Mr Lynch’s Holiday (2 page)

Time: 43:08; Moves: 579. Two kings were trapped behind the seven of clubs. He shifted cards from the ace piles and back again, treading water while the clock ticked on. Just visible on the screen, above the top-right corner of the simulated green baize, a folder of students’ work sat unmarked. He glanced at it periodically and then back at the cards. There were different ways to traverse the vast floes of time.

He found himself staring at the blinking cursor, unsure how long he had been doing so. His body had become synced with the cursor’s rhythm: the ebb and flow of his blood, the throb of his heart, the pulse of his headache. When his eyes finally refocused, it was upon the date display. He stared at it for some time, finding it distantly familiar, before reaching for his father’s letter.

He stood up quickly, feeling dizzy, thrashing about in search of the car keys before running into the street. The hot breath
of the Toyota threatened to suffocate him as he climbed inside. He turned the key and the engine clicked. He did it again and again, as if the act of turning the key could somehow recharge the battery. He got out to breathe and kick the car like a child and then he was still.

On the second leg of the journey the landscape was unvaried. He saw nothing for miles but great expanses of polytunnels, the entire countryside hidden behind wrapping. Occasionally he’d glimpse a field apparently abandoned, its plastic covering ripped open and hanging in sheets as if the crops inside had escaped during the night. For a long time he could detect no evidence of humanity, but gradually his eyes adjusted to the rhythm of the landscape and he began to spot makeshift shacks huddled next to the vast plastic tunnels, T-shirts and jeans hanging from washing lines, plastic garden furniture, a solitary young black man crouching in the shade.

The bus dropped him near the junction to the road that led to Eamonn’s village. From the map it looked to be about four miles by that road, but he saw there was a more direct route over the hills. He had always been a walker, often finding himself walking his bus routes on days off, investigating more closely things he had been able only to glimpse from the driver’s cab. As he climbed the main slope now, even with the footing a little tricky in parts, he realized how much he had missed decent hills like these and the feeling of his blood moving quickly around his body.

Eamonn’s apartment was in the upper reaches of Lomaverde, at the rear of the development, or the ‘urbanization’, as some of the other expats called it in a strange mangling of the
Spanish. His block was at the end of the street; beyond its side-wall lay nothing but steep-rising, bare scrubland, optimistically described as ‘impressive mountain scenery’ in the sales particulars. Now, leaning against the car, paralysed by indecision, he glimpsed something in the distance on the hillside. He looked again and saw that it was a human figure. Nobody approached Lomaverde from the hill. Visitors, such as they were, came along the winding road from the town. The burglaries had stopped but they all remained suspicious of strangers. He shielded his eyes with his hands and looked up towards the black shape.

Dermot had grown used to the sparseness of the landscape on the climb: slopes of arid, white soil, broken up with wild rosemary. When he reached the top he saw the broad expanse of the Mediterranean stretched out before him. The deep blue seemed to rinse his eyes of the grittiness they’d had since boarding the plane that morning. The water appeared completely still and he stood, equally still, his breathing slowing, fully absorbed by the colour below him. He thought of the spray as you walked along the promenade in Lahinch and remembered, for the first time in many years, the taste of seaweed from a bag.

It was only now that he noticed the development below, between him and the sea. He wasn’t sure at first what it was. The gleaming white cubes looked somehow scientific in purpose, a collection of laboratories or observatories perhaps. It was a few moments before he realized that what he was looking at was Eamonn’s village. The neat, white boxes, curving black roads and lush green lawns stood out sharply against the dusty ridge. From where he stood, the sun bouncing off the
sea, a heat haze shimmering around its edges, Lomaverde looked like a mirage.

The man was carrying something and shouting. All Eamonn could catch was a single repeated word that sounded like ‘
Llover
’ and he wondered if this was some strange, wandering weatherman come to warn them all of rain. It was Eamonn’s legs that recognized him first. They started moving, seemingly independent of his will, up the slope, his ears finally unscrambling the words correctly:

‘Hello there! Eamonn!’

He had just a moment to register the incongruity of his father’s presence there on the blazing hillside, dressed in a light woollen jacket, carrying his Aston Villa holdall, before they were standing facing each other, Dermot smiling shyly and saying, as if it were the most normal thing in the world:

‘And how are you, son?’

He lurked in the kitchen, making coffee, peering through the serving hatch at his father, still in his jacket, drinking water, the glass tiny in his hand. Dermot only ever looked in scale with his surroundings when sat in the driver’s cab of a bus, the enormous steering wheel a perfect fit for his outsize paws. He was six foot four, with a lantern jaw and an epic chest. Reminiscent, Eamonn often thought as a child, of popular cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn. Eamonn had inherited his father’s eyes, almost all of his height and about half of his width.

‘I’m sorry if I gave you a shock,’ Dermot called through to the kitchen. ‘I thought you’d have got the letter sooner. I didn’t know now the post was so bad.’

Eamonn saw that the arrival had a certain inevitability about it, being just the latest in a long line of unheralded appearances. There were the annual holidays to Ireland where his father would, on a whim, call in on some childhood friend. Though always delighted, those long-ago acquaintances would nevertheless take some time to recover from the sudden appearance at their window of someone they’d last set eyes on forty years previously.

There was a well-worn family anecdote related by his Uncle Joe at any opportunity. Not long after Dermot had moved to England, he took a train up to Liverpool to visit his older brother. Joe’s lot had a flat above a shop back then and he, Tessie and the kids were gathered around the telly when they heard a gentle tapping at the window. Joe drew back the curtain, expecting a bird or a twig, and instead came face to
face with his brother. Dermot had tried knocking downstairs, but on getting no answer had gone off scouting for a ladder in nearby entries and back gardens. Tessie had screamed and screamed, even when she saw it was just Dermot. It took several measures of Jameson’s before they could calm her.

Eamonn brought the coffee through to the lounge and sat on a hard chair facing his father.

‘Journey OK, was it?’

‘It was.’

There followed a few minutes’ silence.

‘No hold-ups?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

Eamonn nodded. ‘That’s good.’ He wanted nothing more than to crawl back into his bed, to finally fall asleep and on waking discover that his father’s arrival had been an unsettling dream. ‘So …’ he was still nodding, ‘is this a holiday, then?’

Dermot seemed surprised at the notion. ‘Maybe it is. I’m not sure. I just thought I’d get away for a while.’

This said as if it were something he had often done. As if he were the type of man who regularly skipped off for foreign mini-breaks.

‘In your letter, you didn’t mention … I mean, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like, but I was just wondering …’

‘What?’

‘The return flight.’

‘What about it?’

Eamonn rubbed the side of his face. ‘When are you going back?’

‘Oh. A fortnight. I thought that was long enough.’

Eamonn let this sink in.

‘I never imagined you travelling abroad.’

Dermot nodded as if agreeing and then said, ‘Spain’s a
fascinating place. The different regions and cultures, the separate histories, even separate languages. Of course the Generalisimo tried to do away with all that.’ He paused to take a drink before adding: ‘“Extremadura – Home of the Conquistadores.”’

Eamonn looked at him, waiting to see if there was to be any expansion on this chapter heading, but his father had fallen silent again.

He found his gaze returning to the Aston Villa holdall on the floor between them. Its provenance was mysterious given that his father had no interest at all in football and yet Eamonn had no memory of life before the bag. It had travelled with Dermot every day to the garage, filled with a Thermos of tea, sandwiches, a jumper and whatever library book he happened to be reading. In latter years, when his mother’s health had grown too bad, it had served as his father’s shopping bag. Somehow, despite its many years of service, it was in pristine condition. It was his father’s emblem, the essence of him distilled.

‘And Laura? How’s she now?’

‘She’s OK.’

‘At the shops, is she?’

‘She’s gone away for a few days. A research trip.’

‘Oh. She’ll be back before I leave though, will she?’

‘Maybe. Depends on how the research is going, I suppose.’

‘What is it she’s studying?’

‘Oh … no … she’s not studying. She’s writing. A novel. Historical fiction.’

This last he said in a voice not quite his own, as if he were uncomfortable with the words.

‘A novel! Well that’s something, isn’t it? Why not? They’re all at it. Look at that one. She’s done well out of it, hasn’t she?’

Eamonn nodded, waiting for the inevitable.

‘J. K. Potter, is it? I’d say she has a bob or two by now.’

‘Yes.’

Dermot smiled. ‘You know, your mother used to think you might be a writer? Some idea she had in her head, back when you were young, like. Wrote some story about a dog, I think it was, do you remember?’

‘No.’

‘Ah, you do. A dog that could talk. What was he called?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Patch or Spark. Something like that.’

Eamonn closed his eyes. ‘Flash.’

‘Flash! That was it. Flash the talking dog. The teacher said you had talent too. Your mother thought you’d be the next big thing.’

Eamonn said nothing. He noticed Dermot looking at the array of unwashed dishes lined up along the floor by the patio door. ‘Don’t mind those.’ He stood and started piling them up. ‘Just about to clear up when you came. You know how it is.’

Dermot leaned slightly to the left to see how far the dirty plates extended. ‘Will she mind me being here? You didn’t have any warning.’

‘Laura?’ He dumped the plates on the hatch. ‘She won’t mind at all.’ And it was true, he knew she’d have been delighted to see Dermot.

There was a long silence before his father spoke again.

‘I like to have eggs in the fridge. Your mother liked an egg every day and I can’t eat them like that, but I like to have them handy for the odd occasion when I fancy one. I can go weeks between them.’

Eamonn felt something settle upon him: the discomfiting notion that he was now responsible for his father. Given Dermot’s conversational halts and leaps Eamonn wondered how he could ever hope to distinguish between oblique verbal gambits and full-blown dementia.

‘The thing is, they have the dates, don’t they?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The expiry. So the box will sit there with five eggs in for weeks and then one morning I’ll notice that I have two days left to eat the lot of them and I do it. Scrambled, poached, fried, whatever you like. I get through them all!’

Eamonn thought the sermon on the egg had come to an end, but after a few moments’ silence Dermot turned to him and concluded:

‘The expiry dates. They’re great things.’