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As his older brother, I felt somewhat responsible for his well-being. Plus, I’d just wrapped a Viking show filmed in the Wicklow Mountains and was between jobs, so I had a few months to spare.
Aunt Tricia, my mother’s sister, and I made sure that Eion was handling our mother’s loss as best as we could. Our other brothers had their own lives to live. Patrick was twenty and lived in Israel at a Kibbutz. Noel, three years younger than me, had moved into a flat with his friends in the city center, and Jim and Liam, my fraternal twenty-two-year-old twin brothers, had just graduated university and spent too much time partying to worry about Eoin.
“What’s up, Eoin?” I asked him, figuring it must be something big for him to be barging in like this.
“I got a phone call about Da. I know where he is.”
“Wonderful,” I said, without enthusiasm.
I should have known.
Our dad would never be accused of being a good parent. Originally from Scotland, he seemed to have taken Alexander Trocchi’s novels as life guides, drinking, shooting up, and shagging anything he could find.
It was a wonder he had lived as long as he had, leading me to the logical conclusion that the bugger was indestructible.
“You’re not coming, are you?” Eoin asked, his face falling.
“Don’t see a need. Da is old enough to look after himself. He’ll never learn to stand on his own two feet, stumbling as they may be, if we keep bailing him out. He’ll come home when he wants to. If he lives that long.”
“But—”
I could tell he was going to cry. Eoin had just turned eighteen, but he was still my little brother, and with the state our father had been in most of his life, I had been his legal guardian this whole time.
I suspected he saw me as more of a dad than the man who actually fathered him.
Our mother, who’d been through hell at the hands of our father, was a shell of herself by the time she’d had Eoin. Needless to say, she hadn’t had the energy to raise him.
I rubbed my hands up and down my face.
“You really want to go get him, don’t you?”
“I do,” he said, nodding, the tears already beginning to flow.
“Come on, then,” I said, grabbing my phone and car keys.
My reluctance to go looking for our father was at least partly a matter of self-preservation. The Troubles – that period of constant conflict in Northern Ireland – were long over, at least in our neck of the woods, but, like all major cities, there were some areas where it wasn’t too clever to go wandering at night, and we just happened to occupy one.
Andersonstown, or Andytown, as it was known locally, was a suburb in west Belfast that was located at the foot of the Black Mountain. It was largely a working-class area filled with good people, but it was also a bastion for junkies and petty criminals at night.
Most local boys got their first scars by the time they were twelve. My brothers and I were no exception. Our aunt Tricia and our mother had tended to more than a few black eyes, busted lips, and stab wounds over the years.
Our dad loved living here, though, not least because of the bargain prices on both rent and smack.
“You stay in the car, understand?” I instructed Eion now, as we walked outside.
“Aye.”
“Even if shite goes down. I don’t need you being shanked for a second time, and neither does Aunt Tricia, savvy? I don’t want to have to smash someone’s skull in order to rescue you again.”
“I already said ‘aye.’”
“That’s not good enough, lad.” I cringed at the tone of my voice, knowing that it was more “trying too hard” than “big brother serious” like I had wanted it to sound. “Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Swear to St. Brigid?”
Eoin sighed. “I swear to St. Brigid.”
The streetlights were pretty sporadic, but the moon was full, which helped. There were no other cars on the road except for those owned by mad buggers with the brass balls to street park overnight.
“There he is. That’s his coat,” Eoin said, pointing emphatically out the window to a man slumped over on the side of the road.
“He looks pretty rough,” I said.
“He needs help.”
“He might slug me again.”
“Please?”
I drummed my fingers against the steering wheel before saying, “Fine.”
Easing the car over to the side of the road, I got out quickly, looking all around.
There was no sign of anyone except for me and the smacked-out junkie in the gutter, who just happened to be our father. If one could even call him that, seeing how undeserving he was of the title.
“Swing at me, and I’ll knock your teeth out,” I said, taking my good ole dad by the shoulders.
“Feck off, ya wanker!” he rasped in reply.
