child, you want as many people rooting for him as you can get. This young Irish comic with dried wax in his ears seemed to be on our side. And so I found myself on his side, too.
I was ready to work with him on a part-time basis because I was bored and broke. But most of all I was ready to work with him because he thought my son was going to make it.
‘I need to see your act,’ I said. ‘I need to see what you do on stage so I can think about how it could work on the box. Have you got a show reel?’
‘What?’ he said.
Whatever the opposite of inscrutable is, that’s what small children are.
Maybe in ten years’ time Pat would be able to hide his feelings behind some blank adolescent mask and the old man – me – wouldn’t have a clue what he was thinking. But he was four going on five and I could tell that the latest phone call from his mother had given him the blues.
‘You okay, Pat?’
He nodded listlessly, and I followed him down to the bathroom where he squirted some children’s toothpaste on his Han Solo toothbrush.
‘How’s Mummy?’
‘She’s all right. She’s got a cold.’
He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t about to cry. His eyes were dry and his mouth was still. But he was down.
‘You want to watch a video?’ I asked him, watching him polish teeth that still looked brand new.
He spat into the sink and shot me a suspicious look.
‘It’s school tomorrow,’ he said.
‘I know it’s school tomorrow. I don’t mean watch the whole film. Just, say, the start of the first film up until the two ’droids get captured. How about that?’
He finished spitting and replaced his brush in the rack.
‘Want to go to bed,’ he said.
So I followed him into his bedroom and tucked him in. He didn’t want a story. But I couldn’t turn out the light knowing that he was depressed.
I knew what he was missing and it wasn’t even what you could call a mother’s love. It was a mother’s indulgence. Someone who would tell him that it didn’t matter if he couldn’t tie his shoes up yet. Someone who would tell him that he was still the centre of the universe when he had just learned what we all learn on our first day of school – that we are not the centre of the universe. I was so desperate for him to make it that I couldn’t be relaxed about him making it. Gina’s indulgence. That’s what he really missed.
‘She’ll be back,’ I said. ‘Your mother. You know that she’ll be back for you, don’t you?’
He nodded. ‘As soon as she’s done her work,’ he said.
‘We’re okay, aren’t we?’ I asked him. ‘You and me – we’re doing okay, aren’t we?’
He stared at me, blinking away the fatigue, trying to understand what I was going on about.
‘We’re managing without Mummy, aren’t we, Pat? You let me wash your hair now. I make you things you like to eat – bacon sandwiches and stuff. And school’s okay, isn’t it? You like school. We’re all right, aren’t we? You and me?’
I felt bad about pushing him like this. But I needed him to tell me that we were doing all right. I needed to know that we were coping.
He gave me a tired smile.
‘Yes, we’re all right, Daddy,’ he said, and I kissed him goodnight, hugging him gratefully.
That’s the worst thing about splitting up, I thought as I turned out his light. It makes children hide their hearts. It teaches them how to move between separate worlds. It turns them all into little diplomats. That’s the biggest tragedy of all. Divorce turns every kid into half a pint of semi-skimmed Henry Kissinger.
‘I come from a little town called Kilcarney,’ said Eamon Fish, removing the mike from its stand and gently tapping the transparent hearing device in his left ear. ‘A quiet little town called Kilcarney where the girls are legendary.’
I was watching him on a monitor, sitting in the front row of the small studio audience that was facing the backsides of five cameramen. Although we were surrounded by all the usual paraphernalia of the television studio – lights burning in the rigging, cables snaking across the floor, the shadows beyond the cameras teeming with people whose jobs ranged from floor manager to working the autocue to pouring water, all of them wearing what we called ‘blacks’ – the director was shooting Eamon’s act to make it look more like a stand-up routine than just another late-night chat show. There were already too many talk shows that looked like boot sale David Lettermans. But what would really make it different was the host.
‘For those of you who have never been to that beautiful part of my country, you should know that Kilcarney has largely been untouched by the modern world. There are, for example, no vibrators in Kilcarney.’ The audience tittered. ‘It’s true. The priests had them all removed. Because Kilcarney girls kept chipping their teeth.’
There was laughter from the audience, laughter which grew slightly nervous as Eamon ambled off the small stage and slowly came closer to us.
‘I mean, I’m not saying Kilcarney girls are stupid,’ he said. ‘But why does a Kilcarney girl always wash her hair in her mother’s sink? Because that’s where you wash vegetables.’
The laughter grew louder. None of the studio audience – the usual collection of the bored and the curious on the lam for a couple of hours of free fun – had ever seen this Eamon Fish before. But now they felt he was harmless. Then he turned on them.
‘Actually, I’m making all this up,’ he said. ‘It’s all bollocks. Kilcarney girls have the best exam results in western Europe. In fact, the average Kilcarney girl has more A levels than the average Englishman has tattoos. It’s not true that the only difference between a Kilcarney girl and a mosquito is that a mosquito stops sucking if you hit it on the head. It’s not true that Kilcarney girls only get fifteen minutes for lunch because any longer than that and you have to retrain them. It’s not true that what Kilcarney girls and bottled Guinness have in common is that both of them are empty from the neck up. None of it is true.’
Eamon sighed, ran his free hand through his thick mop of black hair and sat down on the side of the stage.
‘What is true is that even in this Guardian-reading, muesli-munching, politically correct age we seem to need someone to hate. Once it was the thick Irishman and the ball-breaking mother-in-law. Now it’s blonde girls. Essex girls. Kilcarney girls.’
He shook his sleepy head.
‘Now we all know in our hearts that geographical location and hair colour have got bugger all to do with sexual morality or intelligence. So why do we need a group of people who we can sneer at? What fundamental need in our pathetic souls does it fulfil? When we laugh about the blonde Kilcarney
