# Read the first page of Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín Read the opening of Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín free, no signup. Nine stories of Irish mothers and their sons. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/mothers-and-sons-colm-toibin - Genre: Short stories - Year: 2006 - ISBN: 9781416534662 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781551995748&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781416534662 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781416534662 ## The opening The city was a great emptiness. He looked out from the balcony of one of the top flats on Charlemont Street. The wide waste ground below him was empty. He closed his eyes and thought about the other flats on this floor, most of them empty now in the afternoon, just as the little bare bathrooms were empty and the open stairwells were empty. He imagined the houses on the long stretches of suburb going out from the city: Fairview, Clontarf, Malahide, to the north; Ranelagh, Rathmines, Rathgar, to the south. He thought about the confidence of those roads, their strength and their solidity, and then he allowed his mind to wander into the rooms of suburban houses, bedrooms empty all day, the downstairs rooms empty all night, the long back gardens, neat, trimmed, empty too for all of the winter and most of the summer. The sad attics empty as well. Defenceless. No one would notice an intruder scaling a wall, flitting across a garden to scale the next wall, a nondescript man checking the back of the house for a sign of life, for alarm systems or a guard dog, and then silently prising a window open, sliding in, carefully crossing a room, watching for an easy exit. He would open a door without making a sound, so alert as to be almost invisible. He thought of the emptiness of Clanbrassil Street as his mother made her way to the Dock. It was as though the very air around her, the pavement too and the bricks on the buildings, were aware of the danger she posed and got out of her way. Her blonde hair untidy, her house slippers dragging as she slouched towards the public house. A fake gold ring, and fake bangles, and loud gold earrings hitting against the redness of her lipstick, the green of her mascara, the blue of her eyes. His mother turned now to see whether a car was coming so she could cross the road and found, he imagined, the road completely empty, no traffic at all, the world made empty for her deepest pleasure. His mother, as she neared the public house, knew that the neighbours were afraid of her sudden kindnesses as much as her tantrums and her drunken rages. Thus a smile from her could be as unwelcome as a scowl. Mainly, she managed a look of indifference. In the street as much as the pub, she did not need to threaten, it was known who her son was, and it was believed that his loyalty to her was fierce. He did not know how she had managed to make everyone believe that he would extract revenge for the slightest insult to her. Her threats too were empty, he thought, emptier than anything. He stood at the balcony and did not move when his visitor, who had approached the building by the hidden side door of the complex, appeared. He allowed, as he did each week, Detective Inspector Frank Cassidy to pass him and enter the small flat, which was owned by his sister-in-law, and used by him only once a week. Cassidy was in his day clothes, his ruddy face displaying a mixture of furtive guilt and businesslike self-confidence. He paid Cassidy every week, a sum either too much or too little, the amount wrong enough to make him feel that Cassidy was fooling him rather than betraying his own side. In return for the money, Cassidy gave him information he mostly knew already. Nonetheless, he always felt that if the forces of law and order were coming close to him Cassidy would somehow make this clear. Cassidy would let him know, he believed, either as a favour, or as a way of making him panic. Or perhaps both. He himself told Cassidy nothing, but he could never be sure that some day his reaction to a piece of information might not be as much as Cassidy would need. ‘They’re watching the Wicklow mountains,’ Cassidy said by way of greeting. ## Books with a similar feel - [So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan](https://uncovered.ink/read/so-late-in-the-day-claire-keegan.md) - [Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro](https://uncovered.ink/read/nocturnes-kazuo-ishiguro.md) - [Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr](https://uncovered.ink/read/memory-wall-anthony-doerr.md) - [The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits by Emma Donoghue](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-woman-who-gave-birth-to-rabbits-emma-donoghue.md) - [Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway](https://uncovered.ink/read/men-without-women-ernest-hemingway.md) - [Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales by Robert Louis Stevenson](https://uncovered.ink/read/strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-and-other-tales-robert-louis-stevenson.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). 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