The Valparaiso Voyage

No seven-year-old should have to carry secrets, be made to wait outside doorways when a bookie enforced the no-children rule, see his Daddy bang his fists against the window of a television shop while his horse lost on eleven different screens inside. I lacked the vocabulary to be a good father, gave too little or too much of myself. I simply wanted to make people happy and be respected. I hoarded gadgets, any possession that might confer status. I loved Miriam because she could simply be herself and I wanted Conor to be every single thing that I could never be.

Possibly Miriam and I could have turned our marriage around if I had been honest to her about my addiction. Perhaps we would now radiate the same self-satisfied affluence as that Dublin family yesterday on the stairwell of Lisa Hanlon’s house. I might even have been around to disturb the intruders at my father’s house, with him still alive and all of us reconciled. Father, son and grandson. The pair of us taking Conor fishing on the Boyne, watching him walk ahead with the rods while my father put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You know I’m sorry for everything I did, son.’ ‘That’s in the past, Dad, let’s enjoy our time now.’

How often in dreams had I heard those words spoken, savouring the relief on his lined face, our silence as we walked companionably on? The sense of healing was invariably replaced by anger when I woke. The only skills my father taught me were how to keep secrets and abandon a son. There was never a moment of apology or acknowledgement of having done wrong. Nothing to release that burden of anger as I paced the streets of those foreign towns where I found work as a barman or a teacher of English, an object of mistrust like all solitary men.

In the early years I sometimes convinced myself that a passing child was Conor, even though I knew he was older by then. The pain of separation and guilt never eased, drinking beer beside the river in Antwerp or climbing the steep hill at Bom Jesus in Braga to stare down over that Portuguese town. It was always on Sundays that my resolve broke and several times I had phoned our old number in Ireland, hoping that just for once Conor, and not his mother, would puzzle at the silence on the line. But on the fifth such call a recorded message informed me that the number was no longer in service. I had panicked upon hearing the message, smashing the receiver against the callbox wall and feeling that the final, slender umbilical cord was snapped. I didn’t sleep for days, unsure if Miriam and Conor had moved house with my insurance payout or if there had been an accident. Miriam could have been dead or remarried or they might have moved abroad. Yet deep down I knew she had simply grown tired of mysterious six-monthly calls. She was not a woman for secrets or intrigues, which was why she should never have married me.

I crossed the Liffey by a new bridge now and found myself wandering through Temple Bar, a mishmash of designer buildings that looked like King Kong had wrenched them up from different cities and randomly plonked them down among the maze of narrow streets there. I bought an Irish Sunday paper and sat among the tourists on the steps of a desolate new square. The inside pages were filled with rumours of the Government being about to topple because of revelations at the planning and payments to politicians tribunals, along with reports of split communities and resistance committees being formed in isolated villages that found themselves earmarked to cater for refugees.

I stared at the small farmers and shopkeepers in one photograph, picketing the sole hotel in their village which had been block-booked by the Government who planned to squeeze thirty-nine asylum-seekers from Somalia, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia into its eleven bedrooms. Racists, the headline by some Dublin journalist screamed, but their faces might have belonged to my old neighbours in Navan, bewildered and scared by the speed at which the outside world had finally caught up with them. The village had a population of two hundred and forty, with no playground or amenities and a bus into the nearest town just once a day. A report of the public meeting was stormy, with many welcoming voices being shouted down by fearful ones. ‘You’ll kill this village,’ one protester had shouted. ‘What do we have except tourism and without a hotel what American tour coach will ever stop here again?’

This confused reaction was exemplified in the picture of a second picket further down the page. This showed local people in Tramore protesting against attempts to deport a refugee and her children who had actually spent the past year in their midst.

There were no naked quotes from the South Dublin Middle Classes. A discreet paragraph outlined their method of dealing with the situation. There were no pickets here, just a High Court injunction by residents against a refugee reception centre being located in their area, with their spokesman dismissing any notion that racism was involved in what he claimed was purely a planning-permission matter.

Two Eastern European women in head-dresses sat on the step beside me, dividing out a meagre meal between their children. I closed the paper and, leaving it behind me, located a cyber cafe down a cobbled sidestreet which was empty at that hour.

My new Hotmail account had no messages, but there again whenever I left a city I was careful to leave no trace behind. I got Pete Clancy’s e-mail address from the leaflet in my pocket, sipped my coffee and began to type:

Dear Mr Clancy,

‘Help me to help you’, you say. Maybe we can help each other. Your problem in the next election could be how to know you have reached the quota if you’re not sure that you have all the magic numbers. Your father once joked that death should not get in the way of people voting. It need not get in the way of the recently deceased talking either.

Fond memories,

Shyroyal@hotmail.com

I stared at the message for twenty minutes before clicking ‘send’. It was a hook but also a gamble, pretending to know more than I did. What would Clancy make of it – a local crank, a probing journalist shooting in the dark, a canvasser for another party trying to snare him? Some party hack might check on the messages for him, scratch his head and just delete it. But I figured that the odds were two-to-one on Clancy himself reading it and five-to-two that the word ‘Shyroyal’ might capture his attention.

I had only heard it once in childhood, when Barney Clancy turned up in a gleaming suit, slapped his braces and joked to my father: ‘This is my Shyroyal outfit. Sure isn’t Meath the Royal County and don’t I look shy and retiring?’ Something about his laugh made me glance at him as I came up the path, after running a message for Phyllis, and something in my father’s eyes made me look away, knowing it had a buried meaning not meant for the likes of me.

By the age of twelve I had learnt to pick the lock on the filing cabinet, opening the drawers gingerly at night, uncertain of what I hoped to find there. Secrets that would make me feel special, photos of my mother or some other token to break the loneliness. The letterheads were torn off the sheaf of paper in the top drawer but, even at that age, I recognized them as bank statements for something called Shyroyal Holdings Ltd, with an address on an island I had never heard of. The rows of figures meant nothing to me, but I could read the scrap of writing on the cigarette packet stapled to them: Keep safe until I ask for them. It was unsigned, but I would have recognized Barney Clancy’s handwriting anywhere.

Not that I had considered the statements as suspicious back then. Funds were constantly being raised for the party on the chicken-and-chips circuit or by good men like Jimmy Mahon at church-gate collections. This seemed just another component of the adult world where important people were making things happen for the town. If I hadn’t previously overheard Barney Clancy’s joke to my father the Shyroyal name would not even have registered. Indeed, at the time I just felt disappointment that nothing belonging to my mother was actually concealed in the drawers.

Even today I couldn’t be certain if my suspicions were correct or the product of a need for revenge. I could barely even recognize the country outside the cyber cafe window and felt doubly a foreigner for half-knowing everything. I found myself thinking of Ebun again, how she had looked calling out from her bed this morning and how Niyi too had looked, staring back at us both.

The cafe was starting to fill up. I finished my coffee, collected my bags from the bus station, found a hardware shop open on a Sunday where I could purchase a crowbar and booked myself into an anonymous new hotel on the edge of Temple Bar. It was important that I shaved at least once a day to ensure that black stubble didn’t clash with my hair. Lying on the bed afterwards, I repeated the name Brendan out loud, as if trying to step back inside it. I remembered how Miriam and Cormac used to say it, the way Phyllis had twisted the vowels, and tried to imagine Ebun pronouncing it. But each time it sounded like a phrase from a dead tongue last spoken on some island where the only sound left was rain beating on bare rafters and collapsed gable ends.

During the first fortnight after the train crash a sensation of invisibility swamped me. All bets were suddenly off, because not even bookies could collect debts from a dead man. Our endowment policy ensured that once my death was confirmed, the house belonged to Miriam with the outstanding balance of the mortgage written off. A company scheme in work meant that, because I died while still employed by them, my Japanese masters would have to grudgingly cough up a small fortune. That was before taking my own life assurance policy into account, not to mention the discussion in the newspapers that I carefully read every day about a compensation fund for victims. My name was there among the list of the missing. There was even security footage of me splashing out on a first-class ticket at the booth ten minutes before the train left Perth. Death had finally given Brendan Brogan some cherished status. He was virtually a celebrity, but he wasn’t me any more.

I was free of all responsibilities, shunting quietly across borders on another man’s passport. Not that my initial decision was clear-cut. In the hours after the crash I wasn’t sure what I had wanted, except perhaps to make Miriam suffer a foretaste of what it might be like to lose me. Little enough beyond recriminations still held us together. But I knew that her anxiety would be intense as she listened to reports of the crash and prayed for the phone to ring, aware I was supposed to be on the train.

Rarely had I experienced such a sense of power. For months I had helplessly waited on word of the factory closing. At night I had kept dreaming of horses that I knew had no chance of winning, but next day I would back them in suicidal doubles and trebles, waiting for that one magic bet to come up that might buy me space to breathe. By night I woke in a sweat, thinking that I’d heard the doorbell ring with a debt-collector outside. By day I hovered inside the doorway of betting shops in case some neighbour passed who might mention seeing me to Miriam. On buses I found myself incessantly saying to Conor, ‘I bet you the next car is black,’ ‘I bet you we make the lights before they turn red,’ ‘I bet you…I bet you…I bet you…’

Brendan Brogan was a man who couldn’t stop betting. But wandering through Perth on the morning of the crash I had the bizarre sense of having stepped outside myself. I wasn’t that pathetic gambler any more. Suddenly I was the man in control who could choose when to release Miriam from her anxiety by phoning home. I imagined the relief in her voice and, with it, an echo of her earlier love. Yet once I made that call my new-found power would be gone. I would have to explain my getting off the train before it started, how I had chickened out of meeting Phyllis in Glasgow. I would return to Ireland to face the hire-purchase men and money-lenders, the pawnbroker who held all of Miriam’s mother’s jewellery which she believed I had put in the bank for safe keeping, and my seven-year-old son baffled by the civil war fought out in the silences around him.

I knew that my not phoning her was cruel and petty, but it was also a confused attempt to reach Miriam by letting her understand powerlessness. It was not that I hadn’t wanted to tell her about my childhood, but I had never found the words that wouldn’t make me feel dirty by discussing it. Her mind was too practical to understand why people had done nothing. But the hang-ups were totally on my part. I could never cope with her lack of guile and she had felt hurt by how I clammed up on nights when the memories turned my knuckles white.

Before Conor was born I genuinely believed I had outgrown that hurt. But the older he got the more I found myself forced to relive my childhood, imagining if Conor ever had to endure the same. Surely at some stage my father must have felt this same love for me as I felt for Conor, an overwhelming desire to protect him at any cost, to kill for him if necessary. Yet every time Conor laughed I remembered nights when I cried, with every meal he refused to eat I recalled ravenous hunger. Carrying a glass of milk up the stairs for him in bed I remembered creeping from the outhouse to cup my hands under the waste pipe from the kitchen sink. What father simply abandons his first child? On some nights Miriam would find me cradling Conor in bed, his sleeping cheeks smudged by my unexplained tears. I would want to go to Cremore where my father now lived and punch his face, screaming, ‘Why, you bastard, why?’

I did actually mean to phone Miriam from Perth after I had scored my point. But somewhere along the line I left it too late. By 9.15 the phones would already be buzzing, with Phyllis calling my father from Glasgow airport and him contacting Miriam. By half-ten I knew her anxiety would be tinged with anger. If I phoned now she would know that I had deliberately been playing games.

And it was a game until then. Partly I was in shock from the realization of how close I had come to still being onboard the train when it left Perth. But my mind was also in turmoil from trying to comprehend the events that had occurred since my arrival in Scotland two days before.

Eleven a.m. had found me outside a TV shop in Perth, watching live pictures of firemen frantically working. Reports were booming from the radio in the pound shop next door, with talk of signal failure and dazed survivors found wandering half a mile from the track. I had more cash on me than I had ever handled before, money nobody else knew about. Enough for a man to live on for a year, but not enough to do more than temporarily bandage over the cracks at home, even if I didn’t blow it in the first betting shop in Dublin. I had needed time alone to mourn and come to terms with Cormac’s last words to me that called for some new start, some resolution. I had also needed time to deal with Cormac’s revelations about my father. The facts should have been self-evident had I wished to see them, but in my ambiguity of both hating him and craving his respect, I had always shied away from over-scrutinizing my father’s relationship with Barney Clancy.

I had bought shaving foam in a mini-market, sharp scissors and a disposable razor. Nobody came into the gents’ toilets in the small hotel beside the bus station while I was removing my beard there. I cleaned the sink afterwards until it shone, putting the scraggly hair and foam and used razor in a plastic bag. The air felt freezing against my cheeks as I dumped them in a waste bin.

People stood around the station in numbed silence as I caught a coach at half-eleven, barely aware of my destination until I saw ‘Aberdeen’ printed on the ticket. Cormac’s voice seemed to be in my ear, giving me strength. Go for it, brother, take them all for the big one. Twenty-four hours before I had cradled his body in his flat, trying to hold him up even though I knew from the way he hung on the rope that his neck was broken. But suddenly it felt like we were together in this, thick as thieves, the inseparable duo that strangers thought we were when we first moved into a flat together in Dublin. I had felt as if I was outside my body when the bus pulled away from the station. I was Agatha Christie faking amnesia to scare her husband. I fingered the first-class train ticket that was still in my pocket. After all the useless bookies’ slips cradled in my palm there, this was the magic card which I had acquired without even knowing. With it I could fill a royal flush, turn over the card that made twenty-one, see the most impossible treble come up. Cormac’s ghost and I were hatching the biggest scam in the history of Navan, laying down the ultimate bet and the ultimate revenge on my father too. This buzz was more electric than seeing any horse win. I didn’t crave respect from the other passengers, it was already there because I was someone else now, free in a way that I thought only people like Cormac could ever know.

When we had reached Aberdeen my nerve almost failed. I spent twenty minutes in a phone box, constantly dialling Miriam’s number, then stopping at the last digit, biting my knuckles and starting all over again. Cormac’s ghost didn’t seem inside me any more. I was my old insecure self, about to muddle my way through some excuse, when I glimpsed a hoarding advertising a ferry about to leave to the Orkney Islands from Victoria Quay. Go for it, go for it. Cormac’s tone of voice was the same as when he had dared me to do things in the outhouse.

An hour into the voyage it started to rain and the wind was bitter, but I stayed up on deck on the ferry, all the way past the Moray Firth and beyond John O’Groats. Eventually in the darkness Stromness port came into view on the island called Mainland. From there I had taken a taxi to a hotel in Kirkwall, where I sat alone in the bar to watch an extended late-night news bulletin about charred bodies still being located among the train wreckage and the death count rising.

Even then it wasn’t too late to change my mind. Miriam would be frantic, with Conor crying as he sensed her anxiety. But life without me was going to occur for them soon enough anyway. The Japanese factory would be the fifth major closure in Dublin since the start of that summer. Every day I had endured the torture of other workers looking for the return of borrowed money. Even if I used the cash in my pocket to clear every debt, how long would it take me to return to the equilibrium of being in the gutter again? It was the one place I felt safe in, where I had nothing more to lose. Winning always unhinged me. Even amidst the euphoria at seeing my horse cross the line I had always been panicked by the money being counted into my hands, knowing that life was toying with me, tauntingly postponing the inevitability of being broke again.

Fragments of my last conversation with Cormac had entered my head:

Maybe you just think you’d blow it becaus you’ve never felt the power of fifteen thousand pounds cash in your hands…Make something of yourself. Ask yourself who you want to be. Suddenly I didn’t have to be a loser whose son would learn to cross the street with his mates to avoid me. I could become someone else in his eyes, revered like my mother in a society where goodness was instantly conferred by early death.

I realize now that I wasn’t thinking straight back then, still in shock from Cormac’s suicide. But as I sat in that hotel bar and listened to the experts being interviewed, it seemed that my getting off the train had been a miracle of Cormac’s doing. There had been no cameras that I was aware of on the platform or at the station’s side entrance. I could never explain to Miriam where the fifteen thousand pounds had come from, nestling in the envelope between the two passports in my jacket pocket. She would think I had been gambling again and I was. I was taking the biggest gamble of my life to provide every penny they would need for years to come.

Another pundit was talking on television as I left the hotel bar long after midnight. He repeated the only fact that the experts seemed able to agree on. The heat inside the first-class carriages had been so intense that investigators would never establish just how many bodies were reduced to ash inside them.

The old sandstone buildings beside the quay at Kirkwall had an almost Dutch feel in the dark as I walked along the pier. An elderly man and his dog reached the end and turned to walk slowly back. Normally I didn’t smoke but I had purchased a packet of the tipped cigars which Cormac liked. I would need to buy red dye for my hair tomorrow and glasses like Cormac wore in his photo, but already with the beard gone a vague resemblance was there. I was an inch taller, but did officials really check such details? I hadn’t known where this voyage would take me, but surely far enough away from my old life that if I had to end it nobody could trace me back.

The paper inside my own passport was thick. At first the cigar merely singed it, making the edge of the pages curl up. Then suddenly a flame took hold. I glanced behind. The old man was out of sight, the tied-up fishing boats were deserted. Gulls scavenged under the harbour lights for whatever entrails of mackerel and cod had not been washed away. The flames licked around my photograph, consuming my hair, then my forehead, eyes and mouth. The cover was getting too hot to hold, my date of birth burnt away, my height, colour of eyes. I had flung my old self out into the North Sea and saw the passport’s charred remains bob on the waves before slowly sinking from sight.

At half-two I got dressed again, ripped the lining inside my jacket so that the crowbar fitted into it without attracting attention, and left the hotel to stroll up towards Phibsborough. That familiar Sunday-afternoon malaise lingered around the backstreets here, but new apartments crammed into every gap along Phibsborough Road itself, standing out like gold fillings in a row of bad teeth.

The tiny grocer’s opposite my old flat had been replaced by a discreet one-stop-shop for transvestites. A single-storey country dairy still stood beside it, from which an old man used to emerge each morning on a horse-and-cart. But it looked long closed down, a quaint anomaly which – by fluke or quirk of messy will – the developers had overlooked in their frenzy.

A new stand had been built in Dalymount Park, but little else appeared to have changed to suggest that the ground wouldn’t pass for a provincial Albanian stadium. Bohemians were playing Cork City at home. I paid in at the Connacht Street entrance and, once inside, paused to lean against the wall of the ugly concrete passageway beneath the terraces which was empty except for a late straggle of die-hard fans.

Nostalgia brought you to the funniest places. The game had already started but I had no interest in climbing up to the terraces. I wanted to forget the bitter finale of my love affair with Miriam and recall the magic of its origins. Everything about the Ireland I had left seemed summed up in the haphazard disorganization of that February night of mayhem and terror in 1983, when Italy arrived as reigning World Champions to play a friendly international. Rossi was playing that night as well as Conti and Altobelli who scored their second goal. Yet nobody in authority bothered to print tickets for the match. The crowd simply drank in the pubs around Phibsborough until shortly before kick-off, then spilled out, fumbling for change as we formed the sort of scrum which passed for an Irish queue.

As a nation we knew we were down and out – with Barney Clancy, by then a senior cabinet minister, hectoring us about living beyond our means. The World Bank hovered in the wings, itching to take over the running of the country. But there seemed a sense of anarchic freedom about those years as well. Half an hour before kick-off I was still drinking in the Hut pub with Cormac and his friends; some of them urging us to finish up while others clamoured for a final round.

The crowd was already huge as we approached the stadium, clogging up the alleyway which led to the ground. Yet it might have been okay had an ambulance not passed down Connacht Street with its siren blaring. We squeezed even further up the alleyway to let it pass, but more latecomers surged into the cleared space in its wake, causing a swollen crush. People responded with good-humoured jokes at first, shouts of ‘Shift your hand’ and ‘Mind that chiseller!’ But soon it became difficult to breathe.