Father’s Music
But Luke was the first encounter to really affect me since my mother’s death. Everything else had a second-hand flavour. I wondered if his wife had consented all along. Was that why he had been so open in the Irish Centre? But I knew she didn’t know, because wives never do, and I was trying to justify something which had increasingly disturbed me. Every day I told myself it was finished and yet that statement seemed too definite for something as vague as our relationship. Some days I decided I was just playing it cool and letting him sweat for a while. I could break this habit whenever I wanted, but perhaps I should use Luke to get me over the loneliness of Christmas. The problem was that his absence made me realise how empty my life was.
On December the fifteenth I decided to visit his shop. I was on a tube and impulsively stayed on after my stop. I watched the stations flash past, not certain if I’d actually go in or what I expected to happen if Luke was there. Maybe I wanted to haul our relationship out into the wintry light of a Wednesday afternoon and see if anything remained. I just knew I couldn’t leave matters as they stood and I couldn’t walk back into that hotel any more than I could break away from Luke.
The store was crowded with serious-looking DIY folk beautifying their houses for Christmas. Piped carols were interrupted by special offer announcements. I felt an almost vengeful enjoyment in being there, setting the agenda for once. I moved around the aisles, watching his staff work and wondering if he was here or in the smaller shop a few miles away. The staff were young and well trained, marked out by red company jumpers and enthusiasm. I could hear them repeat the same soothing phrase, ‘I’m not trying to sell you this but it might just suit …”
A supervisor in a dark suit checked off a stocklist with a visiting sales rep. I passed him twice before I stopped to look back. It was Luke. I watched his eyes flick between the printed order form and the shelves. I felt chilled. I hadn’t recognised him and now, when I did, I realised that I didn’t know this man and I could never have slept with him. The rep was leaving. Luke called something after him. Even his voice sounded different. I was watching a chameleon. Luke turned to look straight through me for several moments before it occurred to him who I was. His face changed but only slightly. It showed neither encouragement nor surprise. I realised I couldn’t talk to him here, I had nothing to say to this man. I backed away, fleeing down a side aisle to escape.
The following Sunday I left it late before deciding to visit the hotel. There were delays with the tube and when it finally came three girls stood by the door laughing hysterically at their own inane comments, as if anxious to antagonise the whole carriage. After Wednesday’s visit I had sworn never to go near that hotel again. Yet at King’s Cross I raced through the passageways connecting the Northern and Circle lines.
I got stuck behind an old man struggling up the escalator with a suitcase. The case stuck out, blocking the left side where people tried to rush past. They cursed him silently and not so silently as he ignored the log-jam behind him. There was something unnerving in his stillness as he stared up the escalator as though a great fate awaited beyond the ticket barrier, which he had only to haul his battered case across the forecourt to confront.
Honor once told me she believed in angels after seeing one pass her window as a little girl. Momentarily I forgot Luke as I watched the old man, fixated by the notion that he was a soul on its ultimate journey. Perhaps this underground was full of ghosts that nobody noticed as they vanished down tunnels at the end of deserted platforms. I couldn’t remember if I had read about such a notion, but, as a child, shabby old men with cases had fascinated me with the unspoken fear that they were my dark father come back.
The suitcase bumped over the rim of the escalator and the old man stumbled, trying to hold it. I pushed past and ran down more stairs just in time to catch the train pulling out on the Circle Line. Yet all the way to Edgware Road I felt an obscure foreboding that I hadn’t stopped to help him.
There was no guarantee that Luke would have come or would wait this late. But I felt he would have taken my appearance in the store as a sign that I wanted to talk. If he didn’t show up then at least I’d be freed from the illusion that I had found somebody who needed me.
I emerged at Edgware Road into light rain and walked quickly on. Looking back, I realise that if I had paused to help the old man with his case I might have missed my connection and arrived so late that I would have run past the shops opposite the Irish Centre. Instead I slowed to stroll casually past so as not to attract attention. Apart from the restaurant with its bored belly dancer, only the newsagent was open, although even he had one shutter down. I saw him closing up, with a huge rack of foreign newspapers pulled in out of the rain. An Irish Sunday paper was there, incongruous among the mass of Arabic newsprint. I could hardly see the photograph in it and had gone past when the eyes drew me back. I leaned against the glass. It couldn’t be Luke, I thought, starting to panic. It was like him, but the face was stockier, the eyes more cold. Ironically it was the suit I recognised first, because, as suits go, Christy Duggan’s taste was pretty appalling. The photograph was obviously a family one, taken at a christening or wedding. I banged on the glass. At first I thought the shopkeeper wasn’t going to bother opening up. The paper was folded, but I could still make out the headline, Dublin Gangland Murder.
I stood outside under a streetlamp, reading the account of his killing over and over until the rain distorted the newsprint. Now I knew that Luke wouldn’t be in the hotel. He would have no way of letting me know the news and no way of guessing that I knew. But I walked on anyway, in case there was a message at reception. I wanted there to be a different receptionist, but the same one eyed me coldly, sensing she had the upper hand.
‘Is there a letter for me here?’ I asked.
‘I’m not his messenger,’ she retorted. ‘Go up and ask him yourself.’
She turned a page of her magazine, deliberately not looking up until I’d gone. I reached the top of the stairs. I hadn’t expected this. I must be important if Luke had found time to see me tonight. We had always kept emotions at bay and now I felt ill-equipped to console him. It didn’t seem right to walk in on his grief. I knocked twice before he opened the door. If he had been crying it was well hidden. He stepped back to allow me in.
‘Luke, I know and I’m sorry,’ I said.
He gave a half shrug. ‘It was all my fault.’
Even when confronting death he seemed composed. His suit was immaculate although the shirt collar looked scuffed. His manner was more apologetic than mournful.
‘You can’t blame yourself,’ I said. ‘I’m just surprised you came tonight.’
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘We can’t let setbacks get in our way.’
He took a pull of his cigar and I realised that my suspicions were right all along. He was a total chameleon, a conman who felt nothing for anybody. I remembered his hands on my neck that first night. He could have killed me and thought nothing of it. Luke studied my face, concerned.
‘What’s wrong, Tracey?’ he said. ‘I’m here to apologise for the row. I’m sorry about the shop, but we’re so busy before Christmas that I was miles away. You were gone before I’d time to say anything.’
He hadn’t realised I was talking about Christy. He thought I didn’t know what had happened.
‘I don’t fucking believe this,’ I sneered. ‘You don’t even let death get in the way of a quick fuck!’
I backed away, ready to flee and Luke reached a hand out.
‘Don’t fucking touch me,’ I shouted. Then I looked at his eyes and realised that Luke hadn’t heard the news from Dublin.
‘Where have you been all day?’
He looked confused by the question. ‘I was in Holland since Friday, buying stock from a tile shop closing down over there. I took the van across. It’s parked outside still.’
‘Oh my God.’ I paused but couldn’t find a way to soften the words. ‘Luke, I’m sorry, but your brother Christy was shot dead in Dublin.’
Only when I held up the sodden newspaper did Luke realise I was serious. His face changed. He took it from me and turned away. I saw his head move as he scanned the blurred columns. Newsprint had stained my hands, the words printed backwards across my fingers. I looked up and realised that Luke was no longer attempting to read. He was silently crying. I went to put my arms around his shoulders, then stopped. Luke had always maintained an emotional distance between us. I could only watch, afraid that any attempt to console him would be rejected.
‘Would you like me to go?’
‘No. Please.’ He walked to the window and put his hands on the pane. I could see him reflected in it and he could see me.
‘You were close, weren’t you?’ I said.
‘He could beat the crap out of me, but he’d murder anyone who put a finger near me as well. I was fifteen before I’d clothes of my own. I lived in his hand-me-downs, vests, underpants, even his shoes sometimes.’ Luke turned. His face seemed to have aged a decade. ‘Even adults were scared of him. He’d take on blokes twice his size and beat them. Yet I was the one always trying to mind him.’
I knew by the way Luke stood that he wanted to be held. I put my arms around him and he buried his face in my hair where I couldn’t see him cry. I recalled a story he once told me, set on a factory roof somewhere in Dublin called Rialto. Luke had heard that Christy and an older boy were breaking in there but he knew their plan was inept. The roofs were slippery after rain as he crossed valleys of corrugated iron and hammered glass, searching for them. A watchman’s torch flashed below, followed by an alsatian’s muffled bark. Then, somewhere among the rooftops, he heard sporadic sobbing. It was too dangerous to call out. Luke waited till the crying resumed, then took a bearing and slid down a gully, where a loose rivet ripped his jeans and flesh. His boots collided with Christy, who rocked back and forth, his crying frightening Luke more than the danger of being caught. Luke stared at the glass below on the concrete floor. The light was bright enough to make the shards sparkle and for Luke to see that the fallen figure lying there had a broken neck.
I stroked Luke’s hair, which was thinning and greying at the roots with traces of dandruff. I felt so desperately sorry, but there seemed nothing I could say to console him. I could see those boys in my mind, Luke trying to guide his brother like a blubbering child along the rooftops as he watched for the security guard and unchained dog. Luke had known how to escape. But Christy had seized up, unable to climb down, even after they heard the body being found and knew the police had been called. Luke remained, minding Christy until the firemen raised their ladders, although he knew he would also be charged and sentenced to an Irish industrial school.
Luke raised his head and wiped his eyes.
‘You should go home,’ I said. ‘People will be looking for you.’
‘I don’t like home,’ he replied. ‘Before meeting you I thought that what I wanted wasn’t important. I put my head down and got on with working for my family. Suits aren’t meant to contain feelings. I should go home, there’s business to take care of. But fuck it, Tracey, I don’t want to ever leave this room.’
‘You’ve no choice,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re needed there.’
‘Come with me.’
I thought of his wife and children. ‘You know I can’t, Luke. But I’ll drive with you if you want and see you get safely there.’
‘I didn’t mean home here,’ Luke said. ‘It’s Dublin I hate. I haven’t gone back for years. I’m not sure I can face watching gangsters queue up to shake my hand and knowing one of them set Christy up. Come to Dublin. It would mean so much to know you’re there. I need you with me, Tracey. Please.’
EIGHT
LUKE’S WIFE AND CHILDREN would be arriving from London on a later flight. It was a fact Luke simply had to live with, he explained, normally you got hassled by the police at Dublin airport. The family name was enough, it just took one detective trying to get himself a reputation. This was why Luke had deliberately raised his children in England. Now he wanted them kept away from all that. I was discovering that Luke had an excuse for everything, even taking his mistress with him on a flight to Dublin while his wife and children travelled alone.
Security at Dublin Airport was non-existent. The terminal was like a cathedral of homecoming, with Christmas trees and clock-work Santa Clauses in the centre of each luggage conveyor belt. People collected their luggage, then drifted through the blue channel where nobody was on duty. No official paid Luke the slightest heed. Crowds thronged the arrivals hall, greeting returning family members. Luke’s younger brother, Shane, had arranged to meet him. I could see him trying to place my face.
‘Who’s she?’ he asked suspiciously as Luke put the bags down.
‘Stick around for Carmel and the kids, Shane,’ Luke replied, ignoring the question. ‘They’re on the next plane. We’ll get a taxi.’
But Shane still stared at me. He had an open, innocent face. In soft light he would still pass for someone in their twenties. I remembered him acting as a peace-maker in the Irish Centre. ‘Ah, for Jaysus sake, Luke,’ he cottoned on, more exasperated than annoyed.
‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘Luke’s just some cheap lay I picked up on the flight over.’
Shane threw his eyes to heaven, then picked up the cases and led the way to the car park. Luke’s wife could make her own way into Dublin. There was an uneasiness between them, with my presence preventing Shane from discussing family matters. I felt Luke had placed me there like a shield. At the car Luke asked to drive and Shane mumbled about him not being covered by insurance before grudgingly handing the keys over.
Shane sat beside him in silence as we drove on to the motorway. I noticed that Luke didn’t turn for Dublin, but drove in the opposite direction to where it petered out into an ordinary road again. The unease I’d known on the flight returned. It had gnawed at me since driving with Luke to the corner of his street in London and watching from the shadows as he reversed past his neighbour’s ornate pillars up to his front door where figures rushed out to claim him back.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘The scenic route,’ he replied shortly. We reached a small roundabout and Luke turned left on to a smaller country road which was ploughed up, with pipes and machinery parked on what was once a grass verge. Luke seemed to be trying to track back to Dublin along a network of lanes crisscrossing the countryside between the airport and the city. But there were half finished roads and diversions everywhere. Shane remained silent, slotted into his role as a younger brother, yet I sensed his satisfaction as it became obvious that Luke was lost. I had expected tears at the airport or angry promises of revenge, but instead a web of tension and distrust hung between them. Christy had not yet been mentioned.
‘Where the fuck am I?’ Luke was forced to mutter at last.
‘It’s structural funds from Brussels, that Maastricht shite we got bribed into voting for a couple of years back. You’d know about it if your Government across the water allowed people a say in anything.’
‘What do you mean, my Government?’ Luke said.
‘Well, you’re not exactly queueing up to vote here.’
‘Dublin is still my town and you know it,’ Luke said, suddenly bitter.
I thought neither was going to back down, then Shane said quietly: ‘I know, but if you want to convince people it might be wiser to come home more than once every five years.’
Luke stared ahead, trying to recognise some landmark.
‘I hardly know this way myself,’ Shane added, soothingly. ‘The Government’s gone mad for building roads.’
‘So everybody can emigrate quicker.’ The bitterness in Luke’s voice seemed tempered as he admitted to himself he was lost. ‘I wanted to slip in by the back of Ballymun.’
‘You’re miles away,’ Shane said. ‘Half the old roads are closed. They’re ringing the whole city by a motorway.’
‘You could have said something.’
Shane shrugged and Luke pulled in among a line of JCBs and earthmovers parked beside a half constructed flyover. Below us, an encampment of gypsy caravans had already laid claim to an unopened stretch of motorway. Luke got out to change places. The brothers passed each other in the headlights of the car. Shane got back in, but Luke stood for a moment, caught in those lights, staring down at the caravans.
The fields beyond were littered with upturned cars, where men moved about, dismantling vehicles for spare parts in the half light. Cars were pulled in as motorists negotiated deals at the open door of a caravan. Children in ragged coats played hide and seek among the smashed bonnets and rusting car doors. A dog vanished into a pile of tyres. Smoke was rising and although the windows were closed I was convinced I could smell burning rubber. I wondered again what my life would have been like if Mammy hadn’t persuaded Frank Sweeney to move to Harrow three months before I was born. I stared at the mucky children careering through the wrecked cars. This was what I had been saved from. As a child I’d had romantic visions about what it might be like, but now it felt as if Gran was beside me, smugly witnessing the justification of everything she had done. What would Luke feel if he knew that his mistress was an Irish tinker’s daughter?
‘Are you English?’ Shane asked quietly.
‘Yeah,’ I said, looking away from the children.
‘Just don’t come to the house or the funeral, please.’
There was no animosity in his tone. I didn’t know if he saw my nod in reply, but he flicked the lights for Luke to get back in. Instead of sitting next to him, Luke climbed into the back seat beside me. I had never known him to display affection but now he reached for my hand and I sensed Shane tracking the movement in the rear-view mirror. Shane started the car.
‘Does Carmel know?’ he asked after a moment.
‘Neither do you,’ was Luke’s terse reply. The tension between them was only partly to do with me. Luke stared out at the December twilight and I could only guess at his thoughts. Five minutes later we pulled in at the entrance to an exclusive golf course. Shane cut off the engine and the brothers stared up the long curving driveway.
‘The back of McKenna’s farm,’ Luke said eventually.
‘I didn’t know if you’d recognise it.’
‘I’m not likely to forget the shape of that blasted hill, am I?’
A BMW came down the driveway and accelerated away. Shane watched the tail lights disappear.
‘I said it to Christy,’ Shane said, ‘the week before they shot him. There was no need for all this aggravation for years. He should have just bought McKenna’s land and built a golf course. You sit on your arse all day and they queue up to hand their money over.’
It was the first time Christy was mentioned and although nothing else was said it seemed to ease the reserve between them. Perhaps their shared memories were so engrained that they couldn’t speak of them. But, from stories Luke had told me after love-making, I began to understand the need he had felt to drive out here. It was a need Shane must have understood. Soon Luke would be swamped by his extended family, with public rituals and duties to perform. But here in the gathering dark, the space existed to come to terms with death.
On the flight over I had told him for the first time about my mother’s death and my visits to Northwick hospital as she grew weaker and more withdrawn until she had just stared back at me. I had grown to hate those visits and to hate myself for resenting the way she used silence like an accusation. I had avoided being there when my grandparents visited, but once I met an old school friend of hers, Jennifer, who called me out into the corridor. ‘She’s dying,’ she said. ‘So what are you doing to contact him?’ I had stared back, uncomprehendingly. ‘Your father,’ Jennifer said angrily. ‘Surely at least the man has a right to know his wife is dying.’
It was the first time I’d ever had to think of him as flesh and blood. He had been an abstraction before, a shameful bogey-man. Frank Sweeney would be eighty if still alive. But because no one spoke of him, I’d presumed him long dead. I had read in a magazine that the average life-span of Irish travellers was under fifty. Even if he were alive, I had told Jennifer, I could hardly chase around every campsite in Ireland. He’d had twenty years to contact us. Besides, after what he’d done, my mother would hardly want to see him now.
Jennifer had a large house in Belgravia, a husband working in the City, children who passed through private schools and emerged polished as porcelain. All the things Gran had wanted for her daughter. Yet although Gran spoke of Jennifer glowingly, I’d never known her to set foot inside our house. Now she glared at me in the hospital corridor. ‘Did you ask her?’ she had snapped, momentarily furious. ‘You’re not a child any more, Tracey. You’ve caused your mother nothing but grief with your silly games and yet you’ve never bothered to find out the least thing.’
Jennifer was right and I knew it. At a certain level I had always withdrawn from other people’s pain into my interior world. After she left I went back to my mother’s ward and asked nothing that might require an awkward response. I had matched her silence with silence and, later, Gran’s grief with flight. This was partly why it had felt important to come to Dublin and to just once be there when somebody needed me.
Luke stared up at the lights of the clubhouse and I squeezed his palm. The curved lake, lit by spotlights beside the final green, had to be man-made. I glanced at Luke’s face, feeling I was in the way, but also that he wanted me here. I could imagine all three brothers here as boys of twelve, eleven and ten, with those extra years providing a hierarchical chain of command. These roads would have been smaller as they walked out among similar bands of boys at dawn. One night Luke had described McKenna, a burly countryman wrapped in the same greatcoat in all weathers, who would eye up the swarms of boys to decide who might have the honour of filling his baskets with fruit and who would walk the two miles back to the city disappointed.
I remembered how Luke pronouced McKenna’s name with quiet contempt, but also a faint echo of childhood awe which I could imagine no adult adversary ever meriting. I couldn’t remember the full story, except that it was the first time I’d heard Shane mentioned in detail. He would have been sandwiched between Luke and Christy among the crowd of boys as McKenna made his choice so that all three appeared to be strong, hardened workers. Luke and Christy had covered up for him when his back ached and his hands blistered during the endless day of picking until finally his tally of baskets began to drop. There was a row and Shane had broken down in tears as McKenna threw a handful of coins on the ground and spat on them.
‘Was McKenna mean?’ I asked Shane.
He snorted. ‘As mean as the back of his balls that only ever knew shite.’ He glanced back, apologetic for his language. It was thirty years since those events but they still rankled. We eyed each other openly.
‘How do I measure up to the others?’ I asked him.
‘There have been no others.’ Shane re-started the car and I believed him and beneath my show of toughness I felt better. Luke ignored our exchange. I wondered what Shane thought of me and was it contempt for his opinion or a bond between brothers which allowed Luke to display his mistress so openly. For the next two days I would have to remain invisible and I sensed that this journey was perhaps Luke’s only way to give some acknowledgement to my presence. Shane would never mention me, not even to his own wife. I suspected there were more dangerous secrets locked away in Shane’s head that would always stay there with a younger brother’s unquestioning loyalty.