‘Leo. You know his name is Leo. But I only go away when Reeny’s at home. If you fell, Reeny would come in in a flash. Those stairs are a death trap. Or if you left something boiling on the stove. But—’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
I flounced out past the bathroom to the little bedroom that was my dad’s so as to get myself under control, as I used to do when I was a teenager and Min was giving me various kinds of grief. I tiptoed across to the window and opened it to let in a bit of fresh air. All my life, even though my memories of him were so old they seemed in black and white, I’d tried not to stand on the strip of thin carpet between the bed and the wardrobe with its deep, secretive corners, because I thought of that as Daddy’s territory. His dinner-jackets used to hang in a neat rank above his socks balled-up in a cardboard box and his brown-paper packets of shirts and the brush-and-polish kit for doing his shoes. The mirror on the wardrobe door was the hinge between the two sides of him: the man in rumpled pyjamas who came downstairs with the cat in his arms and put it down to give me my kisses; and the cinema manager who gave himself a last looking-over – myself seated on the bed watching him adoringly – straightening his dickey-bow, plucking the crease in his pants to hang right, smoothing his hair back with rapid, alternate strokes of his lightly brilliantined palms, and going off in his black gabardine coat like a film star himself.
I sat on the edge of the bed, which sagged, just beyond the iron frame.
‘You used to climb out of your cot in Min’s room and climb in here, and go back to sleep beside me,’ my dad told me when I was small. ‘Maybe you remembered that your Mam slept in this bed when you were in her tummy. But she had to go to Heaven, then. So I sent a message to the priest in the place she came from to tell her father that she’d gone to Heaven, but that she’d left her little girl to mind me. That was you,’ he said, smiling at me, and he absent-mindedly touched my cheek. I knew that if I held up my face in a certain way his hand would not be able to resist the caress.
‘So then Min turned up. I didn’t even know your Mam had a sister.’
He made a face of comic astonishment, and I laughed with him.
Four or five years later, when he was in bed a lot and I used to do my homework up in the room beside him, he remembered that again.
‘Min wanted to stop you coming in here,’ he said. ‘But your Granny Barry told her to let the poor motherless child go to her father if she wanted to.’
He gave me a smile that was frail but mischievous. ‘Of course, Min didn’t like that. As far as she was concerned you weren’t motherless at all. And neither were you. Minnie was only fifteen when she came to us, you know, but she was as good a mother or better than a woman twice her age. But she should have been having fun. I think of that when I see the fifteen-year-olds that come into the Odeon. They never stop laughing – they’re having a great time.’
‘Why did she want to stop me coming in here?’ I asked. All my fights, when I was growing up, were with her, not with him. It was her I had to understand.
‘She wanted to toughen you up,’ he said. ‘She thinks she’s tough herself.’
And he smiled his tender smile again.
But Granny Barry didn’t like her at all and my Dad pretended he didn’t notice. I saw all that, even when I was small. We used to fetch the key to The Hut from Granny Barry at the beginning of our holidays. I’d run up the crooked stairs to the flat over the archway above Bailey’s Yard where my grandmother lived, praying that we wouldn’t be delayed there. There it’d be – the gold rimmed tea-set, the leaf tea in a perforated, chrome ball, paid out on its chain into the boiling water like a diver, the sandwiches – squishy egg or dry ham – in two columns on a leaf-shaped platter.
‘Sit over at the table, you must be dying with the thirst,’ she’d say, kissing me and my dad.
He sat in the armchair that was called ‘Billy’s chair’, smiling, his head resting on the embroidered white cloth that was there to protect the velvet. An antimacassar, Granny once said, and I was delighted, years later, when Markey told me that macassar was an oil men used to wear on their hair. All Granny’s things were perfect, Edwardian things. The chenille tablecloth with bobbles and the Turkish carpet and the bamboo stand for a china pot in the window and the stiff plant in the pot. Granny Barry used to rub Pond’s Cold Cream into its leaves. You could do a production of ‘The Dead’ with them if you made a play out of the story – though how would you do the end? You’d have to have a film coming out of Gabriel’s head. Granny knew who James Joyce was because every day when she lived in Bray she went to the same Mass as one of his sisters.
Min wandered around restlessly, longing to escape out of there. But she didn’t dare say anything. I took the opportunity to show off. I’d read out bits of the Papal Blessing certificate that was sent from Rome to bless Granny and Granda’s marriage – not that Granda was all that blessed, since he died, Granny always said, when their wedding cake was still in the tin. The Blessing was a framed scroll that had always impressed me. It was draped with an olive-wood rosary with beads the size of eggs and hung to the left of an equally imposing Sacred Heart. Jesus could see the Blessing, I once assured my father, if He just squinted a bit.
At last we got away and drove to the bottom of Main Street where we passed the rusted winches and rotting wooden sheds and crossed a creek of the Milbay River and came to a stretch of thin turf with bald patches of gravel and shell behind high fencing, where our hut, standing on concrete blocks, looked out to sea. In my memory it was always a perfect late-summer afternoon when my father unlocked the wire gate and drove us in and then went back to snap the padlock shut. He’d be wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Always. His straight, silky hair would fall across his face. That’s how I remember it. He’d lift his head to breathe in the salty air, and twirling the key with a flourish, he’d walk jauntily back to the car. Then he’d move the driver’s seat of the Ford Prefect forward with a thunk and Min would get in and drive – oh, the excitement! – across the sandy grass.
‘Brake! Brake, woman!’ It was wonderful how they laughed. She’d do no more than move the car at a snail’s pace about fifty yards but it would change her to do it. Her eyes would glint with pride. They’d seek out my father’s eyes, and he’d nod, as if to say, ‘Oh, yes!’
Then Dad would push open the door into air thick with the smells of splintery plank walls and tarpaper and dusty coconut matting. He’d bring in a Calor gas cylinder for the two-ring cooker and a few jerrycans of water from home. Min would have left the floor covered in newspapers the year before, and I’d squat and try to read bits which she’d keep pulling from under my eyes. Then she was knocking down spiders’ webs with a brush and prising open the window and dividing the bag of bedclothes between the iron bed in the inside room where she and I slept and the rubber mattress in the corner of the front room which my Dad would blow up last thing for himself with a bicycle pump.
We lived in our bodies in The Hut. I saw everything.
That was maybe the main reason why I so loved being there. We were close. I was near enough to the other two to understand them. Min would put our supplies out, for example, and I could see by the way she arranged them her pride in them because we never otherwise bought much at a time. We began each holiday with untouched packets of salt and tea and sugar, a stack of tins of baked beans, two cartons of eggs, a pound of sausages, a pound of sliced ham, a big fresh loaf with a black crust and a whole box of Afternoon Tea biscuits. She left everything out for a few hours but then she had to put the things a mouse might be tempted by into old biscuit tins, which she put regretfully away.
Last thing, when all the chores were done, she’d hang her old polka-dot bathing suit on a nail in the partition wall. She didn’t swim in it; she didn’t swim at all. But she loved it and she hung it up as though it were a banner.
I stood up from Dad’s bed, dreamy with memory, and a watery version of myself stood up in the mirror of Dad’s wardrobe. The room – the whole