New Town Soul Read online

  It is a sound that she decides she never wants to hear again, because if she keeps playing that tape over and over she will keep on drinking vodka alone in the dark, slurring her words, blacking in and out of consciousness, hating herself for becoming a drunken lush, an alcoholic. Rising unsteadily, she walks into the bedroom they once shared to stare down at me sleeping in my cot. She knows that I will wake soon and will need to be fed; she knows that yesterday her hands shook so much that she almost dropped me. This spiral into chaos cannot continue, the nights without sleep, the days without seeing a soul, the filth and squalor in this cottage where she can no longer bring herself to cook or bathe her child or do anything except cry. She knows that she must choose between being Dessie Kilmichael’s widow and being a mother to his child.

  How long does she spend standing over my cot, shaking with grief, shaking with desire for the oblivion of another shot of vodka? Finally, she turns and searches for the suitcase that he always brought with him on the road. Ruthlessly, she crams every reminder of him into it. Leaving me alone in my cot, she leaves Brusna Cottages and crosses Main Street. She swings left down Bath Place until she reaches Idrone Terrace with the train tracks and the sea before her. It is raining heavily when she climbs the old footbridge over the railway tracks and stands there for a long time gazing down. There, she hurls all of my father’s demo tapes, his posters and press cuttings, his lyric sheets and every photograph of them together down onto the train tracks, watching as each precious memento is slowly scattered by the wind and the rain seeps into every handwritten lyric. She knows that this is her only way to break free of the past before the past breaks her. She stands there alone until the first train comes an hour later, until its wheels plough over the remaining traces of my father. By then, his life’s work and dreams have been blown all the way down the train tracks. Finally, she walks home to pour the remaining vodka down the sink and to focus purely on the future, for my sake.

  SIX

  Joey

  September 2009

  During my first week in Stradbrook College I realised that it was not a hanging offence to be different there. But no matter how progressive the atmosphere seemed, I was determined not to let my guard down. I planned to blend into the back-ground without anyone noticing me. However, Shane O’Driscoll noticed me. During boring classes he would wink across the room. At break-time he’d slap my back and start up a conversation. Shane chatted to everyone, but when he talked to me he made it feel like we belonged to a secret club of two, sharing a private joke that no one else could grasp.

  Although some people said he came from Blackrock and others that he came from Sallynoggin, he had spent the previous two years in England. The fact that he sought out my friendship confused me, because the whole class – with one exception – kept falling over themselves to be his friend. Only Geraldine, the girl who had smiled at me on that first morning, seemed immune to his spell. Geraldine was different from the other girls in the class: more mature, and yet somehow more vulnerable. She was the classmate I talked to most. Sadly, all these conversations happened in my head, because although I longed to ask her out, I never seemed to find the right words to start such a conversation. The fact that she was the only person in class without a Facebook page made it difficult too: while I knew too much about everyone else, I knew too little about her.

  Within a fortnight, Shane and I were best buddies at break-time. Yet when I tried to describe him to my mum, I realised that I knew virtually nothing about him either. He told me that both his parents had died two years ago, but when you discover that somebody is an orphan, you are terrified of asking the wrong question in case you touch a raw nerve. Whenever I did ask Shane about his life, he side-stepped my questions by turning his replies into jokes, and soon I would be telling him even more about myself, because he was a good listener. He seemed fascinated, almost greedy for every detail of my life.

  ‘What was the hassle in your old school?’ he asked me at break one morning.

  ‘It was all about soul,’ I said, leaning against the wall. ‘My ex-classmates had no soul and I had too much of it.’

  ‘You only have one soul,’ Shane said, ‘unless you steal someone else’s.’

  ‘When I say soul,’ I explained, ‘I mean soul music. My father used to sing it.’

  ‘And he doesn’t any more?’

  ‘He died in a car crash in the Dublin mountains. He was coming home from a gig. He was a singer-songwriter.’

  ‘Was he any good?’

  I shrugged. ‘If you Google him you find weird mentions of him. Some guy blogging, “It was hearing the maverick genius Dessie Kilmichael that inspired me to start playing guitar.” Or, “This dude sounds like a new Dessie Kilmichael – what a tragedy his death was, when songwriters with a fraction of his talent are now millionaires.”’

  ‘And what do you think of his songs?’ Shane asked.

  ‘I’ve never heard them.’

  He laughed in disbelief and kicked a pebble across the yard. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No. He even had a name for his debut album – New Town Soul – but he never got around to releasing it. He was constantly tinkering with it, doing different takes on every track. Mum says he was looking for the perfect take, the one that would make him immortal. She destroyed his demo tapes when I was small.’

  ‘Why?’ Shane looked up.

  I shrugged, unwilling to go into too much detail. At times I knew that Mum still yearned for the companionship of vodka. Occasionally, as a child, I had found an unopened bottle under her bed and knew that she was struggling against the temptation to open it. She always overcame that temptation, though I would see the strain in her for days afterwards. ‘She just did,’ I replied. ‘She rarely talks about him.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’

  ‘I never knew him. I was only a baby when he died. I went through his old record collection, though. Mum kept those, though she never played them. They sort of became my way of getting to know him, if you see what I mean. Some of the records are so old, I think he must have owned them at my age, when he was just learning to play guitar.’

  ‘So, do you play yourself?’

  ‘Don’t get me started.’ I raised my eyes sheepishly to heaven. ‘Why do you think I got such grief in my old school?’

  ‘What do you mean? How could playing a guitar cause hassle?’

  ‘It depends on what you play,’ I said. ‘I taught myself to play. I used to sit in my bedroom and imagine my dad picking out tabs at my age. It’s crazy, but I’d spend hours writing songs and playing them with my eyes closed, imagining that somehow Dad was listening, that he was my imaginary audience of one.’

  ‘You could do far worse.’ Shane spoke so quietly that I knew he was thinking about his own dead father.

  ‘I did do far worse,’ I replied. ‘I entered a talent contest in my old school.’

  ‘What’s so wrong with that?’

  ‘It was more like a karaoke contest – lads dancing to rap tracks and their girlfriends copying routines from girl bands. It wasn’t about talent; it was about conformity, being a pale imitation of some celebrity. In a school where you get bullied for wearing the wrong sort of trainers, what sort of moron walks out on stage with just a guitar and a page of dodgy handwritten lyrics?’

  ‘I bet your lyrics were good,’ Shane said.

  ‘Survival in that school wasn’t about being good, it was about not standing out. You needed to always wear the same clothes as everyone else, never express an original thought or leave yourself open to ridicule. I remember the awful silence when I walked on stage in that hall packed with boys and their girlfriends – or their sisters dragged along to look like girlfriends. My voice dried up and my guitar went out of tune. I knew that all I could expect from then on was to be bullied and made a joke of.’

  ‘Not all schools are like that,’ Shane said. ‘This place isn’t.’

  ‘I never intend to find out,’ I replied, as the bell went for the
end of break. ‘I’m not sticking my head up to let any hard men give me a kicking because they feel I need to be put back in my place. The guys in my old school knew I had no dad to turn to and that I’d say nothing to my mum because she had enough worries of her own.’

  ‘How bad was it?’ Shane asked quietly, as we joined the stream of pupils heading indoors.

  ‘Just taunts and jeers at first,’ I said. ‘Pages ripped from copybooks, insults scrawled on walls, my lunch stolen or my mobile phone stuffed down a toilet bowl. But soon even the geeks were joining in, because if somebody else was being bullied they wouldn’t be targeted themselves. In the end I couldn’t hide the strain – or the bruises – when I got beaten up. Mum was great, eating the head off the principal when he just waffled on about the school’s anti-bullying policy. He promised suspensions but she told him to stop talking rubbish because the ringleaders’ fathers were too well-connected for the school to have the guts to expel them. She told him to stuff his school. Then, somehow, she pulled strings to get me in here.’

  We reached the door into the corridor. Shane stopped and looked at me. ‘Your mum sounds like a good woman. You’re lucky.’

  ‘She’s more than just my mum,’ I said, as we went inside. ‘She’s my best friend.’ I paused. ‘Listen, Shane, don’t mention this stuff to anyone. Here in Stradbrook I just want to keep my head down, OK?’

  SEVEN

  Shane

  June 2007

  That summer he turned fourteen, Shane would smile sleepily and lie to his folks about his plans for the day ahead when they woke him before leaving for work every morning. But the only event he could truly look forward to was his morning visit to Black-rock Library. His day depended on the success of this visit, because he could cope with the long afternoons spent alone if he had a good adventure story to lose himself in. There was only so much television a fourteen-yearold could watch, the new Xbox his father promised him after his old one broke had never materialised and Shane rarely got any texts on his mobile, because his old pals in Sallynoggin were too busy getting on with their own lives to bother checking out his new one. Once or twice, he took a bus back to Sallynoggin and tried to hang out on the green opposite his old house, but he got too much grief from some older lads. They jeered that he had become a snob because he’d gone to live in Blackrock.

  Now, his routine was simple. After each library visit he would go for a long solitary walk around Blackrock or out the Booterstown Road to where a tiny, overgrown cemetery was hidden behind an Esso garage. It was a good place to sit alone without any passers-by thinking he was a loser. Sometimes he would walk up the narrow cul- de-sac at Castledawson Avenue to stand outside the deserted ruin of Mrs McCormack’s dairy where his grandparents first met when they were his age. The front door looked like it hadn’t been opened for years and the frayed lace curtains behind the unlit windows were blackened with grime. At times he felt a longing to explore the empty rooms of that house, but a fear held him back, the foreboding sense of terror which he felt if he even put his hand on the dilapidated wooden gate.

  He would turn for home feeling utterly alone, but the frightening thing was that some afternoons when he returned to the duplex, he did not feel truly alone there. A newly-built development like Sion Hill could not have ghosts, but sometimes he had the sensation that unseen eyes were watching him move from room to room. The duplex seemed unnaturally cold on such afternoons and, even if it was raining, he would sit out on the balcony because he felt safer there. He would try to immerse himself in a library book until he heard his mother’s key in the lock.

  No book could be a substitute for what he yearned for, which was to make a friend. But it was through books that he met Geraldine. As that summer wore on, they were often the only two people scouring the shelves of Black-rock Library in the sweltering heat. She was the same age as Shane, but she looked dead cool for a girl. She was tomboyish, but very definitely female in all the right places. She looked like someone he could talk to, but he was too shy to start a conversation. Geraldine always arrived and left alone. Shane sensed that she had no shortage of friends but loved to spend a part of each day lost in a book.

  Geraldine had jet-black hair and a slightly bossy air. She would browse contentedly until she found a book she liked and then stand between the library stacks, smiling as if entranced by the opening paragraph, before closing the book with a satisfied snap and disappearing back out into the sunlight, unaware that Shane was there, unable to stop staring at her. He started to automatically borrow whatever books she left back, even if he had read them a dozen times before. This was his way of getting to know her, to feel that – unbeknownst to her – he was sharing in some tiny part of her life. Soon, he even began to follow her home – discreetly, from a safe distance – because in his mind it prolonged the time when they were together and it put off the loneliness of heading back to the empty duplex that he still couldn’t think of as home.

  Geraldine lived in the last house on a small old redbrick terrace just off the end of Newtown Avenue. There was nothing grand about the house, just like there was nothing grand about Geraldine. But the house looked inviting, like the sort of home he would have chosen if he had been given any say in this move to Blackrock. It had a side garden with a wrought iron gate and, once, after Geraldine went indoors, Shane peered through the bars and saw a hammock suspended between an apple tree and the wall. That night, when his parents argued so loudly that he couldn’t even read, he closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself swaying peacefully in that hammock.

  On the fifth morning that he followed her home, Geraldine stopped outside her gate and stared back down the road while Shane ducked behind a parked car. When he glanced up cautiously, she was still standing there, waiting for him to emerge. Feeling mortified, he stood up and walked away without looking back. That night, no matter how hard he tried to focus on his book, nothing could block out the sounds of his parents arguing. He felt that he had lost the only friend he had – even if Geraldine had never known that he viewed her as his friend and that he would spend lonely afternoons imagining scenarios where they became buddies, taking turns to sway in that hammock in her garden.

  The next morning, he felt ashamed when Geraldine came into the library. He was afraid she would call him a creep. But she just returned a new mystery book and left without glancing in his direction. When Shane snatched up the book, he noticed a slip of paper sticking out. The handwriting was neat in the way that only a girl’s handwriting could be:

  I bet you think you’re the shiest person on the planet but I would win that prize because I’m shier. Why don’t you text me what you think of this book? I think the ending is savage.

  Geraldine.

  Underneath this message she had drawn a smiley face and jotted down her mobile number.

  Shane didn’t bother going back to the empty house. Sitting alone in Blackrock Park, he finished the book within two hours. He loved every word of it, partly because it was so good, but also because he knew that she had liked it. His first text was short: It was utterly brill. Who is your fav writer?

  Texting took away the awkwardness of talking. By bedtime, they had exchanged two dozen messages. He barely even heard his parents argue that night. When he found it hard to sleep, it was not because of any fears of recurring nightmares about water; it was because Geraldine had agreed to meet him outside Blackrock Library the next morning and Shane felt that maybe he had found the friend he was longing for.

  EIGHT

  Joey

  October 2009

  Six weeks into our autumn term, my new class at Stradbrook College attended an overnight retreat in a centre in Glencree in the mountains. On the way, we stopped off at the burned-out ruins of the Hellfire Club. The others all shrieked and tried to spook each other as they chased through the remote, tumbledown rooms. Only Shane stayed outside the old hunting lodge, sitting on a stump in the forest. When people called on him to join them he would grin and shake his head, but
there was something about his eyes that was the closest I had ever come to seeing him scared.

  I sat beside him, partly to keep him company but also because I was upset. This was the road where my father had died. Shane looked up after a while.

  ‘Can you imagine the sickening taste of raw whiskey and melted butter?’ he asked. ‘That’s what the Hellfire Club members used to drink, toasting the devil in front of a blazing fire when they came up here, roaring drunk, from the Eagle Tavern.’

  ‘And to think that us teenagers get a bad name if we drink a few cans in the park on a Friday night,’ I joked, trying to lighten his mood.

  ‘A Blackrock man once died up here,’ Shane said. ‘Henry Dawson. His servant boy claimed that he’d found him with his throat cut. The same servant boy wound up owning half of Blackrock.’

  ‘Who the hell was Henry Dawson?’

  ‘A gambler with nothing left to gamble, the sort of man that people say couldn’t resist one last bet with the devil.’ Shane picked up a loose stone and hurled it into the undergrowth. ‘He was the last of the family who built Castledawson House. He came into his inheritance too young and blazed through it too soon. In the end he was a wreck from lust and drink and opium, with nothing left except a body wracked by illness and a house riddled with debt.’

  I had never heard Shane speak this way before. ‘When did this happen?’ I asked.

  Shane glanced towards the ruins. ‘Several lifetimes ago.’