The Leaking Pen

By Tom McElligott

This collection of short stories encounters humour and confrontation of young and old in ‘Short Back and Sides’, ‘The Temptation of Adam’ and ‘Grumpy Kelly’. Here the characters go through the journey of growing up and facing life in denial in old age.
Joy, love, raucous wit and a somewhat dark and dubious nature unearths itself in ‘Stephen and Sally’. While in ‘Dampening Down the Heat’, ‘Homeless in the Park’ and ‘Dealing with Remorse’, Max, Amous and David struggle in life with sadness, loneliness and misery.
The characters in ‘Chilling Out’, ‘The Moaner’, ‘The Big Woolly Hat’ and ‘More Rain’ give insight of subtle humour and a side of living in a world of their own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: May 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005157388

Tom McElligott

Tom McElligott stories, poetry and photography have featured in several publications including ‘Losing Touch’ and ‘Moments Thought’ The Clare Champion, ‘A Table for Two’ Limerick Writers Anthology No 12, ‘A Cup of tea’ Limerick City of Culture Anthology The Hearts of Limerick, ‘Stone Cold Man’ Liberties Flash Fiction, ‘Leaving the Country’ Write.ie Website Tell Your Own Story and ‘The Witching Tree’ UL Ogham Stone Journal. He was born in Israel and lives in Limerick. He is married to Alice and they have three children.

Book preview

THE LEAKING PEN

________________________________

TOM MCELLIGOTT

LIMERICK WRITER’S CENTRE

PUBLISHING

Copyright © Tom McElligott 2022

First published in Ireland by

The Limerick Writers’ Centre

c/o The Umbrella Project, 78 O’Connell Street,

Limerick, Ireland

www.limerickwriterscentre.com

www.facebook.com/limerickwriterscentre

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photographing and recording, or any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author.

Book and Cover Design: Lotte Bender

Cover Image: Tom McElligott

E-book formatting: Máire Baragry

Managing Editor: Dominic Taylor

Available as an e-book at www.smashwords.com/limerickwriterscentre

Print copy: www.limerickwriterscentre.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents

are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ACIP catalogue number for this publication is available from The British Library

For Jack and Oonagh

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Dominic Taylor, Managing Editor of Limerick Writer’s Centre for his dedication in promoting Limerick writers and for his help in publishing this collection of short stories.

I would like to thank the members of Limerick Writing Group for their participation in reading and critiquing the stories.

In particular, my gratitude to my wife Alice, for listening, reading and encouraging me and pointing out the obvious, when I couldn’t see otherwise in my writing.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

SHORT BACK AND SIDES

HOMELESS IN THE PARK

GETTING OVER THE HUMP

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

MACKEREL MAN

A DAY WITHOUT MY MOBILE

THE BOTTLE BLOWERS

EXPECTING SNOW

STEPHEN AND SALLY

NEGOTIATING THE PAST

DAMPENING DOWN THE HEAT

CHILLING OUT

THE TEMPTATION OF ADAM

JACK’S TRAVELS

BLACK OR WHITE

THE MOANER

DEALING WITH REMORSE

GOOEY WITH LOVE

THE BIG WOOLLY HAT

I AM

MORE RAIN

GRUMPY KELLY

About The Limerick Writer’s Centre

SHORT BACK AND SIDES

The social revolution that led the renaissance of longer male hair, began in the early 1960s. It was the time of divided generations and the introduction of free expression. Authority was challenged and the crew cut disappeared. Teenagers fell out with their fathers and deep rifts grew between them.

At that time, in my teenage years, I could make no sense of the intolerance that adults had to long hair.

I looked back on the past with eyes of the present. Fathers went crazy and bosses couldn’t or didn’t want to understand what was going on. Da was enslaved to the tradition of shorter hair and tried his almighty best to enslave me to that slave.

Many years later, I came across an old black and white family photograph and smiled. There I was, fifteen going on sixteen, wearing an open necked shirt, no tie. My hair was hanging down to my shoulders, half covering a rebellious face with long dark side-locks. In the photo, Da was squinting at me with a humourless puss on him. I was looking straight ahead at the camera. Poor Mam, the peacemaker, was stuck in between us, giving me the wink with a grin on her. Not for the first time, his obsession for me to have shorter hair had gotten to him.

For whatever it is worth, I felt inclined to write this account about the wearing of long hair and dedicate it to my late father and the dearly departed managers of the post-office.

It was the Saturday, on the day before we attended my granny’s eightieth birthday. Da wanted me to look as he saw fit. By that I mean short back and sides. The unseemly row started. Mam alerted by raised voices, rushed in from the kitchen and said; ‘Sean, tis only a phase that will soon pass. Ignore it.’

And she was right, but Da was having none of it, hot footing it off in a huff, short of breath and muttering; ‘He looks like a bloody poet with that long hair. There was none of that carry on in my time and I can tell you there will be none of it here now either.’

Haircuts began when I was four. I was taken to the barber by Da. It was a gloomy lit place, smelling of stale cigarette and pipe smoke. Three leather chairs with foot pedals were placed in front of large mirrors.

We sat on a bench seat with the coterie of old men. They chatted and studied the racing pages, while awaiting their turn. Stern faced barbers had an almost ceremonial stuffy look of importance about them. They wore white shirts and dark ties, and silver arm bands on their sleeves. They nodded without saying much in reply to repetitive stories.

And then, there was the shaving ritual. The barber lathered up in a soap mug with a bristle hair brush. He rubbed the brush into the face of an up sitting baldy old man. The open cut-throat with the glistening shiny blade was used with great care. The barber tucked his little pinkie in on his trusted steady hand, before manipulating the razor in short deliberate even strokes with skill and dexterity under the nose and over the fat jowls of the man. The shaven lather was wiped onto a white towel that hung limp off the barber’s shoulder. My turn arrived.

‘Next.’

The barber placed a plank of timber across the arm rests of the chair. Da sat me on it and had a word in the barber’s ear. He reciprocated with an acknowledging nod and wink of understanding. Jars of brylcream and bottles of yellow and green liquid caught my eye. The barber, a crusty looking silent man with a cod eye under a raised eye-brow, tied a white cloth around my neck. He tucked it in over the collar of my shirt. I looked up into his black hairy flared nostrils. I could smell cigarette smoke off his palm and an unfamiliar sweet scent, which I would later learn was of snuff. He didn’t speak to me but paused now and again, unrushed like a slow day, to take a drag of his cigarette that smouldered and circled round me like a halo from a congested butt filled ash tray. In a matter of fact way, he completed the haircut leaving me cropped short and smelling of hair-oil. No great issue at the time, because I didn’t know any better but to Mam it was an entirely different matter.

She loved my little quiff or cow’s lick, as she called it. Da being a decisions man, saw things differently and instructed the barber to cut it off because he thought I looked like a little teddy boy. On our return home, we were on our way in the hallway when Mam appeared.

‘In God’s name Sean, what did you do to the child?’ said Mam.

‘Era calm down woman, tis only hair, twill be grand when it grows down,’ said Da.

Mam patted what was left of it over and back with a forlorn look of disbelief and sentimental loss.

When I was eight or nine I discovered to my pain, that Da had unearthed a hidden talent to cut hair. Without a screed of qualification or adeptness to support him he began, un- challenged, with great gusto on yours truly. All he was short of was the barber’s pole.

‘Sit on that chair and don’t take your eye off the door knob, until I tell you,’ he said.

From the dresser he took down the silver hand clipping machine that belonged to my grandfather and blew the dust out of it. A sense of trepidation and fear like being at the dentist came over me. Da placed one restraining hand on my head and clipped and pinched his way round with free abandon. It was a terrible ordeal.

‘Ouch - Ouch! You are hurting me,’ I cried.

‘Nonsense boy,’ he said and gave me a clip around the ear.

I caught Mam’s eye. She was gazing at me with her hand on her face, making sympathetic painful grimaces in my direction. And then Da stood back and said; ‘Now all done. Count yourself lucky boy. When my father cut my hair he took me out to the back yard and poured a big jug of cold water over my sheared head to keep me from catching the flu.’

Now all those years later, in the midst of the Covid19 Pandemic, I cringe at the thought of Da’s understanding of the ‘flu jab’. I can visualise him now in his vaccine roll out, sleeves pulled up, a big line of people queueing up in the back garden and Da there with the hose and jug, shouting next as he dowses each victim over the head with a burst of water, acting as his new found vaccine for Covid19. I digress.

Mam knew that Da’s interpretation of the crew cut didn’t flatter me. But the misery went on until one day, a short time later, he dropped the hand clippers and the handle broke off.

‘Damn it that does it now,’ he said, leaving me half sheared on one side of my head.

I smiled at Mam. She winked back at me out of sight of Da. A surge of elation ran through me at his loss. After this, he took me and my brothers to Paddy Mulvihill for the six penny haircut, while he had a pint in Mulcahy’s pub next door. Paddy didn’t hold back on his orders to give us short back and sides.

Matters grew much worse in my mid-teens, when the real trouble began. The family re-located to the city during the swinging sixties. The revolution had begun. It was the time of the mop-top and hair that hung over the eyebrows, bell-bottoms, jeans and girls wearing mini-skirts. It was the time when teenage boys rode the wave, wore pointy toed shoes and smoked openly, struggling with body images and strained family relations. And that’s how it was with me and Da.

‘In God’s name what’s wrong with these weirdos with the long hair and young wans with nothing on. There will be none of it in this house, I can tell you,’ said Da, in another one of his rants.

We, my brothers and I would turn to Mam, who would throw up her eyes in despair of him. Along with this came his Saturday Examination. Being the eldest, I got his full attention. At first the glaring exchange took place. Out of this, tension filled the kitchen, before Da gave me my marching orders.

‘Go into Bill the Barber in Thomas Street and get a haircut like mine. Tell him I sent you,’ he said.

All very fine for Da to say, because he hadn’t a rib of hair worth talking about. Appealing was futile. I put the price of the haircut he gave me into my pocket and stood there feeling grim, giving Da the dead eye.

‘Don’t give me that look boy and make me come over to you. Off you go and you can take that attitude with you,’ he said for a good-bye.

There was no talking to him. Mam made the sign of the cross and aimed a forlorn glance at the blessed virgin on the mantelpiece for intervention. The only saving grace was that Da didn’t come too.

At the barbers, the place was empty. Grey hair from the previous customers lay strewn round the floor. A horse race was being commentated on a crackly radio. There was no welcome from Smiling Bill. He raised his old eye brow from the racing page and left out a gaping yawn of boredom that gave me an unwanted teenage feeling.

‘What will it be son?’ said Bill.

With a mannerly smile and being polite, trying to buy his favour not to snip off too much, I said; ‘A light trim sir, please,’

‘A light trim is it? Mmm! We will have to see about that now, won’t we?’ said Bill.

Bill told me, with some pride that he was a retired sergeant, who gave haircuts in the army. I panicked. I was scared that a high and tight, military style shearing was imminent. But the outcome wasn’t too bad. I got Sergeant Bilco on a lazy day. He did the bare minimum to see the back of me and return to the racing page, thank God.

It was after two when I got home, knowing only too well that Da would be waiting for me. I stood at the kitchen door and looked at him without saying a word and waited for the inevitable. Within seconds, from out of the paper, where he was seated at the kitchen table, he raised his head. He leaned back and beckoned me to come closer with his index finger. He tipped his glasses down his nose and squinted his radar like eyes on my haircut.

‘Turn around,’ he says, switching his scrutiny to the back of my pole.

‘That’s not a haircut boy. What did I tell you? Back you go and get it cut again.’

‘But I got it cut,’ I said, appealing for some clemency.

‘Off with you. I don’t want to hear another word about it,’ he said and that was that.

Left with no say on the matter, I departed and decided to take my chances by not going to the barber at all. Instead, I wetted, slicked and patted my hair down as best I could behind my ears, hoping Da wouldn’t notice and he didn’t or pretended not to.

Those persecuting times in my teens were terrible. I knew by the way she looked at me that Mam felt sorry for me. But Da was relentless, having none of it, until on another of his Saturday inspections, something different happened. It was just before my sixteenth birthday. The uprising took place in the kitchen. I decided to make a stand. Giving Da a verbal refusal to get my hair cut was high risk. You see, to give back chat to Da, you would want to be brave, or stupid or be able to run like hell. He came from a school of tough knocks, where it was sacrosanct for siblings to do what they were told, with no ifs or buts about it. Voices were raised, complexions reddened and muscles were taught with tension. He lost it and so did I.

‘Go in and get that hair cut now and don’t have me to tell you again,’ he said, as if I didn’t get his message loud and clear enough the first time.

No first names, no Da or Michael, were mentioned in the cold war. I knew that Mam would be listening, waiting there to intervene in case the nuclear war button was about to be pressed.

‘I am sick and tired of this nonsense,’ said Da.

‘All my friends have long hair,’ I pleaded.

‘Not in this house they won’t.’

In a fit of crustiness, he got up from the kitchen table and stood in front of me. His face was dead stern with a look of astonishment on it. The wrinkles on his forehead furrowed together, such was his annoyance with me.

My thoughts ran riot. I stood my ground before him, eyeball to eyeball, unblinking and weighing up the physical differences between us. We were the same height, but he was three stone heavier than me with a twenty five year age gap, lean, wiry and fit. I was just a slip of a young fella, a bean pole of a boy. A thought came racing into my head. Yes, I would run to the kitchen drawer and grab hold of the sharp scissors. In a tizzy and there before him, I would chop off all my hair and say to him; ‘So there are you happy now.’

I was losing the plot. Mam’s intervention through the Blessed Virgin to come and rescue me was never more needed. My stone faced reaction seemed to puzzle him. He ogled at me with a kind of bewilderment, as if asking; ‘What’s got into the boy? Has he popped something? Is he really thinking