The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  Their advantages, of course, included not having a child to raise, plus exotic holidays twice a year. We only went abroad once, when we visited them – courtesy of a secret treble at Folkestone, after which I went straight to the travel agent’s without giving myself time to lose the lot on the next race. It wasn’t the scale of their apartment, occupying the top two storeys of a Victorian house, which stood out, but how ornaments were casually placed on low shelves that a child could reach. Most of the holiday was spent saving them from four-year-old Conor’s clutches.

  A change in Cormac was evident on that trip and not just in the glasses that he had started wearing. Cormac had been wide-eyed, subservient and financially dependent on Alex when they first met. Now in his late twenties he had a good job in Perth (though not as good as his degree would have got him in a bigger city) and there was less of a boyish quality about him. Alex and himself seemed more like equals, knowledgeably discussing wines when they took us out for a meal and debating the merits of little-known resorts in Tunisia and Morocco. His impromptu magic tricks and devil-may-care impersonations had been suppressed as he slowly became a mini-version of the man he loved. But an impish version of his little-boy-lost persona resurfaced at night when Alex imperiously sat down with his Financial Times and Cormac made the mock plea, ‘Can I read the funnies, Daddy?’

  I was proud of him. When they were both at work and Miriam and Conor were soaking in the huge bath on cast-iron legs in a room to itself on the top floor, I sometimes opened his wardrobe. I would finger his suits and jackets, as scared of being caught as if I had sneaked upstairs in our old house in Navan. My kid brother who towered over me. The family success, married to a doctor.

  Not that Phyllis or my father saw it that way, though it was hard to discern what my father chose to see as communication between us had virtually ceased. Miriam maintained some contact because she felt Conor should know his grandfather, though her reports of my father doting on him only caused an unspoken ire within me. Phyllis’s barely concealed antipathy towards Miriam was sufficient to make such dutiful visits infrequent and Cormac was never mentioned during them.

  But it was for Phyllis’s sake that Cormac returned home three times a year and even lured her to Perth when Alex was safely abroad at a conference. Once he even insisted on taking us all for a family meal in the Trocarado restaurant in Dublin. It consisted of my father who spent the evening complaining about the prices though he wasn’t paying; a teenage Sarah-Jane with her musician escort who, if he made up for in bed what he lacked in basic speech, could bring her entire sixth-year convent class to orgasm; Miriam who wasn’t speaking to me after discovering a betting slip in my jeans and Phyllis who could have passed for Nancy Reagan from the adoring way she gazed at Cormac every time he spoke.

  But mainly he met Phyllis alone, though once he insisted upon dragging me along to a coffee shop with them. Her conversation was a labyrinthine code, in which she enquired about his ‘flatmate’ (Alex); his health (AIDS); his job (potential promotions); how much danger existed in the world (AIDS); did he meet many new people in work (had her prayers been answered by a girlfriend); and her worries for Sarah-Jane (that she might contract AIDS even quicker than Cormac).

  Cormac’s conversation was more direct and increasingly one-track – his real father. Apart from being Scottish what did Phyllis recall about him? Lowering her voice, embarrassed at my presence, Phyllis had pleaded that she had nothing more to tell. It occurred when she was young and naive, working in a Glasgow hotel. He had come in with an older self-important man who was so demeaning and suggestive that she ran from the building crying. He had followed, upset at her being upset. ‘Your father was a nice man, a gentleman,’ she repeated, holding Cormac’s hand across the table.

  The man had insisted on walking her home and she felt safe with him, so safe that things happened which neither of them had planned. He was trapped in a loveless marriage, but had not revealed this until the end of the night. He had come back to the hotel looking for her, but she ran away because she did not want to be the destroyer of any marriage.

  ‘Surely he had a name at least,’ Cormac had persisted.

  ‘What married man gives a real name?’ Phyllis replied. ‘You’d never be up to married men, son, always looking for somebody young.’ Her tone was unconsciously woman-to-woman as I watched their heads bend closer together over the cafe table.

  Next came my father’s entry into the fantasy which I now think she had been weaving for so long that she half believed it herself. Her own family had cut her off as she struggled to keep Cormac from the grasp of district nurses and sour-faced nuns smelling of peppermint who wanted to snatch him away into an orphanage. One evening she was put out of her digs in Glasgow because Cormac wouldn’t stop crying. She repeatedly walked the long stretch from Argyle Street to Gallowgate until rain drove her to shelter on a bench in the vast concourse of Central Station.

  She claimed that my father heard her Dublin accent as she tried to hush Cormac. He was in Glasgow on business, with my mother not long dead. Seeing her distress, he had bought her tea in the cramped station buffet that was about to close for the night. It was he who paid for a guesthouse for her and Cormac and brought them back to Dublin. At first she had told him she was widowed too, out of shame. When they married in Dublin they decided to maintain the pretence in Navan, so that people would not look down on Cormac. Even if some neighbours weren’t fooled, they would have gone along with the deception only for ‘that interfering old bitch Josie’. But my father never showed favouritism, she emphasized, refusing to glance in my direction. He had been a good father to Cormac and it would break her heart if Cormac went snooping around Scotland looking for someone else.

  I remembered the dread in her voice again now as the truck entered Navan, getting snarled in early morning traffic. Commuters swarmed from new estates, fighting their way towards the Dublin Road. In the light of what Pete Clancy had said I went over Phyllis’s version, filtering out the pure invention, half-truths, excuses and special pleadings. Being evicted from lodging houses was probably true, with doors slammed in her face at the sight of the child. Perhaps my father had tracked her down in the station concourse in Glasgow, two years after fleeing Barney Clancy’s plans for the nuns to get their hands on her child? But my mother had still been alive when he tracked down his illegitimate son. Was their marriage loveless or was this another veiled self-justification invented by Phyllis? I would never know how much my mother had known when she stepped off the footpath at Ludlow Street.

  The driver looked across as we passed that. ‘Where do you want to be dropped?’ he shouted.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Right so.’ The street was so narrow that he didn’t pull in, just simply stopped. There was a loud beep and one car with a Cavan registration somehow squeezed past.

  ‘Mean fecking Cavan cunt,’ the driver said, ignoring the build-up of traffic behind us as he watched me climb down. ‘You heard what the Cavanman said when he found a fly in his pint?’ He squeezed his forefinger and thumb together, addressing the imaginary fly trapped between them. ‘Spit it back out, you thieving bastard.’

  He drove off, still laughing at his own joke. I stood on a corner of my hometown, as lost as Phyllis surely must have felt on the afternoon when we first drove into the papier-mâché world of lies and evasions that comprised her life in Navan. Maybe initially it was to protect Cormac, but she had continued lying to her adult son in order to shield my father and preserve the facade of his first marriage. Cormac’s voice had sounded so plaintive in that cafe years ago as he asked, ‘Then why can’t I remember anything of Glasgow?’

  ‘Children forget, love. You were much too young.’

  Children may forget, but they vividly remember everything again in middle age. My head ached from the night’s events. I needed to lie down and think, needed to get away from passers-by staring at my dishevelled condition. My legs traced a familiar route along streets soon to be thronged with sc
hoolchildren. I kept my head down, dodging into the back lane. The estate agent had said that the Hanlon house was empty, with Lisa not due home until the morning of the auction. The trees in the back lane were much bigger now. The potholed surface remained the same, although more overgrown with no through traffic now. Most entrances to the sheds where men once laboured over furniture were bricked up. But I could still discern the rates, in pounds, shillings and pence, that Lisa Hanlon’s father had painted on his wooden door when he used to respray cars in the late 1960s. A battered chair had been dumped with other litter beyond it. Hanlon’s shed roof had seemed so high once. It was easier to reach up to it now, yet I found it harder to climb.

  Nobody stirred in the back gardens as I dropped down. I ducked under the apple trees, stumbling over windfalls in the long grass. The original iron windows were still in place. If you banged at the centre of the small middle frame its handle popped up. I climbed onto the sill and reached my hand in. The handle of the main sitting-room windowframe was stiff after countless coats of paint, but eventually I managed to prise it open. The furniture there held no grandeur this morning. I just needed somewhere to rest before deciding what to do next.

  There was an antiquated black phone in the hall. I picked it up, surprised that it was not disconnected. I had no idea what I wanted to say, but I needed to make sure that Conor was OK. The old Cremore number rang eight or nine times. Just when I was convinced nobody was at home it was picked up and a voice said ‘Hello?’

  It was Miriam. Sweet Jesus, I realized how much I had missed her voice. I listened to my wife say ‘Hello?’ several times before she put the receiver down. I kept waiting for her to say, ‘Brendan, I know it’s you out there.’ They were the words I’d wanted every time I had phoned after my disappearance until the number was disconnected. Surely just once she must have guessed it was me.

  I sat back on the floor, resisting the temptation to dial the number again. Her voice had made her shockingly real. The woman I had once imagined would always be there, putting up with me, ready to forgive and start afresh. The peculiar curve of her breasts that always thrilled me when they tumbled from her bra, the way she preferred to make love in the mornings kneeling up on the bed. Her pet names for me, names she only whispered when close to orgasm, her voice suddenly child-like. The love I had despoiled and thrown away. For what? The freedom to escape from obsessions that continued to haunt me. The freedom to gamble away every penny in an orgy of stupidity and not have to face her eyes afterwards. The right to play at being anyone other than myself.

  I wanted to put my arms around somebody: Miriam, Conor, Ebun, Cormac, my father as he had once comforted me in a bed two doors away. His strong arms and unshaved chin. How could I make a deal with his killers? I wanted arms from further back, arms that I strained to remember like Cormac had strained to recall Glasgow. I wanted the comfort of being a child asleep in Josie’s attic, knowing that Daddy was coming home tomorrow. I wanted to lie beside Conor at the age of four when he whimpered with a temperature and I curled into him all night, not caring how wrecked I would be in work, just thrilled to find a niche where I was genuinely needed.

  I don’t know what I wanted, just that eventually, curled up in a ball on Hanlon’s hall floor, sleep managed to catch me out.

  A sixth sense made me wake with a start, ready to lash out. I don’t know what I had been dreaming. My limbs were stiff from lying on the floor, my eyes raw. Hanlon’s gate opened with the same creak they had not fixed in twenty years. A shadow appeared at the hammered glass. I looked around, knowing it was too late to hide. The letterbox was pushed open and a hail of circulars and special offers tumbled noisily onto the mat. The caller retreated down the path.

  I climbed the stairs with pins and needles in my leg. Through the box-room window I watched the postman stop to chat with old Mrs Kelly across the road, checking through the letters in his hand. His skin was jet-black. Laughing at some remark, he walked on.

  I had no idea what time it was. Every clock in the house was stopped. There was a radio on the bedside locker in what had been Mrs Hanlon’s room, beside a plastic Virgin half-filled with clouded holy water. Keeping the sound low I flicked through endless rock music and nonsensical ads until I found RTE. I walked into Lisa’s old room to look carefully out through the blinds. A child of seven or eight played in my old garden. He propelled a red plastic tractor around the white stones, using two levers to scoop up a hoard of stones as he dug with intense pleasurable concentration. Behind him the door of the modern outhouse was open. A man came out with a sheaf of papers and locked the door, placing the key under one of the grey stones they had obviously robbed from a beach. He called the boy and they walked into the kitchen together.

  I had forgotten the sound of the noon Angelus until bells rang on the radio in Mrs Hanlon’s bedroom. The mid-day news headlines followed it. There was a second march by locals in Tramore against the attempted deportation of the refugee and her children. Further reports of evasion from the tribunals and the morning sitting of the Dail suspended in a row over a minister refusing to answer questions. Had Pete Clancy been there, I wondered, taking his place on the Government bench despite his lack of sleep? Greeting fellow ministers, briefing journalists, dealing with the incessant problems landing on his desk. A man who lacked the spark of his father, but was known as a safer pair of hands at a time when conformity and not initiative was needed. He was waiting now like a patient angler, knowing I had to resurface, no matter what rock I swam under.

  Finding an extremely ancient razor I splashed some water and soap on my face and made a crude attempt to shave. I dried myself with an old towel from the hot press. There was so much stuff that Lisa would have to throw out. What had happened to my own clothes ten years ago, I wondered? Donated to some charity shop in Dorset Street probably, with Miriam getting a lift from a friend to bring down the plastic sacks. The last trace of me, except for the betting slips and pawnbroker tickets she had probably found hidden in peculiar places for years afterwards.

  A life totalled off in bags and cardboard boxes. At least Miriam did me that service which I was supposed to do for Cormac. Alex Lever must have presumably done the necessary, though he was such a fastidious man that maybe he found a team of professionals to clear out the wardrobe of his ex-lover – or ex-tenant, as he described him to the police in Aberfeldy the night before I flew to Scotland.

  The Aberfeldy police officers were courteous that night when I phoned them, after their Irish counterparts had pulled away from our door in Raheny. After being cut off twice for non-payment of bills, our own phone was doctored to take only incoming calls. We had to walk to a coin-box near the shops, with Miriam and Conor waiting outside as the slot swallowed half the coins we had gathered up from around the house. They weren’t holding him, the police explained. The doctor had just suggested that Cormac should rest up for a few days, and the psychiatric wing was the only ward of Nine Wells Hospital in Dundee with beds available. It had been months since I heard from Cormac, but I was too preoccupied with my own problems to take note of his silence.

  ‘But what does Dr Lever say? Alex Lever. His…friend in Perth.’

  ‘Cormac just gave your name.’

  ‘Could you phone Dr Lever, please, then call me back.’

  I had waited in the callbox while the queue outside glowered at me and Miriam mouthed a dozen questions through the glass. Finally the sergeant from Aberfeldy phoned back.

  ‘There was no reply at that home number you provided, but we contacted him via the hospital. He was quite brusque, I must say. He claims Mr Brogan is an ex-tenant of his under notice to leave and this would be best handled by the family. He seemed quite insistent that I pass on the message that you can well afford to fly over.’ The sergeant sounded embarrassed. ‘I don’t think I’d fancy him much as a landlord.’

  Conor was discovering the joys of chips that autumn. We bought him some as we walked home past the shops. The Italian proprietor made jokes with h
im as Miriam sat him up on the counter and allowed him to pour his own vinegar. We sat on a bench near the park, our concern for Cormac breaching the hard crust of slights and accusations that generally made conversation impossible. I can see us still sitting there as Conor slowly ate his chips, looking to all the world like a happy family. It was the last walk we ever took together.

  That night was also the last time I ever saw my father, when I cycled over to Cremore. Phyllis was already in bed. It was the year before my father was due to retire. Several months previously I had gone to him, not for money – I knew he hadn’t money – but to see if he could pull any strings with Clancy to bypass the waiting lists for a hospital bed for Miriam’s mother. All I had got was a lecture on how democracy worked and that health service cutbacks were necessary if the country wasn’t going to sink under the National Debt.

  He had made me feel grubby for asking and so I’d hated having to go back to him again. I spied him through the window downstairs, working late on some papers by the light of a small reading lamp. I tapped on the glass and he rose, startled, then came closer, recognizing me. He put the papers carefully in his briefcase before opening the door. We were awkward with each other as he ushered me into the living-room, anxious not to wake Phyllis. His tone was almost formal as he offered me a whiskey. He seemed to avoid my eye directly, a technique he practised on pushy builders. I took the glass, noticing how he had poured himself a larger one. I never visited him, therefore he knew that either somebody was dead or he was going to be touched for money.