Free Peeling Oranges by James Lawless

have no trouble the other way when I wander out in the night. Is it that I think M is too pure, or that the act is dirty? Is it because I have spent so much of my life on a lofty intellectual plain that I consider coitus a base act, animalistic, like the dog mounting the bitch in the street? Or is it due to my age? The doctor can’t answer my questions. Despite the risk, I will have to go to Barcelona again. I am filled with trepidation, but the compulsion is stronger than my fear.
    ***
    ‘Come out of that room. What are you doing in there all the time?’
    ‘I’m all right, Mam. I’m reading.’
    ‘I hope it’s not his stuff you’re reading?’
    ‘No, just books.’
    ‘There’s supper going cold.’
    ‘I’ll be out in a while.’
    ‘Sinéad is here.’
    ‘You talk to her.’
    I hear my mother and Sinéad conversing in Irish downstairs in the drawing-room. There’s a fluency in my moth er’s speech. She seems to be able to focus better in Irish. Perhaps she draws more easily from its well. Perhaps Irish is more anecdotal: stories from the past repeated over many times, just needing the press of a button for replay; not as difficult as struggling in the anglicised grammar of the present.
    I put one of Patrick’s old records (a guitar fantasía by Rodrigo) on the gramophone and wind the handle to drown out the drone of the words rising.
    The sun is shining through the window on the painting of the snowstorm: the travellers make their way head-bowed in the blizzard looking for a house of shells. Behind them the snow heaps up.
    I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s Sinéad. I stop the record.
    ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
    ‘All on your own,’ she says. ‘What are you looking at?’
    The girl in the middle of the storm.’
    Sinéad looks at the painting.
    ‘It gives me the shivers. Where did you get it?’
    ‘Patrick got it in Spain.’
    ‘Didn’t think there was any snow there. It’s funny.’
    ‘What’s funny about it?’
    ‘Not that.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Calling our fathers by their first names.’
    I feel a terrible impulse to tell Sinéad things, to take her into my confidence, to tell her about boarding school and my mother (the side of her Sinéad doesn’t know) and Patrick Foley. I want to tell her how it feels to go around in the world not knowing who your father is or was. To go around living a lie. But I don’t know what I can tell her. Not just yet.
    ‘You’re talking in English,’ I say.
    ‘Oh, I forgot,’ she says, correcting herself in Irish.
    She looks so serious now.
    ‘Tell my mother that.’
    Suddenly she kisses me on the lips. ‘To seal a secret.’
    ***
    At every opportunity I find myself back in my father’s study, I mean back in Patrick Foley’s study, impervious to sun or rain or what the world is doing outside. I delve into a world inside the world, going out only to visit the library as I try to piece history with personal lives, trying to find history’s mould.
    On returning to Dublin from her honeymoon, Mam had found Muddy in a state of shock. She had been attacked by a street gang who tried to extort ‘protection payment’ from her. They had smashed her shop window and could have done more damage were it not for Gearóid (he did not set out for Spain until the autumn). He sorted them out.
    Hallways in the Liberties are dark places where unseen things happen. People collide with unknown shapes; gunmen rub shoulders with courting couples; beggars sleep rough; and children dart through the darkness afraid of the banshee.
    Gearóid appeared one night in the hallway adjoining the Woodburn shop. Martha would have bumped into him only he struck a match. He made no reference at all to the wedding, and behaved towards her as if she were still single, and he was her protector.
    ‘Those wretches won’t be giving you any more trouble,’ he said in Irish, referring to the street gang. He told her that he was going to Spain to support his comrades. And then he was