The Journey Home

by Dermot Bolger

  Every evening that winter my father’s face was like ash, gathered from a burnt-out half-century and spread in a fine crust over his bones. His eyes were more jaded than any I had ever known. He’d come home from work with stories of Pascal Plunkett’s moods, collapse into an armchair by the television and stare at his idle eldest son. He said little and I learnt to match his words. We sat in a silence broken only by my mother’s fussing, while outside the weeds and nettles choked his dreams. Sometimes he’d cough and, looking up, ask me to chop everything down. ‘Tomorrow,’ I’d say. ‘I’m tired now.’ I would mean to put on his rubber boots, take the tools hanging between nails in the shed and walk out as I used to watch him do, but those photocopied rejections seemed to have sapped my strength. I sulked instead, brooding on the few words that passed between us, although it wasn’t what he said that hurt but the disbelief in his eyes when I’d mention all the places I had tried for work. In the end I just said nothing. The present made no sense in his world. He stared blankly at the evening news while they carried the victims of the bombings and hijackings away in black plastic sacks.

  Christmas froze into January. Blue nights alone in the overgrown garden, making tea in the kitchen at three in the morning. That year had become a posthumous existence. At night I’d smoke joints in the bathroom, leaning on my toes to blow the smoke out the window, constantly alert for an opening door. I seemed to have lost the power to sleep, gradually losing track of the everyday world. February came and then March, fresh weeds squeezing through the dead grass.

  At two o’clock one morning I walked down the garden, wading through weeds like a field of barley. Lines of new extensions stretched on both sides, a lone light burning in a garage twelve doors down. I thought of Jews hiding in cellars, snatching only a few seconds of air before dawn. Now I slept while others worked, rose in the afternoons, seemed to come to life only when darkness came. I had fallen from the cycle of life, with no longer the will-power to struggle. The queues each Tuesday afternoon, men pushing like a human battering ram against the door of the employment exchange. The letters posted out sending one hundred people for interview for a single job that I had to attend in case they checked up and cut my assistance. The fear of daring to hope in case it turned to bitterness when I was turned down; the hatred of leaving the bed and having to face the empty letter rack in the hall.

  I turned to go back inside and saw my father standing at the gate beneath the are of bare lilac bushes. At first I thought it was an apparition from the past. He had pulled on a white shirt and a pair of trousers held up by ancient braces. I walked towards him in the blue moonlight, both of us embarrassed, neither knowing how to talk.

  ‘What’s going to happen to you, son?’

  His voice was low, humble with bewilderment. I would have liked to touch his shoulder, to somehow reassure him. Looking at him I knew that I would leave home soon, that only poverty was keeping me there. Ever since our fight about the old woman in the fields we had both lost the simple ease which had once existed between us. I knew that he was thinking about days further back, times I’d waited beside the lilac bushes wanting to feel important, hoping he’d ask me to fetch some tool from the shed. I longed to say, Tomorrow dad, we’ll take those tools down, fix up the garden the way it used to be. But I couldn’t. I had to turn away.

  ‘I don’t know. You go back to bed now. I’m just getting some air.’

  He shook his head and I watched him turn and walk up the path. There was a nettle swaying near my hand. I pressed my fingers over it. It stung badly, but at least the pain felt real.

  Then one morning, grey and ordinary, a letter from the Voters’ Register’s office came. The offer was a temporary position starting on the first of the month. I felt there should be bands marching from the kitchen, majorettes turning somersaults on the lino. Instead my mother was scrubbing floors in Plunkett Undertakers, my brothers and sisters were at school. Happiness seemed to underline my isolation. I went out into the street hoping to meet somebody I could share the news with. Behind the supermarket I saw my father in the forecourt of Plunkett Motors. Younger men asked him questions as they stripped an engine. He pulled on his cigarette, coughed and spat on the tarmacadam. I couldn’t find the courage to go across and tell him.

  On the way home I remembered a television programme I’d seen about flowers buried in the desert which hibernate for years waiting to burst through their whole life cycle during a single day of rain. I felt strong again, like a young bird about to take flight. And I realized why I’d never touched the quarter-acre of garden where all my childhood memories were buried under bamboo stalks of nettles and clumps of weeds. I had been trying to hold up time, to live on in the past having no future to put in its place.

  But now the anticipation of change raced in my bloodstream and I wanted to be rid of that shadow. I returned to the silent house where the stained oilcloth on the table, the flaking paint on the wood, the faded wallpaper in the bedroom which light never entered till evening all seemed to be mocking me, reducing me to the child I’d always been. I took the bailing hook from the shed, donned my father’s old boots, and as I worked every blow was like an act of finality, a foretaste of the separations to come.

  At five thirty my father walked down to the hedge. I still had the letter in my pocket. Your tea son, he said, and I shook my head. He watched me work on for a few moments then turned. I swung fiercely at the last bushes until I stopped, my blood calmed in the afterglow of labour. As darkness fell I lit a cigarette among the ghosts of hen-runs and alder bushes and watched the lit windows of the house occluded by the overgrown lilac I hadn’t the heart to touch. I felt severed finally from the life of that terrace where I had been delivered, red and sickly, by a country midwife. The bonfire of branches and old timber that I had dosed with paraffin and lit was smouldering. I remember a flatness about the evening as if the whole street had been becalmed in time and then, with a swift flapping of wings, a formation of returning swallows swooped over the rooftops and wheeled upwards in a V across the gardens and out into the distance. And when I looked down, the rotten timbers of the hen-house had caught and the carnage began. The shorn surface of the garden looked like a nightmare landscape, fragments lit up and snatched away by the flickering light. Straight black smoke rose to be dissipated into a swirling pall. I watched my childhood burn, the debris of those years borne off into the sky, my final links with what had been home disintegrating into bright quivers of ash.

  I’d no idea what lay ahead, all I knew was that as soon as I got my first pay packet I would start the search for a new home, for my own life to begin. I took the letter from my pocket and walked in.

  Katie, I smell of clay, I dream of earth, remembering until there is nothing more to forget. Where is this place? One square of fading light high up, one night sailor riding the sky. Old bits of glass and stones, leaves that have blown in. Somebody was here before me, I’m waiting for someone to come. Still can’t make sense of it, this dreaming waking coma. Why here, seeing your life run like a film through my skull? Things I could not have known, images I couldn’t have remembered.

  They start with the click of footsteps that mark out your days. Shifting between one set and the next. Afternoons when weak sunlight catches the long windows of the upstairs classroom. The murmur of schoolgirl voices, a rustle of papers, heads perpetually bent down but you have gone so far Katie, so distant from that room. A nun, white and obsolete, in robes, leans across your desk to examine the smudged paper before you. She smiles, mutters inaudible words and when she lifts her hand she leaves behind five chalky fingerprints like the mark of a skeleton implanted in the wood. You stare in fascination at the dead hand as the footsteps dully click their way back to her desk. A bell rings and you move in a shower of coats and blouses down the waxed corridor by the plaster statue and out into the air. Voices call, bicycles manoeuvre through the crush of bodies, birds take off from the single tree inside the gate. You pass the pub, the bookies beneath my
flat, cross the metal bridge indistinct in a babbling group and stand outside the shopping centre by the glass front of Plunkett Auctioneers to place the first cigarette to your lips. You have learnt how to return woodenly the glances of youths, a hard woman of fifteen idling in the click of boots that mount the concrete steps by the bank, watching the swollen queue encircling the bus with trolleys and prams, the taxis loitering by the monument. You put it off, you light up again, joke with the girls positioned around you. But soon you will have to stub that cigarette butt against the rough surface of the wall, lift your bag and walk back across that span of metal, down the twilit laneway by the ruined cottages. You will cross the darkening green where the horses are tethered, the piebald and the white, the young foal anxious beside its mother, and move, through the glare of headlights, across the main road into the embrace of the estate. The creak of a pram two children push, the gang of lads at the corner who shout. They will not find you out. You have hidden yourself well in parallel jeans and a tight sweater. Your accent cold as a robin stretched dead in winter, your stance blending into the roadways. The depleted trunks of two trees stand as forlorn sentinels of another time. You hunch your shoulders in the cold. You do not allow yourself to remember.

  The scent offryingfrom the kitchen. A television shrieking through a wall. Hanging up your coat you hear them, the steps of your uncle overhead crossing the landing to the stairs. He marches down briskly like a man with some purpose, impeccably dressed in his working clothes. His polished shoes go before you towards the table which is set. And each crippled, helpless step is like a hammer beating away at your skull, reminding you of an uncle you once loved. He sits at the head of the table as you sit among his children and sense his eyes scanning the oilcloth, anxious that all of you are fed.

  You long to scream your rage for him as he stalks the house like a caged animal. Instead you lower your eyes to avoid the pain concealed in his. His donkey coat hangs by the door. Soon he will rise and take it, walk out through the dark streets to join his ex-workmates. Cigarettes will be lit, the day’s news examined. All that will not be mentioned is the sense of shame each carries on his shoulders since the plant closed down. Tradesmen who were proud of their skill, the blue overalls perpetually clean, the brown wage packet carried home with calm assurance. It was to be like that for ever: a thousand Sunday mornings when children crowded into a car; a tray of pints carried in an evening; a child’s eyes wide with half crowns. New words have entered their vocabulary since then. They will not spend long with each other, each inventing some task to take them back to a sofa and a television, the library book unopened with its ageing stamp, the white dot that will summon them finally to bed.

  But you will be gone before he returns, back to the street’s anonymity. The window ledge of a chip shop, the smell of watered vinegar. A radio on a wall, a squad car slowing as it passes, a boy’s hand on your shoulder which you shrug off. It’s late now and you know he will be waiting to hear the door. You know that he will search for words in his bulky frame. And you will stand, wanting to run and kiss like once before. But the same stiffness will be inside both of you now. Your feet click out your final moments alone along the deserted streets.

  What did I expect that morning as I walked down the park steps at Islandbridge to work? It had rained overnight and the stones were streaked with rusty rivulets of water and oil. I was exhausted at the unfamiliar hour. The letter said the office was located on the top storey of the court-house beside the hulk of the abandoned jail. I crossed the river and walked up past the barracks, going over the litany of names in my mind. It was where Emmet and Ann Devlin had been held and tortured; where Ernie O’Malley had escaped with the help of Welsh Guards; where James Connolly had been strapped to a chair and carried in by the British to be shot; where the poet Joseph Mary Plunkett had become bridegroom and corpse within one hour of dawn. When Patrick Plunkett first stood for election in the sixties he used to fake a connection by quoting verses from his namesake in the election leaflets that Pascal made my father and other workers deliver door to door.

  Now the jail was empty, an echoing presence beside the court-house where a small crowd had already gathered. My stomach was twisted with anxiety as I entered and paused for directions. The barren hallway made me want to run—the bare flagstones where two children played sailors in cardboard boxes, the single bench along the wall with paint flaking overhead from a once ornate ceiling. An elderly couple rose, the man beckoning with his stick as the women tried to hide behind him.

  ‘Excuse me sir,’ he whispered, ‘my wife was mugged in Ballybough last year and she’s due to give evidence. Her nerves are bad since and we’re terrified to meet those young men again. Is there nowhere we can hide?’

  It was the first time I had ever been addressed as sir. I mumbled guiltily and pushed on, leaving them looking more nervous and ashamed than the offenders casually standing around. I followed the staircase to a high, cold room partitioned by a warren of stacked shelving and three long benches besieged by chairs. No one looked up from their newspapers when I entered, each clerk sunk in those final moments before Carol arrived jangling the three keys from the different locks of her old bicycle like a bell, before Mooney’s brooding presence mooched wordlessly into his inner office and the morning’s work began.

  How often in the following months did I enter that room to find a new person standing as I had stood, left to wait awkwardly till someone condescended to look up? I hated them that morning, hated the bowed heads, the odd murmur of voices; hated the same phrases I’d hear over and over: Are you doing the interview? Did you hear there’s a transfer list soon? Yet later, when Shay left, I often did the same, sinking down beneath Mooney’s presence which lit the office like a black bulb draining each breath of life from the room until no one bothered doing one action more than necessary, knowing how he would snap at them for the least step out of line.

  Mooney appeared behind me, paused to insert his name on the attendance book and was gone into his office across the room. Though no one moved, I could sense the stiffness entering their shoulders and the relief, like a silent exhaling of breath, when he had passed. His tall, country frame was like a prison warder’s, his lined face lacking sufficient bones to hang the red folds of flesh upon. I watched him slam his door, a black-suited Buddha turned bad, the pioneer pin stuck on his lapel, and from deep within I felt an involuntary shudder.

  And then Carol was at my elbow like a diminutive burst of light, gripping it and joking as she led me into the centre of the room and jangled the keys of her bicycle locks for attention. She called my name out to everybody before she had bothered to check it, and suddenly had the clerks scurrying, one showing me where to put my coat, another finding space at a table for me and a third poised to teach me the elemental filing with which I was to pass my days. She was tiny and plump with fading red hair, in her late fifties, as active as Mooney was static, nervous energy bubbling as she shouted commands in her precise south Dublin accent over the dying rustle of newspapers, covering up for her superior with her own workload. She drew the red line in the attendance book as carefully as a heart surgeon with a scalpel, and had clapped her hands for attention when the door behind her opened. She stopped and pursed her lips as a young man strolled in with a leather jacket over his shoulder, then drew a long breath up through her nose, arched her nostrils like a nervous foal, as he approached.

  ‘Hello, mum!’ He grinned and bent to peck her on the lips before slipping past to take the vacant seat beside me. Shoulders stiffened at the tables like trees bending in a forest. Carol stood frozen in the position she had been kissed. Then she turned and ran towards the inner office. Almost before the door had slammed the white intercom on the wall was buzzing hysterically and continued to do so while it was being answered. The young man grinned again, held his hand out and asked me my name.

  ‘Francis,’ I said. ‘Francis Hanrahan.’

  ‘What do they call you at home, Francis or Frank?’ />
  ‘Francy.’

  ‘Good Jesus! Where did you leave the spade?’

  He looked at me closely.

  ‘You’re no more from the bog than I am. Would you settle for Hano?’

  The buzzing had stopped. The girl replaced the receiver and called over.

  ‘Shay. Mooney wants to see you!’

  He grinned and rose to stroll towards the door. When he went in people began whispering about the incident in little huddles. What they said I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t listening. I think I felt a mixture of admiration and resentment. His words had made me feel relaxed for the first time since entering the room. I was elated and yet suddenly scared, for if the others seemed content to ignore me, now I felt threatened by his very openness. Suddenly I resented him because he seemed all the things I was afraid to be, because I was certain he’d see through me and ridicule the defences I’d built between myself and the world. I wished he was sitting elsewhere, that I was among some anonymous clutter of silent clerks. Charles, a clerk with a face like a slapped arse, a perpetual white shirt and tie and a nose to judge precisely which arse to lick, leaned over disdainfully and whispered, ‘Dangerous to know.’ I nodded and began filing the cards in front of me, copying the hand motions of the girl on my left side. The door opened and Shay returned to sit beside me. I sneaked a glance at him. He was only twenty-one but looked older. His jet black hair fell slightly down his shoulder, his skin was dark, as if he were descended from an Armada survivor, his hands were fingering a neat moustache. From somewhere I found courage.