Flash Fiction 1st Place: The Grass Is Always Greener by Gill O’ Halloran

What if years after leaving Kerry’s green hills for England, his Irish father had not been struck by a thunderbolt of yearning while sitting on the top deck of the no. 88 bus to Clapham? What if his Irish father had swallowed that throat jolt, said Sure, I’m homesick, but London’s our home now, instead of moving them to Ireland? Or what if his mother had said, No way; you made your bed, now you must lie in it. But what if his father and mother had never made a bed and lain in it, and he’d never been conceived?

What if his unpregnant mother hadn’t married his homesick Irish father, had let him go back to Ireland alone, and found a different man, a London man, one who could ride the top deck of a London bus without feeling sad, could navigate the tube without a map, a London man who equated Brixton with reggae, not robbery, who knew I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles is anthem to unwavering hope, not a nursery rhyme. What if he’d had an English father and a no O’ surname, one that didn’t forever pronounce him son O’ the father, when he’d determined to delete all the fathering he knew he’d never have?

Or what if his mother had found a different Irish man, not a homesick Irish man, an Irish man who did not assume the Baltic bomb meant everyone was staring at him, who could say Not all Irish people are terrorists, I am not a terrorist, Londoners will like me. An Irish man who sometimes sang in pubs, and sometimes wore green jumpers on St Patrick’s Day, who loved Celtic F.C. and Guinness, whilst knowing this is not the sum total of an Irish man in London.

And what if this comfortable-in-his-own-skin Irish man had made his London bed and lain in it with his mother, and he’d been conceived in London, always lived in London, instead of returning to London aged eight, after his mother, having fallen out of love with all things Irish, had packed toys and clothes, but not their cat, (Daddy will look after him”) and bundled them onto the Dun Laoghaire-Liverpool ferry, (“Our real home.”) What if he’d not had to fake cheerful goodbyes to his Irish schoolmates and his Irish granny, if his shy hellos at the English school had not been met with ‘drink, feck, arse, girls’?

And what if all his what-ifs are just what-ifs and he’s a grownup in London now, with a girlfriend and a baby and an O apostrophe to his name, an O of happy surprise at surviving migration, surviving childhood without a father on tap, yet who still, occasionally, after a pint of Guinness, allows himself to remember the times he’s gone back across the sea to see his Irish father and has felt his Irish father hold him in an awkward embrace, kiss him on the forehead and say I love ye, son, I miss ye all.