It is breakfast and I am watching them at the oval mahogany table ‒ my mother, big on top and bottom, but slim in the middle like somebody has squeezed her too tight; my father solid as a tree trunk, his face fattened and ruddied by years spent in control of his own destiny, only his eyes giving him away.

My sister rarely sits at the table with us.

‘How much do you owe now?’ my mother invariably asks.

‘Oh,’ my father replies with a sheepish grin, ‘about seventeen million.’

‘Could be worse,’ she yawns.

‘But I have almost cracked the code.’

My mother squints at a point past his shoulder. As soon as we finish our toast and marmalade, my father says he is in a hurry and heads directly across the hall to the study. My mother watches him go then turns to me, their invisible sapling, and says, ‘Clear up will you, Peter?’

She wants to leave him as soon as she finds somebody who owes less, and my sister who is goading her into this, even asks to come with her, but neither of them goes anywhere; they just stay upstairs in their gargantuan bedrooms staring out the windows at the sultry rain coming in over Lough Mulhoe. When he abandons his study in the evening, my father regularly checks my mother’s walk-in wardrobe. A typical search is thorough and takes him about half an hour despite the loud protests at his encroachment. He even once threatened to check my sister’s wardrobe when she was giving him lip, but her face took on such an enraged pallidity that the subject was dropped for eternity. I could tell him though – because I have an inquiring teenage mind – that nothing is happening there, apart from the sighs and giggles of two sophomoric females under house arrest.

Dad’s study is a huge room with three tall windows overlooking the swimming pool. An aging antiquarian took away the books a while back – rows upon rows of 19^th century first editions with gold-flaked titles running down the sides. 

‘Sure bookworm could spread to the staircase and then we’d need a rope ladder or something,’ my father pronounced as the old gentleman laid the volumes into cardboard boxes.

Today as usual he is typing potential code-breaking formulae into the computer while simultaneously teleconferencing with associates in Dublin and beyond, experts one and all on financial salvation. His voice quakes with excitement at a new plan B, the idea being to allow the British army to practice house-to-house warfare in the ghost estate behind the apartment block he barely got finished before the crash (the Tilting Tower of Mulhoe as the ‘irate residents’ call it). The British army, one of his advisers warns him, might be too sensitive a presence in the locality, unless they were really paying above and beyond all humanly-conceivable market values.

‘Sure,’ I hear my father retort as I pass holding a tray laden with chipped crockery. ‘The pubs would be full, everyone would be laughing.’

‘They are already laughing,’ my mother hisses; as is her wont she is standing at the threshold to his study listening to every word. ‘Laughing at us; or rather laughing at you.’

He ignores her with a sniff of patrician contempt.

We had been running out of plates and cups. I went around the whole house searching. My sister likes to eat in different rooms, it seems. I leave the tray in the kitchen and, feeling too beaten to attempt to wash them, traipse up the great flight of stairs to my bedroom where my thoughts turn to this famous code… well, we call it a code, but in fact it is the number (that somehow went missing) of a secret bank account in Kazakhstan where my father has a couple of million euro lodged. This code obsesses us all. Even my sister, who pretends to be chatting with pals all day as her finger-tips glance across her phone’s display, is in fact immersed in cryptographical pursuits; for her, solving the riddle is even more urgent than for the rest of us, seeing as her twenty-first birthday is fast approaching.

My own birthday was last week: a down-beat affair, my mother baked a cake but it collapsed inwardly. She tidied its appearance somewhat by adding dollops of extra chocolate, and I felt anguished love for her when I saw how serious she took this latest cover-up. Not that it mattered, I had invited nobody. My father sat there in a sulk, perhaps he regretted making me, I don’t know; my sister excused herself quickly (well, she didn’t excuse herself, she just pissed off); my mother smiled at me, her teeth sparkling like diamonds, and remarked that she had expected something different when I was born. My father guffawed at this.

‘I didn’t mean it in a bad way, Peter,’ she added quickly.

‘Well son,’ my father put in, cheered by my mother’s faux pas and eyeing the untouched cake on my plate. ‘What would you really like to eat tonight?’

‘Eh,’ I muttered. ‘I suppose chips and burgers and stuff.’

My mother, once a renowned foodie, slammed her napkin onto the table and exited the room with her hand pressed to her mouth. 

A few minutes later my father and I were in the Porsche speeding down our endless oak-lined driveway to the Mulhoe road, where instead of driving the two miles to town and its respectable enough chipper, we swerved off at the dual carriageway and headed in the direction of Dublin for twenty minutes, before ascending the ramp to another town.

‘Right,’ Dad said, as we pulled up outside the first chipper we came across. ‘Go in and order anything you want. Then come back to the car.’

He had his sunglasses on, though the sun itself was swiftly vanishing behind the loose-slated roofs on the buildings across the road. I asked him for some money.

‘Payment on delivery,’ he snapped. 

I went inside. The order I put in at the counter was huge, and I only noticed that I was actually starving. Then I went to wait in the car. The motor was running. Dad glanced into the rear-view mirror and lit a cigarillo. We did not speak. Presently the guy from behind the counter, a big man with his hair gelled back behind a bulbous forehead, brought us our take-out in two overstretched plastic bags. He eyed our Porsche with pleasure as my father let down the window. I took the bags and turned to my father, expecting him to pull out a wad of money. Instead, pressing his foot hard against the accelerator, he swerved out onto the street and we drove off.

I must say I enjoyed that meal greatly, despite my guilty conscience. I remembered previous meals in restaurants where we were feted by the owners, and politicians and celebrities would come over and shake hands with my parents, but this stolen feast out-dazzled such spectacles completely.

Even my sister came down and indulged despite the calories… now that we were poor, we needed extra cushioning against the vicissitudes.

I like that word. I used to be in a nice school with a tree-lined avenue and the master of English was forever using that word. These days, I know exactly what he was on about.

During our feast, my mother graced us temporarily with her presence. She glared at the spread on the table and said: ‘How much did that set you back?’

I nearly choked on a chip, but my father declared without batting an eyelid: ‘I covered it, don’t worry.’

She knew of course: sure she must have known what he was like decades ago, must have admired his character flaws once upon a time, have been turned on by them even. (Such unthinkable thoughts). She rapidly retreated back up the stairs and my father was then free to wax lyrical without her withering interruptions.

‘Children,’ he explained. ‘If those gangsters had not set off a chain of events that derailed the world economic system, you know what I would have been investing in now.’

‘Chippers?’

‘No, Peter: Space travel.’

‘Oh.’

‘Why should Kazakhstan get all the glory? Of all places. Why not Mulhoe?’

‘Why not indeed, daddy?’ my sister muttered, then snatched the last bag of chips and followed my mother to the house’s upper reaches.

I looked at the vinegar-soaked paper and the empty bottles of Coke on the table and recalled the look on the guy behind the counter’s face as we sped away; that look, that awe and disbelief reminded me of how my father looked the day his empire crumbled, as he walked past the pool, somewhat poetically in one of his white suits, my mother tailing him, wringing her hands, saying ‘James, James, what the hell is going on?’

These memories upset me. I sit in my room hoping one of them will just crack the code and we can fill the pool again and even pay our bill at the chipper. A knock comes to the door and my father enters with two fishing rods.

‘C’mon son. Those women will be getting hungry.’

‘Can we not just go to a chipper?’ I protest.

‘No petrol.’

We pass the weed-infested helicopter pad and the gazebo; our legs picking up speed, we head down the gently sloping, yet hopelessly overgrown lawn to the shore. I notice a group of horses drinking at the water. They are different from the racehorses we used to own, less handsome, but sturdier and more honest-looking. My father picks up on my surprise.

‘Herself was bemoaning the lack of equinity on the landscape since I had to flog off the Arabian colts…’

‘Where did you get them?’ I ask. He does not respond, just chuckles, and I recall not seeing any horses on the central margin of the dual carriageway for some time now, and this makes me worried for him, as, whatever about a few bags of chips now and again, stealing horses from the dual carriageway to placate a wife who hates his guts anyway, is risking far too much.

I sit into the speedboat and my father pushes it away from the pebbly shore. We let it glide a bit then throw our lines. The day is overcast and sticky. Midges tear along the lake’s surface. The horses eye us from dry land like a gang of lads in hoodies, and behind them, above the house, the sun is a nebula cradled by the grey clouds.

Fishing is not our forte, especially not my father’s, who begins to get vexed after five or six minutes when nothing bites.

‘Those bitches,’ he snarls through gritted teeth, glancing at our mansion up the hill. My mother’s windows are open, the curtains flapping in the breeze. My sister, who lives in a loft on the floor above, is glaring at us from one of the numerous skylights that were knocked out of the roof one noisy morning when we were still sinfully wealthy.

 ‘I’ll sell them, that’s what I’ll do, on the internet!’

I presume he is not talking about the horses, and also that he is not really addressing me, but rather some associate in a parallel universe.

‘I still have ten quid in coins in my room,’ I say to appease him. ‘I’ll cycle to town and get chips.’

‘Great idea!’ my father exclaims, jerking his line out of the water. ‘Ask the women what they want before you set off.’

We paddle with our hands to the shore and stride back up the lawn. In the house my father leaves me without a word and enters his study; I traipse again up the staircase and root around for money, then weighed down with copper, I head down the landing to my mother’s bedroom. She is sitting reclined on her four-poster bed engrossed in a mighty tome with silver flowers embossed onto the cover. Similar books are piled on the floor beside her, and I can hear the tub in her en-suite bathroom filling with water.

‘Yes?’ she sighs, not looking up from her literature.

‘I’m off to the chipper, want anything?’

She pauses, licks a finger, turns the page so fiercely it almost rips.

‘You know I don’t eat junk food, Peter.’

I proceed upstairs to my sister’s. She has a list already made. I never dare enter her room, but on missions like this, I certainly take a peek inside at the cantaloupe walls, the posters, all signed, of pop stars who came and went, at the stacks of glossy magazines, and the odd incongruous school book that has been stabbed a thousand times with a biro. She hands me the list, tells me I am dead if I forget the Coke, and closes the door in my face.

And so it is off down the leafy driveway on my mountain bike with the sound of my mother singing in the bath wafting across the breeze. Just then a white van turns into the grounds. It comes careening towards me. I jump off my bike into the undergrowth. Three burly men are sitting in the cab, and Luigi’s Chips & Burgers is inscribed across the side.

Up at the house there is shouting. I cower behind a tree, then presently the clip-clop of horses’ hooves reaches my ears. My family pass, making good their escape. My father, white-suited, sportily salutes me. My mother, behind him on a chubby piebald beast, is naked; bath suds form a nimbus around her head and her jiggly bits do just that as she rides past me. My sister, taking up the rear, is glowering even more intensely than when I took her order.

I do not know where they are going, or if there is anywhere to go. And this makes me very sad. A tumultuous shower starts. I look up and see numbers in the darkened sky, digits lining up beside one another, black and strong like the lettering on Luigi’s van, and I am certain these are the hallowed ciphers of the code. ‘Yes!’ I exclaim and recall how the science master in my former school used to always tell us that nature provides the answers to our deepest questions.

We will straighten the tower and everyone will love us again! The Murphys of Mulhoe will be back in the saddle: there will be speed boats crashing pointlessly through the waves, and horses, dozens of them, lining the shores.

The sky clears and the wet roof of the house shines in the sun like a reptile’s skin. I saunter drenched and elated up to the house, then sneak past the van and in the door to my father’s study. I am about to quickly jot down the code, when I feel eyes burning into my shoulder. I turn to face the intruder. He rubs a hand up his bulbous forehead.

‘Why you need to rob them chips, boy?’ he asks. ‘Why you not eat something else? Why you not just eat your horses?’

I shrug. Then I whimper because the number has left my mind, and I wish there was a switch somewhere that would stop time right there, so that I could use the non-time to crack the code again… but it is perhaps too late for that kind of redemption.

‘Luigi,’ I say.

He seems surprised that I address him by his first name. Furrows form on his forehead as I confide to him my own personal plan B. He thinks for a moment and then says, ‘Sounds okay to me.’

Despite what my folks tell me I am happier now.  

Five evenings a week, I take up a pew in the back kitchen of Luigi’s and peel potatoes until closing time, which I lob across to Luigi’s mama who shoves them into the cutter.  Luigi’s wife then drops these cuttings into the fryer.

‘Sure you must be bored out of your wits!’ my mother opines, but time is less harsh here than it is back home waiting in my bedroom for the code to be cracked.

When work is finished I mount my horse and gallop home along the central margin of the dual carriageway, laden down with chips and burgers for my ravenous family. My homeward charge startles the night-time lorry drivers. Their headlights blind me like exploding moons, and they blare their horns in admiration.