New Irish Writing: In Common Calamity by Gary Finnegan

I’m 17 for Christ’s sake, I don’t say.

“Thanks June, is there a biscuit?” There’s always a biscuit. She opens a sleeve of mint Viscounts and pushes them my way with the sympathy smile she’s been wearing since my parents’ accident. My sister, Emma, takes one too.

We’re gathered around the hardwood dining table in Nana’s house, which has served as Family Crisis HQ all summer. Auntie June is in the Chair, as usual, her two kids learning Peppa Pig’s accent from the iPad.

June walks Emma and me through bank statements while Nana and Uncle TJ sit glass-eyed with their mouths agape. One of them has entry-level Alzheimer’s, the other just has that look about him.

He’s physically sound, Uncle TJ, but his mood stabilisers leave him checked out half the time, especially when the talk is of heavy subjects like whether Emma and I need a live-in guardian now that Mam and Dad are gone. But his radar still lights up at the mention of money.

“We’ll be fine,” Emma insists again. “The insurance payout will cover the bills, and I’ll make sure Liam gets to school and eats actual food three times a day.”

This. I resent this.

I can get myself to school. Cereal is actual food.

My little sister thinks she’s my mam now. She’s 16. I must have missed the part where they left me to her in the will. But kicking up is the wrong move. I want what Emma wants: to live at home, untroubled by June’s anxious hovering and – above all – without the supervision of TJ, Dad’s bachelor brother.

TJ is like a 90 per cent version of Dad. A bit smaller, lighter on street smarts. Barely passes as a stand-alone grown up, truth be told. He’s like a Russian doll that would have fit neatly inside his brother. I watched him ugly-cry through the funeral in July, but I can’t help thinking the crisis is the answer to all of TJ’s Hail Marys.

“You heard the solicitor, Emma,” June says, her voice straightening out of Kittensoft Auntie mode into her Executor & Trustee setting. “You’re children. In the eyes of the law, you are children.”

June, Emma, Nana, me – we’re all too polite to say the hard thing out loud: Mam and Dad wrote their wills when I was a toddler and Emma was still being breastfed; before Uncle TJ had his first coke-charged meltdown.

TJ is not the adult supervisor we are looking for.

Please – somebody say it!

Handing him the keys to the house and the car, the bank card and care of two teenagers is somehow easier than having a blunt conversation that ends with TJ flinging the Aynsley teapot against the wall.

But time keeps doing its thing, swallowing the last days of school-free limbo. All summer, Emma and I soaked Nana’s spare pillowcases with tears, as we wept our way into the reality of being orphaned.

Orphaned.

It’s not like in the movies, with the singsongs of bittersweet optimism. It’s all grocery shopping and phone bills and house insurance and trying not to look directly at the ashes on the mantelpiece.

As bad as it was to know Emma and I would never again roll eyes at Mam and Dad, never lie about where we’d been, never apologise for giving cheek then watch a film together on the three-seater – at least we were shielded all summer from the practicalities of #OrphanLife.

Saint June spent July and August ghosting in and out of Nana’s house, delivering lasagnes and clean pants, putting tablets into plastic pill boxes labelled with the days of the week. Then she’d race home for school pickup in Navan, haggling with her landlord as she drove, begging not to be evicted from the shitbox apartment they’ve been renting since her divorce.

Now September is a week away. School is a week away. And here we are, fiddling at an unsolvable Rubik’s Cube: Emma and I need to be in Kildare for school, Nana is zombying around a draughty Dublin four-bed, June is in Meath on the verge of collapse. And Uncle TJ is offering to do everyone a favour by minding his orphan niece and nephew rather than let us roll the dice with social services. All he expects in return is, for the first time in his forty-year life, a fixed income and a fixed abode and a little undying gratitude if it’s not too much to ask.

***

TJ stalks around the kitchen island like a walking warning. I need to calm him, convince him Emma wasn’t looking at him funny.

I mean, she might have been looking at him funny. Funny is the look TJ attracts when he starts talking about his IRA days in the ’70s –mainly because he was born in 1984.

I get him seated with a cup of tea. Then I sheepdog Emma up the stairs and quietly enjoy playing big brother for once. Bomb defused, I remind myself for the tenth time since TJ unpacked his bags two months ago, never to follow his drug-stained path. The road Dad steered around all his life, until suddenly swerving onto it last year.

You’re the cut of your father.

People have said it to me since I was a child, until recently. Used to make me happy, proud. But see, this is the thing, the big fear: I’m the Russian doll that slots inside Uncle TJ who nestles in the Dad-shaped figure I used to look up to. We are all of a piece, or so I’ve been told.

***

“This place is not safe for me, Liam.”

Emma is stuffing crinkly school shirts into a rucksack, her brown curls bouncing angrily around her cheeks. “I’m going to Aline’s. Her mam will bring us to school in the morning.”

“We’ve been through this. You’ll just end up back here by the weekend. He’s our guardian.”

“Fine for you – TJ’s little mini-me. It’s not you he keeps his mad eyes for.”

“Calm dow–”

“Don’t do that, Liamy. You know I’m right. He’s a danger to both of us.”

“Ten months and we’re done. I’ll be an adult, you’ll be 17 – driving the Fiesta, if you want.”

Emma halts, grunts, then collapses backwards on to her bed. I remember her crying as a baby, then nothing for 16 years, now regular floods.

“Ugh! Fine,” she says. “Ten months. But how do we get him out after that? Are you going to tell him he’s homeless again? I’ve a sick feeling we’re stuck with him.”

***

They say the first Christmas is hard. I’m not making excuses, but the man lost his only brother in the summer and his new tablets don’t agree with him.

Still, I feel for Emma. She spent all morning stuffing and basting, looking at videos on her phone, trying to give us a TikTok perfect turkey. And now TJ is bent over it on the floor with a bread knife, ripping it to shreds, bawling about how he’s going to find “the hidden poison”, accusing Emma of plotting against him so she can pocket his guardianship allowance.

Roast turkey juices scald TJ’s fingertips, drawing shouts and roars. He smells like skunk and whiskey.

Emma doesn’t even look angry this time. She’s past shaking with fear in the face of TJ’s wailing. It’s a sadness, a hopelessness.

She gestures towards the turkey. “And this is all fine with you, Liam, is it?”

“What do you expect me to do? Go running to Auntie June every time TJ bins his pills?”

“No, I expect nothing from you. You’re all the bloody same.”

“Don’t say that, Ems.” I’m trying to stay chill, but seriously…

“There’s too much tiptoeing around messed-up men in this family. Off their meds and off their heads – and look where all that’s got us. Orphaned.”

“Emma, no. C’mon now.” My blood is up, I can feel the heat climb my neck.

“Still kidding yourself. Clinging to the ‘tragic single vehicle accident’ headline?”

“We’ll never really know.”

“But we do know. And I bet Mam knew, helpless in the passenger seat, looking at Dad’s wild eyes beside her.”

“What good is all this?” It sounds like I’m shouting. “It was an open verdict!”

“Right, yeah… You’re lucky I love you. Take your tablets, ye mad yoke, or you’ll end up as bad as TJ and Dad.”

She pushes a rueful laugh through her nostrils, takes her phone from the table and heads for the hall door, leaving TJ crying in a heap beside an autopsied turkey, and me vibrating on the spot.

I shout an apology, suck in a sharp lungful of breath and put down the gravy jug, unsure how it came to be in my hand.

***

I used to wonder what kind of parent I’d be. Wonder how I’d manage the worry and the work of being a dad. Minding TJ has been good practice: a race through the phases that run from pacifying a drooling, sobbing, self-shitting toddler, to the mood-swinging, gone-for-days late adolescent. A big, delicate bag of bones and hormones.

TJ has been off grid for half the week. We’ve been more relieved than worried, but spent all morning trying to reach him in a hurry.

Emma gets an Instagram message from a friend of TJ in response to her latest Has Anyone Seen Our Uncle post. It says: “No worry – TJ OK xx.”

“Tell him to call June or Emma ASAP. His mother has passed.’”

***

I stand in the front row of the church, my chin pressed down against my sternum. I can’t look at Emma. I can feel her shoulders shaking beside me. To the people behind, we must look like we’re crying together, rocked by the loss of our grandmother, having already planted our parents in the family plot.

Our hysterical laughter is easily disguised as rattling sorrow.

The booming voice of the parish priest declares TJ a man of great faith, and thanks him for the garbled eulogy in which TJ quoted, at some length, The Masterplan by Oasis.

Auntie June looks on, serene – beautiful, even – in the stained-glass light. She has de-aged five years in two days. Maybe she’s relieved that the priest insisted on Nana’s oldest living son doing the talking for the family. Or she’s just glad TJ didn’t soil himself on the altar.

After the soups and sandwiches thing in the hotel, we head back to Family Crisis HQ where we play an extended game of Beating Around The Bush, funeral edition.

Last week, before TJ reversed the Fiesta into the neighbour’s parked car and fled on foot, Emma convinced me we should change the locks.

“Six weeks to freedom,” she reasoned. “We run down the clock to your birthday, get a Protection Order, then figure the rest out for ourselves.”

Sounded like a reheated version of my earlier plan. I eat it up.

Our dough-faced little cousins are pulling out of June’s limbs, overtired at the end of another incomprehensible day.

“So, listen, I better make tracks with these guys,” June says.

“Same,” Emma replies.

“I’ve a few bits to do here,” TJ says, furrowing his brow. “Sort stuff out over the next few days or whatever. Paperwork ‘n’ all. Leave me the house keys, June.”

He looks at me.

“So, Liamo, you staying here, yeah?”

“Well…Ahhm—”

“No,” Emma says, sharply. “He’s coming home with me.”

Coats and bags are gathered, hugs exchanged.

Emma and I walk to the Fiesta.

“Thanks Ems,” I say. “Didn’t want to stay, but he put me on the spot, and I froze.”

She smiles. “No worries, bro. Anyway, I need you to teach me how to drive.”

About the author

Gary is a writer based in Co Kildare. His fiction has appeared in Howl, Ropes, The Ogham Stone and London Magazine. He has an MA in creative writing from Maynooth University and is working on a novel.