Park It … Another Novel Cut

He turned into the park, and found himself heading for his favourite bench, in front of the gleaming lake.

   He didn’t quite make it. He stumbled, again, but this time he let himself go down, until he lay on the grass, face up.

   The grass was moist and Frankie sucked in a deep breath and smelled the damp earth and the rotting leaves all around him. 

    An all-too-earthly voice called to him from beyond the bench.    

   “What’s that you’re at there, Frankie … stargazin’ for beginners?” 

   “Ah shag off, would ya Johnny,” he called out to old Johnny Durnan, who was making his own way home to Aster Park, a short row of two-storey town houses, just beyond Frankie’s apartment block, “let me alone, ta feck …”

   “Right ya feckin’ are,” said Johnny, chuckling as he waddled onwards.  

   Staring up at the sky now brought Frankie back to the time when he was eight or nine. Sitting at the table in the kitchen in Ballymore Park. 

    It was late, and no-one else was there. Mum would be home soon from Mrs O’Neill’s. Dad was back from the pub, after the seniors match, and Frankie could hear his heavy steps over and back in the bedroom overhead, and then the screech of the sash window opening in the bedroom. 

    Frankie had never noticed how loud the humming of the fridge was, and the ticking of Granddad Ned’s old grandfather clock in the hallway … tick, tick, tick!!  Over in her basket, old Lily the wonder dog snoring softly through her grizzled old chops … punctuated by that short swallow and extended sigh thing she did every so often that signified comfort and contentment. Frankie’s nose twitched — she had farted, again.

   He needed to pee. Half-way up the squeaking stairs, he looked out the side window and he could just see the top of dad’s head, out on the flat roofed living room extension they had put in the previous year. The odd nice night, when the sky was clear, Dad would go out there through the bedroom window. 

   In the little bathroom at the top of the stairs, Frankie peed, flushed, and headed for his parent’s bedroom. The window was still up, and he stepped out onto the roof.

Dad was sitting on the old wooden beer crate. Just looking up at the clear navy sky. Full of beautiful stars.

   “Hey Dad,” Frankie ventured, hoping he wouldn’t be shooshed off back inside, and off to bed.

   Maybe it was the pints he’d had in Walshs, but Dad’s deep rumble of a voice was welcoming.

   “Well son, are you off to bed?”

   “What are ya lookin’ at Dad?”

   “Arra, just taking it all in, son …

   Dad never took his eyes from the stars.

   “Did ya know, on a clear night, you can see over 4,000 stars up there, and some of the planets … like Venus and Jupiter … there, Venus is the brighter one, but they’re both much brighter than the stars … you know they’re planets cause they don’t twinkle like the stars do … 

  “Did you know, lad, the light you see from each star has taken millions of years to reach you, so when you look at the stars, you are actually looking back in time!”

   “Brother Broderick was telling us about The Plough in school the other day, showed us this picture … where is it again, Dad?”

   “See it there, that’s the north, north-east …  The Plough … shaped a bit like a saucepan, see?”

   Frankie’s eyes lit up as bright as any star when he did make out the seven stars and their distinctive pattern, much clearer and brighter than the picture in the book. 

   “I see it, I see it! …”

     “If you draw an imaginary line from the two stars furthest  stars … see them … there! … from the handle it will direct you to the North Star. It’s also called Polaris.

   “The lads on the big ships long ago, the ones in charge of steering them, the navigators, used to know here they were exactly by measuring the height of the North Star above the horizon, with a thing called a sextant … and they could measure their latitude — the distance to the Equator, north or south — 

     “What’s the Equator, Dad?”

   “It’s a kind of imaginary line, drawn around the middle of the Earth … they would draw it on their maps, the navigators, you see? it’s exactly half-way between the North Pole at the top and the South Pole at the bottom. The sextant measured the distance of Polaris to the Equator,  so,  they’d know exactly where they were, where their ship was, and where to steer for next, If you were drifting off your proper path, you could steer back on to it …” 

   “Remember that, Frankie, if you’re ever lost … and the sky is anyway clear, look for The Plough, and the North Star, Polaris, and you’ll know there you are.”

   It wasn’t cold, but there was an extra little sharpness in the air.

   “It’s the beginning of autumn here in Ireland, Frankie. Our nights get longer, darker and begin earlier, so on a good night, like this one, you can get a great view …

   “It won’t be long now till it’s winter … and we’ll be stuck here, not like all those birds you see this weather … aren’t they the smart feckers, all the same, flying south to Africa for food and their grand holliers in in the sun, while us poor hoors — divils, I mean — have to get through the feckin’ cold and the rest of it. 

   “The swallows and swifts have left by now …”

   “How do we know where the birds go, Dad?” Frankie asked softly, enthralled. He had never shared stories and stuff like this with just Dad before , He felt like hugging himself with joy.

   “Well, not so long ago, it was a bit of mystery, but now thanks to clever fellas putting those little metal rings around the birds’ legs, identifying them and where they set off from and all that, and then other curious fellas in other countries and places, and birdwatchers, checking on them along the way, and they all reporting to each other and to the experts, we learned they go to Africa, and the Sahara … some of them even get as far as South Africa, right down there … amazin’ isn’t it, Frankie? And I think I’m great if I get as far as Ballyrothery in the auld car, or on the bus, with Clonbracken …

   “The birds often fly at night with only the moon and stars to show the way, following flyways that they just know, it’s bred into them somehow, even places to stop off for a rest and food. 

   “It’s not easy, Frankie, they can hit awful weather, and other bigger birds going after them …

 “And most amazin’ of all, they always come back … even to Clonbracken,” he laughed, his great wheezy, tummy shaker of a laugh.

   Frankie’s heart felt warm and giddy, as he listened to his Dad. Resting his right elbow on dad’s left shoulder. 

   Dad was some story teller when he was in the form for it

   Frankie felt like a bird himself now, happy and free … free to fly off over the Sahara, up among the stars even, while sitting on a low flat roof in Clonbracken, the centre of the universe.

   Dad was on some roll now, and Frankie didn’t want him, or this to ever end … even if he knew Mam would be coming in soon. 

   “The Plough is actually part of a bigger constellation called Ursa Major — a constellation is a bunch of stars that form a kind off shape.

   “A lot of the names come from people like us, in the old days, looking up at the same stars and making up stories about them, and giving them names.

   “Like, Ursa Major, the Indians in America, they called it the Great Bear,“ he explained, patting Frankie’s shoulder, as he pointed with the first finger of his other hand.

    “They would be sitting around the camp fires telling stories about  hunters chasing the Great Bear through the sky, and they could  never catch up to him, until the autumn when they would shoot them with their arrows and the trees were all covered with blood and that was how we got all our autumn colours, the blood of the wounded bear turning the leaves red.

   “‘And that’s how we have autumn’, the storytellers would say, telling all the little Indians — your age, Frankie, and the rest of them, sittin’ there, drinking and talking under the stars — ‘and the spirit of the bear goes into another bear, and the hunt starts all over again’.

   “And the Plough itself … sure, in different countries they have different stories about the same seven stars … in Germany it’s the Great Wagon. The Americans call it the Big Dipper  … see, it’s like a big spoon, or ladle, for dipping into water for drinking. 

   “And the Australians have a great story about the Big Dipper. Yerra, I’ll tell ya another time … you probably should be going to bed, for school in the morning …”

    Frankie had never forgotten that starry night. And the fact that he never got a time like that with dad again.