Catherine O’Flynn - Mr Lynch’s Holiday

‘So. I’d say it’s been long enough since dinner.’ Eamonn was aghast to see, inside the towel, a pair of swimming trunks at least as old as him.

‘Are you thinking of going in?’

‘Of course I am. Are you not?’

‘I hadn’t really planned to.’

‘What? Look at it. You’d be mad not to.’

‘The water will still be cold, it’s only June.’

‘Ah come on. It’ll do you good. Nothing like a plunge in the sea to clear the head.’

‘I’ve not brought my stuff.’

‘Sure you could swim in your pants, no one’s going to notice.’

Eamonn ran his hand over his face. ‘Oh God. OK, OK.’

Dermot grinned and clapped him on the arm.

Eamonn shook his head. ‘It’s going to be horrible.’

Dermot got changed quickly and Eamonn watched him stride into the water up to his knees and then stand motionless. His arms and the back of his neck were a deep red, but the skin on his back and legs was a creamy white. It looked newborn set against the dark, weather-beaten extremities. He felt an unexpected tenderness towards his father’s body. A sadness that there was no one but him to see its trueness and beauty. Dermot walked forward and plunged head first into a wave.

Eamonn’s own entrance into the water was typically protracted and tortuous. He waded gingerly up to his knees and then launched into an ungainly, jumpy kind of run into deeper waters, the cold like a hard kick to his balls. He thrashed about furiously and when the pain finally receded he lay on his back and trod water.

Looking up at the sky, he wondered for the first time how his and Laura’s childlessness might have seemed to his parents. Did they assume that they wanted children? Did they pity them?

The question had bobbed up to the surface between him and Laura occasionally over the years. In their twenties they had been baffled by the appeal of parenthood. They looked at every stage, from pregnancy, through childbirth, to the arrival of a baby and saw only pain, terror and hardship. When they thought of a baby they thought only of all the things they would lose.

After she’d hit thirty Laura became more ambivalent. She still didn’t actively want a baby, but neither could she be certain that she would never want one. She found the finality of the decision unsettling. She shared her doubts with Eamonn:

‘What if we change our minds and it’s too late?’

‘What if we can’t have children anyway?’

‘What if not having kids sends us funny and we start collecting figurines?’

What she wanted above all else was certainty. She read discussion forums on the Internet of the defiantly child-free and the fervent breeders, each group accusing the other of selfishness. The research, she said, had been inconclusive.

Eamonn’s position had changed. He had grown to like the idea of children, or at least a child, but still found the prospect daunting.

‘Maybe no one is ever certain,’ he said.

‘But it’s a big decision.’

‘Maybe you have to just jump.’

‘Do you think we should?’

But he didn’t want to persuade her; he wanted her to be completely sure.

He thought now of Dermot’s words. His parents had not considered themselves complete without children. They seemed to see themselves on the periphery of their own relationship. He found the idea stranger the more he thought about it. It suggested that falling in love created rather than filled an emptiness. He imagined them living in their three-bedroom house for all the years before he came along, waiting. He wondered if he and Laura had been waiting for something all these years and not even known it.

When he raised his head he saw he had drifted further out than he had realized. He saw his dad, a distant figure on the beach, a towel round his waist, walking away back to the line of prickly pears beyond the sand. Eamonn tried to stand but found he had floated out of his depth.

His legs were beginning to ache and he decided he too would go back. He started to swim, but seemed to make no progress. He put his head down again and swam harder, thrashing his arms and legs until he was short of breath. He lifted his eyes from the water and felt a small pulse of panic as he saw the beach still just as far away and the orange buoy still bobbing out of reach in front of him. He tried once more but was unable to free himself of the current. He turned around to see if there was anything he could drift out to, but instead was hit full in the face by a swell and took in water through his mouth and nose. He tried to float on his back again but the waves rolled over his head. His arms and legs were heavy now and hard to lift out of the water. He felt himself being dragged down and only then considered that he might drown. For a split second he felt not fear but surprise and a kind of disappointment that this is how it would all end. Then another swell washed over him and straightforward terror gripped him. As he came up from the next submersion, he heard a voice calling for help and recognized it as his own.

It seemed only seconds before he felt his father’s hand clutching him, his other arm encircling his neck and pulling him along. They struggled for a while, the two of them, and he heard Dermot’s ragged breathing as he fought the current with one arm, saying over and over again: ‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’

When they reached shallow water, Eamonn’s legs were too weak to walk. Dermot dragged him up on to the beach and lay him on the sand. He disappeared from Eamonn’s view for a moment and returned with the towel. He placed it over his son’s body and tucked it in all around. Eamonn wanted to ask if Dermot was OK, but he found it hard to speak.

‘I saw you were in trouble. I was on my way back out to you before you started calling.’ He was rubbing Eamonn’s chest, trying to warm him up. ‘What a fecking idiot I am, forcing you in there when you didn’t want to go and then walking off and leaving you. If your mother was alive, she’d murder me.’ He kept on rubbing. ‘I’m sorry, son, I’m sorry. You’re all right now. You’re all right.’

Eamonn was watching his father’s face close up. A scar on his chin. His wild eyebrows. The blue of his eyes.

‘You’re all right, Eamonn. God, I’m sorry. You gave me such a fright.’

Eamonn pulled his arm out from under the towel and laid a hand on his father’s cheek. Dermot stopped rubbing, kneeled back on his haunches and held his son’s hand to his face.

He stepped from the warm evening air into the church. He dipped his fingers into the stone font, dabbing holy water on his head, chest and shoulders, and then stood for a moment, unsure where to go, unmoored without Kathleen and Eamonn at his side. They sat in the same pew every Sunday. Eamonn squeezing between his legs and the iron bars of the radiator, seemingly finding the clankings and clicks of the ancient heating system more mysterious and significant than the words of the priest. While Kathleen was deep in prayer, her eyes shut, her lips moving, Dermot would pass sweets to the toddler. A rainbow drop. A Flump. A foam shrimp. Tiny points of colour in the half-light.

He hadn’t been to confession since he was a boy. Father Cahill had been his priest then, a giant crow of a man. He’d manifest himself in the schoolroom unexpectedly, shoulders hunched, knees cracking, stalking up and down the desks, rapping boys’ heads with his knuckles if they gave a wrong answer to questions of faith.

Dermot’s father made them attend confession every week.

‘What will we say?’ Dominic would whisper to Dermot in a panic on the waiting pew.

‘You’ve to confess your sins.’

‘But I don’t know what sins I’ve done.’ His brother’s voice high, terrified by what he had failed to do. Dermot would invent sins for them both. Dominic had broken his mother’s teapot and blamed the cat. Dermot had written bad words in the back of the family Bible. Dominic had been gluttonous at table. He invented sins to confirm to the priest that boys were essentially feral creatures and that penance was a blessed and necessary sacrament.