Prose Sean O’Neill

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: SEAN O’NEILL

Sean O'Neill is a Philadelphia born writer based in Ireland. He is a recipient of a Creative Writing MA from UCD and his work investigates how inherited forms of trauma and silence in the North of Ireland continue to permeate into and poison the present.

Slippery as an Eel

Of course, I was late. I found him on the pier, fastidiously combing through his coddled net with Reynaud-riddled fingers.

‘Alright, Pop? You should be wearing gloves on a night like that,’ I said. ‘It’s Baltic.’

‘Aye,’ he said.

‘Suppose you can’t get a proper feel for the weaknesses with them on,’ I asked.

‘Aye,’ was all I got.

No doubt he was ripping we weren’t already hauling in a few eels or the odd pollan, but he didn’t mention it in case I take the hump and decide I’d rather sit in front of the fire than freeze my bollocks off with him while he hardly broke breath to me. Emotional outpourings were never his thing, but even basic conversation with my father was like pulling hen’s teeth lately.

Our first effort was fruitless. I thought it best to wait until we caught a few before I started in on him. The lulls between casting the ninety metres of draft net and trawling it back to the boat would provide enough air for me to lay it on the line. When we came up empty again, the muttering and effing and blinding rose in waves. He knocked the old diesel down to low revs as we pulled the net aboard.

‘Can you not winch that goddamn net any quicker,’ he growled. ‘It’s bad enough you made me wait an hour with my dick in my hand.’

Our next half-moon yielded a good fifteen or twenty eels. No pollans. I hustled to free the catch from the net and get them into the barrels, pre-empting the dog’s abuse that would come my way if I didn’t move with what he considered to be the appropriate amount of haste.

Another pass and the same result. Now, he was no longer squeezing the life out of the wooden wheel of his clinker boat. Still, a smile would have cracked his face. We motored to the far side of the lough where he wanted to make a last-minute inspection of the net before sending it into the darkness where his prey hid, unwilling to let a single one escape. He killed the engine and we bobbed in the perpetual lap. The calm almost got the better of me.

‘Da, we need to talk,’ I said.

‘The key is to make sure the wings are equal,’ he said.

‘We need to talk, Da. About Ma.’

His tongue crept from the corner of his mouth, an added means of increasing concentration. ‘If the tail’s imbalanced you might as well leave it out.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Every time, the same shite about the wings.’

‘Whatever’s caught could swim out the slack side,’ he went on. ‘A couple of inches one way or the other is all it takes.’

‘She’s leaving you.’

He didn’t bother to lift his head. He merely rolled his faraway eyes up from the task momentarily before shrugging and returned to scrutinising more sections of the net with his whitened thumbs and forefingers, occasionally applying tension in opposite directions.

‘Did you hear me? Ma’s leaving you. She’s her mind made up and all you can do is fucking

shrug?’

‘Pass me those pliers, will ya?’

‘That’s typical. You don’t care about anyone but yourself, do you?’

‘Pliers.’

I reached in the tool bucket and hurled the pliers as far as I could into the drink.

‘What a waste of breath. She said you wouldn’t listen. Don’t know how to listen, but I thought I’d do the decent thing and try to save you from dying alone, a miserable old man.’

‘Those cost me twenty quid,’ he said, looking towards the ripple burgeoning in the blackness.

‘Like I said, miserable.’

‘What do you want me to do? Your mother is free to make her own decisions. She deserves to be happy.’

long.’ ‘That’s a laugh,’ I gibed. ‘The poor woman has been caught in your undertow for far too

‘I should just grin and bear it, is that it?’

‘No, stop moping. Stop flying off the handle. Maybe talk to her here and there. Talk to me. I’m about to cut my stick, Da.’

He kept checking his net. Knot after knot, searching for the right words, any words, amongst the tangled mess in front of him which was his mind. For a moment, I thought he was about to emerge from it to offer me a glimpse into everything he kept locked away, out of reach from himself or anyone else for that matter, and at last give voice to all that festered within him. But there was no such luck. I sunk back onto the stern then, having grown accustomed to his silence.

‘It’s like pissing in the wind with you,’ I said.

‘You’re some pup.’ He landed the full sway of his pale blue eyes on me. ‘My head’s wrecked and you know it.’

‘What about the rest of us? Would you ever face it head on and stop acting like you’re the only man in the North haunted?’

‘Easy for you to say,’ he said into his net. ‘It’s not like you’ve been hard done by.’

‘Easy? You’re some craic, Da. Get off the cross and hammer a nail already!’

He shot straight up from the bucket he was sitting on and bungled as much of the net in his arms as he could, heaving it over the side of the boat. He lifted more and more, dumping it down onto the hush of the silt. The net wrapped itself around his waders and the panic mounted as it pinned him to the rail. He managed to cut himself from the twisted nylon before it could drag him into the murk, but he came down hard on the deck after he was liberated from the weight of it. I reached out to give him a hand.

‘I’m good,’ he protested. ‘I said, I have it.’

After reeling for the bench, he gave me his back. As he plopped down, the air that escaped his lungs was like the wet slap of a balloon as it’s slowly deflated. The guilt soaked me to the bone. Had I said too much, pushed too far? But there was no one left to do it. My sisters were shoved off long ago by the ten-tonne heft of his absence. They knew a nonstarter when they saw one. I had the sinking feeling that he was about to cry, and I would have to comfort him.

I looked towards land and wondered if I could swim it. Two hundred yards in the frigid water was a mighty ask, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t seriously consider making a break for it. On the horizon, the lights of Maghery town wavered; lit fuses set in motion by the undulation of the boat. I clung to the winch as swells came on our port side and rolled under the hull. If his torrent poured from him now, the howling would be swept ashore. Someone taking air by the lough might hear his wailing and think they were within earshot of the lingering soul of a long-lost fisherman, fated to float for eternity in those shadowy waters.

I tried to think of something to say. It was me who asked him to abandon his silence, but I couldn’t bear the thought of having to console him if a lifetime’s worth of anguish was finally let loose. He was the one meant to do the consoling, not me. I knew the walls of the Kesh towered over him yet, but all my efforts to breach them were met with fierce resistance. Worse again, if he strangled it further and leaned into his only other register, anger. I imagined him charging me and shifted into the corner to gain a better foothold; taking a stance that would allow me to resist being thrown overboard, just like his net.

It wasn’t always that way. Casting off out onto the lough with him were the times I cherished most, especially when we weren’t fishing. Entire days were spent exploring. There wasn’t a stretch of the shore he claimed to be unfamiliar with. The length of it seemed endless when I was a boy,

and he was always keen to share the knowledge he inherited from his father with me. Traditional knowledge, he told me, needs to be passed down. It reminds us of who we are and where we come from.

We manoeuvred through channels I was convinced were too narrow for our boat that opened into coves that were as close to mangroves as I’ll ever be. He knew of secret beaches where we would anchor and swim to shore. The opportunity to nip my legs as we swam was never missed, touting the eels as the culprits. The tears were always right behind. That foghorn laugh of his stung as I scurried to dry land and wiped the salt that mingled with fresh water from my face. I was terrified of them, and he knew it. He spun yarns of eels growing so large that they could take lumps from a man. All a load of tripe, but they always summoned those childhood fears of the unknown in me.

Camping out on Coney Island was the ultimate prize. It was illegal, but Da didn’t pay any heed to such things. McCallan Island we called it. It was the height of our maritime adventures, many miles from the sea. We were pirates, resting weary sea-legs on a desert island, far from the unwanted incursions of those scurvy land lovers. Da struggled with his old canvas tent as I tried to anticipate where he needed me to shine the torch next. It was always a challenge, but we managed it together.

We sat by the fire, him drinking bottles of Guinness, and me eating the ham and cheese and crisps that Ma had packed for us. I asked if the fire was a good idea, seeing as we weren’t really allowed to be there.

‘Fuck them,’ he said. ‘Let them come for us. We’ll fight them off, won’t we son? This is our island. They’ve taken enough.’

My first bottle of beer was bitter and warm, but it was on McCallan Island. Just the two of us, in the nightfall and the quiet. Two men bonded by more than blood. Moored to each other through culture, and tradition, and the lough. If only he knew how the failing fire threw a giant’s silhouette across our shabby tent while he stared peacefully into the middle-distance of Lough Neagh. I was so proud that he was my Da, astonished by my good fortune.

I wondered then, as we floated aimlessly in those well-known waters, cut adrift from each other, if we couldn’t go back to McCallan Island. We could find our old campsite and dig up that buried treasure left behind. Surely, it would still be there, waiting for us, right where we left it. But some things stay buried.

It was a long row from then to now. How could we have been blown so far off course? The venom of his past was flowing through his veins when we played out our little version of Robinson Crusoe, but the intervening years saw it take hold like gangrene.

He turned the engine over. She didn’t fire up at first and I took it as a sign.

‘Da, please. I’m sorry. Can we talk this out?’

‘What’s there left to say, son? You’ve said it all.’

With that, the cylinders spluttered to life. He steered her towards home at full tilt, throwing spray into my face with every wake he cut in two. I shimmied closer to him and gripped the starboard mooring cleat.

‘Da, I’m sorry,’ I offered above the roar of the distressed engine. ‘It had to be said, Pop. It had to be said.’

He hasn’t heard me yet. Instead, he concentrated on the void between us in the shape of the lough that my tackling him was meant to lessen. I fixed my eyes in the same direction, hoping to catch sight of a beacon that might close the distance between us, but there was no trace of it in the muted water.

When we approached the dock both of us were saturated. He came in too hot, nearly colliding with the rusty old dredger that was floundering in the same berth for as long as I could remember. Putting the dock bumper to the test, he abandoned all the protocols endlessly droned into my skull every time we brought her in. He hopped onto the dock without as much as a word. After tying a hasty cleat hitch knot, he revved up his van and scattered gravel with the front tyres.

I hadn’t a notion for where our catch was headed. All taste for the slimy bastards left me years ago. After I rinsed down the boat with the nearby hose, I started to dry it with the shammy mop he kept tucked away in the bilge, taking my time to make sure I didn’t miss any spots, especially on the stainless. When I finished cleaning the sliver of battered Perspex that Superman himself would struggle to see out of, I was still left with the eels. There was nothing else for it. I fished them out of the barrels with my bare hands and set them free.

One by one.

(Sean O’Neill)