It was in a tradesman’s nature to be late, so an allowance had been made, but this was taking the piss. It was Monday and Griffin had had a few the day before at a party in a neighbour’s garden. He hadn’t intended to drink. Clíodhna was with him, and Hollie and Romy and the two boys, too, the younger of whom was won over with Rice Krispie buns while his brother hung back by the hawthorn, twisting leaves between his fingers. It didn’t seem appropriate to drink in front of the boys, though what was offered was only longnecks of Corona, nothing mad at all, and he’d decided it was more suspicious to abstain than to partake at a reasonable pace. The idea was to exemplify normality. Neither boy seemed to pay attention, though of course, a few longnecks in, he wouldn’t have paid attention to their paying attention … a day later and he was overthinking it, woolly-headed, though hiding it well.
Clíodhna was doing the big shop. Romy and Hollie were at school – study days as the Leaving and Junior Certs approached. Neither of the boys had school. Some sort of staff training or meeting.
They were waiting on the electrician, the three of them, the three lads. It was pedestrian bonding, but Griffin thought there was value in that. Less useful to bombard them with activities, excursions and treats. Children needed to learn to manage boredom. “Waiting” was the activity and Griffin was teacher, though woolly-headed and dehydrated and less and less sure of himself. All of the children they’d cared for before – there hadn’t been many – had been very young, but the boys meant that Clíodhna and Griffin had levelled up, been deemed worthy of a challenge. Now Griffin felt as though in danger of being exposed. That someone would come along and rescind the level-up, tell him he was an idiot for thinking of boredom as a lesson that needed to be taught, that he was a bad person for having been on the beer the day before. Those poor boys. That poor wife, and her caring proclivities, her ambitions of benevolence, and she off out doing the big shop without him, a hungover lump trying to ascribe meaning to being made to wait by a pig-ignorant electrician, who hadn’t responded to two text messages already sent that morning. And the boys, studying endurance, picking their way through the Griffin family home as though conscientious objectors, considering useless appliances and fiddly furnishings, the boys for whom it was so important this bloody electrician show up, which he did, four and a half hours after he said he was on the way.
Griffin had on Saturday tried to replace the electric shower in the main bathroom with a more eco-friendly unit. The new shower wouldn’t work, though he made a troubleshooting list and followed it carefully. He had overlooked some simple thing, some tiny breakdown in the methodology, and now a electrician would be paid for solving the issue, probably instantly. Clíodhna had said it wasn’t the end of the world, but it was definitely something they’d have to work around, wasn’t it, having only the shower in the en suite till this was sorted? Romy was barbed about the whole thing and Hollie was patronising. Don’t feel bad, Dad! The boys seemed unfazed; they were undemonstrative kids, wary, or perhaps they couldn’t make room for a second useless father. Griffin – bookish son of a handy father – had wondered how he’d be as a father of sons, and this was a long path to some answer; he was saddened by the boys’ reluctance to help him reveal it. Hence the longnecks at the party. It felt a bit like silent migraine, clear-air turbulence, or that tsunami he’d watched on YouTube, the one that had rolled in, deceptively languid, and made smithereens of everything in its path.
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But the electrician arrived, and Griffin had successfully presented the calling-in of another man’s labour as a thing responsible fathers did. Responsible fathers were stern about the delay but did not rise to the bait when late electricians were snotty in return; responsible fathers turned off the water supply as requested and showed late electricians to the bathroom, borrowed sons in tow; responsible fathers did not get specific about the mishap, because let the prick figure it out for himself if he’s so smart.
“No school either?” the electrician asked. He was younger than Griffin, well built, handsome.
The younger boy answered that there was not and the older one retreated, as though this was a deeply significant question, any answer to which would incriminate. Griffin watched him step into the spare room – he should refer to it as “the boys’ room” – Griffin watched him step into the boys’ room and imagined him quaking at the electrician’s manner, reliving something stressful, and now Griffin imagined himself and the electrician in a fist fight. In this vision Griffin was holding his own against this agile young electrician and the boys were looking on with admiration.
“The tank is above in the attic, so?” The electrician had come onto the landing and was looking at the Stira hatch.
“Where else would it be?” Griffin asked. It was okay to be curt when you were trying to demonstrate assertiveness to boys who needed such a quality demonstrated benevolently.
But the electrician’s chest went out. He told Griffin there was no need for the tone, it wasn’t his fault the shower was broken. Griffin smacked his dry lips and said with all due respect, with all due respect, the tone was down to having been made wait so long, professionalism under question and so on, and did the electrician not usually get worse responses from men so delayed?
The younger boy was jumping up and down, a long way off touching the attic hatch with stretched fingers.
The electrician pointed at Griffin. “You’re prohibited from carrying out work like this. You’ve to get a registered electrical contractor for bathroom jobs.”
Griffin retrieved the hooked pole for the hatch. “This is a minor work. I checked.” And then, “I lecture in maths.”
“It’s not a minor work if it takes place in a ‘special location’, which is what a bathroom is.”
“Swapping a shower is all. Like for like, as the man says.”
“You could have killed someone. Pure stupid carry-on, and the big nerd head on you. As the man says.”
The younger boy reached to touch the unfolding stairs. “Stay here a minute, good lad,” the electrician told him, and directed at Griffin, “Don’t touch anything.”
Now Griffin saw himself taking the electrician out by the scruff, expelling him, in a sort of mad white flash. He parted with this fantasy at the foot of the stairs. He went to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, took a paracetamol, gripped the lip of the worktop. He thought of the gap his father had loudly disparaged between logic recorded in tomes and the logic of moving parts and useful objects. He wondered if there was a place online where he could review electricians, where such a review would lead to consequences. He was ashamed at his pettiness, but at the same time felt righteous. At some point he realised the older boy had followed him downstairs.
“Are you all right?” Griffin asked, and the boy responded with an unreadable look and a just-discernible nod. Griffin waggled his glass, then poured one for the boy. “I think,” he said, carefully, “the man who came to fix our shower didn’t like when I told him he was late, so he’s being touchy. I don’t know what went wrong, but the job I did wasn’t dangerous. I promise.”
The boy kind-of-nodded again.
“I like doing jobs around the house,” Griffin said. More overthinking: might this be construed as a dig at the boys’ father, who was probably not good at doing jobs around the house? Should he have said “our shower”, when the possessive pronoun might be exclusionary – “our” meaning belonging to Griffin and Clíodhna and Romy and Hollie – or presumptively inclusionary, ours, as in, mine and yours? Griffin could count himself lucky that these were not wild boys, kicking holes in things and screaming, but their reticence was in its way insolent, or at least could be seen as insolent to the petty. Strange things were coming into his head since he’d made a hames of the shower.
“Do you like doing jobs? Like, practical things?” he asked, but the boy shrugged and looked away. “You might do woodwork in secondary,” Griffin added. “Or metalwork. You have all these options.”
“Are they dangerous?” the boy asked, staring into space.
“No. There are rules, of course, and once you follow …” He was endorsing the electrician’s rebuke, and flushed.
“I don’t care if it’s dangerous,” said the boy.
Here Griffin could steer the boy right. Tell him that danger wasn’t a given; that what passed for normality in his life was elsewhere defined as chaos; that it was not weak to care how things worked or worked out. This opening belonged to a single moment; Griffin’s eyes widened, his heart skipped, and then it was gone, and he was no more able to impart these lessons than read the boy’s palm.
He nodded instead and joined the boy in staring into space. After a while he said, “Let’s go and see what this lad is at in the attic.”
The younger boy was standing on the bottom step of the Stira.
“The man didn’t come down,” he said.
“Did he not?” Griffin asked. He joined the younger boy in staring up through the open hatch. The older boy held the newel post at the top of the stairs. “All good up there?” Griffin called. The electrician didn’t answer. “Can I help with anything?” Silence. Griffin got a terrible feeling, a new vision. A dead electrician, in the prime of his life only 15 minutes before, felled by another danger brought about by Griffin’s ignorance. Fried above in the attic. Fallen into the tank and drowned.
Griffin called a couple more times, said, “Christ,” and climbed the steps. At the top he looked around, but there was no electrician. He went all the way into the attic, a space floored but not fully converted. He called again. He tread around boxes of Christmas decorations, ducked around the tank, found no electrician.
“Where did he go?” he asked the younger boy, returning to the landing.
“I don’t know. He didn’t come down.”
“He had to come down, sure. He’s not up there.”
The younger boy shook his head vehemently.
“Did he come down while you were in your room?” Griffin asked.
“He told me to stay here so I waited.”
Griffin looked in the bathroom, then in the en suite, then out the window of the master bedroom. What he assumed to be the electrician’s van was parked a few houses down. He checked the front door, which was locked. He returned to the landing and asked the boys, “Did you lock the door behind him?”
The younger boy shook his head vehemently again. “He didn’t come down.”
Griffin looked at the older boy, and the older boy looked at Griffin.
“Did you?” Griffin asked.
“I was with you, like,” said the older boy.
There began a series of investigatory acts, increasing in energetic absurdity as Griffin checked and rechecked, questioned and reiterated. He explored the boundary of the attic, thinking there must be some way into next-door, that the electrician had shimmied through an opening hitherto unnoticed. He heaved the lid from the tank and shone a light into the water. Checked the upstairs rooms. The downstairs rooms. Phoned the electrician’s mobile, which went straight to voicemail. Walked to the van, looked through its windows, tried its doors, looked all around the street, then his back garden, went back to the van, rattled the doors, banged on its windows. Left a voicemail. Ascended and descended the Stira. All the time the boys watched with an arms-length concern just right for someone who’d lost his electrician and then his mind. Griffin recalled with awful suddenness things he’d read in university in the Fortean Times, or contested with friends under a poster of an alien asking “Take me to your dealer”. A book he’d had, before he’d married Clíodhna, called Mysteries of the Unexplained. A chapter outlining disappearances and reappearances that had terrified him. Locked room murders; John Does found wandering with amnesia; footprints stopped suddenly in snow; hitchhikers picked up on lonesome roads who vanished from kindly drivers’ passenger seats. In the end he pelted the hooked pole across the landing, away from the boys, and cringed when its awful rattle didn’t even make them jump.
He sat on the couch and put his head in his hands. There was shuffling as the boys followed him into the sitting room. He looked up. The younger one sat near him. The older boy stood; he seemed always to be standing, and Griffin had for the first fortnight found this disconcerting, but now was glad that the boy was always where you expected him, and usually where you left him.
“Maybe the electrician is playing a mean trick,” Griffin said. “And if you knew he was, you’d tell me, wouldn’t ye?”
“Yeah,” said the younger boy, in a manner that suggested he expected adults to disappear; his next take was similarly practical. “Who’s going to fix your shower now?”
“I don’t know.” Griffin laughed. “Tradesmen are hard to come by. They have their pick of jobs and come and go as they please.” The laugh grew harder. “You could get a trade yourself, when you’re old enough. And just flit in and out of existence. Charge all the eejits a fortune while you do it.”
“I’m joining the Navy,” the younger boy said.
“That’ll do,’ Griffin said. He looked at the older boy. “You won’t be a tradesman,” he told him, and this wasn’t augury but instruction. The boy, agreeing, shook his head.
Later, Clíodhna came back with a boot full of shopping and told him there was no explanation but the logical: the electrician had walked out while Griffin was in the kitchen, probably for a more lucrative job, and hadn’t the courtesy to let him know – was this hard to believe, when the man was late in the first place and so rude when called out on it? And boys are easily distracted; both boys were good at blocking things out, weren’t they? The van might be anyone’s, and indeed it, too, disappeared that evening. Griffin suggested ringing the guards and Clíodhna asked what on earth he proposed to say to them. This isn’t like you, she said. Come on. So Griffin sat tight. No one phoned looking for the electrician, no one came to the door after him, no Garda or girlfriend or subbie or boss. Griffin waited through the hangover’s tapering, through the appointment of a new electrician, through the repair of the shower, through the experience becoming a tale to tell in a neighbour’s garden, through the boys returning to their own father. Their lives detached cleanly as train carriages, and other children came to stay, some for days, some for long stretches, and Griffin grew used to feeling like a service called when repairs were obligated. Though quietly and in the background he suffered dalliances with Yeats, folktales, na daoine maithe, late night sweats, dreams of footsteps above him in the attic.
*
He was in town one Saturday, years later, when he met the older boy. He was recognisable even as an adult, standing still again; maybe it was the standing still that had stirred Griffin’s memory. Though he would only have been in his mid-20s, there was a mini version of him standing on his right, and a smaller version again in his arms. Griffin approached them – this green father, these two little boys – and didn’t know why he was surprised his onetime foster son remembered him. Because he had been so green himself at the time, maybe.
The boy-now-man had the propensity, still, for looking off into space, rescinding smiles at the last moment. Griffin asked after his brother, who he reported was “flying it”, and his father, the real one; the boy-now-man gave a stoic report that made Griffin sad, which made him open to foreboding. And so he asked if he remembered that day the electrician never came down from the attic.
The boy-now-man gave Griffin one of his tiny smiles. How he had it is that Griffin ran the electrician. Stood up to his disrespect and told him to f*** off out of it (annulling *uck for his own little ones’ ears). He recalled Griffin needing a pint of water, which he downed in one by the kitchen sink, and that he was contrite about subjecting the boys to the showdown, but it was good, actually, it wasn’t a bad thing to witness. When Griffin shook his head the boy-now-man took this for lingering guilt and reiterated: it wasn’t a bad thing to witness. Griffin reeled memory in: the children he’d looked after, the evolution of his approach, concessions made too late, then made in time, hugs offered that caused lumps in his throat, the worry that kept him up at night, staring at the ceiling, the worry that Clíodhna said was proof of his paternal quality, the electrician he’d turned away from, the hostile man who’d ascended and not come down. It would all make sense if he could let it make sense. He looked at the boy-now-man with his own two boys. The results spoke for themselves, as the man says. What goes up, as the man says. As the man says.
[ Walking Ghosts: a short story by Mary O’DonnellOpens in new window ]
Lisa McInerney is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor and screenwriter. She is best known for her novel, The Glorious Heresies, which was the 2016 winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Since 2022, she is editor of the Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly.
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