Songdogs by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online Page B

cocaine. He had set up a dartboard in his next-door room to occupy himself. But one afternoon he sold the dartboard for a line of coke that he did in the public toilets in Victoria Station. Even paid his tenpence to get in and snort it. Afterwards he had nothing left and he locked himself away in the room, where I could hear him scratching at the walls, shouting for another line of coke and a cigarette.
    Those days of mine in London were long and grey. Eighteen years old, having just left home. In a train station, in black drainpipe trousers and a shirt of tentative blue, I pondered my dual heritage, the Irish in me, the Mexican. An explosion of blood made the shape of a flower around my nose, where I had failed to make a place for a small silver stud. I had wanted to announce my manhood with a nose-ring. An old landlady brought me to a bathroom to put Dettol on the side of my face where the blood had strayed, saying: ‘You hacked your bloody face, son, what in the world are ya doing?’ And me thinking it could have been my own mother tentatively dabbing a cotton ball against my nose. I moved through London as if wounded, working on building sites where they changed my name to Paddy. A plethora of paddies in knitted hats and construction belts moving their way around scaffolding. I checked in and out of small rooms all over the city. Walked around with a skin of doubt – dark, but with a field of freckles across the cheekbones. A childish voice inside me asking: ‘Who the hell are you anyway?’ In bookshops on Charing Cross Road I looked at guidebooks to Mexico, wondering if my mother might step out from the pages and appear to me, maybe a sarape around her, maybe standing under a clothesline, fluttering her thinness out towards the Chihuahuan desert. In those bookshops – with the smell of words, the promise of existing in another place, the feet moving by me as I sat lotus-legged on the floor, the clerks staring me down from the register – I decided that I would make my trip to my mother’s country, find her, make her exist for me again.
    And now I wonder what the old man remembers about her these days. Maybe nothing. Maybe silence has cured him of memory. Maybe there’s an absolute vacuum in the anathema of age.
    The kettle gave out a high whistle from the kitchen. When I went outside to tell him that the tea was ready he had his back to me – ‘tea’s growing cold!’ – but he didn’t hear me at all, his shadow sliding away from the wheelbarrow, lengthening across the yard, folding against the aluminum siding of the barn. He looked fairly content as he shuffled over to the side door and bent down, started feeding something to the cat. The cat was running around and around his feet like something possessed. He reached out every now and then and grabbed it by the tail, lit himself a cigarette which chugged away from his mouth. A drizzle came down upon him from some rat-grey clouds.
    I went up behind him and touched him on the shoulder and he whipped around, startled. It was as if he had forgotten I was there. The cigarette dropped from his mouth.
    ‘Tea’s ready,’ I said.
    ‘Ya put me heart in me mouth.’
    ‘I looked for some biscuits but I couldn’t find any.’
    ‘Haven’t had a biscuit in a while.’
    ‘I’ll go shopping tomorrow.’
    ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a bargain to me.’
    He bent down to try to pick the cigarette up from the ground but his fingers couldn’t quite get it. I reached for it, but his boot crunched it first, ploughed it into the ground.
    ‘I need some smokes too, Conor.’
    ‘No you don’t.’
    ‘Come off it, now. Don’t be doing that to me.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I love the odd smoke,’ he said.
    We were quiet for a while, then he rubbed his hands together: ‘You’re getting like Mrs McCarthy for crissake.’
    I reached my hands down into my pockets, felt the breeze lisp its way into me: ‘Well, come on so, the tea’ll be fit to dance