The Valparaiso Voyage

Dynasties like the Fitzsimons, Wallaces and Hillards were among the decent honest politicians who would be easily elected for generations to come, but Barney Clancy was different from them and dangerous and special. People talked as if the River Blackwater would stop flowing into the Boyne below the town if he was not there like some Colossus to watch over us. Things were happening to Navan that the aborigines of Kells or Trim could only have wet dreams about. And my father played his part too, not just helping out with constituency matters but increasingly looking after domestic finance and bills and other mundane matters that Clancy no longer had time for. He was respected in the town as a lieutenant to the whirlwind whose audacity was making us the envy of Ireland.

‘I want no more trouble,’ my father said quietly when I finished crying. ‘If and when your mother forgives you you will come back in and stop behaving like a brat.’

He slipped me an old comic from his pocket as he left. It was crumpled and I’d read it a dozen times before. But I studied every word repeatedly to keep the darkness away. Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids. I spoke their lines aloud, imagining myself at one with them for whole moments inside each story, caught up within their anarchic freedom. Then I’d reach the final page and sounds from the street intruded into my loneliness. Toilets flushing, canned laughter from television sets, a woman throwing tea leaves out the back door and banging the empty pot three times like a code.

After undressing I lay in the dark. I thought of Cormac’s white skin snuggled against mine as sleep overcame us on our ship with billowing sails of autumn leaves, which we had steered out along the Boyne to the open sea to sail towards Valparaiso.

Time is not a concept any child can properly understand. One night can last an eternity while several years fuse into a blur. Did my father and Phyllis decide on that first night to permanently exile me, or did my punishment simply become a habit, a decision they never got around to reversing? Maybe they rowed for months over it or perhaps my father simply let Phyllis get on with running the house. He was too swamped by internal County Council sniping with the main planning department and his recently acquired voluntary weekend role of trying to balance the household books of Barney Clancy so as to leave the great man free to focus on politics.

I once overheard my father tell Phyllis about Barney Clancy’s advice to a businessman moving to Athlone. ‘Make them sit up and quake in their boots at the sight of you. Look down your nose on every last Westmeath bog-warrior. Fear is the only way to get Athlone people to respect you.’ Respect. The word rankled with Phyllis, gnawing at her dreams like a cancer. She craved respect in the same way as women in Navan had started yearning to entertain at home with steak fondue evenings or to take foreign holidays that didn’t involve pilgrimages or fasting.

But the hardchaw Dublin workmen erecting a new fluorescent sign over O’Kelly’s butcher’s in Trimgate Street instinctively recognized one of their own as they wolfwhistled after her every morning, and other mothers at the school gate kept a clannish distance. Phyllis mimicked their accents, despising what she regarded as their bog fashions, headscarves and plump safely-married figures that were ‘beef to the heel like a herd of Meath heifers’. Yet she clung to any casual remark addressed to her, desperate for some sign of acceptance.

Back then neighbours counted how many tacks a man used to upholster an armchair, knew if the postman delivered a brown Jiffy bag from England or whose wife was spied visiting a chemist shop in an outlying town. It must have been obvious, even to Phyllis, that people knew and disapproved of my growing ostracism at home. Children from first marriages were sometimes treated as second-class citizens within Irish families, but never to this extreme. Furthermore, for all her airs, I was still a local and they regarded Phyllis as just a blow-in, tarting herself up like a woman on the chase for a husband instead of one securely married.

But the more they ignored her the more I bore the brunt of her frustration. Each day I came home from school, ate dinner at the same table as Cormac and was banished to the shed before she produced ice-cream for his dessert from the new refrigerator which gave itself up to convoluted multiple orgasms every few hours. When my father eventually arrived home he was sent down to harangue me over my latest alleged insult to his wife – Phyllis having abandoned the pretence of me calling her mother.

Some nights he lashed out at me with a fury that – even at the age of ten and eleven – I knew had little to do with my ‘offence’ or even the inconvenience of my existence. At such moments he became like a savage, needing to dominate me because I was the last thing he could control with life starting to spin beyond him. I’d seen him taunted on the street as ‘Clancy’s lap-dog in the Council’ and heard Pete Clancy’s joke about his father taking my father and Jimmy Mahon for a slap-up meal where he ordered steak and onions and when the waiter enquired, ‘What about the vegetables, sir?’ Clancy replied, ‘They can order for themselves.’

The only place where he still felt in command was the outhouse, in which he began to lock papers away in the filing cabinet again, warning me never to mention them to Phyllis. This made me suspect that they were related to my mother, photographs or other souvenirs of her unmentionable absence. Feeling that I was in the same room as them gave me a certain comfort at night.

Mostly, however, he didn’t hit me. After some half-hearted shouting he simply smoked in silence or questioned me about school, joking about the soft time pupils had now compared to his youth. ‘You’re happier down here with your bit of space,’ he observed once, more to himself than me. ‘Few boys your age have so much freedom.’

Often it felt like he was putting off his return back up to the rigid game of happy families being orchestrated in that house. Mama Bear, Dada Bear and room for only one Baby Bear. ‘She’s a good woman,’ he remarked after a long silence one night. ‘It’s not easy for her in this town.’ He looked at me as if wanting a reply, like he ached for reassurance or justification. Yet I knew he was so wound up that if I opened my mouth his fists would fly.

Some evenings I peered through the chicken wire to watch them play their roles in the sitting-room window. Except that nobody seemed to have told Cormac the plot. He had sole possession of the hearthrug and bedroom, but increasingly he wore the distant look I had first seen in the schoolyard. Self-absorbed, no longer clinging to his mother but largely ignoring them by escaping into his own inner world. He seemed the only one of us not to be bent and twisted like a divining rod by unseen tensions.

With the mines creating an influx of jobs, boom times were hitting Navan. Building sites sprang up. Anxious developers, farmers with land to sell and total strangers would call to the house at all hours, hoping in vain for a quiet word with my father after having no joy with the main planning department. Phyllis had instructions to run people like Slab McGuirk from the door, savouring her status at being able to exclude prominent citizens which made her feel as omnipotent as a doctor’s wife or priest’s housekeeper. Very occasionally she attended sod-turnings and ribbon-cuttings with my father if there was a slap-up meal later in the Ard Boyne Hotel or Conyngham Arms in Slane. A girl was paid to babysit Cormac on those occasions, while I was allowed up into the house, for the sake of appearances.

But the outings were rarely a success. The tension was so electric on their return that the babysitter was barely gone before the rows started. ‘What are you sulking about now?’ she would nag in a tipsy voice. ‘How I held my wineglass or laughed too loud or upstaged Clancy’s pig of a wife – the only woman in Navan who doesn’t know about his mistress in Dublin?’ Phyllis’s voice followed me, spoiling for a fight, as I was dispatched to the shed: ‘Come on! Tell me to start behaving like a grown woman. But you like me as a girl when it suits you, don’t you eh, Mr Respectable?’

I was eleven on the night when they grew so caught up in their row – which now seemed almost like a ritualized game leading to subsequent peace-offerings – that they forgot to properly close the bedroom curtains. The gap was small where they shifted in and out of the light. My father was naked, with black hair down his chest and his belly swelling slightly outwards. I didn’t know what an erection was, just that Phyllis knelt, wearing just a white bra, to cure it in the way that you sucked poison from a wasp sting. I should have been disturbed, but everything about the scene – the way they were framed by the slat of light, his stillness with his hands holding her hair and his face turned away – made it seem like a ceremony from some distant world that I would always be forced to witness from outside.

But I was outside everything now. The whole of Navan – and even the Nobber bogmen arriving in bangers with shiny suits crusted in dandruff – knew it. Pete Clancy perpetually devised new means of public ridicule. His fawning cronies brought in soiled straw to fling at me and shout that I had left my bedding behind. They held their noses when I passed, making chucking noises and perching like roosting hens on the bench in the concrete shelter.

The funny thing was that – although Navan would never accept a blow-in like Phyllis – Cormac had blended in, accepted and even slyly admired for his oddity. From the day that he contradicted Pete Clancy any bullying of him had switched to me instead, although I noticed that in the yard Slick rarely took his eyes off Cormac. He even made a few friends, boys who similarly seemed to inhabit their own imaginations out on the fringe of things. But for every friend Cormac made a dozen of mine melted away, aware that even association with me could put them at risk of being bullied too.

The town whispered about what was happening to me at home, with neighbours always on the verge of doing something. Teachers after I fell asleep in class, my mother’s only brother who arrived home from England and threatened to call to the barracks. A policeman spent twenty minutes in the front-room waiting to speak to my father, with not even Phyllis daring to send him packing. On another night a young priest came, very new to the parish, after spotting me at school. There was a brief and strained conversation before he left and never came back. Old Joey Kerwin probably called upon the curate with a bottle of whiskey and the advice that he would earn more respect in Navan for not stirring up unnecessary trouble and maybe leaving his guitar in the presbytery instead of flashing it around the altar.

Had my father been unemployed or a mere labourer I would have been taken away to be placed in the chronic brutality which passed for childcare. I would have shared a dormitory with forty other starving boys; been hired out as slave labour to local farmers; taught some rudimentary trade and lain awake, if lucky, listening as naked boys were flogged on the stone stairs while two Christian Brothers stood on their outstretched hands to prevent them moving. After the state subsidy for my upkeep dried up on my sixteenth birthday, the Brothers would have shown me the door, ordering me to fend for myself and keep my mouth shut.

When boys disappeared into those schools they never reappeared as the same people. Something died inside them, caused by more than just beatings and starvation. But that system was designed to keep the lower orders in check and provide the Christian Brothers with an income. For the son of a senior County Council official to be sent to an industrial school was as unthinkable as for a priest to bugger a Loreto convent girl. The middle classes managed our own affairs, with minor convictions squashed by quiet words in politicians’ ears and noses kept out of other people’s business. No action was ever taken about my confinement, my occasional bruises or burst lip, or the fact that neighbours must have sometimes heard me crying. My father just got busier at work and – corralled in the home – Phyllis grew ever more paranoid about ‘the interfering bitches of the town’.

‘What were you saying to that Josie woman from the terrace?’ she would demand if I was a minute late home from school. ‘Don’t think I didn’t see you gabbing to her when I picked up Cormac in the car. Does she think we’re so poor she needs to give you food from her scabby cottage that should have been bulldozed long ago? You get home here on time tomorrow.’

Shortly before my eleventh birthday Mr Casey had begun to interfere. Trenchantly at first, after a long period of simmering observation, and then in subtle ways which made us both conspirators. His garden was an ordered world of potato beds, gooseberry bushes and cabbage plants. A compost heap stood in the far corner, away from the lean-to where he made furniture most evenings. Close to the wall of my father’s outhouse he’d erected a small circle of cement blocks, used to burn withered stalks and half his household rubbish. Before Phyllis’s arrival I remember accompanying my father and Mr Casey on occasional outings to his brother’s farm near Trim on a Saturday morning, returning with a trailer full of logs. Long into the evening his electric saw would be at work, with sparks dancing like fireflies, logs thrown over the hedge into our garden and the softest pile of sawdust for me to play with.

Their joint ventures stopped however after Phyllis perceived some real or imagined slight in Mrs Casey’s tone towards her. Afterwards both men kept each other at bay behind a facade of hearty greetings shouted over the hedge. But they hadn’t properly spoken for two years before the winter evening when Mr Casey heard me crying through the outhouse wall. I recall the sudden thump of his hand against the corrugated iron and my shock, after being so self-absorbed in my shell, that an outsider could overhear me.

‘Is that you, Brendan? Surely to God he hasn’t still got you out there on a bitter night like this?’

His voice made me hold my breath, afraid to reply. I knew I had let my father down and done wrong by allowing Mr Casey to hear me, I wanted him to go away but he kept asking if I was all right. Was I thirsty, scared, had they given me anything to eat? ‘I know you’re in there,’ he shouted. ‘Will you for God’s sake say something, child.’

Possibly my inability to reply finally made him snap. But there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t make matters worse. I huddled against the corrugated iron, hearing the dying crackle of his bonfire and longing for him to go indoors so that I could creep out and sit near it for a time until the embers died. Injun Brendan who roamed the gardens at night, forever on the trail with no time for tepees or squaws.

When Mr Casey’s voice eventually died away I stopped shaking. Too scared to leave the outhouse, I closed my eyes, imagining that my fist – pressed for comfort between my tightly clenched legs – was the feel of a horse beneath me. I rocked back and forth, forcing the warmth of the fantasy to claim me. Injun Brendan, always moving along to stay free. The bruises on my legs were no longer caused by Pete Clancy’s gang lashing out at me as I raced past to get home from school in time. Instead they were rope burns after escaping from cattle rustlers. I fled bareback along trails known only to myself, seeking out the recently constructed makeshift wigwam of corrugated iron sheets which Clancy’s gang met in by the river so that I could tear it to the ground. I had seen it one night among bushes by the Boyne but even in the dark I hadn’t dared approach it. Now the fantasy of destroying it filled the ache in my stomach, blocking reality out until the sound of raised adult voices intruded.

‘Don’t you tell me how I can or cannot punish my own son!’

‘Punish him for what? He’s been two years down in that blasted shed. If his poor mother was alive…’

The voices were so loud I thought they were in the garden. But when I checked through the chicken wire I could see Mr Casey in the dining-room window, with my father looking like he was only moments away from coming to blows with him.

‘It’s no concern of yours, Seamus.’

‘It’s a scandal to the whole bloody town.’

‘There’s never been cause of scandal in this house.’ Phyllis’s voice entered the fray, suddenly enraged. ‘Just work for idle tongues in this God-forsaken town.’

The more they argued, the more frightened of retribution I became. I looked up to see that their voices had woken Cormac. He entered the back bedroom and sleepily looked out of the window. By this time I didn’t begrudge him owning my old bedroom. He looked perfect in that light, gazing down towards the shed, with his patterned pyjamas and combed hair. I was sure he couldn’t see me in the dark but he began to wave and kept waving. We never really spoke now. Phyllis discouraged contact at home and at school we had nothing left to say to each other. The adult voices threw accusations at each other. Cormac stayed at the window until I forced my hand through a gap in the chicken wire, scraping my flesh as I managed to wave back to him. Then he smiled and was gone. When the voices stopped I lay awake for hours, with the memory of Cormac’s body framed in the window keeping me warm as I waited for vengeful footsteps that never came.

It was half-nine before Ebun stirred. Niyi had made coffee and quietly left a mug on the floor beside me, before relaxing his vigilance long enough to disappear down the corridor to the bathroom. That was when I became aware of Ebun languidly watching me slip into my jeans. I hurriedly did up the zip.

‘You slept well,’ I remarked.

Ebun curled her body back up into a ball, lifting her head slightly off the pillow. ‘Where do you go now, Irishman?’

‘I have business in Dublin.’

‘Have you?’ It was hard to tell how serious her expression was, but I found myself loving the way her eyes watched me. ‘I think you are a criminal, a crook.’

‘Crooks generally find better accommodation than this.’

‘Do they? Are you married?’

‘Are you?’

She turned her head as Niyi returned. ‘I think he is a gangster, like the men who smuggled us onto their truck in Spain. He has their look. I think we are lucky not to be killed in our beds.’

The man admonished her in their own language, glancing uneasily across, but Ebun simply laughed and turned back to me. ‘I don’t really think you are much of a crook, Irishman. I should know, after the people we have had to deal with.’

‘This is stupid talk,’ Niyi butted in.

‘I enjoy a joke,’ I told him.

Ebun stopped smiling and regarded me caustically. ‘I wish to dress. It is time you left.’

I stood up to pull on my shirt, thrown by her curt tone. When I arrived in Ireland yesterday I had been nobody, a ghost, ready to do what had to be done and disappear again without trace. The last thing I needed was attachments, but I found myself lingering in the doorway, not wanting to leave just yet. ‘Thanks for taking me in.’

‘Forgive us for not being used to your customs,’ she replied. ‘We didn’t make you queue.’

Niyi muttered something sharply, caught between embarrassment and relief that I was going.

‘She means no harm,’ he said in English. ‘But in Nigeria I did not live this way. I had a good job in my village, yet here I must queue with gypsies.’

‘They have the same rights as us Yorubas,’ Ebun contradicted him from the bed. ‘None.’

Niyi accompanied me out onto the landing and had already started down the stairs when I glanced back. Ebun’s expression was different in his absence as she quietly called out, ‘E sheé. Thank you for last night. Call again, Irishman.’

Her words caught me off guard. I was unable to disguise my look of pleasure from Niyi who escorted me down to the front door.

‘Thank you again. Ò dábò.’ He shook my hand formally, as if entreating me to ignore Ebun’s invitation and regard our encounter as finished. He watched from the doorway until I reached the corner into Dorset Street.

There were more cars heading into town at this early hour than I remembered. Walton’s music shop still stood on North Frederick Street, but the shabby cafe on the corner was gone, with workmen even on a Sunday morning swarming over steel girders to erect new apartments there. The bustle of O’Connell Street felt disturbing for 10 a.m. Tourists moved about even in late autumn and there was a striking preponderance of black faces compared to ten years ago, although one could still spot the standard fleet of Sunday fathers queuing at bus stops. I would probably be among them if I had stayed, although, approaching seventeen, Conor would be too old for weekly treats now, more concerned about having his weekends to himself.

Those separated fathers on route to exercise their visiting rights were a standard feature of the streetscape in every city I had lived in over the past decade. Too neatly dressed for a casual Sunday morning as they felt themselves to be on weekly inspection. Their limbo in Ireland would have been especially grim, with divorce only just now coming into law. Existing in bedsits on the edge of town with most of their wages still paying the mortgage of the family home, arriving there each weekend at the appointed hour to walk a tightrope between being accused of spoiling the children or neglecting them. Living out fraught hours in the bright desolation of McDonald’s or pacing the zoo while the clock ticked away their allotted time.

I knew that I could never have coped with such rationed-out fatherhood. It was all or nothing for me and the only gifts that my gambling could have brought Conor were disgrace, eviction and penury. My feelings for the boy had grown more intense as my love affair with Miriam died. Died isn’t the right word. Our marriage suffocated instead inside successive rings of guilt and failure, disappointments and petty recrimination. The pale sprig of first love remained buried at the gnarled core of that tree, but it was only after the axe struck it that I glimpsed the delicate lush bud again when it was too late. One final gamble, a lunatic moment of temptation had cast me adrift from them like a sepal.

Ten years ago when I flew out to visit Cormac in Scotland there was graffiti scrawled in the toilet in Dublin airport: Would the last person emigrating please turn out all the lights. Half the passengers on that flight were emigrants, fleeing from a clapped-out economy. I had been on protective notice for two months already at that stage, knowing that soon I would receive the minimum statutory redundancy from the Japanese company I worked for in Tallaght who insisted on blaring their bizarre company anthem every morning. Together our workers lighten up the world…

The world needed serious lightening up back then, with life conspiring to make us bitter before our time. Mortgage rates spiralled out of control and the Government cutbacks were so severe that Miriam’s mother died in lingering agony on a trolley in a hospital corridor with barely enough nurses, never mind the miracle of a bed. Miriam didn’t know that it was only a matter of time before we would be forced to sell our house or see it repossessed because of my gambling. There were many things Miriam didn’t know back then, so much she should not have trusted me to do.

At seven Conor knew more than her, or at least saw more of my other world. The places where us men went, places men didn’t mention to Mammy, even if she dealt with them in her work. Our male secret. Bribed with crisps to sit still while I screamed inwardly as my hopes faded yet again in the four-forty race at Doncaster, Warwick or Kempton. ‘What’s wrong, Daddy? Why is your face like that?’ ‘Eat your crisps, son, there’s nothing wrong.’ Nothing’s wrong except that half of my wages had just followed the other half down a black hole. Nothing’s wrong except that I kept chasing a mirage where more banknotes than I could ever count were pushed through a grille at me, where Conor had every toy he ever wanted, Miriam would smile again and the shabby punters in the pox-ridden betting shop would finally look at me with the respect that I craved from them.