But what I said was: ‘Fine, Ronnie. Sound as a pound. Yourself?’
‘Never better, Billy. And I hear you’re off on the holliers.’
‘Lourdes,’ I said.
‘I know all about it,’ he laughed. ‘Father Seán was in earlier and told me.’
He raised his hand and carved a crucifix in the air.
‘Dominus vobiscum,’ he crooned.
That night I was excited but managed to sleep for a while with the radio on.
My mother died in June 1982, three months after Grace left the house with you and Lizzie and moved back into your grandparents’ place in Harrington Street. The morning of the funeral the papers arrived from her lawyer, telling me that she was taking me to court for a legal separation and custody. The envelope was on the mat when I came down the stairs in my black suit.
It bothered me what happened at the funeral. There was no need for her to turn up like that, with her father and all her brothers in tow like I was some kind of animal who could not be trusted. It upset me too that she had not arranged for you and Lizzie to come home from your school trip at least for the few days. It would not have hurt to do that much. Whatever about me, but it would have meant a lot to my dad.
The separation hearing was fixed for September in the family law court. When I told my own solicitor that I wanted to contest it and apply in a counter-claim for custody, he said I was absolutely crazy. I was wasting my time and money, he insisted, but the more he did this, the more determined I became, until finally he backed down and grudgingly said all right, whatever I wanted.
‘I mean, if I were you,’ I remember him sighing, ‘I wouldn’t want all that responsibility anyway. But maybe that’s just me.’
‘Yeah, maybe it is,’ I said. ‘Maybe if your fuckin’ wife took your kids away and didn’t let you see them for a few months you’d feel a bit different.’
On the third or fourth afternoon of the case your mother was called to give evidence. When she came up to the witness box I noticed she was wearing the dark glasses that she had bought on our anniversary trip to Paris. Her voice was very quiet as she took the oath. When she answered the first question, the sound of a fire-brigade siren came suddenly pealing in from an open window and the judge motioned to one of the court attendants to go and close it.
She began to talk about our marriage in a way I did not recognise, or certainly did not want to. She had found me distant in the last few years. She had found me very secretive and dishonest, at times I had appeared as though I hated her. At first she had not been able to understand this. She had thought that it was some problem of her own, that I had not been able to trust her for some reason, probably to do with the circumstances in which she had had her first child. She had often blamed herself for this, had often thought that our agreement not to discuss those circumstances was unrealistic and cruel, that I could not get over my deep-rooted resentment of her. But then she had come to realise that this was simply the way I was. I was cold and emotionally violent. I was adept at using silence as a form of bullying. She had suspected me often of having affairs and once or twice, she still felt, she had been correct to suspect this. This had hurt her very much. There had been violent arguments in the house for many years. No, she could not say they were all my fault, not in truth, not on every occasion, but certainly we would not have argued so much had it not been for my drinking.
‘Did you ever feel fear of your husband?’ her solicitor asked her.
‘There would have been times when I was afraid of him, yes.’
‘And would the girls have been afraid of him, Mrs Sweeney?’
She put her hands on the rail of the witness box and bowed her head for a second. ‘Lizzie and Maeve love Billy a lot,’ she said, ‘but yes, sometimes they were frightened of him. When he was drunk or hungover. I’d be dishonest if I told you otherwise.’
‘Mrs Sweeney, can I ask you now, how was your intimate life with your husband?’
Your mother was silent for a moment. Then she cleared her throat. ‘There was very little affection between us for some time,’ she said.
The judge leaned down and said he realised that this was a delicate matter, but he would have to ask the defendant to be a little more specific in her answer.
Your mother took a sip of water and stared at the ceiling. Then she took off her sunglasses for a moment and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She put the glasses back on and bowed her head so that it seemed she was looking at the floor. ‘My Lord,’ she said, ‘I blame myself completely for this.’
‘Mrs Sweeney, with respect, that isn’t what I asked you.’
She nodded. ‘Well, my husband has not been inside the four walls of my bedroom for over five years now. For any reason.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Sweeney,’ he said.
She nodded and took a long drink of water.
‘And would that have been a difficulty for you, Mrs Sweeney?’ her solicitor asked.
Her lips trembled a little. ‘I very much missed the closeness and the company, yes,’ she said, and her voice began to crack. ‘That aspect of our marriage was always very special to me. When it started to go I was heartbroken.’
‘Mrs Sweeney, do you have anything to say to your husband now?’
She shook her head. ‘Just that I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m truly sorry for hurting him whatever way I did. To make him hate me so much.’
At that point I stood up and left the court. I simply could not bear to hear any more. My solicitor followed and pleaded with me to stay but I told him no, I would come back at the end, for the judgement. He told me that he did not want to cross-examine your mother if I wasn’t in the room. I said I did not want him to cross-examine her anyway. I had made up my mind. He was not to ask her any questions at all, I told him; when she was finished giving her own evidence he was just to let her sit down. I did not want her put through any more.
In the end she won the case which was not much of a surprise. In his summing-up, the judge said it would be very difficult indeed for a father to win a custody hearing in any circumstances, but particularly when one of the children was a female step-child. As things stood, Lizzie was almost sixteen and therefore would soon become old enough to be beyond the reaches of a custody order. But in an event, it had been clear to him very early in the case that the girls’ best interests would be served by living with their mother.
Grace left immediately, without speaking to me. It took me five minutes in one of the conference rooms to get calm enough even to think about getting into the car. I drove out of town on my own. All I could think was that there was no drink in the house. I stopped in at McDonagh’s pub in Dalkey, where I bought a half-bottle of whiskey and forty cigarettes. I went home and took a long shower.
When I had finished showering, I poured out two large glasses of whiskey and drank them back, one after the other, as fast as I could. Then I walked down the garden, stepped ankle-deep right into the stream and threw the half-empty bottle over the back wall, into the travellers’ field. I came back into the house, took four sleeping pills and went to bed. From that day on I never had a drink.
Until this summer, when I decided to murder Donal Quinn.
The first Saturday morning after the custody case I called to your mother’s place just after nine o’clock. You will remember, I am sure, that forbidding black security gate out the front and the way they were always changing the access number without telling anybody, or maybe it was just me that never got told. Anyway, I certainly did not know it that first morning, so I had to park out on the road and go in on foot.
I liked the look of the place, the clean new cars sparkling in their bays, the modern red brickwork, the neat little communal garden laid out with trees and shrubs and well-tended flower-beds. It made Glen Bolcain seem even more old and unkempt.
I found the apartment and rang the bell. Your mother’s voice came over the intercom. She asked me to stay where I was for a minute, there was something she wante
d to talk to me about. She came down in the lift and appeared in the doorway, wearing a light blue dressing-gown and slippers. She looked tired. In a cautious tone she asked how I was. I told her I was OK. I gave her an envelope in which was a maintenance cheque and also a set of keys to the bank box in which we had put the small amount of jewellery and personal stuff she had inherited from her mother. She took the envelope and peered at it.
‘This feels funny,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I told her, ‘well it wasn’t my choice.’
‘Let’s not go over it,’ she said.
I asked what she wanted to talk to me about.
‘Billy,’ she said, ‘I think it’s best if you don’t come here in future. To the flat, I mean. I’ve been mulling it over a bit and I think we should meet on neutral territory from now on.’
In the argument that began, she kept using this phrase. Neutral territory. We stood in the front doorway fighting, while people pushed in and out past us.
‘Neutral territory?’ I remember saying, at one point. ‘What Grace, it’s a fuckin’ war now, is it?’
‘No Billy, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘Not any more. So you’d better get used to it.’
You both came came down in the lift, then, and climbed into the car with me. You were dressed up like you were meeting some ancient maiden aunt and not your father. The feeling between us was strained, you did not seem to want to talk much, I noticed that you were both avoiding my eyes. We went to the zoo and walked around for a while in the drizzle, then back into town for lunch in McDonalds. On the way down Grafton Street later we met some of your school friends. They all looked at me in an accusing way, as though they knew secret things about me.
It was very hard dropping you home that first time. There were a lot of tears. You wanted me to come up to the flat for a cup of coffee, but I had to tell you that I did not think your mother would want this. I remember you asking me if I thought that she would ever change her mind. I was not sure what you were asking. I did not know whether you meant change her mind about allowing me into the flat or change her mind about something else. So I just said no, I did not think she would. Which covered all the possibilities, I suppose.
An incident which has stayed with me from around that time: a few months after the custody case I arrived early on Saturday morning at the Royal Marine Hotel. I walked up and down the car park for a while. You all turned up ten minutes later in that battered little red Fiat your mother had bought. She pulled into a space on the far side of the car park, it was as though she was deliberately parking as far away from me as possible. The two of you got out of the car and walked towards me looking like a pair of hostages about to be swapped for a spy. You got into my car and kissed me. Grace did not even wave. She jumped back into the Fiat and drove away fast.
You each had your book lists for school that day, so we went into town to Fred Hanna’s and got your books. You wanted to go to Captain America’s for lunch. Then the three of us drove back out to Booterstown Field where the Fossett’s circus was on. I had got tickets one evening during the week while I was passing on the way home from work, but all that Saturday morning I had kept it as a surprise. I thought you would both be absolutely thrilled when we pulled up outside the big top. But your faces took on a kind of horrified scowl when I told you where we were going.
‘Dad, we’re too old for the circus,’ you informed me, nose in the air.
‘Is that right?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
I sighed. ‘Well so am I, pet, if you want to know the fuckin’ truth.’
‘Circuses are for kids,’ Lizzie added.
I considered the situation. ‘Well, what would you be doing today if you weren’t with me?’ You both laughed a bit and asked me if I really wanted to know. I said yes, of course, and you told me. We drove back into town again, to that place, McGonagle’s, on Anne Street. I had somehow heard that this kip was rough enough at night, but that summer they were organising punk rock concerts for teenagers on Saturday afternoons. Lizzie knew some girl who sang in a group (the Blitzkriegs, as I recall – I told her not to mention the name to your mother) and the two of you wanted to go in and see her perform and meet your friends.
So that’s what we did. I stood at the back swigging a tepid Coke and watched the pair of you as you danced around in your best clothes to the deafening noise of Belinda Bombs and the Blitzkriegs. I felt more than a little old, I can tell you, although there were one or two other parents there, skulking about and doing a lot of staring at their shoes. Anyway, at one point I was coming back from the toilet when I saw a very strange thing. There you were, Maeve, in a murky corner kissing some boy. Not just any boy, but a boy with a purple mohican haircut and a tartan vest and tight leather trousers that looked like some kind of wild dog had been let loose on them. This amazed me. That was my feeling about it, sheer amazement. There was our little Maeve, kissing someone. You were only thirteen. I did not know what to do about this. It was when he put his hands on your backside that I thought I would wander over and start saying loudly how good I thought the music was.
This was Hugh Gormley Jones, I was told. He was in a band also. His band used to be called the Spanish Inquisition but now they were called the Vatican Two. I was glad, I told Hugh, that my daughter had friends who were so religious. He did not get the joke. Hugh Gormley Jones’s conversation seemed to be limited to a variety of bleatings, gruntings, suggestive barkings and incoherent gurgles. The smell of drink off him would have felled a docker. After a while he tottered over to the dance floor and started leaping about – ‘pogoing’, I believe you told me it was called, or ‘moshing’ – which is still the nearest dance I have ever seen to actual physical violence. He jumped up and down in one place, flailing his arms and jerking his head back and forth as though heading an invisible football. He then lurched up to the front of the stage and began copiously spitting at the bass guitarist. This, you explained, was a sign of appreciation.
‘It’s like those parrots, Billser,’ you said. ‘Aren’t there parrots like that in South America, who puke on each other as a mating thing?’
‘Yes, love,’ I told you. ‘Parrots and Irishmen. Two wonderfully expressive species.’
I asked you if this boy was someone special to you and you scoffed.
‘I was only gettin’ off with him, Dad. Actually I think he’s a bit of a wuss.’
‘Maeve, you’re a young woman now. You’re not a girl any more. You have to be careful who you hang around with.’
You sighed and threw your eyes to the ceiling. ‘Listen,’ you said, ‘you needn’t give me the period talk, Billser, and the facts of life. I’ve had all that from Ma till it’s coming out my ears.’
‘I’m just saying, I know what boys are like. It wasn’t that long ago your auldfella was a boy himself, you know.’
‘Yeah, right,’ you said. ‘Back in the Pleistocene era.’
‘Everyone thinks boys and girls are the same these days. But they’re not. They’re made differently.’
‘Jesus Dad, go on. Are they?’
‘I mean the way they think. The way they behave themselves.’
‘Yeah, this spazzo of a priest told us all about it at the Christmas retreat last year.’ You squinted your face into a hideous leer and began to jabber in a mock rural accent. ‘Now girls, de wimmen are like irons and de men are loik lightbulbs. It takes de wimmen a bit of a whoile to heat up like, but de men do switch on just loik dat.’
I couldn’t help laughing.
‘He was a dirty old patronisin’ bastard,’ you said. ‘It wasn’t one bit funny. You’d want to hear the things he was askin’ us in confession.’
‘Maeve,’ I said.
‘Father Danker was his name,’ you said. ‘I told everyone it was rhymin’ slang.’
‘My Jesus, the world’s changed a good bit since I was a kid.’
‘Yeah, well it’s had enough time, Billser, God knows.’
Hugh Gormley Jones and Lizzie w
ere up on the stage now, arms around each other and howling into a microphone. According to you it was a song about smashing society. Just as you had commenced to parse the rather arresting text for my benefit, a thick hail of beer cans came raining down on the stage. This was not what took my attention. What did take my attention, what truly impressed me in fact, was the way Belinda Bombs, who seemed to be dressed in a bin-liner and stilettos, began bouncing up and down and heading them back into the audience. No wonder the Raytown Rhythm Kings never made it big. In my day, we just didn’t have that level of commitment.
By the end of the first year or so, the access arrangements had become tolerable, if only just. You would turn up ten minutes late at the Royal Marine, cross the hotel car park, get into my car. Grace would never stop to say hello but would rush away as soon as possible. Some kind of diversion would be found for five or six hours and then I would leave you back to the hotel where your mother would collect you. This became the routine of our Saturdays, and I suppose like all routines it had its comforts, even if they were not many.
Another thing that gave me solace around that time was the fact that I was not alone. Indeed, after a while, I found I could spot them and pick them out of a crowd, the Saturday fathers, whose ranks I had now joined. No matter where we went, you and Lizzie and I, to burger bars or ice-cream parlours, to cinemas or parks, there they would be, vaguely crumpled in ill-fitting suits and five-o’clock shadows but trying to look cheerful all the same, middle-aged men with children and sins and lost expectations and beer guts. They seemed to carry their pasts around with them like ghosts or physical weights. I mean this literally, you could often identify them from the crushed-down way that they had of walking. And they would have a haunted and guilty look, these men, as they tried to laugh loudly and make jokes and talk about pop songs about which they knew nothing to bewildered and frightened children under whose feet the ground had just opened up. After a time I even got to distinguish different kinds of expressions of guilt on the faces of these men. There was the kind of guilt which has turned inwards and is eating up the heart like some kind of vicious carnivorous worm. There was also the guilt which has taken the shape of suppressed rage. And then there was the kind of guilt which leaves nothing except an odd suppurating blankness behind the eyes. I got to know all these expressions on those Saturday afternoons with you two. Sometimes in those days, passing a shop window or glancing into the car mirror, I would see those expressions on my own face.