Catherine O’Flynn: Mr Lynch’s Holiday

He arrived on a cloudless day. As he stepped on to the tarmac, he looked up at the sky and saw nothing but blue and the traces left by other planes.

The terminal was deserted. He wandered along polished floors with a handful of other passengers. Music was playing somewhere. An old tune, he couldn’t remember the name. It was not how he’d imagined airports. It seemed more like a ballroom to him. Something grand and sad about the place.

Walking through a sliding door he found himself in the arrivals hall, confronted by a crowd of people crushed up against the rail waving pieces of paper and looking at him expectantly. Scanning the faces and signs, he smiled apologetically for not being their man. He looked beyond them to others who hung back and leaned against walls, but saw no trace of Eamonn. He had never assumed that he would be able to meet him. It wasn’t always possible to just drop what you were doing.

Eamonn wasn’t sure how long he’d been awake, or if what had passed before had been sleep. He seemed to have been conscious for hours, lying inert in a kind of trance. He rolled on to Laura’s empty side of the bed and picked up the barely there scent of her perfume, citric and uncertain. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, waiting to recover.

He sidled over to the window, opening the shutters an inch before slamming them closed again. He tried once more, pulling back slowly, keeping his gaze downcast, watching colour flood the floor tiles. His feet retained their mortuary hue, luminously pale on the terracotta slabs.

When he thought his eyes could stand it, he looked out of the window. It was just as he’d known. Another day, dazzling and merciless.

He found the payphones and pulled an address book out of his bag. The book was ancient, a faded lady with a parasol on the cover, the Sellotape holding it together dried out and yellow. The pages bulged with various additions and amendments on old letters, birthday cards and torn scraps of tea-bag box. Looking for Eamonn’s details he came across the phone numbers of various friends and family long dead or forgotten. It was strange to think that by pressing a few buttons he might hear some of their voices again. The book contained his and Kathleen’s entire life, and the information it held was almost all obsolete.

When he found the number he realized he’d need coins and suddenly it was all too much bother and messing about when he could be off and on the road already. He was happy to make his own way. He thought there were few places you couldn’t reach with a decent map and public transport.

He found the buses easily enough at the airport. He boarded one with the name of what looked a fairly large town, in the general direction of Eamonn’s place. The woman driver gave a small nod when he attempted his pronunciation of the place. Receiving change was the first thing that really struck him as foreign. He wondered if she appreciated how much aggro she avoided by not insisting on exact fares.

Eamonn was hungry. He rooted listlessly in the kitchen cupboards, conscious that he had done the same thing the previous day, and maybe the day before that too. He found the madeleine cake hitherto rejected for the dark stain of mould on its underside. He cut away the exterior, leaving a cubic inch of untainted yellow sponge, which he put on a plate and took out on to the balcony along with a cup of stale mint tea.

He sat on the terrace, looking over at the shared swimming pool. It had been empty for almost a year, the chlorinated water replaced with a thin layer of pine needles. He noticed that a family of cats had moved in overnight, locating themselves in the deep end on a discarded Cheetos box. Lomaverde had proven to be a popular destination for hardworking cats and their families. The legion of them snaking in the shadows around the bins had steadily grown. It was hard to tell if fresh residents were continuing to flood in or if the original settlers were simply reproducing rapidly in the promised land.

He was startled by the door buzzer — a strange skip to his heart as he pressed the button, thinking: ‘I have become a dog.’ He was greeted with the klaxon voice of the postwoman. She made occasional trips out to the development, seemingly as and when she felt it worth her while. He didn’t know what happened to the mail between being sent and being delivered, if it languished in a sorting office somewhere or if the postwoman herself kept it all in her flat. He imagined her rooms filled with crates of mail, sacks of other people’s special offers and exclusive opportunities stuffed under her bed.

There was never anything much in the post that he wanted anyway. He shuffled down to the lobby for something to do and collected the pile from his mailbox, dropping each envelope after a cursory glance: Vodafone bill, Endesa bill, Santander statement, and then he stopped. He examined the pale blue envelope closely before opening it.

Dear Eamonn,

How are you? I hope well. All is fine here. Anne came over last week to help clear the last of your mother’s things. I’m glad now that it’s done, I’d been putting it off for too long.

You’re no doubt wondering what spirit has moved me to write, so I will get down to brass tacks. I’m not getting any younger and I have to accept that I could follow your mother any day now and it’s high time I crossed off some of those things on the ‘to do’ list.

I don’t know if you remember John Nolan (son of Eugene), but he works in Harp Travel now and has sorted out flights and tickets for me. I’ll be arriving at the airport in Almería at nine in the morning on 7 June.

Please don’t be going to any bother on my account, I’m well used to taking care of myself. I’m looking forward to seeing you and Laura and getting my first taste of ‘abroad’.

Best wishes,

Your dad

The bright sun on the pale paper was blinding. His father’s looping blue words floated up off the page into the air around him like dust motes. He moved away from the window and read it again. He found himself fixing on irrelevancies like who John Nolan might be, or how Harp Travel could still be in business. He would phone his father later and tell him to cancel the trip. He started thinking of gentle excuses.

Dermot sat near the front of the bus and studied the passing landscape. Near the airport everything was huge. He saw elevated advertising hoardings and vast storage facilities, all on the scale of the airport itself, as if aeroplanes, not cars, might be passing along the road. Further on, the landscape broke down into a cluttered mishmash that he found hard to process. Small, scrappy agricultural plots with shacks made of plastic crates and tarpaulin huddled in the shadow of mirrored-glass buildings and their empty car parks. He looked at the graffiti under every flyover — colourful images as complicated and jumbled as the landscape around them — huge letters with teeth and eyes spelling strange words and names. He saw the same poster for a circus over and over again and later passed the circus itself in the middle of a parched field. The word ‘Alegría’ was written in lights above the entrance.