New Town Soul

by Dermot Bolger

  Still, I had knocked along OK, even if most of those lads had considered me a bit of a sap and I had thought them a harmless bunch of cretins. That was until the bullying started after the talent contest. They might have all seen themselves as stags, but they had the herd mentality of cows. This caused me to get trampled on a lot during my final months in that school.

  That was why I had promised myself that in Stradbrook I would never stand out like a fool again. There seemed to be no danger of that anyway, because few in the classroom paid me any attention as I hesitated in the doorway. Most people who glanced towards me looked away again. But one girl with jet-black hair smiled shyly in welcome from her desk beside the window. I smiled back and she grinned and looked away. I didn’t recognise her features from any pictures on Facebook, but her smile was enough to boost my shaky confidence as I tried to decide what to do next. Should I try to blend in with some group, hoping they might acknowledge me? Or stake my claim to the tempting empty window seat behind the black-haired girl, where I could pretend to look busy by taking out my schoolbooks and try not to show how flustered I was?

  I was about to claim this empty desk when I sensed the atmosphere change. People were staring in my direction again. I was unused to being stared at and needed to resist an urge to glance down and check if my fly was open. Could a joker have already scrawled ‘class geek’ in lipstick on my forehead? But I saw no ridicule in this new scrutiny. Instead – and especially in the eyes of some girls – I felt a sense of being made to feel welcome and almost being made to feel good- looking. It was not a sensation I was used to, and I couldn’t understand the sudden change in attitude. Only one girl played no part in this newly-formed adoration society: the girl with jet-black hair. She was staring at me again, unsmilingly now, almost as if she was seeing a ghost.

  Then a slight movement in the doorway made me realise that it was not me that people were looking at. They were staring through me as if I was invisible.

  Their eyes were drawn to a boy with a black leather jacket over his top, who had just entered the room. There seemed to be nothing particularly athletic or handsome about him, but he had an amused air of confidence and experience that was quietly mesmerising. He had the look of a guy who had already seen everything in life and had declined to buy the T-shirt. He must be the class captain, I decided; their natural leader. If I was going to be bullied here, then he would instigate it. But I sensed that I would not be bullied, because this guy would not allow anything so uncouth to occur in his class. My new classmates would take their cue from him and ignore me, because this is what he did as he brushed past.

  But then, when he opened his mouth, I realised that nobody present knew who he was, except perhaps for the black-haired girl because of the way she quickly turned away. However, I could sense him already casting a spell on every other student present.

  ‘I’m Shane O’Driscoll,’ he announced quietly, ‘I’m the new boy. Did I hear there’s an initiation ritual that involves sacrificing a live chicken?’

  Amid the laughter, one girl asked where he’d got his leather jacket.

  ‘I stole it off a Polish sailor in Captain America’s in Dún Laoghaire. The poor sap is wandering around wearing a blazer from my last school in England.’ Shane turned, as if only now aware of my presence. ‘You all right there, pal? Are you married to that doorframe or just going steady?’

  ‘It’s our first date.’

  I felt grateful when the class laughed because he laughed.

  ‘Well, I warn you, her jokes are bound to be wooden.’

  Shane strolled towards the desk that I had wanted and then looked back.

  ‘Sorry, what’s your name?’

  ‘Joey. Joey Kilmichael.’

  ‘You don’t normally sit over here by the window, do you, Joey?’

  ‘No, actually,’ I began, ‘but …’

  ‘That’s cool. I bags it so.’ The black-haired girl kept her back turned as he occupied the desk behind her, leaving me to find an empty desk at the back of the classroom. Shane looked at the girl’s stiff shoulders.

  ‘How’s it going there, Geraldine?’ he asked.

  She ignored his greeting. Shane shrugged as if amused and savoured the window view that should have been mine. He didn’t pretend to look busy. He looked so laid-back that changing schools might be an everyday amusement. As he had a Dublin accent, I wondered why his last school had been in England. I should have felt resentful towards him for taking my desk, but instead I envied him for being the type of chilled-out person that I could never be. Shane had the relaxed charm that people said my late father had possessed. He gave the impression of being older than sixteen, of being interested in everything yet impressed by nothing. If I had one wish at that moment it was simple: I could never wish to be as cool as him so I wished for the next best thing – that somehow, Shane might pick me to become his dim-witted but faithful sidekick.

  FOUR

  Shane

  June 2007

  In that summer when he turned fourteen, Shane O’Driscoll had no desire to move to Blackrock from the cosy two-bedroom terraced house which had always been his home in Sallynoggin. But Shane would have endured any move if it stopped his parents from arguing. The move to Blackrock didn’t stop their arguments though. At night he felt mortified that their new neighbours on either side of the luxury duplex townhouse at Sion Hill could overhear the rows about bills and money. During the daytime, this mortification and his own shyness made him keep his head down, reluctant to make eye contact with anyone when he crossed the landscaped gardens that divided the Sion Hill development from the constant snarl of traffic on the Rock Road. So he mostly observed his new neighbours from a distance as they reversed into designated parking spaces and emerged from BMWs and SUVs with designer-label shopping bags from the Frascati Centre. Sometimes there were teenagers in tow in Ugg boots and Abercrombie hoodies and with teeth so perfect that the kids looked like they had been enrolled for orthodontic treatment while still in the womb. But beyond exchanging the odd checking-each-other-out glance with some of the other kids, he had no contact with anyone.

  It was only three miles from Sallynoggin to Blackrock, and many working-class families – including Shane’s grandparents – had originally moved there from Blackrock when the new Council estates were built in Sallynoggin half a century ago. But it seemed to Shane that there were no working-class parts of Blackrock left any more. Even the small terraces of Victorian cottages near the seafront had been tastefully modernised and upgraded. Cramped bedrooms where children once slept head to toe and four and five to a bed were now transformed into architects’ studios and treatment rooms for holistic medicine. Everywhere Shane walked in those early weeks in Blackrock, he saw signs of money – discreetly coded or extravagantly brazen – and it was money that he knew his parents did not have. While he could not fault any of his new neighbours, he was cautious about letting any of them get close to him. They seemed nice as they came and went in their large cars, but he wasn’t sure if their niceness was a subtle way to let him know that he was not as nice as them and that his family didn’t belong in Sion Hill.

  The only acquaintance he made there was an older teenager called Simon Wallace. Even these occasional conversations when their paths crossed were desultory. Wallace, who seemed an oddball, only talked to Shane in his half-sneering way because he had no one else to talk to. Wallace dressed like he could never decide whether he was into goth or emo and claimed to be the lead singer in a band too experimental to play gigs or do anything except hang out in a garage that the drummer’s rich father had converted into a rehearsal studio. Shane and Simon Wallace would chat awkwardly for a few minutes whenever they met. Wallace once invited Shane to share a bottle of Southern Comfort, hinting that he knew a great drinking place nearby where nobody would disturb them. Shane made an excuse; he didn’t drink and couldn’t bear an entire afternoon of Wallace boasting about being suspended from school for having drugs on him and how only his
parents’ connections had prevented him from being expelled.

  Shane didn’t want to make any trouble for his own parents because they had enough troubles already. He knew that his mum and dad both loved him, but during the past year they seemed too stressed to do anything except snap at each other and snap at him. He did not recall any such simmering tensions when he was growing up in the Sallynoggin house that had originally been his grandfather’s home. He could still remember his father’s father, Jack O’Driscoll, living with them – a good-tempered old man who sat in an armchair all day and claimed that Shane was the spit of him as a boy. Before Shane even went to school, Grandad Jack had taught him to write by copying the old man’s absolutely perfect copperplate handwriting. Jack had loved to tell Shane stories about his own childhood growing up in Blackrock; about how he started his working life in a small dairy on Castledawson Avenue, employed by a Mrs McCormack – a sour snob with the sharpest tongue and the meanest purse strings in Black-rock.

  The only good thing to come from working in that dairy, Grandad Jack used to say, was that he met his wife, Molly, there. Molly had been working as a kitchen maid for Mrs McCormack. Shane’s grandad had told him a million stories about the salt-of-the-earth folk and the flint-hearted snobs whom he had met in equal measure when he left McCormack’s dairy to work as a messenger boy for Findlater’s on Blackrock’s main street. He used to cycle out to deliver groceries to the big houses in the countryside around Mount Merrion and Stillorgan. The village of his boyhood might have utterly changed, but Shane’s grandad always claimed that – unlike the blow-ins who now lived there in fancy estates – the O’Driscolls had Blackrock blood in their veins for generations, flowing back to the time the village was called Newtown-by-theBlack-Rock and consisted of just a few dwellings hugging the coastline that used to be dominated by a reef of black rock out at sea.

  It was five years since Shane’s grandfather died. Although there had been occasional rows at home, Shane could remember his parents generally being happy together, putting their arms around each other and around him. Sometimes his mother had complained about the Sallynoggin house being cramped, but Shane had loved those small, cosy rooms that felt like home. Shane’s dad had seemed happy in Sallynoggin too, until a year ago, when all of this changed because his dad had become gripped by an obsessive urge to move to Blackrock – a desire which had torn apart Shane’s old life.

  His mum could not complain about a lack of space in this Sion Hill duplex built on the site of an old convent. It was an ultra-modern development, but the high, coved ceilings were meant to evoke a gracious, bygone age. The townhouse had oak floorboards and internal doors with brass handles and coloured panes of glass that allowed light to flood into every room. There were limestone-tiled walls in the bathroom and a Victorian-style bathtub with lion’s claws for legs. In the living room was an antique-style marble fireplace with a coal-effect gas fire. A purpose-built granite kitchen table with matching stools set off the built-in appliances in the kitchen. Large doors opened onto a south-facing balcony. Indeed, most of the rooms had panoramic views across Dublin Bay to Howth Head. Directly across the busy Rock Road, Shane could see Blackrock Park and the entrance to Emmet Square, the courtyard of small Edwardian terraced houses from which his grandfather once set off for work in Mc Cormack’s dairy.

  The duplex felt huge. Every room had an echo because, apart from the built-in fixtures that the previous owners had left behind, the rooms remained unfurnished. A removals van had transported their old furniture from Sallynoggin, but what seemed cosy in their former home looked shabby in these spacious rooms. Shane’s parents had no money to buy anything new.

  There was lots of space in the duplex, but still nowhere to go to escape from his parents’ arguments. No matter what room he locked himself into at night to try and block out their rows by reading a library book, their angry voices intruded through the walls and stripped away any sense of security Shane could muster.

  Shane’s days were lonely, but sleep offered little comfort because his dreams always seemed to involve water. He had one recurring nightmare where he found himself kneeling above a pool in a cellar or a cave: the sort of place where nobody would find your body if you drowned. The dream invariably ended with a sickening sensation of toppling forward, knowing that the water was so deep and ice-cold that escape was impossible. He would wake, drenched in sweat and with his heart thumping, just before his body broke the surface of the water. Shane never told his parents about these nightmares because they were preoccupied with real worries.

  In his first months in Blackrock, he kept his feelings to himself. But it was the loneliness that he found hardest to endure, especially when the school holidays started and his parents left for work each morning. The only good thing about those long summer mornings and empty afternoons was that there was no simmering tension in the duplex. His parents felt guilty about leaving him alone and talked about enrolling him in summer camps, but camps cost money and Shane was relieved when the plans petered out.

  Every evening when his folks came home Shane lied about the new friends that he claimed to have made playing soccer in Blackrock Park. He told them that he was enjoying the best summer of his life because this was what they needed to hear. He would have told them any lies to avoid more rows, but in reality, after three months in Blackrock he had yet to make a single friend. The local kids hanging around Blackrock Park or the Frascati Centre were not unfriendly, but they all knew each other and Shane was an outsider, nervous of ridicule and aware that his parents did not fit in.

  It was madness for his parents to purchase a house that they could obviously not afford, but his father had refused to listen to logic once he became gripped by this oppressive desire to move to Blackrock. In the end, Shane’s mother was browbeaten by his father’s talk and – as she frequently complained – by the fact that he had lied to her and to everyone else about the figures involved. It was only when signing the deeds in the solicitor’s office that she became aware of how enormous their mortgage was: the monthly repayments would eat up every cent they earned.

  Shane’s father was an eternal optimist, always convinced that his latest get-rich-quick scheme would make their fortune. He could sell snow to Eskimos. The problem was that the Eskimos would send the snow back or their cheque would bounce or he would suddenly decide that there was no future in srfect that the kids looked likeld make a fortune by selling sand to Arabs in the desert instead. Now, whenever Shane’s father outlined his latest moneymaking scheme, Shane’s mum would wearily raise her eyes to heaven and he would look across at Shane for support. Shane always said, ‘That sounds brilliant, Dad,’ because he sensed that his dad desperately needed somebody to still believe in him, and Shane desperately wanted to believe.

  Only once, when saying goodnight to Shane one night, had his dad let this mask of optimism drop. The man looked so exhausted that Shane asked, ‘Dad, why did we really move to Blackrock?’

  His father lay on the bed beside him, staring at the ceiling for a long time before replying, ‘This is where your grandad was born. And both his father and grandfather were born in the small mud-wall cabins that used to line Castledawson Avenue. They were knocked down when the priests extended the grounds of Blackrock College. Every night during the last year we lived in Sallynoggin, your grandad’s voice kept coming between me and my sleep, whispering in my head that I should bring you back to Blackrock.’

  ‘But why here in Sion Hill, Dad? I mean, we can’t afford this house.’

  ‘Because some things are more important than money. I’ll find the money somehow. I looked at cheaper houses, but none were this high up.’

  ‘What’s the point in being this high up? We’re just paying extra for the sea view.’

  ‘The view has nothing to do with it, Shane. The minute I walked in here, I knew it was the house your grandad wanted me to buy, no matter what it cost, because you would be safe here.’

  ‘Safe from what?’

 
; Shane’s dad looked embarrassed, his eyes jaded from lack of sleep. ‘Safe from drowning, son. I know it makes no sense, but I was convinced that if we stayed in Sallynoggin, our house would be flooded.’

  ‘Dad, our old house wasn’t even near a river.’

  His father shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s all madness, but I couldn’t shake the notion from my head. Every night, after I’d finally fall asleep, I’d dream that there was a hidden pool of water under the foundations of our old house; that while we slept, it would start to seep through the floorboards and lap up the stairs. I used to wake up terrified that your bedroom was flooded, and by the time I reached you, you’d be floating there in your pyjamas, already drowned and lost to us.’

  FIVE

  Joey’s Mother

  1993

  Music is pounding from the speakers in the living room when my mum wakes from a drunken slumber. Every night has been the same in the three months since my father died. Every night she has sat up until dawn with a vodka bottle and a rough cut of his unfinished album to keep her company. Hearing his voice now as she wakes sends a shiver down her spine. The demo tapes bring her no comfort but only make the ache of his absence worse and cause her to drink even more to try and dull that ache. The sitting-room table has a bundle of posters of my father on it. He is holding a guitar, his face lit by a spotlight. The words ‘Appearing at …’ are printed on each poster, followed by a blank space. She has lost track of all the tiny venues whose names she had had to write into that blank space as he criss-crossed Ireland, stubbornly trying to build an audience for a style that was uniquely his own. He never played big venues, except as a support act with half the audience ignoring him. But she remembers the excitement of small gigs where he electrified audiences with a sound they had never heard before.