At home, my father calls for another meeting in the front room. It’s a summit conference this time, with Onkel Ted present to make sure nobody gets up and starts hitting each other. There’s a big silence in the room and lots of tension, everybody afraid to speak first and the gap getting wider all the time until my father gets up to put on a record. I watch him taking the keys out of his pocket and opening the music cabinet. He picks out a record which then suddenly turns out to be the missing John Lennon single.
‘This is your record,’ he asks. ‘Isn’t that so?’
I nod my head. I checked the bin a few times and wondered if he had disposed of it some other way, maybe burning it. Instead he kept it with his own collection, along with Bruckner and Verdi and Mendelssohn.
‘Zurück,’ he says, translating the words on the record.
‘Yes,’ I answer, and I can’t help thinking how stupid he makes it sound, as if he wants to kill the words.
‘Na Ciaróga,’ he calls the Beatles in Irish. ‘OK, let’s listen.’
He does everything with the same care as always. No matter how much he might hate this music, he treats the record with great respect, dusting it off with a special cloth first, even putting on the dust glider before finally touching down the needle. Then he sits down and we listen to the Beatles together.
‘Get back to where you once belong, get back, Jojo.’
I see my father looking around as if he can’t wait to get the record off his turntable in case it might ruin the needle. It’s clear that my mother has been trying to persuade him to do things her way, not with violence but through discussion and compromise. He even gets up to put on the reverse side with John Lennon singing ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, but the whole thing is more and more unbearable to listen to. The only person who seems to enjoy it is my mother, until my father gives her a sharp look and she has to stop tapping her foot. She remembers why the meeting was set up and that there is a serious side to all this. My father takes the record off because it’s just too much for him and he thinks the whole system is overheating.
I’m glad when it’s over. I’m waiting for him to give his speech about how bad music is like bad food, like chewing gum rotting your teeth, like alcoholism, like taking drugs. I know he feels betrayed, because there’s no defence against music. Music is free to travel anywhere across the sea and you can’t stop it coming into Ireland and going out again of its own free will. He says I am allowing myself to be corrupted and he wants to remind me of all the good things which we have been concentrating on in our family. He says you have to be careful with music and who I allow myself to be influenced by. My mother says the music is quite nice, but she’s heard about how the Beatles have created mass hysteria in young people. We’ve all seen it on TV, girls screaming and fainting when the Beatles arrived in Dublin. My mother says it reminds her of the way girls were screaming and fainting for Hitler, and she doesn’t want me to become brainwashed like that.
‘We don’t want you to become a Mitläufer, a run-along,’ she says.
She says it’s the worst thing that can happen to you, because it makes you powerless in your legs and you can only run in the same direction as everyone else. It’s what happened to the Germans and she remembers how they all became Mitläufer under Hitler, with the same thoughts in their heads and the same look in their eyes. My father says it’s what happened to the Irish as well, when they started speaking English and were forced to run along after the British. Now we’ve all just become run-alongs after America, with the same dreams and the same music, and my mother says if you become a run-along, then you don’t have much choice. My father and mother both know how hard it is to go in the opposite direction and there are many things in this world they will never run along with. That’s why they got married and had an Irish-German family with lederhosen and Aran sweaters, so that we would not be afraid of being different.
When John F. Kennedy arrived on a visit in Ireland, I didn’t want to be brainwashed or become a run-along, so I was the only person who didn’t go up to the corner house to watch him on TV. I didn’t want to be like everyone else, blindly following the leader like they did in Germany under the Nazis. Even though John F. Kennedy was Irish and Catholic and my mother and father liked him for standing up to the Communists who had no religion, I didn’t want to be one of John F. Kennedy’s followers with American flags and green flags waving at him. When he was assassinated in Dallas one day, I was shocked like everyone else to see the pictures on the front of all the newspapers. I watched my mother pasting those pictures of the motorcade into her diary, but I knew I was not one of his followers because she had already taught me how to be different to everyone else. According to my mother and father, it’s alright to be a run-along after John F. Kennedy, or the Pope, or God, or any of the saints, but not somebody like John Lennon.
I don’t want to be a follower of John Lennon either, I like his music, that’s all. My mother says I have to be careful that I don’t get the weakness and lose control of my emotions. Onkel Ted says it’s hard to imagine music doing any harm or killing anyone and John Lennon is not mobilizing any armies. My father says John Lennon is an invader and it’s more like a cultural war. I wonder what he has planned for the record in the end, whether he’s going to break it in his hands in front of me or take it out one day and place it on the garden fire where it will melt down over the top of the weeds a bit like one of the early Beatles haircuts. But this time he’s obviously agreed to deal with this matter calmly. My mother has begun to change him and wants him to do things in the German way. She keeps saying that Stefan is coming to visit us soon and we’re all going to behave in a very different way from now on.
My father replaces John Lennon in the sleeve and takes out Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. He does all the usual things to keep the dust from interfering with the singing and then her voice comes through the room as if she was standing in the corner and you can actually see her chest lifting up every time she takes in a breath. I can see my mother becoming weightless, floating up above the chair with the music. Onkel Ted as well, all of them floating around the room with the ornaments and vases rising up from the mantelpiece. My father keeps looking at me with a big smile on his face now, because he knows I like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and I can never deny that. When the record is finished, he stores it away again and turns towards me.
‘Now tell me,’ he says. ‘Which one do you think is better?’
‘You can’t expect him to give a free answer,’ my mother says.
Onkel Ted is there and nobody would dream of losing their temper or disagreeing with each other. My mother wants to put an end to the door-slamming war between me and my father and maybe we should take all the doors off the hinges for a while so we’ll get used to the idea that they are not there to make noise with. She starts talking about Stefan again because she can see trouble around the corner.
‘Stefan is coming,’ she said, but my father holds his hand up to stop her talking.
‘Honestly,’ he asks me once more. ‘With your hand on your heart, which do you think is the better music?’
Onkel Ted says it’s hard to make a choice between apples and pears if you like them both. My mother tries to make a joke and says it’s a pity we can’t hear them both singing together at the same time, doing harmonies.
‘What is your choice?’ my father demands.
I don’t want to barricade myself behind any song. I don’t want to think of music as war, but I still feel I have to defend John Lennon, because it’s my generation and I want to belong to new music that my father doesn’t listen to.
‘He’s half Irish,’ I say. ‘His mother is Irish.’
My father doesn’t know what to say to that. He knows I’m trying to give the wrong answer again and searches for some hidden meaning to see if I’m deliberately insulting him.
‘Stefan is coming,’ my mother said. ‘Let’s be happy.’
‘John Lennon,’ I continue. ‘He’s an Irish singer actually. I know the songs are in English, but he’s really singing in the Irish language underneath.’
I know it’s a bit far-fetched and my father is blinking as if I’m pulling a trick on him. But I carry on telling him that even though John Lennon’s middle name is Winston, after Winston Churchill, he is still Irish underneath. He has the Irish language in his heart, even if he can’t speak it himself. But I’m no good at persuading my father. I can see him getting angry and he tells me to leave the room. So then I don’t care what he does with John Lennon any more because I’m angry myself and all I want to do now is get my own back on him. I get up to leave, but then I want to have the last word before I bang the door behind me.
‘He’s more Irish than Elisabeth Schwarzkopf,’ I say.
I can hear my mother pleading with him to leave it alone. But his footsteps are already thumping along the floor. He rips the door of the front room open again and comes limping out with my mother after him, saying Stefan would be arriving very soon and we didn’t want to have a bad atmosphere in the house. Onkel Ted is left standing in the front room, making the sign of the cross, but it’s having no effect.
I take flight into the breakfast room where my sisters are making a dress, hunched around a big pattern spread across the table. Ita and Bríd kneeling on the chairs helping Maria to connect up all the pieces of material. Their heads stuck together as if they all had the same sandy brown hair. They look up to see me running around the table with my father right behind me, trying to swing his fist out, scattering the pieces of the dress in all directions. The table is too wide, so he picks up a ruler.
‘Come here,’ he shouts.
My sisters drop everything and escape out to the kitchen, so it’s only my father chasing me around the table now and my mother hanging on to him until he shakes her off.
‘Stefan, Stefan,’ she keeps repeating.
My father takes off his glasses and stares across the table at me. Right or left. What’s his next move, I wonder. It’s a game that has often been played before but this time it’s serious. My mother lunges at the scissors to remove them. My father is out of breath and I feel sorry for him, because I’m younger and faster. I feel I should give myself up out of kindness, let him get me and then it will be over, but then he decides to push the table towards me, to trap me in one corner. He’s already crawling across the dissected dress, reaching out towards me with one hand, so the only thing left to do is to get out under the table, past my mother and up the stairs to lock myself into the bathroom.
After a while, my father comes up and bangs the door with his fist, but it’s no use and my mother is finally able to persuade him to go back down. She closes the door of the front room and they discuss the whole thing rationally once more. From the banisters, I can hear my sisters whispering in the kitchen, trying to keep Ciarán happy. In the front room my father’s voice was going up and down and I’m wondering what’s going to happen to John Lennon now? I can hear my father saying that John Lennon is the last nail in the coffin for the Irish language. My mother says it’s only music and that she listened to some pretty stupid pop songs as well in Germany until they were banned. Onkel Ted tells him it’s important not to be negative, there’s no principle involved and music is not like a hurling match with winners and losers. My mother says it’s time to do something big, something generous and imaginative.
They’re talking for a long time and it even looks like they’ve forgotten about it, thinking back over their lives instead and how things have not worked out the way they had imagined it. Maybe they’re thinking about the time further back when my father was younger and refused to take advice from anyone because he was afraid it would weaken his ideas. When we were small I can remember him going to the funeral of his cousin Gerald in Skibbereen. My mother often made us pray for Onkel Gerald who was drinking too much and telling too many stories. We were not told how he died, only that it was a tragedy. Some time later we found out that he had taken his own life because his older brother had died in front of his eyes in a drowning accident and he never came to terms with that. My father wanted me to know that as a warning, so I would be afraid of alcohol, because Onkel Gerald could have been a great writer if he hadn’t squandered all his stories in pubs around West Cork.
It was one of the biggest funerals ever in Skibbereen, and afterwards all the relatives and friends gathered in the house for sandwiches and tea and whiskey. Everybody was smoking and talking and the small house was crowded, right out to the front door. People kept breaking into tears all the time because Onkel Gerald was a good man who was loved by everybody all the way up to Cork City and Mallow, as far back as Gougane Barra and Bantry. Nobody wanted to believe that he committed suicide in his own home town, when there was so much to live for and he could have been one of the best journalists in Ireland and there was a job open for him any time with the Southern Star.
There was an argument at that funeral. When all the people were gathered together, Aunty Eily came over to my father and spoke to him about how he was raising his children. Even though she was heartbroken with grief for her son Gerald, she told my father that what he was doing was wrong. The news was out that my father had stopped allowing his own children to speak English. Even though she had never been to our house and never travelled out of Skibbereen, she had heard it from other relatives who came to visit us from West Cork, saying they had met my mother and tasted her cakes. They said the children were very polite, but that we were afraid. ‘Fearful’ was the word they used, because each time they asked us a question, we took in a deep breath and were afraid to answer. After the funeral, Aunty Eily told my father that he should stop what he had started before it was too late.
‘You’ll turn them against you,’ she said.
He didn’t listen to her. He smiled and said everybody in Ireland would soon be doing the same. He was leading by example and our family was a model for all Irish families in the future. He would not allow anyone to interfere with his mission or say anything about the way that he wanted to run his family.
I can hear Onkel Ted leaving the house and I know they must have come to a decision. My father has been persuaded to do things calmly and they come up the stairs to my room. I see my father holding John Lennon in his hand and handing it back to me like a toy that has been confiscated. He sits down beside me on the bed with my mother on the other side, holding my hand.
‘If you want to listen to it,’ my father says. ‘If you want to listen to any record, just ask me and I’ll put it on for you.’
He does not mention the fact that I broke into his music cabinet like a thief. He’s going to forget about that. He smiles, trying to put the rage behind him.
‘I mean it,’ he says, and I know this is a big gesture from him. ‘Any time.’
Then he starts confessing something to me. He tells me about the wedding he went to in Skibbereen some weeks back. My father and Onkel Ted both went together in the car, to the wedding of Eleanor and John. He tells me that Aunty Eily was there, too, even though she’s very old now. He could see by her face and the way she walked slowly, how much time had gone by, as if the future suddenly comes rushing towards them. At the reception afterwards, everybody was telling stories and singing, but this time it was my father who had tears in his eyes because he sat beside Aunty Eily and told her that he should have listened to her long ago while he had the chance.
‘I’m afraid you were right,’ he said to her. ‘I have turned them against me.’
My father is telling me this himself. He’s admitting to me that he was wrong. I want to run out of the room, because I can’t bear to think of him like a small boy, with Aunty Eily putting her arms around him. He has tears in his eyes, saying that she told him it is never too late. He says he hopes there is still some time left for us to be friends. He’s worried that one of these days I will leave the house and never come back.
I want to be generous to him. I want to tell him that there is no need to feel so betrayed, that the Irish people are still as Irish as they ever were, even if they’re all speaking English now. It only means they’ve become good at acting. They’re good at stepping in and out of new roles and new languages, because sometime along the way in the history of Ireland, they became good at being somebody else. I want to tell him that people like John Lennon and Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka are all living in the same country now. It’s the country I belong to as well, one without any flag. I want to tell him there is nothing to worry about and that music is not like war, but I don’t know how to explain that and I don’t know if it makes any sense. I don’t even know if I believe it myself.
One day, when I was out in the boat with Dan Turley, something happened that made me think nothing made sense any more. We were coming back by the island when I suddenly heard the shout again. Standing on the island was a man holding a bottle in one hand and waving his fist.
‘BASTARD’ I heard him shout.
It must have been the same man who had shouted Dan’s name from the top of the cliff. I could see there was something about him that caused Dan to go even more silent than before. The man on the island was reducing his name to a joke, an insignificant fisherman. Dan wanted him to go away, to drown and disappear. I could see him narrowing his eyes, imagining the man on the island already washed up on the rocks like a dead seal with bite marks punctured in his skin and big black holes where his eyes once were.
Sometimes voices carry really well across the water, depending on how the wind is set and how the waves are facing. When it’s calm and there’s no wind, the sound carries so far that you can think the whole bay is like a room and you can hear people miles away, just whispering. But this time, the man’s voice was not being carried very well and we could hardly hear him. He seemed to have no voice, even though his fist was up in the air and I could see him raging across the water at us. Here and there, the wind carried a word or two across and then whipped it away again.
‘Buffaloes,’ is all I could make out. ‘Papist buffaloes.’
It was a Northern curse, one that you hear on the radio these days. I tried to imagine what would happen if these two men met face to face, what they would do to each other. This time, Dan stared back as if this was some kind of drunken madman who lived out on the island and the less notice you took of him the better. I could see the thimble shape of the Martello tower and the rough grass draped over the island like green tweed. The seagulls were waiting quietly for something to happen. There was a cormorant on a rock spreading his black, oily wings out to dry. I wondered where the island goats had gone to and where they could possibly hide in such an exposed place. I could see the black tide mark all around the edge of the island and I began to imagine that there was also a black rim on the man’s lips, from drinking and shouting.
I could see him staggering as he tried to come closer, stepping forward on the rocks as if he was going to walk across the water and kill Dan with his own hands. He began to gesture at us, holding the bottle down to his groin. And still Dan carried on without a word, steering past without seeing him and without hearing him over the sound of the engine. The boat bounced across the waves, cutting through the water and separating the white wash to each side. Dan looked back as if he could stare the man off the island, out of existence. He was standing there, balancing on the rock with the bottle in his hand, shouting but unable to reach us with his anger. He took aim and the bottle crashed on the edge of the island, making a tiny noise like a coin or a brass button falling to the ground.
We kept going towards the harbour and steered right into a cloud. It started raining heavily and my knees were getting wet. Behind us, the island was still in sunshine and the grass was lit up luminous green against the dark blue clouds. We knew the rain would hit the island soon and then we would all be soaked. We kept going with the rain bouncing on the water and Dan looking back at the island until it disappeared from view.