The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville Read Free Book Online

before he did the awful thing that sent him to prison. Like so many men who worked there, he had been left with the wheezy rattle of asbestosis in his chest.
     
     
Fegan remembered Ronnie’s hands most of all, and he knew why. They were like his father’s. When he could get the work, Fegan’s father had also been a chippie. Except, since he was Catholic, the shipyard never had any use for him.
     
     
Mixed in with the bad times, when he came home drunk and stinking, there were good times. Like the day, when Fegan was very small, that his father borrowed a car and took him and his mother to Portaferry on the shore of Strangford Lough. They went across the Lough and back three times just for the pleasure of riding the ferry. Then his father went to the pub while Fegan and his weeping mother got the bus back to Belfast. He didn’t come home for three days.
     
     
Of details from those good times, few as they were, it was his father’s hands Fegan remembered best. He recalled the coarse and bony feel of them, the hardness and the warmth, long fingers stained orange by nicotine.
     
     
Fegan was nine years old when he last held them. It was in his parents’ small bedroom on a cold morning. The wallpaper bubbled and peeled with damp. He remembered how the mildew smell mixed with his mother’s floral scent when she entered. She sat down on the bed, picked up a hairbrush, and scraped it across his scalp.
     

 
A few minutes passed before she asked, “Who were you talking to when I came in, love?”
     
     
“No one,” he said.
     
     
The boar hairs scratched like nails. His collar felt like fingers wrapped around his neck, making a tickly sickness at the base of his throat. He watched her in the mirror over her good mahogany dressing table. He stood with his hands on the cool wood. Her eyes were red and wet.
     
     
“You were talking to someone. Was it your friends? The ones you fib about?”
     
     
“No,” he said.
     
     
She swiped the hairbrush across his backside and the sting forced him up on his tiptoes, his buttocks clenched.
     
     
She resumed brushing. “Don’t be telling lies today of all days, Gerald Fegan. Who were you talking to?”
     
     
He sniffed once and stared hard at her reflection. “Daddy,” he said. The brush stopped at his crown. The bristles gnawed at his scalp. She blinked once and a crystal bead escaped her left eye. “Don’t,” she said.
     
     
“It was Daddy.”
     
     
“Your Daddy’s going in the ground today.” She placed the brush on the bed beside her and gripped his shoulders hard. Her breath burned his skin. “They’ll screw the lid down soon, but it’s still open. I didn’t make you look at him because I knew you didn’t want to. But I’ll make you look at him now if you tell me fibs like that. Do I have to make you look at him?”
     
     
Fegan wanted to shake his head to please her, but his desire for her to know was greater. “He was holding my hand,” he said.
     
     
She spun him around to face her. Brilliant light flashed in his head as her palm slammed against his cheek. He staggered, but she held firm to his shoulders.
     
     
“You listen to me, Gerry.” Her face became pointed like a bird’s, pale and fierce. “No more of this . . . this . . . devilment. No more. Do you hear me?”
     
     
He opened his mouth to argue, and another lightning bolt struck his cheek.
     
     
“Not one more word. You don’t see anyone. You don’t talk to anyone. You turn away from them. Do you want people to think you’re mad? Do you want to end up in the hospital with all the soft-headed old men living in their own filth?” She shook him hard. “Do you? Is that what you want?”
     
     
Blinded by tears, Fegan shook his head. He wanted to wail but the cry stayed trapped in his chest. It swelled between his ears until at last air came tearing into his lungs. It burst out again in hacking sobs. He collapsed into his mother’s bosom and let her arms circle