Free Mr Lynch’s Holiday by Catherine O'Flynn Page A

grown up when he was eight. He had left school at sixteen while Eamonn went on to university, the only one in the family to do so. He imagined that, to Brendan, his other cousins and perhaps his own father, he would forever be thought of as a student – a pejorative label meaning someone daft, lazy and essentially childish.
    ‘He was asking me the other day what you did out here, job-wise. And to be honest I couldn’t tell him. Was it something to do with computers? I can’t remember now what your mother said.’
    ‘It was the same job I had back home.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Dermot uncertainly, ‘they have an office out here, do they?’
    ‘I didn’t need an office, I was editing computer books. I worked from home.’
    ‘Oh, right. So that’s going well, is it?’
    Eamonn hesitated. ‘Well, no, I was doing it for the first few months, but the company went bust.’ It pained him to admit this. He could imagine his father thinking there was something fundamentally unreal about the idea of working so remotely, so abstractly. He would assume the collapse of the company was a consequence of the intangibility of the work involved.
    Dermot, however, looked merely concerned. ‘So are you having to look for work?’
    ‘No, it’s fine. I’m sorted. I got a new job teaching English.’
    ‘Oh, teaching. Well, Eamonn, your mother would be very proud. I had the impression that teaching wasn’t your cup of tea.’
    The impression was correct, but Eamonn shrugged it off.
    ‘Well, now, I’d say your Spanish must be tip-top to be able to teach.’
    Eamonn found it irksome that people assumed that living abroad somehow magically endowed you with a facility for language-learning. As if rewiring your brain and having to say a different word to the word you naturally wanted to say every time you wanted to speak wasn’t incredibly, almost impossibly, hard, regardless of where you happened to live or what words the people nearby happened to be hurling around, with near-violent rapidity. The assumption was no less irritating for being one that he himself had held, and one that made his apparent inability to rise above the
bajo-intermedio
standard of Spanish very hard to accept.
    ‘I’m teaching them English, Dad.’
    ‘Sure I know that, but obviously you need to explain the grammar and so on in Spanish. You need to provide the translation.’
    ‘That’s not how it’s done. It’s all done in English. It’s immersive. They pick it up.’
    Dermot considered this. ‘Immersive. I suppose you can communicate a lot with what they call “body language”, can you? Hand signals and so on?’
    Eamonn rubbed his face. ‘I don’t use hand signals, Dad. They can’t see me, for one thing.’
    Dermot looked at him, an expression of dawning realization on his face.
    ‘Oh … but, that’s great work to be doing. I’m sorry now – I didn’t get you at all at first. What do they call them these days? “Visually impaired”, is it? “Sight-challenged”?’
    Eamonn found himself doing something that he hated. It was a noise he made only when talking to one or both of his parents. A kind of impatient sigh, bordering on a grunt. An adolescent habit that he knew was ridiculous in a thirty-three-year-old man.
    ‘I’m not teaching blind kids. I’m teaching civil servants. It’s all done online or over the phone.’ He paused and then added: ‘No hand signals!’
    Dermot was quiet for a few moments and then said: ‘“
Er bekommt keine Luft
.”’
    Eamonn looked around the room.
    ‘Oh, yes, I remember that one all right. Linguaphone it was. Like you’re doing. On the tape.’
    Eamonn was minded to explain that what he was doing was nothing like Linguaphone, but his father continued.
    ‘“
Er bekommt keine Luft
.” “He can’t breathe.” I took the tapes out of the library, thought I could listen to them on the job, but it never really worked. You’d get very absorbed in that stuff. I remember sailing past a stop full of