Father’s Music
From one of Ireland’s bestselling writers, a literary thriller set in London and Dublin.A combination of family fable and gripping thriller, ‘Father’s Music’ tells the story of Tracey, the troubled twenty-two-year-old daughter of an Englishwoman and a wandering musician from Donegal. She knows very little about her father, who returned to Ireland before Tracey was born, but when she is taken to Ireland by her lover, a Dublin businessman with underworld connections, Tracey at last feels she is coming home – to her father’s land.Caught up in Dublin low-life, tormented by memories of her dead mother and eager to follow up news of her father, Tracey finds her journey home to be a dangerous and extraordinary one…
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DERMOT BOLGER
Father’s Music
IN MEMORY
Johnny Doherty, travelling fiddle-player
from Donegal, Seamus Ennis, Ard-Rí of Irish pipers from Finglas, North Dublin and Seosamh Ó hEanaí (Joe Heaney), Sean-nós singer from Connemara, County Galway.
Contents
MY LOVER LOWERS his headphones over my hair, then enters me. He thrusts stiffly and deep. Irish music swirls into my brain, a bow pressing down across a fiddle, teasing and twisting music from taut strings. My breath comes faster as his hands grip my buttocks, managing to rub his shoulder against the walkman’s volume control. The tune rises, filling me up. I close my eyes so that I can no longer see Luke, just feel his penis arching out and in. The set of reels change and quicken. I listen to a gale blowing across a treeless landscape, see a black huddle of slanted rooftops and drenched cows dreaming of shelter. The beat is inside my head from childhood, imagining an old shoe strike the stone flags and the hush of neighbours gathered in.
Luke pulls my legs higher, positions a pillow under my tensed back. I don’t want to ever open my eyes. The music is so loud and quick it seems sweet torture. It courses through me. I can see his old face playing, that capped man with nicotined teeth and tufts of greying hairs in his nostrils. His eyes are half closed, his breathing laboured. He looks so infirm that he could hardly shuffle across the room, yet his hand flicks the bow back and forth without mercy. He squeezes the wild tune loose, an old master in utter control, coaxing out grace-notes and bending them pitilessly to his will, while the wind howls outside along sheep tracks known only to mountain foxes and to him. He is my peddler father, the wandering lone wolf tinker my mother would never speak of, whose restless soul must now be constrained in some isolated graveyard.
My lover suddenly cries. I know I have drawn blood with my nails against his back. But Luke’s voice is lost beneath the reel spinning faster and faster. And I shout too, no longer caring who hears in that cheap hotel near Edgware Road, with no will left of my own. My voice is just one more note lost in the frenzy of a Donegal gale blowing itself out among the rocks beyond the house where my father once played. Then my scream is suddenly loud, piercing the rush of white noise as the reels halt and I hear my lover come, feeling his final thrusts before I twist the headphones off to look up. The same hairline cracks are on the ceiling. A fly blunders against the damp lampshade, clinging insanely to life in late November.
‘Did you come?’ Luke asks. That’s my own business. I stare back until he looks away.
‘Does your wife like you to fuck her like this? Or is she more the country-and-western kind?’
We lie still after that. Why do I always need to hurt Luke? Is it my way of keeping any threat of tenderness at bay? In four weeks’ time it will be Christmas, with his youngest son waking him before dawn. He gets his store manager to phone the boy from his tile shop every Christmas Eve. Afterwards the child asks, ‘Why does Santa have an Irish accent?’ I am not jealous. I have no wish to make silent phone calls to eavesdrop on their puzzled tones. Luke would bring me somewhere better than this hotel if I asked. But it suits our relationship which started in the tacky Irish Centre across the road, with Luke embarrassed by his family over from Dublin, like overdressed extras in a gangster film, and me fag-hagging there by fluke with a black queen. The only point my mother and Gran seemed united on was that I would never marry an Irishman.
I listen to the Asian family being bed-and-breakfasted by the Council in the next room and think of how the envious bitch of a receptionist gawks at us each Sunday. I arrived early last week. ‘Your friend isn’t here yet,’ she said. ‘He’s not my friend.’ I eyed her coldly, raising my voice. ‘He’s my lover!’
Luke turns towards me, half asleep as always after he comes. Sometimes I claim that he calls me by his wife’s name when he wakes. It frightens him in case he’s doing the same with her. I like it when I can frighten Luke, especially as he scares me so easily. Maybe this edge of fear has held us together for all these weeks, because I know our affair cannot last.
I touch the scar below his left nipple. After all those early fights, this is the only mark on his body. The Canal Wars, he called them. I looked it up once in a book on Irish history. He laughed when I said I couldn’t find it, and spoke of rival gangs of Dublin youths fighting for possession of a canal lock where they could swim among the reeds and rusted prams in their underpants. Luke had been ten, sent out by his big brother Christy to spy on the enemy. A rival gang caught him in a laneway and stripped off his shirt before a ginger haired boy with a deformed hand slashed at Luke’s flesh with a bicycle chain. He came home with blood on his clothes. His mother sat with him in the hospital while the stitches were done. Weeks later an uncle struck him across the face in the street for allowing himself to be caught by anyone.
