This Is The Way

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6 (#ulink_1828af39-3448-5bb3-a72b-ea8664eac94c)

Here is a good one. Judith Neill tried to sink a submarine. This was a long time ago. A submarine of the Canadian Navy was pulled up in Dublin for show. Judith went along with some old friends to try gather intelligence is the word. Never again she said. She said she’d left that person she was behind in the past but she was fond of her all the same. She had a tattoo remind her of times gone by. It was the head of a fox, on the inside of her arm near the elbow. She was trouble back then she said but she was lucky because she could have been in even worse trouble, she had got away with it. I said to her I would not tell anyone about the submarine. She said to me I could tell who I wanted.

She said this the first day I met her. This was six seven month after I came to Dublin, five six month before Arthur came. The first day too she said to me questions about my mother. She said to me what was her hair like. I had not thought about my mother, I could not think what her hair was like. I could only go away and think what Judith was like because she was the last woman I seen. I thought she might have been a young person, then I seen the tattoo gone blue on her skin. But the skin sat on her softer than on my mother was what I thought. My mother had hard skin with white cracks.

I could think of my father better. I said to myself things. I said Aubrey Sonaghan was a big man, bigger than me. I said Aubrey Sonaghan had black hair, Aubrey Sonaghan had dark skin. Aubrey Sonaghan had brown eyes. Aubrey Sonaghan wore brown. Aubrey Sonaghan wore a brown shirt made of the same thing a towel is made.

In the university I bent down and touched a cobble in the ground. It was smooth and cold like the top of a skull.

Aubrey Sonaghan is still alive I says. And why wouldn’t he be alive I says.

I said it to Judith.

My father is still alive I says.

She says it too, why wouldn’t he be.

But had I not made it easy to see. This man had laid the lines in himself that would kill him.

The king with his fists, the champion of Ireland, I had written before, the picture I had of him. It could only have been a picture because I do not remember him the champion of Ireland. The picture was the dust on him in the blood. Or the muck and the steam on him, the muck of the fields, the slugs, this man standing in the middle, the mist. He put down anyone came to the fields to take him on. The McGlorys and the McInidons, Kim Jonah come over from Manchester, Driver Fournane from the west, the Saltman Vennace. And anyone the Gillaroos put up against him. He went through them all, beat through them because they came in his way, roads and paths of blood and muscle and bone. I used think it was not pride kept him going. All the others it was pride brought them to him. But I thought that if it was pride in my father he would not have given up. He would not have given up the fighting and he would not have given up his ways for the settled life. Then I thought about it there is two kinds of pride. And it was pride in his person made him stop. He backed out the fighting right at the top, he was unbeaten. And he put away the other pride to back out, to go a different road. There is a pride in your person and there is a pride in your people.

Not all of this I had said to Judith. There were certain things she didn’t want to be hearing, I learnt that early. She didn’t want to be bothered with no one’s troubles. For two month I been coming to this woman’s room the top of the library, I been getting the food, sometimes money.

Your dole has been cut she says to me.

How do you know I says.

I read about it in the paper she says.

I seen a thing on the television the couple of nights before, I didn’t want to say a thing. Damien Thresh Sonaghan Lee a fella twenty eight year of age had went missing near to Galway and they didn’t know if he been kidnapped but then they knew he was kidnapped because they found him after the week lying dead in a lane drowned with white paint that was tipped in his lung.

You look tired Anthony are you feeling well says Judith.

But of course I was not feeling well, I had not slept well the last two nights I was sick thinking. But the Sonaghans and the Gillaroos and their feuding and fighting for hundreds of years, they went on in the world this band of wise people and singers dancing in this woman’s head.

You heard of this fella Damien Thresh Sonaghan Lee I says to her.

No she says.

The fella was found dead drowned in paint in his lung I says.

Oh no yes I had heard about him she says. Was he related to you.

Only distant I says.

Oh dear she says. It is brutal what goes on she says.

It is brutal it is true you are right I thinks. And it is brutal how it all comes close. Came as close as it gets the night before. I went to bed thinking of Damien Thresh and his head held, soon I was thinking of my own head held. The doctor been around to our house when we were childer, got called in the middle the night because myself and Margarita were sick. The doctor said I must drink milk but I would not drink milk. Margarita would not drink milk neither when she seen me sick with it.

The doctor is a man knows more than you my father says. Same time he’s saying it his hand is swinging taking me by the hair, holding me to the table. Same hand that would hold my mother to the table, would hit her in the rib.

I been clicking my fingers all the night and in the morning before coming in the library.

Judith says to me you are a gentle soul Anthony.

I would not stand for it I got up out my seat I went to shout at her but I said nothing.

I sat down again I got back up. I went over to her I put out my hand I says are you okay I wasn’t going for you. I took my hand back in again. And that morning I been walking up and through my room clicking my fingers thinking how quick my father could turn, the change in him.

I was thinking foolish woman.

She says Anthony it’s okay.

I says sorry for this do you know who I’m like is what it is.

Yes yes leave it it’s okay she says but she did not look okay with it and now she would not talk.

Now we sat in the quiet until things were calm. And it was strange, sitting there now, in this room with music playing, a strange music. I heard something like it before but not this music, it was classical music she said. It was a thousand old airs at once. It sounded like wind, it was music for the mountains. I looked out the window I seen the water twinkle in the sun on the grass, I seen the clouds rise six mile, it was music suited that. It was a moment like this with music like this one of the wet sunny days I thought what my mother’s hair was like, it was like the dead yellow blinded summer grass.

But it was strange now all coming to an end, me and this woman Judith, and thinking of the danger coming. This building it was said was a safe place would turn me out I was sure. Turn me out into the streets where sure too would be my fate, I would meet it, boys with hooks and knives scraping them on the ground smiling. I was waiting for it listening to the music, listening to the people in the library coming and going. People were saying things to me. Strange types, different people, good people and friendly words, it was not real. A woman name of Melissa said her dogs were her flowers, that she would lose herself in her little puppies like falling into flowers, a man name of Roy, saying questions for jokes, a man name of Professor Michael Gregory, stopping by Judith rubbing her back, though no words were said about her back, she rubbing his back and saying to him are you all right today, is there any point in another referral, the two of them talking these words in front of me though I am there, and I knew it all now this change in the air, it is what happens before I am to go my separate way.

But I’ve just bumped into RB I had a chat with him says Professor Michael. Twenty minutes we were talking, the years just rolled off, him and me.

Judith says sometimes I think you are too old for me Michael.

And suddenly we were back in our little Tangier says Professor Michael. It was like the golden days. We said we would have a bottle of wine in the Bailey. Maybe I will smoke something illicit or maybe I will have that dinner in Jammet’s I’ve always promised myself. Senex bis puer.

Stop speaking in tongues she says.

Oh where is your Latin dear he says.

He ran back to Montevideo she says.

I listened to that music. It could hit you in the eye and take your head off. You could fall asleep to it. You could eat a very grand meal to it or it would fill you with the power to lift a weight. I looked at the clouds rise to the six mile. In front of the clouds I seen the sea gulls swirl around watching the ground. I expected one to drop out the sky make a go for it any moment. I seen a sea gull my early days in Dublin do that. He took up a slice of pizza from the street had black marks on it, he shook it like a cat with a rat, he swallowed it one go. He got forty feet in the air and he came down. There was a crowd of people looking at him on the bricks of the street and he was two blue sacks and a ring of feathers was all was left.

There was a quiet now in the music would make you do something.

I says to Judith but you know my father had ideas.

Judith looked up, this testing face on her, she was working on fixing a book.

I says he had ideas to bring up our family the best way he could, to raise us up in a house was normal.

Of course he had says Judith, everybody has that ideal.

This I thought this moment this time sitting in the sunny room the top of the library. I thought there wasn’t no one should have abandoned my father because of his ideas, not my mother the dead grass hair on her not my sisters not no one.

In a house that was normal, with settled people about I says. Our people that are in houses live surrounded by others are just the same. My father took us all into a house away from that, in among houses with settled people. People said things and people laughed at him. People hated him they did. But I can see it now he was right to be thinking this way I says.

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.