The Story of Tom O’Reilly

By Thomas Wright

‘I’ll tell you the story of Tom O’Reilly; will I begin it? That’s all that’s in it!’

My uncle put on Ray Bans, to protect his eyes from the rising sun, which showered pound coins on the windscreen of his silver Transit van, and the flat Cambridgeshire countryside around the empty A1. The glasses looked cool against the driver’s pale, chiselled features, and set off his designer stubble and slick-backed Superman hair, but clashed a bit, perhaps, with his grubby blue boiler suit.

‘“The future’s so bright;” Uncle Stephen crooned in ersatz American, ‘“I gotta wear shades.” My future, that is,’ he added, in a classless, placeless English accent, ‘not Tom’s. He’s pub-crawling towards extinction.’

We were hurtling towards Huntingdon, in early June 1988, on the first day of my summer job as a ‘skivvy’ for my uncle’s three-man gang of builders, a week after I’d finished my A-Level exams. The van was fridge-cold, and the smoke from his cigarette kept getting up my nose, but that didn’t blunt my excitement about the work (and working-class) experience awaiting me. Neither did Uncle Stephen’s unflattering word-sketches of the crew members. He’d dubbed Trevor ‘Johnny Bulldog’, and dismissed his fellow brickie and co-boss as ‘if-I-know-my-place-I’ll-always-have-one English’; Tom, the team’s ‘navvy’, wasn’t even worth branding or caricaturing apparently.

‘Tom’s Irish?’ I rasped through my passive-smoker’s cough, keen to display interest, hungry for info.

‘Stage Irish.’

He squeezed the accelerator: eight-eight, eighty-nine – speed warped enough to satisfy, surely, even a youngish man (he was 27) who always seemed to be in a hurry. Slipping my left hand under my U2 T-shirt, I clasped my Virgin Mary medal and muttered an Ave Maria. Too scared to look at the road, I gazed out of the passenger window – hedges, fields and farms, on repeat, blurred into a strip of a sickly green.

‘What’s “stage Irish”?’ I sputtered, to take my mind off his harum-scarum driving, and eager for an insider’s take on an issue that fascinated me. Like my mother, Uncle Stephen never described himself as Irish, or even Anglo-Irish, though it was hard to imagine him (or anyone) matching his sister’s born-again conviction she was a ‘purebred Brit, not a Brigid’. Yet their parents had been Irish-born, and speaking, and proud of it. My grandmother – a tiny, wiry, cobalt-eyed country woman from Limerick – had died three years previously. She’d been the great friend of my childhood (my grandfather, meanwhile, had died just after my uncle’s birth). Each Sunday, holy day, and every other day, she’d taken me to a cold, whitewashed church full of Irish exiles, immersing me in the Catholicism’s dotty dogma and sacred showbiz. She’d lavished traditional Irish songs and stories on me, and introduced me to Irish poetry, which I’d decided to study at university, from September, as part of my so-called English Literature course. I said a rosary to her every night, with the ice-blue beads she’d left me – though I no longer believed in God, or Mary, I still believed in her. I described myself as ‘Anglo-Irish’ for her sake, and to annoy my renegade mother and ‘Queen-and-Country’ English father. I despised their bumptious Britishness, wannabe middle-class snobbery, and support for Margaret Thatcher’s jingoism, as well as her assaults on the working-class. I was sticking my fingers up at them, and all that crap, by working on a building site for my brickie uncle, rather than in a solicitor’s office with my father, who’d procured a summer placement for me at his firm without even asking my permission or opinion. ‘I’m going to be a writer,’ I’d informed them, spurning the placement, after successfully begging my uncle for a summer job, ‘and a bildung site will be better for my creative development than a solicitor’s orifice.’

My uncle blew a smoky speech bubble, then filled it with words, spoken in deadpan Bogart mode, but at Ben-Elton breakneck speed.

‘Stage Irishness is sham-mock Irishness. “To be sure, to be sure”, your grandparents’ dominion-status generation had to put on the Paddy Act when they came over, to offer English bosses and landlords a flattering stereotype. But there’s no sense or justification, in 1988, for Tom turning his life into a rambling Irishman-Englishman joke today.’

He recounted a story, to ‘inoculate’ me against Tom’s “Oirish charm”, about an end-of-building-project party in a ‘ritzy’ hotel, attended by various dignitaries and the industry hierarchy, whom my uncle was ‘schmoozing’ in order to secure subcontracts. A wasted Tom had shown my uncle up in front of the ‘bigwigs’, by emerging from the lavvy ‘yodelling for Ireland, with his knob still hanging out’, hailing Uncle Stephen as a ‘fellow Gael’ then embracing him.

Dumbstruck by the tale’s coarseness and cruelty, I didn’t know where or how to look.

‘Seeing as we seem to agree that Tom’s drunken Irishman act ain’t funny or clever,’ my uncle thundered, ‘let’s also agree you’ll never encourage his paddywhackery!’

* * *

The van halted in a half-built red-brick housing estate outside Huntingdon, spraying gravel on the side of a green Portacabin. Alighting on the firm ground, I was tempted to kiss it, but my uncle was already advancing towards the Portacabin – head down, long torso leaning forwards so I shuffled through the shingle after him. Suddenly, the door was half-opened and an old man’s profile appeared, his skin wrinkly and rust-coloured, his thin hair wiry silver. He spat out an aniseed-scented, urine-yellow liquid, which rainbowed in the air, cascaded down, turned brown on the sandy gravel.

‘Lemme guess Tom,’ my uncle snapped, ‘Trev offered you a glass of Poteen, but it turned out to be water, and drinking that’s against your religion, so you gobbed it.’

Tom’s crumpled face tightened, like old leather being stretched; his beady hazel eyes stood out of its brown roundness. The shaving-brush bristles clung on to his head, against the breeze.

‘Hold your whist! I’m only having me morning gargle.’

Tom’s accent was just like my grandmother’s; I smiled to think she’d found a way to welcome me to the site.

‘This is my nephew, Charlie,’ my uncle said, ‘so mind your pints and quarts around him, and don’t let me catch you expectorating intoxicants on his 501s again.’

He had to be joking – the liquid was obviously Listerine and it had fallen nowhere near me – but neither of the men were smiling. Tom opened the door fully and stepped down. He was about half my uncle’s height, and easily twice his age, but his body looked sinewy beneath his spruce brown corduroy jacket and crisp cream shirt, while his glare set my heart pounding. I took a step back.

‘Would it kill ye to keep your fibbing mouth shut?’

After holding my uncle’s death stare, Tom turned towards me, his grimace turning into a grin, and gripped my hand in his warm, hairy paw. He smelt sweetly, of Old Spice and old tobacco.

‘Tom O’Reilly. A hundred thousand welcomes!’ His voice was velvety, caressing. ‘Rest assured, I won’t hold your misfortunate kinship with Mr high-and-mighty against you. Come in and join the entertainment.’

* * *

There wasn’t much entertainment during my first fortnight on site, as I struggled to achieve the stamina and speed my chores demanded. I carted Jenga-towers of bricks from the store to the two bricklayers as they put up the ground-floor of a semi and kept them supplied with the mouldy-smelling cement Tom mixed up. During breaks, I nursed the grazes and gashes on my forearms, with hands that seemed to be wearing sandpaper gloves.

I soon learned that a skivvy’s life was a sentence of hard, badly-paid labour – judging by my £75 per-week wages. Still, I wasn’t there to gain lucre (my parents would be paying all my university expenses) but experience and writing material. Anyway, after all the lonely months of A-level revision I’d done, it was a relief to be outside, with other workers, doing manual chores with clear procedures, and immediate deadlines; besides, I wasn’t in my father’s office and shadow. Another perk was returning to my parents’ immaculate country bungalow, covered in grime, reeking of BO and the crew’s fags. Every time she gave me a welcome-home hug, my mother held her upturned nose, and her pink face turned the colour of her fading-blonde perm. At dinner, I’d offload on her gritty descriptions of my working day (my gutless father worked late, doubtless to avoid this ordeal). Afterwards, I’d dash off an entry, in a notebook journal I entitled ‘My Life on the Tools’.

During week three, the brickies moved up to the first floor of the house-in-progress, so I tried to carry bricks up the ladder to them in a hod. Packed with a dozen slabs, the hod seemed to weigh half as much as I did. On my first attempt I climbed half-way, slipped on a rung, and fell off, landing awkwardly, just clear of the cascading bricks.

Tom rushed over, picked me up, dusted me down. Chuckling, he proclaimed a miracle, attributing it to Saint Barbara – patron of builders and the Irish Army.

‘It’d be a terrible thing if you did yourself a real mischief,’ he declared, ‘so why not hand the bricks over to meself at the ladder’s foot?’

I felt guilty, and ashamed, accepting Tom’s offer, but Uncle Stephen assured me that no one expected ‘a scrawny nipper to hod carry’ – a comment that relieved and riled me, and turned out to be wrong.

The following day I was chatting to Tom near the ladder, when an almighty ‘Oi!’ dropped on us from the scaffold. I looked up, into Trev’s large, gap-toothed mouth, which was showering mockney and saliva on me.

‘You ain’t at university yet, four eyes, so stop idling. You’re here to do a man’s job of work.’

His shaven, football-shaped head jerked, his red jowls and beer gut wobbled, but his chest was taut under his white Three-Lions T-shirt, and his arms bulged as he gripped the top rail.

‘If you ain’t man enough to do your duties, stick insect, at least don’t put that Paddy smurf off doing his. He don’t need any more excuses to slummock. So stuff your ponytail in your gob and get cracking.’

As Trev stomped off, the scaffold planks trembled; so did my legs. Tom put his left arm round me and raised his right fist at the hulking retreating figure.

‘It’s “serf” ye half-thick, quarter-civilized blackguard. Now ye Limeys can’t butcher anyone else’s language you’re setting about your own! As for the young fella, he’s doing a grand job altogether, so subdue your noise or you’ll get what’s what.’

I tried to smile my thanks at Tom, with quivering lips, while looking around for my uncle, whom I eventually spotted strutting to the store, shaking his head.

* * *

At break time in the snot-green canteen, after a fast-food binge and endless fags, Trev would let off wind from both ends then kip, while my uncle scrutinized the Times or catnapped. Whenever the others slept, Tom stirred up the Portacabin’s fuggy, fusty atmosphere with songs about the hard life of Irish immigrants on the tools in imperial England and reminiscences of the ‘good old country’. For reasons still unclear to me, my uncle had made me promise not to encourage Tom’s “Paddywackery”’, but that couldn’t have been a boycott on his company, surely. If he ever caught us gassing, I’d say I was lending Tom an ear, in exchange for the hand he was giving me on site.

But the truth was, I’d fallen headlong in love with Tom’s way with – and of running away with – words. His language seemed so much more alive (alive, O!) than the stiff, pretentious English I’d been forced to regurgitate in my A-level essays, and the snobbish BBC-ese my parents encouraged me to imitate. Tom’s witty phrases, and invocations of obscure saints, lit up my diary entries, and recalled my grandmother’s talk. His sudden outbursts on what he called Ireland’s ‘English Question’ could have come from the plays of O’Casey. Not that Tom seemed at all ‘stagey’ to me – in fact, the more I got to know him, the more I suspected my uncle was the faker. His account of the labourer’s crude exhibition at the hotel now appeared unbelievable, or believable only if the courteous and cultured labourer had one of those evil twins who appeared in Irish mythology.

Tom told anecdotes about everyday episodes, in a rambling, humorous style. They would begin with a wink and an outrageous claim – ‘“The Shannon Stallion” came in for me at 45-to-1, swaggered over the finishing line.’ His exaggerations then spiralled like the smoke that rose from his full-strength, full-time, Capstan cigarettes – ‘That makes six winners this week. Which is just as well, and me about to buy a princely plot in Limerick for me retirement.’ After each embellishment he’d let out a machine-gun cackle, which usually turned into a violent cough, while I roared.

One lunchtime we were so raucous we woke my uncle, who got up, strode over.

‘While I’m at Wickes, Charles Oliver, get the store shipshape. And start instanter – never mind about leaving Tom to blarney away to himself – he’s used to it.’

As Uncle Stephen marched to the door Tom shouted. ‘Ye seem very unpopular with yourself today, and ‘tisn’t hard to see why. Yer talk’s a disgrace to the nation.’

I made to follow my uncle, but stopped when Tom muttered: ‘Charles Oliver? Charles Oliver! Now, there’s a double-barrel made in England to put the heart crossways inside an Irishman.’

‘I hate the names my father gave me.’

‘May the curse of Cromwell be upon him – that handle’s a holy terror.’

‘I hope my Irish ancestry and Catholic upbringing atone for it and even qualify me as Anglo-Irish.’

‘Kinship with Brigid Gallagher makes you as Irish as Cú Chulainn, never mind “Anglo-Irish”, which means a protestant on a horse. Didn’t I often talk to your grandmother at mass, and at O’Brien’s after? This calls for a celebration, my darling! Sit down and take your ease.’

As Tom skipped outside, I sat down but didn’t feel easy, even though Trevor was snoring loudly. I became edgier still when Tom returned brandishing a large bottle of Guinness and poured the liquid liquorice into two greasy tumblers.

‘Whoa there, Tom – I don’t drink – and Commander Killjoy might wake up – and my uncle might return anytime. You know he abominates booze.’

‘That teetotalitarian’s the abomination! Not that I touch the drink on the tools meself, as a golden rule. Still, ‘twould be sinful not to toast the Dark Rosaleen (i.e. Ireland) and your grandmother’s memory.’

He downed his drink in one, then nodded at mine.

‘Put a hole in that’.

I’d never drunk alcohol before, and was in no hurry to start, especially on a job my abstinent uncle had given me as a favour. Yet I couldn’t offend Tom, or Ireland, or my grandmother, so I raised a shaky glass to them, and to convivial working-class culture, then tried to carry it to my lips. Some beer spilt over the trembling brim, but I managed a frothy sip. The acidic liquid hit my stomach hard. I let out a whistle, which morphed into a sigh as a warm numbness flooded my body and brain. Tom refilled his glass, then raised it, laughing.

‘To your good health and Ireland’s – to the restoration of the sick counties.’

I joined in the toast, without understanding it, then sat there, beaming, as he encouraged me through my ‘First Pint rite’. Yet I was sad that job had been left to Tom – wasn’t it a father’s or an uncle’s responsibility?

Tidying the store legless was great craic, though it took time, because of my booze-fingers, and all the empty Jameson and Guinness bottles I found under the floorboards (there were full ones too). Heading home that evening, the soft feelings generated by the stout hardened into a headache, which was aggravated by my uncle’s daredevil-may-care driving. To take my thoughts of both, I asked the first thing that came to my head.

‘What are the sick counties?’

His fag smoke went down the wrong way.

‘Sick counties?’ he spluttered, ‘Sick-to-death-of-death counties, more like… It’s how Tom refers to Northern Ireland, because he never refers to “Northern Ireland”, to avoid acknowledging it’s part of the Evil Empire he pet hates (except when it offers work or benefits). He’s a Rome-Rule Republican, a united-Ireland firebrand, who gawps at the butchery through emerald glasses, from a safe distance. So keep yours, you well-oiled eejit.’

I sat in appalled and guilty silence all the way home. Later, however, while writing my journal, I consoled myself with the thought that Tom had uttered the toast tongue-in-cheekily, and by recalling my uncle’s bizarre habit of exaggerating, or inventing, Tom’s defects.

* * *

Speeding to work in mid-July, my uncle waved around an imaginary wad of banknotes: ‘I’ve bagged a new job for the dastardly, motley crew – sixteen semis in Cambridge – and I’ll be upgraded to foreman for the duration, which means “loadsa money”! Easily enough to enroll on the surveying course that’ll be my escape to victory.’

He puffed an invisible cigar, Gordon-Gekko style.

‘Hereafter, I’ll be spending most breaks away from the dinosaurs’ graveyard (i.e. the canteen), chinwagging with the Cambridge contractors from the call box-Tardis that’s gonna transport me to a brighter future’.

It was lucky Big Brother was no longer around most lunchtimes, because Tom really got into his stride as a storyteller. He recounted the construction swindles he’d pulled off, including some fantastic industrial injury claims, and a ploy for drawing the salaries of imaginary workmates. Over dinner, I relayed these tales to my mother, who’d known Tom as a child, in the hope of scandalizing her. But I was scandalized to discover she could overlook their outrageousness and roughness, and, eventually, even find them funny, and ‘almost as good as your grandmother’s tall stories.’ Some tales were too scandalous to repeat to her, however – Tom described how he’d seduced ‘all the mots of my English bosses, without the eejits twigging.’ When I raised an eyebrow at that ‘all’ he shrugged.

‘Sure, they were only flesh and blood. In the flower of youth, I had a fine head of Porter-black hair, muscles that stood out like ropes, and was six foot five – God’s truth, it’s been chronicled.’

I was still a virgin, full of angst and ignorance about sex, after my repressive Catholic upbringing and my prudish father’s failure to compensate for it. Women seemed as remote as the statue of Our Lady of Knock I’d used to pray to after confession. Sex was a sorrowful mystery to me, but Tom’s stories took some of the sorrow and mysteriousness out of it.

Yet, even during the word-feasts Tom served up at lunch, I couldn’t forget the poverty of his mornings after. Slouching in the canteen at six, he’d stare vacantly into vacancy, his gaunt face fag-ash grey. But while his hangovers clung on until mid-morning, by lunchtime they’d let go miraculously, and he’d declare himself ‘able for storytelling’.

One lunchtime, over a shared Guinness, while Tom was telling me a tale about a Mother Superior in his old Limerick parish, who’d trafficked illegitimate children to rich American adopters for cash – ‘why, it’s enough to make you renounce your religion, if not your faith; sure, don’t you go to heaven in spite of the nuns and priests?’ – I felt a shadow cast over me, and turned to see my uncle, whose early return from the Tardis I hadn’t expected or noticed. He glared at my glass, then shook his head.

During our helter-skelter drive home that evening, he thundered at me through cigarette smoke. ‘Did I, or did I not, ask you not to encourage Tom’s Paddy act? Yet there you are, prompting his half-cut, quarter-true stories. It’s gone so far, it’s gone off. Don’t mistake the university-of-life experience I’ve given you for your real life, which will begin at university. And don’t bystand too close to a soaked, sputtering squib like Tom – another centimetre and you’ll get scorched.’

I was stunned by the sharpness of his criticisms – and the concern that must have prompted them. He inhaled loudly through his nose – which was his way of signalling a discussion had ended. But I wanted to take a debate with him into extra time, for the first time, even though I couldn’t think of much to say.

‘Maybe I’m wrong but, Tom seems like a good influence… almost a father figure.’

‘Because he plies you with blarney and booze?’

I knew he was right, but again came the urge to answer back: ‘Maybe all his stories aren’t all true, but then neither are yours. That tale about his langer was fantasy, or a nightmare maybe.’ He scowled, then shrugged.

Smiling at my little victory, I ploughed on.

‘And Tom’s not stage Irish at all – he’s as authentic as gran – and often reminds me of her, actually.’

He banged down his fist on the dashboard. ‘Have you gone queer in the head?’

‘I meant in a generational ... in a historical… ’.

‘Sure, they were both forced to leave the failed Irish state and join the Irish welfare staters here, but while she helped build that state, through care work, Tom only scabs off, and slanders, it. Can you imagine what it was like for me growing up in a Little Ireland populated with Toms, and presided over by whiskey priests? You can’t – you’re from another class, country, world – the kind of place I’m gonna get to.’

I sat, shoulders slumped, gawping at the motorway catseyes. His words were unanswerable, but not unquestionable. They seemed to echo the ‘better yourself’ propaganda of my parents, which I’d come to the site to escape. If my uncle was on their side, there was no point arguing with him. Also, they were further evidence of his oddly intense relationship with Tom, which I still couldn’t fathom. These thoughts gave me some distance from my drubbing and emboldened to demonstrate that he hadn’t crushed me entirely.

‘How are Tom’s stories “half-cut”? Surely it’s the morning’s that abstinence sobers him up.’

‘Tom doesn’t dry out – he irrigates, lubricates. Who turned the store into a bottle graveyard? Why d’you think I asked you to tidy it? And here endeth another lesson from life’s university.’

* * *

A fortnight later, at lunch, Tom and I had the canteen to ourselves. My uncle was ‘down the Tardis’, Trev was sprawled out asleep on the table, his fat tongue lolling out, and a soggy J-cloth clasped in his hand, with water pooling around both.

‘The three of us were in this shebeen,’ Tom tittered, ‘slinging pints into ourselves, when this pinched fella comes in with a spade and coal scuttle and fecks the burning fire from the grate, then scarpers. And would you credit it – the landlord charges me with the filching, on account of me “suspect” accent. So your uncle and I stood up for Ireland and beat the backside off the bigot…’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw something blue flying towards us; instinctively, I moved my head back – a J-cloth whizzed past my nose and struck Tom’s face with a splat, made a surprised-skull mask, then peeled off and flopped to the table.

‘Jesus, Mary, and Holy St. Joseph!’

‘That’s enough Paddy bollocks.’ Trev yawned, ‘You couldn’t stand that night, let alone stand up for Ireland, and what would Lord Snooty Sober have been doing drinking with riff-chaff like us?’

‘Is it gone queer in the head ye are?’

Jumping up, like a Jack tar out of a box, Trev bellowed.

‘If you’re calling me queer, I’ll nut you all the way to that cattle boat you come over on, and you can piss off home. Makes sense herding you with livestock – you Micks are full of bull, and your Bridgets are all dirty cows.’

Tom jumped up, faster than a hare.

‘Go get a mass said for the repose of your soul, or you’ll die roaring for a priest. Our women live like nuns!’

I dived under the table, then gaped up at Tom – his face was traffic-light red, his mouth all fangs and froth, his fists tightening into wrecking balls. A wave of nausea rose from my stomach, broke in a series of burps, as I watched him effing and puffing.

Trev lurched round to Tom, and raised his right arm high, as though it were a truncheon.

‘You’ll bring on a Sean Connery, getting narky at your age Paddy; so act it, or I’ll batter you, again.’

Paling, Tom swayed, as though hit, though Trev was lowering his fist.

‘Don’t fancy the boat back? Don’t blame you – ain’t no construction work in your third-world country is there. All you do is blow up stuff we built so you wouldn’t have to live in bogs – and that’s the thanks we get for civ-civiliz … for giving you fucking civilisation out of the kind cockles of our hearts.’

‘Ye know feck all about anything …’, Tom screeched, ‘we built round towers for our saints and scholars when … yees were living outside of caves … God and his blessed mother… I don’t have the wind for it… ’.

Then he staggered outside, muttering. ‘Ballocks to the lot of yees!’

Trev opened his arms, sang ‘No surrender, to the IRA’ after Tom, then glared down at me.

‘Air raid’s over, bunker boy, so get up, and go change your knickers, then get out and on with it.’

After I scrambled to my feet, he grabbed my shoulder, sprayed spit and words into my face.

‘You’re a bigger disgrace than the Anglo-Irish agreement, you Paddy-loving traitor; Maggie ought to bring back national service, sort you out. I’ll be sorting you out, if you egg on Shameless O’Sluggard again.’

* * *

All afternoon, my head throbbed with the echo of Trev’s threats, while the memory of Tom’s transformation into the big bad wolf sickened me, and his parting words stung me like a slap. It was one thing to listen to stories about punch ups in patriotic causes, quite another to participate in one. While I’d admired Tom’s defence of Ireland, my instinct had been to back off. I felt ashamed but knew my instinct was right. I had to admit that my self-righteous uncle had been right also – being close to Tom had brought me too close to trouble and made me lose my bearings on site.

The following dawn Tom looked like death luke-warmed up. Slumped in the canteen, he nodded at the tea my uncle gave him, before nodding off. Then his face contorted with pain, and he started sleep-talking, or shouting.

‘You’re away with fairies and furies Tom!’ My uncle cried, ‘Subdue your noise now’. When that failed to rouse Tom into quiet semi-consciousness, Uncle Stephen went over and shook him gently.

That morning Trev fired a barrage of insults and orders at Tom, who’d take a step back, whistle, then return to his work. After lunch, however, Trev yelled one curse too many, and Tom screamed back. ‘Give over or I’ll give you a good clatter on the gob!’

‘That mean you wanna go toe to toe bog-breath?’ Trev gripped Tom’s throat until the veins bulged; Tom froze, then seemed to slacken and shrivel; ‘Well, shut it then, Murphy and behave!’

And Tom did ‘behave’ until the following day, when Trev sang a song about the protruding ribs of the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands, and the whole Punch-and-Judy show started up, and ended the same way, though this time when Trev grabbed Tom’s throat, I saw my uncle clench his trowel, and release it only when Trev let go.

On the journey home that day, I tried to kindle my uncle’s nascent sympathy for Tom, by remarking that Trev’s racism must be typical of all the discrimination Tom had surely endured since arriving in ‘No dogs, no blacks, no Irish’ post-war England. ‘You don’t need to tell me about “Murphy-bashing,”’ my uncle answered icily, before claiming that Tom had ‘Irish Lorded’ it over Trev when the latter had been ‘fresh out of borstal’, and that it was only after the Irish bully had hit fifty, and all the hangovers, and the hours skivvying had caught up with him, that Trev had started getting his own back, and eventually battered Tom into his ‘current pitiful, self-pitying, stage-Irish mode’. So, despite their superficial differences – ‘Paddy and Mr. Punch; the Irish Bull and the boorish Johnny Bullshit’ – the two men were ‘the same building-site thug, just at different stages of the bully life cycle.’

Even if my uncle’s history were true, it lacked historical context, and I told him as much, and much more, accusing him of ignoring history, on purpose, for his own purposes. He didn’t reply, either because he couldn’t, or felt he didn’t need to. After hearing about Tom’s strongman years and alcoholism, and witnessing his impotent explosions, and feeling the sharpness of his tongue, I no longer saw him through emerald spectacles. To keep out of harm’s way, I steered clear of him, though safety came at a price. Without his canteen table talk, or the illusion of camaraderie to sustain me, I struggled to get through the back-breaking work sessions. I no longer had much to write at home either, so I read my previous diary entries instead. I was delighted to see how my once stiff English had limbered up, through contact with Tom’s and Uncle Stephen’s talk, but sad to think my journal, and my adventure, were over. Gradually, if guiltily, I started to look forward to leaving the site in September and starting university.

One August evening my mother asked for one of Tom’s tall tales; when I told her I didn’t have any more, she said she was sorry, for both of us. She then said she and my father were sorry for having arranged the summer placement at the solicitor’s without asking me – they’d only done what they’d thought best, would I forgive them? I said I’d think about it, but tried not to, for fear I’d end up thinking an office would have been a better place for me to work after all. While it never came to that, I did start to accept that I came from Middle England, rather than my grandmother’s working-class world of Irish songs and stories, and belonged there, or at any rate, couldn’t leave.

* * *

On my last afternoon on site, as I was tidying the store, Tom brought me a cuppa.

‘Pour some nourishment into yourself.’ He chortled, lacing the steaming liquid with whiskey from a small Jameson bottle he fished out of his jacket pocket. ‘Irish tay!’.

After drinking from the whiskey bottle, he took my hand and shook it, with a hand shaking so much I didn’t know where his shakes ended, and our shake began.

‘All honour and power to you and your studies, Charlie. The Lord be between you and all harm. And, when the time comes, say a prayer for me – to Saint Jude.’

* * *

That autumn I began life as well as university, discovering sex, drugs and the wider world of booze, outside of Irish bevvies; I also wrote a play for pub theatre. In it, a labourer from Limerick told stories to himself to get through his crucifying day at work. I wanted to prove to my uncle that Tom’s tales were a class of literature, and to my parents that labouring had been beneficial for my writing career. Not that my relationship with my parents was difficult any longer. Mum sent me long letters, mostly about her embattled immigrant childhood and my grandmother; father posted generous cheques. I was overjoyed to spot mum and Uncle Stephen in the audience on my play’s last night, and to hear her compliments afterwards. ‘Your grandmother would be proud – of herself as well as you. Half the words were hers!’. Uncle Motormouth said nothing about the play – which I regarded as the highest form of praise – and from backstage I’d spotted him laughing.

That was the only time I met him during the 88-89 academic year, which turned out to be a terrible period for his crew. The housing market collapsed in October, when interest rates went double digit. The ‘loadsamoney’ project he’d lined up in Cambridge was pulled. He’d found piecemeal work for the crew until spring, but wages became so awful he’d been forced to lay off Tom.

‘It’s survival of the shape-shiftiest;’ he told me, over the phone in April, ‘T. Rex Trev will soon follow Tom to extinction, while I’m gonna make the evolutionary leap. I’m putting down the tools for good – very – and going to stack shelves in Tesco’s. Then I’ll bet my pittance, plus a loan from a shark, on a surveying course at the IOU.’

In May, I called to see how he was doing (‘fine, dandy’) and asked how Tom was.

‘The bottle’s hit him and he’s going to pieces. He’s a wilderness-years George Best, without the alcohol-flashbacks to the glory days. Since he always worked on the lump, he doesn’t qualify for Maggie’s minimalist benefits. So he nostalgia tours the pubs, telling tall hard-luck tales, to bum drinks off English patronizers. It’s game, set, drinking match over. If he went to home his relatives would ask why he’d stopped sending money, and “when are you going back?” His end is well-nigh; it can’t come quickly enough.’

I guessed he was exaggerating but couldn’t be sure Tom wasn’t really ‘at the edge of the end’, so I called my uncle again a week later for an update. He told me Tom was dead. For a minute, all I could hear was his heavy breathing on the line. A half-forgotten prayer to Jude, the patron of lost causes, came to my lips, but it was interrupted by my uncle’s laughter.

‘According to the nurse at the hospice, Tom’s dying words were aimed at Father Pat, who tried to wangle a devout a death-bed confession out of him – “What are ye here for?” Tom screamed at the priest, “Is it burying me alive ye want to be? How could I be dying, when ye know better than anyone that ye can’t kill a bad thing.”’

My uncle delivered the line with relish, in perfect-pitch imitation.

‘Yet after the funeral, down O’Brien’s, the whiskey priest assured us Tom had put on a grand play act of contrition at the last. “And it’s how you die that matters boys,” says he, to the mainly female company, which included your mother, “not how you live”. So it was odds-on Tom was up there, he said, in the snazzy version of O’Brien’s they’ve got in heaven, enjoying the perpetual life of O’Reilly to come. However, I don’t think Tom’s story should be given a happy-ever-after ending, do you?’