Walking with Ghosts by Gabriel Byrne

Author:Gabriel Byrne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2020-12-17T20:32:03+00:00

i returned to dublin a failed priest in the spring of my fifteenth year. My mother and father worried themselves over me.

—What are you going to with your life? You can’t spend your days lying a hull in the bed.

—If a bomb exploded under the bed he’d just turn over and go back to sleep. No job. No prospects. What in the name of God is going to become of him?

—And now the latest is he’s thinking of joining the army.

—Sure what army would have him. Too lazy to scratch himself. Has to be dug out of the bloody billiard hall smoking like a chimney with all the other layabouts and corner boys.

—I caught him trying to sneak in through the back window in the kitchen. Standing there and the smell of drink off him would knock a horse down.

—See where that will land him.

—Yes, in a motorbike helmet above in the mental hospital banging his head off the wall with all the other wet brains.

—Learn a trade, a trade will always stand to you.

I was apprenticed to a firm of plumbers and central-heating engineers. Central heating was becoming all the rage. There was an advertisement for it on television. A camera moved along a row of houses. In the sitting room of the first house we saw a shivering, miserable-looking family in front of a coal fire. In the next we saw a happy smiling father, mother beaming with their children on the sofa, because they had central heating. The Brady’s are the wise ones, a voice-over said.

—Fuck them and their central heating, I shouted at the television. I resented and detested this family beyond reason as I detested the Hollywood Brady family.

Hi Mom. Hi Dad.

Hi Greg. Sleep well?

Hey you guys, can we have a meeting about my date this evening?

A meeting about his date? Did kids say things like this to their parents?

A maid served them orange juice.

This happy, well-adjusted bunch and their happy teeth. Could there be families like this in the world?

I was a dreadful plumber. On winter mornings with the cold of the pipes in claustrophobic cellars I knew this was not my calling.

—How the fuck did he get in here, he’s as useless as a eunuch in a harem. He’s the worst I’ve come across in forty years, I overheard Tommy, an emphysemic plumber say.

They thought I was a danger to myself and the other men.

We traveled to jobs in a springless van that was falling apart with rust, and I listened to their tales of toilets and legendary plumbers.

—Y’know the big building at the end of Nassau Street? Tommy here put in the plumbing there. A master. That man is the Picasso of toilets.

To try to become one of them, I would buy the tabloid papers every morning and make lewd comments about the bare-breasted girls on page three. They ate their sandwiches away from me. I felt a failure—a failed plumber and priest.

A stooped sleeveen of a man who managed the yard one day asked if he could have a word.

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