Dad’s back at the end of the week. When I get home from school he’s perched on the front steps with his head in his hands like he’s found himself a headache. Mum’s behind him with her mouth going flat strap like she’s giving it to him. The front gate screeches open.
“Friday, at last,” is all Dad gets out before Mum lays her hand flat against his bare back and tells him to sit still.
“He’s done it again, your father has,” Mum says. “You think he’d learn.”
“Catch any, Dad?”
“Just one—”
“And one’s not enough to make up for this,” Mum says, her hands busy on his back. “Look at this,” she says, running the flat of her palm over the shedding skin. “This is what fishing without a shirt will do to you.”
“Peeling again, Dad?”
Mum tears strips off him. “I hope your learning something from your father’s mistakes,” she says. “Because I don’t think he ever will.” She spreads the pieces of skin on the concrete steps and they gather like clouds brewing.
I know the feeling he’s got in him at the moment: the skin prickling like it’s full of static electricity that just can’t find a way out. Fishing with Dad’s what got me burnt the first time. Back then, Mum had the two of us on the front steps with out heads hanging down like a couple of guilty dogs.
Grab us an ashtray, will you” Dad says as he fishes Tally-Hos from the pocket of his Stubbies. I drop my bag inside the door, kick off my shoes and socks, and head into the laundry to see what Dad has on ice in the tub. Whatever it is in there it’s big. It’s stretched out the full length of the tub.
I grab the ashtray from the kitchen table and get back outside. The concrete landing’s smooth and cool beneath my bare feet. “Only one fish, Dad?”
“You only need one if it’s a good one. But you should have seen the ones that got away,” he says and flings open his arms until they’re most of the way around behind him. “You wouldn’t believe how big they were.”
“Nor should you believe,” Mum looks up at me and laughs. “Nor should you.”
The ashtray is made of beer bottle-coloured glass and it ker-chinks against the concrete step when I put it down beside Dad. “Cheers,” Dad winks.
Mum shuffles over slaps her hand on the concrete. “Give me a hand here,” she says. “Like this.” She works her fingers along the coastline of the dead skin. “Try to get a wide piece to start because it always runs out into nothing.” We’re both there working our way out from his spine, following the grooves between his ribs. It’s like we’re opening him up like a cicada, getting ready to let him loose on the world.
When we’re done, Dad rolls a smoke and lights it up. He flicks the ash on top of the skin in the ashtray and the air fills with a dead smell.
Dad says that for the first few days he felt nothing but ghostings, not much more than the rumour of fish, an itch in his fingertips at most. “Either way,” he says. “The linekept coming up empty. I only ever got one decent strike,” he says. “And I wasn’t going to let it go.”
“You were gone a long time,” I say.
“Too long,” Mum adds.
“Well,” Dad says and gets up of the step and heads into the house. “I could’ve come back empty-handed, but you two wouldn’t have ever forgiven me.”
Later, when we’re all in the kitchen, Mum and Dad are working side by side at the sink. A pot of water simmers on the stove behind them. I sit at the kitchen table sharpening a pencil for no good reason. On the corner of the table there’s a pile of shavings and dark smudge of lead.
Dad’s got the fish laid out on newspaper and he’s rubbing off the scales. He hasn’t got his shirt on yet and fish scales are caught up around his wrists. Mum’s humming something to herself as she strings the beans and when she’s done with that she rinses her hands under the tap and puts her arms around Dad’s waist and he sighs and bends at the knees a little and she rests her cheek against Dad’s back and looks at me and smiles. She shakes her head, reaches behind her to the pot on the stove, turns down the heat before things get a chance to boil over.
About Patrick Cullen’s short story ‘Peeling’
‘Peeling’ was first published in the Newcastle Herald (Thursday 15th January 2009).
Read more short stories by Patrick Cullen.