Chapter 16 #2
‘Your dad looks so young in this,’ Sweeney said as she held up a clipping that contained a picture of his father turning the first sod on the Banshees’ pitch.
His hair hung scruffily over his face and in his eyes, and his body was leaner, his cheekbones more prominent but, even digging a hole in the ground, his grin could not be contained.
Fin took it, staring at it for a beat. The club had started before he was born so the photo had to be some time in the eighties. His father’s words from their argument echoed around his head. What are you doing with your life, Fin? Even as a young man, his father had been driven by a purpose.
Michael had known what he’d wanted. Going into the family business. Having his own family. And Gaelic football. And he’d accomplished it all. What had Fin done? Was travel a goal? Was money in the bank a goal? Was just taking each day as it came a goal? Plenty of people would say yes.
None of them were Michael Murphy.
‘There’s a bunch of photographs down here,’ Sweeney said, her arm disappearing before reappearing with a stack of even more memories.
Fin placed the clipping back in the shoebox and replaced the lid before turning his attention to the latest tranche of memories. There was a bunch of old team photos over the years, including his own time wearing the Banshees jersey.
Smiling at the images, Fin studied the one from his first year at the club.
Every kid in the picture—boys and girls—swam in their shamrock green jerseys, but they didn’t care.
Half the kids sat on a long, low stool, their backs ramrod straight, their booted feet together, their arms extended, fists curled and placed knuckles-side down just above their knobbly knees.
The other half stood to attention behind, like eager little soldiers.
He found himself. It wasn’t too hard, with his head too big for his gangly body, his hair a mop, his toothy grin so big it almost fell off the side of his face.
Because that’s how he’d felt, big with excitement at finally being old enough to play the game he’d lived and breathed every weekend from as early as he could remember.
So damn proud to be a Banshee.
And proud of his dad, who sat next to him in the middle of the team, an equally big grin plastered on his face, his whistle hanging around his neck.
‘God, look at Donny.’ Sweeney pointed to the kid standing behind and to the right of Fin. ‘I’d forgotten he had that hey baby expression perfected even back then.’
Fin laughed. His cousin, who had been looking forward to becoming a Banshee as long as Fin, did look the coolest of all the kids, comically puffed chest and all.
Flipping through the half dozen in the batch, he found the photo he was looking for, grinning when he spied Sweeney, dwarfed by her jersey, her scrubbed clean face emphasised by the severity of her tight ponytail. She didn’t look thrilled to be there.
‘You look like you’re in a hostage video,’ he said with a laugh.
Sweeney glanced at it. ‘I much preferred to watch, you know that. I only did it because you dared me.’
Fin remembered. She’d happily come along on weekends to watch his team play either in Ballyshannon or at one of the other locations in the local area.
But, with her trusty Kodak camera in her hand ninety per cent of the time, he’d figured it had been more about the trees and the birds and the way the sun hit the dewy grass—her words—than the love of the game.
Hence his dare. ‘I didn’t think you’d take up the challenge.’
She quirked an eyebrow. ‘It’s almost like you don’t know me at all.’ Pulling out a stack of other photos from the bottom of the box she passed them over, plucking the one off the top and grinning as she flapped it in his direction. ‘Aww, look at us.’
Fin grabbed it and laughed, understanding his mother’s nostalgia earlier for a time when people actually got their photos printed. This image took him right back to those days when weekend video games with Sweeney was his second favourite thing to do next to football.
They must have been seven or eight, sitting cross-legged on his living room floor, their knees touching, their expressions intense as they stared at the television.
The tip of Sweeney’s tongue was just visible as she concentrated, which wasn’t any less endearing more than twenty years later.
They were both in jeans and jumpers so it must have been winter although, god knew, winter in Ballyshannon was more six months than three.
His hair was its usual untameable beast and she had been in her scrunchie era, all her hair pulled on top of her head in a messy knot.
‘What game do you think we were playing there?’ she asked.
‘I’m assuming it was Mario Kart.’ They’d been pretty obsessed with that.
She stared at it for a beat or two longer. ‘God, we were cute.’
Fin laughed. His immediate instinct was to be flippant about her boast, but she was right.
They were cute. Kid friendship in its purist form.
Where a video game was the beall and end-all because everything else in their lives was safe and secure and they could truly be themselves around each other without a thought of artifice.
Lucky. They’d been so lucky. Life had dealt them a good hand. A lot of kids didn’t get that. A fact that had been reinforced a few years later when Sweeney’s world had come crashing down.
‘Who’d have thunk,’ she mused with a dramatic sigh, ‘all these years later those two crazy kids would be engaged to be married?’
Glancing at her, Fin could see the smile tugging at her mouth and he grinned.
The situation was not of their making and there’d certainly been some strange moments, but they were handling this well, he thought, those two crazy kids.
‘It was clearly ordained,’ he said, joining the game.
‘I mean, to an untrained eye it might look like we’re ignoring each other, but look at that knee touch.
You can practically see the smoke rising off us. ’
‘And my tongue sticking out.’ She tapped the picture. ‘That’s a clear subliminal sign of my early desire.’
‘Right? I mean if Feeney watch gets hold of this, we’re doomed.’
‘Pfft,’ she dismissed. ‘If our mothers got hold of it, it’d be worse.’
‘It’d definitely be the photograph they’d use at our fake engagement party.’
‘Yep.’ She nodded. ‘And everyone would stand around and say stuff like’—Sweeney deepened her voice—‘we always knew they were destined for each other.’
‘God, Sweeney,’ he joked, ‘we might actually have to get married.’
‘You know what?’ Her gaze met his, her eyes bright with humour. ‘I wouldn’t put it past our mothers for this to have been their grand plan from the beginning. From day one in the hospital.’
Fin whistled. ‘Talk about playing the long game. That’s a whole other level of Machiavellian.’
‘You say Machiavellian. I say evil.’
The thought of their mothers plotting to marry off their kids to each other for the last thirty-two years and finally being rewarded for their machinations seemed so absurd, all that was left to do was laugh.
Which they did—loud and long. By the time their fit of hysterics had subsided, Sweeney was clutching his sleeve and his abs actually hurt.
They were breathing hard and staring at each other, the silence in the garage magnified by their previous raucous noise.
Fin didn’t know if he’d ever laughed like this with another woman, and that was wrong, surely? Something shifted in her gaze as their eye lock continued and, suddenly, it felt strange again.
Clearing his throat, Fin said, ‘I needed that.’ He hadn’t thought he’d be laughing during this experience and was grateful to Sweeney all over again.
Her hand slid from his sleeve. ‘What else are fake fiancées for?’ she quipped, but it seemed overly bright. ‘Next box?’
Even though they’d discarded nothing from the first box, Fin nodded, pleased to have something to do now to dissipate the awkwardness he was feeling, which thankfully didn’t take long once they started to delve into the second box.
It contained mostly stuff unrelated to the Banshees but related to Fin.
School reports and a science project he’d done on Mars.
The map of the solar system he and his father had used to place the stars on his ceiling in the correct celestial order.
Instructions for the model of the Mir space station they’d completed together.
Fin’s ashtray he’d made in his first year at high school in metalwork.
Why an ashtray when his father didn’t smoke and it was pretty much banned everywhere, he had no idea.
Maybe it had looked the easiest of the few choices they’d been given.
Also, a small clay puffin Fin had moulded and they’d glazed and fired for art class the same year.
Both were … average. The puffin could easily have passed for a platypus.
‘Yeah.’ He inspected his handiwork. ‘I think that’s when I knew I wasn’t going to be doing anything with my hands.’
Sweeney, who had of course excelled at art and topped her metalwork class, laughed. ‘Different strokes for different folks.’
A tinsel-covered Christmas tree ornament in the shape of a Dalek was unearthed next.
He’d made it in grade three because the teacher had told them they could make whatever they wanted and he hadn’t been interested in angels or snowmen.
A star had mildly interested him because stars but it had just been a dumb 2D five-pointed one, and seven-year-old Fin was incensed on behalf of science.
Didn’t people know that stars looked nothing like that?
‘Something in here,’ Sweeney said, handing him a ziplock bag.
Fin peered inside to find a bunch of old ticket stubs. ‘Oh god,’ he said as he sifted through them, a maelstrom of memories rushing to the surface. ‘These are from all the footy matches Dad took me to.’
Emotion welled, needling at his eyes and nose.
Travelling to Melbourne with his dad, sometimes his grandfather too, for the Aussie Rules.
So many days when sitting on his father’s shoulders as they’d gone through the gates at the G had been the best view in the world.
The scarves and hats his mother and grandmother had knitted in the mighty Geelong colours, the hotdogs, the noise of a roaring Saturday afternoon crowd.
The way his father had always let him take a sip of his beer froth with a wink and a whispered, Don’t tell your mother. He’d felt very grown up and part of a club that just he and his dad belonged to, fantasising about the day they’d go to Croke Park in Dublin together for a grand final.
The rest of his childhood he was one part in a big messy extended family but, on game day with his dad, they were the two musketeers. He sniffed hard as his sight blurred and his nose started to run. God … he missed his father.
‘You okay?’
Fin nodded, blinking hard to dispel the tears as he sniffed again, returning the stubs to the envelope. Sweeney’s hand was back on his sleeve and, if he wasn’t careful, that low compassionate note in her voice would sneak right under all his manly-man defences and he’d be a big, blubbering baby.
‘What’s next?’ he asked, dropping the envelope on the almost toppling keep pile.
A beat passed before her hand fell away and she turned back to the box. ‘Just a few books now,’ she said, her voice bright and cheery.
His father hadn’t been an avid reader—mostly because between the bar and the club, he didn’t have the time—but he had a few favourites that he read over and over, including to Fin when he was a kid.
The Railway Children and The Secret Garden were both in the box as was Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
There was also the dog-eared copy of Ulysses that had been his grandmother’s, which his father had read and re-read and Fin had tackled during high school.
He hadn’t been as swept up in it as his father, but he’d re-read it a few times mostly because he’d loved the notes in the margin his grandmother had made.
Even now, flicking through the pages, the sight of the faded pencil marks filled him with nostalgia.
The last one Sweeney dragged out was a collection of Irish poetry. ‘Oh, I remember this book,’ she said as she ran her palm over the cloth cover and traced the embossed, indented title with the pads of her fingers.
Fin smiled. ‘Me too.’ He remembered it vividly.
For a guy who worked a bar and loved a beer and the football, his father was a true romantic, the book a constant on his bedside table. His mother had told Fin once that his father liked to thumb through it each night and pick a random poem to read.
‘I just love the smell of old books, don’t you?’ Sweeney opened the front cover and sniffed the pages. ‘They should bottle it and sell it as perfume.’
Fin laughed, pleased for the levity. He wasn’t sure that would be an easy sell. ‘What would they call it? Eau du Musty?’
‘Ha, funny.’ She turned to the next page and sniffed it. ‘Eau du Bibliothèque? Or … Le Book. Or …’ She inhaled again as if seeking inspiration. ‘Bookish?’
Not bad for being put on the spot. ‘How about Writers’ Tears?’
‘Now you’re talking.’
She grinned as she passed it over, but the transfer was clumsy given he was putting down the two books he already had in his hands and it slipped from his fingers, landing open and face down on the floor.
He crouched to pick it up but, as he did, something slipped from the centre.
For a moment Fin thought it might be some of the actual pages before he realised it was an envelope with his name on the front—Finley—in his father’s familiar bold, slashing style.
It looked like it had been written yesterday, but the date beneath his name was the day of their argument. The day before his father had died.