The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

  Clancy came out, having wiped the blood from his eyes, but both facial wounds still bled deeply. He looked around, bewildered, like he could not believe the events of the previous half-hour.

  ‘Brendan?’ he cajoled. ‘It’s time to talk. This has gone too far.’

  He scanned the moonlight for any movement. I gripped a rock and tossed it towards some stacked rafters. It struck the wood with a soft clunk and Clancy turned instinctively, firing in the direction of the sound.

  ‘Don’t startle me like that, Brendan. Call first, then come out slowly. Your black bitch has probably got the cops by now, so what would be the point of my killing you? We’re both fucked. This has blown up in our faces. We need to coordinate our stories for damage limitation. So don’t hide any more because my nerves are in tatters. I’m afraid you’re going to jump me. Come out and I’ll put this gun down.’

  He was only feet away re-loading by feel, blinded again by blood seeping from his eyebrow. He could see nothing but I swear that he could smell the cold sweat I had known as a child every time he approached me. My heart was so loud he had to be drawn towards it. Yet the doubt gnawed that maybe he meant what he said. He could no longer control events, so why did he not put the shotgun down instead of walking blindly on holding it?

  He fell forward into the trench with an almost graceful motion, hands releasing the gun as they reached out to break his fall. He landed on the shotgun and there was a blast before he fell sideways on top of me. I thought he was dead for a second. Then his hands reached out to grip my hair, clinging to me like a drowning man as he pulled himself up, his voice hoarse and rasping.

  ‘Fuck you, Hen Boy, for ever coming back.’

  There was such strength in those arms that I struggled to break their grip circling my neck.

  ‘Don’t leave me in this fucking ditch,’ he ordered. ‘My leg is busted from how I landed and I’m shot in the belly or you are…there’s blood there but no pain. Get me into my car.’

  ‘You’re going nowhere.’ I pushed him down and scrambled out, looking for something to finish him off with. The site was bare, Slick’s meanness ensuring that nothing worth stealing was left out.

  I heard a noise behind me. Clancy had somehow managed to pull himself up. He tried to rise but found that he couldn’t, then began to crawl towards his car, leaving a trail of blood from his stomach. He winced from the pain from his left foot which sprawled awkwardly behind him, yet he never cried out, even when his ankle knocked against a stone. He just kept inching his way towards his car. I waited until he was only feet away before blocking his path, my shoes inches from his outstretched fingers.

  ‘How will you drive?’

  He looked up, with no fear in his eyes or even a plea for mercy. ‘I never needed help from the likes of you,’ he wheezed.

  ‘You did,’ I spat. ‘My father and thousands like him built your family up, scurrying like worker ants desperate for your approval.’

  ‘Eamonn would have stayed a nobody if Daddy hadn’t taken him up. Like you still are, with the stench of chicken-shite off you, Hen Boy.’

  His voice was weaker, fighting for breath, yet the matter-of-factness of his tone infuriated me.

  ‘Say my proper name! Who am I? Say it, you bastard!’

  ‘The same person you’ll always be. Brogan, the Hen Boy.’

  The violence with which I trod on his fingers surprised me. He rolled over, momentarily shielding himself. ‘Who does that make you?’ I said. ‘Who the fuck are you, you bastard? Who gave you the right to be you? Swaggering around the schoolyard with a superior smirk of your arse. Mr Fucking Untouchable, eh? Well I was as good as you once, I was fucking better.’

  Clancy half sat up, still without a trace of fear in his eyes. Blood poured from the wound in his stomach. Yet I could have searched his pocket for more cartridges to finish him off without his expression changing. ‘You were always one jealous wee cunt, Hen Boy.’

  ‘I was the eldest son like you. So where was my respect? Why did I count for nothing?’

  ‘Out of my way, you little prick, because I’m sick of the sight of you and all the others like you.’ He found strength to reach into his pocket for his keys. ‘There’s a doctor in Kells who owes me a favour. Now just open the bloody car door, boy.’

  ‘You’re going nowhere,’ I taunted, and stepped back so that my shoe clipped a rock. I raised it high and towered over him, the rock poised to shatter his skull. But Clancy just stared up with a half-mocking gaze, so certain he had the measure of my seed and breed that he knew I’d never have the balls to kill him. I lowered the rock wearily, tossing it away into the dark and when I looked back his eyes were still defiantly wide open, having cheated me again, almost like he had choreographed his own death.

  I didn’t dare to close his eyes, but eventually I walked back into the house. P. J. had never really aged. Even in death his look was cautious, as if suspicious about what he might have to declare in the next world. I wiped the shotgun and pressed it into his cold hands. Slick had tumbled over when Clancy kicked him so that I could not see his ripped face. I reached into his pocket for the envelope which had cost Niyi his life and retrieved Conor’s passport too. I pocketed the darts which had Ebun’s fingerprints, then went out to where Clancy’s car keys lay on the mud beside his body. I left them there and walked past the tar barrels, too numb to think or even feel the burn of the flesh wound in my shoulder.

  Navan came upon me suddenly at a bend in the road. The first of a chaotic maze of housing estates jockeying for access to a ribbon of road. Stepping into a driveway I watched two squad cars speed past with sirens off but revolving lights illuminating the shadows. I walked on, getting briefly caught by the lights of an oncoming ambulance. Even the town centre seemed deserted apart from the odd truck getting a head start on the commuter traffic.

  Flower Hill seemed impossibly steep. The pain was growing steadily worse in my shoulder. I was losing blood but somehow I felt stronger now, closing in on home with pure instinct taking over. It was hard to conceive of myself as the age I was. There was something hallucinogenic, yet unearthly real about the familiar streets I lurched through. I knew that I was going home. I could have been six or eight or any unspecified age, walking inside a memory that had never actually happened.

  Finally I staggered into the entrance of the laneway. The ridge of grass down its centre looked like the spine of some reptilian creature. I put a hand out, feeling my way by the walls. O’Brien’s garage still stood there, then there was something new, then Brady’s doorway bricked up. Ryan’s shed was demolished, yielding a glimpse into their garden where sawdust had once always been strewn about, and here at last was Hanlon’s.

  Twice I tried to clamber onto the roof and failed, the second time falling back and almost twisting my ankle. I searched for the battered chair I had seen yesterday. It rocked dangerously when I stood on it, but I managed to get a grip on the roof and scramble over, tumbling down onto the unkempt grass. I had only to open the sitting-room window now like yesterday morning to be safely inside where I could lick my wounds and feel warm again.

  But a dim light in the sitting-room window disturbed me as it drew me close. Breathing heavily, I crouched beneath apple tree branches. Lisa sat in the same armchair as when a child. In truth she seemed little more than a child now. Her hair had not changed, still straight and mousy-brown. She might have been a ghost had she not brought me fully back to the present. The auction was tomorrow. Why not come home a day early to spend one last night alone here?

  A television was on with the sound off. But from her expression I knew she was not taking in the images on the screen. Perhaps she was recalling childhood nights with her face lit by the glow of a coal fire as her mother brought her in milk and they sat together, unaware of being observed.

  Few people had ever loved me. I had done little to merit her love, fleeing from the responsibility of her pain, yet I knew that I had only to knock on the window and she would let me in. L
isa Hanlon would forgive me anything, even my reappearance. I stood up, no longer bothering to hide and had reached the window with my fist clenched to tap on the glass when the sitting-room door opened.

  I stepped back, half-expecting her mother’s ghost to appear, but it was a man holding two hot whiskeys. He was English – I knew from his clothes and the unNavanlike way he gestured with his hands after he put the glasses down. Lisa turned so that I could see how her face had aged. A small child in pyjamas ran excitedly in behind the man to jump into her mother’s arms. Lisa stroked her daughter’s hair, kissing the crown of her forehead. The child looked towards the window, as if after seeing something move there.

  She spoke and both parents looked out at the darkness where I crouched again. Lisa laughed and hugged the child to reassure her. This was the way people grew up and moved on. I should have felt happiness for Lisa that her life had worked out and found its correct pattern. But I just felt a terrible sense of waste, knowing it could have been me behind such a window, instead of still being outside, still hurting, unable to let go. I backed away, aware of blood on the grass which the child would spot in the morning.

  I needed to lie down before I collapsed. Hanlon’s shed was padlocked. I didn’t have the strength to climb back over it into the lane. The wall was low into what had once been Casey’s garden. I knew where I was going now to stem this bleeding and take stock.

  I dropped down into my old garden. Nothing was the same, yet it still smelt of home. The spare key lay where I had seen the man leave it yesterday under the stone. I opened the outhouse door, not knowing what I expected to find. Perhaps the ghost of myself, having waited all these years for someone to unlock the door. The polished floorboards felt strange as I crossed to the computer on the tidy desk surrounded by smart Scandinavian office furniture which radiated order and control. Someone else’s kingdom where someone else’s son had done their homework the previous night, judging by the copybook left open on the desk, emblazoned with stars.

  Without turning on a light, I managed to clean the flesh wound at the small sink in the corner. A shirt hung on the back of the office chair. I tore a strip of cloth from it, binding it tight against the wound. The pain was savage now. A press contained a small horde of drink and a wallet of holiday snaps. Brandy burned my throat, then warmed my stomach as I sat on the floor to examine photograph after photograph. Holiday snaps taken somewhere hot. A man and woman alternated in almost every shot, taking turns to pose with the young boy who was ever-present. Laughing, chasing geese, playing with a dog. The last two snaps were taken back at home to finish off the roll. The child knelt on his bed beside a wall festooned with Disney characters. Teddy bears were piled at his feet. There was no reason why I should recognize my old room with even the window frame replaced, but I knew they were taken there. I touched the walls and ceiling as if to make them real, but only the brandy was real and the tearing pain in my shoulder.

  I have no idea how I managed to fall asleep, just that I woke to find the boy from the photographs watching me. It still felt dark in the shed but the open doorway was flooded with light where he stood. He eyed his copybook on the desk.

  ‘This is my father’s office,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Resting.’

  ‘You tore his shirt.’

  ‘My arm was bleeding.’

  ‘Does he know you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is our house.’

  I wanted to tell him how it had been mine once, but I didn’t. Not just because I heard his mother calling from the kitchen and I knew that time was running out. But because it would have made no sense to someone for whom the past did not exist.

  ‘Eric?’ His mother’s voice came closer, her footsteps crossing the gravel. Rising, I undid the bolts of the new metal door that opened into the lane and stepped out as the woman entered the outhouse. I did not look back as she called after me, but could imagine her in the doorway with her arms protectively around her son.

  I knew that I was starting to lose it now because a mirage stood at the entrance to the laneway, watching me approach. I felt my legs buckle but when I fell I didn’t hit the ground. Conor was real as he caught me.

  ‘How did you know where…?’ I tried to rise.

  ‘We passed here one time and Phyllis said it was always where you ran back to.’

  ‘That was when I was fifteen.’

  ‘You never stopped being fifteen.’ Ebun spoke as she opened the back door of Charles’s mother’s car, where glass had been cleared from the seat.

  ‘Clancy’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ Ebun climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘We phoned the police and gave no names, just the location. We drove back to find police everywhere. I asked if an African had been found there, pretending to be looking for Niyi. A policeman at the barrels said that three bodies were found, all well-known local men.’

  Conor hesitated, unsure of where he wanted to sit, then climbed in beside me as Ebun drove off.

  ‘Did you kill him?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I couldn’t even do that.’

  ‘You told me they were Granddad’s friends.’ Conor shivered. ‘Christ, I’d hate to meet his enemies.’

  I looked back at the woman who had ventured down the laneway, her son holding her hand as he solemnly watched us exit from his world.

  VII

  WEDNESDAY, 9 A.M.

  Traffic was chronic leaving Navan, with a three-mile tailback of reluctant commuters coping with temporary lights as workmen tore up the road. It was freezing in the car with two windows shattered. Ebun silently gripped the wheel with more force than necessary. Beside me Conor was still shaking.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not OK,’ he snapped. ‘How the fuck would I be OK? I’ve seen two men get their heads burst open. Every time I close my eyes I see them again. What do we do now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s bloody great.’ He took a deep breath, trying to pull himself together. ‘Coming from the guy who wanted me to do business with those bastards.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ I said, ‘just Clancy.’

  ‘Oh good,’ Conor sniped. ‘Not the psychopath with the pistol, just the one with the shotgun.’

  ‘Stop bickering,’ Ebun ordered from the front. ‘Let’s get out of here while we can.’

  I looked at the streaks of blood on Conor’s face and the congealed blood around the crude ligature on my shoulder. My face was still bruised from the fight off Dorset Street on Saturday night and the black roots on my hair had started to show through the red dye. The stubble on my face was black. Drivers stared across at us through the smashed windows as they passed in the opposite direction.

  ‘At least we’re not conspicuous,’ I joked grimly.

  ‘No,’ Ebun replied. ‘They see me and just think it’s another attack on a black person.’

  Conor was quieter beside me. He looked to be in delayed shock.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked again.

  ‘The mid-term break is over. I should be in school now. I’m missing double maths.’

  ‘How are you doing at school?’

  He stared at me incredulously. ‘Just fuck off, Dad, right?’

  At least he had called me ‘Dad’ I thought as the car crawled forward while we sat in tense silence. I wondered were we passing the lands that Mossy Egan and Barney Clancy had cajoled Slab into unknowingly signing away; a scam jokingly proposed in the back of some pub. Which one initially suggested it and at what stage did their eyes meet, checking the other understood how the idea had strayed beyond being a joke? The point of no return when the instinct of greed took over. A gamble entered into because it could be taken on, with no comprehension of how the ripples would seep out to form the wave that eventually swept all their sons away.

  Three men lay dead on the outskirts of Navan, yet just now I could only feel a sort of nervous euphoria because I wasn’t one o
f them and my own son had survived. It was like the relief I remembered from school after escaping the savage brutality of the yard at someone else’s expense.

  ‘Why did you come back?’ I asked Ebun.

  She shrugged. ‘I was seven or eight miles gone before I turned around. I parked outside. When I heard shots I hid. Maybe I felt I owed you from Saturday night. When I saw that man fetch his gun I had to check you were still alive.’ Momentarily she took her eyes off the road to glance back. ‘We’re even.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  She looked at the road. ‘I cannot be involved, you understand? Decide what you must do but leave me out of it.’

  ‘It may not be so simple.’

  ‘It has to be. When one of you does wrong we are told they are an exception. When one of us does something we are tarred together. After Niyi we will all be blackmailers, after me all murderers.’

  ‘You killed nobody. You saved both our lives.’

  ‘A powerful man lies dead. That won’t be forgotten. He was right, we are like fallen fruit. We need to hide in the grass, not stand out. Do you not think they will want rid of Lekan and me? They will not say it is because of this. But they will fast-track me out of here and think themselves well rid of trouble.’

  ‘How long…are you two…?’ Conor began.

  ‘Are we what?’ Ebun said.

  ‘Does Mam know…?’ He paused. ‘That’s a stupid question, I know. I suppose there were others.’

  ‘Ten years is a long time, Conor.’

  ‘It wasn’t for Mam.’

  ‘Has she ever…?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ he asked belligerently, then flicked some shards of glass out of the open window. ‘Charles’s mam will go crazy, she loves this car.’

  The long snake of vehicles moved forward again.

  ‘If she had men friends she kept them well hidden from me,’ Conor said quietly. ‘I would have been hurt, I was very fixated about your memory. Ironic, isn’t it, seeing as you were shacking-up with everything.’