He is much less forthcoming about the things other people praise him for, like lifting cars or battling through bereavement to raise eleven kids by himself. On this latter point, he’s particularly dismissive. ‘Which of you was I supposed to give back?’ he replies any time we ask how he managed it, which is more often than you might think. It’s a disarmingly sweet stock answer that’s only slightly undercut by our usual response, which is to immediately begin suggesting suitable candidates.
Because of all these traits, his incredible strength of will and heart, and his litany of peculiar preoccupations, telling stories about Daddy – to each other, or to anyone who’ll listen – is a common pastime for everyone in our family. But getting information directly from him can be tough, especially if he thinks you might use that information elsewhere, say in a book, for example. Some things he doesn’t remember, others he doesn’t like to talk about and still others he has actively forbidden me from mentioning. Luckily for me, and any potential reader, those things he considers too scandalous to print are usually wildly outside the range of anyone’s interests but his own.
I have, alas, been sworn to secrecy on the arcane processes by which this or that cousin acquired this or that plot of land. You will not encounter within these pages even one scurrilous passage about the lengths to which my father may or may not have gone to avoid the roadworks near Castleblayney on long drives to Dublin. He makes up for these proscriptions with boundless generosity regarding material he believes should be included. When it comes to genealogy, dates or the names and designations of machines, townlands and priests he has known and loved, he’s like the Library of Congress, and shares this information with the zeal of those people who work at Yahoo! every time someone accidentally uses their search engine. He has even, for the first time in my entire life, started calling me on the phone, to offer other information he deems relevant, should it pop into his head. ‘We got the new caravan in 1990,’ he’ll say as I pick up the phone, my hands clammy with sweat out of fear that someone has died. Prior to this period of my life, all telecommunication with Daddy resulted from me calling him, unless it was family news like births, deaths or the arrival of an ominous-looking debt letter in any of his children’s names.
‘As I say, it wasn’t 1989 – I found the bill of sale here. And the full length was twenty-six feet. Do you need the licence plate?’
I always match his enthusiasm, not least because I don’t want him to feel like Yahoo! staff do when it inevitably transpires that their new user is just searching the word Google, but the things he deems noteworthy expand by the day. When it comes to more personal issues, or his emotional response to the trauma of our lives, it’s like getting blood from a stone, but there is no upper limit to the entirely unrelated topics, phenomena or events that will prompt a cheerful ‘you have to put that in the book!’ He issued the directive when the actress Courteney Cox visited Derry, and is fond of ringing to describe a particularly funny political skit he’s heard on local radio. He’s extremely active in campaigning for the inclusion of any and all stories relating to dogs, and specifically his current dog, Sally, such as the spellbinding time she went all the way round the house and looked at him through the window. My dad is quite well read, so I can only speculate as to why the movements of dogs and priests, and detailed third-hand descriptions of Northern Irish radio comedy are deemed so essential. I have repeatedly explained that the central thesis of my book – in fact, all books that have ever been written – precludes these topics from playing a major part in a narrative, but also say that I’ll see if I can fit them in.
These statements too are met with scepticism.
In a sense, my siblings and I were lucky, in that we were less inclined to take our dad for granted than other kids. We had first-hand experience of life and death, and generally doted on him. My blasé, cynical schoolfriends would have been appalled to see the glee with which we greeted him when he came home from work, or the delight we took in fussing over him on Father’s Day well into our teens. But we didn’t always regard him as a godlike hero, because we also had to accompany him to the shops, which was more than sufficient to ground him in our eyes. Daddy can be a difficult customer. On one occasion, he spent so long arguing with a pleasant young cashier I think my soul actually left my body. The items he was trying to buy were not, she insisted, part of the deal he was citing, and if he’d just hand over the extra ￡2 that was due – really not that much at all, if he thought about it – we could all be about our business. Daddy remained, both literally and figuratively, unmoved. ‘The deal says three for two,’ he declaimed, with the haughtiness of an archduke on the Titanic demanding spots on the lifeboat for him and his eight fur coats.
‘That’s for the smaller packs, sir,’ she replied. ‘If you would just read the—’
‘I did read it,’ he said with great exasperation, as if we were not holding up an entire shop’s worth of customers, and this woman were not a cashier but a free-roaming lunatic who had entered his home and demanded he set fire to his trousers.
‘I read the small print,’ he repeated, ‘and that’s not made clear anywhere.’ He had already been holding up the line for a few minutes, but it was clear he was just warming up. I think I had spotted this might happen earlier, since my dad’s gaze had seemed shiftier than usual, as if he knew he might be skirting the rules a bit and was preparing for the confrontation.
There could have been another way, I’m sure. Had the cashier approached the issue with a light touch, or a note of good humour, my father could have been argued down. She was open-faced and pretty – which made this experience all the more painful for my thirteen-year-old self – but resolutely unwilling to haggle. She also hadn’t realised she was standing face to face with God’s one, true, perfect miser, one whose frugality was radicalised any time he felt fobbed off or ignored. She had fallen into his trap by suggesting he hadn’t read the wording on the deal when, by the time he got to the checkout, my father would know the deals of any shop as if they had been tattooed on to his skin at birth. So here we were, feeling the slow, steady tick of time trickling into an endless stalemate. My father wore the expression of a man who intends to count to six million. Tutting was audible behind us, and those shoppers who enjoyed the company of their own children began steadily decamping to other lines in the hope they might see them again before they died.