The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  By my fourth cup of coffee I felt sick but I stayed online, checking for mail every ten minutes and trying to talk myself out of risking the visit to Ebun but in truth I was just counting down the minutes until seven.

  Pete Clancy might have simply deleted my message, dismissing me as a crank. The cafe filled up as offices closed, with newcomers impatient at my hogging a terminal. At six o’clock I sent him another copy of my e-mail, this time to his official address in case he was only checking mail from there. But when his reply came at six-forty, it was from the private address he had given.

  Shyroyal,

  Whoever you are you’re fond of games. I can vaguely place Maguire’s hill field, which is more than I can do for you. I work hard for anyone who genuinely needs my help, but have no time for jokers. I’m attending a party meeting in Kingscourt tonight and it’s feasible that I could pass that way en route home around one thirty. But only if you could give me one good reason why I should meet you or anyone else in the middle of nowhere.

  Yours P. Clancy

  I savoured the sense of power his irked tone gave me. Trying to puzzle out who I was had him rattled. A girl behind me rose, thinking that I was finished. I hit the reply button and typed in the two emptied account numbers on my father’s list, followed by the words ‘be there’. The speed of my reply would panic him further into definitely turning up. I just still didn’t know if I had the balls to confront him.

  It was a twenty-minute walk to Ebun’s flat, where I waited behind a parked van to watch Lekan and Niyi leave. The bottleneck of rush-hour traffic was starting to ease as I scanned the row of bells at the front door, few of which had names attached. The door opened and the two Romanians from last night appeared. One muttered something before gesturing with a flick of his head that I could enter. The stairway was deserted, with a hubbub of noise behind doors on each landing. I had to knock three times at Ebun’s flat before a chain was put on and the door opened slightly. The side of Ebun’s face appeared, frowning slightly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You said I could call.’

  ‘That was before.’

  ‘I can explain,’ I said.

  ‘Men with guns always can.’

  ‘Do I look like a criminal?’

  Ebun turned slightly so I could see her hair. I wondered was she addressing somebody else in the flat. ‘This life turns us all into criminals.’

  ‘I’m dealing with dangerous people,’ I said.

  She turned her head again so I could see her eyes scrutinizing me. ‘You don’t know danger. Danger is being sealed in a truck by men with guns who say “trust me”. Danger is not knowing if you will be shot or suffocate as you’re driven across the Mali bush before the doors are unlocked again. Danger is being on a rusty boat at night from Morocco to Spain, not knowing if you’re going to be thrown overboard.’

  Her almost patronizing tone hurt.

  ‘I’m not a bad man, just out of my depth,’ I said. ‘I took a risk coming back here. Now you want me to go away again, is that it?’

  A man began shouting on a lower landing. His footsteps ascended as Ebun closed the door fully. He had reached the landing below me when I heard the chain being taken off and the handle turn. Ebun beckoned me in and closed the door.

  ‘I don’t want you to go away,’ she said. ‘I want you to hold me. It’s been so long, Brendan, since someone just held me.’

  She pressed her body against me, her arms around my back. Yet our hug wasn’t sexual, at least not at first. The voice shouted on the landing below us, with somebody else shouting back. I couldn’t understand a word of the quarrel but didn’t need to. People crammed together, feeling violated if the least of their few possessions were touched. People stranded at a crossroads with no signposts, tortured by doubts over whether they should have stayed at home, by thoughts of faces beyond reach and memories nobody else could understand.

  Ebun felt so warm, the succour of her skin through her dress, the way her leg pressed between mine. We stood, wrapped together and yet apart, each seeking solace for a grief the other could not grasp. Gradually our trembling stopped. There was a brief plateau of calm as we drew breath, looked at each other and almost laughed. ‘Mo féé,’ she murmured. ‘Mo féé.’ Then a different trembling began, hands no longer restrained, seeking a more physical and immediate healing balm.

  I had never seen a black woman naked before. I wanted to undress her and slowly take my time. Ebun insisted on matching me, button for button. The weight of her breasts was in my hands as we kissed and her fingers stroked my nipples. Shouts from a block of flats beyond the gardens, girls’ voices calling, a dog’s incessant bark. The wonder of her skin, softness like no other. The down of pubic hair that she shielded with her hand, not allowing me to look. Ebun’s weight on top of me as she seized command. A sensation of being pummelled as her buttocks heaved up and down. Her flesh was mesmeric and different, illicit to the small-town boy inside me who had never changed. My eyes closed. It almost felt like being back in that outhouse with Cormac, the newness of his hand and tongue opening me up. Then the image changed from Cormac to Conor and how he must have looked with Charles in my old bedroom.

  I opened my eyes, disturbed. Ebun looked down, her hands leaving the pillow to grip my shoulders. She held me there, saying nothing but making me focus on her and the present tense. On my head thrashing on the pillow, my body suddenly arched and buckling. On the cry drowned in my throat by her tongue and how her body kept moving, prolonging her silent pleasure long after I had come.

  It was eight-thirty by her cheap watch on the dresser when I woke. Ebun lay beside me with the blanket tight around her. I had the impression she had been watching me while I slept.

  ‘E káalé,’ she said, almost teasingly.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

  ‘Why would I not be?’ she replied. ‘I feel good, clean. You must leave before they come back.’

  ‘Tomorrow…’

  ‘Yes?’

  It felt awkward, with different lives colliding. I had always lacked Cormac’s gift of moving chameleon-like between different sets of circumstances.

  ‘I do not know if I will still be around.’

  Ebun pulled the blankets tighter. ‘What do you think I am after? Marriage, a passport?’

  ‘Don’t take me up wrong.’

  ‘I might not be around either,’ Ebun retorted. ‘I do not know when a knock on the door will come to deport me. Either way I will never be owned by any man or family again.’

  ‘This business that I came back for…I don’t know where it will lead. But if I can I want to see you again.’ I gazed around. ‘This room is the only place in Dublin where I still feel at home.’

  ‘What did you expect?’ Ebun replied. ‘Once you leave there is no way back.’

  ‘It’s different for me.’

  ‘Everyone housed in this building says that. It’s only different because you ran away. You didn’t see your family butchered, your son dragged off to be a soldier or your daughter whimper to death. You suited yourself.’

  ‘I needed to find myself.’

  Ebun’s laugh hurt for being incredulous, as if at a child. ‘I do not understand “find yourself”? I understand about finding food and water. Finding money to bribe a criminal to stick you in another truck from Spain to Ireland where you almost choke on your own vomit from the fumes. Lekan had to come home to find his wife raped, his child dead. All you had to find was yourself and now you think you have the right to come home.’

  ‘I’ve more right to be here than…’ I stopped myself.

  ‘Than me?’ She stroked my face. ‘Perhaps so. But I have more need.’

  I left the bed and splashed water on my face. People shouted again in a foreign language downstairs.

  ‘We both have needs,’ I said. ‘I need my son.’

  ‘Then go to him. Because I would give my life to see my daughter for one moment.’

  I turned. ‘You left a daughter behind?�
��

  ‘In a hole in the ground where her aunts could not hurt her again,’ she said. ‘Do you think I would leave her if she was alive?’

  ‘What happened?’

  Ebun lay back. Her voice didn’t sound like her own. It was distant, factual, as though there was no emotion left to be wrung. ‘What can happen to girls at a certain age, what my father insisted would not happen to me and I swore would never happen to her. It is illegal but Ede, where my husband brought me to live, is remote. The head of police in that part of town is from my husband’s family. Almost everyone important is. My husband’s mother and her sisters, they made sure I was out of the compound. I knew they had played a trick once I got off a truck in the square. You could hear my daughter’s screams even at that distance. Maybe they rushed the job for fear I would come back. My mother-in-law hated that I answered back and spoke for my husband at their family gatherings because he would not speak for himself. I did not know my place. They said that only a widow had the right to speak like I did. My daughter was too like me. It was their way to brand her as one of them.’

  Cold water dripped down my face. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all I could think to say.

  ‘It is easier for Jewish boys. They get presents, they do not bleed to death.’

  The room felt cold. I put my shirt on, desperate for a cigarette. The sense of healing was gone.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘The deed was done and covered up. His family did not approve of what his mother did, but they protected her. I left with Lekan who came for me.’

  ‘And Niyi?’

  ‘I do not talk about Niyi.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My husband’s cousin had money. He was well named – Niyi means Wealth has Value. But always he was the black sheep. He did not approve of what they did, but even he did not go to the police in Lagos. Instead he paid for all three of us to leave.’

  ‘So you owe Niyi.’

  ‘I owe nobody nothing. But I will never go back, even if your people deport me. My home died with her last cry. Death would be better than back there.’ She looked across. ‘Please leave now. They will return soon. Go to your hotel, go anywhere.’

  ‘I’m going to a bar,’ I said, making my mind up.

  ‘How will getting drunk help you?’

  ‘Last night I spied on my son and heard him mention he might be there.’ I put on my jacket. ‘What does Ebun mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Gift of God.’

  I took out the envelope containing the account numbers and Shyroyal documents, wrote Pete Clancy’s name and office number on the front and placed it beside her on the bed.

  ‘Keep this safe,’ I said. ‘I have no one else to trust. Later tonight I must meet someone. If I do not call again and they try to deport you, phone this man, read out the first number inside and tell him he can have the rest when your permit for asylum arrives.’

  I did not kiss her and she did not smile. I undid the chain and opened the door. Niyi stood on the landing outside. He looked scared and watchful. I had no idea how much he had heard. Neither of us spoke as I brushed past and headed down the stairs.

  If Sarah-Jane’s christening was the talk of Navan, then her first birthday was to be celebrated more quietly seven months after we fled to Cremore. It happened so quickly that I never even knew the house was being sold until the day Phyllis began packing. But things started to lurch in that direction on the night, two weeks after the christening, when I attended Navan dog track for the second time in my life. There was a party function on in Cork that night with my father glad to escape overnight from this new nocturnal world of night feeds and sleep deprivation. Normally Cormac would never risk visiting the outhouse before midnight, but at 9 p.m. I heard his knock on the wood. Fully dressed, he almost danced on the path.

  ‘She’s zonked out with the light off. She won’t wake till the baby wakes at twelve. We’ve been talking all evening with Cranky Eamonn out of the way. I finally got her to tell about my real father, a man she met in Scotland. He sounds lovely. She fell in love with him, even though she didn’t know his name. I want to do something crazy, let’s go to the dog track.’

  How did Cormac know that I loved spying through the corrugated iron fence at the greyhound track? He always seemed to guess people’s weak spots. If we were caught I knew that I would be beaten and he would not. But I let myself be persuaded, as both of us ran with half-tied laces through back lanes with the stench of alcohol and cigarettes blown out through pub extractor fans.

  Stopping at the public toilets he beckoned me in. The floor was flooded, the lights broken. He guided me into a cubicle like an archaeologist exploring an Egyptian tomb and struck a match to reveal the graffiti there. Crude drawings of oversized breasts and penises, slogans for the IRA and against the EEC and dangerous messages scrawled in biro: Be here at six-thirty, Tuesday, I have nine inches for you. Underneath in a different hand: I was here. Where were you? Friday lunchtime, I’ll kneel and suck you dry. Under it again, in black marker: Fucking queers, you should be burnt alive.

  ‘Come on, Cormac, it’s disgusting. Let’s go before someone finds us.’ He ignored me and lit another match, his mesmerized look disturbing me.

  ‘Who is this man, do you think? Where would you find him?’ He pointed to a name mentioned in three different messages on the wall – Bartley Dunne’s.

  ‘I don’t know. Come on before someone comes!’

  Eventually my anxiety spurred him into leaving. There were two races left when we reached the dog track. The gates were open, with punters already departing. Nobody challenged us. I found a programme on the ground and studied the names and strange codes of times and form.

  ‘Let’s bet.’ Cormac took a ten-pound note from his pocket.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘I just did. I was saving it.’

  I remembered my father ransacking the outhouse but telling nobody what he was searching for. Before I could challenge him Cormac was walking along the line of bookies with their leather bags. Each refused his bet until the last one glanced around, then took the tenner and gave him a ticket and three pounds change.

  His dog limped home second last. Cormac seemed unperturbed, more interested in observing Pete Clancy and his overweight mother among the crowd. ‘I’ll get him back for you one day,’ he said, ‘just like I got all the others. I’m no good at betting, you try your hand. I’m going to the toilets.’

  I knew he didn’t need to, he just wanted to study any graffiti on the walls. But I didn’t care what trouble he got himself into. Here I actually was at last on these steps, holding a programme between my shaking fingers and with money to burn. What was the smallest bet I could put on? Fifty pence maybe. What would Cormac say if I lost it? The printed times meant nothing to me, nor the condensed shorthand notes that outlined each dog’s form. A small crowd gathered around the parade ring. I liked the look of number five, how he strained at his lead and something about his eyes. Pete Clancy glared over, knowing I had no right to be among decent people. Tomorrow I would get a kicking after school. But I didn’t even care if they dragged me off to his makeshift wigwam by the river like he always threatened to do. I was going to finally place a bet and not just for fifty pence. It was everything or bust. The bookie didn’t want to take it. ‘What the hell age are you, sonny?’ he snapped. ‘Do you want me to lose my licence?’

  ‘My da sent me down,’ I pleaded. ‘He’s in the bar. He’ll beat me if I don’t get a ticket.’

  Greed and not pity made him take the bet. Three pounds on a no-hope outsider. Number five didn’t deserve to win, but the leaders collided. Even then they were catching him all the way. I didn’t shout or scream like others in the crowd. I was totally still, transfixed for twenty-nine point eight two seconds. No other life existed. No Pete Clancy, no outhouse. Just me and that dog racing as one. Cormac returned as people started to disperse. He glanced at my face.

  ‘You lost, eh?’

  �
��No,’ I replied. ‘I won. What does nine to one mean?’

  Nine to one plus the stake back meant thirty pounds. The bookie demanded to see my father. Alone I would have fled, frightened that the row would be reported back. But Cormac stood up to him, exacting every penny. We walked home, shell-shocked by our fortune.

  ‘You’re a genius,’ he said. ‘A sheer fecking genius. What will you do with the money?’

  ‘There’s a hole in that tree in the lane. We’ll keep it there.’ My euphoria was gone. Thirty pounds would not change my life. Even with three hundred I would lack the courage to run away. I yearned to be back in the outhouse where I could relive the sensation of placing that bet again and again.

  A week later I woke to hear the outhouse door being thrust open. It couldn’t be Cormac who always had to knock four times as I had the hidden key. I pulled the blanket tight around me, convinced that my father had been told about the dog track and I was due a midnight beating. Phyllis stood behind him in a nightdress. This had to be really bad. I started shaking, too scared to cry.

  ‘Where is he? Where the hell do you have him?’

  The light blinded me. I put my hand up to cover my eyes and when I took it away my father was shifting the filing cabinets, looking behind his old desk, snatching at my blankets. If he had a knife he would have slashed the mattress open.

  ‘Where is he, Brendan? Tell me.’ Phyllis spoke pleadingly, her use of my name disturbing me. Normally I was just ‘you’ or ‘him’. They looked haggard. Sarah-Jane had croup and neither had known a proper night’s sleep all week.

  My father stopped searching, finally convinced that Cormac wasn’t hiding in the outhouse. Phyllis started crying. ‘Have you seen him, Brendan?’ she beseeched. ‘He can’t swim. What if he goes near the river? You know him. Surely you know where he is?’

  She was wrong on both counts. It wasn’t possible to know Cormac. At most you could hope to share the same space as him. I had no idea where he was, beyond suspecting that our thirty pounds was gone too. They treated me as their only hope. My father didn’t want the police involved. We drove for half the night, along every back lane in Navan where I scrambled onto the back of parked container trucks and peered into disused warehouses, calling his name. Then out along the Boyne as far as Bective, as I searched one riverbank while my father took the other and Phyllis shivered up on each bridge, jigging the whimpering baby wrapped in a white blanket.