Cork, December 1995
(Eamon Patrick Keane died on January 5th, 1990)
BEHIND the bedroom door you are sleeping. I can hear your snores rattling down the stairs to our ruined sitting room. Here among the broken chairs the overturned Christmas tree, we are preparing to leave you. We are breaking away from you, Da.
Last night you crashed through the silence, dead drunk and spinning in your own wild orbit into another year of dreams. This would be the year of the big break of Hollywood, you said Oh my actor father, time was, time was we swallowed those lines but no longer.
Before leaving I look into the bedroom to where your hand droops out from under the covers, below it the small empty Powers' bottle, and I say goodbye. And at seven o'clock on New Year's Day we push the old Ford Anglia down the driveway, my mother, brother and I. We push because the engine might wake you, and none of us can face a farewell scene. I don't know what the neighbours think if anything, when they see a woman and two small boys stealing away in the grey morning, but I don't care, we're heading south with everything we own.
The day I turned 12, which was four days later, you called to say happy birthday. You were, as I remember, halfway sober, but you didn't say much else, except to ask for my mother who would not come to the phone.
In the background I could hear glasses clinking, voices raised, and you said: "Tell her I love her," and then the change ran out, and I began to understand what made love the saddest word in any language.
Christmas that year you had access to the children. We met in Cork station. I remember your new suit, your embarrassed embrace, the money you pressed into our hands, and the smell of whiskey. We found a taxi and the driver stared at us, throwing his eyes to heaven and shaking his head.
What I see now are many such faces: the waitress at the Old Bridge Cafe where drinks were spilled; the couple who asked for an autograph and watched your shaking hand struggle to write, before they heat a mortified retreat. And on through pubs and bookmakers' shops to one last cafe, where Elvis was crooning Love me Tender Love Me Sweet on an ancient radio. By now, nobody was, able to speak.
There was a taxi ride home, we children in the back, you in the front, and what lives with me still always, the moment of leave taking, Christmas 1972. Because, as the car drove you away from our lives, I saw through the steamed up windows that your eyes had become waterfalls.
I was too young to understand what you knew that we were lost to you, broken away. Down the years we struggled to find one another, but I was growing up and away, and you were drifting closer to darkness. And at the end I gave up writing, gave up calling. I gave up. Until one night my cousin called to say you were gone. It was a few days into the New Year, and your heart simply gave up in a small room in the town in north Kerry where you were horn. I remember that you sent me the collected stories of Raymond Carver for Christmas. I had sent you nothing, not even a card. Now I would send you a thousand, but I have no address.