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jmccloskey.com
Category:
Historical Fiction
ISBN-10: 1545025037
Type: Fiction
Pages: 304
Copyright: march 20 2017
ISBN-13: 9781545025031
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
A story of second chances for three generations of fathers and sons.
My father and I began the restoration of the ‘69 Jaguar when he died. My son is now old enough, I return to the task.
We work from a garage that was converted from a coach-house by the last landlord of the great estate. He returned a broken man from WWI with a passion for cars.
I have a heart attack during the work and pass away.
Mary, my wife, is heartbroken and alone in the house when Michael goes abroad to find work.
She comes to the garage, convinced a remnant of me lingers there. Her heart too fails and I witness her death as a ghost, lingering in the garage where I spent most of my life.Something binds me to the place, I suspect it is the unfinished car.
Michael returns years later with an illness and a partner. He begins on the car. There is a presence, maybe more than one in the shadows that also haunt the garage, they trouble me.
Work progresses, Savita his partner, argues that he should rest but the work transforms him, gives him renewed focus.
Savita is pregnant. They are both elated. I pine for Mary, who must be waiting for me.
Years pass before I return. The 69 is still here. Micheal waited until his son was old enough to remember the car before he sold it.
Several buyers are turned away as unsuitable. Then Henry appears, we are all in agreement that he is suitable. Michael forces him to come clean. He is the son of the last landlord and shares a past with the car.
He drives away and waves to the garage, to me and my father and the last landlord as they step from the shadows to join me.
Excerpt
Chapter 14
Once, and only once I called out to him, I laughed at my foolishness afterwards.
‘Dad, are you there?’ my voice broke as I asked the question; I was more than a little choked up with emotion. I waited hard for an answer, closed my eyes and turned my ear to one side to focus on the echo of my voice, it seemed to linger abnormally long in the rafters before the sound was swallowed up by the night. No reply came back of course; but there was a moment in that silence when I was waiting, that void, that vacuum, when everything grew still. A moment when I thought I heard him sigh, as he often did when he was about to speak.
My attention was drawn to the metal sign. The old Alfa Romeo glistened as the single bulb over my head swung gently to and fro in the draft. I dropped my tools and crossed the floored to stand beside it. The air around me felt charged. I had very few photographs of my father, any I had were taken here in this garage, himself clad in an oily overall. I smiled when I recalled that in my memories he was always wearing the same oil stained overalls. This one physical thing I had, a greasy hand print on the corner of the sign. I made sure it was never wiped or cleaned. It was precious, as if some of his DNA was still trapped in the greasy stain.
He’d been moving the sign, lining it up. His old friend Patrick directing him.
‘That’s fine,’ Patrick had said, ‘No point making it perfect, nothing in here ever is.’
My father threw a rag at him. He ducked, laughing, then threw it back.
‘Wipe that oily paw print off will you,’ Patrick called to my father.
My father had the rag poised over the sign, but he stopped. ‘No, that’s just about right, this old lady deserves to have a greasy hand print on her, not a collectors signature.
And so it was that my fathers hand-print had never been touched. Though it was now so faded it was barely visible.
I raised my hand and spread my fingers wide, holding them in the air above the imprint of his. I had done this so many times over the years. Watching as my hand grew in size from the small soft hands of a boy to the calloused hands I now held over the sign, hands that now matched his own.
A breeze caught the wooden doors and threw them open with a loud crash. I didn’t flinch, my hand remained poised over the sign. If I was being warned away there was no point, I was at home here. The Captain might have been the master of the estate once. I would like to think I was now master of the house, but I’d willingly give up that title to Mary. Yet there was no doubt that I was the master in my little haven.
‘What do you think of the work so far Dad?’ I asked, my hand still raised and hovering over his own hand-print. If I was asked if I believed he was there, or could hear me, I’d have laughed at the notion, but secretly I was never so sure, perhaps it was nothing more than wishful thinking. I spoke to him more and more often after that, asked questions, suggested solutions to problems I met with the work. I had a habit of talking to myself when I was working anyway, but it was never anything more than thinking aloud. The remarks were never directed at anyone else. I guess it was a symptom of spending so much time alone. But now those conversations ended with Dad. There was nothing unhealthy or eerie about it I told myself, however, I never told Mary.
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