Scowling, we wandered through street after street of new homes, completely lost in that new suburb at the foothills of the mountains as remote to us as our own had been to our fathers. The brickwork on each house looked too new, too consciously trying to be old, not to seem like Noddy houses. We grumbled in the clean air, among the brightly painted doors and privet hedges, speaking of the poetry of rusting steel, our favourite old factories, crooked laneways decked with glass and graffiti. Families were climbing into cars for Mass, a dog came proprietorially out to investigate and fled to the sanctuary of his porch when Shay knelt to bark at him. After an hour a bus came. An old tramp sat across from us in the back seat playing a mouth organ and banging his feet in time to the tunes. I knew I finally had to go home. I left Shay in the city centre looking for his car abandoned on Friday night and nervously got a bus. I tried to rehearse words to myself, remembering the speeches I made to my father in my mind about the old woman. Now the same phrases come back again five years on. This time I swore I’d say them.
But in the end I said little and they said less, though I could see the hurt in their eyes. My young brother told me they had gone to the police earlier that morning. I kept wanting to explain but as soon as I stepped back inside their house I knew that, like trying to talk about the old woman, it was impossible to bridge our worlds.
But this time I think my father wanted to tell me he understood. I had sensed his attitude to me change the first day I returned from work, but to my mother I was still a child. I could hear her scolding him in the kitchen for not being firmer as I lay in my room. I wanted to go down and apologize but by now it had become more than just a weekend. I was punishing them with my silence just for being what they could not help being. A mother and father I loved but no longer belonged to. It was time to enter my own world yet it seemed I couldn’t make the break without causing them pain and deliberately denigrating the memories that bound us. What had once united me with my parents now seemed ridiculous—those memories of gardens and jockeybacks. From that Sunday I was like a wound inside their house, festering without air, living only for the evenings when I could take the bus to town.
Because now it was Shay that I lived for. In the weeks that followed I didn’t just want to be with him, I wanted to become him. Sometimes it seemed I had almost succeeded. Towards closing time in a pub, if I lowered my head for a moment with his voice still in my ears, I felt physically locked inside his body, seeing through his eyes, sharing his thoughts. At work the girls slagged me for unconsciously imitating his gestures as his key words found their way into my speech. Even Mooney treated me with caution as an appendix of Shay.
Each night spent wandering through bars and parties with him made my home seem more distant. I was split in two, my personality changing each time I opened the front door, the afterglow of being with him reinforcing my isolation in that room where my parents sat trapped before a television. In their company I was sullen, closed in on myself, but once I left I could feel myself change. I would shout and embrace him when he entered the pub and he’d laugh, calming me down like a young puppy. Drink gave me courage to become all my imaginings. I hid behind it, stumbling down alleyways after him, falling, singing, hopping up to ride on his back to shout like a Horse Protestant. I became a jester unleashed, knowing only exhilaration, yet capable of being stilled and made to feel childish by one look of irritation from him.
I longed merely to be allowed to take a blanket and curl up on his floor below the huge bay window. As each evening progressed I’d grow nervy, ordering that last drink for us just a fraction too late for me to reach the bus stop on time, glancing at the pub clock, dying for him to suggest that I stop over. Sometimes he’d be chatting up a girl or just tired and wouldn’t bother and finally I’d have to face the long walk back to my parents’ house, with the night oppressive on my shoulders. But more often he would offer me a mattress and I’d casually accept, trying not to sound too excited.
The night would wind leisurely back to his flat, via kebab shops and snooker halls. Shay kept a small axe under the seat of the Triumph Herald and auctioneers’ signs and advertising hoardings on quiet corners we passed often vanished in the darkness. Back in the flat he’d chop them up, hold a match to the fire-lighters thrown beneath them, and we’d sit across from each other at the Victorian fireplace, talking over dope and tea about our pasts and our plans. Often the front door banged at two in the morning and Mick would arrive with a group of mates. I’d clear the table while Shay searched for the cards. Dealer’s choice for any poker variation; Klondikie, Southern Cross, Ace High, Blind Baseball, Seven- and Five-Card Stud, under a barrage of wisecracks while Ian Dury and Wreckless Eric revolved in the cramped space beneath the sink. If the game flagged he’d throw in a few rounds of In-Betweenies, and we’d dare each other to go for the pot, laughing when somebody lost and had to stoke it.
If dope was plentiful Shay would produce an ornate water pipe from beneath his bed. Slowly it passed along the lips of the gamblers. I’d close my eyes and lean backwards to feel the room lurch and buckle in my mind, white colours merging into brilliant shades that blazed against my eyelids. I’d open them to arguments about who should go for skins to the twenty-four-hour shop. I’d offer to go and stand blinking in the bright shop, feeling like a criminal as I asked for washing powder and sliced ham as well in an effort not to buy the cigarette papers too conspicuously. The boys would crack up when I returned, clutching the bag of shopping guiltily under my jacket. They’d break for coffee and, still slagging me, hold putting competitions on the carpet with those who were knocked out, betting on those who were left.
Some nights people brought bags of magic mushrooms which Shay fried on a pan with oil and salt despite protests from all. They took time to take effect. On the first night I had forgotten them when the colours began to explode. Shay was sleeping in bed. I lay on the mattress beside the embers of the fire like a man strapped to a galloping horse, feeling the drug like a Martian from a B-movie coming alive in my body. For two days at home I still felt them as I sat before the television with my father, frightened to speak or make a sudden move, paranoid that he would notice the twitching I imagined I had developed.
One night Mick fell asleep lying on the side of the bed. Shay took every poster and cartoon off the wall to collect the Blue-tack on the back. He rolled it into a long sausage stretching from Mick’s hands which we joined at his groin up to his mouth. We smeared the tip with mayonnaise and, carrying him gently outside, left him to wake on the front steps. That was the night Justin Plunkett came by with a slab of black from Morocco smuggled in through the diplomatic bag. He was out of place, deliberately slumming it in his expensive leather jacket among the cluster of jeans and grubby sweat-shirts. He left soon after, blown out by the lads’ indifference. On the steps outside he woke Mick.
‘Hey, my man, it’s not cool, you’ll catch cold.’
‘Go and fuck yourself!’ Mick said and, after thinking about it, added to the retreating back, ‘And fuck your politician daddy too’, before stumbling back inside. Then, as always, it was back to the cards, money still passing across that table when dawn greyed the window. Finally Shay would kick them out, curl up on his bed, and I’d lie again beside the fire, knowing that in a few hours I would screw up my eyes in the light and walk with him to work, the smell of drink on our breaths, our stomachs empty, our heads sore, our feet stinking and no love for Jesus in our hearts. And that evening I would turn the corner with a shiver of dread, returning to worried looks —my father’s sunken smile, my mother’s silence, her eyes close to tears—and I’d hate myself for the stab of triumph, as though I could only measure my independence by their growing bewilderment and pain.
The tenant in the room next to Shay’s drifted in and out of institutions. Once he had returned home to his native Galway and after two weeks in an asylum there one morning, instead of medication, they gave him thirty pounds and a one-way air ticket to Manchester. Now meals on wheels c
ame once a day to feed him, harassed social workers calling most evenings. At night we could hear him pacing his flat, perpetually walking in circles. At two o’clock each morning he’d take his dishes out to the front lawn in a basin and wash them kneeling on the grass. He had a key attached with string to some part of his body but rarely managed to find it beneath all his clothes which he wore at once. Most nights when we’d reach the house he’d be standing on the steps, his hands scrambling through his three coats, kicking at the door in desperation.
‘Shay!’ he’d beseech in his Galway accent. ‘Let me in Shay. I’m praying for you Shay, you and your young friend.’
He’d corner us on the step for quarter of an hour, droning on excitedly about how many Masses he’d attended that day and how many miles he had travelled on his free bus pass. Shay claimed that one day there would be plaster-cast statues of him in the glass panels over every Catholic doorway in Dublin, that we should keep the tin-foil containers they left his meals in to sell as future relics. Yet Shay was the only person in that house to rise, at no matter what hour of the morning and with how many curses, to let the shambling figure in. I’d lie on the floor listening to Shay calming him down enough to get him into his room. The other tenants were noises I could rarely put faces to. Their lives were shadows on the landing, the noise of footsteps in the hallway, a locked toilet door, the clink of six packs, a raised television, whispered evacuations on the night before rent day.
In the backyard the landlord had stacked old rotten timbers of doors and window frames from the four other properties he owned along the street. In times of shortages Shay hacked away at them steadily with his axe. I’d hold a torch, shivering in the night air, and listen to the rhythmical chopping while the lights of a hundred bedsits flickered out across the black, abandoned gardens. That’s what I remember most about his small flat, the glowing embers like a bird’s nest as I drifted to sleep, and waking, stiff-limbed and hung-over, to the scent of wooden ash.
One night stands out from those first months when everything was so shockingly new. High up in a warren of bedsits, while far below Rathmines was awash with litter and tacky lights. At two in the morning there were still queues in the fast-food shops, music from pirate stations blaring through speakers where girls knifed open pitta bread, flickering shifts of colour carried through windows on to the street from the video screens above the counters. Traffic jammed the narrow roads where the last old ladies lived in crumbling family homes, taxis outside the flats unloading party goers who shrieked and embraced and then quarrelled about splitting the fare. A tramp was slumped on his bench where he slept each night beside the swimming baths, oblivious to the noise around him.
Earlier in the pub beside the canal I had found myself talking all evening to a girl. It had happened spontaneously, we were both drunk and at ease together, laughing in the ruck of bodies against the bar, teasing each other with the anticipation of what might come. Across from us Mick and Shay were joking with some girls from work. He caught my eye and winked in congratulation.
I cannot remember whose party it was, it was merely a succession of stairs till we reached an attic. Thirty bodies danced in the crowded room where the only light came from candles stuck in bottles. Whoever rented the flat only owned three records which were played over and over. The girl had come with us, she was half-slumped against me as we waltzed until I was almost carrying her. Yet still I raised the bottle we were sharing to her lips, watched the gin dribble down like tears on to her dress. What did she want from me? Would I know what to say to her when I was sober?
But it wasn’t really her I was thinking of as we danced. Above all else I wanted Shay to see, I wanted to prove myself. Steps led up to a tiny bedroom with a low, sloping roof. I kicked the door open where a young boy lay unconscious from drink on the bed. I called back to Shay and Mick who took him between them, carrying him down those long flights of stairs to the back garden where they walked him in circles, his bare feet trailing through puddles, till he woke without a clue where he was. The girl had swayed against me so I had to catch her as we watched them carry him past. I led her in and as I turned to lock the door she collapsed without a sound on to the carpeted floor. Light came from a low window divided by a wooden lattice which threw a shadow across the floor in the shape of a crucifix. In a flat across the street I heard a child crying and imagined a young unmarried mother pacing up and down her few feet of space trying to pacify it before the other tenants complained.
I had to crawl on my knees to find the girl, help her up, manoeuvre her on to the bed. I doubt if either of us got any pleasure. I struggled to stay erect, fumbling in the dark for condoms, trying to undo buttons as people banged on the door; she slept through it, waking occasionally to mumble another man’s name. All I kept thinking of was Shay outside, walking with the drunken figure, knowing that for once it was me up here. I came half-heartedly and lay spent in the dark, holding her clumsily in my arms and listening to the commotion on the stairs. I realized I’d forgotten her name, where she worked. I had sobered up but I was scared now, not knowing how to approach her when she woke. I wanted to ask Shay but knew that would make me feel small again in my mind.
When she began to stir I helped her up, got her dressed, hurried her down to the street outside. She wanted to be held a little longer, wanted some words to make sense of what had happened. I wanted to talk to her, ask her to meet me properly again some evening. We walked to the main road, sat on the pavement saying nothing until a taxi approached and I hailed it, helped her into the back and gave the driver a bundle of pound notes and her address.
The police were leaving when I returned, a siren’s blue light rinsing the pavement as heads watched from windows along the street. Shay had thought the party had everything except a police raid so he’d phoned them. The host was in the hall, screaming at Mick and him to get out. Behind them an old black bicycle was unlocked. Shay mounted it and wobbled down the steps on to the footpath. He shouted at me to jump on to the crossbar. The bike swerved as it took my weight, then nearly unbalanced when Mick climbed on to the carrier at the back. The owner ran behind us screaming, as we weaved along the grass verge till we collided with a tree trunk, got up, left the bike there and walked home. Like a puppy with a stick, I waited for some acknowledgement, but neither of them mentioned the girl and I realized that nothing I could have done in that attic would have made Shay think less or more of me. They would have been as cheerfully indifferent if the girl was walking now along the shadowy roads back to find space beside me on the floor of Shay’s flat. I thought of the silent taxi driver speeding towards the outer suburbs, of what might have been if I hadn’t been afraid it would come between myself and Shay.
What time is it Katie? It stops when you pass into the twilit hangar of the old factory. Intimate afternoons of pills and laughter. Choices are discussed. One girl talks of pregnancy, the independence of a flat and an allowance. Another speaks of England, a bedsit shared with an older sister. Someone repeats stories of council bed-and-breakfasts in Bayswater: Asian children crammed into one room; breakfast a fried egg and a slice of bread in a plastic bag. None speak of the land outside, concrete melting into greenery that stretches away decked in alien foliage. Now all that is real for you begins here. The cold sitting-room light is forgotten; your uncle’s fist clenched around the nun’s neat handwriting; a television with the sound turned off; the steel rivets of accusations, his shame at your expulsion. What is his name, can you even remember? Good. What is your own? Even better. One girl disappears with a youth into the gloom where cobwebs hang from girders and torturous water drips at the far end of the cavern. ‘Are they?’ you ask. ‘No,’ somebody laughs. ‘She has a vampire’s teabag in.’
Outside light is glaring. You lurch across the carriageway, past the old cobbler’s bypassed by the builders, by the gothic bare-stoned mansion ensnared by Corporation terraces, up the hill of the main street, shivering in the afternoon light. The schoolgirls have been released in
trails of bright colours. From outside the clothes shop you watch them come. Who was the girl who laughed among them a few months ago? Another stranger inhabiting your body in limbo. The security guard’s uniformed back turns as you slip past into the shop. A voice of metal crackles inside his walkie-talkie as the skirt fits neatly underneath your own. Like arrayed ghosts the clothes hang on racks. An assistant laughs as he chases after her down through the tunnel of clothes and you are gone through the unguarded shop door. Back to twilight, back to warmth, a dozen items laid out on a floor. The young fence lifts them up, hands one back as worthless. He leaves in their place a variegated row of pills, a thin, dung-coloured slab in a tiny plastic bag, a trace of white powder. He retreats from you with patent leather footsteps.
When you speak now it is in a private slang, birthdays and older girls’ dole days your only reference points. Your landmarks bordered by a bus to town, a view of sky through corrugated iron, a black road leading inexorably home. One night you sit with two friends by the low carriageway wall where the woodland once stood. A child behind you with his father’s axe is chipping away at a young sapling surrounded by mesh. Two youths stop in a stolen Ford, they coax and the three of you climb in, voices singing from the back seat. The last remaining red light is broken. The car shoots on like a released prisoner, but to you, half-stoned, it could be in slow motion. By Mother Plunkett’s Cabin it flies, twisting down towards the ancient castle. Overgrown branches whip against both sides of the windscreen, the girls shrieking as the wheels cascade through the flooded hollow. Chained dogs grow frantic inside each farmyard as the car skids against the side gravel and veers sharply right. They slow near the snakes of landing lights laid out around the airport, the flickering reds, the rows of coloured bulbs rising up to meet the belly of the dropping plane. But you have grown quiet now, watching the moon keeping track through the hedgerows. The songs and voices do not penetrate. What nightmare journey are you remembering? What night when he cradled your head in his arms as you cried in the seat; what car that sped under a canopy of branches away from that house; what names of dead parents whom you called out for? If you spoke now how would your voice sound; if you yearned for home which direction would you turn? The car speeds through a tunnel of trees, the shuttered moonlight between the trunks distorting your features so you look like two different persons.
The Journey Home Page 7
