The Valparaiso Voyage

But I had needed to escape from Navan that night, just like I had to flee from Lisa’s house now. I descended the stairs, left the estate agent’s brochure in the hall, closed the gate and refused to glance towards the house, two doors down, into which my parents had once driven me home with such pride from the Maternity Hospital in Drogheda.

Athlumney graveyard on the Duleek Road out of Navan. Twice a year my father came here – on Christmas Eve and 12 November, my mother’s anniversary. He always arranged for 7 a.m. mass to be said for her on that day, calling me from sleep in the outhouse with an awkwardness that verged on being tender. He’d have rashers and sausages cooked for us to share in silence before anyone else was awake, watching the clock to ensure that we still managed to fast for an hour before communion. We drove, in our private club of two, to the freezing cathedral where the scattering of old women who knelt there glanced up at us. Afterwards in the doorway people might whisper to him, with supplications for Barney Clancy, our local minister in Government, to be passed on through his trusted lieutenant. An old woman sometimes touched my arm in a muted token of sympathy, as I shivered in the uneasy role of being a rightful son again. On our return from visiting the grave, my stepmother Phyllis would be up with the radio on and the spell dissipated for another year.

Standing now beside the ruined castle in this closed graveside I wondered what had possessed him to be buried with his first wife? Was it an act of atonement or another example of miserliness? My father, careful with his pence, even in death. In recent days the doctored version of his life had been freshly carved in gold letters on the polished black marble: Also, her loving husband, Eamonn, died in Dublin…

The wreaths from his funeral were not long withered, the earth still subsiding slightly so that the marble surround had yet to be put back in place. I hadn’t anticipated his body being laid here, where only the old Navan families retained rights, nor that I would feel a surge of anger at him for seizing the last possession that my mother owned.

I should remember something about her, a blur of skirts or just a memory of being hugged. It’s not that I haven’t tried to recall her, but I was either too young or have blocked them out. My first memory is here in Athlumney. Her coffin must have been carried three times around the outer boundaries, as was the tradition then, before being lowered into the earth. But all I recall is adult feet shuffling back from the graveside as someone let go my hand. I stand alone, a giddy sensation. A green awning covers the opened grave but through a gap I can see down – shiny wood and a brass plaque. When I scuff the earth with my shoe, pebbles shower down. I do this repeatedly until a neighbour touches my shoulder. I am three years and eight months of age.

It is night-time in the memory which occurs next. I wake up crying, with the street quiet outside and my room in darkness. Yellow light spills onto a wallpaper pattern of roses as my door opens. My father enters and bends over my bed, wrenched away perhaps from his own grief. He climbs in, rough stubble against my neck as his arms soothe me. How secure it feels as we lie together. I want to stay awake. A truck’s headlights start to slide across the ceiling, with cattle being ferried out along the Nobber Road. I love having this strong man beside me in the dark. I don’t remember waking to find if he was still there in the morning.

The polished floorboards in the outhouse come to mind next. I am playing with discarded sheets of transparent paper, crammed with lines and angular patterns which he allows me to colour in with crayons. Lying on my tummy to breathe in the scent of Player’s and Major cigarettes. His only visitors are men with yellow-stained fingers who laugh knowingly and wink at me as they talk. The extension bell on his phone frightens me, ringing so loudly down in the shed that it can be heard by half the street who are waiting the seven or eight years of wrangling, lobbying and political pull that it takes to have a phone line installed back then.

This was before my father was headhunted by Meath County Council as a planning official. He was simply a quantity surveyor, running his own business from a converted shed, which had been constructed in our garden by a previous owner as a hen-house. Here he received courtiers in a black leather swivel chair, men who tossed my hair, slipped me coins and excitedly discussed rumours of a seam of mineable zinc being located outside the town.

Some had business there, like Slab McGuirk and Mossy Egan – apprentice builders knocking up lean-to extensions and milking parlours for the bogmen of Athboy and Ballivor. Others, like old Joey Kerwin, with a hundred and forty acres under pasture near Tara, simply sauntered up the lane in search of an audience for their stories, like the mock announcement of a neighbour’s death to the handful of men present. ‘All his life JohnJo wanted an outdoor toilet, but sure wasn’t he too fecking lazy to dig it himself. He waited till the mining engineers sunk a borehole on his land, then built a bloody hut over it, with a big plank inside and a hole cut into it to fit the queer shape of his arse. The poor fecker would be alive still if he hadn’t got into the habit of holding his breath until he heard the fecking plop!’

I remember still the roars of male laughter that I didn’t understand. New York might have Wall Street but Navan had my father’s doorway, with men leaning against it to spit into their palms as they shook hands on deals. Occasionally raised voices were heard as Slab McGuirk and Mossy Egan squabbled about one undercutting the other. It took Barney Clancy to bang their heads together, creating an uneasy shotgun marriage where they submitted joint tenders for local jobs that the big Dublin firms normally had sewn up.

My first memories of Clancy are in that outhouse: the squeak of patent leather shoes that set him apart, the distinctive stench of cigar smoke, deeper and richer like his voice could be. The way the other men’s voices were lowered when he arrived and how his own accent could change after they left and himself and my father were alone. Often, after Clancy in turn departed, my father’s sudden good humour could be infectious. I would laugh along with him, wanting to feel in on his private joke, while he let me sit on his swivel chair. With my knees tucked in, the makeshift office spun around in a blur of wallcharts, site maps, year-planners and calendars from auctioneers; all the paraphernalia of that adult world of cigarettes and rolled banknotes, winks and knowing grins.

But I remember sudden intense anger from my father there too, how I grew to dread his raised voice. Just turned eight, how could I know which architectural plans were important and which were discarded drafts? A gust of wind must have blown through the opened door that day when my father saw Slab McGuirk out. Half-costed plans slid from his desk onto the floor. I still remember unfathomable shapes on the wafer-thin sheet as I began to colour them in, absorbed in my fantasy world. That was the only time he ever struck me until Phyllis entered our lives. Curses poured forth, like a boil of frustration bursting open. Curled up on the floor, I understood suddenly that everything was my fault. I was the nuisance son he was stranded with, perpetually holding him back.

Then his voice changed, calling me to him. Tentatively I dared to glance up at this man who was my entire world. His arms were held out. Old familiar Dada, beckoning and forgiving. Then the black phone rang. He picked it up. From his tone I knew that it was Barney Clancy. I might not have been there. His swivel chair was empty. I sat in it, with my ear throbbing. But I didn’t cry. Instead I spun myself round until the whole world was flying except for me, safe on my magic carpet.

The revolving slows to a halt in my mind. A bell rings, a crowd rising. Zigzagging on a metal track with its fake tail bobbing, I fret for the mechanical hare. The steel traps open, greyhounds pound past. Floodlights make the grass greener, the packed sand on the track sandier, the sky bluer above the immaculate bowl of light that was Navan dog track.

Men jostled around gesticulating bookmakers with their leather bags of cash. A young blonde woman laughed, teasing my father. I couldn’t stop staring at her, like somebody who seemed to have stepped through the television screen from an American programme into our humdrum world, except that her Dublin accent was wrong. The woman teased him again for not risking a small bet on each race, as she laughed off her loss of a few bob each time the bell went. But my father would have regarded the reverse forecasts on the tote as a mug’s game, when an average dog could be body-checked by some mongrel on the first bend. He would have been holding off to place one large bet on a sure tip handed to him on the back of a Player’s cigarette packet.

I was an eight-year-old chaperone on that night of endless crisps and lemonade when I first saw Phyllis. Hair so blonde that I wanted to touch it, her fingers stroked the curved stem of a gin and tonic glass. She didn’t smoke back then, her palms were marble-white. Her long red nails gripped my father’s arm when one of her dogs finally won, leaving an imprint on his wrist as we sat in silence while she collected her winnings.

I had four winners that night. If a dog broke cleanly from trap six with sufficient speed to avoid the scrum on the first bend it invariably featured in the shake-up at the end. Dogs in trap five generally faded, but trap four always seemed to get pulled along and challenged late if they had closing strength. The knowledge and thrill were instinctive within me, my heart quickening at the bell, my breath held for twenty-nine point five seconds, my ears pounding as time moved differently along the closing straight. Except that all my winners were in my head – they never asked if I wished to place a bet. Indeed, all night I had a sense of being airbrushed out as they spoke in whispers. They didn’t even spot my tears as I jigged on a plastic chair after soiling myself. It was my fault. I should have touched his arm to ask him could I go to the toilet on time, but was afraid to intrude on their private world until the stench alerted Phyllis.

I remember the cubicle door slamming and the marble pattern on the stone floor as shiny toilet paper chaffed my soiled legs. My father hissed in frustration while I gagged on the reek of ammonia cubes from the flooded urinals. Most of all I remember my shame as men turned their heads when he led me from the cubicle. Outside the final race was being run, with discarded betting slips blown about on the concrete and whining coming from dog boxes. Phyllis waited, shivering in a knee-length coat.

‘How is he now?’ Her voice was disconcerting as she glanced at me, then looked away. On the few occasions during the evening when I had caught her watching me I’d felt under inspection, but the brittle uncertainty in her tone made her sound like a child herself.

They walked together without touching, edging ever more fractionally apart as they passed through the gates. Lines of parked cars, the greasy aroma of a van selling burgers. I kept well back, suffocating in the stench of self-disgrace. They whispered together but never kissed. Then she was gone, turning men’s heads as she ran out between parked cars to flag down the late bus to Dublin. I didn’t know whether to wave because she never looked back.

It was Josie who cleaned me up properly before school next morning, standing me in the bath to scrub my flesh pink with thick bristles digging into me like a penance. My father didn’t have to warn me not to mention the blonde woman. Of late Josie was paid to walk me to school each morning and wait for me among the mothers at the gate. My afternoons were increasingly spent in her damp terraced cottage in a lane behind Emma Terrace, playing house with her seven-year-old granddaughter or being held captive by pirates and escaping in time to eat soda bread and watch F-Troop on the black-and-white television.

Cigarette smoke rarely filled the outhouse now, with the telephone jangling unanswered. The first mineshaft was being dug on the Kells side of town, the streets awash with gigantic machines, unknown faces and rumours of inside-track fortunes being made on lands that had changed hands. My father was away every second night, working in Dublin, while I slept beneath the sloping ceiling of Josie’s cottage. Her granddaughter shared her teddies, snuggling half of them down at the end of my bed after she swore never to tell my father or any boy from my school that I played with them.

It was Josie who found the first letter in the hall, opening up the house to light a fire for his return. She tut-tutted at the sender’s insensitivity in addressing it to ‘Mr and Mrs Brogan’. It was an invite for a reception in Dublin to announce details of the next phase of the mine. Some weeks later a second envelope arrived, this time simply addressed to ‘Mrs Phyllis Brogan’. Josie stopped in mid-tut, her tone scaring me. ‘But your mother’s name wasn’t Phyllis?’

It was Renee to her neighbours, but spelt ‘Irene’ on this gravestone in the quietude of Athlumney cemetery. Below my father’s recently carved name space existed for one more, but surely Phyllis could not intend to join them?

I knelt to read through the withered wreaths left there three weeks ago. ‘Deepest sympathy from Peter Clancy, TD and Minister for State’. ‘With sympathy from his former colleagues in Meath County Council’. A tacky arrangement of flowers contorted to form the word DAD could only have come from my half-sister Sarah-Jane. It resembled something out of a gangland funeral. Rain had made the ink run on the card attached to a bunch of faded lilies beside it, but I could discern the blurred words, ‘with love from Miriam and Conor’. I fingered their names over and over like an explorer finding the map of a vanished continent. Next to it lay a cheap bouquet, ‘In sympathy, Simon McGuirk’. It took a moment for the Christian name to register. Then the distant memory returned of a teacher in the yard labelling McGuirk as ‘Simple Simon’. Pete Clancy had battered the first boy who repeated that name as he offered McGuirk the protection of his gang and rechristened him ‘Slick’. It was only the thuggish simpleton himself who did not grasp that his nickname was coined in mockery.

Meanness and premature baldness were passed on like heirlooms in the McGuirk family. Slab’s son resorting to such extravagance perturbed me, but not as much as the small wooden cross placed like a stake through the heart of the grave. I only spotted it as I rearranged the wreaths. My father must have placed it here some time in the past decade. The unexpected gesture shocked me. I knelt to read the inscription: Pray also for her son, Brendan, killed, aged thirty-one, in a train crash in Scotland.

Market Square. The old barbershop was gone; its proprietor one of the few kindly faces I remember. A boiled sweet slipped into my palm on those rare occasions when I was allowed to accompany Cormac there. Mostly my father cut my hair himself, shearing along the rim of an upturned bowl. A video outlet stood in its place, between a mobile phone store and a discreet lingerie window display in a UK High Street chain-store. Shiny new toys for the Celtic Tiger. McCall’s wooden-floored emporium had disappeared, with its display of rosary beads threaded by starved Irish orphans with bleeding fingers who were beaten by nuns. Instead, music blared from a sports store displaying cheap footballs handsewn by starved children with bleeding fingers in safely anonymous countries.

The Dublin buses still stopped outside McAndrew’s pub, where an ‘advice clinic’ caravan was double-parked, belonging to Pete Clancy. No election had yet been called, but with the delicately balanced coalition only hanging by a thread, more experienced politicians were getting their retaliation in early. Pete Clancy’s face stared from a poster, like a touched-up death mask of his father. I recognised the two men dispensing newsletters outside the caravan, though their faces had aged since their days as young Turks laughing in my father’s outhouse. They were mere footsoldiers now, ignored by the younger men in suits talking on mobile phones in the caravan doorway.

Jimmy Mahon was the older of the two. A teetotaller barman, he had been nicknamed ‘the donkey’ by Barney Clancy who got my father to dole out the most remote hamlets for him to canvass. Mahon was known to work all night on the eve of an election, leaflet-bombing letterboxes. He would have happily died for Barney Clancy and reappeared as a ghost to cast a final vote for him. At one time there were dozens like him in Navan, but now he cut a lonely figure as he approached the bus queue, impassive to the cynicism and indifference of Saturday afternoon shoppers. He reached me and held out a leaflet.

I stared back, almost willing him to recognize me without the beard. Three weeks ago he had probably followed the cortege here from Dublin at my father’s funeral and perhaps knelt unwittingly in the same pew as the man who killed him. He glanced at me with no recognition in his eyes, then passed on. The four-page leaflet contained eleven pictures of Pete Clancy, claiming personal credit for every new traffic light, road widening, tree planting, speed ramp, public phone or streetlight installed in Meath over the past six months. As old Joey Kerwin used to joke, the Clancys only just stopped short of claiming credit for every child conceived in the constituency. Help me to help you, a headline proclaimed on the last page. Contact me at any time at my home phone number or by e-mail. I almost discarded the leaflet like most of the bus queue, but then pocketed it, deciding that the e-mail address would be useful.

The first bus to arrive was a private coach from Shercock. I boarded it, wondering if anyone in that small town still remembered Peter Mathews, a petty thief who limped into town on a crutch and got caught withdrawing money from a stolen post office book, which he hid before the guards came. He found himself stripped and bent over a chair in the police station. He found himself dead from a heart attack with his pancreas bleeding from a blow to the stomach. Guards who’d had better ways to spend their Saturday afternoon contradicted each other in court. Swearing in the jury, the judge asked anyone if they had to declare an interest in the case. One juryman had spoken up. ‘I have no interest in the case, Your Honour, I’m not interested in it at all.’ He might have been a spokesman for my father’s generation. ‘I have no interest in seeing what’s in front of my eyes, no interest in things I don’t want to know about. If people didn’t turn a blind eye, Your Honour, we’d all be fucked.’

Half the bus would be fucked tonight if they got the chance, I suspected as I looked around it. Thick-calved Cavan girls wearing skirts the size of a mouse’s parachute and platform heels that needed health warnings for acrophobia. They shared lipstick and gossip in a suffocating reek of perfume. A radio almost drowned out the lads behind me discussing the new satellite channel a local consortium had set up to beam video highlights of junior local hurling matches into selected pubs until 10 p.m., when the frequency was taken over by a porn channel from Prague.

We crossed the Boyne near the turn for Johnstown. To the left a line of mature trees blocked out any view of the Clancy family residence, a Palladian mansion with an additional wing built on by Slab McGuirk and Mossy Egan the year my father left private employment. County Council workers had extended a six-foot stone boundary wall for free when the road was being widened. Beyond it the road grew lonely, broken by the lights of isolated homesteads and livestock huddled in the corners of fields. I stared out into the dusk as we reached the first turn for Tara, the dung-splattered seat of the ancient High Kings.

‘Let’s stop at Tara, I’ve never seen it,’ Phyllis had pleaded as we passed here on the second occasion I met her, six months after our night at the dog track. By then, the secret was all over Navan about my father having remarried. Nobody seemed sure about how long he had been living a double life in Dublin or why he told none of his old friends. But people were impressed by stories of Barney Clancy being best man at the wedding and treating them to dinner in the Shelbourne Hotel. Brian Lenihan and two other Government ministers were rumoured to have joined in their celebrations, which became a near riot when Donough O’Malley arrived and my father reluctantly allowed his wedding night to be hi-jacked, flattered by the attention of such great men.

My father ignored Phyllis’s request to stop at Tara in the car that day. Her interest in seeing it would have been negligible. But her apprehension and self-doubt about having to confront her new neighbours was evident, even to me, two months past my ninth birthday. Even the way she spoke was different from how I remembered her Dublin accent at the dog track, so that she seemed like a child unsuccessfully trying to sound posh.

My father, on the other hand, wanted the business finished, with his new bride installed and the whispers of neighbours faced down. He had accepted the job of heading a special development task-force within the planning department of Meath County Council and needed to live in Meath full-time. A more than respectable period of mourning had passed since my mother was knocked down by a truck on Ludlow Street, and it was several years since Phyllis’s first husband, a Mr Morgan, passed away in his native Glasgow, leaving her with one son, Cormac, a year younger than me.

Neither Cormac nor I spoke to each other on that first journey into Navan. Cormac looked soft enough to crush, pointing out cattle to his teddy bear through the window and keeping up an incessant, lisping commentary. We shared the same freckles and teeth but his hair was a gingery red. Even though I was preoccupied in struggling against back-seat nausea, I could see the effect that his whispered babbling and the unmanly teddy bear were having on my father.

‘Does this mean we’ll be going to see the dogs again?’ I asked.

‘You never saw your mother at the dog track. She was never there. Do you understand?’

My father didn’t turn as he spoke, but his eyes found mine in the rear-view mirror. Mother. Was that what I was meant to call her? Half the town probably saw them at the dog track, but to my father power was about controlling perceptions and this was to be his wife’s stage-managed arrival into Navan.

Some time during their first night in the house I cried out. Perhaps my tears were caused by a sense of everything changing or maybe the inaudible shriek of a ghost being banished woke me, with no untouched corner left for my mother to hide in. All evening the house – already immaculately cleaned by Josie, whose services were now dispensed with – had been scrubbed by Phyllis. Neat cupboards were pulled apart like an exorcism, old curtains torn down before her new Venetian blinds had even arrived, and alien sounds filled up the house.

I just know that I cried out again, waiting for the creak of his bed in response and for yellow light to spill across the pattern of roses. Cormac’s eyes watched like a cat in the dark from the new camp-bed set up across the room. But it was Phyllis who entered to hover over my bed. My crying stopped. How often have I relived that moment, asking myself who Phyllis was and just how insecure she must have felt? A young twenty-five years of age to his settled, confident thirty-eight. Had they been making love, or did I startle her from sleep to find this house – twice the size of the artisan’s cottage she was reared in – closing in around her like a mausoleum to the goodness conferred by death onto another woman, knowing she would have to constantly walk in that other woman’s footsteps, an inappropriately dressed outsider perpetually scrutinized and compared.

Her hand reached out tentatively towards my wet cheeks, her white knuckle showing off a thickset ring. I flinched and drew back, startling Phyllis who was possibly more scared than me. Eyeball to eyeball with a new life, sudden responsibilities and guilts. We were like two explorers wary of each other, as she stretched out her fingers a second time, hesitantly, as if waiting for me to duck away.