By Ian O'Brien
It was parents’ evening that did it. He’d heard the sniggers on the way in and when they’d sat at Miss Flint’s desk, he’d seen that look pass over her face, just briefly, that flash of something between embarrassment and surprise. When he was younger it didn’t seem to be an issue, he thought his Dad looked like everybody else’s. The long hair was like the men he saw on the sleeves of Mum and Dad’s records, the cowboy boots and the waistcoat like the men in the films his Dad had let him stay up to watch; he’d felt grown up then, like it was their club, perched on Dad’s knee, the spaghetti westerns a kind of ritual, a glue that bound them. He would laugh wide-eyed at the saloon fights, the men crashing over tables, taking whiskey bottles with them and his Dad would swig at his own lager and the smell would mix with tobacco and for a minute he would be in the saloon itself. He’d pretend to understand the jokes that his Dad laughed at and didn’t feel embarrassed when the dusky barmaid toyed with the string on her blouse. But here, in the bright sports hall of his new school, with its neat tables and plastic chairs, everything about his Dad stung him—the shoestring necktie with the buffalo skull, the denim shirt with the dog-eared collar, the tassels on the jacket and of course the hair, the greying curtains that he’d twist when he was nervous and bite the ends of, like he did when Miss Flint welcomed us over. His dad looks like Jesus, Finn had whispered, just loud enough to hear, sat with his friends at the next table while the teacher tried to get his mother to look at the red squares on a handout, and the words fluttered in his stomach. He didn’t hear a word Miss Flint said. The room swam with sound, filled until it felt like the room itself was laughing. The chair beneath him felt hot and he hoped Miss Flint couldn’t smell the whiskey on his Dad’s breath, surely she must, and when he reached forward to shake her hand and the shoal of tassels shimmered, he felt his stomach grip and he watched his Dad’s hands, coarse and frayed, the fingers nicotine-yellow, her hand in his, gentle, like a trapped bird.
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