JP

Cork was certainly cleaner than East London. Greener. It seemed bigger, because it was more open, which probably sounds ridiculous, given where we were coming from.

Clean, green and spacious. What more could you ask for?

I yearned for the tower blocks.

Dad’s old home was a stone cottage and his parents had resisted the temptation to install mod cons like radiators. We were used to underfloor heating in our flat, every season of the year. In Cork, Charlie and me shared a bed, and the two of us had feet like ice blocks every night as we desperately tried to warm up under the scratchy blankets.

Our grandmother was an odd woman. She’d had Seamie, her only son, late, and was now in her mid-seventies. Her face was weather-beaten and slack, not aided by the fact she’d no teeth and refused to wear false ones. The combination of gumminess and her thick Cork accent meant we kids couldn’t understand a word she was saying, which she in turn interpreted to mean we were thick. The only thing we did pick up on was that she seemed to call us poxy an awful lot. I told Dad one night and he broke his heart laughing.

‘She’s saying paistí, you daft bugger,’ he said. ‘It’s the Gaelic for “children”. Christ, I got you home to the old country just in time.’

Seamie fought with his mother a lot. He told me one night, when drink had loosened his tongue, that she wanted him to ask for work on the big farm nearby but he had point-blank refused.

‘My father – your grandad – used to own the land over beyond,’ he said. ‘Then that McCarthy shower came in and starting buying up acres and industrializing the farming process. They bought my oul’ fella out and said he could stay on working for them, but of course they fired him within the year. He was too old and too expensive. I should have inherited that land. He didn’t even get a good price for it.’

Seamie was bitter about his lost inheritance, the very event that had forced him to emigrate to London in the first place. Being home again reminded him of that.

He decided to move us to Dublin.

What a bad decision that turned out to be.

Seamie figured the capital could offer a better selection of jobs, if he could organize some sort of childminding there.

The problem was, in the meantime he had to go back on the dole.

Our dad wasn’t built for handouts or pity. It dented his pride in ways I only understood when I got older and realized it was a trait we shared.

He started to drink more, and our surroundings didn’t help. We hadn’t been well off in London – we’d been right at the bottom of the ladder – but it had been a different sort of poverty. A less lonely sort. It was the eighties and nobody had anything. But Ireland in the nineties was a different kettle of fish.

Seamie managed to get us a council house in an estate in the Dublin suburbs. It was bigger than our small flat back in London, and the whole place was certainly newer. The Irish were starting to build, big time. Alongside the fancy new estates and apartment blocks, concentrated pockets of social housing with Formica kitchens, brown windows and thin walls were being thrown up.

But while you could hear your neighbours flushing the toilet and having sex, there was none of the family feel to the areas, not like there’d been in the tower blocks. The new council estates were planned like somebody had flung darts blindfold at a map of Dublin. A few here, a few there, mainly on the rougher northside of the city, a token couple on the softer southside. A young lass could end up in a house in our estate, alone with a gang of kiddies, and have to take two buses across town to see her mum.

Nonetheless, little gangs of newly resident kids sprang up about the place, and I was in none of them. I stood out because I still had a cockney twang that, apparently, made me sound like a fucking muppet off EastEnders. Charlie was so young she picked up the Dublin accent straight away. Between that and the difference in how we looked, you’d never guess we were related.

It wasn’t all bad. There were days when Dad would bring us out to the fishing village of Howth, not far from the estate we lived in. There, Charlie and me would run along the pier, before we all hiked up to Howth Head. We’d get chips on the way home, and if it was a Friday night, we’d watch Cheers and Only Fools and Horses on the telly. They were happy times, moments when Seamie really made the effort. Glimpses into what life could have been like.

As the years passed, Dad’s reasons to be at home all the time dwindled. I was old enough to let Charlie in after school and make a basic meal. Seamie could have got a job, but at that stage the rot had set in. Alcohol, combined with bitterness, had started to addle his brain.

I saw it – but I didn’t see it. I was only a kid, and I’d responded to being picked on by other kids by toughening up and becoming a bit of a shit myself. I mitched off school and smoked joints in the park. I shoplifted and scammed and generally did what I could get away with.

Nobody spoke to me about my mum leaving. Nobody explained to me the effect it must have had.

And nobody checked up to see how Dad was doing on his own. We were between the cracks.

I found Charlie crying in her room one night. She was usually such a happy-go-lucky kid, even in our circumstances. Seeing her upset like that gave me a fright.

‘What’s the matter with you, silly boo?’ I said, sitting on the end of her bed.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘It must be something.’

‘It’s stupid. There’s a tour tomorrow to the zoo, and everybody is going except me.’

‘Why aren’t you going?’

‘Because Dad didn’t sign the permission slip and he says he has no money.’

My jaw clenched tight. She never asked for anything.

‘I’ll sort it,’ I said.

I went downstairs to the sitting room, where Seamie was asleep on the couch. I called his name, but he was out of it. Carefully, I reached into his pocket, and I just about had his wallet out when he woke and grabbed me by the wrist.

‘Whash you after?’ he slurred.

‘Just the remote,’ I said.

He blinked and closed his eyes again. I opened the wallet, took out a tenner and put it behind him on the couch so he would think it had fallen out. I’d fake his signature and Charlie could have her little trip. It was as I was taking my hand away that I brushed his jeans and realized they were wet.

Dad had pissed himself.

I felt like crying.

It decided things for me. I would leave school. I was only fifteen, just the legal age to do it. My teachers all reported that I had brains, or at least was smart enough to pretend I was stupid, just to try their collective patience. But the Irish education system was expensive – uniforms, books, lunches – and money was tight. Seamie got the full gamut of social benefits on offer, but more and more of it was going on booze. I might have been a little wanker in training, but I loved my sister and never stopped feeling like I was somehow responsible for her. If I worked, the two of us would have our own cash.

I got a few hours as a lounge boy in the evening and stacked shelves during the day.

I was at that for a whole month before Seamie realized I’d quit school. A letter had arrived from the headmaster to say I hadn’t returned after the junior certificate exam and it would have been the norm for him to have sat down with my parents and discussed my options. He was a nice bloke. It must have been like having a small stone removed from his shoe, me leaving, and yet he had the decency to say in the note that I was a bright kid who was wasting an opportunity.

I came in from work that evening to find Dad sitting at the kitchen table with Charlie, a glass of whiskey in his hand and an empty glass in front of my seat.

‘Sit down,’ he barked, his voice telling me he’d had a couple already.

He poured the whiskey into the second glass and pushed it towards me.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

‘You’re a man now, aren’t you? Making decisions for yourself. Leaving school without telling me and getting yourself a job. Charlie here tells me you’ve been working for weeks. Not that I’d have known. You haven’t been handing anything up. That’s the proper thing to do, John Paul. To contribute to the running of the household.’

I pushed the whiskey back towards him.

‘I figured we could divide the expenses,’ I said sourly. ‘You take care of buying the alcohol and I’ll take care of the other bits. Food and that.’

Seamie banged his hand on the table.

‘You’ve never gone hungry on my watch,’ he shouted.

That wasn’t entirely true, but I let it go. When he was in this humour there was no winning an argument with him.

‘It’s late,’ I said. ‘Charlie should be asleep. I need to go to bed. I’m up early in the morning.’

I started to walk back out of the kitchen, but he grabbed my arm.

‘You should have told me, lad,’ he said, and he looked sad. For a moment he was his old self, not the man who’d been beaten down by life.

‘You’re too young to be out working when you don’t need to be. You should be getting yourself schooling so you can get a decent job. I don’t want you to end up like me, and that’s where you’re going.’

Teenagers are cruel. The man meant well. It wasn’t all his fault I’d left school, though his neglect and drinking had contributed to it.

But all I could see was a drunk, slurring his words and having a go. I was the one doing my best. I could have been out with my mates all the time, meeting girls, getting stoned. Instead, I was working and helping my family.

I shook his hand off my arm.

‘I’ll never end up like you,’ I said. ‘You’re a pisshead. No wonder Mum left. You can’t even get a job. I’m out working so she’ – I pointed at Charlie – ‘doesn’t need to ask you for money for school stuff, and you think I should be in school too? Why? So I can be home early every day to listen to you feeling sorry for yourself while you sit on your throne in the sitting room drinking and watching telly? You’re a fucking failure.’

Whatever else I was going to throw at him never made it out.

Seamie pushed himself up from the table and punched me so hard in the face I went flying. He was still a strong man. His fist, when it hit, broke my nose and knocked out two teeth.

Charlie screamed as the blood spurted everywhere. I lay on the floor, dazed, but not so out of it that I couldn’t see Seamie staring at his own hand, looking in absolute shock at what he’d done.

‘John Paul,’ he choked, and tried to pull me up. I batted him away.

‘Get the fuck off,’ I choked through a mouthful of blood.

He staggered backwards and then, in shock, walked right out of the house.

Charlie dialled 999 before I could tell her not to and then sat on the floor beside me, trying to stem the bleeding with her housecoat.

‘I saw this on Casualty,’ she said, in an attempt to make me smile so she’d know I was okay. Her face was white and she was shaking. In all her short years, she’d never witnessed anything so violent. ‘If you can’t breathe, tell me, and I’ll stick a pen in your throat to let the air in.’

‘Please don’t stab me with a fucking pen,’ I said, then started to cry, which set her off. I was so grateful she’d stayed with me. I felt sorry for myself but deep down I knew I’d provoked Dad. I’d set this train in motion and I did not feel good about it.

The cops came with the ambulance. I told them I’d been in a fight. I was terrified that if I told them what happened, Charlie would be put into care. Seamie was a shit dad, but everybody knew the system was a cesspit for kids.

The cops asked a few questions but they weren’t all that interested. I’d left school, I was known to hang around with bad lads, and they discovered Seamie was on his own with us. It was assumed I was just a mess.

We came from a certain area, a certain class.

Seamie tried to stay off the drink for a couple of weeks afterwards. The sight of the bruises on my face was a constant reminder of how he’d lost it, in every sense.

But as they faded, so did his willpower.

It was 1996. Apparently, Ireland was doing well. There was money in the country, lots of it. People were well off and happy. That’s what they said on the telly, anyway. It wasn’t like that in our house.

The Celtic Tiger wasn’t lifting all boats, and I was starting to resent both it and all those smug wankers who seemed to be doing so well for themselves.