Catherine O’Flynn - Mr Lynch’s Holiday

By the time he reached thirty, comfortable in his job and in his life, he was bored by his own incessant commentary, sick of beating himself up about every lifestyle choice he made. That was at the heart of his willingness to move abroad: to live in a place where he was unaware of the secret signs, for such things to be invisible or unreadable to him, where he might imagine the best of everyone. He hadn’t been lured to Spain by the sand and the sea and endless re-runs of A Place in the Sun on daytime television, but rather by the promise of sitting in a bar and not being able to extrapolate an entire way of life from someone’s choice of shoe.

One afternoon, settled in Lomaverde, leaning back against the wall of the shallow end of the pool, he had squinted at the horizon. A transformation had taken place. The beauty had become invisible. Blue sky, blue sea, blue tiles. What once was sublime had become banal. He knew he’d made a mistake. A few weeks later the pool was empty and he knew then too that there was nothing he could do about it.

Dermot searched high and low and still there was no sign of it. He wondered if Laura could possibly have taken it with her. He tried to picture her struggling with it down the road. It seemed only marginally less likely than the fact that his son, at the age of thirty-three, did not own an ironing board. Based on Eamonn’s appearance, he shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was.

He laid his shirt out on a towel on the dining table and did the best job he could. Afterwards he sat on the futon and tried to read his book. It was a history of Spain he’d ordered from the library. On the flight over he had been absorbed by its accounts of Los Reyes Catolicos and their efforts to drive out the Moors. He had been particularly taken with the tale of Boabdil the Unlucky, picturing him sighing as he looked back over the Granada he had surrendered. He thought now of the poor souls he’d heard about the other day, washed up on the beach, never even getting a glimpse of their lost land. The book kept championing the great gains made by Ferdinand and Isabella, but Dermot found them an unsympathetic pair. Intolerant, you’d have to say, by anyone’s standards.

He looked at the clock and strained his ears for any signs of life from beyond Eamonn’s door. He’d begun to think of it more as a crypt than a room. He imagined his son lying in state on his bier, the shutters closed tight to keep out the sun’s rays. He thought Eamonn may as well have stayed in Birmingham for all he ventured out or appeared to care about the world outside. The only thing he seemed to do was look at his computer. He said he was working, but his face showed no sign of concentration or thought, just blank-eyed absorption in whatever it was he saw in the glow of the screen. The flat mirrored his lifelessness. He had never been handy. Kathleen always said Eamonn had been graced with brains, not brawn, but Dermot couldn’t see that it took much brawn to put a line of sealant around a bath, nor any evidence of brains in not doing so. There was scant furniture and what there was seemed placed without any particular thought or care. It felt a makeshift rather than a homely place, the desire to leave evident in every corner.

And then there was Laura, the invisible woman. He wondered when Eamonn might reveal what in God’s name he had done with her. There was nothing of hers that Dermot could see around the flat.

Eamonn had lost things often as a boy. Maybe all children did, Dermot didn’t know. Jumpers, pumps, Matchbox cars, marbles, all of them vanished into the chaos of his days. It was a great mystery to Dermot where they went. He remembered being careful as a boy, cherishing the things he had, jealously guarding any small space he could call his own in the house. Perhaps because Eamonn was an only child he could afford to be careless and leave things lying around. Maybe they had spoiled him and not taught him the value of his belongings. Whatever the reason, his absent-mindedness was remarkable. It was made worse by his inability to conduct a logical search. He could not grasp the connection between a missing item and his own previous whereabouts. He would waste hours searching in places he had not been. Climbing a tree to search for a guitar. Looking in his wardrobe for a bike. The physical location of things seemed entirely mysterious to him, unrelated to any action of his own. Had his missing Action Man turned up on the top deck of the 43 bus, Dermot imagined Eamonn simply shrugging and putting it down to the unknowable shiftings of the world and its contents.

He read another line and then closed the book. He did not enjoy unpunctuality. Sometimes, as a driver, with circumstances beyond his control — six inches of snow, a motorbike gone under a lorry, stuck behind Slow Joe McEvoy — he was late. But not often. With very few exceptions, unpunctuality was a choice, and Dermot chose to be on time. He walked over and knocked on Eamonn’s door. ‘Are you awake in there?’

Indistinct murmuring.

‘Eamonn. Are you awake? It’s quarter to one.’

He heard the clatter of something falling to the floor, followed by swearing. ‘I’m awake. I’m awake.’

‘They’re expecting us at one.’

‘Who?’

‘For goodness’ sake, Eamonn. Are you not up?’

‘Oh … Is it lunchtime already?’

‘It’s quarter to one. They’re expecting us at one. I don’t want to be late.’

‘Are you not ready?’

‘Of course I’m ready. I’ve been sat here ready for the past thirty minutes. I’ve been waiting for you!’

A pause. ‘Look … you go. It’s you they invited really. They could see me any time. They wanted to meet you.’

‘Eamonn. I don’t know them. They invited both of us.’

They had bumped into them on the way back from the barbecue the previous evening. An English couple. Friendly. Polite. Nice people. The kind who, like him, would consider lateness as ill-mannered.

There was more noise from behind the door and then it opened. Dermot recoiled a little at the sight of his son stood in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, white as a sheet, hair sticking up in the air, eyes screwed up.

‘Dad, they’ll be delighted to have you. They just want to make you feel welcome. I’ve got a load of work to catch up with anyway. They won’t miss me. I’m not sure they were even expecting me to go along.’

Dermot looked at his son and then at his watch. He turned and left without saying another word.

As he walked along the street he couldn’t think of another time he had gone to a stranger’s house for lunch. He couldn’t think of a time he had gone to a friend’s house for lunch. He didn’t, until Eamonn had introduced the word, even eat lunch. He ate dinner in the middle of the day, and dinner was a sandwich, a cup of tea and a look at the Mirror or the Evening Mail . Back when he was working he might have chatted to some of the other lads, maybe played a hand of cards afterwards in the canteen, but only because they were there, it was never an arrangement. Socializing was done in the evenings at the houses of friends, or at the social, or in the pub. You drank and you chatted and you had some laughs. He didn’t know what you were supposed to do in the middle of the day. Kathleen would have known what to expect. She would have read about it in a magazine. She’d be briefing him now at the doorstep, picking at imaginary stray fibres on his shoulder.

‘Hello, Dermot! It’s so lovely to meet you.’

A woman with short, bobbed, silver-grey hair was smiling at him.

‘Hello again, Jean.’ He stood on the step, awkward. ‘I’m very sorry now, but I’m afraid Eamonn can’t come. He has a terrible amount of work to do and …’