Departures by Jennifer Cornell Page A

the Wimpy’s on the evenings he was working, although once, against his wishes, I did go to see him there. I knew what it was that made him find it so demeaning, and I had wanted to tell him that he had no reason to be ashamed. My mother had always objected to uniforms of any kind, and had discouraged us from professions in which all employees were required to look the same. While clothes, she warned me, could not make the man, they could sometimes tell him what kind of man he was.
    And yet my father did not mind his job, I think; so I left before he saw me, and without speaking to him as I’d planned. Protected by the invisibility too often accorded those engaged in menial tasks, he had no need to speak to anyone, and no one spoke to him. The noise of scolding parents and of orders placed and altered did not disturb him. The restaurant had two levels, both of which were partitioned into smaller areas by the artful arrangement of large, white troughs of plastic vegetation. From four o’clock until midnight my father moved his mop from one end of the place to the other, taking a ten-minute break every so often to wait for the floor to grow littered with cartons and cold chips before he started the process over again. At the end of eight hours he changed his clothes and went home, through the silent town with its derelict arcades and grim police patrols, up the empty, unlit Road to the house.
    In so small a city as Belfast, it was inevitable that Geordie would discover that my father had a job, and when he did he could barely contain his glee. As far as he knew, the government offered no reward for turning in squatters, but informing on those who were working while claiming to be unemployed paid fifty pounds per head. The first night he came to our house to gloat, he lingered on the doorstep for a full twenty minutes while our dinners cooled and the dust from the street blew into the hall, leaning against the doorjamb and smoking through his teeth and chatting about times getting tough, making ends meet, doing whatever necessary in order to get by. Every so often afterwards he’d drop by unannounced to comment on the few additions my father’s wages bought and which Geordie’s keen, intrusive eye invariably managed to spot. When he was gone my father would sit as if physically drained. In the end, unnerved and anxious, he turned to his brother for advice.
    My uncle’s response was typical. In the days before experience had honed his business sense, he had accepted a brown and yellow, five-berth caravan as partial payment for property he’d bought, then sold; this he now proffered for our use.
    His voice cheery, unwilling to accept the problem as real, he suggested we get away for a while, have a holiday, forget about the whole thing. He’d run us down himself if we wanted, and we could give him a ring when we wanted to leave.
    Caught up in the spontaneity of the notion my father agreed, though he made sure to look in on Harry before we left. The caravan was just outside of Newcastle, usually a popular seaside resort. But in early March it was still dark and sparsely populated; few people cared to spend their wages in a town with little else to offer than a fewenshrouded amusement halls and a fitful, troubled sea. Even at peak season my mother had always preferred Portrush. She liked to walk the path beside the bed-and-breakfasts where the wind was strongest and the smell of salt water was sharpest on the air. There was a set of swings at the far end of the most distant pier, and it was there we could always find them, once we’d eaten our fill of candy and ice cream, had gambled our pennies on the miniature horses, and had no more money left to spend. I stayed with them once when I was too sick in the stomach for food or for rides and watched them play. With hair unpinned she shook her head at him—Don’t go so high! —and he stood behind her, just out of her reach, sometimes