Chapter 4
Thirty-Four Years Ago
It had been an ace day, until the moment Kip Carney had swung open the door into the tiny kitchen expecting his mother to be standing as she usually was at their kitchen sink.
He was rushing home to tell her his news.
Mr Flaherty, the school principal, had got word he’d been picked for the junior Connaught rugby team.
He’d called him from class, no bad thing as Mrs Murphy was trying to beat a bit of Irish into them.
Kip liked Mrs Murphy. Alright, so she told him he was as thick as an ass and wondered aloud daily what his mother was thinking sending him to school at all.
Kip couldn’t understand how other kids seemed to be able to string all the letters together that just jumbled up on the page before his eyes.
He couldn’t explain to his annoyed teacher that he was cleverer than any of them on the rugyby field.
But once the spring shot daffodils through the hedgerows, he occasionally brought a small bunch for her desk because he knew she liked them, and she often slipped him an extra banana from her lunch box if she spotted his own was thinly filled.
‘Mammy, Mammy, you’ll never guess what,’ he’d come rushing in from the front hallway, full of his news to share with her – when you’re twelve years old, the whole world revolves around you. Or at least it did for Kip Carney until he pushed through the door that day.
The weird thing was that the kitchen was exactly the same.
Quieter, somehow, emptier, his mother instead of standing at the kitchen sink was slumped to the floor in front of it.
Her nose bloody, her gaze strangely unseeing – even when he drew up close and fell to his knees next to her, she hardly blinked, never mind looking at him.
‘What happened? What is it? Did someone do this to you?’ His mother never answered him.
But somehow, he gathered her up, she was a tiny thing.
Already, he was taller than her, broader than her, strong enough to carry her probably, if she’d trust him to.
He bundled her across the floor into the rocking chair that his father often said was older than all of them put together.
Now, Kip wasn’t sure what to do, once his mother was safely in the chair.
He looked around the kitchen. Then he walked to the cupboard where his mother kept what little medicines were needed in the house.
There were plasters, TCP, cotton buds and paracetamol – surely some of these could help to patch his mother up.
He grabbed the lot, brought them to the table next to his mother. ‘I’ll get Dad, he’ll know what to do.’
‘No, Kip, no,’ she murmured. ‘Your father is gone.’ She reached up her sleeve and pulled down a tissue, began dabbing it at her bloody nose.
‘Gone where?’ His father never went anywhere, well not during the day anyway. You could set your watch by him. On dole days – he was up and spruce to go and collect his money, then, six nights of drinking in the local pub and a seventh night of darkened mood when everyone knew to keep clear of him.
‘Gone gone.’ She shrugged and then she began to cry again, as if her heart would break and somehow, Kip understood. His father had left them.
‘It’s alright Mammy, everything will be alright.’ He put his arm around her shoulder, although it was uncomfortable – theirs wasn’t really a family for hugs and the likes.
‘Will it?’ she looked at him now.
‘It will,’ he said with a lot more conviction than he felt.
‘How will we live? I mean…’ She looked around the kitchen, their needs were simple, but even so, they were just about scraping by.
‘We’ll be fine,’ Kip said, although he had no idea how.
As it turned out, without his father in the house, they were better than fine. Once his mother’s sadness faded and his brother’s anger subsided, their home became something it had never been when their father lived with them – peaceful.
Oh, the kids in school had a field day, of course, jibing and jeering at them, but Constance Macken, his favourite teacher in the school, told Kip not to be minding them, instead to show them all that he was better than any of them at the one thing he was good at.
Kip lost himself on the rugby pitch. He was fearless, relentless and always sportsmanlike; a clean and honest player who relied on talent and hard work.
Everyone thought Kip was all about the rugby – but Kip knew, to be a good man, you had to have a lot more to you than that.
And he wanted more than anything to be a good man, to be a much, much better man than his old man had ever been.