Free Mr Lynch’s Holiday by Catherine O'Flynn

The sound of his razor scraping his chin, the smell of his soap. All these things Eamonn had forgotten and each one triggered a complex mix of recognition and distance, a nostalgia for something still there. His father both alive and dead.
    He couldn’t recall Dermot ever taking a nap before. He had noticed a few small signs of age since his arrival. Nocturnal trips to the toilet, the occasional effortful noise when standing or sitting. He remained, Eamonn was sure, fitter and healthier than himself, but there was a change nonetheless. Eamonn didn’t know whether his father had aged a little in the months since his mother had died, or whether he had just seemed younger and more vital next to her.
    He would one day become authentically frail and need someone to care for him, and, as his only child, it would be Eamonn’s responsibility. This was something he had known for many years, but still he found it impossible to believe. Strength was one of his father’s defining features, never something he had made a show of, but his sheer physical presence made it clear. There was a power within him, a manifest capability. At Kathleen’s funeral Eamonn had offered to return from Spain, to rent out the apartment when such a thing was remotely possible, and to live nearby, but the offer was gestural. He didn’t believe that his father needed or wanted him around and he knew moreover that he would never accept such an offer.
    Beyond an assumption of some kind of standardized grief, he had not considered how the loss of his mother had affected his father. In some ways, neither had he considered how her loss had affected him. Living in Lomaverde, at such a remove, he was not confronted by her absence every day. It wasn’t that he pictured her still alive, but neither did he always remember
that she was gone, or consider the reality of Dermot’s day-to-day life on his own. It was easy to not think too much about it, to half-imagine things essentially unchanged.
    Laura had encouraged him to ring home more often, but Eamonn felt she didn’t understand how self-sufficient his father was, didn’t really get the nature of his relationship with his father at all. ‘We don’t live in each other’s pockets,’ he’d say. ‘We don’t need to be talking to one another all the time.’ Besides, Dermot was surrounded by Kathleen’s relatives back in Birmingham. That was part of it, though Eamonn tried not to admit it, even to himself. A long-held suspicion that his dad was easier in the company of some of his nephews than his son. Eamonn’s cousin Brendan, for example. A man of few words who knew how to strip an engine and place an accumulator bet. Dermot saw him a lot. They seemed able to communicate in a language Eamonn had never learned.
    The snoring built slowly to a peak with the loud finale inevitably rousing the sleeper.
    ‘Oh …’ His eyes opened and focused on Eamonn. Dermot smiled, embarrassed. ‘I was asleep.’
    Eamonn nodded.
    ‘I wasn’t the driver.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘I was dreaming I was stuck in traffic on College Road, but I wasn’t the driver. I was sat upstairs with all the bloody kids.’
    ‘You must have been glad to wake up.’
    ‘I don’t know who was driving the bus.’ He said this as if he should have known.
    ‘Maybe there was no driver.’
    Dermot looked at him as if he were an idiot. ‘Someone was driving the bus, son. They don’t drive themselves.’
    Eamonn scratched his head. ‘Went OK at Jean and David’s, did it?’
    ‘Yes. Very nice. They were advocating being a grandparent.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘Did I tell you about Keiron, Brendan’s eldest?’
    ‘What about him?’
    ‘He’s gone and got his girlfriend pregnant. Fifteen years old, the pair of them. At the same school. So Brendan’s going to be a granddad.’
    ‘Christ.’ Eamonn felt the familiar mixture of awe and horror. He remembered seeing his cousin nonchalantly smoking in the park when they were children. Brendan seemed