He kept a notebook with him, wrote the accounts in it. Sometimes he read the financial situation aloud at the dinner table, promised that soon there would be enough for us to make our great trip to the Chihuahuan desert. ‘Yes,’ he’d say, ‘just a few more months and another big job, we’ll be on the pig’s back.’ Mam’s lips would give a small twitch as if Mexico was sitting there, at the edge of her mouth, as if she might just be able to taste it.
But instead he built his own darkroom. He wanted to use the old cow shed, but it let in too much light, so he created it from scratch. Hired a JCB and dug out the foundations, sat me in the plastic swivel seat, pretended to let me steer the huge yellow digger. He drained the foundation holes with an industrial hose-pump and put in pipes, dropped the cement in by himself, let me draw my initials in it. He contracted a couple of men to help him on odd days. They called him ‘Boss,’ in an almost derisory way, and they went into exaggerated raptures when Mam brought out tea and slices of fruitcake. ‘Missus Lyons, ya make the best cup of tea in the county.’ ‘Jaysus, Missus Lyons, I’d put some of this on me head and beat me brains with me tongue trying to get at it.’
Once, when the old man was gone to town for sand, I heard a wolf-whistle as Mam bent down to work at her stone wall. She stood up and smiled, waved at them, and the men hung their heads and went back to work.
Out there with his shirt off in the cool drizzling summer, my father strutted around. His chest had begun to sag just a little so that he would sometimes pinch at his nipple to make it look hard. I remember now that he sucked in his belly and put his hands over the side of his love handles to seem slim. There was still a drama to him. Up on the roof the hammer was raised high, an arm cocked histrionically to show a muscle. Flamboyant with the electric drill, his finger wagged when he showed me how it worked. He had begun to comb his hair across, to cover up the large bald spot, but it was still impossible to control. It was long enough that it sometimes blew out and fell to his shoulder. He licked his fingers and pasted it back.
The building was modular and neat, made of cinder blocks, with two rooms separated by wood panelling, no windows, a flat roof, carefully insulated, mindfully monitored so that no light leaked in under the doors. He drilled bolts into the wall for file cabinets and shelves, ran in electricity and water, jerryrigged a phone line. He called it ‘The Gulag,’ a nickname that could have been a premonition. He had a string on the knob of the second door, which he kept locked, so that, when he pulled it, it would flip the lock and open the door. I would go out at dinnertime to call him in. Some shuffling around before he opened the door, a sound of papers moving, drawers closing, lids going down on boxes. Then he’d pull the string to expose the small banalities of his world. Rows of photos hung under a string of red bulbs, a contact sheet of Friesians or an advertisement for cheese. He’d wipe his hands on a piece of red towelling and ask me: ‘Is it chips she’s cooking again, tonight?’
It was a familiar phrase.
Early one morning I heard the old man thunder down the stairs. I followed him. A fire in the kitchen, the chip-pan ablaze. Mam stood in the middle of the floor, staring at it, eyes effulgent above her gorse-coloured dressing gown. She didn’t even look at him, kept staring at the fire as it leaped. ‘I only wanted to cook something,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t sleep, you see that I cannot sleep lately.’ The old man wrapped the flap of his string vest around the handle of the pan. He moved through the kitchen, muttering some surreptitious obscenity, stormed outside to the yard, where he threw the pan into long grass for the night dew to seal it. The last few sparks were spectral in the grass. He came back inside, a burn on the inside of his palm, licked at it, chopped an orange in half to soothe the wound.
‘Are ya off your fucken rocker, woman, who wants chips at this hour of night?’
She was by the stove, still motionless beside the tea kettle, not unlike a tea kettle herself, one hand bent out spout-like, her face silver, slowly beginning to move on the balls of her feet, but lucid, a whistle in the voice — ‘It was just a little mistake, Michael, we all make mistakes’. He looked at me, his eye-whites slashed through with twigs of redcurrant, fingered at a bit of sleep in one of the corners, then scratched at the cavern of his belly button, looked like he was trying hard to remember something that wasn’t important anyway. He moved the tongue around his lips: ‘And you, young fella, isn’t it time for all good children to be in bed?’
He guided me to the hallway, kissed me on the forehead. I hugged him, ascended the stairs in a confusion of love and hatred. Don’t worry about it, son,’ he said, ‘your Mam’s just a little tired.’
That night I heard them arguing downstairs, and after that, when I called him in from the darkroom for dinner, he’d say: ‘Is it chips she’s cooking again, tonight?’
On television there were programmes where men came up behind women at stoves, wrapped their arms around their waists, even helped them stir whatever was in a pot — and I wondered why the old man didn’t do that with Mam. Slumbering in their own solitude, they didn’t even saunter to mass together, as other parents did. On Saint Valentine’s Day I gave them identical holy crosses made from reeds, left over from Saint Brigid’s Day. They came up to my bed at separate times and thanked me, my father with a pound note, my mother with a cup of hot chocolate. They were in different worlds, impossible to bridge. I imagined them swaying through the house, the open jacket of my father’s pyjamas not even touching against the jumpers that Mam wore over her nightdress, the two crosses placed in different windows at opposite ends of the house.
Weeds grew around the bottom of his darkroom. I tried to break in, but he had locked it tight and there were no windows to get through. Once, when he was travelling for a week, I tried to dig a tunnel for myself at the back. I imagined myself as some gaunt-faced prisoner breaking into his gulag, war ribbons dangling from the holy medal at my chest, using a trowel to scrabble away at the mucky mess, him high above me in a watchtower with a rifle. All I hit was foundation stone. When he came back he asked me about the hole. I told him I’d seen a dog back there, digging. ‘You chase him off with a big stick next time you see him, right, son?’ I gave up after that, though there were still times I rifled through the pockets of his trousers, unsuccessfully looking for the key.
The old man made friends with a big-shot who owned a meat-processing company in Swinford. O’Shaughnessy was the sort of man who had bottles jangling in the pockets of granite-grey suits. He had a bulbous nose and a huge belly, drove expensive cars that rolled down our lane late at night and beeped very loud for the old man to come out drinking. Mam hated O’Shaughnessy, avoided him when he came to the house — he was always trying to touch the sleeves of her blouses, planting Continental-style kisses on her cheeks. Sometimes, when he visted, she went out and did a few bits and pieces of work on her wall, even at night, in the dark. The old man and O’Shaughnessy would come home when the pubs closed and they would sit in the living room together, loud guffaws rising up through the house.