Down on Luck

Chapter One

Gavin

I liked old things. Most people these days would be streaming, legal or not. I still had a thing for physical media, having been alive when the internet went public and 12 before it got good.

I also had two older brothers, being the second eldest of six. All boys, so I grew up in a household full of testosterone – well, besides our poor mother, of course. So, I knew about things well before and after my generation.

I didn’t go back as far as VHS, though I was aware of it. For videos, my media of preference was good ol’ DVDs. I went back as far as vinyl for albums.

Impressive as my music collection was, it was surpassed by leaps and bounds by my DVD collection, which was bought for a steal out of the bargain bin and lining the shelf in my bedroom from end to end. The only concession to modern tech I made was watching them on a laptop with an internal DVD player. It was the same one I’d had since I was 14 but it was working through the miracle of self-maintenance, one of the main reasons I’d gotten a PC with a hard-drive door to begin with. A screwdriver was really all it took to put new brains in the old case.

I had a reason to justify the number of DVDs I had. At least to myself. I was going to be an actor and was using the bit of advice I had one heard Liam Neeson give about practicing lines by watching movies and paying attention to what was being said. Seeing the type-casting coming from a mile off, since I was a Dublin Paddy after all, I focused on movies that had Irish characters, real and otherwise.

Mr. Neeson made several appearances, particularly in historical pieces like Michael Collins (my second favorite) and Gangs of New York (my favorite). He was from Belfast and had a noticeably different accent, at least to other Irish, but it was still nice to hear an authentic voice and there was always Brendan Gleeson as “Monk” McGinn in Gangs.

I never knew what the feck DiCaprio was up to as Amsterdam. Though to be fair to the Yanks, Brad Pitt did an admirable job with the notorious gypsy gab in Snatch.

“Gav! We gotta go!”

Usually I would have yelled at Eoin for busting in like that, possibly throwing in a ‘gobshite’ or two, but he was in such a state that I was worried.

“What’s happenin’, Eoin?”

“They’ve found da!”

“Wonderful,” I said, without enthusiasm, hitting pause.

Our dad would never be accused of being a good parent. Originally a feckin’ Scot, he seemed to have taken Alexander Trocchi’s novels as life guides, drinking, shooting up and shagging anything he could find. It was a wonder he had lived as long as he had, leading me to the logical conclusion that the bugger was indestructible.

“Yer’re not comin’, are ye?” Eoin asked, knowing my signals.

“Donna see a need. Da is old enough ta look after himself. He’ll never learn to stand on his own two feet, stumbling as they may be, if we keep bailin’ him out. He’ll come home when he wants ta. If he lives t’at long,” I said.

“But -”

I could tell he was going to cry. Eoin had just turned 18 but he was still my little brother and, with the state our dad had been in most of his life, I had been his legal guardian this whole time. I suspected that he saw me as more of a dad than the man who actually fathered him.

“Ye really want to go get him, don’t ye?”

“Aye,” he said nodding, the tears already beginning to flow.

“Oh, geez, come on then, ye wee muppet,” I said, getting up from my desk.

My reluctance to go looking for dad was at least partly a matter of self-preservation. It was a stereotype, to be sure – the Troubles were long over, at least in our neck of the woods, but, like all major cities, there were some areas of the capital it wasn’t too clever to be wandering at night and we just happened to occupy one. Ballymun, to be exact. Once a beautiful area with some of the tallest skyscrapers in Europe, it was now a bastion for junkies and petty criminals.

Most local boys got their first scars by the time they were 12. My brothers and I were no exception. Our dad loved it though, not least because of the bargain prices on both rent and smack.

“You stay in the feckin’ car, get me?” I asked, as we walked out to my motor.

“Aye.”

“Even if shite goes down. I don’t need you gettin’ shanked again and neit’er does mum, savvy?”

“Aye,” Eoin agreed.

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“Swear ta Brigid?” I asked.

“I swear ta Brigid,” Eoin vowed.

We’d been raised Presbyterian because our dad insisted. That was yet another reason for the local kids, all of them feckin’ Fenians, to beat the shite out of us growing up, which is why we tended to go around in groups of three or four. As we grew, though, we started to move away from how we were raised, taking more after our mother in every way.