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Michael turned and jumped on to the shingle. With a few long, crunching strides he crossed the stones, sprang on to the rocks and leaping like a buck in flight he reached the water’s edge and plunged in.
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The old, black and white border collie raised his head above the level of the basket in which he slept and, with tongue lolling, watched his master swing his feet out of his bed, stretch his arms above his head and stand up on the bedside rug in his striped pyjamas. Five o’clock. Liam stepped two paces to the window and looked out. The grey, pre-dawn sky was beginning to pale. As he did every morning at this time, he straightened the blankets and the quilt and laid side by side on top of them the two pillows in the white pillowcases his mother had made from bleached, ten-stone flour bags. The collie watched, with head now lowered on his front paws, as Liam removed the pyjamas from his slim, white body, folded them neatly and laid them on top of the multi-coloured quilt. He vigorously scratched his testicles and masturbated in front of the mirror on the wardrobe door, but stopped before ejaculating. He did so because he had read in the Old Testament that Onan so displeased God by spilling his seed upon the ground that God slew him for it because, as it said in Genesis, “he did a detestable thing.” Then Liam dressed in his underwear, grey shirt and woollen trousers and sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his socks and tie his shoes. Before straightening his back, he picked up a thick notepad that lay on the floor, glanced at the pages he had written the night before, and standing up, he added the notepad to a pile of papers, books and notebooks that covered a small table in the corner by the window.
“Let’s go, boy.”
The dog leapt out of his basket and followed Liam out of the room. Liam could hear his father’s snoring from his parents’ room as he crossed the landing to the bare wooden stairs. Those parents raised five children in this house, three boys and two girls, but only Liam and an unmarried sister, Morna, with a child of her own, still lived at home. She slept with her baby son in a single bed in her parents’ room with only a curtain between the two beds. She had been made pregnant by a shipyard worker from Belfast who had been on holiday in Corrymore. Because he was Protestant she was forbidden to marry him. Because she was Roman Catholic she was forbidden to terminate the pregnancy. Liam often worried about what would become of her, a naive seventeen-year-old girl with a baby boy.
Libros Libertad 