Donal Ryan: A Slanting of the Sun

She’s going out with a man the last few years who used to be a farmer until he sold half his land and set the other half. Any time I meet him he turns red and the hand he offers me shakes a bit, and I feel sorry for him. How’s business? he asks. How’s things in the computer world? The finest, I say, all go. I talk the way he does to settle him, to stop him being nervous. I’m not worth being nervous over. Good, begod, he says. That’s the way to have it. Sure is, I say, and we look at each other, unsure of how to look away. Did you see the match? he asks me every time, and I lie that I did and he settles into a long analysis and the redness and uneasiness slowly recede. And I like that he’s there, for her, so I can more easily be not there, for her.

My father’s name was Finbar. I didn’t always know he was my father. He was an old man when I was a child, but tall and handsome, and he lived in a bungalow halfway up the Long Hill. He wore dark suits and smoked non-stop. He’d had a wife one time who had died. There was a picture of her in the kitchen, smiling beside the Sacred Heart. I’d be dropped at his gate and he’d answer the door with an expression of surprise, and act as though his life was completed by the sight of me. He lived three streets and a lifetime away from my mother. She’d been his secretary once, for a few months, and something had happened that led to me. He built a room on the back of his house for me, with a skylight, so I could look at the stars as I fell asleep. But all I ever saw was plain blackness. Finbar would look up at the starless night and down at me and put his hand on my face and say Sleep tight, little man. And in the mornings he’d say Come on, little man, rise up out of it. He never took me anywhere. It was years before I realized he’d been ashamed; not of me, but of the fact of my existence.

Finbar died when I was eleven and a man told me in the living room of the bungalow as I sat and stared in wonder at the stillness and smokelessness of Finbar’s corpse that he was my brother. He looked almost as old as Finbar had. He was bald and he wore glasses and his eyebrows were black and bushy and curled upwards at the ends like a cartoon devil but his face changed and seemed kind when he smiled. He told me he’d fallen out with Finbar years and years before and he’d never gotten the chance to make up with him. We had words, he said. Over you. Me? And he nodded, and then I knew, without anything more being said. Always be nice to your mother, he said. Don’t ever fall out with her. Or if you do, be sure and make it up. And I never saw that man again that said he was my brother. But someone sold Finbar’s house and my room at the back of it and I suppose it must have been him.

When I was fourteen I kicked a kitten against a wall with all my strength. I’d been walking through the castle demesne and saw her there, standing still, crying softly. There was a wet crack when the kitten struck the wall as tiny perfect pulsing things inside her burst. The day stopped, the breeze fell away, a drifting leaf came to rest at my feet. There was nothing now that could be done to undo this thing I’d done. I turned away and walked home and my mother asked how I was as I passed her in the hallway and I ignored her as I always did in those years but I wanted to cry and beg her to make it that I didn’t kill the cat, to make the world rewind so the clenching thing inside me would loosen and fall away.

Jenny left me once before, but I knew that she’d come back that time. But just to feel our scales were balanced I went to town and walked up Pery Square and nodded at a dark-haired girl who stood with her back to the railings of the People’s Park. There was glittery makeup on her face, her green-brown eyes were blackly ringed; her breath was warm and slightly sour, her teeth were prettily gapped. I told her what I wanted and I paid her twice what she asked for and she nodded and smiled and stroked me gently until I slept and kissed my ear to wake me in the early morning. I drove her back to town in the cold dawn and dropped her near a shabby door on a passage off a lightless street. I waited to see if she’d look back at me. But she didn’t. What did I expect?

You can’t destroy energy. So every sound ever made still exists. Everything I’ve ever said is still floating through the ether, and everything that was ever said to me. I stood before a whalebone in the natural history museum once that was set on a plinth behind a screen of glass and I imagined my father was standing beside me, a made-up father, young and lean, T-shirted and muscular. The two of us marvelled, and whistled our wonder; his arm lay lightly along my shoulders. I cried at the memory of a thing that never happened. Fuck you, Finbar, I said, out loud, but no one heard. And those words are floating gently still around the universe. I hope he never hears them.

I often wondered where my mother went the nights I was in Finbar’s house. Maybe she was out, with friends, or men, being young, or maybe she just needed a break, to be alone, away for a while from my relentless love.

BUNRATTY WAS SUDDENLY behind me and I was only a downhill and an easy straight from Shannon. I wondered at my freshness, the lack of pain in my knees and ankles. I realigned my shoulders, hips and knees, and set my face to the cool breeze, and soon I was passing the empty guard box at the airport gate.

I saw a pilot on the edge of the wide path. He was smoking a cigarette, watching me approach, leaning against the metal jamb of the gate in the fence along the edge of the hangars for private jets. He was smiling at me. A black Gulfstream sat soaking sunlight on the concrete, parked at an angle from the nearest hangar, its nose cone cocked outwards almost jauntily, in a way that made it look as though it had been parked up in a hurry, like a car left on double yellows while an errand was being hastily run. I slowed to a walk as I neared him. He breathed a line of smoke skyward and said: Hello, friend. You look tired. Come and sit and have some coffee with me. And he ground his butt with a gleaming shoe and pushed himself away from his slouch and started to walk without looking back, and I followed him.

He showed me the controls of the jet, the throttle and the tiller pedals, the altimeter and trim counter and radar screen; he offered me his headpiece and his hat and roared with laughter when I put them on, and I looked across the tarmac at the distant terminal building and the viewing area where Mam and me sometimes used to go for a day out to watch the planes take off and land, and I was sure I could see two figures there looking back at me, a dark-haired man and a fair-haired child. I looked west at the glint from the water of the Shannon estuary where it lapped across the mudflats of Rineanna, and I thought how mad it was that I was here, with this sallow smiling man, and I took a small white cup of coffee from him that was haloed by wisps of steam, and he said that he was sad this day and he would tell me why.

His father had been a hotelier, a big man who laughed a lot and helped his neighbours with their problems. He turned to Mecca and prayed when he was meant to, but he was more observant than devout, a friend to all men. His father had been accused of harbouring insurgents and was taken one night and held for an autumn and winter in a prison at the edge of their town. Visits were not permitted. His father was released one cold morning and sent walking home barefoot. He was a different man, stooped, narrowed, yellowed, curled-up and dried to cracking like a fallen leaf. His eyes seemed wider in his shrunken face; they were cast down and filled with darkness. When he spoke, he addressed the ground, in a whisper, as though afraid his jailers would hear him, and take offence, and return for him. And he shrank and shrank from fear until nothing was left, and he slipped from this life without noise.