Catherine O’Flynn - Mr Lynch’s Holiday

At the terminus he asked if the driver spoke English and she said a little. Eamonn’s place was unmarked on the map. A new town. Purpose built. There was just a small cross in biro that Eamonn had made for his mother before he left. Dermot tried the name of it anyway on the driver and when she looked blank he was unsure if it was his pronunciation or the obscurity of the place. He pointed on the map to where he was heading and she shook her head and blew air as if trying to whistle. She opened her window and called to the driver of a bus parked across the street. She turned back to Dermot.

‘Is very far. Difficult.’

‘Right.’

‘Bus T-237 to here.’ She indicated a point on the map a little distance from Eamonn’s cross. ‘ Después …’ she blew air through her lips again and shrugged. ‘Taxi?’

‘Right. Thank you very much.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘ Gracias .’ The driver smiled and showed him where to get the bus.

He took his time walking through the town, looking in the windows of the shops he passed. He saw one that seemed to sell only slippers and another one just pyjamas. At the baker’s he paused and studied the display before deciding to enter. Inside he found he was a good foot and a half taller than any of the other customers. Some of the women turned to look at him and he gave each a brief nod of his head. There was no queue that he could discern, but the two women behind the counter seemed to know in which order to serve everyone. When it came to his turn, he pointed at a stick of bread filled with ham and cheese, and bought some kind of milkshake as well. He took them out into the street and ate them waiting for the bus, enjoying the warmth of the sun seeping through his clothes.

Time: 43:08; Moves: 579. Two kings were trapped behind the seven of clubs. He shifted cards from the ace piles and back again, treading water while the clock ticked on. Just visible on the screen, above the top-right corner of the simulated green baize, a folder of students’ work sat unmarked. He glanced at it periodically and then back at the cards. There were different ways to traverse the vast floes of time.

He found himself staring at the blinking cursor, unsure how long he had been doing so. His body had become synced with the cursor’s rhythm: the ebb and flow of his blood, the throb of his heart, the pulse of his headache. When his eyes finally refocused, it was upon the date display. He stared at it for some time, finding it distantly familiar, before reaching for his father’s letter.

He stood up quickly, feeling dizzy, thrashing about in search of the car keys before running into the street. The hot breath of the Toyota threatened to suffocate him as he climbed inside. He turned the key and the engine clicked. He did it again and again, as if the act of turning the key could somehow recharge the battery. He got out to breathe and kick the car like a child and then he was still.

On the second leg of the journey the landscape was unvaried. He saw nothing for miles but great expanses of polytunnels, the entire countryside hidden behind wrapping. Occasionally he’d glimpse a field apparently abandoned, its plastic covering ripped open and hanging in sheets as if the crops inside had escaped during the night. For a long time he could detect no evidence of humanity, but gradually his eyes adjusted to the rhythm of the landscape and he began to spot makeshift shacks huddled next to the vast plastic tunnels, T-shirts and jeans hanging from washing lines, plastic garden furniture, a solitary young black man crouching in the shade.

The bus dropped him near the junction to the road that led to Eamonn’s village. From the map it looked to be about four miles by that road, but he saw there was a more direct route over the hills. He had always been a walker, often finding himself walking his bus routes on days off, investigating more closely things he had been able only to glimpse from the driver’s cab. As he climbed the main slope now, even with the footing a little tricky in parts, he realized how much he had missed decent hills like these and the feeling of his blood moving quickly around his body.

Eamonn’s apartment was in the upper reaches of Lomaverde, at the rear of the development, or the ‘urbanization’, as some of the other expats called it in a strange mangling of the Spanish. His block was at the end of the street; beyond its side-wall lay nothing but steep-rising, bare scrubland, optimistically described as ‘impressive mountain scenery’ in the sales particulars. Now, leaning against the car, paralysed by indecision, he glimpsed something in the distance on the hillside. He looked again and saw that it was a human figure. Nobody approached Lomaverde from the hill. Visitors, such as they were, came along the winding road from the town. The burglaries had stopped but they all remained suspicious of strangers. He shielded his eyes with his hands and looked up towards the black shape.

Dermot had grown used to the sparseness of the landscape on the climb: slopes of arid, white soil, broken up with wild rosemary. When he reached the top he saw the broad expanse of the Mediterranean stretched out before him. The deep blue seemed to rinse his eyes of the grittiness they’d had since boarding the plane that morning. The water appeared completely still and he stood, equally still, his breathing slowing, fully absorbed by the colour below him. He thought of the spray as you walked along the promenade in Lahinch and remembered, for the first time in many years, the taste of seaweed from a bag.

It was only now that he noticed the development below, between him and the sea. He wasn’t sure at first what it was. The gleaming white cubes looked somehow scientific in purpose, a collection of laboratories or observatories perhaps. It was a few moments before he realized that what he was looking at was Eamonn’s village. The neat, white boxes, curving black roads and lush green lawns stood out sharply against the dusty ridge. From where he stood, the sun bouncing off the sea, a heat haze shimmering around its edges, Lomaverde looked like a mirage.

The man was carrying something and shouting. All Eamonn could catch was a single repeated word that sounded like ‘ Llover ’ and he wondered if this was some strange, wandering weatherman come to warn them all of rain. It was Eamonn’s legs that recognized him first. They started moving, seemingly independent of his will, up the slope, his ears finally unscrambling the words correctly:

‘Hello there! Eamonn!’

He had just a moment to register the incongruity of his father’s presence there on the blazing hillside, dressed in a light woollen jacket, carrying his Aston Villa holdall, before they were standing facing each other, Dermot smiling shyly and saying, as if it were the most normal thing in the world:

‘And how are you, son?’

He lurked in the kitchen, making coffee, peering through the serving hatch at his father, still in his jacket, drinking water, the glass tiny in his hand. Dermot only ever looked in scale with his surroundings when sat in the driver’s cab of a bus, the enormous steering wheel a perfect fit for his outsize paws. He was six foot four, with a lantern jaw and an epic chest. Reminiscent, Eamonn often thought as a child, of popular cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn. Eamonn had inherited his father’s eyes, almost all of his height and about half of his width.