This Is The Way

I pressed my knuckles down on the back of the radiator, felt the heat in my hands, pressed the grille in the heel of them.

I says I see the people about me now in this city, I see the people in the university, and they are good people, my father was right.

I started laughing.

I says sure amn’t I a settled person meself.

You keep talking about your father as if he is dead says Judith. You keep saying was. Where is your father now she says.

He’s keeping on the way he was set I says. No reason to be thinking or saying anything other. He might be dead and gone and twisted to smoke but he might just as well be sitting good decent people from other settled houses around him talking about things. He might be enjoying a drink with them. He might even be living in Spain all I know, with land down there all I know.

Judith had stopped working on fixing her book now. She was looking at me, she was thinking. She said to me she wanted to help me out any way she could.

Even a little she says.

She gave me an envelope, two hundred euros in it.

Your bonus the word she used. And for all you’ve done to help me these last couple of months she says. You know my door is always open.

And this is it now I says to myself. Out now in the world again after letting her down, after showing my teeth.

Her phone rang, she was on it five minutes. She did not say much to the other person. Will you she kept saying. You will be very comfortable. I think stress brings them on she says.

She got up and she said she was going home.

I am sorry I says to her.

She didn’t say anything, waited for me to say more.

I says sorry I couldn’t be the help you wanted.

Anthony you’ve been just great she says. She put her arm around me, she pressed me in against her. I laughed, then I went cold.

At the canteen a man in black had to let me in around a rope. He said I could have my dinner but I’d have to eat quick because there was something happening later. I watched the few people were there, a priest in a grey suit, the older people it was said had come to the learning late.

Many ways I was as well to be away from Judith. I did not like that she was out to touch you, I did not like the way she put on the soft voice. It would compromise you it would. You would feel like a fucker if you said anything against this. And I did not like the feeling all I done was a waste of a person’s time. I didn’t want to be leading her think I am a person I am not, and now I was left like this. Left I didn’t know where. In this place with low ceilings Judith said were vaults. Left with I didn’t know. Two hundred euros. Left with thoughts. I thought of the things I been through. I thought about what I should do now. I would be taking the dark streets back to the tall house over the river soon and I did not think about the dark in them streets for two month because of what this woman Judith done for me.

I thought about my father. I thought about the good things in him. His ideas. I thought he was not vicious with animals. I will say that about him. There was a horse the end of a field one Sunday near the house we lived, he could not see it being hurt. It was drinking from the pipe and it was bet up. There were sores on its neck and flies were drinking from the sores. My father went in the field and he led the horse by the head out the field. The boy who bought the horse stopped him on the way says it is mine and my father said to the boy where he get this horse. The boy said he got it in the Smithfield market. My father made the boy sit up on the horse keep it in control and my father walked beside it touching the horse’s head saying kiss kiss horsey horsey. They were going to walk back to the market, there was an hour left of it. My father wanted to sell the horse to a better owner see its condition would improve. He did not care who he looked like he just wanted to see the horse was okay. People seen him and he seen them seeing him but my father walked in the roads and streets, he was not thinking about his ideas to be a settled man he was only thinking about the horse.

But I got a phone call from the guards say my father was in the station. They took the horse from him and the boy and they gave it to the horse group was what they said to me. When I got to the station my father was singing quiet no way no Botany Bay today. Outside on the road I says to him was that all you could say to them people. It was said my mother’s grandmother died in a station in the north of Ireland, they wouldn’t leave her alone. I says it to my father this would be the same men that would kick the fires and move you on. I was angry with my father. I says they wouldn’t give no reasons to interfere. You have no pride I says to him. It was true, he had no pride left, never in his people, now not even in his person. I let him go on ahead of me to the car. He had grey dirty sheets flapping from his back and his shoulders were wide as a wall. He stopped, he turned his head to the side to say something, I stopped too. He was a slow sunken beast was how he looked. I waited until he went on again. And there was nothing until we were in the house and then dominay dominay dominah started, his words to God to beat him.

In this empty canteen with the women cleaning up the dishes I thought about where to go and I says I will stay where I am until I am cleaned up too.

7 (#ulink_70f754d6-18bc-5d22-a6e1-8ad5e3dd3b39)

This is not something I said to Judith. This is something I am saying now. The time I am thinking my mother had not left the house yet. That was years away. My brother Aaron was alive this time. He had a good few years to go. He was twelve, I was ten. My sister Margarita was eleven. My sister Beggy she got called though her name was Kate the same as my mother was eight.

The house is miles from the country. This is Dublin, we were Dublin, but we did not go to Dublin. We stayed in the house and we went down the shop for milk. We got on the roof, we worked in our garden. We fixed our car and we cleaned words off the door of it some boys put there. Some boys wanted to get me back for hitting them and they sat on our wall. Their daddies came and stood for a while. My father went out to speak with them and he shook their hand. You could not call these people country people though there is some that calls them country people. There is some that calls them buffers too though that is not a word I have known. My father did not use the words like buffer. My mother I think wanted to get out. I do not think this I know this from later. She wanted to be with her family that was out in the world. She wanted some day to be with the tall white stones of her dead in Rath.

My mother was happy to see her brothers come to the house when my cousin Paul made his communion. My father respected this and he gave Paul money. But he did not like my mother’s brothers because he knew they didn’t like him. They have come to the house as a message or a warning he thinks. They lived in houses too but it was different. They lived in houses were surrounded by their own. They did not like the Sonaghans and never would, it was natural. And they did not like a Sonaghan had moved to a house like this in a place full of buffers. They said the word Aubrey like they were playing in their mouth with a stone, the same as the word buffer.

Do you still do the fighting one of them says.

My father did not answer, my mother did not speak for him. My father moved around my mother’s brothers in the kitchen or he stayed watching the television or he went in the garden to work on the fountains. He made fountains. He wore gloves doing it because of his psoriasis of the skin. I heard my mother’s brothers say is he still making fountains. My mother says leave him to it and she was laughing. Her hand was holding up her head and she left a pot boil up for her brothers until the window was misted.

My father made great fountains. That is the one thing the people in the estate knew about him. He made a fountain for a man and a woman with a nude woman lying across the side. After this all them on the road wanted fountains with nude women lying across the side. He will do you a deal they had said about him. My father made a fountain for my mother after they got married. It had a nude woman but it also had a nude man on it. They were my mother and father and they were lying on a snake. The water came out a spout between my mother’s and father’s head and they had photographs taken of it.

I do not know how these people met. My mother will tell you a story. In it my mother will be in a nest on a cliff and my father will have climbed the cliff and stole my mother and maybe he will have killed some eggs. My mother came to think the marriage should never have happened even though her childer is made of both the Gillaroo and the Sonaghan. My mother has gone off with Beggy to the London Borough of Enfield and maybe she is telling Beggy stories now about the way Aubrey Sonaghan stole her from her people. Beggy will have to think about who she is and Beggy might think how this marriage came to be. She will think of her sister Margarita and how she got married young and went to live out west and even though Margarita did not marry back into the Gillaroos it was as good because she turned away from the life her father tried to make for her. She will think of me and maybe she will hear that I left the house too, and she will think of Aaron and the things that brought him down. She will think of us scattered and seeded and turned to the soil and maybe she will be right to think this marriage should never have happened.

But it is only a way of looking at it, it does not mean that this is the right way. Even my mother used tell a different story. Even around the time I am thinking, the time her brothers came with Paul, she might have told a different story. The real trouble did not begin until after Aaron killed himself. That as I says was years ahead.

Come close childer my mother says.

We were all of us childer in the one bedroom this night. Beggy got the terrors and she came in the bedroom to me and Aaron because Aaron was the boxer who’d look after her. In came Margarita wondering what all this was about. In came my mother saying there there childer. It is okay you curl up by Aaron’s feet she says to Beggy. Margarita and me were sitting on the bed our back on the wall. What is wrong little Kate my mother says stroking the head of Beggy. There there Aaron is here to look after you, Aaron will box them away. See this she says taking down one of Aaron’s boxing prizes, this is to ward off the ghosts.

This trophy here she says this is a sign of the strength of your father. Your father put all his anger away to bring two families together.

The Sonaghans and the Gillaroos says Beggy.

Good girl Kate says my mother. The Sonaghans and the Gillaroos it is. And you are very special childer you all are because you are the first childer in hundreds of years who’s made of both Sonaghan and Gillaroo. It’s been so long that the last childer like that wasn’t even people my mother says.

If they wasn’t people then what was they mammy says Beggy.

They was fish says my mother. The Sonaghans and the Gillaroos was all once fish. And you heard of this place Melvin where the families is from. All that’s there now is a pond but it was all once a lake where the Sonaghan fish and the Gillaroo fish did live. They lived together there and they was happy childer. It was more usual that the Sonaghans would keep to themself and the Gillaroos the same but sometimes a fish from one family would court a fish from the other. A fish from one family if they was trying to court another they would swim around them and the circle would get smaller until both fish was touching. And when two fish like that had babbies then if the father was a Sonaghan then the babby would be a Sonaghan and if the father was a Gillaroo then the babby would be Gillaroo. There was many new Sonaghans and Gillaroos came into the world this way and it was a happy world that lake in Melvin.

But there was a world outside that lake my mother says. Down the length of one shore of it was a farm owned by a fella the name of Dan his name was. The only idea the fish in the lake had of something going on beyond the lake was when Dan’s cows would dip their pink nose in the water to have a drink. But other than that they was two separate worlds. This Dan now was a crooked sort. Dan was only the second son of his father and so when his father died the farm should have been passed to the eldest. But you know what Dan did as his father lay dying on his death bed. It was a terrible thing childer, he murdered his older brother.