Free Where Old Ghosts Meet by Kate Evans Page A

about that. There’ll be others, Nora, you’ll see. One of these days I’ll be comin’ over to Ireland to dance at your wedding.” They laughed. “You never know!” she warned. “Now, what about the rest of the family? Tell me about them.”
    â€œThere are two of us, two girls. I’m the eldest. I had a brother Joe but he drowned when he was ten years old. He was the youngest.” She swallowed the other half of the tongue and followed it rapidly with a scoop of scruncheons which she chewed on and savoured hugely. She wondered whether to go into any more detail. It was likely her father Peg wanted to hear about. She paused for a minute, collecting her thoughts, allowing herself to slip into that cool dispassionate place reserved for him. Finally she set down her knife and fork, fiddled about with them for a minute until she had them placed in a perfect V shape on her plate and then took a deep breath.
    â€œWe called him ‘The Da,’ my father, that is. He wasn’t a ‘Daddy’ sort of person somehow, not like other people’s fathers, a bit distant, I suppose. He was an intelligent man, intellectual really, but he had no idea how to cope with the practicalities of life. Money meant nothing to him. He’d forget to pay bills, spend lavishly on things we didn’t need and then become depressed when everything got out of hand. Yet he worked with money. He was a bank manager.” Nora stared at the food on her plate, almost untouched. She picked up her knife and fork and scooped up a small mound of mashed potato. It was halfway to her mouth when she changed her mind, put it back down and pushed the plate away.
    â€œHe hated his job,” she said. “‘Drudgery,’ he called it. But he stuck with it because it was permanent and came with a pension. Security, that’s what he worked for all his life but in actual fact, what we had was just the opposite.” She thought about her father for a moment. “I believe he loved us and truly cared for us but he had no idea of our individual hopes and dreams, no sense of what made us happy or sad, what our ambitions were or what we worried about at night when we lay in bed.” She paused before continuing. “I think that he somehow believed that if he could just hold on tightly to the reins and never let go, not for any reason, that everything would be all right and he’d manage to keep it all together.”
    Nora forced herself to eat some more mashed potato but she had lost all interest in her food. Suddenly she shocked herself by voicing quite coolly the very thought that was foremost in her mind at that moment. “Being abandoned by his father as a little boy must have affected him deeply.”
    She closed her eyes, imagining his shame, his confusion, his anxiety, hearing the cruel taunts of small boys: “Would ye look at Molloy beyond, his oul’ fella’s fecked off to America.” “Yea, my daddy says he’s off with Buffalo Bill chasin’ after them injuns, learnin’ how to be quick on the draw. Bang, bang. Ooooooooo. Bang, bang. I’d say now, there’ll be a couple a scalps in the post from America this Christmas. What do ye say, fellas? Oooooooo … ooooo.” “Nice to have somethin’ from Santy Christmas mornin’, any oul’ thing at all! Eh, Eamon?”
    Anger swept over Nora, tangling up her thoughts, snatching at her breath, making it impossible for her to continue. She didn’t look at the woman to her left but instead examined the white knuckles of her clenched fists. A voice inside her raged. The selfish, cowardly bastard. How could he do such a thing? How could anyone leave that poor woman and her child in that damp miserable place, in the wilds of bloody nowhere, with nobody to care for them, nobody to protect them, and when the Black and Tan hooligans came and ransacked their little home and burned it to