Read Molly Fox's Birthday for Free Online Page B

warmth, the fondness we all had for each other had prevented me from thinking through the nature of this difference, its implications. I knew instinctively the kind of life I needed to live, and since leaving home I had started to lead that life; I felt its rightness. But I hadn’t realised until now that it would, inevitably, exclude me to some degree from my family, affection and love, even, notwithstanding.
    â€˜It’s true,’ Andrew said, ‘you can’t have it both ways.’ He talked then about his own family, and was uncharacteristically forthcoming on the subject. ‘It’s indifference rather than hostility,’ he said, ‘although there’s a fair bit of that too, particularly with my father. He’s not a bit proud of me. When I do well in my studies, my exams, he takes it as some implied criticism of himself; he always has to get his dig in. Looking at pictures? Nice work if you can get it, although what’s the bloody point? As for my mother, it’s Billy who matters, not me.’
    â€˜What’s he like?’
    Now that I come to think of it, I have never heard any man mention his brother. The subject seems distasteful to most men .
    â€˜Billy? Billy’s a hood. A wee smart-Alec and a hood, but my Ma thinks he’s the be-all and the end-all. I had a big bust up with him about a month ago, the last time I was at home. I found a box under the stairs with a gun in it, a gun and ammunition.’ He let me absorb this information for a moment, aware of how shocked I would be. This conversation was taking place in the early 1980s. Andrew and I were from opposite sides of a deeply divided society. Although we both abhorred the bitter sectarianism of that society we also knew that were we to talk about politics we were bound to disagree, to argue even. That’s how deep the divisions went. Sometimes when I was back at home and I saw a tricolour flapping above the fields from a telegraph pole, or when one of my family members made a casual, bigoted remark for which they were rebuked by no one (including me, it has to be said), I did think of how ill at ease, how threatened, even, Andrew would feel on my turf, and with reason. Apart from the most oblique and passing references, we had until now dealt with the subject by the simple means of avoiding it. But one of those bullets Andrew had found could have had my father’s name on it, my brother’s, mine. To know that my friend had a brother who was a Loyalist paramilitary chilled me, and he knew this. It chilled him too, in a different way.
    â€˜I faced him with it and I argued with him.’ I was just about to ask Andrew what he was going to do about it, and then I realised that I didn’t want to know. ‘I told myfather as well but he already knew; I think he knows even more than he’s letting on. He’s worried, I can tell. Billy’s in deep. Anyway,’ he said, remembering the train of conversation that had brought him to this point, ‘that’s families for you, or at least that’s my family. I’m stuck with them and they’re stuck with me. Blood’s thicker than water, I suppose.’
    Does Andrew remember that night when we confided in each other, just after I broke Henry’s heart? I’ll never know, because were I to ask him, I’m sure he’d have the courtesy to pretend he had forgotten, unlike my mother who, to this day, casts Henry up to me. But it did mark a new stage in our friendship.
    We never went to each other’s houses, and for a long time college and a few selected pubs and cafés in the city centre remained our common ground. I didn’t even know exactly where he lived until one day, in third year, when I had been bringing lecture notes to a friend in Rathmines who was ill and was afraid of falling behind with her work. God only knows what use my lecture notes would have been to anyone. Looking back it seems that