The Journey Home

‘Fuck your da’s boss. He’s chicken shit. Who’s his famous brother?’

His face had stared at me from lamp-posts at every election time, his eyes gazing from cards dropped into the hallway with fake handwriting underneath. I tried to match the features in front of me now with the image of Patrick Plunkett I had last seen, repeating rhetorical phrases on a current affairs show as he refused to answer the interviewer’s questions.

‘Your future, smiling local TD,’ Shay said. ‘A genuine chip off the old bollox. Justin. So christened because of his one-inch penis. I see he’s dispatching the last of his troupe. Would make a great newspaper headline for any editor wanting to go out of business fast.’

The two women in the corner were about to leave.

‘Surely the cops know,’ I said.

‘What fucking country do you live in Hano? You know any guard wants to get transferred to Inisbofin? It may be an embarrassment to the government to have it open; it would be an even greater embarrassment for the fuckers to have to close it down. Youth must have its fling. The party knows he’ll drop it when the old bastard expires and he’s called upon to inherit the seat. He’s being groomed already, two or three funerals a week.’

For the first time I detected bitterness in Shay’s voice. But to be angry would be to admit he was a part of their world. Shay shrugged his shoulders and suggested we go upstairs. When I closed my eyes I felt like a boat being rocked from side to side. At the doorway Justin Plunkett pushed a glass into my hand. I heard Shay slagging him about the suit, his good humour returned. Shay’s hand was on my shoulder, steering me upstairs, past the country men in their bar, up two more flights and into a tiny room in darkness except for a blazing fire and a single blue spotlight. It shone down on a long-haired figure on a pallet strumming a guitar. A man crouched beside him, keeping up a rhythm on a hand drum. I found a seat among the stoned crowd and tried to follow the singer’s drug-ridden fantasies. Each song lasted quarter of an hour, filled with tortoises making love and nuns in rubber boots.

I felt sick and yet had never felt better as I gazed from the window at the tumbledown lane outside. The sleeping children had gone. A man with a cardboard box and a blanket jealously guarded their spot. Far below, Dublin was moving towards the violent crescendo of its Friday night, taking to the twentieth century like an aborigine to whiskey. Studded punks pissed openly on corners. Glue sniffers stumbled into each other, coats over their arms as they tried to pick pockets. Addicts stalked rich-looking tourists. Stolen cars zigzagged through the distant grey estates where pensioners prayed anxiously behind bolted doors, listening for the smash of glass. In the new disco bars children were queuing, girls of fourteen shoving their way up for last drinks at the bar.

And here I was lost in the city, cut off in some time warp, high and warm above the crumbling streets. I think I slept and when I woke the owner was shouting time from the foot of the stairs. The singer had stopped and accepted a joint from the nearest table. The lad beside me who had been eyeing the guitar stumbled up to grab it, closed his eyes and began to sing:

Like a full force gale

I was lifted up again,

I was lifted up again,

By the Lord…

He wore a broad black hat with a long coat and sang with his eyes closed, living out the dream of Jessie James, the outlaw riding into the Mexican pueblo, the bandit forever condemned to run. He opened his eyes again when he had sung the last refrain, handed the guitar back apologetically and moved down the stairs towards his dingy Rathmines bedsit. I thought of home suddenly, the cremated dinner, my parents waiting for the dot on the television, exchanging glances but never asking each other where I was. I felt guilty once more and yet they suddenly seemed so distant, like an old photograph I’d been carrying around for too long.

‘You alive at all Hano?’ Shay’s voice asked. ‘You don’t look a well man. A tad under the weather I’d say. Listen, there’s a mattress back in my flat if you want to crash there. And I’m after scoring some lovely Leb.’

‘What about your wheels?’

‘Leave them. Not even Dublin car thieves are that poor.’

Home, like an old ocean liner, broke loose from its moorings and sailed in my mind across the hacked-down garden, further and further through the streets with my parents revolving in their armchairs. I could see it in my mind retreating into the distance and I stood to wave unsteadily after it, grinning as I took each euphoric step down after Shay towards the take-away drink hustled in the bar below and the adventures of crossing the city through its reeling night-time streets.

Hope. A four-letter word. Hope. Mornings are the worst Katie. You wake when your cousin rises, tumbling into the warm hollow she has vacated on her side of the bed. Two years older than you, she dresses quietly for her work in the fast-food restaurant in town. She arrives home each Thursday with sore arms, tired feet from dodging the assistant manager and ten pounds more than on the dole. When she is gone you lie on, luxuriating in those private moments alone in that room. Then you hear his footsteps start through the wall beside your head. Rising at the same time he did when he walked down for the early shift. You hear the smudging sound of the brush over his boots before they descend the stairs. The routine, that is what is vital for him, the pretence that there is still something to be done. The front door closes and you know he will walk to the mobile shop with the same dilemma, ten cigarettes or a newspaper. You rise quickly before he returns, the situations vacant column always the winner. You will try to have finished your breakfast when the footsteps restart in the hall and hurry to the door before he spreads the page of close type over the Formica to stoop like a man holding a mirror to the lips of a corpse.

Hope, Katie. That is what he pretends to have. You cannot bear to watch the bowed head, the finger moving steadily to the bottom of each column. You reach the school long before the lessons start. Remember, you ran here so eagerly once. Now it is no more than a sanctuary from the despair of that house. There is a wall to smoke behind. A girl says, ‘Are you game? The Bounce?’ And you slip quickly back out that gate, skirting the road he will take at half-past nine to the Manpower office, not going in if the same girl is on the desk as the day before, afraid he will lose face by appearing too eager. You run down by the side of the Spanish Nun’s, past the green and gold of the Gaelic Club, by the mud-splattered row of caravans, till you find the gap in the hedge and are running fast across the overgrown car-park to reach the vast cavern of the abandoned factory.

Here is education, here you belong. A dozen girls are gathered in the dripping shell where their sisters once bent over rows of machines. Here at last there is no pretence, no talk of imaginary futures. Sometimes they sit in near silence or play ragged impromptu games; sometimes boys come. Somebody lights a cigarette, somebody has pills. A small bottle passes down a corridor of hands till it reaches you. You hold the capsule in your hand, a speckled egg to break apart. You pause, then swallow. Hope. Four-letter words punctuate the jokes you laugh at. A girl leans on your back in tears as laughter almost chokes her. There are colours to watch. The concrete refuses to stay still. There is warmth. A circle of faces to belong to. The sound of a chain being pulled from a gate, the engine stops in the van. The girls by your side pull you on as the unformed security guard unleashes the dog. You race exhilarated across the grass, the sky twisting and buckling. You can hear barking behind you and the girls begin to scream. The wall rushes at you, automatically you jump. The sharp surface grazes your knees before hands pull you clear and down on to the path beside the carriageway. The footsteps are racing now; you join them—a flock of pigeons circling back towards the estate.

Hano and Katie had followed the weak scraggle of street lights which petered out beyond the green with its pub next to the closed-down swings beside a battered caravan in the tiny amusement park. To their left a new estate of white council houses slept with an unfinished look, out of place among the fields. On their right through the blackness they could breathe in the sharp tang of sea air blowing across the expanse of sucking mud exposed by the low tide. The road wound upwards through moonlit golf courses and the flaking paint of holiday chalets, until it levelled out into a car park on the very brink of the cliff. Hano stood with his arm around Katie when they reached the edge, mesmerized by the scene below. The whole of Dublin was glowing like a living thing sprawled out before his eyes, like the splintered bones of a corpse lit up in an X-ray. Hours before he had still been a part of it, one cell in a vibrant organism. Now up on this headland where Katie had led him he was cut off and isolated from the lives below. She stood almost indulgently beside him while he gazed, then took his hand again to pull him on through the dark. He panicked for a moment when her form vanished before him, thinking she was intent on some suicide pact, before realizing that she had begun to climb carefully down the black and seemingly impossible rock face towards the foam flashing below them. She gripped his hand, never speaking or looking back, but instinctively choosing the correct path along the slope. Once she slipped and as his arm was jerked forward he heard the noise of pebbles tumbling down to vanish into the sea below, but she didn’t cry out though her leg must have been grazed. She was up a second later, nimbly finding footholds in the rock face again. The sea wind blew into their faces, stinging his exhausted eyes, but keeping his limbs awake. He focused his mind solely on reaching the strand alive, no longer wishing to think of the events which had led him here, or the promise of what might happen when he reached solid earth again. His life, as he had lived it, was finished, but there would be time for decisions later; now it was enough to be led. Her warm hand brought him through the teeth of the night, where swaying lights winked across the water, neither judging nor demanding, but human and alive, a tiny embryo of hope.

She stopped and his momentum sent him careering against her back. They had reached the bottom. Without speaking, they walked across the sand which parted beneath their feet, slowing them so they seemed to move in a dream. A dark outline against the V of the cliffs took the shape of a concrete bunker as they approached. On both sides steel shutters glinted in the dark from the closed toilets. There was a narrow exposed entrance at the side of the shelter and a large open space at the front overlooking the sea. Most of the bench against the wall inside had been hacked away, but occasionally a strip of wood still ran between the concrete supports. When Hano struck a match he saw the walls covered in graffiti before the wind choked the flame. Sand and litter had been blown in across the floor and from one corner the smell of urine lingered. Yet when he squatted below the open window at the front there was shelter from the breeze. Katie was standing beside him, leaning on the concrete sill to gaze out at the waves.

‘How do you know this place?’ he asked.

‘What does it matter?’ She replied and huddled down beside him in silence. But after a moment he heard her voice.

‘Seems like a lifetime,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know, so fucking long ago. Often lads would steal a car at night, arse around the streets in it, looking for a chase. But sometimes, you know, they’d just drive out into the country. You’d be with them in the back, killing time, seeing what the stroke was. I loved it and hated it…brought back things I didn’t want. We were so spaced you wouldn’t think I’d remember any of it. But I know every laneway here like the veins on my wrist. They’re the only shagging things that do seem real.’

Katie laughed and leaned against him.

‘Last day I went to that kip of a school some teacher starts looking over my shoulder. We’d taken tablets the night before and things seemed to be shooting across the room. My eyes kept jerking round to follow them and I couldn’t hear a word the old biddy was saying. She screamed at me and when I looked up she was like some bleeding ghost you know, all the features indistinct, out of focus, like. But they were all that way by then…figures from another world, days rolling together in a blur, nothing real about it.

‘But I remember every second driving out here—it was vivid, Hano, you known what I mean. One time we almost drove as far as Leitrim. I was shouting directions from the back, like a lost animal finding its way home. I got frightened when we got close, screaming for them to turn the car round. They thought I was fucking cracked. “Faster,” I kept shouting as we sped back. “Faster! Faster!” Just like that little girl running through the night again, only this time I was racing away from her.’

She was silent and, just when he thought she wasn’t going to continue, her voice came out of the darkness again.

‘No matter where we went we always wound up here on the coast. I don’t know why. Walking down the pier in Rush in the dark or outside the closed-down amusements in Skerries. The cove at Loughshinny or out along the arches of the railway bridge. Out here was my favourite, around Portrane and Donabate. Watching dawn break, you know, all sea-birds and grey light over the water.’

Her voice softened as though the litany of names were soothing her. The edge of hysteria was gone that had always been present in the flat, except for the nights when she just sat sullenly for hours wrapped up in her duffle coat.

‘What happened when you reached the coast?’ he asked, taking his jacket off and spreading it over both their shoulders. They leaned close together as she searched in her jeans for cigarettes, lit two and handed him one. He watched the red tip burning upwards towards her lips as she inhaled.

‘Fuck all,’ she said. ‘That’s the funny bit. All the screaming and slagging stopped when we hit the shoreline, like we were at the end of a journey. When the wheels touched the sand there’d be silence, all of us just staring out at the sea. It belonged to nobody, no little bollox in a peaked cap could come along at midnight and turn it off. We’d get out then and throw sand, skim stones, that sort of shite. Git and Eileen could swim so we’d smoke a few numbers waiting for them. And you know, blokes who were half-animal in Dublin would talk to you about things they’d normally be ashamed of, mots they had fancied or nightmares or the future stretching away before them. They were too thick to know how bleeding short it was.’

Like a cancer gnawing inside, the stab of jealousy shocked him and he hated the words even as he spoke.

‘Have you spent a night with someone here before?’

‘What if I did?’

‘Who was he?’

Her shoulders hunched defensively and she became that huddled figure in the flat again. Her voice was hard, almost contemptuous.

‘For fuck sake Hano, what does it matter to you? You’re not a child any more. Aren’t we screwed up enough without raising old ghosts? The past is as dead as Shay, you can’t own it or change it. So don’t explain yourself to me, Hano. I don’t want to know what the fuck you were at in that room back there. And don’t ask me questions, right. You’re still alive, I’m still alive. That’s all that bleeding matters for now.’

She was right, but after what she had seen he still needed to prove himself. But the gesture of placing his arm around her shoulder which would have been so natural a moment before now felt awkward and contrived and her shoulders stiffened beneath his touch. He moved his lips down and while he encountered no resistance, there was no life in her mouth. He knew he should stop, yet like an overwound spring, in his exhaustion and self-disgust, seemed unable to prevent himself—though he knew she would twist away, hurt and withdrawn, with her back turned to him. He laid his head against the wall, his eyes closed, and sighed. The only sound in the hut was of the waves carried in on the damp air. Then, to his surprise, he felt fingers in the dark searching for his hand again.

‘What are you trying to prove Hano?’ she whispered. ‘That you’re better than them, or the same or different? You don’t need to. Listen, this place is full of ghosts for me. Git and Mono, they’re both doing time now. A vicious attack—no reason for it, no excuse. They shared a needle with some junkie inside. They’re locked in the Aids unit, wasting away, waiting to die. Beano’s up in St Brendan’s after burning every brain cell out. Six months ago the world looked up to them in terror. Now the kids on their street wouldn’t want to recognize them. Burned out so fast, Hano, like violent, brutal stars, you know what I mean. Never heard them laugh those last days, just sitting there, no brains, no words, slumped on the canal. “Hey Beano,” I said last time I saw him, “remember the night we crashed the car up in Howth?” He looked through me like that drunk back along the road. They’re gone now Hano, like dada walking across fields to work, Tomas with no light in his cabin. This place was theirs Hano, let them rest here. We’ll find our own maybe, somewhere.’

Then she leaned back until her head lay snugly against his chest and, rolling on to her side, drew her legs up against his and was still. Hano could feel the frustration draining from his body and knew that he was tumbling downwards into a warm drowsiness where sleep would come, as unstoppable as the waves below, crushing on to the wet strand, fainter, and fainter, and faint…

CHAPTER TWO Monday

Hano dreamt of whiteness. Winter time. He was walking from a grey estate of houses down an embankment towards a new road. It had been snowing in the night. Now a single set of footprints curved downwards towards the noise of water. A new steel bridge bypassed the old hunch-backed stone one which was cut off by a row of tar barrels. A circle of Gypsy caravans squatted on the waste ground around it.

Hano knew the place now, the Silver Spoon, the bathing place Shay had often spoken of. The summer evenings when mothers from the West had sat on the grass, watching children in short trousers splashing in the water, their hands holding slices of bread and jam. The footsteps were Shay’s, yet there was no sign of movement in the camp site they led to. Scrap iron, parts of cars, a washing machine with one side dented lay on the river bed. To move was like walking through a wall of ice, cutting into his flesh, amputating the movement from his hands. The Gypsies had left clothes out to dry along the tattered bushes near the bridge which had grown solid with frost, rigid to the touch. How long had he been walking like this, searching for Shay? He passed the clothes and then looked back. A pair of old jeans were stretched between branches. Just above them was a ripped check shirt and then, three inches further up, Shay’s face grinned at him, also made of cloth, completely flat and stiffened. There were no hands, no feet and just a necklace of leaves where his neck should have been. Shay seemed to be trying to speak but his features were too frozen to allow him. Hano reached out slowly to touch the face and as his fingers encountered the icy brittleness of the cloth he shuddered and woke.

Hano tried to focus his eyes in the harsh sunlight reflecting off the bare stone of the bunker and, failing, closed them again, leaning his head back and banging it on the wall. The pain shocked him to his senses and he realized that he was freezing and alone. The memory of the dream disturbed him though the details were already obscure. All that remained was the sensation of eternally searching for Shay. Then the memories of the previous night returned and with them came paralysis. He grew rigid with fear, unable even to turn his head towards the doorway. Somehow he had expected that morning would bring normality, a return of his old world. Katie had placed his jacket neatly over him before departing. He told himself he was relieved that she was gone. There would be no responsibilities left in the hours before they caught him. He could wait here shivering in this filthy bunker or walk outside. It made little difference to the outcome. Yet he huddled to whatever small warmth the jacket and his cramped position gave him. What if they already knew he was there? The squad car parked on the beach; two guards calmly smoking on the bonnet as they waited for him to appear? What if Katie hadn’t abandoned him, but was crammed into the back seat, a burly hand over her mouth? What if the guards weren’t there? He grinned to himself. What if he had to go on, alone and hungry? There was no fight left in him. He stood cautiously up and turned around. The strand was deserted. An autumn sun was trying to thaw out above the cold waves where, in the distance, a local fishing boat bobbed like a toy Russian trawler. He put his jacket on and walked stiffly out, slapping his legs to restore the circulation.

Then he caught a glimpse of Katie bent between the boulders and limpet-covered rocks where sunlight glinted among the green rock pools. He almost shouted in relief but turned instead and waited by the water’s edge till he heard her approach. Relief had given way to defensiveness, like an embarrassed stranger trying to claw some dignity back the morning after a party. He remembered those few mornings when he woke with some girl from work, both toying with life, automatically talking when there was nothing really to say. Now when everything was urgent neither Katie nor he could speak. He realized that he had never really spoken to her until last night, that they had shared the same room dozens of times, muttered the same few words to each other without ever knowing who the other was. He knew she could sense the tension within him.

‘I thought you’d gone,’ he said at last.

She didn’t reply.

‘You don’t have to stay you know. There’s no reason.’

‘I’ll go if you want,’ she said. ‘Piss off and leave you here.’

‘You should have last night. It’s him you always wanted. Why come with me?’

‘Maybe I didn’t come with you,’ she said. ‘Maybe I just came along, you know what I mean.’

Driftwood was strewn on the beach. She moved away to hurl a piece of rotten timber back into the foam. He had always thought of her as retarded for some reason. He remembered the distaste he felt once when drinking by mistake from her cup. She was indistinct to him from dozens of girls he’d seen lining street corners around his home, jeering at passers-by, listlessly watching each day pass, smelling of boredom and adolescence gone stale. It had always puzzled him when Shay called her the country girl.

‘Maybe I just hadn’t anywhere to go back to,’ she muttered after a moment. ‘Maybe I couldn’t take another morning of it, another night. What the fuck do you know of my life anyway? Your friend killed it for me back there, made me so I could never fit in again. Would have been better if he’d knifed me.’

Hano watched a woman in a grey overcoat with a dog approach from the far side of the beach. She was the first person he had seen since the previous night. He shivered, realizing that every stranger was a threat, to be watched and avoided if possible. It was too late to move back to the bunker. Katie had hunched down watching the wood drift back towards her. The waves crashed in, splashing his feet with spray.

‘You scared Hano?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Yeah.’

‘Then I’ll go with you. Because I’m scared shitless too.’

‘Don’t know where I’m going Katie. I’ve nowhere to go.’

She was silent. He imagined Mooney’s desk, the red line being drawn, the unreality of it all.

‘Hano?’

He looked up. Her face was drawn, the hair ragged, eyes tired. She mumbled something and, when he looked blankly back, repeated it again in a whisper.