“She packed a bag and climbed into a taxi,” his sister confessed, jumping when the microwave pinged behind her. “About an hour after Dad left.” Shivering she opened the microwave door and withdrew the heated plate of spaghetti. “That was around half past six, and she hasn’t called or answered her phone since.”
“So, what?” Joey demanded. “Mam just left you here alone with the boys? No explanation or anything? She just upped and left?”
She offered her brother a sad smile and set the plate clearly meant for him down on the table. “Here; I saved you some dinner.”
“Shannon.”
“You should eat it before it gets cold.”
“I’m not hungry. Answer me.”
“Are you sure?“
“Shannon!”
“Yes,” she admitted quietly. “I suppose she did.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because you were going to the cinema.”
“Shannon!”
“I didn’t want to trouble you again.” She cringed, cheeks burning. “I feel like that’s all any of us do these days.”
“Because I’m your brother,” he snapped, closing the space between them and tucking her under his arm. “That’s what I’m supposed to do.”
I watched as both Shannon and Sean clung to Joey, a lot like I had earlier in the car.
“You call and I come running,” he told them in a gruff tone, but his eyes were locked on mine as he spoke. “Every time.”
DADDY DUTIES
JOEY
Once again, I found myself up shit’s creek without a paddle – or a parent to show me the way.
My father was gone, my mother was missing, my sister had been beaten to a pulp, my brothers had been abandoned, and my girlfriend had been possessed by some demon bastard called premenstrual syndrome.
And here I was, in the middle of the carnage, trying to stay clean and keep my head on straight.
Im-fucking-possible.
Shannon was at home with Sean, and I was supposed to be in the city, at a minors training session of my own, but I was here, in Ballylaggin GAA Pavilion, with my attention switching between each of my brothers’ underage matches.
Reverting to the life-learned pattern that had led me down the path that Molloy had dragged me out of at Christmas was not an option, so instead of drowning out the noise by self-medicating, I settled for a smoke instead.
Sitting on the grassy slope, away from all of the other parents and supporters flocking the GAA grounds, I rolled a joint, while I waited for the boys to finish competing in their underage hurling blitz.
With my arms hooked loosely around my knees, and my hood up to conceal my face, I took a deep hit, holding it there just long enough to feel the burn in my lungs and the haze in my mind, before exhaling slowly.
Hurling wasn’t Ollie’s cup of tea. He struggled with the concept of the game in the same way Shannon used to struggle with Camogie before she gave it up.
Tadhg, on the other hand, seemed to have the gene that had been passed down from our father in droves.
Hurling came naturally to him and, when you watched him play, you knew you were looking at something special.
At someone special.
I had a feeling that, given the time and space to hone his craft, providing our father didn’t suck all of the joy out of the game for him like he had for me, that Tadhg would become the best one of all of us.
Ols was a trier, but the kid just didn’t have the hand-eye coordination, dexterity, or cut-throat attitude that went hand-in-hand with the sport, which was fine by me. I couldn’t care less if any of my siblings played or not.
To me, it was a game, just a game, but to our father, our ability to hurl was a rite of passage that couldn’t be skipped over or avoided.
From the age of four, a hurley had been thrust into each one of our hands, and we had been marched over to this very pitch, handed over to the underage trainers and coaches, with our father’s full permission to bend, break, and shape us into the best we could be.
It was our own personal baptism of fire.
Smart but not insolent, confident but not arrogant, brave but not audacious; Darren had always fit the mold of golden boy to perfection. All of those characteristics, along with his mild-tempered mannerism and perceptive nature, were the primary reasons why he had always been our mother’s favored son, and up until he learned of his sexual orientation, our father’s favorite, too.
Most importantly of all, Darren had been both a skilled and proficient hurler, but he had never been a phenomenal one. He had never taken the shine off our father, and, because of this, the old man had never felt threatened by him. Because, in our father’s eyes, the better hurler you were, the better son you were, unless you were better than him. Then you were a threat to his legacy, and he loathed that more than if you couldn’t hit a ball straight. He wanted us to be reminded that he had been one of the greats and not the other way around.
While I had never been the son our mother could be proud of, lacking the silver tongue my older brother possessed, I had managed to fit the stereotypical prototype required to be accepted and praised by our father. Until, at the tender age of eleven, when I made the unforgivable error of coming under the radar of the county selectors, something my father hadn’t managed to achieve until he was thirteen, and Darren fourteen. After that, our relationship went downhill fast, shifting from tempestuous to downright intolerable.
The more I played, the more he hated me, and the more he hated me, the harder I played just to piss him off further. It was a vicious, never-ending cycle of toxicity that resulted in me resenting the game almost as much as I resented him.
My father hated me because I played the game better than he ever had, and I hated my father because he had morphed me into his own personal living, breathing clone.
He taught me everything he knew and then resented me for using it, while I loathed him for instilling inside of me a gift that would never be mine. For the rest of my life, whether I was better than him or not, he would forever be credited with my achievements. I still played, though, because, in all honesty, I didn’t have a whole host of other skills.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” a familiar voice said, as a tall figure sat down on the grass beside me. “How’ve you been doing, kid?”
Immediately tense, I balanced my smoke between my lips, and turned my head to look at him. “What are you doing here?”
“Daddy duties.” Shane inclined his head towards where a minis game was going on. “You see that young fella over there? The big lad with the ball?”
“Yeah?”
“His ma is an old doll of mine from back in the day,” he explained, holding his hand out. “Resurfaced lately, with a habit and her hands hanging. Apparently, he’s meant to be mine, or at least she says.”
Inhaling one more drag, I passed him the joint and exhaled a cloudy breath. “So she says?”
“When it comes to women like her,” he paused for a moment to take a hit before continuing, “labeling that kid as mine holds as much merit as her falling into a bunch of nettles, and being able to pick out the one that stung her.”
I winced. “A stab in the dark.”
“A very fucking wild stab in the dark,” he agreed with a chuckle, exhaling a cloud of smoke.