“Ah well, he should never have gone. He’d had four heart attacks already. He was an accident waiting to happen. He was very good with spreadsheets, though. And email. I think you should go. And take me with you.”
“Really?” I said. “You’d be interested in seeing Australia?”
“I would if you’re paying,” she said with a wink.
“It’s an awful long way to go.”
“They say First Class is very comfortable.”
I smiled. “I’ll think about it,” I said.
“We could see the Opera House.”
“We could.”
“And climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge.”
“You can. I don’t like heights. And they wouldn’t let me up with a crutch anyway.”
“You’re old before your time, Cyril, did anyone ever tell you that?”
The train pulled into Limerick Station and a young couple got on and sat in the two seats across the aisle from us. They looked as if they were in the middle of an argument and were sitting on it for the time being so as not to be overheard by an audience. She was clearly fuming and he was sitting with his eyes closed, his hands clenched into fists. An inspector walked past, checked their tickets, and when he moved on to the next car the man, who was about thirty, reached into his backpack and pulled out a can of Carlsberg. Holding the can with thumb and third finger he popped the ring-pull and a spit of foam flecked up onto his girlfriend’s face.
“Do you have to?” she asked.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he said, picking up the can and taking a long slug from it.
“Because it would be nice if, just for once, you weren’t drunk by six o’clock.”
“You’d be drunk every day too,” he said, “if you had to put up with you.”
I looked away and caught my mother’s eye, who was biting her lip and trying not to laugh.
“And you can’t smoke on here,” said the woman, glaring at him when he took a pouch of tobacco from his bag and a packet of Rizlas. “It’s a train.”
“Is it?” he asked. “I thought it was a plane and I wondered why we were still on the ground.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
“You fuck off,” he replied.
“You can’t smoke in here,” she repeated, raising her voice now.
“I’m not smoking,” he insisted. “I’m just rolling them for later.” He shook his head and looked across at me before glancing at my mother. “Have you had fifty years of this?” he asked me and I stared back at him. Did he think my mother was my wife? I didn’t know what to say, so simply shook my head and turned back to look out the window.
“The trains are very comfortable these days, aren’t they?” said my mother, pretending that none of that had happened at all.
“They are,” I said.
“Not like in my day.”
“No?”
“Of course, it’s years since I was on a train. And when I left Goleen first, I took the bus, not the train. It was all I could afford.”
“That was where you first met Jack Smoot, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“No, it’s where I met Seán MacIntyre. Jack was waiting for us at the other end.” She sighed a little and closed her eyes for a moment as she traveled back in time.
“Have you spoken to Jack lately?” I asked.
“About a month ago. I’m planning my next trip over.”
I nodded. We’d told each other almost every detail of our lives but had always avoided mentioning one particular night in Amsterdam almost thirty years earlier; it seemed easier not to talk of it even though we both knew that we’d been there.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “What is it?”
“Why did you never go back?” I asked. “To West Cork, I mean. To Goleen. Back to your family?”
“Sure I couldn’t have, Cyril. They threw me out.”
“No, I know that. I mean later on. When tempers had softened.”
She raised her hands in an uncertain gesture.
“I honestly don’t think anything would have been different even if I had,” she told me. “My father was not a man to change his mind on anything. My mother wanted nothing to do with me. I wrote to her a few times but she never replied. And my brothers, except perhaps for Eddie, were always going to side with Daddy because they each wanted the farm when he was gone and didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. And of course, Father Monroe would have chased me out of town on the back of a donkey if I’d dared to show my face. And your father…well your father was certainly never going to help me.”
“No,” I said, looking down at the table and scratching away at a mark there in a nervous gesture, one that took me back in time to the Dáil tearoom many years ago with Julian Woodbead. “No, I suppose not.”
“And the second reason,” she continued, “was an even more basic one. Money. It wasn’t easy to travel in those days, Cyril, and what little I had I was saving in order to be able to survive. If I wanted a holiday, I took a couple of days in Bray, or if I was feeling adventurous, maybe I went as far south as Gorey or Arklow. And then, in time, I started going to Amsterdam every few years. The truth is, Cyril, that I never gave it much thought. Once I was gone, I mean. I never thought about going back. I never wanted to. I put it all behind me. Until today.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
Another noise from across the aisle and I stared at the young couple who, without my noticing, had moved seats so they were sitting next to each other. He had his arm around her now and she was leaning into his shoulder, her eyes half shut in tiredness as he reached down and kissed the crown of her head. At that moment, they looked like a picture postcard. Give it an hour, I thought, give it one shake of the train on the tracks and they’ll be at each other’s throats again.
“Young love,” I said, smiling at my mother as I nodded my head in their direction.
“Been there,” she said with a shrug and a roll of her eyes. “Done that. Bought the T-shirt.”
Kenneth