The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  I almost drowned, wading into reeds with a stick, and lost a shoe in thick mud. Phyllis didn’t scream about the waste of money. Instead she called me a great boy and asked would I keep on searching barefoot. A heron fished at a weir where the reflection of trees turned the water green in the dawn light. I didn’t want to find Cormac, I wanted to search on, basking in their gratitude as I tore my face and clothes. This was what it must feel like to be him, I thought, the focus of attention.

  I climbed into the ruined abbey at Bective, scouring the nave and oratory, heedless of stones cutting into my soles. A tractor started nearby, with cattle being herded for milking. Phyllis, who had driven on towards Trim, returned and beeped the car horn. I knew they didn’t want to be seen. All the way home she convinced herself that Cormac would be waiting there and warned my father not to strike him. His bedroom was empty. It was years since I had stood in the doorway. I was afraid the dried blood from the cuts on my feet would stain the carpet.

  ‘I have to go to school,’ I said.

  ‘Skip school for once,’ Phyllis replied. ‘You deserve it. Wash your feet, take some food and go to bed.’

  She looked puzzled before I realized that I was smiling at her. Tentatively she smiled back and I almost swelled with pride. No longer tired, I felt like a dog with two tails. My euphoria lasted to the foot of the stairs where I overheard her tell my father: ‘Keep him home for as long as Cormac’s away. We don’t want lies spread around the town.’

  Two nights later four knocks on the outhouse door announced Cormac’s return. He looked different, like an inflated version of himself.

  ‘Where the hell were you?’ I asked. ‘They have the guards trawling the river for you.’

  ‘Why?’ He looked incredulous. ‘I hate water. Bartley Dunne’s isn’t a man, it’s a pub. I hitched to Dublin and had the most wonderful time.’

  ‘Where did you stay?’

  ‘A man’s flat. I met him outside the pub. It was wonderful. He thought I was a fifteen-year-old Protestant escaped from the Freemasons’ boarding school.’ Cormac affected an upper-class accent that made him sound older. ‘We tried everything together. Everything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I glanced through the chicken wire, terrified of lights appearing in the house.

  ‘I’m not alone. There are dozens in Ireland like me, hundreds even, maybe.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t like girls the way you do, Brendan. I have to describe girls to get you excited, but I get excited just seeing you.’

  I was confused, scared for him and myself. He looked so animated I was afraid he would climb onto the outhouse roof and tell all of Navan about his adventures. He jigged around describing the man’s house in Sutton with views of the sea and a special machine he had to make real apple juice.

  ‘I had to seduce him,’ Cormac said. ‘He kept saying I was too young, so I told him all about you.’

  ‘You told him what?’ I was truly petrified now.

  ‘That you were twenty-six with a job in the bank and we’d been lovers for two years.’

  ‘Jesus, Cormac. You didn’t tell him my name?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Cormac smiled. ‘Brendan is too common for a Protestant name. I made one up. That’s all you need do if you want to be someone else. You don’t always have to be you, you know.’

  ‘I don’t want us to do those things again,’ I said. ‘They’re not right.’

  ‘That’s true.’ He took out a packet of cigarettes and offered me one. ‘With you they’re not right. You’re not one of us. I can tell the difference now.’

  Sarah-Jane started crying in the house, an angry scream, demandingattention. The bedroom light came on. We watched Phyllis’s silhouette pacing the floor, trying to soothe her.

  ‘Your mother’s been crying for days,’ I said. ‘Don’t you care for her?’

  ‘Yes.’ Cormac’s voice sounded sombre. ‘But it was better when there was only the two of us in a flat and your father came and went. I remember her waiting at the window and it always felt like Christmas when he came. Navan was never the same. What I did in Dublin wasn’t wrong, but what they’ve done to you is. I knew it from the day they put you in here. I just never found a way to make her understand.’ He looked at me and laughed. ‘Let’s live in Dublin. It’s the place to be. There’s an open market called the Dandelion and proper record shops. We’ll make them move.’

  ‘How?’

  A second silhouette appeared at the curtain, my father jadedly taking his turn. Cormac touched me. I stepped back wincing but he calmed me, rolling up my vest to examine my bruised back.

  ‘It was Pete Clancy, wasn’t it? I saw him give you a hiding in the lane on Monday with boys looking on. I want to make him suffer.’

  ‘Don’t be crazy. Nobody can touch a Clancy.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette and walked outside to toss the butt into Casey’s garden. ‘Lock the door,’ he whispered, ‘or they’ll know you have a key.’

  ‘What are you going to say to them?’

  Cormac didn’t reply, just picked up a pebble and aimed it at their window. I locked the door, hid the key and watched through the chicken wire as his second pebble caused the curtain to twitch. Phyllis was the first to make it down. The baby cried away ignored upstairs while Phyllis wept and hugged her son. Finally she let him go and looked back towards my father in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘I want an explanation,’ he said. ‘It’s been three nights.’

  ‘I was afraid.’ Cormac broke down in tears.

  ‘Afraid of who?’

  ‘Pete Clancy.’

  Phyllis looked back at my father, silencing him. ‘Why are you afraid of him?’ she asked.

  ‘He did things to me. Things I didn’t want to do.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Dirty things. After school on Monday in the wigwam they’ve built by the river. He said he’d drown me if I didn’t let him.’ He leaned forward and whispered something. Phyllis stepped back as if she’d just been slapped and turned to my father.

  ‘Do something,’ she screamed, causing lights to come on in back bedrooms along the street. ‘You have got to do something!’

  My father looked rattled, unsure of what to believe. ‘How the hell can I?’ he snapped. ‘What proof do I have?’

  ‘This.’ Cormac spoke clearly enough for the listening neighbours to hear. He slipped his shirt off and turned so they could see his bare shoulders in the light from the kitchen doorway. Phyllis ran her fingers lightly along his neck and turned away.

  ‘You can see the nail marks,’ she wailed. ‘That Clancy bastard almost clawed the skin off his back. What are you going to do, Eamonn? Are you a coward or what?’

  Even if my father did nothing, I knew that by teatime tomorrow adult whispers about Pete Clancy would have insidiously reached every corner of Navan. Rumours more damaging than even the most savage beating I had fantasized about. Watching my father I should have felt a thrill of revenge. Instead I felt such anger that I found myself shaking. Four years ago I had cried, telling him the truth about Pete Clancy beating Cormac up. The man had refused to allow himself to believe what he knew was true. His face told me that he was sceptical of Cormac, yet I knew he would allow himself to believe this lie.

  Over the next few days my father did what any official in his position would do. He talked of going to the parish priest, the school principal and the police. He swore to have it out with Barney Clancy and bring that man to his knees because of his son. Then he went silent, knowing that his bluff was being called by the rumours about Cormac and Pete Clancy which had been exaggerated as they spread throughout the town. To my father power was about the control of perception and this time he was powerless. He sat up drinking for two nights, unable to bear being in the same room as Cormac. A week later he came home with a determined look, summoned me from the outhouse to sit with Cormac and drove off with Phyllis and the baby.

  That afternoon he showed Phyll
is the solution to the problem, keeping his back turned as he stared out of the bay window and talked about the move being in everyone’s interests. He would have been too embarrassed to watch her breast-feed Sarah-Jane in the empty living-room of the house he had hastily purchased in Cremore.

  Half an hour after leaving Ebun’s flat I slipped down a lane beyond George’s Street and discovered that I knew the Oliver Twist pub and yet I didn’t. I had drunk there during a different incarnation, when it was Boyle’s Bar. The long marble counter was all that remained from the days when a white-aproned Mr Boyle patrolled its length, refusing to serve pints to women and deciding, with his own perverse logic, who to bar on sight and who to eventually initiate as an accepted regular by plonking a ‘Baader Meinhof’ before them – a cocktail concocted and christened by himself ‘because it would blow the head off you, boy’.

  Golfers qualified for the US Masters easier than most drinkers qualified for a ‘Meinhof’. This was why a ripple of awe passed through the bar when Cormac earned us both one on our first visit, due to Mr Boyle’s child-like amazement at Cormac’s disappearing ten-pound note trick.

  Like all of Cormac’s scams it was simplicity itself. He asked Mr Boyle to take ten pounds from the till, write his initials in one corner, place it inside the white handkerchief in Cormac’s hand and stare intently at the raised handkerchief for forty seconds. This was long enough for me to discreetly pick the banknote off the floor (where Cormac had dropped it when raising the handkerchief), use it to get change for the cigarette machine off the dozy barman at the far end of the counter and disappear into the toilets before Cormac opened the handkerchief with a flourish to reveal a note inside announcing, ‘It’s in the far till behind you’.

  Mr Boyle had been enthralled (plus unwittingly ten pounds poorer) and – aged twenty-one and twenty-two – we became his youngest accepted regulars by around twenty years. Cormac might have felt more at home in the Oliver Twist now, but the barman would have given him the same ‘here comes another cradle-snatcher’ look as I received when I sat at the counter to order a drink.

  The funny thing was that it was here, watching ranks of openly gay men converge around crowded tables and cram onto the small dance floor in this utterly changed pub, that I felt in danger of being recognized. Not that I knew many faces, but several old acquaintances of Cormac’s stood out. Men with whom he had brief and casual affairs, with Cormac allowing them just close enough to realize afterwards that they had only the vaguest sense of who he was. Nobody ever penetrated the vague friendliness behind which he kept the world at bay, until Alex Lever arrived from Scotland to work in the newly opened Blackrock Private Clinic.

  If few people present might remember Cormac, his relationship with Alex Lever would still be talked about by many gays who came out in the 1980s. One man glanced across to scrutinize me and looked puzzled, confronted by a hybrid of memories. With my dyed hair I looked enough like Cormac to fool customs officials who glanced quickly at his passport, yet still sufficiently like an older beardless version of myself to confuse the drinker who turned away. He had been a volunteer doorman in the Hirshfield Centre, Dublin’s first gay club in Fownes Street among the cobbled rundown lanes in what became Temple Bar, on the night I brought Miriam there after the pubs closed on our first proper date.

  She was incredulous at first, refusing to believe we were actually going in even when I explained that – unlike Zhi-vago’s or McGonegal’s or other straight night-clubs – there was no hassle from bouncers or barmen ripping you off. Girls from the Dunnes Stores meat counter often arrived en masse to enjoy the company of stylish male dancers without the hassle of being drunkenly pawed.

  I had made it sound like an adventure she could laugh about with friends, but in reality I wanted to show her off to Cormac. A girlfriend was probably the only thing that Cormac would not borrow and forget to give back. This was before Alex Lever, when Cormac was still the carefree centre of attention among a group of young men in the TV room upstairs. Immediately he charmed Miriam, feeding her the most outrageous lies about me. I remembered how natural everything seemed that night with Cormac’s friends making Miriam welcome, teasing him and being teased back as they conveyed the image of a perfect Peter Pan world.

  So why did the world inside the Oliver Twist seem sinister now as I scanned the tables for any sign of Conor? AIDS had occurred in the meantime, but it was more than that risk or Conor’s age which made me uncomfortable. It was hypocritical to feel that what had been all right for a brother was not okay for a son. Still I hated the notion of Conor belonging among this pumping music and the mêlée of hands touching shoulders as men passed. It reinforced just how much of his growing up I had missed. I spotted Charles who danced with another young man in the ruck of bodies, with Charles whispering in his ear. I must have stared so hard that eventually his companion noticed and said something. Charles looked across, giving me a cheeky dismissive wink, then continued dancing.

  I turned to order another drink, with the barman mustering a sympathetic ‘I-told-you-so’ look. Younger voices suddenly besieged my shoulder, calling him by name, clamouring for attention. Immediately I knew that Conor was among them. I recognized his laugh and heard within it not only a disconcerting echo of Cormac but of my own father’s voice too.

  Conor stood directly at my shoulder, pressing against me in his anxiety to be served. The child wasn’t old enough to be in any pub, let alone here. I wanted to turn and look up into his face but couldn’t bring myself to. Yet I could almost feel his breath and sense his aura of youth, so eager for experience and open to hurt. His hand came down onto the counter next to mine, lifting the first drinks and passing them back. Such long fingers he always had, made to play the piano. Chatting about the march they had been on, he handed the money over, hovered for his change and was gone.

  Eventually I found the strength to turn and watch him laugh among a large group which Charles had also joined. His hair was the same colour as mine had been once, yet he looked more like Cormac. Charles drifted away, pausing to joke with somebody before following the youth he had danced with into the gents. I had simply wanted to feel close to Conor for a while, but found myself following Charles.

  The music was even louder in the toilets, the walls dominated by an archly ironic mural, a pastiche of The Bathers by Seurat. I half expected to find them in some cubicle together, but the other youth was washing his hands at the gold-topped taps, while Charles urinated with his back to me. As the youth left, Charles looked up, taking in my presence in the mirror above the urinals.

  ‘You got a problem?’ he asked, starting to do his buttons up. I didn’t reply. He turned and brushed past me to reach the washbasins.

  ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’m asking.’

  ‘Old enough to know better.’ He flicked water towards me. ‘But still young enough to enjoy it.’

  He dried his hands and walked towards the door, deliberately barging against my shoulder.

  ‘You hurt Conor in any way and I’ll come looking for you, pal.’

  He looked back, perturbed and less cocksure, unable to decide if I was an admirer of Conor’s or a family member dragging in the dangers of the outside world. His uncertainty made him look younger.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Still young enough to burst your balls, Charlie boy.’

  He didn’t reply, just stared one last time and left. I found myself trembling, knowing that I had said too much and should leave now. But I felt like a fly trapped on insect paper. The thought of Conor being so tantalizingly close was killing me. I closed over a cubicle door, staring at the graffiti and the small hole punched in the wall into the next cubicle. What was Charles telling Conor now? Suppose he came in, demanding to know who I was? I couldn’t bear the thought of meeting him in a toilet. Unlocking the cubicle, I splashed water on my face and went back outside.

  Every seat along the counter was
taken. The pub was packed, with more punters spilling in. Screens on the walls displayed videos while music blasted from the speakers. The former doorman from the Hirshfield Centre appeared at my shoulder.

  ‘I just can’t put a name on you,’ he said. ‘But I know your face from years back. Was it on holidays somewhere?’

  I shook my head, afraid to let him hear my voice. My collar was stained with red hair-dye in the heat. Charles must have said something because Conor glanced over, half-threateningly and half-scared. Who did he see? Yesterday I had not recognized him and he was only seven when I disappeared, but surely some memory of me remained with him? Not that I wanted us to speak because I wouldn’t know where to begin.

  Men jostled me as I blocked the crowded floor, but I refused to budge, watching Conor intently and not caring how others at his table had started jeering at him over having an admirer. My son was just so beautiful and I was so proud of him and ashamed of myself. He checked his watch, with Charles obviously offering to accompany him. But Conor shook his head, grabbed his jacket and headed for the door. His friends looked over as though defying me to follow. I half-thought they were going to block my path, but I would have fought my way past them because my resolution was gone. I couldn’t bear to be parted from the sight of my son.

  It was cold outside in the dark lane. Conor had almost reached George’s Street. He glanced back to register my presence and ducked into a smaller alley, confusing me. Could he be waiting there? The thought was horrifying – maybe he liked older men. Then I remembered that a shortcut there led out into Dame Street. I prayed that he was trying to lose the person he presumed to be an admirer, but I followed just the same.