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For Finbar, of whom I am exceptionally proud
AUNT NIEVE
‘How come you never told me I had an aunt?’ That was the first thing I said. I know, my first question should have been, ‘Are you alright, Dad?’ He didn’t look alright. The light was awful, but I could see blood on the side of his face. I’m amazed I didn’t say, ‘What is that smell?’ because it sure stank in there. I’m not talking about a whiffy locker room smell, but the kind of stench that can make it possible to see your breakfast a second time around. Or most obviously I guess I should have asked, ‘Where are we?’ or, ‘Why are we chained to a wall?’ But instead, the first question I asked when I regained consciousness was about genealogy.
‘Well, Conor,’ Dad croaked, not even looking at me, ‘the first time you met her, she tried to kill you.’
She had, too.
I was sitting in the living room watching crappy morning television. I was dressed, shaved and ready to go. You had to be with my father. It wasn’t unusual for me to run out of the house two minutes behind him and find that he had left without me.
‘Are you ready?’ he called from the bedroom – in almost Modern Greek.
That was a good sign. It was a simple matter to gauge my father’s moods – the older the language, the worse his frame of mind. Greek wasn’t too bad. I shouted back, in the same language, ‘Born ready!’ I had learned a long time ago that I had to speak in the language of the day, or else he would ignore me completely.
He came out of his bedroom in a white shirt with a tie hanging around his neck. ‘Could you do this for me?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
Tie tying was one of the very few things that Pop found impossible to do with just one hand. Most of the time I didn’t think of Dad as having a handicap at all – I know a lot of two-handed men much less dexterous than him, and anyway, I was happy to do him a favour. I was just about to hit him up for a bit of cash, so that tonight I could take Sally to a nice restaurant, as opposed to the usual crummy pizza joint.
‘What’s with the tie?’ I asked.
‘The dean wants me to smarten up a bit. There is some famous ancient languages professor visiting who wants to talk about my theories of pronunciation. As if I don’t have anything better to do than babysit some idiot.’
That question was a mistake on my part. He said that last sentence in Ancient Gaelic. That was the language he used when he was annoyed or really meant business – it was almost as if it was his mother tongue. I’m not talking about Gaelic, the language of the Irish, I’m talking about Ancient Gaelic, a language found only on crumbling parchments and in my house.
‘Aw c’mon, Pop,’ I said as chirpily as I could, ‘maybe this professor is a beautiful she idiot, and I can finally have a mom.’
He gave me a dirty look, but not one of his more serious ones, and tucked the bottom of his tie into his shirt.
I plopped myself down on the sofa. I could hear Dad humming some prehistoric Celtic ditty as he brushed his teeth in the bathroom. A fight broke out on the television show I was half-heartedly watching: two women were pulling each other’s hair and the studio audience was chanting the presenter’s name.
‘Turn that damn television off,’ he shouted, ‘or I’ll put a crossbow bolt through it!’
I quickly switched off the TV – coming from Dad this was not an idle threat. He owned a crossbow – as well as a quarterstaff, a mace and all sorts of archaic weaponry. If it was old, he had it. Hell, he even made me practise sword fighting with him every week before he gave me my spending money.
This gives you an idea of what life was like with my father – the mad, one-handed, ancient languages professor Olson O’Neil. People said that he lived in the past, but it was worse than that – it was like he was from the past. It was cool when I was a kid, but now that I was older, I increasingly thought it was weird – sad, even.
That Dad embarrassed me from time to time wasn’t really the problem. Now that I was starting to get a few whiskers on my chin, what really got me down was that he seemed disappointed in me all of the time and I couldn’t figure out why. I was doing well at high school. In a week I would graduate, OK, not at the top of my class, but pretty up there. I had never really been in trouble. My girlfriend didn’t have pink hair and studs through her nose, or eyebrows, or even her bellybutton. Dad liked Sally. It seemed as if he wanted me to be something – but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell me what.
A knock came on the front door that was so loud, it made me jump to my feet. Now, weird is what my life is these days, but here is where all the weirdness began.
We live in a converted barn outside of town with a regular-sized front door that is cut into two huge barn doors. When my father answers a knock, he always peers through a tiny hatch to check who’s out there. I, on the other hand, like to undo the bolts and throw open the two big doors. It shocks visitors and it has the added effect of annoying Dad. I don’t do that any more.
I dramatically swung open the two doors and found myself face to face with two of the biggest, sweatiest horses I had ever seen. Riding them was a man in full King Arthur-type armour and a woman in a hooded cloak. With hindsight I wish I had said something clever like, ‘The stables are around the back,’ but to be honest, I was too gobsmacked to speak.
When the woman pulled back her hood, she took my breath away. She was astonishingly beautiful, with a wild mane of amber hair. She seemed to be about five or ten years older than me – twenty-five, twenty-seven maybe, except something about her made her seem older than that.
‘Is this the home of Oisin?’ she asked.
‘There is an Olson here, Olson O’Neil,’ I stammered.
She considered this for a second and took a step into the room – or, I should say, her horse did. I had to back away to stop from being trampled.
‘Who are you?’ I demanded.
She looked around the room and her eyes stopped on an oak fighting stick that was mounted on the wall. A look of satisfaction crossed her face. ‘I am his sister,’ she said.
I started to say, ‘Yeah, right,’ and then two things struck me. One was that she was speaking in Ancient Gaelic – I was so stunned by the appearance of those two that I hadn’t noticed it before. The second was her eyes – she had Dad’s eyes, and nobody had dark peepers like my father.
‘Dad!’ I called out. ‘There’s a woman out here who says she’s your sister.’
That is when all hell broke loose. Dad came charging out of the bathroom screaming at the top of his lungs, with toothpaste foaming out of his mouth like a rabid animal. He grabbed the war axe off the mantel, which I always assumed was there just for decoration, and hurled it at his sister. She pulled her head back just in time to avoid getting a quick nose job, but her companion wasn’t so lucky. The flat side of the axe hit him square on the shoulder and knocked him from his saddle. The rider desperately tried to stay on his mount. The horse made a horrible sound as he pulled a handful of hair out of its mane, but it was no good. He hit the ground with a crash of metal and then, as if being attacked in my living room by equestrians wasn’t surprise enough – he disappeared – he just vanished! One second I was watching the Tin Man falling through the air, arms and legs flailing in all directions, and the next second he was gone – poof! In the space where he should have been, was a pile of rusted metal