Fragile Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

at the foot of the pier and we were flanked by the Dublin Mountains, the curve of Sandymount strand and the Bull Wall jutting like a crude finger into the sea. How strong I felt standing there, the tide lapping the rocks below. A Saturday father again and you were mine for the allotted time span.
    Do you remember our walks on the pier? How long ago it seems now. We trained our binoculars on the ferries as they sailed back and forth across the bay. We made up stories about the passengers: spies, pirates and gangsters, monsters, ghouls and werewolves too. You’d a taste for the bizarre, my son. A chip off the old block, some would say. When it was time to return to your other world, you sometimes cried as I drove away from the docklands; a dead place in those days, filled with derelict warehouses and empty wasted sites. How short those hours seemed then, hard-fought and won. But it was real time. Our time. Not stolen from dreams.
    I’m going to slip away. It’s late now and I’ve an outline to finish before tomorrow. The writing’s not going well, I’m afraid. No inspiration. How Harriet would snort if she knew. She doesn’t believe in writer’s block. “Let your fingers do the thinking and your mind will catch up,” she always says. “It hates being left out of the action.”
    So, it’s black coffee and a long night. I’m working on the problems between Gary and his father. Can’t sort it out, Killian. They spar with each other, old bull, young buck, but their dialogue has no life. It’s fake, contrived mush. I’ve always found fathers to be tricky characters to handle. I never knew my own father, not on Saturdays or any other day. So there you have it, Killian. No role model. It’s not an excuse for failing you – or for bad dialogue. Just a fact of life.
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    F ather … Our Father … heaven … father … daddy … Saturday Daddy … cakes … pocket … daddy come home …

Chapter Six
    T he Donaldson brothers started work on the studio, converting the old stable where Celia Murphy once stabled her donkeys and, in a time before then, her father kept his two plough horses. With their sturdy bodies and strong, ruddy faces, the brothers were so alike that Lorraine had difficulty distinguishing one from the other. They sang in harmony as they worked. Garth Brooks fans. Although they harmonised surprisingly well they stopped self-consciously whenever she entered the studio. Their taste in music drove Emily to despair. Discordant, desperate, dreary, dreadful dirge. What had been an amused tolerance for country music had swelled to a passionate hatred. Every hammer blow they made was a reminder that her young life was changing inexorably.
    One evening, while unpacking a crate that had been blocking the landing, she discovered an old photograph album of Lorraine’s. Listlessly, she turned the pages that chronicled her mother’s childhood holidays. Lorraine discovered her sitting cross-legged beside the crate, the album open on her knees. She knelt down beside her and stared at the photograph of two small girls sitting on a dry-stone wall, bare legs dangling, their swimsuits clinging to their tanned, skinny bodies. Virginia’s straight black hair swung over her cheeks. Her eyes peered from under a long fringe. She was thin and leggy, her stomach almost concave in a red bikini. She held a dead crab which, seconds before the camera clicked, she had pressed against Lorraine’s face. Lorraine, in an identical bikini, looked startled, as if she was trying desperately to hold her balance on the wall. A pair of donkeys grazed in the background and the old two-storey house looked exactly the same as now: dingy grey pebble-dashed walls, a hall door in the centre with a window on either side. Three windows on the top floor, two large and a small one in the centre, offered a distant view of the ocean. Celia Murphy stood in her doorway, her hand raised in a wave as if she was personally greeting the camera.
    Emily turned