took four days to round up the paperwork: medical certs, exit visa and so on. They were the longest four days of my life. At first I thought it would be a simple job of handing over the money and walking out of there with him in my arms and getting a plane home. That’s how much I knew.
Now that I had chosen JJ I itched to get out of that city. I wanted to take him away from that orphanage, away from the filth and the dampness and the paint peeling off the walls and the smell of detergent that would choke you. I was so worried someone might come and lift him out from under my nose that I spent every minute of those four days standing over him and talking to him, just getting used to him. When I saw him a couple of days later he’d been taken from his crib and was sitting by himself in a separate cot at the back of the room. He was wearing a new pair of pyjamas and there were clean sheets under him. For the first time I had a clear view of him and I hardly recognised him with all the dirt stripped off him. His eyes were still dark but his skin was several shades lighter and I knew straight away that this was one thing that would set him apart when I got him home. Of course what I couldn’t see then were all the other things that would make life so awkward for him, all the grief and misery which has him lying out there today on that ship with pipes draining and feeding him.3 All I saw that day was a little boy who needed love and attention, a thin hardy boy with eyes round from hunger, eyes balanced over those high cheekbones like two marbles.
We got back to Ireland on the twenty-second of March, flew into Shannon at two o’clock in the afternoon and I was never so happy to see rain in all my life. One hundred and fifty pounds it cost to get a taxi from Shannon to the door here, 130 miles the driver told me. It was half six when I brought JJ O’Malley through the back door of the old house and he must have felt right at home the minute he got inside. You have to remember this is the old house I’m talking about—bad roof and damp walls and draughts coming in under the doors rattling the window frames. I stood there in the middle of the floor with him in my arms watching our breath cloud up in front of us and it was as cold as a grave.
We were in about an hour, the fire down and me feeding him a bowl of soup on my knee when the knock came to the door. I knew before it swung open who it was; he’d have seen the light in the window.
“Frank,” I called, without getting up, “come in.”
He was in the middle of the floor before he noticed JJ. You could see him nearly take a step backwards. I never let on.
“Take a seat, Frank,” I said. “Push out the door.”
Frank swung a chair out from under the table and sat down. I was pretending to fuss with JJ but what I was really doing was trying to put myself in Frank’s place and figure out what he might be thinking. We go back a long way, Frank and myself; neighbours and school together since we were kids and a long spell in London in the seventies and eighties. There’s not a lot we don’t know about each other but I could tell that evening I had him fairly flummoxed.
“You were gone a few days,” he said, not taking his eyes off JJ.
“A few days,” I said. “Out foreign.”
“Out foreign?”
“Out foreign.”
He wasn’t happy. He tried another tack.
“I thought there might be something wrong.”
He was still staring at JJ. He told me afterwards it was as much as he could do to stop himself from reaching out with his hand to touch him and make sure he was real. Leaning out on his elbows he was, staring at him. I turned JJ round to face him.
“Say hello to your new neighbour, JJ. Frank, this is my son, this is JJ O’Malley.”
I held out JJ and Frank drew back in his chair.
“Anthony . . . ?” He had his hand out, pointing. “Anthony . . . how, where . . . ?”
I could barely keep from laughing.
“I bought him,” I said casually.
“Christ!”
“Two thousand dollars, give or take a few pounds, import duties and all the rest.”
“For God’s sake, Anthony!”
“What?” I said, playing the innocent. “You don’t think it was a fair price. I thought it was a fair price.”
You could see the colour rising in Frank’s face. Go to the dresser, I said, and get the bottle. He poured two stiff ones and drew in his chair. It was my turn to start talking and now that it was I didn’t know where to start. The more I thought about it the more I realised that some stories are so daft it makes no difference where you start telling them. You might as well start at the end as at the beginning because one part is as far from making sense as the next. But I had to start somewhere so I just took it out of face. I told him how, after the cattle had been taken away, I’d had a lot of thinking to do. Six months before I could stock up again, what was I to do in the meantime? Night after night in front of the fire thinking and mulling things over, looking at the telly and trying to make sense of things. I told him how I’d seen the coverage of all those revolutions and those orphanages and how I’d got the idea of going abroad and getting a child of my own. Money wasn’t a problem, I had my own house—what else would I do with it all? So I told him about the trip to that bitter city and all the days spent traipsing from one orphanage to the next with no clue what I was looking for. And then I told him how I found JJ and the wicked witch and about the haggling as well. No more than JJ years later, Frank could hardly believe it either, you could see it in his face. But I wasn’t ashamed of it. I wasn’t ashamed of it then nor am I now and that is something I cannot explain. He was quiet for a while after that and then he shook his head.
“I’ve heard some good ones in my time but I can say in all honesty I’ve never heard the beating of what you’ve just told me.” He laughed. “And I never figured you for the fathering type, Anthony.”
I shrugged. “There it is, you see, you never know. Spend enough nights on your own thinking and you start seeing things about yourself. You see the things you’ve done and the things you’re likely to do and when you see that the balance of your life is already in the past you find you’ve got some hard decisions to make. You either face up to it or you settle down to pissing away what’s left of yourself. There were nights here when that fire never went out.”
It all sounded a lot wiser than I felt but it seemed to make sense at the time.
“He’s a fine child though,” Frank said. “How old did you say he was?”
“Two years old, he’ll be two years old in the middle of April. At least that’s what I’ve been led to believe.”
“And he’s healthy and everything?”
“He seems to be, there’s nothing wrong with his appetite.”
We talked on for another hour and it must have been near eight when Frank got up and put his glass on the table. Maureen would call over in the morning, he said. By that time JJ was flat out in my arms, his eyes closed and his mouth open. I put him in my bed next to the wall with two pillows outside him so he wouldn’t roll over in his sleep and end up on the floor. He looked comfortable in that big bed, all warm and peaceful with the blankets pulled up under his chin. I put the light out but left the door open and when I got back into the kitchen I saw the two empty glasses on the table. I
