Swallowing the Sun

  For Alberta, always.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Also available by David Park

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Praise for Swallowing the Sun

  Chapter 1

  The three of them are in the yard where the whitewashed walls are grimed and rendered in shadow by the dropping dusk. His father’s soiled vest has a puckered hole over his heart and the misshapen loops of his braces sag by his side like buckled wheels. The cigarette clenched in his mouth has almost disappeared into a dot of red. As his head bobs and angles and the words spew out, the red circle moves round the tight square of the yard like a firefly. Around the tight square of the ring. Then his father takes the cigarette out of his mouth and spits at their feet with a hawking scrape of his throat, and as if with the greater freedom it brings, his voice climbs higher and he’s calling them ‘little cunts’ and ‘bastards’.

  His head is framed for a moment by the square of yellow light coming from the kitchen window but he’s moving constantly, weaving in front of them, sometimes turning little circles of himself. Working himself up. And the two of them aren’t worth a piss in the wind, an arseful of roasted snow. What sort of useless little cunts would let toerags like the Thompsons take their bike off them? It’s fuckin’ dresses they ought to be wearing. It’s handbags they should be carrying. Bloody nancy boys the pair of them. While his father shakes his head to the sky he sneaks a glance at Rob but he’s looking at his feet, trying to shrivel himself smaller, trying to make himself invisible. He looks again at the red dot of his father’s cigarette. It’s stopped moving. He’s taking it slowly out of his mouth, drawing on the final dregs before flicking it with his thumb and first finger into the corner of the yard. It tumbles in a little flurry of spark into the seam of shadow at the base of the wall.

  They know it’s coming now. He can hear Rob make a kind of whimpering noise, feels him edge a little closer to his shoulder. He wants to push him away – it’s not fair of him. What can he do? What can he ever do but let his father tire himself out on him, take the first flush of the anger.

  ‘It was my fault, Da. I’m the oldest, I should have stopped him.’ His voice flickers and breaks like the tumble of his father’s cigarette butt. The open-handed slap shudders his whole body, flaming his cheek and all the parts of himself that can’t be seen.

  ‘Of course it was your fault! Of course it was your fault, Martin – I don’t expect any better from him any more. But you’re no better than he is – lettin’ yourself be pissed on by shite like the Thompsons.’

  ‘He had his brothers, Da!’ Rob suddenly shouts.

  ‘Shut your face! Don’t you even speak to me. Don’t you ever speak to me again, you useless piece of piss.’

  They both know they’ve only made it worse. They hear it in the pitch and rhythm of his voice, see it in the tightening strut and jerk of his movements, know that something has to be expelled. Something got rid of that can’t be kept in any longer, and they stiffen and brace themselves.

  ‘Take off your shirts.’ And when they look at him in confusion: ‘Take off your shirts now!’

  Their imaginations fuel their fear – they’ve never been here before. As his fingers tremble with the buttons he weighs up the chances of making it through the door into the entry. But he knows the bolt can sometimes stick and that if he didn’t make it he’d be trapped between the shut door and his father. He looks around the yard desperate to see something that might be used as a weapon but sees only the skeletons of rusted bike frames hanging from hooks screwed into the walls, the concrete coal bunker, a dressing table stripped of its mirror and drawers. Maybe the bolt would slip smoothly and he’d be gone. It would mean leaving Rob but in this moment his fear is stronger than what he feels for his brother. The decision is made for him because he has thought about it too long, the chance has gone, and his father’s impatient hands are pulling at their shirts, trailing them over their heads in a pop of buttons.

  ‘Now take your stance like men – the way you’ve been shown.’ He shows them again, hunching himself into a tight bristle, his raised fists masking his face so that only his eyes scream out over the top of his fingers. They stand in front of him, his mirror image and he can smell his father’s sweat and the sweet scent of their own piss and fear as he comes closer. He punches each of them on the side of the head – a short stabbing blow that thuds dully against their temples like a piston. Rob stumbles backwards.

  ‘Keep up your fuckin’ guard!’ his father shouts and hits them again, on the other side of their heads. ‘Are you just goin’ to stand there and let someone paste you?’

  He half blocks his father’s next blow with his forearms, but his bones feel like twigs that might snap. Rob doesn’t manage to block his fist and catches it again on his temple. He’s starting to cry, a kind of smothered sob that never rises above a murmur. From next door comes the sound of a television set; there are people all around them living lives that are different to the one that is theirs.

  ‘Stop that fuckin’ snivellin’,’ his father demands, ‘before I give you something to gurn about.’ But as he says the words, his breathing is laboured and soon he stops and stands with his hands on his hips. There is a thick furze of black hair under his arms. Perhaps it’s over. Perhaps it’s over and they’ve made it. ‘Square up to each other,’ he says and then his voice changes for a moment and he rests his arms on their shoulders. ‘The world’s full of people like the Thompsons and they’ll walk all over you if you don’t know how to defend yourselves. It’s for your own good. You have to be able to look after yourselves.’ He skims the backs of their heads lightly with the back of his hand in a gesture of playfulness. Of affection.

  ‘Rob, take a pop at him. Your best shot. Make him step back. Make his eyes water.’ His brother looks into his eyes and he sees the red flare on the side of his head, the thin trickle of snot he tries to sniff away. He nods his head to tell him to do it, then nods again, watches as his brother screws his eyes shut and swings a blow at him that is aimed at his shoulder but flails mostly into air. There is the snort of his father’s derision, the sound of music from their neighbours’ television.

  ‘Show him how, Martin, show him how or I’ll do the showing. Make him step back. Make his eyes water. Don’t let that bastard Thompson take anything belonging to you ever again.’

  Rob is looking at him. He’s nodding but his eyes are frightened. More frightened than he’s ever seen them.

  ‘Show him, Martin! Show him, son!’

  He clenches his fist. Something catches his eye and for a second he glances up at the house, sees his mother’s face hanging ghostly behind the glass.

  Chapter 2

  A constellation. That’s how he thinks of it. Ten beautiful stars, each one shining brightly in the night sky. They had always been told that she would do well, but no one at the parents’ evenings had ever mentioned stars. He hadn’t even known that such things existed, so when she had told him on the morning of the results he had been filled with apprehension, thinking that perhaps the stars indicated a reservation, a steward’s enquiry that might soon strip her of the bit of paper she held in her hand and award it to someone else. When he asked about the stars Rachel had laughed as she explained and then everyone had laughed. Even Tom. Just for a moment, before he realised he was laughing, even Tom had laughed. Ten A-star grades. Top of the tree, top of the tallest mountain, it’s a miracle. But whenever he thinks of it, he feels what everyone must feel in the presence of a miracle – that it’s a trick, a sleight of hand that will leave him looking
foolish and deceived as soon as he allows himself to trust it.

  He knows it will be better when he sees the certificate which will be presented to her this afternoon; like the cheque in the hand after the lottery win: the indisputable confirmation that fantasy has been transmuted into reality; the tangible evidence of what the mind is frightened to believe. He looks at the stage and sees the table stacked with the glinting wink of silverware and knows that the certificate is there and part of him wants to hurry towards it and hold it. To kiss its undeniable truth.

  The memory of another time when he held a certificate to his mouth and kissed it, suddenly imposes itself on his memory. It’s in an echoing, tiled corridor that smells of polish, and comes just after closing the heavy, wood-panelled door of the office. Holds it to his lips tenderly and in a sudden release kisses his father’s name, gives it to Rob to kiss, then slipping it into his jacket pocket, hurries with him towards the sharp-edged throw of light breaking from the street outside. But he wants no thought of that world to intrude into the perfection of the present and so he tries to push the memory away and stares again at the table of silver.

  The prizegiving’s about to start. The teachers process into the hall, the younger ones self-conscious and a little giddy in their academic gowns and hoods but he likes the gowns, thinks that they add weight to the occasion, the appropriate dignity. They file on to the stage and stand at their seats as the headmistress, school governors and dignitaries assume their places. He takes the opportunity to strain forward in his seat once again, in order to see if he can spot Rachel, but Alison calms him into restraint. The rows and rows of white-shirted prize-winners and participants conceal her and he feels a pulse of frustration. Two blonde-haired girls whisper together, their heads angled into each other like stooks of corn, while others discreetly point and smile at what their teachers consider the best their wardrobe can offer. She should be wearing the stars in her hair in a garland, a wreath of ten diamonds. She should be sitting on the stage, not with the others, and not because she’s better than the other girls but because her journey has been longer, more difficult, and above all because it started with him.

  And he can think of nothing that he gave to help her. No part of his brain or being. She climbed this mountain on her own and when he thinks of the miserable school he went to and the pathetic little pyre of his own qualifications, it fills him with shame and confusion. He wishes he could put a match to it, burn it out of his memory for ever. They never had prize days – were told that for every one boy who got a prize there were hundreds who didn’t. Maybe no one ever did anything that merited a prize, maybe they couldn’t find chairs for the parents that weren’t decorated with phalluses or sectarian graffiti. It comforts him a little to think that if perhaps, just perhaps, they had been given things to aim for, some encouragement to go beyond the narrow and fixed expectations, they might have achieved, if not stars, then something worthwhile.

  But when he looks at the table with the silverware and the certificates it scares him, too, because if he can find no connection with these stars, then what connects him with his daughter? What makes him her father? He looks at Alison, his wife, who sits in her best suit and the make-up that she hasn’t worn in a long time and he wonders if it was some hereditary misprint, some freak of genetics that produced such a child. He thinks of the items he stands watch over in the museum, the bones and fossils, the reproductions of the extinct; remembers the North’s oldest footprint of a reptile found in sandstone on Scrabo Hill 230 million years ago, and he wonders if it is part of an evolutionary process – a step forward to something better, which throws off the husks of the past and discards all that is dead and worthless. But how can seventeen years, seventeen years, which to him feel like the blink of an eye, produce such a result? And there is even more fear edging his confusion because if she has travelled such a distance in so short a time, then what is to stop her travelling on ever further, until, when she looks back, they are nothing more than a speck on a half-forgotten horizon? If her parents are no part of her achievement, what is to stop her discarding them as an unnecessary burden? He grips his programme, then flicks the pages as if the answer might spring out. There is a long list of university entrants. Already they have been talking to her about the possibility of Oxford or Cambridge. It sounds like a different continent, a different universe and for a second he feels frightened by the stars.

  In the museum the lads called him ‘The Star Man’ when they heard. Before the variations started: Stars in his Eyes, Patrick Moore, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star – he’s heard them all and none of them made him feel anything other than proud and in the voices of those who used them, he could hear admiration, a desire to share some of the glory through their association with him.

  The headmistress stands at the rostrum and welcomes everyone and then the choir is singing, their voices filling the hall and he’s never heard of the composer or the title but it sounds like the music you might hear in a cathedral. The faces of the girls are earnest, malleable; moulding the softness of their features to the rise and fall of their voices. He looks at Alison and she smiles back at him and it feels as if they’ve just stepped inside a new world and that there is something sacred about it, something holy and he wonders should he bow his head. For a second he averts his eyes, looks at the floor and then in a sudden moment of panic he thinks that he doesn’t belong here, with these people who have more money than he has, who live in big houses. People who know each other and have enough knowledge and confidence not to be sitting in their very best clothes. Shuffling in his seat he stares at the door where the prefects stand with handfuls of programmes and wonders if there is some other way out of the hall. The collar of his new shirt is too tight and he tries to loosen it by pushing a finger down between it and his neck. His foot kicks the chair in front. It’s too warm in the hall. He looks around at the closed windows. Why did no one think to open them? The collar constricts like a noose. He finds it harder to breathe. Perhaps he could slip out as the choir is finishing, leave unnoticed while they retake their seats. Maybe his being here spoils the moment, taints what is about to happen. The whiteness of the girls’ shirts, the burnish and glint of the silver, the brightness of the stars – all begin to whisper to him that he doesn’t belong in this place. He closes his eyes and for a second he feels as if he’s in a newly painted room and his hands are black with soot and, as he struggles to find an exit, his grimed prints press their pattern on the walls.

  The touch of a hand. Pressed over his. He looks down and it’s Alison’s and it pulls him back to the moment and she’s looking at him and silently asking if he’s all right. He nods and forces a smile and then it’s too late because the choir is finished, only the echoing memory of the music trembling in the corners of the hall, and the headmistress is delivering her speech. He tries to calm himself as he always does by thinking of the objects he watches over every day, anchoring himself by focusing on their physical reality, the cases where their permanence is preserved and stored. So as she delivers her speech and talks of the results, the percentage passes, the appearance in the Sunday Times league table, he thinks of sixteen polished stone axes, their heads grey and smooth like fish; weaving looms from the linen mills; giant steam engines with pistons, valves and dials. While she talks of the successes of the year, then the great sporting victories and the girls selected for Ulster in hockey and tennis, he repeats silently the factory slogans from the mills, ‘Trade is the golden girdle of the globe’, ‘Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening’, thinks of display cases full of coins, flint-headed arrows, standing stones, the giant Irish elk with its antlers spread the length of a man’s body.

  Then she’s introducing the guest speaker and he feels calmer. It’s some former pupil who’s running her own company and they start to give out the prizes and he claps each of them, starting with the youngest first-former and he keeps on clapping even when his hands are sore because he knows that each one who
hurries across the stage brings the moment closer when he will receive the confirmation that he needs. The girls all nod their heads quickly like little pecking birds as they shake hands and as they walk across the stage stare at the floor as if watching out for a pitfall, some obstacle that will cause them to stumble. No one looks out at the audience and some let their hair fall and curtain their face. On the ground floor of the museum there is a pond with terrapin and goldfish. The bottom of it is spattered with coins. Why do people always throw coins into water? Is it the payment they think they need to pay for their wish? Is it the price that must be paid for warding off evil spirits?

  And then the moment arrives, almost before he’s realised, and as they read out the stars, there’s a ripple of admiration from the audience but he doesn’t clap more loudly or draw attention to himself; instead he sits perfectly still and watches as she gets a few seconds of conversation and a quick pat of commendation. They almost forget to hand her the cup for the best results and as she walks off, Alison is straining forward and clapping and this time he calms her with a restraining touch. And now he only wants to be invisible, to be nothing more than a particle of light reflected in the silver of the cup she carries. He rubs his hands as if to dry the sudden dampness that seeps into the palms and glances about him to gauge if anyone realises he’s her father. All around him stretches a sea of white shirts, the sheen of silver, the noise of clapping, the fistle of programmes. But now it’s real and no one can take it away from her. And to hell with them all because he knows he’s her father but, as if to prove it to himself, he scoops up thick handfuls of memories, starting with the first time he held her, a bloodied lightness after the long hours of Ali’s struggle and the nurses had to prise her from him. Then he lets the memories drip through his fingers like droplets of water until they settle and form into a silent pool below the surface of his being.