The Arrival of Fergal Flynn Read online

  FOR SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD FERGAL FLYNN, GROWING UP IN 1980s BELFAST ISN’T EASY.

  His father and brothers despise him; he’s his mother’s crutch one day, her punching bag the next; he has no idea what he wants to do with his life; and he fancies one of the boys in his class...

  Fergal just wants to belong — but knows he

  never will.

  When handsome young Father Mac arrives in the parish, Fergal embarks on a whirlwind journey towards a new life. As their relationship deepens, he discovers his sexuality, his talent for singing and the wonderful, terrifying opportunities the

  world has to offer.

  Funny, tender and unflinching, The Arrival of Fergal Flynn is the story of a young man struggling to find his voice against all the odds.

  Brian Kennedy was born on 12th October 1966,

  one of six children, and was brought up in Belfast.

  He discovered his natural singing voice when he

  found he could repeat a note pitch perfect at school

  and harmonise along with the radio.

  He has had numerous platinum-selling album releases —

  from The Great War of Words in 1990

  to Get on With Your Short Life in 2002.

  He has a television show on the

  BBC, Brian Kennedy on Song.

  The Arrival of Fergal Flynn is his first novel.

  www.briankenncdy.co.uk

  The Arrival of Fergal Flynn

  The Arrival of

  Fergal Flynn

  BRIAN KENNEDY

  Hodder Headline Ireland

  Copyright © 2004 Brian Kennedy

  First published in 2004 by Hodder Headline Ireland

  A division of Hodder Headline

  The right of Brian Kennedy to be identified as the Author of the Work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988.

  A Hodder/LIR paperback

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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

  ISBN 0340 83229 0

  Typeset in Plantin Light by Hodder Headline Ireland

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Hodder Headline Ireland

  8 Castlecourt Centre

  Castleknock

  Dublin 15

  Ireland

  A division of Hodder Headline

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  Table of Contents

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  1

  Mr O'Connell, the permanently itchy maths teacher, normally ignored Fergal Flynn in a friendly kind of way, until that particularly hungover Monday morning in 1982. After repeated waves of nausea, dry swallows and cold sweats, the teacher realised that he'd squandered yet another weekend. A rerun of the previous few days filled his aching head on fast forward: the frantic pints of beer fuelling the Dutch courage to trawl the seediest bars in the centre of Belfast in a vain attempt to get some legless girl to sleep with him - only to be dropped like a half-finished cigarette the second he hesitated to pay for the umpteenth round of Harvey Wallbangers, while someone else poached his 'kill', as he liked to call them in the male-dominated staff room. A wave collapsed in punches at the centre of his skull like a hundred boxing gloves falling from a great height. He groaned out loud, holding the sides of his head for fear it was going to split in half.

  When he finally snapped back into the reality of the fifth-year classroom, he realised he'd been staring directly at Fergal. His frustration erupted like one of the boils on his hairy back.

  'For fuck's sake, Flynn. Can you not even manage to sit like a fella, never mind talk like one? Do you have to cross your legs like a bloody bitch in heat? Jesus, but you're some class of a sorry fucking queer handbag, so you are!'

  Before Fergal had time to blink, Mr O'Connell launched the wooden-handled blackboard duster as viciously as he could and it caught its target hard across the ear. The rest of the class ducked for cover behind their filthy jotters, then exploded laughing as a little cloud of chalk dust burst on impact into the stale classroom air.

  'See, even the teachers hate you, Fruity Boy Flynn,' said Frankie Burns triumphantly through tight-lipped convulsions, as factual as the schoolmaster's dull voice that tattooed Fergal's brain every day.

  Home was no better. In fact, it was often worse. Fergal's reputation at school only served to cement his death sentence within his immediate family, especially his three brothers. Paddy Jr and John, the sport-obsessed twins, were seventeen - a year older than Fergal - and Ciaran was the fourteen-year-old 'baby', their da's favourite because he'd actually been planned, sort of. Conversation came to an immediate standstill if Fergal entered the tiny front parlour where the mortified twins planned their endless matches with friends. If he made the bigger mistake of hanging about the house too long, he miraculously transformed into a punching bag, and even his mother Angela turned a blind eye. She hoped that some of her other sons' manliness might literally rub off on him if they hit him hard or long enough. Her husband always said it would.

  In the Flynn household, fists were questions and bruises were answers. Fergal spent as long as he safely could away from the house, if there weren't too many riots, because he just didn't speak the language.

  ~

  Angela had just turned nineteen when she discovered, to her horror, that her favourite skirt no longer fitted her. She was not only three months pregnant by her equally petrified twenty-two-year-old husband-to-be, Patrick Flynn, but it was twins. He was a local hurling champion and part-time barman, sinfully handsome. When he'd asked her to come up the fields with him one Sunday afternoon she'd hardly been able to breathe, never mind refuse. She would never be allowed to forget her first time surrendering, deep in the damp heat of neglected grass that would one day become a housing estate, to Patrick's warm whispered reassurances that he'd pull it out in time. It was all started and over in a miracle of seconds.

  When the news of her impending motherhood eventually reached Angela's father, he drank a full bottle of rum that had been in the back of the cupboard for about fifteen years and went looking for the culprit with a wrench. He found Paddy behind a tyre factory drinking bottles of stolen vodka with his mates, who ran at the sight of the old man swinging the rusty tool. The future father- and son-in-law rolled around on the waste ground trying to kill each other for the guts of an hour, with an audience of about thirty neighbours, until an army patrol unit appeared and they had to break it up. Angela married Paddy so quickly that her home-made dress was still being altered right up until the morning she left her parents' house for the wedding. Her sister Concepta stood in front of her, repeatedly pinning her hair into submission to distract her from the fact that their father couldn't look at her. They ignored the neighbours' net curtains that rippled with disapproval as they
got into the car (borrowed from a friend whose daughter had been in a similar predicament). All Angela's mother Noreen would say over a tight grip on her rosary beads was, 'Youse have already laid in your bed, so youse'd better make the best of it!'

  The newlyweds left the chapel under a man-made arch of hurling sticks held aloft by Patrick's team-mates. A sudden starving flock of pigeons dropped from the window ledges, diving on the uncooked rice that a few brave well-wishers threw even though the church forbade it on a huge sign in hand-painted black letters. Most of the pigeons landed on the groom, trying to get at the flecks of perfect white rice lodged in his raven hair. The shoulders and lapels of Patrick Flynn's immaculate black morning suit were instantly destroyed by squirt after panicked squirt of slimy white pigeon shit, amid disgusted groans and howls from his mates. He'd only hired the suit the day before, under pressure from his mother.

  He grabbed one of the hurling sticks and swiped at the ravenous darting beaks, roaring. 'Cunting rats with wings! Nobody shites on Paddy Flynn and gets away with it! Especially not on his fucking wedding day!'

  The parish priest went purple in the face and made the sign of the cross over and over again. Angela burst into tears. Her mother's oldest friend finally calmed her down. 'Shite is good luck, love -whether it's from an oul' pigeon's arse or not! Don't you be crying on your wedding day, there's time enough for tears.'

  Paddy carried his ruined, rented jacket over his arm in the rain to the strained reception a few hundred yards away in the Beehive pub, and drank until he couldn't stand up.

  ~

  No one had ever told Angela how a child was born. When her time came, the pain was so bad that she prayed and screamed for Jesus to forgive her sins with every unbearable contraction. She thought that maybe the babies would rip out through her belly button, but she was too scared and too embarrassed to ask the midwife a single question. The labour lasted for thirty-two agonising hours. When nature did eventually take its course, she almost died from the shock of how the babies were delivered. While she lay in the city hospital with a fever, her husband was well into what would become a lifetime commitment to alcohol, hurling and hollow talk.

  Soon after the birth of Paddy Jr and John, an old spinster woman died in Walker Street, not too far from Angela's parents' house, where the newly wed and the newly born had no choice but to start their family life in the confines of the postage-stamp sized back bedroom. Angela and Paddy waited till it was dark and carried what little they had into the tiny two-bedroom house that time, but not colonies of insects, had forgotten. They changed the locks and took over the rent book after a tricky bit of negotiation with the head priest - the bishop happened to have 'inherited' the entire street. Angela's father refused to visit because he wanted to hit Paddy Flynn every time he clapped eyes on his smirking face.

  Apart from the fact that they were God-fearing Catholics, Angela couldn't even spell contraception, never mind get hold of it. When the howling twins were only six months old, she broke down, behind a mountain of damp home-made nappies, when her period refused to come and the morning sickness did. She wasn't even twenty-one when every drop of blood drained from her husband's face as she nervously told him he was going to be a father again. The news was more than her own ailing father could take. Coupled with the cancer that had been sworn to secrecy in his lungs for a good few years, he was dead before he could see his namesake's head being dampened in St Bridget's baptismal font.

  Now that her beloved daddy was gone and she was about to have three babies under the age of two, Angela fell into a downward spiral of depression. Her husband flew into a violent rage, calling her a 'moody oul' bitch', if his clothes weren't laundered to perfection or his dinner wasn't steaming on the table when he came in from work. It was worse if his team lost. Patrick had been spoilt rotten by his own adoring mother, who'd opposed the wedding from the start and had gone so far as to suggest that the pregnancy was not her innocent angel's doing. The moment the twins were born, though, their strong features were clearly straight out of the Flynn gene pool and that had put a lid on that argument.

  The night Fergal first opened his eyes, there had been a riot at the bottom of their road. Not far away, a few Catholic families were living right beside a predominantly Protestant area. Most of the neighbours were friends, but that didn't stop gangs of masked men torching the houses of the Catholics, whether they were inside or not. Everyone was terrified they were going to be burnt to death, but the Flynns' little house was temporarily safe - an overturned bus had smouldered on the avenue for two whole days making it impossible to pass. Paddy was watching the news, with the volume down low, as Angela got the twins to settle. Every available space in the wee house was covered in miniature clothes that she was trying to dry in an endless rotation of laundry.

  She was about to hand her husband a dutiful cup of tea - even though, yet again, he wasn't speaking to her - when it crashed to the tiles. He threw her a menacing look, but she grabbed her swollen belly as her waters broke all over the floor, along with the china, two full weeks before she thought they would. Paddy Flynn bolted out of the house in a panic to get her mother and Concepta, the only one of her sisters who hadn't yet escaped to England. When they arrived Angela was in the wee back room, in the throes of birthing Fergal. Anyway, the riot meant they couldn't have gone to the hospital even if there'd been time.

  Angela was terrified that she would wake the twins, so as the contractions increased and the pain stabbed her repeatedly, she stretched her mouth as wide as it would go in a muted mime of agony. Noreen and Concepta screamed that she should push and shout for all she was fucking worth. They crowded into the tiny, bare-bulbed room, voices pleading, as Fergal prepared to enter the world.

  'C'mon, our Angela. C'mon, love, push! You know you can do it! You did it before, love, and you can do it again. Thank God it's only one this time! Jesus, will you not cry out, Angela? God, let's hope it's a girl and not another one of them smelly lazy fucking boys.'

  Secretly, Angela wanted a girl too, but the pain was so bad she felt like she was having an elephant. She just wanted it out of her, no matter what kind it was. They pleaded over and over for her to at least answer them, but the only evidence of the torturous miracle taking place was the thick stream of tears that soaked the top of her nightdress and blurred her vision. She was staring at a fixed point on the wall. Her father's younger, kinder face, smiling and proud from behind glass in a framed photograph as he held her hand on the day she'd made her First Holy Communion, before she'd disgraced the family.

  The local midwife arrived just as Angela's third son was almost out. He began testing his lungs after a slap and the proclamation, 'It's a wee boy, Mrs Flynn.' Noreen and Concepta looked at each other and said 'Fuck' in disappointed unison.

  As the shock began to evaporate, Angela looked at her newborn's face and then again at her framed father. Finally she spoke. 'I want to call him Fergal, after Daddy.'

  She knew her husband would resent it, but she was past caring.

  2

  From the moment they could walk, the Flynn twins had been like little celebrities, stared at by everybody. They ran rings around anybody who dared to challenge them, on or off the football pitch. Everybody wanted to be on their team if a game started because they were scarily competitive and stopped at nothing to win. Paddy was the brains of the outfit and John, with his easily ignited temper, was definitely the brawn. Sometimes Fergal felt dizzy just looking at them. He felt like he was their exact opposite - he was tall and a bit gangly, while they were sharp-featured, naturally strong and thickset - and he couldn't help feeling outnumbered by the simple fact that there were two of them and only one of him.

  The twins were brought to the hurling matches with Paddy if they were good, and they fought for their father's attention, which he loved. As soon as they were old enough, he taught them how to head-butt. Fergal was instantly afraid of his father and he cried every time Paddy went near him.

  'Jesus, Angela
. Are you sure he's a fucking boy? Can you not keep him from yapping? Just like that fucking no-good father of yours - he was well named after that oul' bastard.'

  He knew exactly how to hurt her, and every time he said Fergal's name it sounded like he had a bad taste in his mouth. Angela was as protective of Fergal as she could be, but the twins were constantly demanding, and when Ciaran came along she began to rely more and more on the little white pills for depression that the doctor handed out like sweets, without even looking at her. She never got a chance to tell him how sad and angry and tired she felt at the same time, all the time.

  Paddy went from job to job. He was hot-tempered and unemployment for Catholic men was at an all-time high. There were long periods when Angela had to quietly keep the house afloat financially. She took in washing from the wealthier areas and stitched together a variety of cheap dolls outfits by hand for a greasy one-eyed man who ran a busy stall on the market. Their tiny house looked more like a sweatshop with neatly piled stacks of little unfinished fairy costumes here and material for petite nurses uniforms there. Cyclops, as Paddy referred to him, called once a week with her cash wages and another load of miniature clothes parts for his patient, identical, plastic princesses-to-be.

  Fergal grew into a soft-featured little fella with a cowlick that made him look like the front of his hair had been in a roller all night. When he was with Angela in the family-allowance queue at the post office, it wasn't uncommon for someone to ask how old her little girl was. In the morning, he often woke up crying and in a panic, thinking he'd gone blind, because his long eyelashes had managed to glue themselves shut overnight. Angela would curse him to hell and threaten to cut them off with her sewing scissors - giving him nightmares - as she'd have to stop in the middle of twenty different things to warm the kettle, dip the corner of a flannel into the hot water and dab his eyes till the gunk was dislodged and he could see again. His chest was delicate too and in the days of experimental medication for asthma he was regularly off school with a chest infection, which the damp, dusty house didn't cure. Sometimes he helped his mother fold the mountains of ironing she took in.