The Valparaiso Voyage

by Dermot Bolger

‘It’s OK.’ I put my hand cautiously on her shoulder. ‘I’m here now.’

  I could feel the bones through her skin, her arm wasted away that had often lashed out at me.

  ‘What the hell ever use were you?’ She was in tears now, silent ones that got caught up in the lines on her face.

  ‘Please, Gran,’ Conor said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ It was hard to tell who she was addressing. ‘So many things I’m sorry for.’

  ‘Did Granddad tell you things, Gran?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘About money in my name in a Jersey account.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Pete Clancy.’

  She snorted. ‘What would he know, the little pip-squeak? Any money was long spent.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It didn’t belong to your father or Barney Clancy either…but he made your father spend it…badgering and cajoling him to release it in drips and drabs and never tell Pete about it. Pete wanted to be Mr Sheen leaving everything clean, but Barney had expenses he never wanted his son to know about. Some old pluckered crow he hung out with. Barney claimed the man who owned the money would never come looking for it but his son did.’ She turned to Conor. ‘Your granddad was a good man, he just lived too long.’

  ‘But the account is still open,’ Conor said. ‘There’s two accounts in my name.’

  ‘I wanted to tell you but it’s hard to break the habits he bred into me. There’s no money in either.’

  ‘What was in them then?’

  ‘The one I’m supposed to know of has stuff about Clancy,’ Phyllis said, breathing heavier now with the effort to speak. ‘Papers about land deals your granddad didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘Things he didn’t want me to know he had kept. I was very jealous when I was young, I couldn’t help it. They are things he wanted you to have, belonging to your grandmother. Letters and poems he wrote for her when they were courting in Navan, photos, a lock of hair in an envelope. He used to keep them in the garden shed at first in a filing cabinet. He thought I never knew or maybe he just liked to pretend I didn’t.’ She looked at me. ‘Does Miriam know you’re…?’

  ‘No.’

  Her left hand hovered, afraid to touch mine, reminding me of that night decades ago when I cried out and we first confronted each other.

  ‘She’s been good to us…better than we deserved.’ Phyllis took a long breath, eyeing the drip beside her bed. ‘Why have you really come?’

  I looked out at the Dublin skyline. ‘Because yous are the only family I have.’

  Her hand lightly brushed my fingers, then this time held them. As two guilty people we recognized each other.

  Lunch-hour traffic was choking Phibsborough, the narrow crossroads blocked with cars and buses. A light rain had started falling. Pete Clancy’s face stared out from the early edition of the evening paper in a newsagent’s window, along with a picture of Egan and McGuirk taken at a racecourse. Mystery Deaths, the headline read. Rumours of business quarrel gone wrong.

  Conor turned away from the window, holding his stomach. ‘I keep seeing that man when the gun blew up in his face,’ he said. ‘He was a lonely geezer. You see lots like him in the saunas.’

  ‘What saunas?’ I demanded.

  ‘Christ.’ He straightened up. ‘I’m going to have to start remembering you’re a parent.’

  I hailed a taxi on the North Circular Road. ‘Is your mother still working in that same Advice Bureau?’ I asked. ‘She’ll be going out of her mind.’

  We sat together in the back, watching streets flash past. I reached into my pocket to take out his passport, examining the photograph before returning it to him.

  ‘Have you fresh clothes?’ Conor asked.

  ‘In a hotel down town.’

  ‘I wouldn’t book out just yet if I were you.’

  ‘I think the fatted calf’s neck is safer than my own one just now.’

  The taxi sped on, taking the new motorway and then turning at a massive roundabout. I was utterly lost, relying on Conor to direct the driver. We stopped in the carpark of a huge shopping centre, with central fountains and long aisles of British High Street shops. It felt like being inside a spaceship that had docked at the motorway interchange.

  ‘Times have changed,’ I remarked. ‘I knew they had plans to develop the scabby shopping centre where Miriam worked, but I never thought it would become this.’

  ‘It didn’t,’ Conor replied. ‘This isn’t it. But the motorway blocks the old road into it and it takes forever to get there by taxi. It’s simpler to come here and walk.’

  We strode through the shoppers pushing trolleys back to their cars and came out the far side into a loading bay where lorries queued up. A security guard eyed us, speaking into his walkie-talkie.

  ‘Mam stopped shopping here,’ Conor said. ‘They don’t really encourage locals and used to spot us coming in this way. Twice I was put out of the centre for loitering when I waited for her outside a clothes shop. She went ballistic the way Mam does and word went around that she wasn’t a local at all, she was a troublemaker.’

  Boulders had been placed at the back of the loading bay to prevent any car entering from the small path which Conor led me down. There were few shoppers here, with locals put off by the prices. It took us ten minutes to reach a huge bank of dumped earth which had never been properly seeded so that it was a mass of weeds and nettles. Beyond it the path led down into a valley. There was a footbridge over a small stream and above it, beyond a wasteground where horses grazed, the rows of grey estates of cheap houses caused me to catch my breath. I knew this sight, yet I had been away so long that it was foreign to me, like the walls of an unfamiliar exotic port suddenly rising up out of the sea. A row of shabby shops bordered the wasteground, half of them closed down.

  ‘That was where the new shopping centre was meant to be,’ I said. ‘It was planned for years.’

  ‘There was a massive re-zoning around eight years ago,’ Conor said. ‘A Council vote that came out of the blue. Mam is always talking about the fortunes made. Even the banks pulled out of here then.’

  We walked down the hill together and crossed the tiny bridge. I felt for the two darts in my pocket and fired them into the water. Horses tethered to long ropes watched us with patient eyes.

  ‘Let’s go to Jersey together,’ Conor said. ‘Before you give yourself up. Get those documents and post them anonymously to the tribunal. I don’t want them sitting in my name. I want…what’s the word…?’

  ‘Closure.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Conor nodded. ‘And wouldn’t Mam just love for people who voted for some of the re-zonings around here to sleep that little bit more uneasily in their beds at night.’

  We reached the shabby row of shops, both of us apprehensive now as we stopped outside the rundown Citizens Advice Bureau.

  ‘She’ll kill me,’ Conor said.

  ‘No. I’ll explain.’

  ‘You?’ Conor raised his eyes. ‘Jesus, she’ll really kill you.’ He paused. ‘You and her, you don’t ever think…?’

  ‘What’s past is past,’ I said. ‘Maybe we’ll be friends…eventually.’

  We peered in the window at Miriam working at her desk.

  ‘Do you think you’ll go to jail?’ Conor asked.

  ‘Probably. Why?’

  ‘It just might be safer than going in here.’

  Conor walked forward to knock on the glass. He looked back as the glass door opened. At first Miriam only had eyes for him as she hugged Conor, drawing him to her in relief, unable to decide if she should scold him or cry. It took her a few moments to look up. When she did I could not translate the look that entered her eyes nor really comprehend what I felt myself.

  Somehow it didn’t matter what she said or did, what the authorities did or what fate awaited me. I had no way of knowing if she would ever forgive me for the grief that I had caused her and fo
r my deception and lies. I just knew there was nowhere else I wished to stand except exposed before her. I held her gaze.

  ‘Hello, Miriam,’ I began, ‘It’s a long story.’

  About the Author

  DERMOT BOLGER was born in Finglas, north Dublin, in 1959. One of Ireland’s best known authors, his eight novels include The Journey Home – one of the most controversial Irish novels of the 1990s; Father’s Music and Temptation, both of which are available from Flamingo; and The Woman’s Daughter, which will be reissued by Flamingo in the autumn of 2002. His eight plays, including The Lament for Arthur Cleary, The Passion of Jerome and April Bright, have received several awards including the Samuel Beckett Prize, and have been staged in many countries. Plays: 1, the first volume of his Selected Plays, was recently published by Methuen.

  A former factory hand and library assistant, he founded the Raven Arts Press while still in his teens. In addition to being a poet and editor, he was the instigator of the collaborative novels, Finbar’s Hotel and Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel (which have appeared in twelve countries) and editor of The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. He lives and works in Dublin.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.co.uk for exclusive information on your favourite HarperCollins authors.

  Praise

  From the reviews for The Valparaiso Voyage:

  ‘A highly original and often brilliant novel. Bolger knows his landscapes, local political intrigue, north Dublin gangsterism and provincial pride, and brings the reader at pace through a complicated storyline. He might even have invented a genre.’

  In Dublin

  ‘This is a gripping expression of family warfare and of rural, small-town Irishness. From the first to the final page, you read and read.’

  Scotsman

  ‘The brooding ambience captures the underlying darkness of modern Ireland and the characterisation is excellent. Bolger sustains our sympathy for his flawed, fragile hero having to dig deep into his emotional reserves.’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A tale of Irish fatherhood in its various avatars: stern, combative, sentimental, guilt-wracked…The rhythms and energy are irrepressible and hoist us towards an unexpected final poignancy.’

  TLS

  By the same author

  Novels

  Night Shift

  The Woman’s Daughter

  The Journey Home

  Emily’s Shoes

  A Second Life

  Father’s Music

  Temptation

  Plays

  The Lament for Arthur Cleary

  Blinded by the Light

  In High Germany

  The Holy Ground

  One Last White Horse

  April Bright

  The Passion of Jerome

  Consenting Adults

  Plays: 1 (selected plays)

  Poetry

  The Habit of Flesh

  Finglas Lilies

  No Waiting America

  Internal Exiles

  Leinster Street Ghosts

  Taking My Letters Back: New & Selected Poems

  Editor

  The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction

  Finbar’s Hotel

  Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel

  Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing Face of Irish Theatre

  Copyright

  Flamingo

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Flamingo is a registered trade mark of HarperCollinsPublishers Limited

  www.fireandwater.com

  Published by Flamingo 2002

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2001

  Copyright © Dermot Bolger 2001

  Dermot Bolger asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  The Author and Publisher are grateful to Mrs Maire Mhac an Tsaoi for permission to reproduce two verses, in Irish, from the poem ‘An Long’ by Padraig de Brun. Thanks also go to Theo Dorgan for permission to reproduce his English translation of those same two verses.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. With the exception of one or two public figures whose real names have been used, the names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. At the time of writing, two tribunals investigating payments to politicians are still sitting in Dublin Castle, but have not, to the author’s knowledge, investigated politicians or planning decisions from the county of Meath.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-40449-0

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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