I remember once as a child missing the bus stop at the village and being carried up the long straight road into the Corporation estates in the West. I was terrified by the stories I had heard. I could have been a West Berliner who’d strayed across the Iron Curtain. When I was eight the new dual carriageway made the division complete, took away the woodlands we might have shared, made the only meeting point between the two halves of the village a huge arched pedestrian bridge. He listened incredulously when I confessed to not having been in the Bath Wars, then described how each summer’s day the boys in the West would gather on the hill overlooking the river valley that had miraculously survived between them and the next suburb. Below lay the only amenity for miles: a filthy, concrete open-air pool. On the far hill the enemy was massed with strict military ranks observed. Daily pitched battles were fought for possession of the muddy square of water. That Friday by the prison wall Shay lifted his shirt to show me the scar left on his back from the evening he was captured on a reconnaissance mission and beaten with a bicycle chain. I think now of Ernie O’Malley escaping through the gate that stood behind us that day, both wars a struggle to reach adulthood. To Shay the scar was as much a part of growing up there as Black-and-Tans smashing doors was to his grandfather. I told him instead of my world of hen-runs and potato beds, of opening the back door one night to find a hedgehog trapped in the light, pulling its head in and squatting for hours till it could escape into the dark.
Shay had left home when he started work at eighteen, and perpetually moved from bedsit to bedsit since. I envied him for having made the break. The world he spoke of was magical—late-night snooker halls and twenty-four-hour kebab shops where the eyes of a waitress at four in the morning were lit by Seconal, walking home from a poker session to a flat at dawn with thirty pounds in change. That Friday afternoon I desperately wanted his friendship, wanted his respect, wanted to become a part of his world. I tried to lie and invent experiences but found I hadn’t the confidence.
Instead I tried to prove my manhood by cursing Mooney and speaking of the hatred already building in me. It was contagious in that cramped office where no one knew who would be reported next. Only once had I been inside Mooney’s inner office where the blinds were kept drawn, giving the room an air of perpetual twilight. An old-fashioned lamp with a metal shade burned on his desk, highlighting his joined fingers, and a white circle of disordered papers stretched away into the dusk at the table’s edge. Leather-bound volumes coated with dust lined the walls except for the space behind the desk where the largest map of the city I had ever seen was hung. The political boundaries had been drawn and redrawn on it as successive governments reshaped the constituencies to their advantage. Once a year when Mooney went reluctantly on holiday with his wife and children, Carol worked in a frenzy to make sense of the papers before his return. I had been sent in to deliver two completed folders and Mooney had ignored my knock and my query about where to leave them. Only when I was leaving did he speak. I see everything in this office, he intoned. I turned. In the lamplight it was impossible to see his eyes, only the joined hands motionless on the desk. They picked up the nearest paper, dismissing me. But as I cursed him by the wall of the jail I realized Shay was the only person who didn’t share in the collective orgy of hate. For him it would have given Mooney a stature he didn’t deserve.
He kicked at the ashes, enjoying the last few breaths of air.
‘Listen Hano, that’s his world up there. Do you not think he knows how they hate him? I tell you, the man gloats on it. Not only has he got them for eight hours a day, but before work, after work; every waking hour they spend discussing how they hate him makes him the axis of their lives. He lives off it for fuck sake, it gives him importance. Just ignore the cunt. That’s what really kills him.’
Shay grinned and began to walk back towards the office, teaching me the golden rules of survival and promotion. Do nothing unless you absolutely have to. Make no decisions whatsoever. Perpetually pass on responsibility. Remember that no extra work you do, even if you stay till midnight, will ever find its way on to your record. Only your mistakes will be marked down, black marks on your file for ever. Any innovation will be seen as a threat by those above you. Therefore those who do least, who shirk all decisions, will always progress. It was why Mooney, who spent his day brooding behind an Irish Times at his filthy desk, now commanded his own section, while Carol, who ran and fetched, who kept the office running single-handed, blundering her way through the work he refused to touch, would never progress beyond being his useful assistant. She had committed the fatal mistake of making herself indispensable and would remain there till Mooney finally retired and some white-shirted graduate came in to modernize the office over her head. I had been wrong to imagine work as an adult world. The same old roles of childhood were played out there. As we walked up the steps I wondered suddenly would I be there till sixty-five, learning to rise the ladder and lick higher arses? The thought frightened me more than the unemployment I had known a week before.
Back in the office Shay and Mary played games to spin out the afternoon. If Mooney was safe from them, Carol rose to their bait every time. At half-four, Shay cocked his head like an Indian tracker, then clicked his fingers. Mary had reached the Ladies before Carol even opened Mooney’s door. I watched Carol discreetly check the locked door as Shay and Mick bent their heads dutifully down. She pretended to examine the stacked shelves beside the toilet, shifting uneasily from foot to foot as the minutes passed. Beside me Shay and Mick took bets and softly hummed ‘Singing in the Rain’, until after a quarter of an hour Shay raised his head, touched my shoulder lightly and switched his humming to ‘Here We Go, Here We Go’.
‘Is the post ready, Paula?’
‘No, Carol. I’ll have it finished in five minutes.’
‘What have you been doing all afternoon? Must I do every little thing in this office myself?’
She clenched her fists against her scarlet face and skipped up and down like a child with a rope as she screamed ‘There’s none of yous good!’ Shay watched her flee the room and race across to the toilet in the pub, then picked his watch up.
‘Fifteen and a half minutes,’ he told Mick. ‘You jammy bollox.’ He passed a pound across the table and rose to tap three times on the door. Mary emerged with the paper, glanced around surreptitiously and used it to put the clock on five minutes.
At five to five we stampeded down the steps. The weekend, which had been the worst time of the week when I was unemployed, suddenly stretched joyously before me. I stood enjoying the late spring sunshine. Shay had left just in front of me.
‘Good luck mate,’ I shouted. ‘See you Monday.’
He waved back and then paused.
‘What’s your hurry?’ he said. ‘Fancy a pint? Celebrate your first week of survival.’
He stood a few feet from me, happily indifferent to whether I came or not. I thought of my mother at home, my father due in from Plunkett Motors at half-past five, washing his hands in the deep enamel sink, my little sisters running in and out the kitchen door behind him. I didn’t want to admit to being expected home.
‘Ah, I’m a bit skint. Had to work a back week, you know yourself.’
‘Jasus, there’ll be enough times when I’ll be broke. Get into the car for fuck’s sake if that’s all that’s wrong with you.’
They would wait till the Angelus came on the television, neither praying nor speaking till the chimes stopped, then they’d cover my plate and leave it in the oven. There would be no questions asked when I got home, just silent hurt filling the room of plywood furniture.
A battered Triumph Herald was parked by the prison wall like a relic from Black-and-Tan days. ‘My only love,’ Shay said, patting the canvas roof, and with great difficulty managing to lower it. The rusty bodywork had received more blows than a punch-drunk boxer. After four attempts the engine reluctantly spluttered to life and we moved off towards town. I felt both guilty and elated, filled with a sens
e of liberation. And perhaps because we had spoken earlier of our home place, all the way to town we talked of travel, each charting more mythical journeys across the European continent. Paris, Berlin, Lisbon; places that to me were just names from subtitled films glimpsed when my parents went to bed, but for Shay they were real. He spoke of them like women he would one day sleep with.
That evening was my first glimpse of Shay’s Dublin. It was like an invisible world existing parallel to the official one I had known, a grey underworld of nixers and dole where people slagged Shay for actually having a job. One summer he’d worked as a messenger boy on a motor bike and knew every twisted lane and small turning. I kept intending to go home after each place we visited but then he’d suggest another and we’d be gone. There was no premeditation, the evening just drifted on its own course. I’d imagine my mother’s plain cooking gradually stuck to the plate, the meat drying up, the shrivelled vegetables. Then Shay would park another pint in front of me and that would put an end to that. I began to see how Shay survived the office without bitterness or hatred. To him it was just a temporary apparition, eight hours of rest before he entered his real world.
At nine o’clock Shay insisted on buying me a Chinese meal, joking that the seagull’s leg refused to stop twitching. By then I was talking as I had never talked since I sat in the old woman’s caravan, living off every word he spoke, making him laugh with stories about my father’s boss. But I shied away from any reference to my home, ashamed of it suddenly as I envied his freedom, his experience, his accepted adultness. Two girls sat at a nearby table. Occasionally one glanced across at him.
‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Will we give it a lash? It’s up to yourself.’
I got frightened of being caught out. I was not a virgin but was terrified of the direct approach. My few successes had been scored hurriedly after dances, brought to a messy climax, before bolting as though from the scene of a crime. If we approached I knew I would be tongue-tied. I hesitated and, trying to feign an experienced air, suggested they might not be the type. He grinned at them and gave a mock wave of his hand.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Cute country girls in their bedsits. They may have lost their virginity but they’ll probably still have the box it came in.’
But it was obvious I was nervous and when they rose to leave he blew a kiss after them and suggested we play snooker instead.
The hall was a converted warehouse with no sign outside. The old man behind the counter was watching a black-and-white television. He greeted Shay like a son and asked him to mind the gaff while he slipped out to the pub. The walls had been whitewashed once but only vaguely remembered the event. We chose the least ragged of the vacant tables. Shay broke, then leaned on his cue to look around the semi-derelict room.
‘I used to live here after I was expelled from school. Old Joe had great hopes for me but I knew I hadn’t got it. The place is in tatters now but no wankers come in. I tried a few of the new ones. Deposits, video cameras, and toss-artists who think a deep screw is a mot with a BA. Fuck this, I said, I must be getting old.’
It was ten o’clock when we left. The old man still hadn’t returned but occasionally men left a few quid behind the counter as they wandered out. ‘Is it cool?’ Shay asked. ‘You sure you don’t have to head home?’ I lied again and followed him through the feverish weekend crowds beneath the neon lights, then down towards a warren of cobbled laneways off Thomas Street. The pub we came to looked shut, the only hint of life being a fine grain of light beneath the closed shutters. A tramp passed, stumbling towards the night shelter. He mumbled a few incomprehensible words, one hand held out as though his fingers were cupping a tiny bird. Two children sleeping rough watched us from the doorway of a boarded-up bakery. Shay tapped three times on the steel shutter and I had the sensation of being watched before it swung open. A middle-aged Monaghan man with an old-fashioned bar apron beckoned and welcomed Shay by name. The downstairs bar was thick with smoke, countrymen nursing pints, a figure with a black beard gesturing drunkenly in the centre of the floor. Two old women sang in a corner, one lifting her hand with perfect timing at regular intervals to straighten the man beside her who was tilting on his bar stool. Nobody there was under fifty, no one born in the city that was kept out by the steel door.
‘Gas, isn’t it?’ Shay said. ‘Knocknagow on a Friday evening.’
He gazed in amusement, then headed downstairs to the cellar. Here the owner’s son reigned, the father never coming closer than shouting down from the top step at closing time. Four women with sharp, hardened faces sat in one corner drinking shorts. The dozen people at the long table shouted assorted abuse and greetings at Shay as he grinned and waved two fingers back to them. He called for drink and introduced me to his friends. I began to suss how the locked door kept more than the industrial revolution out. The girl across from me was rolling a joint; the bloke beside Shay passing one in his hands. He took three drags and handed it on to me. The pints arrived. I dipped into the white froth, my head afloat. Two of the women in the corner rose and ascended the stairs, bored looking, stubbing their cigarettes out.
‘The massaging hand never stops,’ Shay said. ‘Pauline there left her bag behind one night so I brought it over to her across the road in the Clean World Health Studio. She was clad in a leather outfit after skelping the arse off some businessman who was looking decidedly green in the face as if he’d got more for his forty quid than he bargained for.’
‘Forty quid?’ I joked as the next joint reached me. ‘Well fuck Father Riley and his bar of chocolate.’
It was to be the first of numerous nights with Shay in haunts like that, always tucked away down crooked lanes. I think he had a phobia about streets that were straight. But that night in Murtagh’s stands out because everything was so new and spinning faster and faster. It had all reached a blur when the young man in the check suit appeared, with features so familiar I drove myself crazy trying to place them. As he spoke he clapped his hands like an American basketball player, his body perpetually jiving as if linked to an inaudible disco rhythm. Shay frowned slightly when he saw him approach. He was the first person there Shay seemed to tolerate more than like. The young man slapped Shay’s shoulder and shook hands with me with a polished over-firm grip.
‘My main man Seamus. A drink for you and your friend.’
He returned with three tequilas. I copied Shay in licking the salt, drained the glass in one gulp and sank my teeth into the lemon. It was like electricity shooting through my body. I slammed my fist on the table and shook my head. The young man laughed so much he insisted on buying another round. Shay grinned sardonically as he watched me trying to place him.
‘Add thirty years,’ he said, ‘four stone of fat and a bog accent. You’ve already mentioned him twice tonight.’
I studied the figure arguing animatedly with the two women left in the corner. My brain slowly reconciled the two opposites.
‘Plunkett,’ I said. ‘My da’s boss. He’s something like him, but Pascal’s a bachelor.’
‘Fuck your da’s boss. He’s chicken shit. Who’s his famous brother?’
His face had stared at me from lamp-posts at every election time, his eyes gazing from cards dropped into the hallway with fake handwriting underneath. I tried to match the features in front of me now with the image of Patrick Plunkett I had last seen, repeating rhetorical phrases on a current affairs show as he refused to answer the interviewer’s questions.
‘Your future, smiling local TD,’ Shay said. ‘A genuine chip off the old bollox. Justin. So christened because of his one-inch penis. I see he’s dispatching the last of his troupe. Would make a great newspaper headline for any editor wanting to go out of business fast.’
The two women in the corner were about to leave.
‘Surely the cops know,’ I said.
‘What fucking country do you live in Hano? You know any guard wants to get transferred to Inisbofin? It may be an embarrassment to the governme
nt to have it open; it would be an even greater embarrassment for the fuckers to have to close it down. Youth must have its fling. The party knows he’ll drop it when the old bastard expires and he’s called upon to inherit the seat. He’s being groomed already, two or three funerals a week.’
For the first time I detected bitterness in Shay’s voice. But to be angry would be to admit he was a part of their world. Shay shrugged his shoulders and suggested we go upstairs. When I closed my eyes I felt like a boat being rocked from side to side. At the doorway Justin Plunkett pushed a glass into my hand. I heard Shay slagging him about the suit, his good humour returned. Shay’s hand was on my shoulder, steering me upstairs, past the country men in their bar, up two more flights and into a tiny room in darkness except for a blazing fire and a single blue spotlight. It shone down on a long-haired figure on a pallet strumming a guitar. A man crouched beside him, keeping up a rhythm on a hand drum. I found a seat among the stoned crowd and tried to follow the singer’s drug-ridden fantasies. Each song lasted quarter of an hour, filled with tortoises making love and nuns in rubber boots.
I felt sick and yet had never felt better as I gazed from the window at the tumbledown lane outside. The sleeping children had gone. A man with a cardboard box and a blanket jealously guarded their spot. Far below, Dublin was moving towards the violent crescendo of its Friday night, taking to the twentieth century like an aborigine to whiskey. Studded punks pissed openly on corners. Glue sniffers stumbled into each other, coats over their arms as they tried to pick pockets. Addicts stalked rich-looking tourists. Stolen cars zigzagged through the distant grey estates where pensioners prayed anxiously behind bolted doors, listening for the smash of glass. In the new disco bars children were queuing, girls of fourteen shoving their way up for last drinks at the bar.
The Journey Home Page 4
