The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  IV

  TUESDAY, A.M.

  The new extended licensing hours meant that the pubs in Navan were still only emptying as the taxi manoeuvred its way through the narrow streets around Market Square. The town seemed to stretch out forever now, with estate after estate of mock period houses built in the style of Late Irish Grotesque. I let the driver drop me off at the pillared entrance to one such development on the Slane Road. There was no sign of life through the ornate gold-tipped railings, as though a curfew came into existence at eleven o’clock.

  The driver was watching so I strolled up towards the first house and waited until he had done a U-turn back towards Dublin before slipping out again to walk along the Slane Road. A straggle of old labourer’s cottages were interspersed with modern bungalows. Earthmovers had ploughed up the uneven gravel verge, entering fields marked out with crosses for new houses. Beyond a deserted garage forecourt two last streetlights watched over a junction where a night-bird alighted from a five-barred gate as I passed.

  Eventually I reached an unchanged stretch of roadway where I could recognize every bend, the stream which sometimes flooded two low-lying fields in winter and the whin bushes by Jennings’ low wall where fattened cattle liked to shelter. The stars were not as bright as I remembered them, but the halo of orange light cast by Navan had quadrupled since I had last walked here.

  Being dropped off in Navan allowed me to arrive by stealth at Maguire’s field and try to ascertain whether Clancy came alone. My right hand kept fingering the loaded gun in my pocket. It was a new experience for me and I was terrified of it suddenly going off. Several times headlights warned of an oncoming car, allowing me time to shelter in a ditch. But one car surprised me from behind, its headlights blinding me. I anticipated it swerving across the road. A glancing blow with no witnesses and a quick respray would solve Clancy’s problem of unwelcome e-mail, but not gain him the account numbers he so obviously needed. The car sped past and at heart I knew he would never risk such an accident until he discovered who I was.

  I left the road where it bent past a crooked rowan tree and took the small potholed lane leading to Maguire’s farmhouse over the hill. Halfway up I backtracked through a sloping field of wheat to the hill field under pasture where I had told Clancy to be. A car was already parked there, its lights off. I crouched beside the stone wall, watching. But there was no sign of anyone keeping guard at the edge of the field, in the bushes bordering the road or by the closed gate. The car itself could be empty for all I knew.

  I lay on my back to stare up. From here the stars looked as bright as I remembered them. Memories flooded back of a night spent lying here, having hitched from Cremore at fifteen, knowing that no search parties would be sent out. Logically I should have enjoyed Dublin. My own bedroom with no ‘Hen Boy’ jeering in my new school and even Phyllis making an effort to pretend we were one happily unhappy family. Instead I had found the house suffocating at night, missing the noise of rain on the corrugated roof. Navan used to feel safe because everyone there knew that I was nobody. But cast adrift in adolescence in Cremore I couldn’t cope with neighbours who treated me like Cormac’s equal.

  Several times I had absconded to Meath, breaking into the outhouse. Once I was discovered crouching there by the new owners and fled out into these fields. Lying here I had imagined imponderable rendezvous with my unknown future. First love, first kiss, first sex with a girl, first win at a racecourse, first everything to be savoured.

  The future lay behind me now, but it lay ahead of Conor. I could ensure he needn’t skimp like me. He wouldn’t have to search for a factory job on the day secondary school ended, while Cormac spent the summer on an exchange holiday in Paris to increase his chances of getting the points for university. If I played my cards right Conor could have money to study wherever he wished, open a business or simply travel. He need never know where the money came from but I would have left him with more than just bad memories of his father in a betting shop.

  A car door slammed. I peered into Maguire’s field at a solitary figure in an overcoat, waiting to see would he speak or signal to anyone. After a few moments Pete Clancy turned to open the car door again, as though having put the whole episode down to a hoax. Before I could change my mind I chanced my weight upon a thin strand of barbed wire and clambered through the gap. I stumbled, then regained my footing but remained crouched. The noise halted him. Clancy closed the car door and walked slowly towards where he figured I had to be. But he didn’t call out or betray any sign of nerves. His stride was almost nonchalant, as if vaguely amused to be here. I suspected it was not the strangest place he had ever met people.

  I rose to my full height, fingering the gun in my pocket. He stopped fifteen feet away, but still didn’t speak. He had become his father, the same stocky build, same unruly hair tamed by Brylcreem. I watched him try to place my face in the moonlight.

  ‘I haven’t got all night,’ he said at last, disgruntled that his silence hadn’t lured me into speaking first.

  ‘It’s not the first time you’ve been in this field?’

  He sounded baffled. ‘I’m a politician, there isn’t an inch of Meath I haven’t been in.’

  ‘Not the first time you were in this field at night.’

  My voice was familiar to him, even with the Navan accent almost gone. I could sense his mind like a computer, searching back-up files but still unable to place it in any way that made sense.

  ‘What are you saying?’ He didn’t sound defensive, just baffled. I knew he didn’t remember the incident.

  ‘A summer’s night years ago. You gave a girl a lift home from a dance in Trim.’

  ‘That wouldn’t have been unusual.’

  ‘You joked about your father never getting a first preference vote off her family.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ His memory banks were working furiously, his tone aggressive. ‘And what are you insinuating?’

  ‘Lisa Hanlon. A slight girl, not especially pretty.’

  ‘I remember the family. The grandfather was a Blueshirt in the thirties. The mother died recently.’

  ‘I’m not discussing her family. You didn’t try to rape her family. I’m discussing her.’

  ‘I remember her, all right!’ Pete Clancy muttered irritably. ‘A scrawny sparrow you couldn’t get two words out of. Who says I tried to rape her? Do you think I’m going to be frightened by some trumped-up blackmail threat?’

  ‘“You’re not getting out of this car until you give me something,” you told her.’

  On that night I had been with Cormac and his university pals at an illegal bar set up by the students’ union in the Junior Common Room in Trinity. There was a riot when porters tried to close it. Police stood outside on College Green, harmless country lads just unleashed from training in Templemore. Cormac blew them kisses, passing me a joint under their noses. ‘Young Men in Uniform,’ he’d shouted in a Polish accent, hands raised in a Papal blessing, ‘I love you!’

  ‘There was no penetration,’ Clancy said testily, jangling his car keys irritably.

  ‘Your father always said there were more ways than one to skin a cat.’

  ‘I remember nothing untoward,’ he said. ‘Nothing that wasn’t common practice back then.’

  Cormac’s friends were back at our flat on the North Circular Road, playing poker at dawn, when the police arrived. Dope was being hidden, windows opened, hard-drinking Maoist students reverting to scared South Dublin boys who hoped their daddies had sufficient connections to squash any possible conviction, when the police asked for my help in identifying a girl pulled from the canal.

  ‘Lisa thought she was going to choke,’ I said. ‘The way you wouldn’t release her head.’

  ‘There was no penetration and no complaint,’ Clancy snapped. ‘That was twenty years ago. Now what the hell business is it of yours, Hen Boy?’

  ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He stopped, shaken. ‘Your voice…for a moment it rem
inded me…’ He stepped forward, an edge of menace entering his tone. ‘Say something!’

  I remained mute, watching him examine my face more fully. The moonlight nullified the red dye in my hair, while Clancy – unlike Miriam or anyone else who first met me after the age of seventeen – knew my face when it was beardless. He had held it close to his, taunting, spitting, threatening. His eyes were wide now, scared. His hand was half-raised as if about to tear my glasses off.

  ‘You’re dead,’ he whispered finally. ‘I was at your memorial mass, along with fifty bookies and loan sharks looking for what you owed them.’

  I gripped the gun in my pocket so hard that it hurt my fingers, holding his gaze and aware that my silence was unnerving him.

  ‘Say something, fucking Hen Boy, with your stink reeking the schoolyard.’ He was trying to provoke a response, unnerved by a situation slipping beyond his control. ‘Shyroyal, my arse. Slypeasant more like. What’s one spluttery blow-job off a buck-toothed Blueshirt bitch when all of Navan knows that you rode the arse off her, then disappeared back into the arms of your red-arsed queer bastard brother.’

  The jibe about Lisa struck home. I remembered how small she had looked in the hospital ward and shame at how my initial feelings were of relief that she had tried to commit suicide because of him and not me. I was the one who had failed her, yet it was I who held her hand and persuaded her to tell the doctors her name, lying that everything would be all right. She knew it wouldn’t be, that the taste would never leave her mouth. Yet there seemed no point in going to the police about a Clancy back then. This was six months after I met Miriam. A fortnight later I heard that Lisa had emigrated, having never told her parents why she was going.

  Pete Clancy’s face came close to mine. ‘Speak, you fucking fraud! You’re meant to be dead! What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to haunt you.’

  ‘Really?’ Clancy blew air into my face and stepped back. ‘Is that meant as a threat?’

  ‘My father died of a heart attack when somebody tied him up.’

  ‘I know,’ Clancy replied. ‘Unlike you I attended his funeral.’

  ‘Maybe I was saving myself for the inquest.’

  ‘Dead by misadventure. He would never have had to leave Navan only for that shirt-lifting brother of yours. Do you know how many years his lies haunted me? That’s why your father wound up in Dublin, at the mercy of some Dublin junkie.’

  ‘A methodical junkie,’ I replied. ‘He ransacked every drawer and cupboard.’

  ‘Money for drugs, anything for a fix.’ He managed to sound sympathetic, his manner still not composed but regaining a measure of watchful cunning.

  ‘He made a poor job of the attic though.’

  He opened his mouth, then glanced quickly towards the bushes. ‘He was probably trying to grab what he could and run,’ he reasoned.

  ‘He seemed in no hurry.’ I advanced on him. ‘Until Da’s heart attack scuppered his plans.’

  Clancy stepped back, uneasily taking in how my hand clenched something in my pocket. ‘Your father was a good friend to my father.’

  ‘Maybe not such a good friend to you.’

  ‘You’re talking riddles,’ he said.

  ‘I’m talking digits,’ I corrected him. ‘Sorting codes, numbered accounts to mask identities, bogus names, watertight serials your father thought untraceable once.’

  ‘Leave Daddy out of this.’

  ‘We wouldn’t be here, Clancy, if it wasn’t for our fathers. Did they fall out?’

  ‘How would I know?’ he snapped. ‘I was never that interested in your bloody father.’

  ‘I doubt if they did. Lap dogs are never unfaithful, no matter how often their master kicks them. The problem is that they’re only ever faithful to one master.’

  ‘You’re still talking in fucking riddles, Hen Boy.’ Clancy was finding it harder to control his unease. Froth coated his lips. A car passed on the road. We both turned, startled by the intrusion, and watched tail-lights disappear from sight.

  ‘Say what you came to say,’ Clancy snapped. ‘I haven’t got all night!’

  ‘Temper,’ I mocked. ‘You always had a worse temper than even Slick McGuirk.’

  The name perturbed him. He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Do yourself a favour, Brendan, piss off back to under whatever rock you’re after crawling out from under.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘We’re different people living in different times now. Even if we regret certain things we can’t change them.’ I found it disturbing how different Clancy now looked as he spoke – weary and concerned. ‘The past is finished, kaput, over and done with.’

  ‘What if it’s still gaining interest in the Channel Islands?’

  ‘You’re an arsehole, Brogan.’ His voice was so low I could barely hear it. ‘If you have something of mine then post it to me. Now for your own sake turn around and walk away. You’ve been away so long you understand nothing.’

  I stepped back, deliberately raising my voice. ‘I understand that you don’t mind stitching up Slick McGuirk. Phyllis overheard his name only she was too frightened to tell anybody. She could be persuaded to change her mind.’

  The movement in the ditch seemed to startle Clancy more than me. I wondered was it perhaps the first act Slick McGuirk had ever done that wasn’t at his command. I had enough time to shoot him, whole seconds that stretched forever. But cowardice or greed or puzzlement at Clancy’s unexpected tone stopped me. Once I fired a shot my last hope of a passport was gone.

  By the time Clancy reacted I had already reached the gap in the ditch through which I had entered. The barbed wire almost broke beneath my foot. I threw myself towards the wheat, crouching under cover of it before rising to run. One set of boots pounded through the gap to trample the wheat behind me. Then I heard Clancy shout as the barbed wire gave way and he fell heavily. Cursing loudly another man clambered past him. This had to be P. J. Egan. It was twenty years since I’d last seen him, but Clancy would only trust people who went back so far and were as enmeshed as himself.

  Both men ran blindly behind me, but closing all the time. I heard an engine start – Pete Clancy must have hobbled back to his car. The road lay to my left with the lane directly before me, but neither would provide cover. Until my words provoked McGuirk into emerging I was still bluffing, without enough proof to be convinced that he had killed my father. If Clancy had come alone I could have struck a bargain with him – Clancy would do a deal with the devil. But McGuirk and Egan were different. I could almost smell their animal fear and hatred behind me. I needed to escape and consider my next move.

  I veered right, crouching down in the moonlit wheat. The field narrowed here as the lane swung around. Beyond it lay a small enclosure with no cover, used for grazing in the old days. Maguire’s farmhouse lay over the hill if I could get that far. McGuirk and Egan still seemed to think that I was heading for the lane, until they were alerted by a stone clattering off the wall as I clambered into the enclosure. I heard Egan shout and knew they had changed direction to follow me.

  The going was heavier in the enclosure, slowing me as I ploughed through cowpats and long tufts of grass. Both men scaled the wall, panting heavily. Without turning, I could visualize their beer bellies and sweat under the armpits of their Terylene shirts. I heard a car speed up the lane, lights off as its windscreen buffeted the overgrown hedgerows. But if I reached the farmyard before Clancy I knew that he would never dare to drive in after me and waken the Maguire household.

  McGuirk and Egan knew I had reached safety too. I heard them slow up as I crested the steep hill to climb the gate into the farmyard. Maguire’s farmhouse lay in darkness, its outhouses silent. I jumped down, hearing Clancy’s car bump over rough stones where the tarmac ran out. Headlights came on suddenly, blinding me. I turned my eyes away and saw the farmhouse properly now, with slates gone from the roof and windows boarded up. Far below on the other side of the hill light glowed from a
new bungalow built beside the ribbon of the Slane Road. McGuirk and Egan climbed over the gate, too breathless to curse. The cobbles were strewn with straw and spilt feed, the sheds padlocked. I ran past the huddle of old outhouses, knowing that a narrow gate in the far corner led into another field where the car couldn’t go.

  But I never reached there. Clancy’s headlights were right behind me, making my huge shadow shake against the white-washed walls. Something snapped inside me. All right, you fucking bully, I thought, the pair of us will go to hell together. Drawing out the gun, I turned, feeling a surge of adrenaline as I pointed it blindly at the car, a gush of power so strong it was almost sexual. My finger squeezed the trigger for one second, then two. Long enough to realize it was jammed and remember Barney Clancy’s mocking laugh upon seeing it years ago, long enough to curse Joey Kerwin and endure the oncoming realization of my own stupidity. The chicken-shit Hen Boy outfoxed again.

  I crashed onto the cobbles, trying to avoid the car. But Clancy must have swerved violently as he hit the brakes, because he managed to halt the car with its back wheels skidding around to finish inches from my face. Had McGuirk been driving I would be dead. Clancy’s henchmen were upon me within seconds, shapes indistinct as they dragged me forward into the headlights. One of them picked up the gun from the cobbles. I heard a car door open.

  ‘Why did you brake for?’ McGuirk complained. ‘It would be simpler to just run over the cunt, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you’re too chicken I’ll do it for you.’ McGuirk’s tone was wrong, lacking the servility of a lieutenant who knew his place.

  ‘I said no, Slick.’

  McGuirk sounded mutinous. ‘He knows about me and his da.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Clancy’s legs broke the beam of light as he walked around to stand in front of the car. ‘The Hen Boy died in Scotland years ago. His widow copped such a packet in compensation that my dad had to dissuade Eamonn Brogan from soliciting a contribution. There was a time when the dead might occasionally vote but they sure as hell never could talk. I remember canvassing here as a boy and watching old man Maguire kill a pig in this yard. Buckets of blood for black pudding and the screams when his throat was cut. The difference of course was that the pig existed. This fucker doesn’t.’