder what on earth Dad does in this silence.
‘What were you doing before I came?’
‘Thirty-three years ago or today?’
‘Today.’ I try not to smile because I know he’s serious.
‘Quiz.’ He nods at the kitchen table where he has a page full of puzzles and quizzes. Half of them are completed. ‘I’m stuck on the number six. Have a look at that.’ He brings the cups of tea to the table, managing not to spill a drop despite his swaying. Always steady.
‘“Which of Mozart’s operas was not well received by one especially influential critic who summed up the work as having ‘Too many notes’?”’ I read the clue aloud.
‘Mozart,’ Dad shrugs. ‘Haven’t a clue about that lad at all.’
‘Emperor Joseph the Second,’ I say.
‘What’s that now?’ Dad’s caterpillar eyebrows go up in surprise. ‘How did you know that, then?’
I frown. ‘I must have just heard it somwh—do I smell smoke?’
He sits up straight and sniffs the air like a bloodhound. ‘Toast. I made it earlier. Had the setting on too high and burned it. They were the last two slices, as well.’
‘Hate