It's always the same the Saturday before Christmas. Even if you didn't intend to go back to Ireland, there comes a moment when you say you might go up to Euston and take a train to Holyhead. It comes over everyone.
They never knew if Liam was coming home for Christmas. His mother always believed he would be back because he would write from September onwards and say that he'd be home from London for certain, but no one was to come and meet him, he'd just walk in and surprise them.
And surprise them he did over the years, Liam would tell you with a grim sort of laugh. Like the year he brought over a wife. That was a surprise.
Of course the marriage hadn't lasted long, she was far too young for him, anyway. The others had been white-faced about it all but Liam's mother had said wasn't it just as well that it wasn't a real marriage, meaning one in a Catholic church. His mother had a healthy disregard for anything else. Registry office jobs just didn't count.
And of course there was the year when Liam came home but didn't actually get home. He met a lot of people in Dublin and for three days they just kept going to this pub and he missed the train home on Christmas Eve. He had tried to hitch but it was wet and windy and maybe he might have looked a bit dishevelled and people could have been fearful of giving him a lift.
So he never got there.
But of course some busybody from the town, some Bad Samaritan, had managed to see him hitching and drunk and it was all reported back. The bad news. Liam was in Ireland but he hadn't made it home.
There was another surprise too, the year he was sober. His brothers hadn't got over that surprise yet. That was around the time Liam had met this terrific fellow called Jimmie, wouldn't you know, from Scotland, and Jimmie had said he was ashamed of his life that all the drunks in the streets of London with nowhere to go seemed to be Scotsmen.
To be civil and also because there was a lot of truth in it, Liam said that he thought a fair percentage of them were Irishmen. Anyway, Jimmie had said that's as maybe but you don't see Londoners or other Englishmen lying in their own gutters, or thrown out of pubs; they have little places to go to, so Jimmie started helping any Scots he found in bad shape, sometimes he got them into hostels, sometimes only a comfortable corner in Cardboard City, or a dry doorway. But he always asked them where they were from and if they said Galway or Mullingar he left them where they were - saying sorry, he was only looking for fellow Scots.
Liam thought that this was a bit hard so he did his own nationalist bit and dragged a good few compatriots out of the way of late night buses speeding home or worse dangers. And as Jimmie said to him, mystified, it wasn't the kind of thing you could do somehow if you were pissed yourself, so you had to stay sober for it. And Liam didn't touch a drink for eight months.
It was during that time he came home to Ireland for Christmas and stunned them all. Brought presents, remembered the names of his nephews and nieces, noticed his mother was looking frail, saw how rundown the old farm was. He didn't tell them much about the kind of rescue work he and Jimmie got up to.
His brothers were eejits. If he had told them about Jimmie and his bright burning eyes and the way he'd lift a young drunk teenager up in his arms and wipe his face for him, then Liam's brothers could easily say that Liam was turning into a poof. He didn't want to risk that, because nobody, just nobody was going to say a word against Jimmie.
And in the end he was glad he had never told them anything about him because Jimmie was stabbed to death the following March by an old madman with a knife who didn't know he was being helped. Liam had run over with his jacket to try to stop the blood, but Jimmie was dead in minutes. Maybe seconds. He preferred to think it might have just been seconds.
Liam shrugs now when he talks about it. Jimmie knew it was going to happen one day, you couldn't expect everyone to know what you were at.
That's what he always said, you can't expect folk to be bloody inspired that you're doing your best for them. We don't have a flashing halo saying we're the good guys, a lot of the things that happen in life are nobody's fault - just sheer bad luck.
Liam finds it cheering to think of it when things are bad. And things are bad quite a lot of the time. Liam's mother had died the same year as Jimmie. He had gone home for the funeral, annoyed that his brothers hadn't called him earlier, when his mother was still alive. He would like to have said goodbye.
But they said they didn't really like to rely on the fact that he might still be sober, and indeed as things turned out hadn't they been right? Why inflict a drunk on a dying woman, let her remember him in the short hour of his glory.
Well of course Liam was drinking again. His best mate had been killed in the street 50 yards away from him. He'd never had a decent job or a good woman in his life.
He couldn't keep doing this rescue thing on his own. And what's more he wouldn't do it. Not after what happened to Jimmie. He didn't want a knife in the gut from a fellow countryman who didn't understand that he was one of the good guys.
So the atmosphere around the time of the funeral hadn't been what you would call cordial. Nothing that would make you want to go back there again.
Now he and Jimmie use to say in the good old days that too many Scots and Irish held ludicrous grudges over the years and that they'd be all better by far if they went home every now and then, laid the ghosts, and indeed anything else that presented itself, according to Jimmie. This way, the past wouldn't become such a strange, frightening forest of wrong turnings and wishes that didn't come true.
Yes, very easy to say. And when Jimmie was around easier to do, but no human could expect Liam to go back to his home place and not buy people a drink, and then when he did one word would borrow another and there would be some smug remark which would sting and hurt and it would all end badly.
Better not to risk it, not to go at all.
Liam is 49. He looks 65. He has a room in West London in a big house where the police are often called because someone has been dead for three weeks and people report the smell. It's that kind of house, he says. A man collects the rent on the first of the month and if you don't pay, the door of your room is removed and everything you have thrown on the street.
Not much to show after 30 years in London but then to be fair he wouldn't have got on well at home either. And Jimmie used to say that there were some people who needed a broader canvas. Great expression that. But then Jimmie was full of them.
The canvas isn't as broad for Liam as it might be in a huge city of 12 million people. He clears tables in a pub around the corner from the house where he lives. It's very handy for him because he finds it hard to walk. Something wrong with his spine, he imagines. No, of course he hasn't seen about it, could anyone imagine the hours it would take waiting in some doctor's surgery and then in the outpatients of some hospital? It will right itself or it won't.
Meanwhile hanging around and clearing tables is a fine occupation, you'd be in this pub anyway so why not make a business out of it? That's a great thing they have in London, where people don't get served at tables. The punters leave their empty glasses with great rings of spilled beer around them on the table and a regular like Liam will go round, gather them up and wipe the tables. He gets four pints a night for this. And the pubs open on Christmas Day in London so he'll be busy there at lunch-time.
He hears some of the regulars talking. A lot of them are Irish and many are going home for the holidays. He won't go. Nothing to go back for.
Still, on the Saturday before Christmas you always get the urge. Go back. Surprise them. Be part of a big crowd coming home to Ireland. As Jimmie always used to say: Nothing is written in stone.