As I knelt beside her and closed her eyes, the rain suddenly stopped. And in the silence that followed I told her I loved her and that she was finally at peace.
Chapter 5
As I was about to leave the house, I returned to the living room and stuck a Post-it note on the old radiogram, reminding the house clearance people to drop it off at my house. I ran my fingers along the dusty mahogany lid. I’d persuaded Tess not to get rid of it. I wanted to restore it. Joe and I had a selection of vinyl and we’d actually use it. But, more importantly, it was once Dad’s pride and joy and the only thing I had left of his.
Like too many Irishmen in those times in Britain, he died in a tragic accident on a building site. On a day of torrential rain in Salford, he jumped down from his digger to inspect the edge of a deep trench where pipes were being laid. He then lost his footing on the treacherously slippery ground and slid into the pit. An avalanche of mud, copper piping and concrete followed. As the blood was draining from his body I was at Priory Road primary, colouring in a picture I’d drawn of the four of us. I was looking forward to showing it to him when he got in from work. In it we were on holiday in Ireland in front of my grandmother’s house. It was the last one I’d ever draw of us all of together.
My memories of him were fading but now and again I’d get flashbacks. He’d be hunched over the radiogram listening to Radio Athlone in the evenings or to the Gaelic football after Mass on Sunday. Michael O’Hare’s banshee-like football commentaries would be filling the room and Dad would be raising a fist in the air whenever his beloved Mayo team scored. The Irish showband and country-and-western records he stored in the radiogram were the soundtrack of my early childhood: Big Tom and the Mainliners, Frank Mcaffrey, the Miami Showband. Sometimes when he and Tess got in after a dance at the Irish Club, I’d creep out of bed, sit on the bottom of the stairs and listen to the shuffle of waltzing feet behind the closed door.
I glanced down at my watch. Five to one. I was meeting Joe at the Infirmary at two thirty for my scan appointment. I was starting to fret and imagine the worst outcomes. I grabbed the binbags and was about to head out the living-room door when a song that Dad used to play a lot came into my head. I started to whistle the tune to myself. “The Men Behind the Wire” was an old song about internment and the raids by British soldiers during the Troubles. He used to play it on a loop and always on low volume in case the neighbours heard. I knew all the words. He’d bounce me on his knee and laugh as we sang along together, and he made me solemnly promise never to sing it at school.
I always assumed Tess had given away all of Dad’s old records when I bought her a CD player. But I hadn’t actually checked inside the radiogram. So I turned back and opened the lid. By the side of the turntable there was a storage space and I was delighted to find a pile of about twenty forty-fives still there. I picked some up and sifted through them: Margo’s “If I Could See the World Through the Eyes of a Child”, Big Tom’s “Old Love Letters” – “Take Me Home to Mayo” – the song we played at Dad’s graveside, Tess’s favourite “My Son” by Brendan Shine as well as a selection of Jim Reeves and Johnny Cash. As I went to pick some more up I saw a brown envelope sticking out of the bottom of the pile. I tugged at it. It was fat and torn. I put the records back, sat down in Tess’s armchair and shook the contents on to my lap. Old bills, Mass cards and yellowing insurance policies fell out.
I found the letter inside an old birthday card.
Dad’s handwriting was beautiful. His words fell across the page like sloping rain. Black ink had faded to lilac and the blue of the Basildon Bond paper was blanched but I could read everything clearly.
Whalley Range
Manchester
3rd September 1960
My dearest Tess,
I hope you are keeping as well as can be expected in the circumstances. I lie awake every night wondering how you are.
Kathleen Slevin is a great girl to get the letters in and out, isn’t she? The ganger man on my new job in Salford is from Bohola. He knows the Slevins and says they are a decent family. It comforts me to know you have an ally in there.
Do you remember Pádraig Flynn from the dances in Ballinrobe? Tall fella with a lazy eye? He’s on the Salford job too. One of the men he lodges with told me he was asking questions about us. I may have to have a word in his ear. Sometimes it feels like there are too many Mayo people in this part of Manchester. It’s like I never moved away at all. I’m starting to wonder if we might be better off in London or Birmingham.
Not much has happened here since I last wrote. It seems to rain even more than back home. Earlier today I was watching yer man in his yard across the way – a big old beast with a knotted handkerchief over his baldy head. He
