Glenfergus

A WHOLE WORLD ago when I was a young boy in Glenfergus I sat on top of a hill which I knew was not quite ours and watched as far away across the fields the majestic rock quarry thrust out its insides and shed its skin at will. Scavengers scampered around and within it, but I paid little-to-no attention to them; they were, to me, mere ants scurrying around the godly figure which offered itself to them. The process took hours: back and forth they went, little dots rolling around to and from machinery, toiling away in compulsive groups, or grafting as slow, worn down individual black specks. I had a book with me, which I turned to, leafing through its pages in the slower, more mundane moments, so that I could sit there long enough to see it all, to witness the whole world change. For the most part the book was never in my hands, the pages never in my eye line, but instead lay dormant across the wild floor, not so much sitting open, but erected, like a tee-pee, pieces of grass sticking up and tucking themselves amongst its pages; a different structure for different ants.

I hardly need to say this. It is an honest image, fixed and undeniable.

Other things, however, I must write down. Words once committed to paper can organise our thoughts in a way that our minds alone never could, and certain memories – what happened in the last two weeks, what has been done in the last six months – cannot be left to roam at will through my mind. They must be written down, put on a record from which they cannot veer, or else there is no telling where they would go, no knowing what they could do. After all, if we are not certain of what it is we have done, how can we ever hope to move on from it?

When I arrived back in Glenfergus I stepped from the car onto the familiar pebbles of the driveway and paused in front of the great house. It was built nearly forty years before by my father, who was canny enough to anticipate the children that would come to fill it, yet too naïve to imagine that any of them would leave and return as seldom as I.

The front door and windows were new, but its otherwise jaded presence remained. There was nowhere for it to go, no way for it to change. The front foyer protruded and the rest of the house, all pebble-dashed and whitewashed, splayed out either side; the freshly mown lawns and the tall thick hedges that bound them creating only tamed, well-kept versions of the endless fields beyond, which crushed in and suffocated its every breath. I had wondered beforehand how I would feel in this moment, but couldn’t answer it then. I lit a cigarette. I had managed to quit a few months before, but some things in life get stressful, don’t they?

It was the first time I’d been back since the Christmas before last. What’s that, eighteen months? It was two nights and away again. Sarah was with me. No, that’s not right. I’d been there since – called in on the way through when a work trip took me so close that not doing so would have seemed a deliberate avoidance, too conscious a decision even for me. That was the major difference this time of course: business. I’d been a lawyer for over a decade, but until then Glenfergus was one place where my services were never required.

Time is another difference. On my previous visit I only stayed a few hours, not even for dinner; a fleeting visit if it counted at all. Did it count? Best not to ask that question. Where would the line be?

I wiped my feet instinctively on the mat as I stepped inside and breathed in the old distinctive smell. The dish of holy water still on the wall to the right, I still ignored it. So too the hat rack, laden with coats and shabby work clothes stained with muck and god-knows-what. Perhaps one or two of the innermost garments adorning it were mine, still hanging there after all that time.

Max, my father’s old brown Labrador was lying in the void beneath the hollow stairs, his beloved rainbow-coloured mat faded beneath his paws. He looked up lazily, hiding whether or not he recognised me. He didn’t bark so whether he knew me or not, he was neither excited nor affronted by my presence. I reached down and patted him on the head, because I knew how he felt.

Noise from every direction: rooms in the house appear here and there almost randomly, and sound travels through each and every one of them as if trying to escape. My mother was cooking. I could hear pots clanging together and the old, noisy fan swirling steam around the kitchen. The TV blared from the living room. The generic sound of news reports told me it was Dad that was watching. Voices everywhere. Nathan’s the loudest, with another, female, presumably that of his wife Hannah, joining in. I wasn’t familiar enough with her voice to tell for sure.

I took off my jacket, acclimatising to the usual, ridiculous heat of the place and threw it over the banister, ignoring the weighed down hat rack, and took another moment, having made it this far, to prepare myself.

‘Was that the door?’ I heard my mum’s voice ask from the kitchen.

I was late, which was good according to Mum.

‘I hate to think of you rushing down those big roads.’

But it meant that I wasn’t in the house five minutes before I was at the table trying to fit hellos in between bites of roast beef. The great wide oak table was extended, with Dad sat at the head of it. Mum, Nathan, Nathan’s wife Hannah, Peter, the twins Catherine and Clare and I filled the rest of it. I sat down to the right of Dad at first, but apparently that was Nathan’s seat. I couldn’t give a damn where I sat, but still, that annoyed me.

My older brother by eleven months, Nathan had never left Glenfergus, deciding instead to stay and try to become king, to embrace the locals and take advantage of as many people as possible. He’s the type who should come with small print, or one of those voices that appear at the end of an advertisement on TV, speaks really quickly and explains the catch, hoping you don’t quite hear it. I should have been immune to him by then, but I wasn’t.

‘How are things?’ I asked him, and was soon cursing myself at the mistake, as he began telling me, talking awkwardly across the whole table due to the seating plan he’d insisted upon. You never bloody learn, do you? I nodded along, all the while looking straight forward, past Peter’s shoulder and out the window, into the long back garden, which leads onto a series of large open fields, which go on and on, just like Nathan, who had rather fallen into the category of after-dinner speaker, with the meal having barely started. I had no hesitation in believing that it was a special act, perhaps for one night only, for my benefit, or rather whatever benefit he got from doing it in front of me.

‘It all sounds very exciting,’ he said, incongruously, at this point. It was a line I rather felt should have been reserved for my side of the conversation. Once stolen, I could only add a general grunt of agreement and a solemn nod, upon which he picked up where he had left off and rambled on, and I resumed looking forward.

I could see the quarry in the distance, just past Peter’s ear-lobe. Glenfergus depends on it for its sustainability and independence. Large lorries would come to it, shipping stone away and out of the village, and at one point in time nearly every man in the town was employed there for that purpose. The situation then was not entirely different: our family was one of the few that didn’t provide someone towards the workforce. Yet, as I looked towards it, it was as though it had hardly been touched, as though they had barely scraped the surface. Nothing ever changes.

I wasn’t paying much heed to Nathan. It’s not that the work he described was devoid of merit – though it certainly wasn’t that exciting either: he described a daily routine that had altered so little in the previous ten years that he might as well have preluded it with an assurance that the sun was still rising for him each morning. It’s just that I knew he was not telling me this because it was important. Even he couldn’t think that. It was just one of his old tricks. He was telling me as an excuse for what I knew was coming.

It came now.

‘And of course we’re always looking for ways to expand,’ he said. ‘But enough of that. How’s work with you?’

‘Well, you know,’ I began, before swiftly being interrupted.

‘Indeed we do,’ he said. ‘It’s been in the papers, hasn’t it?’

He smiled like a man that had made a winning argument. In a way he had. My job had been in the newspapers, and it hadn’t been pleasant. Of course, setting out, having my picture in the paper might have been nothing more than an extra bonus that came with being involved in the biggest case of my career; but then everything seemed like it would be different at the start. In the end the picture, like the whole thing, was somewhat unflattering and unwelcome. ‘I suppose you’ve taken better pictures,’ Sarah had said, at our apartment, the day it came out. An understatement. But then as far as she was concerned none of what was going on at the time was really showing my best side.

‘Yes,’ I said, eventually, ‘the headlines have been in the papers.’

‘So we know all about it,’ Nathan said.

‘Yet you felt the need to ask.’

‘Well, I’m sure there’s even more to it than we know.’

‘There certainly is.’

‘So…let us hear it,’

I half expected someone to step in. They would have in the past, but already I could sense a change in dynamic. Nathan was in charge now. I looked towards Catherine and Clare. I could barely tell them apart. Both of them were hairdressers and their own hair was constantly changing, always in some new experimental style, so it was hard to keep up. They probably changed it just to quell the boredom. It’s all well and good opening a hair salon in Glenfergus, but the people there have never exactly been innovative, and they weren’t going to start with innovation on the top of their head. Neither of them had said a word over dinner, and they were showing no signs of doing so now. Nathan is in charge, and I need that like I need a hole in the head. In fact, in Glenfergus, I might prefer a hole in the head. How does that sound girls, for a bit of innovation?

‘Just keep reading the papers,’ I said. ‘If you think that tells you anything.’

‘Well you haven’t been here to tell us anything yourself, have you?’

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘Yes, that’s the story, isn’t it?’ he said.

Mum interrupted: ‘Sure he’s here now. Isn’t that all that matters?’ she said, but in the silence that followed I wished she hadn’t bothered.

Nathan looked at me for a moment, waiting for me to speak, daring me to say more, before he finally gave up and smugly took up of his knife and fork, as though he still considered the whole routine to have been a success.

They didn’t understand, of course. That was all it was. But I could never forgive them for it.

‘For now, you can keep talking about your own business,’ I said, and again I instantly regretted it.

‘Which one?’ he asked dryly, and didn’t bother to wait for an answer: ‘Magennis bought a fair few beasts of ours at the mart last week. He must have been desperate. Paid a fortune. You can thank him for the wine’

I wouldn’t have thanked anyone for the piss Nathan served, but anyway, I fought on. Perhaps being a lawyer has me well trained for his nonsense, for I had certainly needed to learn to keep quiet in the previous few months. Of course doing so now only left the room in silence, allowing him to rattle on, to no one in particular. I stared back out the window. Peter noticed and looked behind for a second, as if wondering what exactly I was looking at. I’m not sure if he knew that I was merely looking elsewhere, and I’m not sure how he would have felt about it; whether he would have sympathised with me or instead reckoned that I should be showing Nathan more respect, paying him more attention. It was Peter, the youngest sibling, only eighteen, that confused me most. Having missed so many of the years he had grown up through, I didn’t get him, didn’t know where he fitted in. He would disappear quickly after dinner.

‘And we hired two young lads straight out of school a few months ago. Marty is training them up. They’re like ducks in water,’ Nathan said.

‘Or pigs in shite.’

‘Hmm?’

‘They’re pigs in shite,’ I repeated.

‘Oh. Yes. Well same thing.’

‘And Marty is getting married, David. Did you know that?’ Mum interrupted again, this time to my relief.

‘No, I didn’t. How wonderful for him. To whom?’

‘Christ’s sake, David, sure he’s been with Joanne for five years.’ Nathan said, wiping all other voices away again.

Why am I here? I wondered.

Oh, for a week anyway, I had said to my mother, when I phoned to say I was coming. A week: that is the really questionable part. The words felt as strange to me as they must have sounded to her, but the decision came upon me suddenly, and I said them as a contract with myself, knowing full well that I would all too likely leave after a day or two if I felt it could be done without consequence.

To do so would have been no good. I needed the break from work, couldn’t face going back there – no, Nathan, you didn’t read that in the paper, did you? – and Glenfergus had been the only place I could go, the only excuse I had.

‘They’re building a house on the edge of the village, darling. Lovely big house, isn’t it, Nathan?’ Mum said.

‘It’s some unit now. Costing an arm and a leg mind. Last he spoke of it, was adding up to over…’

Dad had been quiet. I imagine he tended to be those days. But when he wanted to he could still impose order under his roof. A single, gentle, clearance of his throat brought Nathan’s mouth to a close, and there probably wasn’t another man in Glenfergus that could have done that.

‘Of course, that’s his business,’ Nathan continued. ‘A damn fine house it’ll be too.’

No more was said. It wasn’t a scolding, but a correction, a reminder, and it happened so fast that if an outsider were to look for the source of the noise, they wouldn’t have seen any trace of it having being made. And I’ll tell you another thing, they’d have been a long time guessing it was the wee man at the head of the table that made it.

He is why I was there, of course. He was my excuse: the explanation I gave my boss when I said I needed the time off work, the reason I gave Sarah when I left our apartment and told her I’d see her the following week.

I had to finalise his will. It was four months since he’d been diagnosed and I hadn’t seen him since. Busy with work, you see. But this would make up for it is what I’d told myself when I made the promise to my mother.

A week will make up for it.

It was easier to convince myself of it on the phone to her, than it was then, with him sat before me.

‘Sure it’s good to have that done,’ Mum said, as one-by-one we dispersed from the dinner table and emigrated around the open plan kitchen and living room.

It’s good to have that done. When her time comes they can put that on her gravestone. But her time had not come, and in this instance, I agreed with her. The falseness, the production-act of dinner – complete with Nathan’s soliloquy - ceased, and everyone fell into their own natural, muted routine. Hannah and Clare stood in the kitchen, contently chatting away about things apparently of little-or-no concern to anyone but themselves. Catherine, beside me, turned on the TV and flicked through the channels, while Mum watched on from behind her teacup. Peter, as I said he would, disappeared, and Nathan for now had thankfully given up his attempts at impressing me, and stared intently into a newspaper. Dad did the same and presently, almost simultaneously, with a brief nod to one another, they leant over and silently swapped the two papers, in a synchronised act that resembled a ritual, and which I was briefly, just for a second, strangely envious of.

It seemed like they might have sat like this forever – that is, were it not for the great disrupter that had me there in the first place – had I not posed a question. I had just noticed that in the family tableau I was sitting amongst – perhaps in Peter’s place, a last minute pentimento - there were two further absentees.

‘Where are the kids?’ I asked.

‘We got a babysitter for them,’ Hannah said. ‘For tonight, you know?’

Why did I only notice their absence then? Because they weren’t crawling around my feet perhaps.

‘What age are they now?’ I asked, and Nathan eyed me from behind his newspaper, offended that I didn’t already know, and I felt a brief second of satisfaction, before Hannah quickly answered, seemingly unconcerned by my ignorance of the matter. Probably best. Watching him squirm would have made it all too tempting to repeat.

‘Pauric’s seven, Eve is three,’ she said.

Eve is three. Too old to crawl, but equally too young for me to have lost count. I’ll have to pay attention to stuff like that, if I am to last a week, I thought.

Wait, what did she just say?

‘Why do you need a babysitter tonight?’

‘Of course, Darling, you won’t have known,’ Mum said. ‘Of all things, we have a party to go to.’

There are three rules for when you’re at home with your family in a place where everyone knows everyone. Well, they’re really more like two rules and a consequence, but anyway, first off, number one: it doesn’t matter if you don’t know the person standing next to you, be prepared for the inevitable fact that they will know you.

‘Isn’t that right, David?’

‘I’m sorry, who are you?’

‘Nathan’s apprentice. Well sort of, I’m just out of school really.’

‘And what are you saying?’

‘Just that he’s doing a great job, isn’t he? Nathan I mean.’

‘Yes, yes, I’m sure he is,’ I said, peering across the party at the table of deserts up against the far wall, trying to figure out a route I could take to get to it without having to shake too many hands. The cheesecake looked as though it would be worth about three handshakes, maybe four at a push.

Rule number two: When you’re back in a village where everyone knows everyone, you have to do everything that everyone else is doing. Even though I only arrived that evening, if the O’Donnell’s weren’t in full attendance at the retirement party for Gerry O’Mallachy, the village’s primary school principle, well, it would be the talk of the town the next day. So get a babysitter in, put on a brave face, and try and put up with the nonsense that you get from the villages sixth grade teacher, the girl who walks O’Mallachy’s dogs – though she fears he may have time to do that himself now – and Nathan’s apprentice, well sort of, he’s just out of school really. Everyone does everything in a place like Glenfergus.

‘So just you stand over there, David.’

‘Where?’

‘Over there, by your father…very nice…now everyone say cheese!’

‘Cheeesssse.’

‘Lovely…Just one more now. Lovely!’

‘Great.’

‘More wine?’

‘Yes.’

‘Say when.’

And finally, the consequence: When you’re in a place like Glenfergus, where everyone knows everyone, and everyone does everything, it’s impossible to hide.

‘James is over by the fireplace by the way, David. You two really must catch up,’ the camera woman said, although I wasn’t sure who she was or how she knew who I should or shouldn’t be catching up with. I smiled back at her, before making my way off in the opposite direction, cursing the fact that James had positioned himself in front of the dessert table, thus ruling out any chance of cheesecake.

I felt a funny, childish novelty as I made my way around my old headmaster’s house, searching, without avail, for a small, quiet space to settle myself. There was a seemingly endless amount of rooms, but I turned away from each one. They were all filled to the brim with guests, giving off the impression that to walk in would be to walk onto a large stage and be held there on display. There seemed to be an impossible amount of them, and I toyed with the bizarre notion that they must be following me around, moving from room to room as a strange practical joke.

Yet my family were nowhere to be seen. We were separated – or had separated ourselves – shortly after arriving, and I made my way through the kitchen and out the patio doors into a large white marquee that connected the house to the garage, in search of some of them. The sides of the canopy were lined with bales of hay, and there was a rickety stage at the front made from wooden crates and plywood, with a band, sounding as make-shift as everything else, performing loudly on it.

In the garage – I laughed to myself slightly when I saw it – two young lads, wearing white shirts and bow ties stood behind a wooden desk, a make-do bar counter, laden with spirit bottles. Behind them were a series of buckets, filled with ice and beer bottles. Whoever had planned this had gone to great pains, and whoever paid went to great expense. Men shouted orders, and the two boys duly tried to keep up with them, pouring spirits and mixers into glasses of ice like they’d been doing it all their lives. One man, uninterested in the theatre of it all, merely pointed to a bottle of Jameson and had it handed to him, before I was finally able to catch the eye of one of the lads and nod towards one of the beer buckets. He grabbed a bottle, opened it and handed it to me; all done with mannerisms that suggested the novelty of the job may have already worn off. Could be a long night ahead kid, I thought, but proceeded to say nothing as I spotted Peter across the crowd and instead signalled for another bottle, while also pointing my brother towards a table in the corner of the marquee.

Peter and I sat in silence and observed the scene before us, the dozen or more tables and the people who came and went from them, moving to and fro with ease and comfort: one slick operation. The scene was embarrassingly intimidating. Everyone mingling between one another, it was full of potential awkwardness and questions. How’s life and the likes. A constant string of them walked passed us, and every now and then one of them held up a hand or nodded. I was relieved that a similar gesture back saw them smile and walk on, so that for the most part we were left alone.

Apart from us, only one group seemed separate from the occasion: a table of older men huddled together by the side. I recognised them not by their faces, but by their movements. They were the same group of men that can be found at all such occasions – or rather the latest version of the group. As members die and young men grow old, they replace each other naturally, but there is always such a group; people in Glenfergus moving through life as they do, like beads moving across an abacus.

‘Was O’Mallachy Principal when you were around?’ Peter asked, and I looked at him, almost suspiciously.

‘Of course he was.’

‘Ok. Just asking.’

‘He’s been Principal for over twenty-five years. I think that’s the point, that’s why they’re doing this.’

‘Ok.’

Peter’s birthday was not long passed. Sarah brought a card across to me one night a few weeks before. I looked away from the papers on the coffee desk in our living room for long enough to sign it. I remember the giant ‘18’ button on the front of it. You wouldn’t have remembered, would you? She asked, and I wondered why she had decided to go buy a card and tell me I had forgotten, rather than remind me in advance so that I might go and get one myself.

She was right, of course. Were it not for the giant button, I doubt I would even have known his age. He was well over six foot, and even sitting down his wide shoulders made him an imposing figure beside me. Yet he had retained that childish face of his; it was a trick, and it meant that he could pass for any age.

‘What have you been getting up to?’ I asked.

‘Working mainly,’ he said.

I racked my brains for another topic of conversation. Ideas popped into my head but I rejected them all one by one, before falling, inevitably, into the trap of asking: ‘and how’s that going?’

He answered in the shy, bland grunts of a young teenager; taking on the character of his face rather than his physique. Punishing me perhaps for not having listened to Nathan earlier, or maybe just for not having known more naturally. Either way, he was saying that I shouldn’t have to ask, so I gave what was supposed to be an approving, interested grunt, and didn’t say anymore, until a final idea popped into my head and I decided not to bat it away.

‘He took us on a school trip once, you know?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Who do you think? O’Mallachy.’

‘Oh.’

Fuck it, I thought. Let him huff, let him take Nathan’s side, if he’s going to quiver over such things. And then he was up, on the other side of me, as though I had said it out loud, walking away in a manner I knew meant he wasn’t coming back.

‘Here,’ I said, lifting his bottle of beer. ‘Take your drink then.’

‘I’m not drinking. Dad will be tired soon enough, and I’ll drive him home.’

I watched him go, until he was lost amongst the crowd, amongst a sea of strangers and vaguely familiar faces, and – there he was again – James, his happy, naive face floating by. He spotted me instantly – it is impossible to hide – and I was made to surrender, trapped in my little corner. He came towards me and I was forced to welcome him, handing him Peter’s untouched beer, for which I received a great big silly thank you and another stupid grin.

‘No, no, sure who else could it be for,’ I said, because there was nothing else I could say, because Peter hadn’t given me the chance to say anything else. He’d annoyed me, and I turned to James, ignoring whatever it was he had already begun to talk about.

‘James, you mind, don’t you, the time O’Mallachy took us on a field drip to Dublin?’

I didn’t think he could have forgotten. By the standards around here, O’Mallachy was a bloody pioneer when he took a group of school children to Dublin. To Dublin, of all places. The moon might have seemed a less bizarre notion, for at least it could be seen from the village during the cold dark nights.

On the trip each second on the bus took us further than any of us had ever strayed from our own front door and I felt it all like a physical pull. The trip was for a tour of Croke Park and inside the city we were met by a wall of traffic, and I felt we were finally somewhere worth being. Aeroplanes flew overhead, nonchalantly floating what seemed like mere feet above our heads. Then the stadium appeared, towering amongst the tiny houses around it. Of the tour itself I have little memory. I have no doubt that it too was startling, but it is not what I remember. It seems, looking back, that no sooner were we off the bus than we were back on again, eating lunches of cling film wrapped sandwiches from plastic boxes; and I back in my seat, nose pressed against the glass window pane, unable to pull my eyes away from the city scenes around me for fear of missing a single inch of the place.

Of course this was of no concern to O’Mallachy. Our great pioneer was at the front of the bus, giving-off a keen sense of get-this-over-with. He questioned the driver: ‘Why don’t they just put these things on the edge of the city, so we don’t have to get through the whole place to get there?’ I still think of his words when stuck in particularly bad traffic. Funny what the mind remembers.

And what do I remember of staring out the bus? It is the people that got me. In an area in the size of which we had only managed to create Glenfergus, they had created a hundred different worlds. They were everywhere. I don’t know which of them I was attracted to most – in fact no, I do. It was none in particular, it was all of them: the variation, the options, the possibilities.

Yet somehow:

‘I’m sorry, David, I don’t,’ James said.

His remark pulled me out of my memories. He looked confused: just like I always remembered him. He hadn’t changed. He looked exactly as he did the last time I seen him, eighteen months before, and exactly as he had done the time before that – which was when?

‘We should catch up,’ he said, interrupting my thoughts again, and I murmured back at him.

‘You should come down to the pub on Saturday.’

‘Sounds good,’ I replied, but I was looking around the tent again, only vaguely listening to him. Soon he was calling one of the young barmen by the name as he walked past, and motioning for him to bring us two more beers.

‘Great service,’ I said, as he handed one of them to me.

‘Yeah, open bar. Not bad, eh? But look, I need to go, I want to get away before any of that starts,’ he said, motioning to the stage, as he stood up. ‘But I’ll see you on Saturday, yeah?’

‘Why, what’s happening now?’ I asked, but he was already gone, the tent was full and the woman just in front of me was turned around and loudly shushing me. Every seat was filled, all silent and attentive, with me at the very back, trapped.

‘Gerry is making his speech,’ the woman said sharply, before seeming to recognise me and adding a pleasant smile and a bizarre little wave.

When I finally emerged outside the darkness of night was there to greet me and mock the time lost listening to O’Mallachy’s drivel. Of course, like all things Glenfergus, I invariably speak for myself here: but yes, drivel. Real mind-numbing, thank-fuck-that’s-over stuff. I couldn’t wait to get out, and in doing so paused only briefly at my mother’s table to enquire about Peter, who I was told had indeed taken Dad home, and wouldn’t be coming back. Because, David, he has to be out early in the morning, she explained when I asked why. She snapped the words at me like it were common knowledge – so why don’t you know? – and explained that the rest of us would simply have to find a lift home with someone going our way. I could tell by the scenes around me and the smile on her face that she would not be looking to go anytime soon.

Outside, my phone offered no signal, no distraction, and as I replaced it in my hand with a cigarette, my mind started to wander, in the manner I had grown scared of, taking me back in what had become its habitual manner, to moments and periods in time that I would have preferred not experience again, when it was all still happening – a legal debacle big enough to grab even Nathan’s attention.

The memory that forced itself to the front of my mind was not about it, however, but because of it. It was a fresh image, from only hours before, as recent as it was troubling.

I approached the office of my firms managing partner with a letter of resignation in my pocket. It was composed at home the previous night on something of a whim, an earlier attempt at putting truths on paper, after I had decided that something had to change; even if this was quite a lot of change for one go. My words were prepared: the most significant I would ever share with him, though we’d shared plenty.

They were the words of someone astray, without place. Lost. Nowhere but within myself, with the past and the future stretched out around me, distant and immaterial, good only for having got me here, and now as unattainable as they were undesirable and utterly irrelevant. But then, upon seeing him at his desk, the words vanished, scared off like a small animal. Those words, as important and true as they were rushed and confusing, were gone; and I was left standing, mute, with his expectant, questioning eyes glaring at me.

‘What is it, Mr O’Donnell?’ he asked, and I could feel the ghostly presence of my co-workers on the other side of the glass wall of his office. They haunted the hallway, exchanging paperwork and small talk, but mostly, I felt, watching. Dread and hesitation flooded over me, and I clutched my breast, much like if I were having a heart attack, to feel that the letter were still there, and not lose anywhere else. I felt it in my pocket, and timidly delivered some less shocking news:

‘I think I need some time off. Need to go home for a while.’

He stood from his desk. He could hear the lack of conviction in my voice, the absence of truth, or at least the whole truth. He knew I didn’t just need to go home. Oh, how I needed so much more than that.

‘And why is this?’ he asked, to which I explained that it were for family reasons; an answer he considered unduly ambiguous.

‘Come now, David,’ he said, spreading his arms, as though showcasing his office.

‘We might be more open with each other than that. Are we not an honest bunch here? Here, where you are more than ever such a valued member of the team?’

‘My father is dying,’ I said. ‘And I have to get his affairs in order.’

His arms dropped away, disappearing shyly behind his back. I nearly laughed as I watched the power and suspicion vanish from his eyes. He was quick to grant me leave.

‘Take as long as you need, he said. If nothing else, you deserve a reward for your work.’

A fucking reward.

‘Though I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances, of course,’ he said.

Of course you are, I thought.

Of course he didn’t think what he was saying was wrong. To him, I was the one wrong for thinking it was – as is the way with everything. It was of no relevance to him that our victory had left one of our clients – my client! – in prison. He makes no apologies for it, because it was a win nonetheless, and a prestigious, unprecedented one at that. So to-hell-with my client. But now he knew my father was dying, and that’s a real shame, so he tucks in his arms, puts on his compassionate face, and says he is sorry.

‘I appreciate that,’ I say, and I am no less of a fraud than he. Because at least he was only being honest. Perhaps I should have done the same. Perhaps I should have said that I needed a break to recover from it all. But no, I didn’t say any of that. I accepted his gracious reward, though I was not deserving of it, and thanked him swiftly.

‘Of course, David,’ he said, before continuing, with the earlier look of suspicion returned on his face: ‘We can all trust each other here, can’t we?’

‘Of course,’ I said, and turned quickly to the door, keen to get away, out of his office and out of the building, in case the letter, seeming to grow heavy in my pocket, might scream out the words of its contents at any second.

I left O’Mallachy’s and began to walk the mile or so back to the house. Cars followed me along the dark road; a mass exodus which my family had seemed so reluctant to be part of. You go ahead, David, my mother said, a full glass of wine in one hand, and an air of youthfulness and spirit in spite of her years. As I walked I was forced at regular intervals into the ditches and hedges of the road, as I stepped clear of the cars. I held up a feeble hand of acknowledgement each time, but saw nothing in reply from the dark, invisible interiors of the vehicles that passed me. Soon I was wondering how long I’d been walking. It felt long because of the excursions onto the grass, but I couldn’t work out a time and found this greatly unnerving. Another car came along, fast, and I jumped aside, stumbled and crashed into a hard metal gate. Am I drunk? The notion came to me with the cold steel pressed against my back. Even in the bleak darkness I thought it was my unfamiliarity with my surroundings that left me feeling most blind. I stood up straight, cursing my decision to walk, and only then noticed that the car that had almost hit me had stopped on the road. The window rolled down and the light inside was flicked on. O’Mallachy himself addressed me from the driver’s seat.

‘Nearly got you there, chap,’ he said. ‘Come on, jump in. I’m headed your way anyway.’

It seemed more a command than an invitation, but when I looked at the road ahead I decided to comply and was soon in the car with my seatbelt on, listening to him ramble again.

‘Just leaving a few ones home, you know?’ he said; ‘has to be done, or else you’d never get your house back,’ and he glanced towards the backseat and laughed, and I was glad that the journey would be short.

‘You know Anne and John, don’t you?’ he asked, and I felt a hand reach over my shoulder and turned around to the see the woman who had shushed me earlier. ‘I do indeed,’ I said, as I arched my back and shook her hand awkwardly, while she replayed the familiar smile of before. The backseat light was on above them and as she sat back I saw a similar expression on her husband’s face, before it slowly turned to a weak grimace. ‘You know, son,’ he said, ‘I never got talking to any of your folk. Tell me, how’s your father?’ and a heat rose in my chest and my eyes closed at the sound of the question I only then realised I had been trying to avoid all night. We were coming up the lane to their house, but I knew they would not leave without an answer. He will not have even considered whether or not he should ask. Nothing is private to these people. What is local is common knowledge. My family’s attendance at the party tonight was probably, above all else, a response to this: an attempt to answer a thousand questions with one picture, with their simple presence.

‘Yes, well…’ I stuttered. ‘He’s still going…he’ll…’

‘He’ll not give up without a fight, will Mr O’Donnell,’ I heard O’Mallachy say from beside me.

‘But anyway, here we are,’ he added quickly, bringing the car to a stop outside the front door.

‘I’d know that he won’t,’ Kevin said from behind, before thanking O’Mallachy, and tapping me on the shoulder as he got out of the car.

‘Not a bit, pleasure having you,’ O’Mallachy said, and I just stared forward.

We turned back on to the road. He said nothing, but I could tell O’Mallachy was conscious of the fact that he’d just rescued me.

Soon we pulled up the pebbles of the driveway. ‘It was a great night, Gerry,’ I said, to fill the silence. Gerry didn’t sound right as I said it; that funny teacher student stigma again.

‘Yes, everyone seemed to enjoy it, didn’t they?’ he said, with a smile, as the car came to a halt again. ‘Here we go. Saved you a bit of the walk anyhow.’

I felt very small in his car, in his presence; associations as particular as his are hard to dispel. I thought about thanking him for interrupting Kevin for me, but I didn’t know how it should be done, so in the end said nothing. I merely opened the door, jumped out, thanked him for the lift, and walked away, with a brief wave back, before he was gone. He won’t have expected thanks, or wanted them for that matter, but he knew what he was doing. The teacher in him, I suppose. He was simply looking out for me. There’s a rule in that somewhere.

Inside, I tiptoed past the sleeping Max, and listened for any sound from Peter or my father, though I expected none. What sort of car journey did they have together? I wondered what conversations they had in general; their age gap more akin to that of grandfather and grandson. I climbed the stairs carefully, afraid of the creaking floorboards which never came. Had they been fixed? The house felt slightly different, slightly off, like an accurate recreation of itself. I moved slowly but the only sound was my own heartbeat, until, as if from nowhere, a sudden voice, two distinct syllables:

‘David?’

I approached the half-closed door of my parent’s bedroom and pushed it open. He was sat in an armchair beside their bed; an old man wearing silk pyjamas, a robe and slippers. There was a newspaper on his lap. He looked nothing like my father.

‘Is it just you?’ he asked.

‘No one else was ready to leave.’

I went and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I couldn’t get a word with you all night,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t get a moments privacy.’

‘I don’t think they like to leave me alone,’ he said. ‘Your mother would think I’m asleep now, otherwise I dare say she’d be here.’

He said it like it was a joke, one I was not yet ready to be part of, and it was only silence that followed. Seeing someone too often can leave you short of conversation, but not having seen him in so long had left me with nothing to say, because with all that had happened in between, I could find no place to start.

‘Your will,’ I said, eventually.

‘What about it?’

‘You don’t have to worry about it, you know. Once I see a draft of it, it can be altered and finalised quickly’

He was smiling, as though his next punch line was coming up. It was.

‘There is no will, David.’

‘What?’

‘Nathan has helped gather documents, a few different things we thought you might need, they are down in the living room. But there’s nothing legal. Certainly there is no will.’

Perhaps he did expect me to laugh. Or perhaps he thought I would shout, and that is what he found funny. Or perhaps he just didn’t care. He was sitting there, as if none of it were any concern of his, as though this world, which he is on the way out of, could no longer inflict him with its problems. As though he, now of a different type, could laugh at our little earthly problems.

‘What can I say,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t been expecting to die.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘How can you not have records of anything, the land you’ve owned, even just for legal reasons?’

‘The lawyers don’t come to Glenfergus too often, son. They never have. The land I have is family land. You’re grandfather made a will leaving it to me; I haven’t got round to doing the same myself.’

‘But when you were diagnosed?’ I asked. ‘Surely then…I could have even suggested someone to do it.’

‘I wanted you to do it.’

I couldn’t reply. The silence returned and all I could hear was my heartbeat again. And why do you want me to do it? I nearly asked, but didn’t, because I knew why. Because that is what I did, is all I did, so why not ask me to do it, in the presumptuous manner they had always had of me, and which I would never forgive them for.

‘I should get to bed, before your mother gets home.’

I looked up at him. Very well, I will do it, and then I can be gone.

‘Good night, Dad,’ I said, as I closed the door behind me.

Downstairs in the living room I looked at the boxes in the corner, four of them, crammed with files and loose pages, and cursed under my breath as I went upstairs and into my old bedroom.

Was it hard to see him like that? I can’t say it wasn’t, but above all it was strange. Unusual to see him embracing the night, basking in its virtues, its silence. He was never a man of the night. He used it only to rest for the next day, which would start early, often before the sun had risen, depending on the time of year. He was not an overly strict man in our childhood, but a bedtime was a constant rule. I often thought that it would not have been so regimentally imposed were it not that he always wanted to get away himself. All his other rules about homework and everything else were formed around a bedtime. Get all that work done son, so we can get to bed.

Perhaps it was not all that different now. No, I will say it for certain: it was not all that different now. Surely this will only work if I ascertain such things, and that is just one of the things that have to be set in stone. I have to write these things down, set it all out, and it can be understood once and for all.