Animals of Winter Prism

There are only a few people in my novel
But there are tons of animals

 

Its wings were orange, marked with black eye-like ellipses, tiger wings for bog safaris, the texture of a paper lantern when lit from behind by the sun. 

There they were, the foxes.  Three sets of eyes watching him through a veil of rain. 

 

 

He told the spider how secondary school is hard with all the changing rooms between classes for different subjects, how he gets lost because all the corridors look the same. 

 

 

The next morning the cows were restless in the shed, Daddy hadn’t gotten up for milking.

 

 

A blubbing mess of kittens spills out before her. 

One, two, three, blind kittens sopping in a puddle.

 

 

 

The walls were crooked in places.  The chickens would have to mind the draft. 

 

 

When he was big he was going to make a house for the birds out of wood, so the robin that lived in the yard, that Granny said was Granddad, who had died before he was born, could live there. 

 

 

‘Goodnight moon, good night owl and goodnight rabbit,’ he said, to the rabbit from his porridge bowl who was in the middle of the lawn and had thrown him a blinking wave.

 

 

He crawled into the wardrobe to hide in the dark dark.  Under Granny’s fur coat that hung there for storage he howled to his pillow with all the anguish of wolves and for once it was the monsters that trembled at Kai.

and of course

 

 

A rook cawed in the tree.  Kai stared up at the treetops, rooks, jackdaws, ravens, corbies along with other birds he didn't recognise were gathering there together.  The branches of the trees were crowding with them. Their wings rattled and shook the leaves.  Their black beady eyes peered down on him praying.

novel excerpt
outtakes
 

Teenagers

Kai switched on the kettle.  The sound of the water bubbling against the element irritated him.  He took his favourite mug from the mug tree and threw a teabag in it.  The inside was stained, off-white with a brown rim that didn’t look clean.  He rinsed it under the tap, rubbing at it with his thumb until it squeaked but the stain wouldn’t shift.  He put some washing-up liquid on a scrubber and brushed it under the hot tap but it didn’t come white.  He noticed a crack on the lip of the mug he had not seen before.  He left the teabag in it to brew.  He had had to re-boil the kettle. 

The tea tasted off.  He sniffed the milk suspiciously.  He tipped a little in the sink to watch if it curdled.  It created a rainbow on the metal basin of the sink like the multi-coloured sheen of oil on water.  An image, seal pups bobbing in the ocean, oil coalescing in death-rainbows across their backs and them freezing, the oil-slicked fur not insulated against the cold, hazy before his eyes. 

He blinked and the seals vanished.  The tea was missing sugar.  He took a spoon of sugar from the sugar bowl, spooned it in and stirred. 

‘Kai,’ said Mammy, ‘the past few days have been difficult.’

He tasted the tea again but it was bitter so he added a second spoon.   He stirred.  Her presence in the kitchen had surprised him. 

‘I hope we can put them behind us, the three of us, and forget about them.’

He tasted the tea and thought it was fine for a moment, until, its aftertaste rose up his throat and poisoned his mouth. 

‘Not hold grudges. I’m sure we’re all sorry for what went on.’ 

Perhaps the teabags were different, he examined the box then set it down, they were the same as always. 

‘And we can be friends again, the three of us.’

He spooned in two more heaped spoons of sugar and stirred vigorously around and around so the granules would not stay lodged at the bottom. 

‘I hope that you are sorry too,’ she said.

He sipped it again, really wanting to be able to drink it.  Wanting to heat himself up. 

‘That you’ve thought about what you done.’

The tea was stubbornly vile.  He poured it down the drain. He didn’t understand the way she was looking at him.  It was undrinkable, perhaps from the dirt of the cup.

‘Did,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s did, not done,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said.

He looked at her.  The hair at her temples, up-close to the roots were grey, coarse and wiry. It wasn’t just her hair; it was the lines around her eyes.  Crows’ feet extending backwards as she smiled at him, some kind of fake smile.  He watched the creases around her mouth as her lips moved. 

‘Stop, smiling’ he wanted to say. ‘Stop talking.  Can’t you see the damage you’ve done to your face?’ but he said nothing.

Bridging chapter

Trying to edit a bridging chapter all morning, the passage of time is quite clunky.  Granny has just died and Kai is still innocent, but not for too much longer...

All February long the house kept itself as quiet as the hills.  No one except Daddy bothered much with making noise.  Kai was sad even when the sunshine came.  Mammy looked like a line, drawn straight with a ruler from head-to-toe.  Grown so skinny she was sore to look at.  She welcomed the spring birds back to the garden through the window over the sink.  Her rubber gloves were yellow like the daffodils that had begun to flower.  They talked of Granny and how she loved the springtime.

He was waiting, for March winds to come and blow the grief out of the house.  For a morning when he did not wake up happy to remember Granny had died.  

He checked her room every day to make sure it was the same.  Her clothes still hung in the wardrobe.  The Sacred Heart still burned above the bed.   He picked her perfume up off the dresser and sprayed a squirt into the air.  Granny was a gap in a day made longer.  She was a name that had changed columns in the nightly roll call of prayer.

Lent was easy, nothing left was difficult to give up.  On St. Patrick’s Day they went into town to watch the parade and eat green ice-cream.  Tractors with banners on their sides and lorries with trailers advertising local businesses slowly circled the square.  It was a traffic jam dipped in bunting. 

There were cheerleaders with bayonets who didn’t look American.  Kai stood on the bottom rung of the barrier rail to see if Jimmy was in the crowd.  The town was thronged.  He smelled a chip van.  

Some faces were painted, everyone wore green.  A stage was set-up in a giant trailer at the top of the square.  Mammy tugged his elbow to get down before he fell.  She was frozen and shivered in a denim jacket.  They were leaving.  Daddy was like a cat on hot bricks all day waiting to get into town.  They were leaving.  Before the parade was even over.  Daddy had disappeared, so he got to stay.  He was gone to wet the shamrock, god-knows-where.  He could find his own way home.  They were leaving.  Before the band came on stage, before he found the lads, before getting chips from the van.  She had had enough of it.   

Kai said ‘Thank you,’ for the Easter eggs.  The count was one short without Granny’s.  The stretch in the days made the farm bigger.  There were further away places to explore before coming home for the dark.  The calving was over and the lambing had begun.  There were three new calves; Kai fed one with a bottle.  Daddy got up in the night time to lend John-Jo a hand.  He was in charge now, making the decisions.  They were going to keep chickens and grow potatoes and lots of other vegetable that weren’t potatoes.  Like rhubarb and carrots, and tomatoes and lettuces that grew under glass.  They cleared the weeds and the high grass from Granddad’s old glasshouse.  Part of the frame was held together by twine, that didn’t matter.  It did the job.  

Kai hoed and weed.  There wasn’t much talking just the distant purr of tractors on a slurry scented breeze.  Warmth bounced from the soil onto his face.  Daddy rolled cigarettes leaning on a rake.  He shielded his eyes from the sun with a flat palm to inspect Kai’s work.  Kai liked the dirt. He liked discussing how the cabbages were doing and talking about the weather.  He learnt when the best time to spray for greenfly was.  He picked a caterpillar off a leaf and set him to the side.  He shook his head to scold him so he wouldn’t come back.

Granny and Granddad had kept vegetables back when they could manage.  Watching them grow was exciting.  Daddy said they would save money.  He wanted goats as well as chickens.  To whitewash the shed and mend the walls.  To make it one of those open farms, which wasn’t proper farming just taking school kids around on tours.  It was easy money with a grant for keeping old rusty machinery and planting apple trees.  Mammy wasn’t sure.  He had no experience, children drove him nuts.  But that wasn’t the point, nothing she said about it was.  

‘That’s where we found you,’ said Daddy pointing to a cabbage.  He laughed and so did Kai.  It was one of his funnier jokes. It made Mammy happy to see them out working together.  It mattered less then when he fetched messages from town and took his time in coming back.  

She sat at the table with her face in her hands, exhausted -  they’d been talking about the farm. The wind banged a door shut.  She jumped.  Daddy, waving his arms about the room, with his projects and plans, the new ideas, the ones he never stopped from having.  Her shoulders bunched around her ears.  Her feet under the table shifting.  She reached for the cigarettes.  She’d shaken her head against the talk but still she’d said ‘yes.’  Conceded and agreed as he blustered and blew.  The more animated he became the more she seemed to fade.  

The forms for the bank loan were laid out on the table.  Along with the solicitor’s letter making him executor to the changes. The big changes.  The ones that would change everything.  The loan for improvements for an open farm to get the free money from the grant.  The loan against the farm.  Her lips moved word-for-word as she read and her finger underlined the sentences.  ‘You’re sure?’ she asked him later.  Her signature scratched slowly across the line, she stopped, she looked up, ‘I’m sure,’ he said.  ‘You’ll like goats on the farm, won’t you Kai?’ he said. He winked.

‘Yay!’ said Kai to Mammy. 

She preferred the calm of letting things alone.  Of leaving the dust to settle on the farm like it had on Granny’s dresser.   But the forms had to be signed for the changes to go ahead.  ‘Yay!’ Kai said, excited about the goats.  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Daddy.  His hand on her shoulder but he didn’t smile.  She stood up from the table, ‘I don’t think…I just think…I.’  But it was too late; he’d stormed out the door.  

He stayed away a long time until the tock tick of the clock was worried.  Until the television finished saying its ‘Prayer at Bedtime.’  Mammy’s nails tap-danced on the arm of the chair.  No one told Kai to go to bed.  The door hadn’t opened, no matter how much they didn’t looked at it.  He had had a fine evening drawing pictures of the goats.  He stayed up until he could stay awake no longer.  In the morning Daddy was back and happy.  The forms had been signed so the goats were being ordered.  ‘Yay!’ Kai smiled.  Mammy’s smile was watery.  ‘Of course I trust you,’ she said. 

Daddy’s humour was as predictable as the weather.  Which meant Kai never knew if he was in good form or not.  His jokes weren’t like Jimmy’s jokes, they weren’t always funny.  Kai was learning how to tell the different jokes apart.  There were the jokes to make you laugh and jokes to make you cry.  ‘She’d never win the Housewife of the Year, would she Kai?’ as Mammy served them up the dinner.  Kai knew it was a joke because he laughed.  Kai laughed too but wasn’t very funny.  Mammy un-laughing found the ridge of the scar on her chin with her finger.   She traced the pale crescent like there was something she had to remember.  Kai ate-up the grey dinner as an apology for the laughter.  Mammy’s knife pushed the food around her plate, piling it from one side to another.  Kai wasn’t allowed play with his food like that.  They were waiting to hear back from the bank. 

Daddy’s jokes could be mean or they could be embarrassing.  ‘An arse on her like the back end of a knacker’s pony’ and Kai sniggered because it was funny picture but not a very nice thing to say about Theresa.  At least she had plenty on top.  Not like Mammy, who was ‘like two Disprins on an ironing board’.  Kai blushed eyes fixed on the middle distance.  He was in good form because the loan had been approved.

They could be warnings or threats.  ‘We’ll end-up in the poor house if she has her way,’ with a wink to Kai while he explained to Mammy everything she was doing wrong with the books.  It wasn’t different ways of doing things; it was her way was the wrong way.  She was addled by the figures.  A mind like a sieve, so she went to lie down. ‘Women eh?’ said Daddy.  Kai shrugged. They’d been fine for years before Daddy came back but he didn’t want to say it. ‘A man doesn’t want to come home to a face like a long streak of misery,’ he bared his teeth with a smile.

They were two hardworking men who had been out in the garden all day the least they deserved was a clean house and a decent dinner.  It was time for her to move on, to pull herself together.  If not for Daddy’s sake then for Kai’s.  ‘Yeah!’ Kai agreed, they were getting goats and the free money. 

Mammy looked different now he say her through Daddy’s eyes. 

Mammy’s sleeve was zigzagged with snail trails from her nose when she asked him where he’d been.  A man needed a reason to come home in the evening so Daddy went to the pub.  Kai was glad it was time to move on because he wanted bars for his packed lunch and his uniform laid out in the morning the way it used to be.  They laughed that she wouldn’t know how to cook the vegetables once they’d grown them.  ‘The mice will run away,’ said Kai because the cupboards were bare.  He and Daddy shook with laughing, but inside Kai didn’t laugh, he knew it wasn’t funny.

The next Sunday Mammy smiled and put on lipstick.  ‘We’re going to have a roast,’ she said, ‘the way Granny used to make it.’  Mammy’s teeth were lipsticked too, as if they’d bitten on the tube.

Granny didn’t use as many pots.  Granny didn’t let the spuds boil over.  Mammy transferred them from one pot to another, they were overcrowded.  She scalded her thumb, ‘Feck,’ she said and shook it.

‘Feck!’ she said again, because the oven wasn’t switched on. 

There was no tinfoil for over the chicken.  She forgot the lemons.  She put the gravy through a sieve to try to get the lumps out.  The greens were turning floppy.   Kai wished it was dinner from the freezer like pizza and chips.  It was well after dinner time.  He had set the table. Daddy sighed behind his newspaper.  Mammy’s face was shiny with steam.  It would ‘Just be a minute.’  Kai’s stomach was growling.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Daddy as he left the kitchen.

‘Where you going?’ asked Mammy

‘To get something decent to eat,’ he said taking his coat from the rack in the hall

Mammy’s hands dropped to her sides.  She watched his back leave.  He didn’t turn to see her watching.

The spuds were soupy in the pot and the meat bled under its black skin.  Kai picked about the chicken.  He didn’t touch the spuds.  He put six green beans on his plate for Mammy to count.  The gravy tasted good.  There was ice-cream out to defrost, lots of ice-cream because there was no one there to share it with.  Mammy sat at the table with him smoking while he ate.  She didn’t touch her dinner.  She smiled when he said it was lovely but the rest of the time she sat there her forehead was creased with thinking.  He did all the washing up until his fingers were shrivelled and smelly.  She smoked another fag and went to bed.  It was too early for Kai’s bedtime. 

He was shy to go into the bedroom since Daddy had come back.  It smelt different.  But he went in and he left her a glass of water.  It was dark with the curtains closed and she lay on the bed in her clothes.  Only her eyes acknowledged him. ‘Goodnight’ he said, setting down the water. ‘Goodnight,’ she blinked with her eyes. 

It was a treat having the television to himself and the ice-cream.  He watched Satan climb on top of a lady and they had a baby who was Satan’s baby in New York.  The farm outside was still, he drew the curtains, the quietness scared him.  She had short hair and her name was Rosemary.  He flicked the channels when the bad stuff happened with the neighbours.  He guessed how long it would be each time before it was safe to flick back.  He had to read for a long time after before he could fall asleep.

The next morning the cows were restless in the field, Daddy hadn’t gotten up for milking.  A bellow echoed the farmyard as he left for school, the cows were in distress.  Mammy wasn't up either. 

That week a timber frame was erected for the chicken coop.  Rolls of wire netting rested against the wall of the shed.  There were plywood planks in the shed to be sawed into shape for the walls.  Kai’s job was going to be painting them.  Sheets of galvanising would be screwed down for a roof. Chickens lay eggs in nesting boxes.  

Three weeks flew by. Mammy eyed it each evening for progress.   Some hinge or nail or stable was missing so he couldn’t get it done.  Mammy nodded.  She understood.  They did it all on the Saturday, the one the chickens arrived, John-Joe lent a hand.  Kai’s paint was drying on their new home when they got there.  The robin had watched him work.  The walls were crooked in places.  The chickens would have to mind the draft.  

Kai did his homework; he kept out of the way.  Daddy gave him a spin in his new car.  No goats had come.  All the trees had leaves and the flowers were in bloom.  The world was full of life again.  Mammy hardly went out anymore, only to go to work.  If the phone rang, Kai had to answer, ‘She’s just gone out,’ he said, ‘I’ll get her to ring you back.’  But she didn’t ring back and the phone rang less.  

His evenings were for birdsong and for walking.  Confirmation was coming soon.  Daddy rubbed his hands together, Kai was going to clean up.  

‘Do you remember that time we went to the beach in the summer, the hottest summer ever?’ Mammy asked.

‘No I don’t remember,’ Kai replied, he said it with a swallow.   

I found my father through facebook

My sister joined Facebook in 2009.  In April of that year she searched our surname with the forename Rock. We knew our father had a son from a second marriage that he had called Rock for the actor Rock Hudson.  It was one of the few things we knew about our father. I had never met him and my sister had not seen him since she was eighteen months old.  We were now in our late twenties. 

My parents met and married in Hove, England in the early 70s.  They lived there for six years before my mum fell pregnant with my sister.  I knew little about that time.  Growing up, our father was not spoken of and I had not felt encouraged to ask.  Occasionally my mother might say, ‘You’re just like your father you…’ but she said it to my sister, it was not said to me.  To the extent that I thought he was her father alone and when people asked me about my father, I told them I didn’t have one, because, as a child, I believed that to be the truth.

A lone parent in a rural Irish town in the 80s was the exception, not the norm.  I was the only child in my primary school class from a single parent family.  When I did not draw a picture of Galway winning the All-Ireland hurling final, the class assignment for the day, the teacher brought me into the corridor to ask why. 

‘But Miss,’ I told her, ‘I don’t know what a hurling match looks like, I don’t have a father.’ 

Then I started to cry.  She cried too.

I cried because I was a being unjustly admonished for my failure to complete an impossible task.  She cried because she pitied me.  Her compassion scared me so I cried harder.  What was the big deal, what was I missing out on?

Secondary school presented more problems.  My father, his occupation, appearance, his likes and dislikes were the fodder of French and German oral work. I grew weary of answering questions on my family.  My lack of basic paternal knowledge was an annoyance, a nuisance.  I invented different versions of a father for each class and no one challenged me on them.  My father was a series of petty peeves and irritations, a question on a medical form I couldn’t answer, a missing signature on a homework journal, a spare seat at a school concert. When I hit that inevitable patch of adolescent angst I had no fantasies of him coming to save me.  My heart was a walled garden. 

There were terrible inferences, none of which had ever been confirmed. That he had abused my mother in some way to cause her to flee.  He must be a bully, he must be violent.  I didn’t dwell on it, it wasn’t spoken of and it didn’t affect me.  After my initial outright rejection of his existence, when I discovered its biological impetus, my next assumption was that I wasn’t his child.  Who could casually abandon their own children, would he not at the very least have been curious to see what I looked like?  No, there must have been some question over my parentage that my mother was keeping schtum on. 

What had I picked up about him over the years? That he was tall with blond hair.  That he was a plumber.  That my mother ran away to Ireland when she was eight months pregnant with me, on the ferry, with the help of her brother.  That he chased after her.  There was a reconciliation.  I was two weeks overdue.  He re-plastered the ceiling of my grandparent’s sitting room.  Then, growing restless awaiting my birth, he borrowed money off my grandfather to go to the Netherlands to find a new job but the next time he was seen or heard of again was by my mother’s friend, at a bus stop in Hove with another woman. 

My mother kept contact with my fathers’ parents.  They were his adopted parents, and his adoption was often cited as the reason he had a ‘chip on his shoulder’.  We knew we had a half-brother named Rock because when my English grandmother died, my mother went over to the funeral and met my father and his new family there.  Despite wanting to, we were not allowed to go to the funeral.  Your father has a ton of other children now, she reported back, with names like Rock and Brent.  How many, we asked?  She couldn’t say, four or five.  What were the other ones called?  She didn’t remember.  Did they look like us?  A bit, not really. 

My sister searched our half-brother’s name on Facebook, and a dark-haired, stern-faced, hoodied youth who bore her more than a passing resemblance showed near the top of the list.   She sent him a private message. 

Is your father Richard?

wot of it? 

Were his parents Seb and Bella?

yeh

Does he have two daughters from a previous marriage?

Rock confirmed this to be the case.  My sister rang me, I was on my way home from work, it was Friday and a sunny evening.

‘No way!’ 

‘Way.’

‘Send me the messages, what does he look like in his profile picture?  I’m going to add him!’

Blithely I sent him a friend request and less than an hour later he accepted it.  I had already been to the off-licence, I sat at my laptop with my glass of wine and I typed.

Hi

We got to chatting.  I went from being the younger of two children to being the second eldest of nine children my father sired.  Nine, an obscene number, an irresponsible number, he wasn’t even Catholic.  No wonder he could afford to let one or two drift by the wayside.  I felt reckless and surreal so I rolled out the banter.

Your mother must be in bits, mine got off easy.

lol

He listed his other siblings.     
   
Dan is adopted

Okay right

Why would someone with multiple children adopt another?  Turns out it was family joke I failed to get.  Where were they living, still in Hove?  No, they’d been brought up in Luton , the rest were scattered but Lexus and Brandon were living in Letterkenny with their parents.  Letterkenny, in Ireland? Letterkenny?

2 stop d 2 yung uns getting into trouble Lol 

They had moved to Ireland a few years previously but Rock hadn’t wanted to go, nothing to do there, no mates, nothing but fields.  He worked occasionally in hotels and mainly at trying to stay out of trouble.  His interests were alcohol, women and weed.  He liked hanging around causing trouble with his brothers, I might have heard of them they were (in)famous, but not with Dan because he was a junkie.

Are they on Facebook? 

They don’t get much internet access at the moment I was told.  What was it like growing up with such a big family, I asked?  His mother was a saint but his father ran the house like a boot camp.  It was becoming clear they didn’t get on. 

U find out urself wen u met him lol

He didn’t have a number for the house in Letterkenny or a mobile number for his father.  He might have a mobile number for his mother somewhere.  I was giddy and lightheaded with my bottle of wine.  I had been keeping my sister up-to-date on the progress of our chat.  I trawled Facebook for the accounts of the other siblings he’d named.  The photos I had access to were few and far between, the shots were too blurry and of bad quality.  Still I scoured them for resemblances.  I logged onto Bebo to find my youngest half-brother’s account.  There was a nice photo of him in Letterkenny with a dog.  There were no photos of my father. 

I dialled my father’s second wife’s number.  She didn’t pick up.  I left a voicemail, my words were garbled, my voice was squeaky, I spoke at a fast-pace. I sent her a text in case she didn’t listen to the voicemail. 

Is your mother’s name Vivian?
 
She replied to my text.

Yes

Your dad is out walking the dog.  I’ll get him to call you when he gets back

Boom! Nearly 30 years of nothing, no contact, no correspondence, such an anodyne response.  I was jittery, terrified, what would he think of me and what would I think of him?  He rang the next morning.  His voice was deep, gravelly and very English.  We had difficulty understanding each other.  He wanted my mother’s number to get her permission before speaking with either me or my sister.  I was angry, I couldn’t give him my mother’s number, I couldn’t land that on her doorstep without warning her first.  Why did he need her permission? I was an adult capable of making decisions in my own right.  As a compromise I gave her his number, she called him and then he rang me back and we spoke.  He filled me in on ‘my brothers and sisters.’

‘Two of your brothers are at her majesty’s leisure.’

But what did that mean?   I was confused, the omens had been there since my conversation with Rock, I knew without being able to seize the meaning.  I brushed over it.  They’d moved to Letterkenny for the good of the younger kids, to keep them out of trouble, but only the very youngest Brandon at fifteen was living there.  His sister Lexus 16 had stayed one year before running back to the UK to live with her sister.  I only retained snippets of that first conversation, impressions.  He was exceptionally fond of his dogs. 

I didn’t say much about myself.  There was a worm of doubt in my mind - this man has no interest in you, you are strangers with nothing in common; I didn’t want to bore him.  He asked after my mother, he was very interested in what she had been doing with herself and particularly in her love affairs since his departure.  It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to contact us you see, he had heard a rumour she was shacked up with a man in Dublin and had started a new life there.  How long had he been living in Letterkenny.  A few years, he had driven past our house once with work and thought about popping in.  Why didn’t he?  He didn’t know, he thought our mother didn’t want us to have anything to do with him.  I quizzed him on his health, heart disease and congenital illnesses.

I wanted to meet him.  I had only a sketchy idea from a handful of photos what he looked like.  He was someone to poke with a stick, to regard with curiosity and wonder, a circus freak.  The sooner we met the better as far as I was concerned.  Get it over with, like ripping off a plaster.  I chatted more to Rock, who had also been inside, the extent of the schism between him and our father became apparent.  He was suggestive of things like ritual beatings, sadism, a highly dysfunctional household.

I am not sayin he wer a nonce or ne ting

Another word whose meaning I had difficulty grasping. I resolved to avoid further Facebook chat with Rock.  My perspective of my father was being coloured. I read Steven Pinker books to assess the genetic implications of my discoveries.  Nature or nurture, should I be concerned about my genes?  How closely related were these half siblings to me?

‘Your father always said he wanted enough children for a football team,’ said my mother.

Would she have provided him with one if they had stayed together?  Alternate history versions of my life streamed through my head, like movies in which the Nazis win the war. 

Then my 16 year old half-sister contacted me via Facebook.  A second perspective assuaged my fears on the brutality of their upbringing.  She lol-led away Rock’s insinuations.

It weren’t dat bad lol 

U’ll see wen you met him u shud meet him lol

We met on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Athlone.  Athlone, the heroin capital of the midlands, I thought on the train there.  My sister was coming from home, me from Dublin and our father from Letterkenny.  It had seemed convenient.  What could I wear that said fuck-you-I-never-needed-you, yet showcased how slim, attractive and blazingly intelligent I was, while indicating my availability to take any money he might want to compensate me with.  Topshop.   I was on the train and we three were to meet in the train station car park. 

I drank too much coffee and tapped my fingers on the table top in time to some blasting techno.  My sister promised she would come alone, she had three children and a husband, I had no one, but when the train pulled into the station her car was full.  This wrong-footed me, I had wanted it to be about us three, myself and my sister and our relationship with our father.  Not about grandchildren, they could be relegated to some future date, our primary relationship should take precedence.  They had just driven down for moral support she assured me.  They wouldn’t interfere. 

Her husband was concerned about her safety; he wanted to ensure he wasn’t a psycho before she got into a car with him.  The car was some make of SUV and Lily Allen was playing through the speakers.  First impressions, he seemed fine.  His hair was too long and he was wearing jewellery, ‘Never trust a man who wears jewellery,’ my grandmother always said.  His clothes were a bit Jack and Jones, mutton dressed as a lamb, for my tastes but that is hardly a capital offence. 

I sat in the back.  We were tongue tied and awkward.  Presumably we agreed to go from the train station to the town to find somewhere to have a coffee and chat because off he drove with my sister’s husband and their kids tailing him.  Once he was out of the car I saw my father was very tall.  Nearly 6’4’’ in his heyday, he remained an impressive height and build.  He laughed because myself and my sister are so short, the runts of the litter and I’m 5’6’’.   All his other daughters tipped 6’’. 

I picked a pub, not a café, and ordered a Bulmer’s to suit the weather.  We sat on a hard wooden bench around a cramped wooden table in a dark corner of the pub while the sun blazed on outside.  He talked more about his dogs, about breeding them and showing them competitively. 

‘So you’re into breeding?’ I said.

I do a line in abandonment humour.  He liked music too; he’d seen T-Rex before they were T- Rex.  He had to repeat a lot of what he said, his English accent was so thick.  Great, my father is Jim Broadmoor, I snorted into my pint.  There were breaks in the conversation.   He mostly questioned us about our mother.  He told us some anecdotes from their youth involving sexual exploits, he was not embarrassed to share them with us. 

Everyone went outside for a cigarette.

‘Fancy meeting you here!’ said my sister’s husband, as he strolled past with the kids. 

There were handshakes and introductions, we piled back inside for King Crisps and Coca-Cola.  I zoned out, the conversation was dominated by grandkids, babies, he’d never seen Rock’s baby girl.  Rock’s fault of course.  He hadn’t contacted us because he’d assumed my mother didn’t want him to.  He’d shown up at the divorce proceedings, she had not.  Somehow this was the irrefutable evidence he’d needed that she’d wanted nothing more to do with him and as such that he should have nothing more to do with us either.  Our English grandparents, they were no saints, they’d had his dog put down when he was a teenager. 

He left hurriedly.  The train trip had been longer than the meeting.  His wife didn’t want him to meet us.  Why? I asked.  She needed time to adjust, to get her head around it, he said.  She seemed okay in the text messages, I said.  Did he want me to talk to her?  It wasn’t a good time he said, the youngest daughter back in Britain, she missed her company.  Why did you let her go her go if she is only 16, I asked?  Couldn’t stop her, anyway what was the worst that could happen with her older sister looking out for her.   He was there by stealth - he’d lied to his wife, as far as she knew he was out doing the shopping.  He had a shopping list he was in Athlone to fill.  Brandon, the youngest, was waiting for him at home.  This last remark, piqued me, fuck Brandon, I’d been waiting by whole damn life. 

The monster Rock’s words conjured was not the man who appeared in the flesh. 

Life went on with the odd text message exchanged between my father and I.  Things weren’t going well for him at home.  His wife was agitated.  She’d threatened to kick him out of the house, he was sleeping in the car.  I was perplexed, was their marital disharmony my fault? 

One evening I saw I had a missed call from my father as I left my creative writing class.  ‘Your brother Brett is out of prison today,’ he said, when I rang him back, ‘we’re celebrating.’  Fantastic news.  Great to hear.  I cycled home and on to the Tesco up the road past my house.  Inside, as I walked up and down the aisles, I began to cry.  I couldn’t find the tuna fish.  It wasn’t where it usually was.  The supermarket had been rearranged.  Things weren’t where they were meant to be.  Everything was wrong. 

I found it difficult to motivate myself to do things.   Walking to work one morning I felt an intractable pull towards the train station.  Before I knew it I was chugging my way down the coast.  Playing hookie, on the mitch, skiving, what did it matter, nothing seemed important any more, everything was absurd, ridiculous.  I wrote a poem about it. 

At work I looked around the office floor and giggled. I was in a hyper-surreal stare, peeling away from reality, detaching from what was going on.  Where did I fit between the people in the suits and my new family?  The 16 year old was pregnant. Her boyfriend was older than me.  Aligning the columns of my excel sheets seemed trivial.  Was my baby brother really a junkie?

My father text my mother.  Odd sporadic texts.   Reminiscing about their time together, versions of stories she strongly disputed.  The deviation between their remembrances of a shared history was extreme.  They each doctored the past, sanitised it so it fit in line with their individual narratives.  Revisionists, truth was eroded or lost, telescoped against the subsequent events that occurred in their lives.  

I was sad, that I had stirred this to the surface, that the past meant more to them than the future, that one day this would happen me too.

We met our father for a second time. He came to my home town and the three of us went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner.  He talked more about his house, the décor, the dogs, his love of cooking but most of all he spoke about my mother.  The great sex they’d had on their honeymoon, what a goer she’d been.  I drank too much.  He was drinking too; but it had little effect.  In the smoking area of a local pub he told me I was hard, my defences were up, I wasn’t letting him in.  He wanted to hold my hand walking down the main street when we left the pub.  I let him.  In the same spirit as a child who holds their hand over a flame to see how long they can keep it there. 

He had nowhere organised to stay.  He wanted to stay in my mother’s house.  She was away at the time but I could not allow it, plus I did not want to stay with him alone in the house.  He ended up staying on my sister’s couch and driving away before breakfast the next morning.  I haven’t seen him since. 

He continued to text my mother, frequently and intensely, despite her ignoring him, then despite her asking him to stop.  He still loved her.  He’d never loved anyone else.  She was his real wife because she was his first wife and any other wives after that didn’t count.  We were his only real children, not the children he had brought up and was still bringing up, but me, who he had met twice, and my sister who he’d abandoned at eighteen months.  A man only has one wife and therefore his children by her are the ones that count. 

My youngest half-brother sent me a message on Bebo, hate mail.  I was destroying his life, tearing his family apart, why had I ever made contact, and what did I want from them?  He despised me and he hadn’t even met me.  I text my father.  He didn’t reply.  I rang him, he didn’t answer.  He text me back later, he was watching Michael Jackson’s funeral with his wife.  He was busy. 

Later that summer my mother called me at work.  He was hounding her, insisting they meet.  He had left his wife for her.  He wanted them to be together.  To pick up where they’d left off 30 years later.  I paced outside the office listening to more tales of their marriage that I had never heard before.  Things she was prompted to tell me by his persistent calls and text messages. 

Then work threw me a curve ball.  I was being deployed to a role in the UK, to Hove to be exact. 

‘Did I know it?’

 ‘Yes, I had family there.’ 

‘Lovely,’ the HR representative replied.

I deleted my Facebook account. 

I thought about places that may have been relevant to my parents but I did not seek them out. Where they had married, the first house they’d bought.  I’d received a present of Hove Rock which I read.  Was there a criminal undertow to the town?  My bones were tired as I watched the grey waves smash against the stony shore. 

The day I finished for Christmas the south coast of England was covered in snow.  In January I was re-deployed to London.  My walk to work in the morning took me from St Paul’s over Southwark Bridge at the Tate modern and along the bank side to my office near London Bridge.  Squinting as the early morning light bounced up from the bleak concrete streets, I should have found the view edifying.  But I was worn out, bleached by the light, faded and hollow. 

I wasn’t thinking about my father or his family anymore, but in a way I was.   The structures of the universe had altered.  The discoveries that I had so casually made had underwritten my identity, what I thought I knew about myself, what I thought I knew about the world.  The disclosures of the past year did not have an immediate effect on me but a powerful one.  I’d opened a Pandora’s Box for everyone including me, I’d engendered needs I’d spent a lifetime supressing and received a second rejection – it was my mother he wanted not me. 

In March I took to my bed.  I decided not to go back to London any more.  I decided not to do most things anymore.  It wasn’t a decision so much as a physical inability to force myself to do them.  I had atrophied. 

My Dad reappeared.  I had not been in contact with him.  He showed up at my sister’s house demanding to know why our mother had not shown up at the divorce proceedings thirty years previous.  My sister, losing patience, told him to ask her himself.  He went to batter down my mother’s door.   She hid by a window in the upstairs landing pretending not to be at home to have a good view of him shouting his demands and questions up at her.  He left a large candle in a candle holder, like something from an altar, outside the front door.  And though she says she wants nothing to do with him it sits in pride of place in her hall. 


also see: poem