The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  A voice called his name. It was Niyi with Ebun lagging behind. They stopped, surprised to see me, though Ebun fought to disguise a smile. ‘Shé alaáfiá ni?’ she asked him.

  ‘Adúpé,’ he replied.

  Niyi muttered something that I could not catch.

  ‘Share it,’ Lekan replied in English. ‘Maybe Cormac is hungry.’

  I found myself ravenous once I began to eat the bread and cheese. Niyi was perturbed at my presence, causing Lekan and Ebun to exchange an amused glance.

  ‘My sister wonders which of us you come to see?’ Lekan asked.

  ‘You,’ I said.

  ‘She thinks you are a poor liar.’

  Ebun angrily hissed something and Lekan threw his head back to laugh, even coaxing a reluctant smile from Niyi. I knew who I had come to see. But now that she was here, among this queue of unsettling faces, the force of my attraction frightened me. A passing cluster of Irish girls shouted at us, their abuse indecipherable but its meaning clear.

  Navan had been no insular place during my childhood. Conversations were littered with placenames: The Bronx, Yonkers, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Staten Island – places to export our young. Uganda, Peru, Mozambique, Rwanda – places to send money for our foreign missionaries. Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait were places for nurses to amass fortunes in by the time I left, while my father’s generation had already discovered the charms of Liechtenstein, Jersey and the Cayman Islands. The outside world was always part of our lives, but it had remained someplace else, somewhere to escape to or exploit or explore. The tables were being turned in this queue, with distant placenames becoming blood and flesh. I hated the stab of hypocritical prejudice I was discovering inside me, but somehow it felt as if this queue was robbing me of my homecoming.

  ‘I should go,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the food.’

  ‘Stay if you wish.’ Lekan made space for Ebun to sit between us. ‘We have all night.’

  The tarmac was cramped, with people around us reluctant to surrender space to our swollen number. I felt the warmth of Ebun’s leg pressed against mine and became intensely aware of her body. The curve of her neck when she lifted her head back, the upturn of her breasts and how they shook slightly when she laughed at something Lekan said. I also sensed her awareness of my presence, but I could not be certain if her interest was genuine or a means of tormenting Niyi. There seemed little I could genuinely tell about her.

  I just knew that I loved the illicit warmth of her leg and that she could never guess at the childhood memories it brought back. Nights when Cormac and I had huddled together for warmth, when he ignored my protestations and we touched each other’s bodies in new ways. Explorers without maps, stumbling into sensations as we pretended we needed to practise the things that we would do when we had girlfriends. As the elder I knew it was wrong, but Cormac kept driving us forward, like he could never have enough of each new sensation. Side by side, our bodies could not have been more different. My skin was sallow, but his seemed alabaster in the light of the candles he robbed from Saint Joseph’s shrine in the cathedral. I remember how their light flickered across the walls, casting a glimmer over the chicken wire at the window. Just bright enough to puzzle my father when he woke one night and slipped quietly from bed, knowing that Phyllis would need her sleep to cope with her latest bout of morning sickness in a few hours’ time. Her sleeping hands wrapped protectively around the tiny bump beneath her nightdress, the fresh start – eight months after her miscarriage – that would become my half-sister.

  How long did he stand at the unlocked bathroom window, perplexed by that flickering light, with the world he had painstakingly put back together about to fall apart? I heard the kitchen door open and his steps on the path. Cormac heard them too, but refused to scramble up. His lethargy seemed to paralyse me. Everything felt dream-like, with my worst nightmare becoming true. I lowered my hands to cover my erection as he lifted the latch.

  My father stood in the doorway, staring at Cormac who gazed serenely back. At last I knew how he had felt, the same shock as I had experienced in his attic tonight. If I had been alone in that candlelight he would have removed his belt. But Cormac’s impassivity altered the balance, like he was already far more a man of the world than my father would ever be. Momentarily my father seemed defeated, confronted by something outside his experience that he could not control.

  ‘Get up to the house.’ His voice was barely a whisper.

  ‘Which of us?’ It was Cormac who replied. I wanted to pull the blanket over me but was too scared to move.

  ‘Don’t you be cheeky, sir. Get up to that house now!’

  ‘Why can’t Brendan come? We slept in the same room once.’

  ‘You won’t bloody well do so again!’ My father was losing his self-control, teetering towards violence. ‘Your mother in her condition…after what she’s been through…if she knew about this, boy, it would…’

  ‘And will you tell her or I?’

  My father looked at me directly for the first time, man to man, almost imploringly like he needed confirmation of what he had just heard. It was hard to tell which of us was more shocked by the threat buried inside Cormac’s effrontery.

  ‘I want Brendan back in the house,’ Cormac demanded, releasing my father from shock.

  ‘You want locking up! Both of you. Especially you, Brendan, at your age. Get up!’ My father pulled Cormac to his feet, grabbed his pyjamas and pushed them into his arms. ‘Get dressed, damn you, Cormac Brogan! Now I don’t even want to know what’s been going on out here.’

  ‘You never did anyway, once the neighbours heard nothing. And my name isn’t Brogan! I don’t care if you legally adopted me, I’m no son of yours and never will be.’ Cormac turned to me. ‘I’m glad my father is dead, having seen how your father treats you!’

  The slap caught Cormac so hard that the boy was knocked face-down onto the mattress beside me. I put my arms around his shoulders to protect him.

  ‘You think you’re a know-all, don’t you? This has all been for you…you illegitimate little bastard…’ My father stopped, shocked by his own words, then stared at the candles. ‘Brendan, did you rob these from the cathedral?’

  ‘No. Canon Bourke gave them to me.’ Cormac turned his head to stare defiantly at my father, wiggling his backside slightly. ‘He said I was to stick them up my step-father’s tight arse and light a fire there for Christ.’

  There was utter silence. Even Cormac must have been momentarily terrified behind his defiance because I felt a tremble pass through his naked body. Then – I couldn’t help myself because the image conjured up was just so funny – I started to laugh, my shoulders shaking as I struggled to disguise it. Cormac joined in, both of us near hysterics and beyond control, tears in our eyes as we pictured my father kneeling with a holy candle burning from his bum. Stepping back into the garden, at a loss about how to deal with us, he sat down on a wheelbarrow, his head in his hands.

  Eventually Cormac stopped laughing. He patted my shoulder, then slipped into his pyjamas and walked out past my father. Neither spoke, with my father watching him walk back up to the house. I was in for a hiding now, I thought, with his pent-up fury about to be spent on me. But he just stood up after a few moments and walked away, not even looking back like he didn’t know what to say but wanted the unspoken rules understood. None of this had ever happened, he had never seen us and we were never to mention it again. I had pulled the blanket tightly around myself and watched him enter the kitchen, noticing for the first time how he had become a slightly stooped man.

  A sudden shouting match occurred in the queue behind us, a flashpoint of near violence between two Eastern Europeans. Wary voices were raised around them, with nobody risking getting involved. One man shook a fist, then spat at his opponent’s feet. He stalked off, making it clear that he was postponing unfinished business. Niyi watched him depart.

  ‘Gypsies,’ he remarked bitterly. ‘Every trick they know.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Ebun told
him.

  ‘I will not stop. I see every trick,’ he retorted fiercely. ‘We are not the same as thieves or beggars. I do not forget I am Yoruba.’

  ‘You are nobody now,’ Lekan interjected quietly, then glanced at me. ‘You ask what I did back then, òré mi. The police were no help, they were with the gangs. I locked up my shop, then I ran away.’

  ‘So did I,’ I replied. ‘The problem is that I’ve no more places to run to.’

  Ebun’s fingers suddenly brushed against my arm. ‘Then walk,’ she said. ‘Even Niyi will think me safe if you walk back with me.’

  She rose, catching Niyi by surprise.

  ‘You going home?’ he asked.

  ‘I would not call it that.’ She beckoned for me to follow, picking her way through the bodies on the ground, never looking back to see if I was behind her. When she reached the corner she stopped to wait for me. My body ached with sudden tiredness. I wanted rid of every memory conjured during that day. But something about how Ebun stood brought back that street corner in Broadstone with its spiked railings and how Miriam had first turned to face me, the sudden promise of her lips and body offering the possibility of a different life. That sensation was here again, different yet offering the same sense of balm.

  Ebun watched me as if trying to read my thoughts and having as little success as I had with hers. Then she smiled and shyly held out one hand.

  III

  MONDAY

  My euphoria didn’t last long – just the two hundred yards that it took for Ebun and me to self-consciously let go of each other’s hand. Every glance from a passer-by killed something of the brief ease between us. We walked in silence along St Stephen’s Green, where a car alarm blared through the night air, down Grafton Street with its torrent of young voices and figures, and onto College Green where a huge queue for taxis waited opposite the closed gates of Trinity College. The glances had switched from curiosity to open hostility by the time we reached Westmoreland Street, where the atmosphere held the same edge of menace that I remembered from my teenage years. Youths spilled out from kebab shops in cheap fluorescent tracksuits and runners. Two teenage girls in tiny skirts shivered as they boarded a night bus to Clondalkin, eyes hardening as they watched Ebun pass.

  When I offered to wave down a passing taxi she turned the suggestion against me, wanting to know whether I was scared or ashamed to be seen walking with her. I was neither. It was just that since returning home I had felt anonymous but the constant glances made me uncomfortable now as we crossed the Liffey. O’Connell Street was always dangerous at this hour, but Ebun strode up it so resolutely with her chin thrown back that I began to wonder if she wanted my company at all.

  A gang of youths passed. One of them shouted something, then footsteps doubled back. I sensed Ebun tremble slightly before his footsteps stopped, the youth picking up a jacket that had fallen from around his waist. I took her hand in mine.

  ‘I can mind myself,’ she insisted, but didn’t take her hand away.

  We turned onto Parnell Street, past a shop with boarded-up windows. She stopped to look at the shabby pub across the road.

  ‘This was our shop,’ she said. ‘Nigerian. They came out from the pub three nights ago, flinging stones and bottles across. A battle on the street.’

  I knew the pub but had never dared to drink inside it. A criminal was shot dead there the year before I disappeared.

  ‘Most local white people do not like the men from the pub, but they do nothing to help. They just watch from windows. Niyi was here. He and others started throwing the rocks back. The drunkards were shocked, like they expected us to lie down. We are tired of lying down. From now we fight our own battles.’ She stopped at the corner of North Great George’s Street, where the derelict sites once used as unofficial carparks had been replaced by crude replicas of the original streetscape. The flats where she had been attacked on Saturday were just beyond it. ‘I know my way from here. Go back to your hotel if you like.’

  ‘And if I don’t like…?’

  She scrutinized me. ‘What do you want, Irishman?’

  ‘Just to talk to someone.’

  ‘Talk is cheap. That’s why we do it all day. You may walk me to my flat. Nothing more.’

  I wasn’t ready for anything more or at least not like she meant. The image of Conor in my old bedroom still haunted me. I wanted to lie down and yet knew that I wouldn’t sleep. Maybe I simply wanted to rest my head on Ebun’s breast and forget everything for a time. We walked past Hardwick Street flats, both of us aware of the danger if we were seen by the same youths, and turned onto Dorset Street.

  Two Romanians sat on the bottom step outside her house, lowering their voices as we approached. She stopped a few feet from them. ‘We are here,’ she said. ‘These men will think something is going on if I ask you in.’

  ‘Do you care what they think?’

  ‘You are not forced to live among them.’ She watched me unsmilingly. ‘I care what you might think.’

  ‘Let me come up,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave as soon as you ask.’

  ‘I won’t need to ask,’ she replied. ‘Do you think Niyi will leave us for long?’

  Ebun walked past the men whose glances intimated that I was now the outsider. I followed her up the wooden staircase to the flat on the top floor. The window had been left open, making the room cold. It seemed even smaller than when I had left. It was hard to believe that three people could share such a spartan place. I walked to the window, looking out at the blocks of Corporation flats which bordered the tangled back gardens of these old houses.

  ‘Where do you dream about at night?’ I asked. ‘I mean in what country do you find yourself?’

  ‘I don’t dream about countries.’ Ebun put some water to boil on the two-ring cooker and checked how much coffee was left in the small jar. ‘I dream about people I left behind. Sit. You look like you have walked all evening. Your family, they make you no welcome?’

  ‘Anyone who knows me here thinks that I have been dead for years.’

  Ebun turned, having carefully measured out coffee into two chipped mugs. ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘People disappear for all kinds of reasons.’

  ‘I know that. I mean why come back?’

  ‘I have a son.’

  Ebun hunched down to examine my face. ‘The bruising over your eye is small now. I am glad I put ice on it.’ She sat back on the bed. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Different places, never stopping long, playing out roles. Do you know Halloween?’

  ‘I have never met her.’ Ebun’s expression remained serious for a second, before she laughed at my ignorance. ‘I am from Africa, not Mars. Of course I know Halloween.’

  ‘It was one of the few days as a child when I was allowed to do things with my brother. Both of us racing around wearing cheap masks. I loved looking through the eye sockets and feeling I was somebody else. These ten years have been like wearing an ever-changing Halloween mask, free to be anyone but myself.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I can hardly feel my own face any more. I don’t know what’s skin and what’s rubber.’

  ‘Maybe you’re just not who you were back then.’

  The water was starting to boil. Ebun rose to pour it into the two mugs and brought the coffee over. It tasted good as we sipped in silence. Eight months had passed since I had last touched a woman, three months since even speaking properly to one.

  It had been late at night in a bar in Lisbon after chancing a visit to the Irish embassy to inquire about renewing Cormac’s passport. I had promised to return the next day with a completed form, but knew from my carefully phrased questions that a computer check would show that Cormac was deceased. I was drinking alone when I met a woman with whom I could have gone home. For the next three hours we shared the unspoken presumption that I would. But at 3 a.m., as we emerged onto the sometimes dangerous labyrinthine streets around Alfama, I found that we had talked too much and too openly for me to carry
through the polite deceptions of a one-night stand. I don’t think she realized that I wasn’t coming until she hailed a taxi to her apartment in Campo de Ourique. But I had hinted about secrets kept hidden from the three women who had shared my life in different countries over the past decade and suddenly I’d grown scared of what I might let slip in bed. That was always the danger about letting anyone get too close. After her taxi departed I had walked all the way back to my pensao off the R Portas de Santo Antao, knowing that mentally the fortifications created around my identity were starting to crumble at last.

  Lowering the chipped coffee mug, I fought against the urge but found that I couldn’t stop myself from doing something with Ebun which I had done with no other woman – strip myself naked by saying my name. I wanted to touch her, yet wanted to run away. I don’t know if I feared Niyi or the police pounding through the door, but I didn’t care about the risk any more.

  ‘My real name is Brendan Brogan. I faked my own death because I wanted to start again, properly this time. I had a class of half-brother who stole my home once, my status in the world. In exchange I stole his life.’

  ‘Why tell me this?’ Ebun asked.

  ‘For years I’ve wanted to tell someone.’

  ‘But I’m not someone,’ she replied quietly. ‘Not like your countrymen on the street with passports and rights. You pick me because I do not count.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Your name means nothing to me. Who can I inform?’

  ‘You count to me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t stop that attack on Saturday for no reason. I needed to help you so I could feel I had done one worthwhile thing. You looked…you are…special.’

  ‘E jòó. Don’t do this,’ Ebun warned, almost scared.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Make this play. You don’t know me, what things happened, things I saw. I am together now, I need to stay this way. I have a new life to find. I have no time for…’

  She stopped and picked up the coffee cups, walking to the sink.