Tidings: An Anthology of New Irish Christmas Stories

TIDINGS

An Anthology of

New Irish Christmas Stories

TIDINGS

An Anthology of

New Irish Christmas Stories

Edited by Seán Farrell

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

Founded 1984

First published by

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

62–63 Sitric Road,

Arbour Hill,

Dublin 7,

Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Compilation and Introduction © Seán Farrell, 2024

Individual Contributions © Respective authors, 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 84351 895 2

eBook ISBN 978 1 84351 908 9

Lilliput gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Set in 11 on 16pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Niall McCormack

Printed in Scotland by Bell & Bain

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Checked Luggage

Patrick Holloway

Rear-view Mirror

Julia Kelly

Severance

Elske Rahill

The Fall of Man

Donal Ryan

All the Names She Knows

Martina Devlin

The Goulds’ Holiday Party

Oona Frawley

Christmas in the Old House

Maya Kulukundis

The Artist Sketched by a Friend

Rob Doyle

Bicycles

Kevin Power

Never(again)land

Lorcan Roche

The Turkey’s Tail

Alicia McAuley

In Remembrance of John Moriarty

Michael Harding

Pilgrim X

Mike McCormack

Wigilia

Alice Lyons

Acknowledgments

Preface

THIS COLLECTION IS to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of The Lilliput Press, four decades in which Antony Farrell has devoted himself to making the impersonal personal.

For Lilliput, Christmas parties are a time when the books, and the selling of books, the readers of books and the writers of books, the printers and the designers and the producers of books, all come together and the music plays in the background. That drawing together gave us the prompt that these pieces share: ‘Christmas parties’. Rather than selecting samples of previous material and giving this book a commemorative tone, we wanted to commission new work, because what is Christmas if it isn’t a new beginning?

So here it is: the guest list for our anniversary party, a few of my father’s friends that we think you’ll enjoy spending time with. Some of them you’ll get on with more than others. There’re a few new people here too, because what would a party be if there’s no one new invited? And there’s you of course, the reader, the stranger who makes everything come alive.

Introduction

i

MY FATHER USED to drive down from Dublin to see us, but those visits are vague; there’s nothing to describe. There is a photo. I’m not sure where it is now. There’s no memory conjured by the photograph, it’s just the memory of a photograph.

It is a type of still life, but there are no fruit or flowers in it. Arranged on a slab of granite is a letter written by my sister. I know it’s her letter by the amount of ink she used to blot out her mistakes – childish lines in fountain pen interspersed with blocks of redacted text. Also part of the composition is a large box of Black Magic chocolates with a red tassel; a copy of Ulysses open on the blue title page; and the lower part of someone’s leg, the foot dressed in a colourful sock. I think the sock was hand-knit, which is why it was on display. I don’t know why it wasn’t taken off and draped on the stone. There’s an idea that we were having fun. The lighting of the photo suggests summer, the box of chocolates Christmas. The idea of the tableau – the strange documentary, directorial impulse – suggests my father, Antony Farrell.

Years later he was nearly attacked in London thanks to this compulsion. Diminutive in a duffle coat against the English winter, he had gone into a red phone box to make a call and had found the inside wallpapered with postcard-size advertisements for prostitutes. He was shocked, titillated and inspired.

He was also seized by determination: he would bring the pictures back to Dublin and create an art installation. Some kind of display that would reflect the feelings with which he had been so unexpectedly confronted; that instant of garish isolation. Carefully, he began to remove the pictures, making sure not to damage the exhibits. It was slow, methodical work but he soon had a little pile. He was interrupted by a man on the verge of violence. The ads were his property; it was his business to organize the services advertised and he was not in the mood to let anyone get in the way.

I can see my father patiently explaining – in those remnant Ascendancy tones – to an aggressive pimp about the important artwork he was going to make. It’s telling that Antony held his ground. He didn’t give those pictures back, and got away against the odds with a glossy stack in his coat pocket. They were in a large cream envelope in a desk drawer for years: dirty photos, strings of London numbers and suggestive text. One item in the vast and sprawling Lilliput complex. Another aspect of life that needed framing and exhibiting: because Posterity is fascinated by everything, and life is too precious to be let go. The British Museum in London may have the Elgin Marbles, but Stoneybatter has the interior world of a South Kensington telephone box.

His instinct to root through skips may appear as Church of Ireland parsimony, but it’s also an impulse to preserve. An alabaster sculpture of two lovers entwined: ‘Can you believe someone was going to throw this away? It’s such a generous rendering! I’ll put it in the window of the shop.’

The photograph of a book and my sister’s writing, of the Black Magic chocolates and the leg with its knitted sock, is another small artefact stored away. It could have been a short row of faces, but what would be the sense in that? He has that photograph in a box somewhere, I’m sure: ‘A visit inspired by familial obligations, late 1980s, County Meath.’

ii

The older I got, the more regularly I saw him. He used to bring me to Navan shopping centre for the afternoon. I would eat ice cream with coloured bits on it and we’d be silent for hours. My father does not know how to talk to children, and I was a difficult child to talk to.

He asks what I’m reading and I tell him.

He asks what I ate for dinner and I tell him. School is fine.

He asks what else is going on. I say nothing much.

We still have those conversations today, only work is fine now instead of school. Unless I’m involved in a Lilliput project, and then we have something to talk about.

I still hate Navan, and the long silences it holds. The relapse into tension after the ice cream was eaten.

I stole glances at him, but he was always looking somewhere else. On reflection I imagine him stealing glances too, both of us trying to identify the stranger in the seat beside him.

There was a deep sense of alienation, a wordless chasm in the car. The floor on the passenger side was so rusted you could see the road through the holes. I used to fix my eyes there and watch the tarmac speed by between my feet.

One day as we neared home, the ordeal nearly over, he pulled up roughly onto the hard shoulder. The front wheel bumped along the verge and we came to a halt with empty road ahead.

‘I have another twenty fucking minutes,’ he said. I had no idea what he was talking about. We sat together staring out the windscreen, the hedge too close. After some unbearable moments he took a cassette tape and: ‘This is The Who, Live at Leeds 1977,’ he said. ‘Their most important recording.’

I didn’t listen to music. There were hymns in church on Sunday but that was about it. My father turned the volume up and I was horrified. It was an unspeakable noise, a terrible cacophony louder than I thought possible. It went on for exactly twenty minutes, then he turned it off. The car began to move again and he drove me the few hundred metres home.

The next time he picked me up, he played the tape again. There was no discernible point at which I began to enjoy it. There was no moment of realization regarding the fact that The Who have to be listened to loud or not at all. But at some point I stopped gritting my teeth against the sound and opened up to the energy of the music, at some point I squeezed my eyes tight shut and began to headbang along. I didn’t know it then, but I know now that the main work of a publisher is of persuasion: they manage to combine what you will like with what you should like rather than presenting what you already know.

The car was full of tapes, stacked between the seats, spilling from the glovebox, on the floor. Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, The Troggs, Chuck Berry. It was the early nineties and I had just discovered rock and roll.

Once, in the silence between songs, he gave me an enormous responsibility and shared an impossible intimacy as he introduced the next track: ‘This is the song I want played at my funeral.’ The first time I heard Elvis’ ‘Such a Night’ was monumental. As my father sang along, I wondered what night he was thinking of; and for the first time I began to ponder his death. The music stood for something essential inside him, and when he died it would play on.

In that car, or another because they never lasted very long, I got to know him without us having to talk at all. He spoke as Kris Kristofferson, Christy Moore, Willie Nelson, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Dusty Springfield, Mick Jagger, Leonard Cohen – and I listened and I felt that I understood.

Some of it was unfathomable. He went through an unfortunate Enya phase, for example, and he refused to play anything but the likes of Mary Black and Frances Black, or Clannad (and other names I’ve obviously blocked from my mind), insisting that I just had to listen to it. Be open to it. But maybe these things take time. I’m over forty now. Recently I was sitting in the car in a dark and empty railway station car park. I was waiting to pick up one of the children coming home for Christmas, but I was too early. Rain ran down the windows and the orange light from the lamp posts held the loneliness of expectation, of loss before and loss to come again. ‘A Woman’s Heart’ came on RTÉ Radio 1 and it took a terrible effect.

iii

It’s often difficult to date memories, but I can be sure enough of this one. In the Season of the Daisies was published in 1993, so the proofs would have been out around the same year, and I would have been nine or ten. After a visit, my father came to tuck me in and say goodbye. Which means he came as far as the doorway and threw a half a ream of A4 paper at me. It landed on my face.

‘Proofread this for me will you? I’ll collect it the next time I see you.’

‘What’s proofreading?’

‘You just read it and mark up any spelling mistakes in the margin – or if the grammar’s wrong. You read it forwards, and then read it backwards so you don’t get distracted by the meaning. Here’s a pen.’ A fine-nibbed Pilot missile followed, and he was gone.

The narrator is a young boy, so I suppose he thought I might be an expert on the subject. I searched for spelling mistakes although I couldn’t spell, desperately hoping to find one to show him when I saw him again. But I soon fell into the trap that every manuscript lays. I was sucked into the story and stopped looking at the words. The magic of murder, of different human voices and their terrifying worlds. I was used to books, and expected it of them, but to have this happen out of a pile of sheets of paper was new. This was not a book, this was something spilling out across the bed that had to be collected up and put in order using the numbers at the bottom of each page. This was an idea that something could be made. A book was no longer one thing and life another. There was a midway point, before the text was formed. A bridge over the gap between the two worlds.

I began to go to stay with him in Dublin. The house on Rosemount Terrace, Arbour Hill, was a confusing place with dark carpets, a cold kitchen and an empty fridge. There were two other small rooms downstairs and three upstairs. They were all full of books and desks, and sometimes people. One had a bed in it, so did another but it could only be found once the paperwork was removed. There was no space that wasn’t part of Lilliput. There were heaps of paper everywhere, big bricks made of the same book wrapped in plastic, boxes of different books, typewriters, shelves and shelves and shelves of books, stacks of manuscripts. There were photos on the walls, paintings, pictures. A sketch that Picasso did on a napkin, hugely enlarged. An enormous drawing of a face made up entirely of lines of handwriting. Black-and-white photos of a scary-looking man.

‘Samuel Beckett. You’ve never heard of Samuel Beckett? He’s a struggling writer.’

My ignorance intrigued him then and it intrigues him now. Like a sports fanatic or an old woman in a country village who knows everything that has gone on in the parish for a hundred years, he knows the value of the little details, and he can’t understand how anyone else can live without them. ‘Are you seriously going to tell me you’ve never heard of Paddy Canny?’ he’ll say ‘You are so ignorant.’ There’s a genuine fascination at work as he marvels at the poverty of my experience. He’s someone whose deep curiosity for their environment – whose subsequent retention of information – is boundless and vast; it renders him benevolent and puts him in high good humour.

It’s the product of living in a particular world and never tiring of it, never considering that there is anything beyond it. It’s the knowledge of many years of experience, of an enchantment that doesn’t allow forgetting and an appreciation for what fits where, or rather for the fact that everything fits everywhere.

The most profoundly important philosophies can be summed up in the simplest of statements. After years of being a parent, the only advice that has continued to resonate with me was something I overheard a Mennonite with a moustache and a placid sense of superiority say: Kids copy. Whatever lengthy arguments or theories about nurture and nature, or why and how and what, those two words have guided and rebuked me whenever they come to mind.

And then there’s my father’s go-to phrase, when he comes across another little proof that, though things are incorrigibly plural and drunkenly various, we can always establish a relationship. Sometimes he says it wistfully, always triumphantly, often with a little knowing flourish. Two small sober words, sparkling with clarity: Everything connects.

iv

When we ate (rotisserie chicken that came in a foil bag, brown sliced pan, bananas and Galaxy chocolate) he insisted on tablemats under the plates. These were unfolded sample dustjackets. In the bathroom there were boxes of toilet paper printed with various dirty poems.

The sound of the typewriter. He typed with index fingers and his tongue poking out the side of his mouth, the same way he uses a keyboard now. He spoke for what seemed like hours on the phone, on his lap a manuscript and in his hand a pen. He wore jumpers that his aunt knitted him and smoked cheroots from a square tin.

Occasionally, in an effort to give me attention, he’d take me to the Phoenix Park. I’d climb the steps of the Obelisk and he’d kick the ball up to me and I’d have to catch it and send it back down to him. It was a type of boredom I didn’t rediscover until I had to do the same type of thing with my own children. But most of my time in Rosemount Terrace was spent reading or writing or drawing, or annoying the other people working in the house. The front room was the main office, but it was mostly full of stock. There was a mysterious French woman upstairs called Marie and a man named Hugo who sat in the living room. He once used a whole roll of Sellotape to attach me to a chair so he could get some peace. A guy called Martin with long hair and a soft Northern voice told stories about cleaning public bathrooms. How did they get the shit on the ceilings, he’d wonder.

There was a long low cupboard by the tiny unused fireplace. The sliding doors were difficult to work as they had indents rather than handles, but when I managed to jam them open I found a record player sitting on rows of records, packed tight as After Eight mints. We took it out and blew the dust off, plugged it in. There was one speed for singles and another for LPs and lowering the needle in the right place was a delicate operation. The volume up, the scratch of the needle at the start of Rubber Soul crackles, and ‘Drive my Car’ kicks in. I wasn’t allowed to play the records until everyone had gone home. I spent a long time waiting, looking at the album covers, choosing what I wanted.

After thirty years a lot of them were warped, but I just thought it was part of the music. ‘Six Blade Knife’ by Dire Straits was not improved by the swollen effect but I tried to dig it anyway. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Mackem, Antoine, The Byrds, The Animals, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello. I listened to them lying on the brown carpet, jumping up to dance to ‘Crocodile Rock’.

In the corner was a Christmas tree. It had no decorations or lights, but its branches were covered in cards. There was even one balanced skew-ways at the top, a star on the front of it, an Xmas scrawl inside.

And then my first Lilliput Christmas party. That narrow empty living room and the bigger room at the front were full of adults, so full that it was quicker to crouch and move among the legs and shoes than try to go upright. The record player was up on a table and those private sounds, the songs I would sing out loud, the tunes that were precious to me, sifted in among the endless drone of voices.

It was an innocent party: I didn’t know what drunk was and the room was just a mass of people and noise. One man put his hand on another’s shoulder and smiled at him. People turned their heads on one side while other people spoke.

I remember a man with a bald head. I may be inventing the bow tie, but the bald head is very clear. An old-fashioned bald head: no skull shave, plenty of thick hair circling an extended shiny patch. I won’t give him a name because I didn’t know his name then. Only that there was a fixed glint in his eye and it was impossible to understand what he said. It sounded like haw haw haw haw haw. I remember him distinctly because, very late in the evening, my sister and I climbed up on a chair behind where he was standing and drew on the back of his bald crown with a burnt cork. Whether it was thanks to his refined manners or his advanced state of grace he didn’t even flinch – just carried on talking to the bleary-eyed chap in front of him. Ha haw haw haw haw haw, he said as we made our marks.

v

When I was a teenager I wanted to spend more time in Dublin, in the flat above the new shop in Sitric Road. My father never had any objections to my fuckwit friends sleeping on the sofa (though they preferred the floor because of the fleas). He’d come out of his room in the morning in pale green Y-fronts, kick someone awake and tell them to go and buy milk. He’d shout about all the CDs being out of their boxes and go back to his room to read. Despite the quality of the welcome, it was always there.

And there were always guests at lunchtime too. Usually a lone adult. My father would put whatever provisions he had on the table and ask whoever it was if they were any good at cooking. ‘I have an onion and some cheese. Delicious.’ There were crumbs and long conversations, or rather long attentive sessions. The people who came always had a hobby horse and would ride it for hours while my father listened and asked questions. Some of them drank, some of them didn’t. Sometimes they stayed and stayed and lunch would become supper.

One big man in sandals seemed as interested in talking to me and my sister as he was talking to my father. We played Monopoly but he wanted to change all the rules when we tried to explain them to him. ‘Why does it have to be like that? Why don’t we do something else? What would happen if we worked together?’ It was infuriating. Lilliput published the prescient The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet by Richard Douthwaite in 1992 but I didn’t think I needed to read it, the author had already made his point.

During those empty teenage afternoons – sometimes with the background sound of lecturing or hectoring, sometimes in silence, always in that yawning, adolescent isolation – I wandered about reading the backs of the postcards propped up on the