Free The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) by William Brodrick Page A

going to write down what’s happened and what I feel.
    My dad was sent to prison last week because he threw a brick at a boy in a bread shop. They all reckon it’s because he feels bad about my mum’s death. They’re all wrong. He feels bad but he can’t tell them what he did and why. When I saw my dad in the cells before they took him away, I could see it in his eyes. He was glad. He wants to be locked up. It’s the only way he can get away from me. Because most days, there’s one of these moments. He looks at me asking himself just how much did I hear and see. I don’t say anything and he doesn’t say anything. We just look at each other and I can tell he feels bad. But now he’s in prison. He’s glad and I’m glad. My grandmother’s glad, too.
    23rd June
    My grandma doesn’t realise it, but she stares at me while she talks. She’s worried. She’s got questions but like my dad she’s afraid to ask them. She puts down animals at work. She’s no idea how many cats and dogs she’s killed. Must be hundreds. She doesn’t feel a thing when she does it.
    My granddad never asks any questions, not any more. Instead I ask him and he doesn’t have any answers. I watch him avoiding the truth and I wonder if I should even stay and listen. He keeps two passports. Like the others, he’s two people.
    Uncle Nigel wanted to know who saw my mum after he left on the night she died. He knows something happened but he’d never guess what it was.
    7th July
    I just want my mum back. I loved her and I still do. The paralysis and the cancer didn’t change her. She wasn’t any different, not to me. She was still my mum. Everyone else felt sorry for her and said she didn’t have much of a life. But I didn’t, not once, and I’m unhappy because she’s gone and I miss her every day. No one understands that even though she was ill, I didn’t want her to die. They all said, ‘She’s at peace now,’ as if that changed everything. Well, it doesn’t. She was given peace but mine was taken away.

11
    Michael lay on his bed. He’d kept on his overcoat as a kind of protection, a thick skin against the awful cold he was about to remember. When he’d come back from Northern Ireland, Danny, the army psychologist, had told him to lie down on a bed and listen to some tapes – chimes from a Buddhist monastery, the sound of the wind in the trees, the sighs and murmuring of the sea. The idea – advanced for the times – had been to help Michael relax; to calm the anxiety so that his suppressed anguish could surface … in the imagined mountain air, in the dreamed-up woods, on a make-believe beach. He’d tried his best but with each foray into the subconscious he’d simply fallen asleep. When he’d turned up for the interviews, taking his seat by the table with the box of tissues, he could only yawn. But now he was savagely awake, his senses sharply attuned to the crash and sudden lull of real waves upon real sand. The tide was coming in. Michael let himself go back to that terrible late November. Eyes wide open, heart beginning to race, he watched Captain Michael Goodwin act and speak; watched himself as though he was a disembodied spirit observing the preliminaries to the unforeseen catastrophe. Everyone was acting normally, even though their nerves were frayed…
    ‘Where is he?’ asked Michael.
    ‘He’ll come.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Soon.’
    ‘You’re sure?’
    ‘I’m sure. Relax. He said he’d come.’
    ‘It’s dangerous for me here … and for you; for us all. We should have met out of town, not
here
. For God’s sake, the place is crawling with Provos.’
    ‘I know, so, but he insisted.’
    The doorbell rang. Twice, then a third time. The signal meant the caller was alone, as planned. Liam nodded, left the sitting room and went to unlock the front door.
    Liam was small-time. He gave low-grade intelligence on well-known figures in the Belfast Brigade of the IRA. Just their movements. Where they went. Who they