The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘For what?’

  ‘What I might feel.’

  ‘What do you feel?’

  ‘Leave now like you said you would.’ She washed the cups loudly, angry with herself or me. ‘Niyi will be back soon. He will think we are…’

  ‘Who is Niyi to you?’ I walked towards her. ‘He cannot be your lover. I see how you treat him.’

  ‘Niyi was the cousin of the man I married.’

  ‘Is the cousin,’ I corrected.

  Ebun turned to face me. ‘I do not wish for a grammar lesson. You are not the only one whose life is complex. I am gone from his family. He fled them too, but is still one of them.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘I will have no talk of him.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a noise in the doorway. We both turned. Ebun seemed afraid. It was Niyi. He said something in their language.

  ‘I am okay,’ she replied in English. ‘Cormac is leaving. I will walk him down.’

  ‘Only to the door,’ Niyi cautioned. ‘Remember what happened last time you went outside alone.’

  ‘I will not be caged. I am a free woman.’

  Niyi shrugged and reached for the coffee jar that I realized was now empty. Ebun followed me down the stairs, her hand touching my shoulder to warn me where a step had crumbled. I opened the front door. The East Europeans were gone, but two passing Irishmen glanced up. One murmured something to his companion who grinned. There was a creak on the stairs. I sensed Niyi behind us, listening. Ebun glanced back, almost defiantly, then walked me down onto the street.

  ‘Call to see me,’ she whispered.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Meje…seven o’clock. There is a march in O’Connell Street. It will do no good – here or at home people will never accept strangers, they are too scared of what they might lose. But Niyi and Lekan like to think they are doing something. There they will meet other Nigerians and talk, talk, talk. I hate their endless talk. I hate this forever waiting.’

  Maybe Ebun heard Niyi move down the wooden staircase, because she indicated for me to walk on. I had only gone a few yards however when I heard her footsteps briefly follow.

  ‘My husband,’ Ebun whispered, touching her breast, ‘he is dead. But dead and cold only here in my heart.’ She leaned forward, then stopped, her hand having brushed against my jacket pocket where Joey Kerwin’s old revolver nestled. ‘What’s that?’ she whispered sharply.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I know the feel of that nothing. All you men are the same.’ Her eyes were cold, suspicious. Niyi’s voice called from the doorway and she turned to go in, without looking back.

  Two weeks after my father found Cormac and myself together I got to handle serious money for the first time. The time came for my class to make our confirmation and not even Phyllis could stop my involvement. A suit was purchased – my first one ever and with long trousers too – and a white shirt that almost choked me at the neck. Likewise my shoes were too tight – carefully chosen so that I could just about get away with wearing them once before being put away for Cormac to grow into.

  The clothes felt so new that they could not belong to me. I walked to the cathedral, terrified I would stain them. Even the coins I received caused me anxiety in case I was blamed if their weight pulled the lining of the pockets out of shape. I balanced them carefully, noticing how the crinkled texture of Mr Casey’s pound note felt different from ordinary paper. When the bishop questioned me at the altar, I did not faint. As I walked back to my seat with a white rosette on my lapel, the suit’s prospective owner – Cormac – looked up devoutly from kneeling beside Phyllis, then threw his eyes towards Lisa Hanlon in the girls’ pews and winked.

  Outside the church a handful of neighbours and some parents of other boys pressed more coins in my hand while Phyllis hovered tight-lipped, waiting to sweep me home. The hot day was upsetting her, and the way other women eyed her stomach. But she was on her best behaviour, not even interfering when Josie pressed a pound note into my fist. The tears in the old woman’s eyes made me uncomfortable as she hugged me. I was as relieved as Phyllis to escape back to the house where even local builders knew not to call any more.

  To Phyllis’s credit, she had a slap-up meal for us afterwards, a Sunday dinner on a Saturday with orange squash and ice-cream and jelly. She laughed and even patted my hair that she had spent half the morning yanking into shape. After the suit was put away, Cormac and I were allowed to play together in the back garden. It seemed as good as the treat of lunch in the Ard Boyne Hotel that other boys had talked about. My father even brought down crisps and chocolate to the outhouse that evening.

  He didn’t mention the events of a fortnight before, any more than I mentioned how Phyllis had not actually let me keep any of my confirmation money. I knew things to be tight financially. She had the cost of raising her own son, the worry of another forthcoming mouth to feed, plus the expense of keeping me. I cost her a fortune. She was never done telling me this and saying how lucky I was that free second-level education had come in – thanks to the mad generosity of a Government minister whose behaviour had been disgraceful when Barney Clancy allowed him to gatecrash their wedding dinner in the Shelbourne Hotel.

  I didn’t mind losing my confirmation money, which at least made me feel that I was contributing to the house. It was losing my nocturnal freedom which bothered me. My father had asked Mr Hanlon to put a new Chubb lock on the outhouse, after temporarily removing my mattress so that I could be safely airbrushed from their neighbourly conversation as it was being fitted. This seemed his only method of keeping us apart. It would be impossible to lock Cormac’s bedroom without having to explain to Phyllis about us ‘queering each other up’ – a phrase I overheard older boys use about an FCA instructor but had never previously understood.

  Now at eight-thirty each evening I was locked into the outhouse until dawn. I could live without Mr Casey’s illicit soup, but the curtailment of my prowling tormented me. I was missing Lisa Hanlon undressing at her bedroom window; her mother finishing the Woman’s Own crossword by the fire; my twice-weekly vigil from the roof of Hanlon’s shed to spy on Foxy O’Rourke’s girlfriend doing to him in the lane what Cormac had taught me to do. I missed her teasing laugh afterwards, wiping her hand on a tissue while he gasped against the shed door as though shot. Most of all I was missing the lights of Navan dog track and my being able to glimpse, through a chink in the corrugated iron boundary fence, the last bend and most of the straight up to the finish. I used to have to try and guess which dog won by the shouts from the crowd on the evenings when I managed to get there in time to spy on the final two races. More than anything in life I longed to stand among that crowd, lay big bets with the bookies and show no emotion as my dog romped home, the boy admired for his acumen. Stories of the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo would pale beside the legend of the Navan boy who sent the Dublin bookies home with empty bags and tails between their legs.

  I missed Cormac’s visits too, though I knew that what we had done was wrong. But life felt empty after briefly having known somebody who cared. It was hard not to dwell on memories of him lightly biting my nipple and how his warmth always remained after he was gone. Some evenings he appeared in their bedroom window, when he knew Phyllis and my father were watching Charles Mitchell read the nine o’clock news. Creeping like a cat so they wouldn’t hear his footsteps, he stood on the bed so I could see his body framed by light. Often he merely waved but once he stripped off his pyjamas to press against the glass with hands outstretched. I never knew if it was a deliberate mimicry of the crucifixion or just seemed that way.

  If I was unsure of how Cormac’s mind worked, then my father seemed utterly perplexed. Ever since he had found us I’d started to see him in a different light, no longer king of anything. Bricks and mortar were what he understood, things that followed a logical pattern. Perhaps my mother might have fitted into such a world, trained by the Loreto n
uns to be content with her allotted role and to cajole him emotionally to play out his part too. But it wasn’t just her death which drove my father to seek Phyllis. All his life he had been a secret misfit. I knew that from the night when I found a notebook of hand-written verses locked in the filing cabinet. They had shocked me more deeply than if he was a Martian or a Protestant. Such softness did not belong in his circle and would have been used to mock and bait him.

  Looking back, it revealed how he always needed something more, a glimpse into fantasy worlds that men only laughed about in barbershops in Navan. He had needed to possess a trophy when the term still only existed in the pages of smuggled copies of Playboy. He had needed to experience sensations that Loreto girls knew they didn’t have to provide to trap a husband. Yet, after my mother, the rough and tumble of some slovenly shop girl from the bog would have been beneath him.

  Phyllis didn’t look like a Loreto girl. From the start there was something disconcerting about her appearance, like she belonged in Green Acres or some other American television programme. From the day he revealed his second marriage my father became almost as big a joke in the town as Slab McGuirk who, when his wife went on pilgrimage to Lough Derg, spent an evening projecting pornographic films onto the closed Venetian blinds in his living-room window, unaware that the images came clearly through on the street outside.

  Navan men kept their desires secret, maybe even from themselves, whereas my father had allowed his to become flesh and be scrutinized by everyone. His showgirl, his Princess Grace, his soft-breasted baby doll. Unlike other men’s fantasies, she was still there in the morning among the real world of cattle marts, cow shite and oil shortages. She was sensitive to every petty slight, possessed by growing demands and anxieties to which he slowly became ensnared. Now her son had stepped forth from his previous unobtrusiveness to taunt him in ways that my father had no idea how to deal with.

  ‘Isn’t bastard a bad word, Daddy?’ Cormac had asked in an innocent voice, breaking the terse silence at breakfast on the morning after my father discovered us. Phyllis was struggling to keep down a slice of dry toast beside him. ‘I heard Pete Clancy use it about a boy in school. I had to ask the teacher what it means but even he didn’t know, Daddy.’

  There could be nothing worse for a grown man used to exercising power than to be wound up by an eleven-year-old boy. Another child might be crushed by the revelation my father had let slip, but Cormac seemed quietly pleased with his new status. If he was illegitimate then the whole notion of her having previously been married was just a sham invented for the neighbours. The shame of her son knowing this would have been too much for Phyllis, who was convinced she was about to lose this baby as well at any minute. One day as a treat in school we were shown a Tom and Jerry cartoon, with the mouse perpetually threatening to wake a huge dog while the terrified cat tried to pacify him on tiptoes. It reminded me of Cormac toying with my father, though in the weeks after my confirmation Phyllis grew so withdrawn in self-absorption about her pregnancy that I became both the sole audience for Cormac’s games and the object of desire behind them.

  Even as he stripped away my fear of my father, I resisted, finding the vacuum that replaced it too painful. I needed to respect my father. His omnipotence made sense of my childhood. I felt I had been banished to the outhouse for a clear purpose, the penance for an unspecified but definite sin. It was part of my father’s God-given plan. But the more Cormac baited him the more I was forced to admit the possibility that only his weakness and inability to stand up to Phyllis kept me there. He was as unable to intervene in a woman’s right to run the house as he was incapable of boiling an egg. He had allowed her bastard to sleep in my bed, her bastard to steal my life. Yet her bastard was my only friend. Just saying the word ‘bastard’ aloud excited me at night. What man had Phyllis once allowed to ride the arse off her? A visiting American perhaps, straight from Hawaii Five-O or Mission Impossible, attracted by her dyed blonde hair, which of late occasionally betrayed its red roots. Such thoughts made the lure of Cormac more exotic as he displayed himself in their bedroom window. I carried the burden of my mother’s respectability, even if I lowered it into the muck. But Cormac’s illegitimacy was a clean sheet, giving him the freedom to break any rule.

  I woke one Saturday night, knowing something was wrong. There was a scraping noise, like chalk on a blackboard or ghostly fingernails clawing at the door. Slowly it opened to reveal a patch of empty moonlight. Something flew in, striking me on the chest. I put my hand down to pick up two keys on a ring. A Chubb and one that looked like it would fit the new lock my father had also asked Mr Hanlon to fit on the top drawer of his old desk.

  ‘Scared you.’ Cormac appeared in his pyjamas in the doorway.

  ‘Where did you get them?’

  ‘Himself and Phyllis must have been going at it backwards like dogs upstairs this afternoon. He sent me for sweets to be out of their way, told me to walk as far as Trimgate Street. I stole the keys from his jacket pocket and got copies made in the locksmith’s.’

  ‘Wasn’t the locksmith suspicious?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Cormac flicked a packet of Silk Cut across to me. ‘Sure didn’t I forge a note in his handwriting asking for spare keys.’

  The image that Cormac conjured up of my father and Phyllis doing it, even when she was pregnant, excited me more than the keys in my hand or the stolen cigarettes. He lit one for us both and I tried to inhale without coughing too much while he took the keys back from me.

  ‘Let’s see what he keeps in that drawer. I bet it’s dirty magazines.’

  I never told Cormac about my ability to pick the filing cabinet lock. I had already tried the same trick with this locked drawer but failed. Now I was torn between wanting to stop Cormac opening it and longing to know what was inside. I dreaded it being more poems – I could cope with my father being cruel but couldn’t bear for him to be exposed as an idiot. The key turned with the faintest click. Cormac stepped back, wanting to implicate me.

  ‘You open it.’

  I couldn’t chicken out. The wooden drawer was stiff and awkward. I stepped back when it was open a few inches as though I had received an electric shock. It was the first time I ever saw Cormac stunned. A severed human hand or Polaroid shots of Phyllis naked would not have left us more dumbstruck. Cormac dropped his cigarette on the floor and reached his fingers out. I stopped him in fear. Then we looked at each other and I let go his hand, helping him to take out and count the fabulous fortune. Five-pound notes, ten-pound notes, the colours of the new twenties. I had never even known that fifty-pound notes existed. We sorted them by colour, our fingers trembling. It reminded me of the day of my banishment, four years before, when we knelt together to sort autumn leaves into ships. This time there was no Phyllis to break us up. We counted the money over and over, laughing like we were drunk. Cormac spread it out on the mattress and we removed our pyjamas, rolling around on top of it, giggling when banknotes stuck to our flesh with sweat.

  Cormac made me kneel so he could pretend to wipe my backside with a fifty-pound note. His hand lingered, probing and teasing as he rustled the note around my testicles. I was breathing heavier now, legs trembling as I stared down at riches beyond comprehension, a fantasy fortune that could not belong to my father. Things were tight at home, with my own confirmation money needed by Phyllis. This had to be County Council wages for next week or party money Barney Clancy had asked him to mind. I was getting cold and scared, wishing that Cormac’s hand would stop yet wanting him to go on forever.

  It took us an hour afterwards to replace the money, arguing about how exactly it had been arranged and then about where we should hide the spare keys so that I could open the door in future. It was typical of Cormac not to mention the ten-pound note he had stolen. There was always one part of the picture I was excluded from.

  The following Monday I came home from school to find the outhouse turned upside-down. My mattress lay in the garden, with my clothes scattered on the gr
ass. My father was frantic, not caring how much he upset Phyllis who sat in the kitchen with her hands around her stomach, crying as though he had gone mad. He never told us what he was looking for and never found the keys either, hidden under a loose stone in the corner. But that night when I checked the drawer it was empty and it remained empty ever after, except for occasionally containing a list of hand-written sixteen-digit numbers. I would never handle such sums of cash again until the morning I waited for the paramedics to come and cut Cormac’s body down from the ceiling of his apartment in Perth and lay him out naked on a mortuary slab.

  Eleven fifty-five a.m. – not quite high noon in Temple Bar as I laid Joey Kerwin’s revolver on the bed in my hotel room. I emptied out the ancient-looking rusty bullets, with no way of telling if they still worked or if the gun was as self-destructive as Barney Clancy had once jokingly claimed. What had it been used for, if anything? The 1950s IRA Border Campaign had been a brief idealistic splutter compared to what came after. By the time I grew up all that generally marked out those once youthful volunteers was their later conservatism, success in business and membership of the Tidy Towns Committee.

  Joey Kerwin had been far older than most. Could I imagine him killing somebody with this gun? Could I imagine myself pulling the trigger with Pete Clancy’s matted hair and skull splattered onto a wall? It was a fantasy I’d played out a thousand times, remembering the stink of ammonia cubes in the flooded concrete shed that passed as a school toilet. The terror that I would choke as they flushed the cistern again and again. My head pressed right down into the bowl, his hands gripping my neck as he laughed: ‘Chuck, chuck, chuck the Hen Boy!’

  I put the gun down and shaved at the mirror, checked to see if I needed to put more red dye into my hair. Opening my bag I counted out whatever money I had left. There was enough to live on for a month if I was careful. I had little to return to in Oporto, where for the previous two years I had worked in a bar owned by a Greek businessman. As in every other city I had departed silently, giving notice to nobody but with my rent paid up and every bill settled. Nobody was ever inconvenienced by my continual vanishing off the face of the earth, except for those puzzled few hurt for having briefly regarded me as a friend or lover.