Free His Father's Son: To save the son he loves, a desparate father must confront the ghosts of his past by Tony Black Page B

not?”
    “I just can’t. I’m finished with Ireland. She knows that. That’s why she’s gone there. Marti knows it too. Jaysus, he must be terrible worried, desperate he’ll be at the thought of going there. He’ll know I’d never go.”
    “Bluey, mate, you have to prove them wrong.”
    “I can’t. There’s things you know nothing about, Macca, things we came over here to get away from, to escape from. I could never do it, I just couldn’t … sure, I’d be disgraced entirely if I even tried.”
    “ Bluey, Bluey, mate .” Macca placed a hand on Joey’s arm. “If you want to see your son again, you’re going to have to go back there.” He leaned into Joey’s face, shook him at the shoulder. “There’s nothing else you can do. You have to go, for Marti’s sake.”

8
     
    Ireland was not like anywhere Marti had ever seen. It had started off with the rain coming down in little specks and then there was the sun, but the sky was still a grey colour and looked very low and close to people’s heads. He remembered the sky in Australia always looked very blue and very far away and not at all like it did in Ireland. Everyone walked very fast around the streets and Marti had to stay close to Mam’s back or be knocked down. Sometimes there were buildings with colours painted on them and sometimes there were buildings that were only grey and he wondered why they didn’t have the colours. When there was rain coming down Marti wanted to go into one of the buildings with the colours, but Mam said if they stopped every time there was a bit of rain they’d be lucky to get a yard.
    He wondered was Mam happy to be in Ireland, but he didn’t think she looked very happy the way she kept lifting the big bag from her shoulder, staring at people and saying, “Ignorant bogtrotters, the lot of them.”
    It had been a long flight from Australia and not as much fun as Marti thought it would be at all. It had been difficult to sleep on the hard seats that were very straight and he was always being told off for fidgeting. Mam had dragged him straight from the airport into the rain and when they arrived at the train station Marti thought they were both very wet but Mam said it was only damp. There was steam coming off their clothes and going into the air and he wondered if this was what Mam said was only damp. Then a man with a pointy black umbrella came and shook all the rain off and said, “Is it a drowned rat ye have there, missus?”
    Mam smiled and said, “Ignorant bogtrotter,” but nobody heard her when she said it like a whisper.
    The train was long and empty and Marti and Mam had to queue behind a man in a vest with a whistle and wait for him to blow the whistle and let them go on. When the queue moved everybody made the chatter noise and went to have their tickets ready. A man was singing really loudly, and when Marti turned round to look at him he saw the man was leaning on a wall and had a big messy beard and messy grey hair. He was singing really loudly, but Marti couldn’t understand the words and wondered why anyone would be singing really loudly waiting to go on the train.
    “Why’s he singing, Mam?” said Marti.
    “That’s Arthur Guinness singing, son,” said Mam. The man behind them in the queue laughed and said, “Tis. Tis.”
    “Do you know him, Mam?”
    “Jaysus,” said the man in the queue, “that’s a card ye have there, missus.”
    Mam smiled and shook her head and said, “No.”
    When the train left the station, the outside looked very different to when Marti was on the train in Australia. The ground was green instead of red and the sky was grey instead of blue and it made him think of Dad back at home with the red ground and the blue sky. He missed Dad and Australia and driving about in the ute and even going to school with Jono. Ireland seemed a very strange place compared to Australia, which was always warm and bright and felt like home. Marti felt the sadness growing inside him when