The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  For years if I awoke beside some girl in Belgium or Portugal I would watch her sleep, wondering if she might still have come to lie there had I introduced myself as Brendan Brogan? Simply saying Cormac’s name gave me confidence. Reaching out in the dark to fondle soft breasts, I could almost feel Cormac inside me, urging me on, his hand buried within my hand as it ran along a girl’s back, his breath coming quicker in my mouth. I knew I would never have the self-confidence to make these conquests on my own.

  But in the long hours awake while some girl slept I always became myself again, with guilt making me imagine Miriam at dawn in our bed. The young widow burdened with a son, subject to unwelcome offers in her implied loneliness from men who made their services sound like a favour or from the hardchaws queuing for free legal aid in the Citizens Advice Centre if she still worked there. For years she haunted my dreams. Often in them she was fleeing with me from our former selves. ‘Will Brendan and Miriam ever find us?’ she would ask, staring out through the eyes of some Scandinavian girl whose skin she had borrowed.

  Ebun was the first woman I had been attracted to who did not physically resemble Miriam in some way. The irony was not lost on me of having found her in a city where every street conjured memories of my wife. Ebun’s husband was dead but only in her mind. Miriam and Conor were alive in mine and even my father was there, tearing at my conscience. I had business to finish, impossible amends to make, futile supplications I could never deliver. It was vital to focus on what had to be done and get cleanly away without implicating anyone. By getting involved with Ebun I was putting my own plans at risk. I could not believe that I had betrayed my name to her. She might have gone to the police already. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility that in seven hours time I might see her again, though after discovering the gun I didn’t know if she would let me in.

  I replaced the gun and money carefully in my bag and lay back to read the morning paper. There was something uncanny about the pages devoted to the ongoing tribunals. Apart from the young solicitors representing them, I remembered every face in the photographs. Yet they had all aged so much they seemed like stooped, bewildered old men. My father’s contemporaries, facing a wall of cameras as they walked to give evidence, with their razor-sharp memories suddenly as forgetful about every aspect of their business dealings as my father’s mind might have become had he been allowed to live.

  One former Dublin planning official had told the judge on Friday that he was now too destitute to buy himself lunch in town. They were just finished hearing evidence of how he had previously needed over thirty bank accounts to cope with apparently unsolicited ‘consultancy fees’ from builders and developers and would often have to leave notes to remind himself of the location of cash stored in his house. The papers seemed outraged by his selective amnesia and reluctance to incriminate himself.

  A Donegal-based builder whose company records were destroyed by fire when stored in a caravan on a building site had followed him into the witness box. This was the third such fire, along with two cases of flooding, the tribunal had encountered in recent months. The elderly builder seemed baffled by large movements of cash from his bank account into offshore companies that he claimed never to have heard of.

  On every page not dealing with the Northern impasse, reports of more refugees disembarking from container lorries or the church apologizing for elderly priests up on child-abuse charges, the former practices of the banks, the medical profession, the judiciary and the blood transfusion service were being investigated. Now that the Promised Land of prosperity had finally arrived, Ireland seemed determined to tear itself apart. Letter-writers hectored with a self-righteousness born from having to confront what they always knew about how Ireland worked but previously preferred only to whisper about in half-admiration. Apart from the succession of children crippled in territorial punishment beatings that people were eager to overlook for fear of rocking the boat, the cease-fires held in the North. But here in the South politics seemed to have dissolved into tit-for-tat character assassinations to compensate for the lack of real power now that most important economic decisions were being taken elsewhere in Europe.

  The indefinite postponement of the trial of former Taois-each, Charles Haughey, on charges of obstructing a tribunal investigating his hidden wealth, was relegated to a few paragraphs, with his legal team successfully arguing that it would be impossible to select twelve jurors who were not prejudiced against him.

  On the night when I finally ran out of excuses for not bringing her to Cremore to meet him for the first time, Miriam had argued with my father about Haughey. But not argued seriously, they merely took up the stances common at the time. There was no middle ground back then, you were utterly for or against Haughey. Those who queried the source of his mansion, his island retreat or private yacht were West Brit Blueshirts, unable to stomach the sight of an Irishman living as well as our former masters.

  ‘So what if he has made a few bob for himself,’ my father had testily admitted towards the end of an uneasy meal – social workers being people he regarded with suspicion. ‘If he can’t look after himself then surely to God what chance has he of looking after the rest of us? Where would the old age pensioners be without him, with free phones and travel? Hasn’t he paid the rent arrears for every second family in Donny-carney? You ask the people going into your clinic. The poor will always love Charlie because poor times need a strong man, strong enough to lift himself up and drag the rest of us along with him.’

  These days, by the look of the letters page, the rest of Ireland didn’t seem overly keen to be associated with Haughey any more or reminded of their former adoration of him. I remembered bonfires blazing outside Clancy’s house on the night Haughey first visited Navan after his election as party leader. Market Square crammed with red-faced men in white shirts with straining buttons, screaming more shrilly than pigs at the slaughterhouse. Women’s faces that night wore a flushed look, like they had drenched their knickers at the fleeting touch of his hand in the throng. It wasn’t just the tribunal witnesses who were suffering from selective amnesia now. Bold after the event, the letter-writers were like those Italians who kicked and hacked at Mussolini – when his dead body was safely hung from a lamppost.

  Apart from a terror of being contaminated by any association with his reign, there seemed little in the paper to separate the political parties. Even the small left-wing factions had merged into one party that toed much the same line as the others. They seemed happiest bickering over incidentals, with the bitter intensity of rival football supporters in a provincial town.

  Maybe this was how it had always been. Real politics was never about important issues when I was a child. The Americans or Russians could bomb wherever they wished, once it wasn’t Kingscourt or Dunshaughlin. We were happy to send peacekeeping forces afterwards, but only so that people in obscure countries could discover our likeability. Our soldiers in the Lebanon worked hard to protect the locals, were never corrupt and, while often under fire, generally only ever shot each other and then by accident. Real politics was about drainage grants and septic tanks. It was so intimate that my father, when acting as tallyman at an election count, could lean over to inspect a ballot paper from Rathmolyon or Kilmessan and, by glancing through the preferences, name the family it came from.

  Perhaps there was no real difference between the parties because in the main they comprised a succession of hard-won fiefdoms. Forty years ago Barney Clancy’s father had decided to retire at the same time as another War of Independence veteran who also held a safe Meath seat from a Navan powerbase. But a gerrymandering of the constituency boundaries meant that it was only considered possible for the party to hold one seat locally. Splitting the vote in Navan could let Labour into Meath. No convention was held to decide whose son would stand as the single agreed candidate. Instead the two octogenarians were found collapsed, faces covered in blood, after privately settling the question in a bare-knuckle contest in which Barney Clan
cy’s father had broken some of his former comrade’s ribs.

  A nation-wide survey of marginal seats in the paper now suggested that the Clancy family dynasty could finally be under threat in a snap election. This explained his caution in the second reply I had downloaded at the cyber cafe this morning. The first, sent at seven-fifteen last night, read like an automatic response:

  Dear Mr Shyroyal,

  Thank you for your e-mail received this evening. I will give it my urgent attention as soon as possible.

  Yours truly,

  Peter Clancy,

  Junior Minister

  The second one had been sent just before midnight from a different e-mail address:

  Dear Shyroyal,

  I am at a loss to understand your message or know how it is that I can help you. If you need assistance with something please give me more details? Communication is more immediate at this private e-mail address.

  Sincerely

  Peter Clancy,

  Junior Minister

  It was a clever reply: seemingly bland, courteous and circumspect, yet opening the door a fraction. If the name Shyroyal had not hooked him he would have ignored my e-mail. I had spent an hour drafting my reply before being satisfied with it. Headed ‘Strictly Private’ it had read:

  Dear Junior Minister,

  I need help in returning something into the right hands. Indeed I almost feel mandated to do so. Something left uncollected abroad when somebody died. It doesn’t grow on trees unless under apple boughs protected by bees. Is Maguire’s hill field still there? No back seats this time. One a.m. was once your favourite time, why break the habit. Let’s meet tonight alone.

  Shyroyal, The Jersey Rose

  Clancy would be suspicious of the e-mail and yet scared. I could be a journalist but the bees incident was so obscure and went so far back that I couldn’t even be sure if he would get the reference.

  When I was ten Barney Clancy had installed a beehive in the orchard garden of his house. One night my father inadvertently woke me by entering the outhouse with his face covered in bee stings, unaware that he was being observed as he locked something away in the filing cabinet. It was during the brief flurry of a reluctant, embarrassed police enquiry into Clancy’s alleged involvement with a parcel of farmland – adjacent to Josie’s terrace of cottages – re-zoned for housing shortly after being bought by an Isle of Man company and then resold for several times the price.

  The investigation was seen locally as a dirty-tricks salvo by the new Government to oust him from his seat at the next election. It backfired to the extent that, after his exoneration, Barney Clancy was able to bring a running mate into the Dail with him when the party swept back to power. The bees didn’t last long, but the image of my father’s blotched face had haunted me for years. All his life he had a phobia about bees, so how could he have allowed himself to get so badly stung that night? Years later in Portugal I had examined a beehive and realized how much documentation could be concealed beneath one, once some unfortunate lackey was on hand to retrieve it when required.

  Despite the collapse of the police investigation at that time rumours had lingered around Navan. Not just about the farmland (which suddenly benefited from having sewerage and other services laid across it), but about the unknown directors of another Isle of Man shell company who flattened Josie’s terrace and then got permission to build Navan’s first shopping centre in its place on the nod from my father’s development task-force.

  This begrudgery was put down to sour grapes on the part of local shopkeepers who felt threatened by the development. Most people were excited by the prospect of different shops and being able to use terms like ‘supermarket’. On Sundays families would motor in from as far as Castlejordan and Old-castle to marvel at the scale of the building site, for which Slab McGuirk and Mossy Egan won the joint contract. Its almost inaccessible location behind Emma Terrace caused incessant traffic jams. But I had always blamed Phyllis for its whereabouts, imagining that she had pressured my father into siting it there so as to shift Josie into an old folks’ chalet on the edge of town.

  The birth of Sarah-Jane changed Phyllis, making her at least in part a Navan mother. Not that people hadn’t come to regard Cormac as being as much a local as any blow-in could become. But here was a child who truly belonged to the town, one that neighbours could coo over and ask about.

  Phyllis was as nervous as a bride-to-be on the morning of Sarah-Jane’s christening – rushing back and forth to the mirror; getting Cormac to light her cigarette, terrified she would smudge her lipstick as she fretted at the front door. I was pressganged back into my now-too-small communion suit, with Cormac gleaming after the bath which she had got him to share with me – to my father’s silent apoplexy when he came in. We walked like a proper family to the cathedral, getting there just before twelve o’clock mass started. My father had asked Barney Clancy to be godfather, which accounted for the larger than usual crowd that remained behind after the mass. Neighbours came up to touch the baby and spoke warmly to Phyllis who seemed close to tears. For once she and my father actually looked like a couple. She could almost have passed for a Loreto ex-pupil. There were sandwiches in the house afterwards, with people who had never been inside the front door admiring her scrubbed kitchen and how the bread was cut in triangles with the crusts removed. Phyllis kept the back door locked as though for the first time ashamed of the outhouse instead of being ashamed of me.

  This was meant to be the day of the thaw, when Navan decided to reach out to her or maybe when Phyllis finally allowed herself to relax enough to feel accepted. Her anguish after the miscarriage (and the loss of some of her looks) had softened attitudes, as had my father’s increasing status within the County Council. Sarah-Jane was passed from arm to arm in the smoky living-room, as neighbours swapped stories of other christenings, filling out the interwoven patchwork quilt of Navan families. I moved around with plates of sandwiches as people avoided my eye or gave quick sympathetic glances. I was desperate to hear my mother’s name mentioned, but in every quilt certain patches simply get sewn over.

  Josie should never have turned up there, having not been invited. I didn’t hear a knock at the front door which some neighbour must have opened, but I sensed a sudden tension and turned to see Josie holding a neatly wrapped Babygro.

  ‘I just wanted to give you this and wish the baby a long life.’ Josie pointedly addressed my father, ignoring Phyllis who stood beside her. I don’t think it would have made much difference if Josie had been friendly. The great and good of Navan were initiating Phyllis into their chosen ranks. This was no place for some old cleaning woman with a cheap print scarf on her head.

  ‘That’s kind of you,’ my father replied, embarrassed. ‘If you’ll just give it to my wife.’

  ‘I’ll give it to you, Eamonn. I remember tasting sherry for the first time the day you were christened in the town and making sandwiches on the day poor Brendan was baptized. My good wishes are for you and the child alone.’

  I didn’t want my name mentioned. I simply wanted to exist on the edge of things, not belonging there but at least not banished to the outhouse. Phyllis gingerly prised the package from her hands.

  ‘It stinks of those filthy cottages,’ she snapped. ‘Eamonn should knock them down for the sake of the town. They’re only disease traps. Do you honestly think I’d put the likes of this on a child of mine?’

  ‘That will do now, Phyllis,’ my father said, aware of everyone present. He had always retained a soft spot for Josie. The room was silence, with the day ruined. I knew people were now just waiting to leave.

  ‘God knows what you’d put on,’ Josie said. ‘My eyesight may be failing but I still recognize a tramp if nobody else can. At least this poor baby here will know who her father is.’

  Phyllis leaned forward. Somehow she found the restraint not to grab the old woman’s hair. ‘My first husband died in Scotland when Cormac was young,’ she whispered, near tears.

  ‘Is
that why you married Eamonn in a registry office?’ Josie retorted. ‘I had my niece check the records. They have you down as a spinster, not a widow. You never saw outside a Dublin slum till Eamon Brogan let his prick override his senses. If these baby clothes smell different to you, it’s because you never knew any that didn’t have a dozen shitty arses already put through them.’ She pointed towards me. ‘Brendan’s mother’s ghost is watching over him, which is more than you do for that bastard son of yours.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ My father shouted now, furious.

  ‘I’m not the only one to first taste sherry at a christening.’ Josie looked at Phyllis and almost spat. ‘Should you decide to try your hand at mothering, you’ll find him in the lane getting sick, as stocious as the knacker who banged you up with a bastard son after paying for a knee-trembler down some stinking Dublin lane.’

  Next morning – after Phyllis had cleaned Cormac up, put him to bed and decided, with an Irish mother’s logic, that Josie had lured him into unwittingly drinking the sherry – Cormac chanced his most innocent voice over breakfast again: ‘What’s a knee-trembler, Daddy?’

  The slap across the table left a red mark on Cormac’s cheek. Phyllis’s protestations were silenced by my father’s look. Cormac didn’t seem to mind as he glanced up and winked at me. Seeing somebody else being hit made us almost seem like a normal Irish family.

  Already I was accepted as a regular in the cyber cafe where I spent the late afternoon, even recognizing some of the customers who drifted in and out. Beyond the window Dublin floated past, leaving me no longer astonished by the changes but feeling cheated. Nobody had ever hinted that things might change like this if I had stayed. I recalled Brian Lenihan laughing at the notion of full employment in an interview with Newsweek: ‘Sure how could we all live on this one little island?’