The Journey Home
‘Go and fuck yourself!’ Mick said and, after thinking about it, added to the retreating back, ‘And fuck your politician daddy too’, before stumbling back inside. Then, as always, it was back to the cards, money still passing across that table when dawn greyed the window. Finally Shay would kick them out, curl up on his bed, and I’d lie again beside the fire, knowing that in a few hours I would screw up my eyes in the light and walk with him to work, the smell of drink on our breaths, our stomachs empty, our heads sore, our feet stinking and no love for Jesus in our hearts. And that evening I would turn the corner with a shiver of dread, returning to worried looks —my father’s sunken smile, my mother’s silence, her eyes close to tears—and I’d hate myself for the stab of triumph, as though I could only measure my independence by their growing bewilderment and pain.
The tenant in the room next to Shay’s drifted in and out of institutions. Once he had returned home to his native Galway and after two weeks in an asylum there one morning, instead of medication, they gave him thirty pounds and a one-way air ticket to Manchester. Now meals on wheels came once a day to feed him, harassed social workers calling most evenings. At night we could hear him pacing his flat, perpetually walking in circles. At two o’clock each morning he’d take his dishes out to the front lawn in a basin and wash them kneeling on the grass. He had a key attached with string to some part of his body but rarely managed to find it beneath all his clothes which he wore at once. Most nights when we’d reach the house he’d be standing on the steps, his hands scrambling through his three coats, kicking at the door in desperation.
‘Shay!’ he’d beseech in his Galway accent. ‘Let me in Shay. I’m praying for you Shay, you and your young friend.’
He’d corner us on the step for quarter of an hour, droning on excitedly about how many Masses he’d attended that day and how many miles he had travelled on his free bus pass. Shay claimed that one day there would be plaster-cast statues of him in the glass panels over every Catholic doorway in Dublin, that we should keep the tin-foil containers they left his meals in to sell as future relics. Yet Shay was the only person in that house to rise, at no matter what hour of the morning and with how many curses, to let the shambling figure in. I’d lie on the floor listening to Shay calming him down enough to get him into his room. The other tenants were noises I could rarely put faces to. Their lives were shadows on the landing, the noise of footsteps in the hallway, a locked toilet door, the clink of six packs, a raised television, whispered evacuations on the night before rent day.
In the backyard the landlord had stacked old rotten timbers of doors and window frames from the four other properties he owned along the street. In times of shortages Shay hacked away at them steadily with his axe. I’d hold a torch, shivering in the night air, and listen to the rhythmical chopping while the lights of a hundred bedsits flickered out across the black, abandoned gardens. That’s what I remember most about his small flat, the glowing embers like a bird’s nest as I drifted to sleep, and waking, stiff-limbed and hung-over, to the scent of wooden ash.
One night stands out from those first months when everything was so shockingly new. High up in a warren of bedsits, while far below Rathmines was awash with litter and tacky lights. At two in the morning there were still queues in the fast-food shops, music from pirate stations blaring through speakers where girls knifed open pitta bread, flickering shifts of colour carried through windows on to the street from the video screens above the counters. Traffic jammed the narrow roads where the last old ladies lived in crumbling family homes, taxis outside the flats unloading party goers who shrieked and embraced and then quarrelled about splitting the fare. A tramp was slumped on his bench where he slept each night beside the swimming baths, oblivious to the noise around him.
Earlier in the pub beside the canal I had found myself talking all evening to a girl. It had happened spontaneously, we were both drunk and at ease together, laughing in the ruck of bodies against the bar, teasing each other with the anticipation of what might come. Across from us Mick and Shay were joking with some girls from work. He caught my eye and winked in congratulation.
I cannot remember whose party it was, it was merely a succession of stairs till we reached an attic. Thirty bodies danced in the crowded room where the only light came from candles stuck in bottles. Whoever rented the flat only owned three records which were played over and over. The girl had come with us, she was half-slumped against me as we waltzed until I was almost carrying her. Yet still I raised the bottle we were sharing to her lips, watched the gin dribble down like tears on to her dress. What did she want from me? Would I know what to say to her when I was sober?
But it wasn’t really her I was thinking of as we danced. Above all else I wanted Shay to see, I wanted to prove myself. Steps led up to a tiny bedroom with a low, sloping roof. I kicked the door open where a young boy lay unconscious from drink on the bed. I called back to Shay and Mick who took him between them, carrying him down those long flights of stairs to the back garden where they walked him in circles, his bare feet trailing through puddles, till he woke without a clue where he was. The girl had swayed against me so I had to catch her as we watched them carry him past. I led her in and as I turned to lock the door she collapsed without a sound on to the carpeted floor. Light came from a low window divided by a wooden lattice which threw a shadow across the floor in the shape of a crucifix. In a flat across the street I heard a child crying and imagined a young unmarried mother pacing up and down her few feet of space trying to pacify it before the other tenants complained.
I had to crawl on my knees to find the girl, help her up, manoeuvre her on to the bed. I doubt if either of us got any pleasure. I struggled to stay erect, fumbling in the dark for condoms, trying to undo buttons as people banged on the door; she slept through it, waking occasionally to mumble another man’s name. All I kept thinking of was Shay outside, walking with the drunken figure, knowing that for once it was me up here. I came half-heartedly and lay spent in the dark, holding her clumsily in my arms and listening to the commotion on the stairs. I realized I’d forgotten her name, where she worked. I had sobered up but I was scared now, not knowing how to approach her when she woke. I wanted to ask Shay but knew that would make me feel small again in my mind.
When she began to stir I helped her up, got her dressed, hurried her down to the street outside. She wanted to be held a little longer, wanted some words to make sense of what had happened. I wanted to talk to her, ask her to meet me properly again some evening. We walked to the main road, sat on the pavement saying nothing until a taxi approached and I hailed it, helped her into the back and gave the driver a bundle of pound notes and her address.
The police were leaving when I returned, a siren’s blue light rinsing the pavement as heads watched from windows along the street. Shay had thought the party had everything except a police raid so he’d phoned them. The host was in the hall, screaming at Mick and him to get out. Behind them an old black bicycle was unlocked. Shay mounted it and wobbled down the steps on to the footpath. He shouted at me to jump on to the crossbar. The bike swerved as it took my weight, then nearly unbalanced when Mick climbed on to the carrier at the back. The owner ran behind us screaming, as we weaved along the grass verge till we collided with a tree trunk, got up, left the bike there and walked home. Like a puppy with a stick, I waited for some acknowledgement, but neither of them mentioned the girl and I realized that nothing I could have done in that attic would have made Shay think less or more of me. They would have been as cheerfully indifferent if the girl was walking now along the shadowy roads back to find space beside me on the floor of Shay’s flat. I thought of the silent taxi driver speeding towards the outer suburbs, of what might have been if I hadn’t been afraid it would come between myself and Shay.
What time is it Katie? It stops when you pass into the twilit hangar of the old factory. Intimate afternoons of pills and laughter. Choices are discussed. One girl talks of pregnancy, the independence of a flat and an allowance. Another speaks of England, a bedsit shared with an older sister. Someone repeats stories of council bed-and-breakfasts in Bayswater: Asian children crammed into one room; breakfast a fried egg and a slice of bread in a plastic bag. None speak of the land outside, concrete melting into greenery that stretches away decked in alien foliage. Now all that is real for you begins here. The cold sitting-room light is forgotten; your uncle’s fist clenched around the nun’s neat handwriting; a television with the sound turned off; the steel rivets of accusations, his shame at your expulsion. What is his name, can you even remember? Good. What is your own? Even better. One girl disappears with a youth into the gloom where cobwebs hang from girders and torturous water drips at the far end of the cavern. ‘Are they?’ you ask. ‘No,’ somebody laughs. ‘She has a vampire’s teabag in.’
Outside light is glaring. You lurch across the carriageway, past the old cobbler’s bypassed by the builders, by the gothic bare-stoned mansion ensnared by Corporation terraces, up the hill of the main street, shivering in the afternoon light. The schoolgirls have been released in trails of bright colours. From outside the clothes shop you watch them come. Who was the girl who laughed among them a few months ago? Another stranger inhabiting your body in limbo. The security guard’s uniformed back turns as you slip past into the shop. A voice of metal crackles inside his walkie-talkie as the skirt fits neatly underneath your own. Like arrayed ghosts the clothes hang on racks. An assistant laughs as he chases after her down through the tunnel of clothes and you are gone through the unguarded shop door. Back to twilight, back to warmth, a dozen items laid out on a floor. The young fence lifts them up, hands one back as worthless. He leaves in their place a variegated row of pills, a thin, dung-coloured slab in a tiny plastic bag, a trace of white powder. He retreats from you with patent leather footsteps.
When you speak now it is in a private slang, birthdays and older girls’ dole days your only reference points. Your landmarks bordered by a bus to town, a view of sky through corrugated iron, a black road leading inexorably home. One night you sit with two friends by the low carriageway wall where the woodland once stood. A child behind you with his father’s axe is chipping away at a young sapling surrounded by mesh. Two youths stop in a stolen Ford, they coax and the three of you climb in, voices singing from the back seat. The last remaining red light is broken. The car shoots on like a released prisoner, but to you, half-stoned, it could be in slow motion. By Mother Plunkett’s Cabin it flies, twisting down towards the ancient castle. Overgrown branches whip against both sides of the windscreen, the girls shrieking as the wheels cascade through the flooded hollow. Chained dogs grow frantic inside each farmyard as the car skids against the side gravel and veers sharply right. They slow near the snakes of landing lights laid out around the airport, the flickering reds, the rows of coloured bulbs rising up to meet the belly of the dropping plane. But you have grown quiet now, watching the moon keeping track through the hedgerows. The songs and voices do not penetrate. What nightmare journey are you remembering? What night when he cradled your head in his arms as you cried in the seat; what car that sped under a canopy of branches away from that house; what names of dead parents whom you called out for? If you spoke now how would your voice sound; if you yearned for home which direction would you turn? The car speeds through a tunnel of trees, the shuttered moonlight between the trunks distorting your features so you look like two different persons.
Hano let her walk ahead of him, silent now like he remembered her from the city. The cliff walk led to a small cove with the ruins of a burnt-out store. Somebody had torn the election posters pasted on the concrete blocks over the windows so that only strips of the candidates’ faces were left. Katie paused, then chose a clay path across the deserted golf course towards a hollow crammed with caravans and shabby wooden chalets. Summer was past, the grass grown tall again after the trampling of sandalled feet. They huddled in the porch of a chalet with their backs against the flaking white wall in the morning sunlight. With his finger, Hano traced the name ‘Sunnyside’ in forlorn black letters on the door.
Katie pressed his hand and slipped around the side. He gazed anxiously back at the flags on the greens as the tinkle of breaking glass came. There were footsteps on wood, rusty bolts dragged back and then he was inside, searching with her for food and warmth, anxiously drawn every few moments to peer through a broken window.
It was musty in the chalet, the spartan furniture riddled with the pinholes of woodworm. They found two blankets, wrapped themselves up and waited for darkness. Both knew how vital it was to get away but were paralysed by fear, reluctant to make a decision as though the night could somehow protect them. Outside a wind was blowing up. Far off” they heard a tractor and later the noise of music and slogans being broadcast from a speeding van. Towards noon a dog barked as a woman called its name. They rarely spoke until hunger drove them out in the afternoon to plunder the empty caravans. It made little difference what he did now but he still shivered at each smash of glass.
Back under the blankets they shared what little they had found: a crushed bar of chocolate, stale biscuits, a can of beans they opened and ate cold. Katie had discovered a small radio. He hesitated before turning it on, wanting to prolong the time when he could at least pretend he might return to his past. It ranked second in the news bulletin after the report of a low morning turn-out at the polls. The party spokesmen were trying to twist the turn-out to their advantage: the government claimed it proved the people had not wanted an election, while the opposition blamed the level of apathy on disillusionment with the current administration. Both predicted that their supporters would be out in the evening. The longer they waffled on the more Hano allowed himself to hope it had all been some bizarre nightmare.
Then the details of the fire were given, with rhetorical condolences by the same spokesmen. Since morning the government had been turning it into a late campaigning ploy, knowing the opposition wouldn’t dare interrupt the saga of one family’s grief after two tragedies in a single week. The Junior Minister spoke of being glad of the burden of office at the present time, that the responsibilites of state were shielding his mind from the awful grief in his heart. When the votes were counted and the country’s future secure he would return to his native countryside and mourn among his own. Hano could see Patrick Plunkett in the studio, lips pursed over the microphone, eyes dry as he calculated the chances of bringing home the third seat with his surplus that would ensure they couldn’t deny him a full cabinet position next time. The gardai were following a definite line of inquiry but Hano’s name was not mentioned on the air. He switched the set off.
‘Fuck them,’ Katie whispered beside him. ‘We’ll get away. Tomas will hide you till you decide what to do. He has to be alive. I can feel it. He has to be.’
It could only be a matter of time. When his name was broadcast her uncle would realize. The police would check her old home even though she had never gone back before. But where else did he know outside Dublin? A blurred succession of roadways he had hitched on; the farm his father had come from; the small wood belonging to the old woman. Katie lay calmly beside him like a different person from the one he had known.
‘Home?’ he said uncertainly.
‘That’s all Shay ever spoke of,’ she said. ‘Trying to get home from Europe at the end; I never thought of going home till he began talking about it.’
Shay had simply arrived back saying nothing to him and Hano had never dared to ask. Automatically he made a note to ask Shay now and winced, cursing his memory for letting him forget. He felt sickened after the voices on the radio.
‘Never spoke about it much to me,’ he said.
‘Coming home, trying to fit back, that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘If you asked him he’d clam up, stare into space. One night I said to him that when I was stoned I started thinking they’d sucked the air out of Dublin, you know what I mean, and people around me were opening and closing their mouths with nothing coming in, nothing going out.
‘It sounded bleeding thick when I said it but he just rolled another cigarette and stared out the window. Then he started talking about nights up in the loading bay of a canning factory in Denmark when he’d look down from the hoist at four in the morning on the workers below, nobody speaking, the limbs just moving automatically. He said he’d start thinking the conveyor belt and the loading machines were alive, that at half-seven they’d stop and the arms of the men would keep on moving back and forth till some cunt remembered to press a switch.’
Those months Shay spent in Europe puzzled Hano like an oppressive weight. He didn’t know why they were important, but if he could fathom what happened there he might understand why he was here now. He had the facts that Shay had finally told him on the last night, but they alone could not explain his unease. It hurt to have to ask Katie what he had said as if it somehow gave her possession of part of Shay. He leaned his head against the wall and listened to her.
‘Often, you know, I wasn’t really sure what the fuck he meant by things. Once he said you could never go home. It was some old Turk in a hostel filled his head with it.’
Hano listened to her describing Shay’s bed with three others in the dormitory, the steel locker, the piece of wall for the pin-ups and photographs, the Yugoslav woman who served them meals on metal plates without a smile. He remembered the easy boredom of the Register’s office, the cardboard boxes burning between the blocks as they leaned against the prison wall smoking.
‘Anyway, the Turk said you carried home around inside you. It was more real there than when you went home. It didn’t change and you weren’t changed seeing it.
‘It was some week when Shay was broke and spent each night sitting with him. Your man used to scorn the younger Turks for drinking and looking at whores at night. Time went too slow that way he claimed. He’d sleep instead and every hour slept was a victory. He said he was cheating time, making it work for him so he could go home sooner. I told Shay that Beano who did six months in the Joy once said that was what the old lags did as well.
‘But no matter what you did this old Turk said, when you went back to your village you were a stranger inside and always would be. You know, Shay’d repeat that like he was bitter, then just look out the window and wait for you to come home, Hano. I don’t know what the fuck he was remembering but it was like he’d forgot I was there. Jesus, he’d look so old then, sitting in the shadows, the cigarette burnt away to nothing at his elbow, just waiting for you. I’d curse you Hano, whatever you knew that kept him apart from me.’
Hano remembered the silence in the kitchen when he’d opened the door, Katie’s bitter eyes turning to stare at him. How many lifetimes ago did it seem? Once you left home you could never go back. They lapsed into silence, waiting for darkness, to blunder forth, knowing that nothing lay ahead of them.
At dusk a golfer took them to the main road. He chuckled at Katie’s dishevelled hair, taking them for teenage lovers returning to face the music after a night sleeping rough. A van brought them to Balbriggan half an hour before the booths closed. Cars sped down the main street with loudhailers, party workers desperate to get each last vote in.
Hano and Katie queued for chips in The Pop Inn, the crowd joking about the air of frenzy outside. It had been two days since he had eaten anything hot, and now the smell of the boiling grease made his stomach turn. An election agent poked his head in, scanning the faces for somebody. A policeman passed. Hano lowered his head, trying to keep the tremble from his legs. The few late voters were jostled by the canvassers as they made their way to the booths in the town hall. Nobody noticed them as they walked through the square except the punks who sat on the court-house steps with bottles of cider in plastic bags at their feet. They whistled after Katie. Hano grabbed her hand when she seemed about to shout back and steered her off the main street through the terraces of houses by the closed-down hosiery factory. Ornate plaques high on the wall commemorated medals won at trade fairs in Vienna and Paris before the turn of the century. The names of rock groups were sprayed on the brickwork below. A few boats were tied up at the small harbour, coloured lights reflected on the water from the disco bar on the pier. On the hill the lights of the new estates glowed over empty concrete streets. They passed again into darkness and began walking along the Drogheda road.
A farmer picked them up not far from Gormanstown. He was returning from voting in the city.
‘Could you have not voted closer to home?’ Hano asked.
‘I did, I did,’ he chuckled. ‘This afternoon. But the brother always gave his number one to Patrick Plunkett and sure there’s no reason Plunkett shouldn’t have it now just because me brother’s dead. Especially this day, the poor man. A fierce fire that was. Ah, but you can be sure the Brits were behind it. And you know why? The Plunketts were the men to stand up to them, like their grandfather did, that’s why.’
The booths had closed when they reached Drogheda, the town looking like a dancehall car-park after a holiday weekend. The pubs were jammed. The only faces left on the streets stared from election posters on lamp-posts and leaflets piled like autumn leaves along the ground. There was little traffic. Unloaded trailers of lorries were parked on the quayside beside the crumbling Victorian warehouses. They climbed on to the back of one, stretched on the bare boards and stared at the railway viaduct spanning the mouth of the Boyne. Katie’s head rested tiredly against his shoulder. He stroked her hair, closed his eyes and leaned back against the tail-board. The flashlight came from nowhere. Both knew it was a garda before he spoke.
‘Hey! What are you at up there? Come here to me!’
He was running around the side of the trailer before they had jumped to the ground. They heard him call as they dodged through the narrow cobbled streets by the storehouses. The lights of a car turned the corner and bumped down towards them. Hano froze, waiting for the siren to come. Katie pulled him on as the headlights sped past, catching the figure of the garda puffing and slowing down as he cursed their backs.
They didn’t stop till they reached the darkness of the Slane road. They rested in the gateway of a field watching the lights of occasional cars heading for the town. When lights came the other way they pressed back against the bushes, afraid to hitch now. To their left the Boyne ran sluggishly towards the sea, silvered occasionally by rocks. They walked on, listening anxiously for the noise of an engine behind them. Twice they pressed themselves flat against the ditch as cars passed, cursing their fear when they were plunged back into darkness in their wake.
They had travelled over a mile before Katie stopped and listened carefully.
‘It’s a lorry Hano. Fuck it, we’ll take a chance.’
The lights were higher off the road, the noise of the engine deeper. Katie placed one foot on the tarmacadam and thumbed it. It roared past and they had cursed the driver before it skidded to a halt twenty yards in front of them. The driver was in his early thirties. He grinned down at them as they climbed into the warmth of the cab. He was returning to Sligo, having driven since seven the previous evening from Belgium through France and then up from Rosslare. He didn’t ask questions, didn’t want conversation. He just drove, grey eyes ringed from lack of sleep, smoking cigarette after cigarette as he manoeuvred through the narrow streets of each small town—Slane, Kells, Virginia, Stradone, Ballyhaise, skirting the border beyond Belturbet, before moving down through Ballyconnell. He offered them cigarettes and large bars of continental chocolate, talked about the traffic police on the continent, the rigs of the other drivers waiting in the ferry port. Tomorrow his brother would take the truck to Galway to collect a load for Ostend. He would rest for two days till the truck returned. His wife would still be at home, the two children put to bed. Four years more was all he’d drive. The regulations were stricter now, spies in the cab regulating the hours you were supposed to drive, strikes among dockers, the same hassles always with the customs in England. Where was the profit for a haulier now? Missing the children growing up, feeling a stranger at times in your own home. But the bungalow he’d built from it, that was the best in the district. Last year he’d taken home a fireplace from a shop in Brussels. This time it was a chandelier, the only thing left in the back after unloading in Drogheda. Hano thought of it swaying absurdly from the ceiling of the container behind them, the young woman waiting at home with the firelight flickering and all the lights turned down. The driver wore a stained blue jumper with no shirt underneath.