In The Name Of My Father: Chapter 32 & 33

Oh what a tangled web…

“Telling Helen about the accident was probably the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life. Knowing she was carrying Alistair’s child compounded the situation. I worried a lot about her, and I so wanted to keep in touch, but you know how it is, time and tide. We soon lost touch, and I felt she had chosen to keep things private. I could have done better.”

“It’s always difficult. We don’t want to intrude, so we hang back, and then we find we’ve lost the opportunity, but how the good Lord works! Here am I talking to you, all because of a photo, and a visit from Helen’s daughter. Serendipity?”

“And now, somehow we have all connected like a tessellation of polygons set free in the universe. How amazing is that! I am bursting with excitement.

“Alistair’s family was a wonderful mob of people, full of life, clever, very clever, and bucket-loads of fun. You don’t remember him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We were great friends. The family fell to pieces when they got news. I took charge of the handing over of his belongings from the police. There wasn’t much, just his clothes, some loose change, and his wallet.”

“That’s what happens when you take that vow of poverty!”

“Actually, I’ve just remembered. He also had a small micro recorder in his pocket. I hung on to it. No idea why. It was cracked and I hoped it could be fixed, but to be honest I just never got around to it. I got caught up in the funeral and…I should have returned it I suppose, but I didn’t think...”

“And the police didn’t think to check?”

“Well, it was quite mangled. They probably thought it wasn’t worth bothering about. It was a while back.”

“Still, even back then their job was to discount nothing…no stone left unturned. Would I be able to have a look at it? I have a retired friend Jim Murray. He was an electronics engineer. He could check it out. I’m not promising anything, but I think it’s worth a try.”

“To fix it?”

“Probably not, but Jim might be able to download the recordings, if there are any. Not too many of us would have been walking around back then with little recorder machines in our pockets. These days you’d have your mobile if you really needed it, but back then things like that were more of a novelty. Alistair must have had the device with him for a reason, and that reason could still be intact. You just never know. So what do you think? Shall I contact him?”

“Let’s do it.”

Just a hunch…

“Have you ever had a hunch about something, and you just have to take it a stage further?” Alistair asked.

“You’re asking ME? I’m the queen of hunches. I have hunches about things when other people are sitting back thinking everything in the garden’s rosy…works a treat when I need it.

“So spill it out. It’s good for the soul, and one step away from canonization, so I’m led to believe.”

“Hunches almost never happen for me. I’m often accused of being too literal to be intuitive.”

“You don’t say!”

“I’ll try to ignore that remark. What I was trying to say is, creativity is not a skill I will ever be remembered for, but for once in my life I was working purely on a microscopic thread of magic that I didn’t realize I had.”

“Such a heavy load to carry,” she teased.

“More than you could ever imagine, but, let me ask you this question. How often in your life have you met an Alistair who was named after a man with the same name, who went into the priesthood?”

“Never? Very strange.”

“That’s putting it mildly. I’m known in my family as the voice of reason, somebody who never jumps to conclusions, a reliable person who mulls things over for way too long, sifting through the minutiae of possibilities, but , in this case, I was bitten by the coincidence.”

They were sitting in Attica, the coffee shop where they had met to discuss John’s illness, except this time, the atmosphere was very different.

“And?”

“So, I rang my father…feeling a bit stupid to be honest. The thing is, had the name been Jim, or Mick, or Bob, I probably wouldn’t have given it another thought.”

“And we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“That’s right. I was sure I was on to something but I needed a bit more information. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried because it was as easy as pie. Dad clearly had held onto a lot of his boyhood feelings about Alistair, and the priesthood, and about losing his best friend ever, but I knew he was bursting to talk, and when he started it was as if Alistair had walked out of his life only yesterday.

“The thing I regretted most was that I couldn’t be the purveyor of good news. I could see he was getting excited about things, maybe the possibility of meeting up with him, about reconnecting, and the last thing I wanted to explain was that he had died. When I told him about the accident, he was devastated.

“And then when I explained about you, and the qualities that I see in you, I could tell he was gutted.”

“What? No, no, no, it can’t be that easy.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too incredible even for me to think about…it’s really too whacky to imagine that this search of mine could end up being such a breeze.”

“Remember, even if it all turns out to be true, you will still only be on the start of a journey. It won’t be immediate happy families. It’s been many years since all of this happened and there’s no guarantee that we can take things further, or that the family would want to.

“So there you are,” he said sheepishly scratching his head. “For once in my life I followed an instinct that might be to your advantage.”

“Well, I’m glad you did! I’ve been feeling out of my depth. I went to an internet cafe the other say and sat for a couple of hours, and at the end of that I was close to putting my head through a brick wall.”

“Maybe you need to put some space between this.”

“No way!”

“I’m just concerned you’ll get your hopes up and…”

“Too late! I posted it on The House of Facebook.”

“Well that’ll drag them in!” he laughed.

“I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you’d laugh.”

“Well you’re wrong about that. I personally have very little to do with Facebook, but it has its merits once you get past the wealth of handsome people showing off their ripped bodies.”

“Or sharing what they had for breakfast.”

“You know I like the idea of using it as a way to reconnect with old friends, but it’s not what I imagine REALLY happens there.

“For me, the urge to correct other people’s grammar and spelling mistakes is enough to make me realize I’m dangerous.”

“They might just block you! It’s why I don’t spend too much time there, but getting back to the posting, I’ve actually had a few replies,” she answered sheepishly,” not necessarily with the name O’Grady, but one person who said she knew one at school, another person worked with someone with the name, or, the best one, a person whose name is actually O’Grady.

“I agree that posting a note is a bit of a pathetically-long bow, but given that Facebook is there, and it costs nothing other than time, I still think it was worth the risk. I know it doesn’t even COMPARE with your first-ever below-the-surface-level hunch, but you never know. We could maybe combine the two.”

“So…on Facebook… what exactly did you ask?”

“I didn’t give much away…just said I was looking for information on a family from Victoria called O’Grady, that there were four children, three girls and a boy called Alistair. Somebody said they knew of a smashing young bloke who works at a cafe in Warrandyte. He has Down Syndrome, has been there for years, and runs a tight show in terms of making sure people get served on time and that tables are cleaned quick-smart. He’s very well spoken, polite, and has a better intuitive intelligence than many supposedly able people.

“It’s a bit light on detail, but it’s something. You never know!”

“I don’t have much more than you already know, but if anybody can dig out some information it will be my mother. She was a teacher for years, and she knows who is related to whom, and she’s pretty good on the detail. Dad’s like most men…totally short on the said detail. I bet I’ve fired them up though! Mum will now be combing through the minutiae of information she might have.

“But you know, right now I’m just trying to get my head around the serendipity of this. Had your father not got sick and landed in hospital, none of this would have happened. I’d have flown to Melbourne and spent time with my kids, I could possibly sat beside you on the plane and exchanged pleasantries, but that would have been it, your mother might still be alive and you would still be hanging onto a curiosity that is driving you to distraction because there was no way you could get to the bottom of it.

“As it stands, your father, DID get sick, DID get positive news on his health, DID tell you the truth about your parentage, we DID recognize each other on the plane, we DID have that drink, and then, the clincher…I am Alistair, your biological father was Alistair…I was named after a priest…your father was a priest…both of them had O’Grady as their surname. I think this was all meant to happen. I’ve always pooh-poohed things like this but…”

“Do you believe in all that stuff about the universe sending us messages?” Ailsa asked quickly.

“Until recently, I didn’t, but now I’m not so sure! My head’s spinning with all these random nudges and happenings that are right in front of us, but as yet to be jig-sawed together. It actually challenges my faith, but at the same time inspires me not to be so rigid in my thinking. So the short answer is, I wish I could say I do believe, but the truth is I’m still a Doubting Thomas.

“There’s a lot in life that we don’t necessarily understand, but we accept it in the grand scheme of things. Say for instance, that day when your mother bumped into John for the first time since they’d split. How do you explain that away? And had that NOT happened where might you be now? Yours would be a whole other story, and we might never have met. The fact is Ailsa, we can scrutinize every fine detail of our lives, follow the twists and turns to try to find the planning, but the truth is, there’s less real planning in life than we care to think about, and a helluva lot of serendipity.”

“And hopefully, a helluva lot more, to come!”

“If we are supposed to find out, we will. I know a couple who were childhood sweethearts. They thought they were destined to be together, but he went off to England to study, planning to return, but he didn’t. She became a nurse and they each married different partners. Years later, after a failed marriage, she went looking for him and found him through the internet. It was difficult at first because there we were so many men with the same name, but then she remembered he had a Norwegian middle name. She found him on a university website, still in England, and she in Australia. Both were free to marry, so the love story began again.”

“Now that’s a pretty impressive tale, if ever I heard one! Doesn’t make it easier though! ” she wailed dramatically. “A few weeks ago, all I wanted was for my mother to talk to me. I just needed some answers. The truth is, it was none of my damned business. Imagine my response if she had tried to intervene in MY life.”

“But your motivation was honorable.”

“Was it? As fully-grown adults we don’t need people to tell us how to conduct our lives, or to confess to a past. I had no right, and now I’m minus a mother and I may have opened up a can of worms the trail of which I can never imagine.”

“There’s a grand plan for all of us, one that we can’t sidestep. Yours is a huge loss, and yet, it brings three families together.”

“Three?”

“I’m including mine here…your present family, your father’s, and mine. I’m certain that my parents would be excited at the prospect of reconnecting. But now I’m wondering where I am in this web. I’d never given much thought to my name, and now it’s the connective element in such a tangled, yet exciting web.”