Free The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones Page B

on both sides. They hug him then hold him at arm’s length to look at him. One sees a son and the other sees a brother. Billy sees his origins.
    The next day rain falls in long thick beads down the windowpane. Billy’s grandfather hasn’t seen his son (Billy’s father) since he was eighteen years of age. There is so much to tell. The questions come at him all day long. Then when his father’s schoolmates arrive on the door the questions start again. Questions about his father and about the country he’s made his life in; soon Billy finds himself giving the one answer, descriptions that seem to cover both the place and the person—quiet, warmish, given to long silences, the contentment of lakes and the way they reflect their surroundings. Billy looks at the folds of his grandfather’s face. The old man is grinning down at the pipe he is packing—‘So is ee a good worker, Billy?’
    ‘The best.’
    ‘The best.’ His grandfather looks behind to one of his father’s old schoolmates. ‘Did yea hear dat? The best. Not just “good”. No. The best.’ He smiles in a secretive way and turns back to Billy. ‘So, tell me. How does ee spend his Sunday mornings?’ Billy has to think about this. It could be a trick question. He isn’t sure whether the old boy is a churchgoer or abstainer. Either way he’s bound to be a zealot about his choice. Billy looks up from his teacup. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘What was the question?’
    His grandfather leans forward with a cagey grin. ‘I asked how my boy spends his Sunday mornings.’
    ‘Thoughtfully,’ answers Billy, and this time his grandfather rocks back and slaps his leg with delight. He finds Billy’s uncle smirking in the corner of the room. ‘Did you hear that?’ Now the uncle is shaking his head; his eyes are watering with mirth. The grandfather refills Billy’s whisky glass. ‘Thoughtfully. I like dat. I like dat a whole lot, Billy.’
    The hours pass. Family lore. One or two photographs. Now for some history. The grandfather shows Billy his firearms collection. He picks up an antique weapon, and as he runs his fingertips over the smooth cherry stock his grandfather tells him: ‘Dat was used back when Londonderry closed its gates to the English. About two hundred years ago. A relative used dat to kill King James’s explosives man.’
    ‘Really?’ says Billy.
    The old boy purses his lips. ‘No. But you can tell that and no harm will come. The next part I’ll tell you is one hundred percent true though.’
    ‘The next part’ he shared with Bill Glenn on the train back to Dublin. ‘The siege lasted over a hundred days and people were reduced to such a state they ate dirt and gnawed on hides to stay alive. A dog’s paw sold for five shillings!’
    ‘Really?’ asks Glenn.
    ‘I’m not entirely sure, Bill, to be honest.’
    In Dublin they meet up with the team and hear about the rout at Limerick. We cut Munster apart with five tries, but at a terrible cost. George Smith is carrying his arm in a sling and we have England next.
    9 pm. The slick dark of the road leading down to the docks where a huge crowd had assembled to see us to Holyhead. We stayed out on deck, sharing the freezing night with the crowd, and as the ferry departed they threw their hats in the air.
    We were back on water, back to that indeterminate space that we had first liked across the Pacific then grown sick of across the Atlantic. We retired to our cabins and to kill the hours Mister Dixon called for an exchange of ‘things never before seen or experienced’. Fats Newton lay on his pillow, his feet up against the cabin walls, and recited his list—olives at the Irish dinner
    street lamps glowing through the bleak London fog at noon
    champagne
    elephants (in Regent’s Park)
    a ride in a motor car
    black people and Spaniards
    Maria George in
The White Chrysanthemum
    The huge swimming pool at Montevideo, all enclosed, two hundred and twenty dressing rooms
    on Fats