Gavin Corbett - This Is the Way

Which now I says.

He would not answer.

Hello I says, are you gone deaf.

Your brother’s burial he says. That was the time I decided he says.

What did you decide I says.

That I wanted no more of the old life he says.

Yes I says. And then you hit the road again for three year like the best of them.

He lit another cigarette, but it was not to chastise, I could see, and I did not say anything.

That was for no love of the road he says.

That night Arthur was restless. I had my eyes closed and I was tired but I could hear the wires in the camp bed creaking, I could hear the click of his lighter. One stage he moved to the window to smoke. I did not tell him to stop, I did not say anything. I was tired, I was thinking about my father. I was thinking about what Arthur had said about him. Me father now the reader I thinks. The reader now, wha. Well what brought that on I thinks. A change had come over him said Arthur. Oh, a change. I seen a change come on him all right. His hands into fists, the blood to his head. A change, and when it came it came quick.

When I went asleep I seen again my father hitting my mother. There was music following every swing of the arm. The picture of that was in my head, the sound of it. It was slower than real and he was beating but there was a skill or a grace to his moving. When I woke out of it the music was still going in my head, it was the classical music. There was also in my head a question. The question was repeating. You learnt to read now father was the question. It was a question but I couldn’t get at the first word of it, the where or the how or the why. Or maybe I was just saying it to myself, like it was inevitable.

I thought Arthur was still awake, I says out loud where did this thing the Sonaghan side of me family come that we want to be improving ourself the whole time.

There was no answer from him.

I says did it come from me grandfather.

He did not answer this question neither and I thought he was asleep then but I woke the next morning with the sound of him coming in the door of the room. He been out most the night walking it turned out.

I took your key this time he says.

I says you okay.

He says I’m tired of the walking, and he fell on the couch and slept.

The Cliffs were the houses Arthur and my father lived in when they were young men. Hundreds of years before in this place they blew out the stones that built the city and the name the Cliffs came because one side was a cliff. Before they built the houses the Cliffs was only a camp where my grandfather and grandmother and my father as a young fella and Arthur as a baba lived for some of the year. Some men came down from Dublin one time asked for cannon balls and the men of the camp went in their wagons and got the men from Dublin cannon balls weighing in their hand. It got the men from Dublin’s interest and the next there was a gang of these fellas came down raked the land and cleared the site and got more cannon balls from the time of Wolfe Tone. Soon after this the houses were built.

In the Cliffs the people grew vegetables. The soil was rich but it wasn’t only the soil made the vegetables grow, it was that the Cliffs was down in the ground. One side of the Cliffs was the high wall of stone, the other side the other way was open to the fields, but the side the wall of stone was was the side the wind blew in. It blew over the tops of the houses and the vegetables were protected. My father said he seen it from a young age, seen the people in the Cliffs build glass houses, they built a town of them, built tunnels of them, the glass houses ran one into the next. The frames of them were made of wood treated with gum and of metal they beat into shapes that were needed, metal from farms and from houses that came down. In the frames they put the glass and they put sheets sacks and blankets.

But the man with the Perspex came. He was not a strange man the people thought. Arthur thought that he wore blue. The man done them all a deal. The glass came out and the Perspex was put in. In two year the Perspex had lines across it and the dirt set in the lines and the Perspex turned yellow. Someone had the idea to lift up part of the Perspex because it closed all the gaps. He said the old glass and sheets sacks and blankets did not close all the gaps and the vegetables needed to breathe the air. They lifted part of the Perspex but it did not help the vegetables, they would not grow any more. Some people were defeated by it.

But that is the story of the Cliffs.

My father met my mother when he was twenty three or twenty four or twenty five and he left the Cliffs when they got married. Arthur lived in the Cliffs until he was thirty four and he got hassle because he just could not find the right woman. Some people thought he was queer. He was not queer, he liked young girls.

Arthur met Teresa Gillaroo when he was thirty two and he brought her to live in the Cliffs when he was thirty three. I know it about the age of them because she was sixteen and Arthur was twice the girl’s age when they met, I know because it was talked about at the time.

Arthur was crazy about this girl. I am saying that. He learnt about her in our house. He would come to our house. My mother liked him. He would let on he did not need my mother to look after him. Of all the Sonaghans my mother should have married Arthur and I am not joking. Arthur would say me brother got himself a Gillaroo where is there one for me and my mother would hit him on the head and say you will get your chance don’t be impatient and Arthur would say the families will fall out again by then.

This time Arthur and my father and Aaron and me were talking in our house and my mother was speaking on the phone with one of her cousins in Rath. The cousin told her another one of their cousins was running in a race in Dublin. My mother did not say to us about her cousin in the race because she did not care. Then late in the evening she said it about her. My father said what cousin. Teresa my mother says. She is a little bitch you do not know she says. My father asked my mother where the race was on. She said she did not know. It’s in the Phoenix Park then she says. Sure we’ll go my father says. He was interested by the people got involved in sports because Aaron got taken in by the boxing club.

They went to the race but I did not go. My father took my mother and Arthur. I heard of some of it later. I seen Teresa a year after and the picture I have in my head of her in the park was she was thin. Somebody had seen her running about Rath and they said she should join the club for the runners. They seen she had the body for it. Her legs were like the front of knives. Arthur was looking at her body and he wanted her body. Arthur and my mother and father were on a hill and watched her come around on the grass and when the runners disappeared behind the trees Arthur went running through the trees. He skidded down the other side of the hill in the trees and the birds flew everywhere and the deers stood up. When he came out the other side of the trees he had to dig his heel in the ground to stop himself and his head stopped just in time. The runners went past him a minute after and he was getting his breath.

He drove down to Rath. He knew he was taking a risk and he drove around Rath instead of into Rath. He went in a pub in another town. The bar man was going to kick him out but then Arthur damned the people in Rath. He got to talking about sports and Arthur is a friendly man. He asked the man about running. The man said there was a running club not too far and he told Arthur where it was.

The running club had the times for the training outside of it and Arthur can read numbers. He waited outside two times in a row and then Teresa came along. He did not want her body this moment, it was not this simple. He just wanted to go with her now because he loved this girl because he felt he was looking after her by driving across Ireland for her. But he did not know what to say to her. He said to her he was the brother in law of her cousin Kate Gillaroo now Kate Sonaghan up in Dublin. Then he thought of this. He said to her that the walk back to Rath was a long way and she after been running. He gave her a lift toward Rath but he stopped outside the town. He was straight up with her. He says if I go in there it will not be good.