I don’t know whose idea it was to take my father out for the day, but it was me who suggested the cinema. My brother Dara and I were back in Derry for the weekend to celebrate our dad’s 76th birthday, and such visits typically involve us staying out in his house in the sticks, where he lives with my sister Caoimhe and her husband Eddie (his favourite son), and making occasional trips for provisions to the city. We spend the rest of our time harassing him to talk about the olden days (which he doesn’t much care to do), to distract him from giving us jobs to do around the house (which he very much does).
In this way it is a regression to childhood, which was apt as we had both travelled without kids. Even five years in, acting like a parent around him gives me impostor syndrome. There’s something about juggling babies or scolding children, and then being marched up to the attic to find a very important piece of wood, which my dad needs right this minute, that makes me feel like a small boy playing at being a dad, as if I’ve burst into the living room, wearing his work shoes and a drawn-on beard saying, ‘Look at me, I’m an adult, ha ha ha!’
On the morning of his birthday, we presented him with some vinyl records and a new workbench that my 10 siblings and I had gone in on together. It’s a beautiful feat of engineering, a wheeled rectangle of ordered storage and sliding drawers, the only downside of which is the fact it came unassembled. Fearing he’d spend the whole day trying to put it together or, worse, get someone other than Eddie to do it for him, my brother and I bundled him into the car for an early afternoon showing of the new Mission: Impossible.
The thriller has a lot going for it as a dad film: cars, explosions and, despite being the seventh film in the franchise, a plot that requires no prior knowledge of the series to be comprehensible. It depends, I guess, on what you consider comprehensible, since very little of the film’s plot makes literal sense, but that didn’t matter to my dad, who resisted any instruction from me on what was going on. He certainly didn’t evince much interest in my treatise on the series’ unwieldy naming schema, hamstrung by their insistence on keeping the colon between Mission and Impossible for the first one, and refusing to include another, resulting in titles that now sound like run-on sentences pronounced by a breathless toddler.
Its near three-hour length was a bit of a stretch, but greatly aided by reclining seats and, well, a plot that melts on contact with your brain like candyfloss.
By the time we got home, we’d forgotten much that had happened, save that we’d been very entertained. Even better, Eddie had assembled the bench, which meant Dara and I could pepper our father with questions about the olden days. He was no longer listening, however. His new bench had reminded him: he had some things he needed us to get from the attic.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
