The Fields by Kevin Maher

Author:Kevin Maher
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780316223560
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

11

The Next Two Months

The next two months are the best in my life. Really. Turns out that having half your family taken away from you and looking after your dying dad is a bit of a breeze after all. Sarah and Siobhan have got a deposit down within a week, and are out of the house before the fortnight is up. They share a tiny one-bedroom flat in a grim three-storey tip on Hamilton Street, just off the North Circular road. They say, on Sunday visits, that the move was the prod they needed to fulfil their futures as bright young independent women in an emerging Ireland. Within the month Sarah has a job as a cashier in Allied Irish Bank, while Siobhan is working in the men’s fashions section of Dunnes Stores.

The Monday-morning farewell with Fiona is pretty gruesome, everyone all weepy at the front door, as the taxi man puffs on his John Players and we get a taste of the real Ireland from hundreds of years ago when you were born to leave home before your time. She gives me the biggest goodbye of all the siblings and squeezes the feck out of me, telling me always to check under my bed for ghosts and ghoulies and to keep my precious Saidhbh safe from harm. I love that last bit, because it makes me forget about the hard and tight lump of sadness that’s stuck in my throat and concentrate instead on the feeling of manliness glowing in my stomach.

Once the door shuts behind Fiona, Claire and Susan almost instantly go into seventh heaven mode. They each grab a room for themselves, and are happy, as per the new rules, to exchange a daily routine of washing up, hoovering, and even making a tray of brown scones, bran buns or German apple slices for the privilege. They can’t quite believe their luck, in fact, and they secretly treat Dad’s cancer as the best thing that ever happened to the family.

Me, I’m told to buckle down at school and am given a new roster of home duties that include lots of manly stuff, like using Dad’s prized hatchet to chop blocks of wood into kindling for the fire. Or filling the coal bucket up from the bunker out in the back garden. It’s mostly maintenance related stuff, and the central heating is the biggie. Dad himself makes a big deal of it, and shuffles down, grey scratchy style, and announces over sodden Weetabix that it’s time to teach me a few things about the house. ‘Because I won’t always be around, ye know.’ He says this last bit without a drop of feeling, like he’s reading from a manual underneath the table that gives you handy hints on what to say to your son when you’re going to die but don’t actually want to talk about it.

Sometimes, when he’s being like this, all deathy, but not, I want to run up to his face and scream, ‘Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer!’ a million times, just to see what he’d do.

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