Алекс Баркли - I Confess

And Murph realized later that ‘no matter what’ wasn’t just because his mam had died, it meant ‘no matter how drunk your father is’ and ‘no matter how many times you’re spotted wandering around on your own’ and ‘no matter how many times people drive by the house and see one little shape on the sofa in front of the television’.

And he remembered that he was suddenly in Laura’s mam’s arms and it felt like it was an accident, as if you could slip off a bench and jump into someone’s arms and after she hugged the life out of him, she put her cold hands to his cheeks, and he could smell flour and apple skins and margarine, and he wanted to cry more, but he wanted to be polite. He started to think about his mother with her hands covered in pastry, slicing apples so fast it was like a magic trick.

Three hours later, Murph woke to the sound of hammering on the front door. He sat up, his heart pounding. He waited for it to stop, but it didn’t. He went to his door, and opened it quietly, and ran across to his father’s room. He knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked harder. Then he opened it. His father’s bed was empty. The hammering on the door wouldn’t stop. Murph went to the landing, and hid behind the wall, and looked down at the front door. He could see a hand pushing through the letter box, and his legs started to shake.

‘Liam! Liam! Is there a Liam here?’

Murph frowned. He didn’t recognize the voice. But whoever it was, he knew his name.

‘Liam! It’s about your granddad! Open up!’

Murph thought his heart would explode from his chest. He ran down the stairs, slipping on some of them, then got to the front door, struggling with his shaking hands to open the latch. There was a man standing there — a stranger — and Murph was panicking now about opening the door to him.

‘Don’t worry, son — everything’s going to be OK,’ he said. ‘Your granddad’s taken a bit of a fall—’

‘He’s my dad!’ said Murph. ‘He’s my dad! He’s just old.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the man. ‘He’s not making a lot of sense. He told me he lived the next house down, and he told me your name was Liam, that you were twelve and I—’

‘Where is he?’ said Murph, already running, in his bare feet and his pyjama bottoms, in the direction the man had pointed.

‘I was driving by, and the headlights caught him,’ said the man, following Murph. ‘He’s back there a small bit — I can show you—’

‘Dad!’ Murph screamed. ‘Dad!’ He almost ran out on the road, then turned, and started running in the pitch dark. ‘Dad!’

He stopped when he saw the top of his father’s head, and the strips of his grey hair half across it, half falling down. He was lying curled on his side in the ditch, his black wool coat around him.

Murph rushed to him, and collapsed on the grass beside him. He took his head gently in his hands, and turned it up towards him.

‘Daddy!’ he cried when he saw the blood, and the grazes down his face. He could hear the fright in his voice and it frightened him more and he burst into tears. ‘Are you alive? Dad! Are you alive?’

He put his ear to his father’s mouth, and he could feel his breath against it, and he went dizzy with relief. He hugged his head, then his chest, and then he lay his head against it. He could feel his father’s shoulder shift, and his arm fell down heavy across his back. Murph closed his eyes and hugged him tighter.

His father patted his back. ‘Liam,’ he said. ‘Liam. Liam. Liam.’

‘Yes,’ said Murph.

His father let out a long sigh.

‘You’re OK,’ said Murph. ‘You’re OK. We’ll get you home to bed. You’ll be right as rain in the morning.’

The man had come up behind Murph. ‘Is he all right, son? Is it bleeding much? The cut? He wouldn’t let me call an ambulance. Will I call an ambulance?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Murph, looking at the man over his shoulder. ‘Thanks all the same. He just wants to come home.’ He turned back to his father.

The man looked away, pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes. ‘Let me help you with him, so.’

Murph sat by his father’s bed. There was a roll of cotton wool and a small basin with water and Dettol on the bedside locker. He started to pick the black bits of gravel out of the cut. Jerry was drifting in and out. Murph tore off some cotton wool, dipped it in the basin, and squeezed it out.

‘It might sting a small bit,’ he said, pausing before he put it gently to his father’s face.

Jerry winced, but then seemed to drift off. By the time Murph had cleaned the wound, his father was watching him with one eye and it made Murph smile.

‘It looked worse than it was,’ said Murph, patting his father’s arm.

‘You’re a great man,’ Jerry said. ‘You’re a great man.’

‘Aren’t you the same yourself?’ said Murph.

It reminded Murph of what people used to say about his father: ‘That’s a man you can rely on’, ‘That’s a man that’d never let you down.’ But since his mam got sick, and then when she died, Murph heard different things about his father: Jerry Murphy was ‘gone altogether’, ‘devastated altogether’, ‘in a heap altogether’.

‘She took his heart with her to the grave,’ he heard an old woman say outside Mass one Sunday. She didn’t realize Murph was right beside her. He wanted to turn around and roar at her: ‘My dad tells me the whole time he loves me! No one’s dad does that! And you have to have a heart to love someone, so it’s not in any grave! It’s inside his chest! And Mam had the biggest heart in the world, and people with big hearts don’t usually steal things in the first place, plus she’s probably up there now handing out bits of it to the angels if they’re stuck.’

Instead, he made his eyes look scared, turned to the old woman and said: ‘I heard every Valentine’s Day, it comes back to haunt him.’

Murph sat in silence for a moment, watching his father’s chest move up and down. ‘Is it I’m too much trouble for you?’ he said. ‘Without Mam here?’ He waited for an answer, shoulders rigid, heart pounding. ‘Because I’ve no problem... it’s as easy to make two sets of sandwiches in the morning as it is to make one.’ He remembered Laura’s mam. Wouldn’t it be an awful shame if people thought we weren’t a family? Wouldn’t it be an awful shame? Murph wiped his arm across his eyes, and under his nose.

‘I miss Mam,’ Murph said, then. He didn’t mean to.

His father nodded, and he kept nodding, and his head was loose on his neck. ‘The auld... bitch,’ he said.

Murph’s heart closed like a fist, then burst to fill his chest and pound against it.

‘Cuh... cuh, cuh...’ sobbed his dad. ‘Consolata...’

Murph let out a breath.

‘Telling everyone,’ said his father. ‘Telling everyone...’

Murph felt his gut twist, because he didn’t want to know what Consolata was telling everyone, because it can’t have been good, and it could travel so far.

‘Saying... I’d done a bad job up above...’ said his father, ‘that I couldn’t be relied on, that I was too... too... fond of the drink... that... that... I was a wreck altogether...’

‘What?’ said Murph, because he knew that when his dad was working, he worked hard, and he didn’t drink. He only drank with the loneliness of the house around him.

His father nodded. ‘Told people... I was...’ He shook his head. Then his forehead crumpled, and he raised a limp hand to cover it. Murph’s heart started to pound again. His father let his arm fall to his chest, and when he looked at Murph, it was like he wasn’t seeing him any more, that he’d forgotten he was there, because then he mentioned Rosco, and that was too much at this stage.