“You always were an arrogant little prick,” Da said, taking the smoke. “I should’ve kicked your ma down the stairs when she told me she was on the bubble.”
“And you probably did.”
“Bollix. I never laid a hand on any of yous unless you deserved it.”
He was too shaky to light up. I sat down next to him on the steps, took the lighter and did it for him. He stank of stale nicotine and stale Guinness, with a saucy little top-note of gin. All the nerves in my spine were still stone-cold petrified of him. The flow of conversation coming out the window above us was starting to pick up again, awkwardly, in patches.
I asked, “What’s wrong with your back?”
Da let out a huge lungful of smoke. “None of your business.”
“Just making small talk.”
“You were never into the small talk. I’m not thick. Don’t treat me like it.”
“I never thought you were,” I said, and meant it. If he had spent a little more time getting an education and a little less getting an alcohol habit, my da could have been a contender. When I was twelve or so, we did World War II in school. The teacher was a bitchy, closeted little bogger who felt that these inner-city kids were too stupid to understand anything that complex, so he didn’t bother trying. My da, who happened to be sober that week, was the one who sat down with me and drew pencil diagrams on the kitchen tablecloth and got out Kevin’s lead soldiers for armies and talked me through the whole thing, so clearly and so vividly that I still remember every detail like I saw the movie. One of my da’s tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life. He would have been a lot better off thick as a plank.
“What do you care about my back?”
“Curiosity. And if someone’s going to come after me for part of the cost of a nursing home, it’d be fun to know in advance.”
“I’ve asked you for nothing. And I’m not going into any nursing home. Shoot myself in the head first.”
“Good for you. Don’t leave it too late.”
“I wouldn’t give yous the satisfaction.”
He took another massive drag on the cigarette and watched the smoke ribbons curl out of his mouth. I asked, “What was that all about, upstairs?”
“This and that. Man’s business.”
“Which means what? Matt Daly rustled your cattle?”
“He shouldn’t have come in my house. Tonight of all nights.”
Wind nosed through the gardens, shouldered at the walls of the shed. For a split second I saw Kevin, just the night before, lying purple and white and battered in the dark, four gardens away. Instead of making me angry, it just made me feel like I weighed twenty stone; like I was going to have to sit there all night long, because my chances of ever being able to get up from that step by myself were nil.
After a while Da said, “D’you remember that thunderstorm? You’d’ve been, I don’t know, five, six. I brought you and your brother outside. Your ma had a fit.”
I said, “Yeah. I remember.” It had been the kind of pressure-cooker summer evening where no one can breathe and vicious fights erupt out of nowhere. When the first bang of thunder went off, Da let out a great laughing roar of relief. He scooped Shay up in one arm and me in the other and legged it down the stairs, with Ma yelping furiously behind us. He held us up to see the lightning flickering above the chimney pots and told us not to be scared of the thunder, because it was just the lightning heating up air as fast as an explosion, and not to be scared of Ma, who was leaning out the window getting shriller by the second. When a sheet of rain finally swept over us he threw his head back to the purple-gray sky and whirled us round and round in the empty street, Shay and me screaming with laughter like wild things, huge warm drops of rain splattering our faces and electricity crackling in our hair, thunder shaking the ground and rumbling up through Da’s bones into ours.
“That was a good storm,” Da said. “A good night.”
I said, “I remember the smell of it. The taste.”
“Yeah.” He got one last minuscule puff off his smoke and threw the butt into a puddle. “Tell you what I wanted to do, that night. I’d’ve only loved to take the pair of yous and leave. Up into the mountains, live there. Rob a tent and a gun somewhere, live off what we could kill. No women nagging us, no one telling us we weren’t good enough, no one keeping the workingman down. You were good young fellas, you and Kevin; good strong young fellas, able for anything. I’d say we’d have done grand.”
I said, “That night was me and Shay.”
“You and Kevin.”
“Nope. I was still small enough that you could pick me up. That means Kevin would’ve been a baby. If he was even born.”
Da thought that over for a while. “And fuck you, anyway,” he told me. “Do you know what that was? That there was one of my finest memories of my dead son. Why would you be a little bollix and take it away?”
I said, “The reason you’ve got no actual memories of Kevin is that, by the time he came along, your brain was basically mashed potato. If you feel like explaining how that was my fault, exactly, I’m all ears.”
He took a breath, gearing up to hit me with his best shot, but it sent him into a fit of coughing that almost jolted him right off the back step. All of a sudden both of us made me sick. I had spent the last ten minutes angling for a punch in the face; it had taken me that long to figure out that I wasn’t picking on someone my own size. It struck me that I had about three more minutes within range of that house before I lost my mind.
“Here,” I said, and held out another cigarette. Da still couldn’t talk, but he took it in a shaky hand. I said, “Enjoy,” and left him to it.
Upstairs, Holy Tommy had picked up the singing again. The night had got to the stage where people had switched from Guinness to spirits and we were fighting the British. “No pipe did hum nor battle drum did sound its loud tattoo, but the Angelus bell o’er the Liffey’s swell rang out through the foggy dew . . .”
Shay had vanished, and so had Linda Dwyer. Carmel was leaning on the side of the sofa, humming along, with one arm around half-asleep Donna and the other hand on Ma’s shoulder. I said softly, in her ear, “Da’s out the back. Someone should check on him, sooner or later. I’ve got to head.” Carmel whipped her head round, startled, but I put a finger over my lips and nodded at Ma. “Shh. I’ll see you soon. Promise.”
I left before anyone else could find anything to say to me. The street was dark, just one light at the Dalys’ and one in the hairy students’ flat; everyone else was asleep or over at our place. Holy Tommy’s voice came out our bright sitting-room window, faint and ageless through the glass: “As back through the glen I rode again, my heart with grief was sore, for I parted then with valiant men whom I never shall see more . . .” It followed me all the way up the Place. Even when I turned down Smith’s Road I thought I could hear him, under the buzz of passing cars, singing his heart out.