Leaving him and attending boarding school at five years old was like landing on a different planet. Oh so this is how other people live. I didn’t have to feel upset about turning over rocks and not finding anything moving beneath, I was with people who stepped on and over rocks, who would never think of what was underneath. People like me. I felt settled at boarding school. Discipline. Schedules. Order and routine.
When I finished school and didn’t get accepted to the Gardaí, instead of going to Tipperary for training in Templemore college as I’d planned, a continued life of structure and regimental living, I returned home. The island I missed became ordinary again. Most of the kids my age were gone to university or moved to Cork or Limerick or Dublin or even Australia and America for work. The ones who stayed had reason to. What was my reason. I was staying because I failed. I didn’t know what else I wanted to do.
Until I was flicking through the newspaper one day and it became clear.
I have no intention of asking Jamie to drive me to the train station, and after last night Cyclops is a definite no, ever again. The buses won’t work for me. I call my aunt Pauline who I know has enough to do on a bank holiday Monday with holidaymakers eating in the Mussel House, especially on a day like this where the sun is splitting the rocks and it feels like the middle of August. She would have dropped everything for me before, and that was probably unfair at the time too, but she doesn’t now. She sends my cousin Dara, which is an interesting and disappointing choice as he and I have never been close. He’s always been rude to Pops, a sneery kind of cynical sarcastic attitude. His brother John I would have been happy to see but she didn’t send John. I wonder if she sent Dara for a reason.
We make polite-ish chit-chat the entire way, about his weird kids and his weird wife, and his weird life, in the weird snidey way that he talks. He does itty-bitty jobs, different things depending on the season, helping out on farms during lambing season, driving lorries whenever a guy he knows needs lorries driven, cutting hay during hay harvest season, working behind the bar at a different bar every year. But never does he work with the family, not helping Mossie out at the mussel farm, or Pauline at the Mussel House or B&B. I’ve always thought he can’t stand his family, yet he’s always around them, he wants to be away from them but can’t leave. He wants to do better than them but hasn’t the skills or mindset, and so he keeps his distance when he’s right beside them. He’s unhinged, you can see it in his eyes. I tell him about Dublin and my job, and he makes sarcastic jokes in response to just about everything I say, and I can’t wait to get out of the car, to end this charade and wipe his greasy sarcasm and bitterness from my skin.
It’s as we’re nearing the station, driving through Killarney that I start to feel more confident. End is in sight. When he pulls into the car park I’m ready, I don’t want this to be a wasted trip, so I open the door, feel the fresh air on my skin, feel the freedom from him isn’t far from me and ask him, Dara, what did you do with her for those two weeks. Where did you go.
He smirks as if he was expecting the question and I immediately wish I hadn’t asked.
That’s for her to know and for you to find out, he says.
And I know then that I will. I’m not coming home again, I’m not setting one foot on that island until I’ve done what I was supposed to do.
Fifteen
I’m on the 17.39 train from Killarney to Dublin. It will get me there for 21.02, and then the 21.33 to Malahide, so with hours ahead of me and a needy mind that needs company, I put my headphones on and search YouTube for Rooster. I’m expecting to have to trawl through copious amounts of non-Rooster-related content but I’m surprised to discover dozens, possibly hundreds of videos of a teenager named Rooster, who looks like Tristan. Tristan from ten years old all the way up until two years ago. Rooster is playing video games and commenting through them, hands moving in the same annoying over-the-top way when they’re not on the controls. I leave one video to enter another and find the same thing. Rooster is visible in the top corner of the screen, while the video game he plays is the larger screen. Talking talking talking in an annoying accent. I watch him grow up. All on his own YouTube account. He begins his introduction with a Rooster call. A Cockadoodledoo production. The brass plaque on number eight suddenly makes sense. His calling card. A link encourages you to get new merch. I click on it and it brings me to a website with branded mugs, hoodies and stationery. A sophisticated Rooster.com complete with links to videos – Cockadoodledoo Inc.