The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘You know well that I’d blow it on a horse.’

  ‘That’s what you’d do with fifteen pounds or even maybe fifteen hundred.’ Cormac poured himself more white wine, draining what seemed to have become his personal bottle. ‘But maybe you just think you’d blow it because you’ve never felt the power of fifteen thousand pounds in cash in your hands.’

  ‘Nor am I likely to,’ I laughed, ‘unless some crazy accumulator comes up.’

  ‘Or your kid brother gives it to you. You might be surprised about what I have in the bank. What you have too.’

  I sat up to look at him and then at the tide which had come a good way in. ‘Maybe we should head back,’ I suggested, though I felt too lethargic to move. ‘The drink is getting to you.’

  ‘I was never more sober. Possibly it comes from being a tight-arsed Irish cunt, as Alex so succinctly phrased it.’

  ‘Look at who was talking? No disrespect to him, Cormac, but Alex turns off his windscreen wipers going under bridges to save energy.’

  ‘That made it all the harder for him to discover that I had been sponging off him in Ireland, feigning poverty while in college. He saw our bank statements, you see.’

  ‘What bank statements?’

  ‘The ones in the possession of someone called Des Traynor.’

  Utterly confused now, I took a long sip of red wine, trying to place where I had previously heard the name.

  ‘Alex was in Dublin two months ago to withdraw some money he has stashed away. I think he never paid tax on it, but he has it somewhere with this Traynor geezer that people are not supposed to know about. He was visiting Traynor in an office but not an actual bank when Traynor started complaining of stomach pains and wanted a medical opinion as a sort of quid pro quo. Alex sent him off to provide a specimen. It’s an old doctor’s trick when they want a good root around. Traynor seems to be a fairy godmother to half of Ireland and Alex, spotting a computer printout being put away in a drawer on his arrival, wanted to know which half.’ Cormac brushed some grains of sand off his trousers. ‘It turns out that I was among those on that printout, with several accounts listed in my name. You’re there too, and Sarah-Jane.’

  ‘Stop taking the piss.’

  ‘That’s what I told Alex, when he arrived home with a face on him like a wet Sunday in Stirling. The bigger fish didn’t have names at all, just anonymous account codes in the Bahamas and Cayman Islands. But we were using our own names on Jersey. Alex managed to copy down two account numbers before Traynor returned with his specimen. Alex was furious with me, claiming that I’d deceived him. Things haven’t been the best between us lately. Even in Dublin he used to see people.’

  ‘Boys?’

  ‘Younger ones. Fleeting adventures. He’d a nose to sniff out sex and I could always tell afterwards by the way all his tension was released. He’d be so guilty, so kind, finding a hundred unspoken ways to try and make it up to me. The funny thing was that the times when he was being horrible to me were the times he was being most faithful. Then I’d see his tension build again, bickering, finding fault, claiming that I was squandering money. One week before I finished college he started leaving me a flask of hot water to make tea with during the day and took the flex of the electric kettle to work. He unscrewed the radiator tops so I couldn’t turn them on.’

  ‘Why did you stick with him?’

  Cormac refilled my glass with the dregs of the bottle. ‘That was a good week. I came home late from college at the end of the week, walking to save the bus fare, and he had every light on, the apartment warm, a fabulous meal waiting and a new coat for me as a present. I locked myself into the bathroom, bawling. I knew that some young fucker had just sucked him off.’

  Aware that I was supposed to mind Cormac I tried to say something soothing, but he ignored my words. An anguish, concealed earlier behind his apparent stoicism, came to the fore.

  ‘Isn’t the fact that you love someone enough reason to put up with them? But since he found out about these bank accounts Alex has been so mean to me, refusing to believe that I know nothing about them. He doesn’t care about the truth. I know in his heart he’s been searching for a way out. He’ll never take me back because he’s found someone younger to bully and then make up to in his special way. Jesus, Brendan, in bed he could be so…’ Cormac let the sentence trail. ‘Some little pink-pricked cunt,’ he muttered, almost to himself.

  ‘You’ll get over him, people do, Cormie.’ It was years since I had used his pet name.

  ‘I will be free of him, I promise you.’ He looked across. ‘We’re loaded, brother, money to burn.’

  ‘Maybe Alex was making it up?’

  ‘Not Alex. He has great hands but a lousy imagination. The accounts are real, I know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Simple. I flew to Jersey last week, walked in and flashed my new passport. The old one got stolen with our luggage in Tangiers in the summer. The bank was surprised by my presence, because normally all transactions go through your father. They said that he’s the other signatory who normally makes withdrawals. I told them he was sick in Dublin. The cashier was cute, with lovely hands. I was just amazed the poor boy didn’t get wanker’s cramp having to count out fifteen thousand in cash. That’s how I know Alex won’t take me back. The night of our final quarrel I tried to give him every penny of it, but it only made things worse.’

  Suddenly I remembered where I heard Traynor’s name before. At my own wedding, when Alex was talking to Barney Clancy.

  ‘Traynor has something to do with Clancy,’ I said.

  ‘You bet your life he has. “Kneel up on the bed,” Alex used to joke. “Let’s see if you’re as good a dog as your daddy.”’

  ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘Nothing’s funny about your father. Maybe he beat the crap out of you, but he ignored me. I was an illegitimate charity case put up with as part of the baggage of the woman he wanted. So how come he’s opening accounts for me, when he allegedly never had two pennies to rub together?’ Cormac looked at me. ‘Maybe you know the answer? I mean he is your father?’

  I drained the stolen wineglass and flung it onto the rocks below us where the waves were crashing. ‘Come off it, Cormac,’ I said angrily. ‘You know I know nothing.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Cormac was apologetic. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve just grown paranoid this last while. Don’t you get cross as well.’

  I couldn’t stop my fury – not at Cormac but at my father. I remembered how cheap he made me feel when I had wanted him to try to improve Miriam’s mother’s chances of a hospital bed. Funds were being openly raised in business circles that month so the Tanaiste, Brian Lenihan, could fly to America’s most exclusive clinic for a liver transplant. But Lenihan was different, my father had snapped when I raised it. He had served his country whereas Mrs Darcy was part of the minutiae of ordinary citizens forced to pay the price of having lived beyond our means. If my father was putting money aside for me then surely that had been the time to give it.

  Instead I had blown a week’s wages on crazy bets after he turned me down, hoping against hope to win enough money to buy her a few weeks somewhere as a private patient. We’d endured months of trying to nurse her, calling twice daily at her rented house in Broadstone because she refused to move in with us where Conor would have to witness her suffering. There had been short stays in hospital when her relapses were sufficiently bad to briefly merit a bed, before her eventual death, almost unnoticed, waiting on a trolley in the corridor. Money would not have saved her life, but she might have died with some dignity in one of the gleaming new private hospitals around Dublin, which nobody was quite sure how people could afford.

  ‘The bastard,’ I snapped. ‘I could have gone to university like you if there was money. I might have done things and been someone. For my twenty-first birthday he gave me ten pounds, for my wedding a wall clock made in Taiwan. He knows we’re crucified by mortgage rates. If he has money earmarked for us then what’s he
waiting for?’

  ‘What makes you think it’s his money?’ Cormac asked. ‘Or will ever be ours? Clancy is behind it. It’s an open secret in the circles Alex moved in that Clancy fixes planning permission in Meath with your da as his poodle.’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ I snapped angrily. ‘I know he gives up almost all his free time to be at Clancy’s beck and call, but at work he’s a good public servant. I’ve read reports in the Meath Chronicle of him fighting his corner at Council meetings to block re-zonings. Clancy isn’t even on the bloody County Council!’

  ‘Easy, Brendan, easy.’ Cormac gently put a hand on my shoulder. ‘That’s why I never told you about it before. I know how you still look up to your father. But he’s just a stooge. All his huffing and puffing is used to block developments until the builders are willing to grease a few palms that Clancy controls. Alex has the inside track. But he doesn’t want to understand that your father would have no scruples about letting Clancy use our names, as a front to pay for his shirts and cigars and mistresses with no money trail pointing back to him.’

  ‘You stole Clancy’s money then?’ I felt a mixture of fear and a boyish thrill of revenge.

  ‘Let them prove it. Do you think Clancy will run to the cops about his slush fund of bribes and backhanders? I didn’t want his money, I wanted Alex back. For weeks now he’s kept totting up, totting up. Every penny for every year before I started work. Every holiday, every bus fare, every fucking tube of KY jelly. He made me feel like a little tart and even cheaper still when I returned from Jersey with money like I was trying to buy him back. He couldn’t leave me with any self-respect. He had to justify it in his own mind by cheapening every moment of our past until all I was ever was a cheap slut with my mouth open for his cock and my hands open for his cash.’

  ‘Stop it.’ I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Stop thinking of yourself like that.’

  He put his fingers up to touch mine and held them for a moment, warm in the dusk. ‘I was never cheap, was I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Still, I seduced you, years ago. I shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘It’s long forgotten,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘I don’t really remember…’

  ‘You remember everything,’ he insisted. ‘You were the first person I ever fell in love with. It would have been wrong if we were real brothers, wrong to even think that way. What would you do with fifteen thousand pounds?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t have fifteen thousand pounds.’

  ‘You do now. Make something of yourself. Ask yourself who you want to be.’

  I didn’t reply, staring at him in the gloom. All my life I realized that I had wanted to be him. To be inside Cormac’s skin, know the thoughts he knew, experience life in a way that was different from the second-rate staleness of everything I experienced. Even his pain seemed more valid than mine.

  ‘I’m glad it’s over,’ Cormac said. ‘I won’t want to be Alex’s new lover with a heart full of hope and a back scarred by the clawmarks of Alex’s nails. I’ve seen them together. He’s twenty-one with a cute bum and no idea of what’s in store for him. Kiss me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Old time’s sake. One kiss. I won’t bite you, I promise.’

  His face was close to mine. I could barely make out the beach behind us now, the darkness broken by the lights of the pub back up the cliff steps. Nobody could see us, we were as alone as in the outhouse. Our early experiences had led me to tortuously question my sexuality in adolescence before quickly realizing that I loved women. I had never wanted to kiss any man since, yet I opened my mouth to taste his tongue again after all these years. It felt wrong, yet it felt right. Just for a few seconds, then he withdrew his tongue.

  ‘I lied to you,’ he said, ‘this is no headland, it’s an island cut off at high tide. You tell Phyllis I loved her and I was serene making my own choices again, the way I did before Alex. The time I ran away to Bartley Dunne’s she got so upset I might have drowned that she taught me to swim. I bet she’ll regret she didn’t bring you along. I love you, brother. Honestly, I’m not worth drowning for.’

  I put my hand on his shoulder. His fingers gripped mine and intertwined, then next moment he had slipped free and was scrambling over the rocks. Sluggishly I tried to follow, but Cormac was getting further ahead all the time. Dark waves covered the sand behind us. I called his name but he never looked back, just poised for a moment before diving off a rock to swim towards the shore.

  I picked up a small container he had dropped, recognizing it as one the doctor had given me with sleeping capsules for him. That Rioja was not contaminated by cork. Sleight of hand was always his speciality. The dose wasn’t enough to put me asleep, just to leave me groggy and off-guard.

  Cormac must have heard me call across the deserted sands, but he walked calmly on up the steps towards the pub. I realized why he had asked me to wait outside there. He could laugh with the barman now about getting caught by the tide when out walking alone, as he ordered a hot whisky to keep warm and waited for a taxi to arrive.

  Several times over the next few hours I tried to wade out but the water was too deep. I called for help but nobody heard. It was almost dawn before the tide retreated sufficiently for me to wade across. The pub was shuttered up, the roads a winding maze until I hit a main road where I could hitch. Even then no one stopped until a taxi came along, the driver suspicious at the state of my clothes. I had to pay in advance before he would take me to Perth and even then we argued as I persistently urged him to hurry on.

  I knew I was too late anyway. Cormac had left the key in the front door, with a note for Phyllis on the table. Beside it, an envelope with my name contained two account numbers and the address of a Jersey bank, along with fifteen thousand pounds in cash.

  I picked up the chair he had kicked over, standing on it to cradle his body and try to undo the knot around his neck. But single-handedly I was unable to release his hanging body. I phoned the police and waited for them to come, throwing the wad of bank notes in a wastepaper basket. With my hands around his waist, I talked incessantly, telling Cormac secrets that I had told nobody, begging his ghost to haunt me, pleading that I couldn’t cope without him in the world.

  I couldn’t tell if the police took ten minutes or ten hours. But when the knock finally came I stood up and lightly kissed his hand.

  Make something of yourself. His voice inside my head kept repeating the words. Retrieving the money from the bin I stuffed it into my pocket before letting the two policemen come in.

  It was two o’clock by the time I climbed the steps to Ebun’s front door. My first priority was to retrieve the bank mandates. Sixteen hours earlier I had walked down onto this street, loins saturated with the after-glow of lovemaking, unsure of whether I might see her again. Now my body felt cold as I repeatedly rang what I hoped was her bell, peering through the letterbox in the hope of seeing feet descend the stairs.

  A man walked up from Dorset Street, taking out a key. He looked Romanian or Polish and shrugged when I asked whether I might check if Ebun was in. I climbed the stairs in front of him and knocked on her door but there was no reply.

  Twenty years had passed since I last entered Gardner Street church, opposite Ebun’s flat. But with time to kill I went in to marvel at its curiously ornate ceilings and the side altars, I was often reminded of inside churches in Portugal. One shrine to St Euphemia near my flat in Oporto had always been festooned with beeswax replicas of heads and limbs, left as promessa – payment for successful intercessions or tokens by those seeking cures. A tiny yellow arm to represent an arthritic one or a wax model of a neck left at the shrine to St Braz by a mother with throat cancer.

  The Irish were more coy about revealing the intentions behind their prayers. Three old women prayed separately at a side altar before a statue of Mary, lips moving almost imperceptibly with the faintest murmur of prayer barely audible as I passed. An office girl prayed in silence, light from a stained-glass window catc
hing her hair. She looked beautiful, kneeling several pews behind a black woman who rocked back and forth, oblivious to the reserve usually pertaining there.

  Here seemed a good sanctuary to wait until Ebun returned. An old man lit a candle at the shrine to St Joseph the Worker as I knelt out of some childhood instinct and tried to pray. But it was so long since I had prayed that the words turned to muck in my mouth. I used to love Navan cathedral as a child, especially the side aisle when suffused with light. It had been a refuge from Phyllis if she was forced to bring me down town with her and called in, as was her habit, to light a candle for some silent intention. I had discovered that by bowing my head in silent prayer I could make her feel guilty about disturbing me and therefore postpone my return to the outhouse while savouring the cavernous solemnity there.

  I could not remember what I prayed for back then. But once an old woman slipped ten pence into my hand and, while Phyllis was trundling through the Stations of the Cross, I lit a candle for my mother like a secret act of subversion. Cormac’s subversion had been more public during our final week in Navan, even if nobody could directly confirm the suspicion that he was responsible. But a bush-fire whisper spread around Navan that every candle on St Anthony’s shrine had been lit and arranged to form the burning outline of two testicles and a bulbous rampant penis.

  The funny thing was that Cormac did believe in God in a way I never could. Often in Dublin he had dragged me into churches (in the same way as he often talked me into attending bizarre parties) to watch him light a single candle and pray. Once he told me that his first erection had occurred at eleven, kneeling before the alabaster limbs of a crucified Christ in the cathedral. Subsequently his private vision of Christ seemed to have become a figure of infinite forgiveness and eroticism.

  This had made the Scottish policeman’s question about Cormac’s religion seem blackly comic on the morning they cut his body down in Perth. I had sat in a corner being questioned by one officer, while his colleague liaised with the paramedics who appeared from nowhere in Cormac’s flat. Queries about age, nationality and occupation I could cope with, but the religious enquiry started me off into uncontrollable laughter. The paramedics paused, as if about to descend upon me with needles to administer a sedative. But how could I pigeonhole Cormac in a way that would satisfy the officer going through his standard routine? The policeman watched me, still not fully convinced that I hadn’t been involved.