Andrew Fox - Over Our Heads

When I got to the Oarsman, I found Kevo behind the bar. I was surprised and happy to see him, though at first I didn’t recognize him. He looked like a new man: cleanly shaven rather than stubbled; wearing a black shirt tucked into black trousers rather than overalls or jeans; and with his hair grown out, waxed and parted rather than shaved to the skull or hidden under a baseball cap.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

‘Is this your local, is it? Just started last night.’

I ordered a drink and watched him pick a glass from the shelf, hold it at a perfect angle beneath the spout and pull the tap. The dark liquid crashed into the glass, rolled back on itself and rose. Kevo pushed back on the tap at the precise moment I would have done. He set the pint aside to settle and leaned across the bar. He smiled, and I realized how young he was, how possible it might be for him to do something. I asked about the other lads. He told me what he’d heard. That Graham finally had figured out how to hotwire a car, which he’d driven around for a night before slamming it into an eighteen-wheeler. That Tony had some cockamamie plan to open up his own firm, but was still and probably forever would be working out the details.

PJ Nolan, incidentally, bought three restaurants from a bad bank for one euro apiece. The last I heard, he’s doing reasonable business.

The first time I tried to install the star nut, I had no soft blocks to cushion the dropouts and no vice to steady the fork, so I rigged up the front end and straddled the wheel, squeezing with my knees. I placed the nut in the mouth of the steering tube and covered it with a scrap of driftwood. I took a hammer from my father’s toolbox, weighed it in my hand.

The shed was crammed with old paint cans and broken patio chairs and musty cardboard boxes spilling lawnmower engine parts. When he was younger, my father had used it as a workshop. On summer weekends, he’d patched punctures and replaced chain guards for Mona’s friends and mine, and in winter he’d resealed hulls for small fishermen and varnished our mother’s furniture. I’d grown up fascinated and enraged by the hours he chose to spend secluded from us in there. But since I’d returned to him, and found his bike corroding, I’d taken it on as a project and made the shed my own.

Already I’d stripped away the rusted components and cleaned a decade’s worth of sand and grease from the frame. I’d raided the plastic boxes on the shelves for tools and inner tubes, and visited the bike shop in Balbriggan for a pair of chrome hubs, a brushed steel headset and stem, a set of aluminium brake levers and calipers and the most expensive chainset I could afford.

I swung the hammer and felt a nice shudder in my wrist, but when I lifted the wood the nut fell to the floor and rolled to rest by my heel. I set everything up and swung the hammer again but this time missed the centre of the wood and lodged the nut at an angle. When I tried to pry it out, it splintered in the hammer’s claw. When I fished for it, I cut a red slice in the meat of my thumb. When I leaned the bike against the wall, the wheels slipped their stays and the frame and fork keeled over. I stood for a while with my thumb in my mouth and looked at what I’d done.

In the kitchen, the kettle whistled beside a bowl of oats and raisins. A cup with a tea bag scrunched inside sat waiting on the worktop. I took a roll of plaster from the first-aid box beneath the sink and bandaged my thumb, lifted the kettle from its cradle and made the porridge and the tea. I set a tray and climbed the stairs to the study, where I found my father hunched over his desk, still wearing his blue bathrobe and black gorilla-foot slippers.

The desktop was a salvaged ship door from Napoleonic times; years before, Dad had planed and sanded it and bolted it to driftwood legs. The shelves above his head held complete boxed sets of Popular Mechanics, Civil Aircraft Markings, Propliner Magazine and Automotive Repair , as well as his slide collection, his stamp collection and his library of films recorded from TV. I set the breakfast things down in front of him. He stared blankly at the cup and bowl, then stretched his right hand in the wedge of light that angled in from the high window. The fingers were surprisingly slender.

‘You see that?’ he said.

‘See what?’

‘That ring.’

‘That’s your wedding ring, Dad.’

His eyes were quick. ‘Christ, I know that . You dirty-looking eejit. I’m not all gone yet that I’d forget a thing like that .’

His finger tapped the freckled hollow at his temple. He held out his other hand, the third finger of which showed a pale band of soft skin beneath the knuckle.

‘But I usually wear it on this finger is the thing. I change it sometimes when I have to remind myself to do something, you know. Your mother taught me that, but … What was it, is what I want to know. Do you understand me? I’ve forgotten what it was I was supposed to remember.’

‘It’ll come back to you,’ I said, as evenly as I could.

Before my second attempt at installing the star nut, I tuned the spokes, ran new tubes inside new tyres and bolted the wheels to the frame and fork. I greased the headset bearings and screwed on the compression rings. I magic-markered a red X in the centre of the scrap of wood and positioned it over the mouth of the steering tube. Then I raised the hammer, brought it down and felt a shudder and a little give. I repositioned the wood and brought the hammer down a second time. A third.

The wood slipped, and I knew before I looked that the nut had broken. When I did look, I saw a long fissure that my hammer alone could not have caused. It was the result of an original flaw, a weakness in the casting. I took a thin piece of sawn-off scrap metal and hammered the nut all the way through the hollow tube to the floor. I knew that I would have to take the bus to Balbriggan to get another one. But as I gathered up the pieces and flung them in the bin, I took solace from the knowledge that it was the nut, and not my method, that had been defective.

On my way to the bus, I offered to walk Dad to his doctor’s appointment. We took the cycle path that hugged the dunes behind the house. The sky was low above a tidal plain dark with seaweed, the waves a deep icy blue where they broke on the near side of the island line. The arcade and the chip shop were shuttered for the season. Dad greeted the drunks huddled on the wall by the public toilets each by name. We cut through the lane by the caravan park and came out on the main street at the monument to Great War dead. At the surgery, I said goodbye but found myself unwilling to leave.

‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ I said.

‘But you’ll miss your bus then, won’t you?’

‘Yeah, but … You can get home all right?’

Dad looked past me up the street. In the near distance the red front door of the house was visible. He laughed.

‘Fuck off, you,’ he said.

The owner of the bike shop in Balbriggan had a high forehead and a cabled throat, oily fingernails and plastic glasses mended with electrical tape. Behind him was a corkboard to which faded posters from suppliers were pinned, in front of him a glass case strewn with so many parts it looked as though a bike had exploded in there.

He wanted to talk about the merits of the new Shimano range and about his sons’ successes in the downhill racing leagues. I rushed the transaction as politely as possible, half-ran for the return bus and stood up front by the driver watching the rocks of the coastline blurring past the window.

Back at home, I walked from room to room looking for Dad. His bowl of porridge and his cup of tea were still upstairs, untouched. As I cleaned them at the sink, I told myself that he must be stuck in the usual queue behind wheezing smokers and diabetic fatsos. Or maybe he had gone to the bookies for a flutter or ducked into the Lifeboat for a pint.