The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘It’s Cormac,’ I began. ‘He’s in some sort of trouble in Scotland.’

  He lowered his voice to ask, ‘Does his mother have to know?’

  ‘Not necessarily. I can probably handle it.’

  ‘Good man.’

  I hated myself for feeling a flush of pleasure. But how often had he ever praised me?

  ‘You can phone me in work,’ he added, ‘I have a direct line now, a private number.’

  ‘Dad…?’

  He looked directly into my eyes now. I wondered what he saw there. His failed son, a glorified factory hand, going nowhere.

  ‘How are you fixed?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘It’s very short notice. I only found out tonight. They think that someone should go over.’

  I could see the momentary suspicion in his mind. They knew enough about my gambling for Phyllis to drop veiled barbs when Miriam visited. I think he wanted evidence, a form signed in triplicate perhaps. Yet I had never come to him for money in the past and I was only here now because there was nobody else to whom I was not already secretly in hock.

  ‘There’s a boat from Larne, isn’t there?’

  ‘I’m flying,’ I hissed angrily. ‘The first flight I can get.’

  ‘But you’ll have to pay top dollar at short notice,’ he argued. ‘Unless maybe you stay a Saturday night.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ My voice was louder, knowing that he would panic if he thought Phyllis might wake. ‘Just because he’s not…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said bitterly. ‘It would make no difference anyway if he was your fucking son.’

  ‘Son…’

  He sounded genuinely distressed. But I felt cheap having to ask him for something. I put the whiskey down.

  ‘I’ll get the fare somewhere else,’ I said quietly.

  ‘No. Just tell me what you need. Please.’ He spoke slowly, almost like a plea. ‘What do you need?’

  There was something perturbing in his gaze, like he was seeing me properly for the first time in decades. He looked lost and, I suddenly noticed, far older than I remembered. I repeated what Cormac had once told me the full fare to Glasgow was, but that didn’t seem to answer his question. There was a long silence during which I could think of nothing more to say, while he waited, almost expectantly. Then with a shrug he turned and walked to a small bookcase in the corner. He took down a tattered hardback with its dustjacket missing, counted a pile of banknotes out from between its pages, counted them again, hesitated and then added several more to the pile. I checked the amount when he handed it to me.

  ‘There’s too much here,’ I said.

  ‘You might need it, or maybe get the young lad something.’ He poured himself another whiskey. ‘Miriam hasn’t brought him over since her mother died. It isn’t because…’

  ‘She’s been busy,’ I replied. ‘I know there was nothing you could do about the hospital. I never told her about the time I called over.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said, relieved. ‘It’s always best to keep things among ourselves.’

  I watched from Hanlon’s window until the street was deserted, then picked up an estate agent’s leaflet from the hall so as to look like someone on business and slipped out the front door. There were few enough familiar faces on the route to Market Square where a bus for Dublin had always stopped outside McAndrew’s pub at one o’clock. I was starving and went into a small newsagent’s on the square for some chocolate. The shop assistant was in her late teens, near tears as she tried to cope with the three shrieking Romanian women who jabbered in broken English at her with carefully controlled hysterics.

  ‘I gave you back your huge banknote but you haven’t given me all the change. Please, you’ve left me forty short.’

  All three shouted at her again in unison, creating as much noise and confusion as possible. They did not want the magazine they had bought, it was too dear, they had their money back, she had her change back, they did not understand, they were leaving.

  A door opened and a man appeared from the kitchen behind the shop, taking in the situation. ‘Call the police,’ he snapped, ‘they’ve tried that same bloody trick in every small shop in town.’

  The women glanced towards the door, their exit strategy coming into play. ‘Look,’ one said with a beatific smile. ‘On the ground. Money. Is not ours. Must be yours.’

  ‘Get out and stay out,’ the man glowered, then turned to the girl as they exited. ‘How long were they here, pet?’

  ‘It seems like forever, Daddy. They wouldn’t stop shouting. They had me so fazzled I was about to tell them to just go.’

  He looked at me, slightly taken aback by my half-shaven appearance. ‘I wouldn’t mind if they tried it out on the likes of me,’ he told me. ‘But they wait till they see an old woman or a child alone. Anyway, sir, what can I do you for?’

  I ate the chocolate ravenously in the queue of people sheltering under the striped awning of the butcher’s shop beside McAndrew’s pub. Gradually I became aware of being observed. Panic-stricken, I searched for a name which came to me just as the old woman approached. It was Mrs Kennedy who lived on the corner. Barney Clancy once got her husband appointed as a Peace Commissioner. The title had fascinated me as a child, even after I discovered it was utterly meaningless.

  ‘It couldn’t be…?’ she began, almost against her will. ‘I’m sorry, but your face just reminds me of…would you be related to…?’

  ‘Desculpe ter de a enganar,’ I replied, staring blankly at her. Embarrassed, she backed away, mistaking my Portuguese for Romanian or Polish. I repeated the sentence, my accent as thick as possible – I’m sorry I have to fool you. People glanced at me.

  ‘He’s probably with those women who were thrown out of the shop,’ one man muttered, presuming I had no English. ‘Up to every scam. To think we worked our guts out for years to have this shower fleece us.’

  Mrs Kennedy surprised me by glaring at him. ‘Apart from lifting pints, what work have you done these past twenty years, Jimmy? I raised four children who all had to leave. I hope they got a better welcome than you’re giving people here.’

  ‘That wasn’t the same,’ he muttered, defensively. ‘Your children actually worked in England.’

  ‘They were given the chance to.’

  The bus pulled in, breaking up their argument. Terrified to say a word of English, I paid my fare in silence by letting the driver pick what he needed from the proffered coins in my palm. I stared out of the window, aware of whispered conversations about me. This was everyday life for Ebun, perpetually judged by self-appointed juries of strangers, the stigma of looking different.

  That was the funny thing about meeting Cormac in Nine Wells Hospital in Dundee on the morning that I flew into Glasgow and caught a train. From how the police had described him on the phone I’d expected Cormac to look different or share the heavily medicated look worn by many of those who wandered along the corridor there. But he looked more like a junior doctor who all the nurses would fancy. We sipped coffee in the canteen while I waited to speak to his doctor. Cormac shook his head, mildly abashed, as if his antics during the previous days had happened to someone else. Perhaps it was the light sedatives I knew he was on, but his wide-eyed look reminded me of the time he ran away to find Bartley Dunne’s in Dublin and woke me in the outhouse on his return. Except that back then there had been a wonder in his gaze, the sense of a sailor straining to embark on a wondrous voyage. Now his eyes seemed filled with puzzled bemusement, as if surprised to glimpse the harbour walls of his destination rise, suddenly grey and dreary, before him.

  ‘What the hell were you at, Cormac?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I can’t see why there’s so much fuss just because I went for a walk.’

  ‘It was one long walk. The police said you looked like you’d been walking for several days.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with walking.’ A shadow of his old smile returned. ‘Once you’re not doi
ng it in stilettos down somebody’s chest.’

  ‘Be serious, Cormac.’

  ‘How’s the little monster and the Iron Lady?’

  ‘They’re grand,’ I said, determined not to have the conversation deflected.

  ‘And you…still betting on two flies crawling up a wall?’

  ‘You’re the patient here, Cormac. Where’s Alex? Why isn’t he with you?’

  ‘You’ve lost your knickers again, haven’t you, brother? I’ve only lost my marbles. How much are you in hock for?’

  ‘Stop changing the subject,’ I insisted. ‘Where’s Alex?’

  ‘Alex who?’ He smiled again. ‘“Don’t ever call me Al,” he says on our first night. Take away the Al from his name and what’s left – ex. My ex.’

  ‘It’s over?’

  ‘Not quite. He’s not my ex-landlord yet. But he will be on Friday when he wants the keys back.’

  ‘But I thought you pair were…?’

  ‘As snug as bugs in rugs? In my world, Brendan, the day you meet a man is the day you should start preparing to lose him. Go and see who’s in charge here, will you, and get me the hell out. This place freaks me. Do you know there’s one corridor a mile long? A patient sat down beside me this morning and said that if you walked all the corridors you’d have run a half-marathon. If I stick around much longer he’ll come back with running shorts and ask me to join him.’

  Cormac did seem fine despite the doctor’s concerns about him needing more rest. I didn’t mention his forthcoming eviction, but promised to stay around to mind him until he was back on his feet. I was due a week’s holiday from work, which I had never taken as we lacked the money to go anywhere. But Cormac was in such flamboyant form that suddenly this trip felt like a holiday as we fled the hospital, as giddy as miching schoolboys.

  Cormac flagged down a taxi and asked the driver to suggest a good hotel for lunch. He laughed at my attempts to insist that we head to Perth where he could get some rest. They had found nothing wrong with him beyond chronic exhaustion and he would sleep better after some fresh air. Once we hit Perth there would be packing and decisions to face. He hadn’t seen me in months, so why not relax and enjoy our day.

  I should have argued more strongly, but perhaps at heart I didn’t feel capable of the responsibility of minding him. Certainly it felt like Cormac was minding me that afternoon, insisting on buying lunch and choosing a good wine, even though the doctor had cautioned against drink.

  ‘A glass or two won’t kill me,’ Cormac said when I protested. ‘Besides, I’m absolutely clear-headed now. The walk did me the world of good. I wasn’t thinking straight in Perth, behaving like a hysterical schoolboy. People leave one another all the time. There’s no need to climb onto the rooftops in some grand gesture.’

  ‘You didn’t?’ I said, alarmed.

  ‘Let’s just say that with my fear of heights I didn’t get far.’ He grinned ruefully at the joke against himself. ‘All I did was hug the chimney with Alex glowering from the skylight, telling me not to be ridiculous in his most doctoral voice. Some woman across the street phoned the police. Their arrival frightened me but it frightened Alex more.’ He mimicked Alex’s accent. ‘My position, my position.’ Cormac laughed. ‘I thought we had left all that “the neighbours” crack behind in Navan, but poor Alex was always cursed by respectability. The day he showed me our flat I said he should stick it in The Guinness Book of Records as the largest closet in the world.’

  ‘What did the police do?’

  ‘Nothing. I’d come down by then, shivering with the cold, trying not to snivel. They came in and looked at us like we were dirt. God knows who Alex thought he was fooling by talking about a disagreement with his “tenant”. That was the night he took his things and told me I’d a week to get out.’

  ‘Why is he leaving you?’

  Cormac shrugged. ‘I thought he was dependable. Broody and full of contradictions, a bit like your da, but dependable all the same. He loved boxing and spent hours watching it. If someone went down he’d shout at the television, “Stay down, take your count of eight. What are you jumping up for?” But that was me that night after the police left, up and trying to shadow-box on the count of one, determined to show him I had it in me. Never mind Friday, I was gone ten minutes after he slammed the door. Do you know the funny thing, brother?’

  ‘What?’ I asked, noticing how little food he had actually eaten.

  ‘You never lose a habit. The first day I arrived in Scotland I peered out the taxi window all the way in from the airport convinced that at any moment I would recognize my father among the passers-by. That was why I went walking. I kept praying, “Father, if you’re here, then now is the time to find me. I’ll keep walking until we meet on some bend of the road”.’ Cormac looked at me. ‘I always thought I had come to Scotland just to be with Alex. But then I thought maybe there was a reason for this pain, that my destiny, the reason for this journey, was to meet my real father. Funny isn’t it, how you fool yourself, when he’s sitting somewhere, doting on his grandchildren, oblivious to my existence.’

  Cormac allowed me to harangue him into eating a proper dessert and reluctantly accepted my decision that he could not order another bottle of wine.

  ‘You’d make a great mother hen,’ he remarked as we left the hotel, ‘not that of course I’ve ever actually been laid by you.’

  Outside another argument ensued about his refusal to return to Perth. He claimed that he felt at ease for the first time in months. He needed to be out in the fresh air and so did I, by the look of me. We required an afternoon without thoughts of Alex and Miriam or other problems. My resistance was weak enough for him to overcome any objections to purchasing two more bottles of wine in an off-licence. I felt lighthearted suddenly. Cormac was the only person I ever felt truly myself with. At my most wretched in Navan he had seen something to cherish in me. He seemed closer than any real brother I could have had, the saviour who had brought me in from that shed.

  Even if my married life was a mess and Cormac had nothing to look forward to in Perth, we made each other forget our cares that afternoon. We were so close that it felt like those secret nights in the outhouse with the world blocked out. Not that there was any physical contact now, but an almost spiritual togetherness. I was his guest and he was intent on showing me Dundee or at least the quickest way out of it.

  Again we travelled by taxi, past a sprawl of housing that only ended when we reached the golf courses at Carnoustie. We stopped once so he could show me a sweet-factory laid out as a 1940s museum, with boiled sweets I had last seen in the windows of tiny shops in Navan. He insisted on buying a brown bag of them and on us downing several malt whiskies in the theme pub beside it while the taxi waited.

  The clouds that had buffeted my plane that morning had disappeared and the autumn afternoon was warm. We were getting further from Perth, but Cormac seemed to know where he was going, directing our taxi driver. The road grew smaller and just when it seemed to peter out we reached a quiet pub carpark overlooking a beach reached by steep steps. The tiered tee of a golf hole protruded through the dunes bordering the strand where the tide seemed to be miles out.

  We paid off the taxi with Cormac assuring me that we could call another one from the pub after we had finished our picnic. This seemed a grandiose term for bullseyes and wine, but – after asking me to wait at a bench outside – he emerged from the pub with two sandwiches in his hands and two stolen wineglasses under his coat.

  ‘The old “It’s behind you in the till” ten-pound note trick still works,’ he observed, with a grin. We laughed about old Mr Boyle in his apron and swapped a hundred other memories as Cormac led us across the sand to a small but steep headland which split the beach into two and was crested by the remains of a small tower. He had also managed to smuggle a corkscrew from the pub. The first bottle of wine was white. It tasted good outdoors, even though I felt it go to my head. I knew Miriam was waiting for a phone call about Cormac’s condition, a
nd my father too in his County Council office, hogging his special phone line like Commissioner Gordon in Batman. But I was engaged in minding my brother and just now Cormac seemed like a reincarnation of the free spirit with whom I had once shared a flat in Dublin.

  The beach was deserted, with just a few cars parked outside the pub as golfers conducted friendly post-mortems on their rounds. Cormac opened the second bottle – a Rioja – even though the white wasn’t finished. I had relaxed my concern about him. We were simply two brothers taking time away from the massive problems in our lives to savour a few snatched hours of freedom together. The red wine tasted cloudy, with Cormac blaming himself for having broken the cork inside the bottle. But I drained my glass anyway as I lay back to watch the evening sky deepen.

  ‘There’s a beach like this in Jersey,’ Cormac said, ‘Portelet Bay. Visit it if you ever go there.’

  ‘What in God’s name would I be doing in Jersey?’

  ‘Stranger things have happened, take my word for it.’ Cormac leaned across for my glass and replaced it a moment later, refilled. ‘We should have had more days like this, just the two of us, eh? Two little boys with two little toys.’ He looked down. ‘You do forgive me?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Everything. Your life.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my life.’

  ‘Did I say there was, brother?’ He looked serious, then grinned. ‘Still I bet you even money there is.’

  ‘I could stop gambling if I wanted to.’

  ‘I believe you. The only thing is that I don’t believe you do. You’ve no clue about how special you are.’

  ‘That wine is going to your head,’ I said, half-embarrassed. ‘There’s nothing special about me.’

  ‘Miriam could see it one time, that’s why she married you. The promise you never delivered on because you’re afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘To let go of the past you’re carrying around on your back, to simply float free.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ I said.

  ‘What would you do if I gave you fifteen thousand pounds?’