The Journey Home

by Dermot Bolger

  I slagged him about it for days, no longer just an observer but finally part of his world. I joked across the office with Mary and Mick, dodged Carol, ignored Mooney, made friends with the girls in the room, falling in love with each briefly and individually. Some nights I sat beside Shay in Murtagh’s listening to the guitarist bop. Each week someone else there would be leaving for London, Berlin, New York. The postcards began to line the mirror behind the bar while those left compared places and contacts.

  As I watched I sometimes imagined my father sitting in some Kerry bar in his youth while his friends debated which boat to take. It was different now, the scent of hash, the music in the background, the certificates and degrees. Yet their eyes must have looked the same, the jokes to hide bitterness, the feeling of being already gone once you had made the decision. My father had clung to some vision in his heart, managing always to return from each English factory, digging in, clinging to his vision of home. I doubted if many of those drinking in Murtagh’s would return. The gap was smaller now between home and elsewhere. They would lose the accents quicker, be easily assimilated. They would not meet signs proclaiming No Blacks, Dogs or Irish. Now they were literate, white, equal Europeans. Those equipped with new passports showed them off, the smaller EEC version replacing the green Irish one. And it wasn’t just unemployment that drove them away, rather they were going home to the world they had grown up with in their minds: the American films, the British programmes, the French clothes, the Dutch football they watched on satellite channels. For most, the fields their father’s worked would have been exile; now they were catching planes to their own promised land.

  Justin Plunkett moved among them, shaking hands, buying final rounds. He told them the best bars in Berlin, explained how to buy a tageskarte on the U-bahn, dispersed knowledge from across the continent where he vanished for three days of every month. One night when I was drunk I saw him as the angel of death, moving in gaudy colours through the bar, slapping the shoulders of those who would have disappeared by the following Friday. Perhaps he was just carrying on his father’s work: clearing the country of debris, propelling it towards its destiny as a pleasure ground for the rich, a necklace of golf courses encircling the city, a modest number of natives left for service industries.

  That same evening his father’s face had been on the news making a speech to visiting EEC ministers. Justin had asked the television to be put on and had stood gazing at it, oblivious to the dozen hands raised in mock Nazi salutes behind his back. I cannot remember the speech word for word. There’s no need to, it was just the standard phrases that could be joined together like Lego to suit any occasion:

  We are just a small nation in this great community. But our heritage abounds with saints, with poets, with dreamers. We in government are realists, first and foremost. We know we cannot all live in this one island. But we are not ashamed of that. Because young people are to Ireland what champagne is to France! Our finest crop, the cream of our youth, nurtured from birth, raised with tender love by our young state, brought to ripeness and then plucked! For export to your factories and offices. My fellow European ministers, we are but a small land with a small role to play in this great union of nations. But a land with a great history. Long before Columbus set sail in 1492, long before Amerigo Vespucci gave his name to that great continent, our missionaries in their boats of animal hide had already discovered the new world. Through all of the dark ages we have gone forth to spread the word of God among you, to petition you for arms to repel our invader, to fight your wars. Once more we entrust to you the flower of our youth: not black or yellow but white; not illiterate or backward but qualified; not as migrants or illegals but as equal Europeans. We know they are ready to take their place; we know you will not turn your back on this greatest of assets.

  Okay, okay, maybe I’ve embellished it slightly, I’m exaggerating, but it was some such shite.

  Living with him, I began to see the conflict that was always present within Shay. I still don’t fully understand those two sides of his nature, the fear of being trapped perpetually clashing with the sense of belonging somewhere. At first the move home to the new flat seemed to still his restlessness. But if he had run away from home at eighteen, in some ways now home had begun to run away from him. Our suburb had been planned without shape, so each time you seemed to hold it in your grasp when you looked away and looked back there was something else new, something else changed, not only buildings but moods, levels of despair. As long as Shay had kept his flat by the canal he could forget his past, but once he moved back it seemed to hound him. People who could not find it on a map spoke of the place like a suburb of Beirut when he told them where he had moved to. Without wanting to, he began spending his time defending the streets and the people he had grown up among. And then, late at night, we’d return to those streets, a thousand miles removed from the columns of news-print about them, those sleeping rows of houses where people thrown into nowhere were building their own lives, their own homes. And we knew nothing we could ever say would explain the hold of that place for us.

  I could see a new tension develop in him. In work he was like a child growing bored of a game, spending most of the day on auto-pilot. He began to clash more with Mooney as the old man found that he could needle him indirectly by abusing the new clerks coming in. I knew Shay hated himself for being drawn into the politics of the office. At weekends when there was a party with somebody leaving I would have to force him to go, reluctantly driving back into the flatland he had left.

  I remember one night how he kept the whole company laughing by acting out sketches—like Mooney’s wife wrapping a new fur coat over her shoulders after his cremation and lifting the lid of the urn to blow his ashes out of the window with the words: ‘Well dear, here’s the new fur coat I’ve been asking you for these past twenty years and here’s the blow-job you’ve been asking me for.’ The clerks clustered on the floor at his feet, drinking from bottles, laughing at every song he invented, every impersonation. Shay fed them for over an hour with a comedian’s perfect timing, then suddenly shut up, growing sullen as if disgusted with the whole spectacle. As we walked back to the car he said curtly:

  ‘I’m nobody’s fucking court jester, Hano. Listen, they’d live their lives off you if they could. But we’re just the light entertainment on their way up the ladder. They’re sitting back there now, feeding the pair of us into a mangle with their talk.’

  Now his talk grew filled with images of Europe. He started sitting with Justin Plunkett at weekends, asking questions, filling out his knowledge of the continent. I ignored those conversations. My new world was too perfect to contemplate it ever changing. But one morning at twelve o’clock he put on his jacket without a word and walked out of the office. Mooney and Carol were at a meeting and Mary managed to cover up his absence. I found him at home, sitting beside a row of coffee cups. The ash tray at his elbow was choked with butts.

  ‘I’m wasting away Hano,’ he said. ‘I can feel my mind drying up with every day spent in there. It’s no longer a joke, mate. It’s not funny anymore.’

  I tried to reason with him. I wasn’t scared for his sake but for my own.

  ‘Forty years you could spend there doing the same fucking thing,’ he said. ‘What’s at the end of it all? Just enough money to survive every fortnight. Three and a half years of it Hano and I’m no richer, no more qualified to do anything than the day I walked in there.’

  ‘But you’ve good crack. You enjoy yourself outside.’

  ‘I’m sick of it, the job, this town, they’re just too small and they’re making me too small. Can you not imagine it Hano, anonymity, losing yourself in some foreign city where nobody knows who you are and nobody cares? What do you say? Are you game? We could just go, now, in a few weeks time, the pair of us, together.’

  Shay looked up at me, cigarette in his hand, his eye with that old gleam as if suggesting a party somewhere. But this time I was frightened, he had gone out beyond my dep
th. I wanted to go and yet I knew I hadn’t the courage. He was waiting for an answer. What was keeping me here? It wasn’t ties or commitments, it was the simple fear of being swallowed up by the unknown. Yet I was even more terrified of being left behind by him. He was smiling just like that first night with the girls in the Chinese restaurant, only this time there could be no excuses, no games of snooker to put it off. This time my bluff was being called.

  ‘But this is my home,’ I said lamely.

  ‘Home! Good Jesus, Hano, what’s that? Do you think it wants you? That it has any use for you? Phone up Patrick Plunkett now and he’ll pay for the taxi to the airport. Home is where you make it, not just where you’re born. A chicken doesn’t spend its life squatting on the fragments of its shell does it? Hano, I can’t breathe in this kip anymore. And you’ve fuck all to look forward to. Don’t you realize you’re temporary. In two months when you come up for renewal Mooney will be able to give you the chop. What have you got in front of you then? The dole? Some scabby Manpower scheme? It’s a sinking ship. Come on, let’s get off while we’re ahead.’

  Every word he said was true. I had no answer for it beyond the simple paralysis of fear.

  ‘What would we do over there Shay? How do you know it would be any better?’

  ‘Take the risk, just once in your life. We are the young Europeans they keep telling us. Screw them Hano, we’ll get out. Just think about it, at half-eleven tonight when the pubs here will be closed and the last bus gone, people will be just going out to drink in Amsterdam, strolling down the Ramblas in Barcelona, gawking up at the whores starting work in the Reeperbahn. Hano, you’re just turned nineteen, I mean you’re a big boy. We’ll find work easily enough. Give it a lash for a while anyway then we can come back. Come on, what do you say?’

  Shay spent the evening trying to convince me, but I was like a man trapped on a ledge, scared to go back in, terrified to jump. I kept thinking, it’s just a passing whim, tomorrow he’ll wander back to work. But he didn’t. He neither resigned nor phoned in sick. Mooney smiled as he dictated the first letter to Mary. It was returned with the scrawled message over it, Go fuck yourself! When Mick heard of Shay’s intention he laughed quietly to himself, but it was Mary who took it badly. I never knew how close she and Shay had been, their heads always bent together, hatching tricks, covering up for each other. Somehow she saw his action as a sort of betrayal. She made bitter jokes about him in the office. He had started work when she was still in her late twenties. As long as he was there she could remain joking in that perpetual state of youth. Now his departure seemed to bring her age home to her, reminding her of all her own failed chances to escape before her child had arrived. Suddenly the figure of Carol fussing in the office, of cycling home to a lonely home in Deansgrange and existing only in those hours of work, began to scare her.

  Yet what was interesting was how quickly Shay was forgotten. For a week clerks speculated at the tables, the conversation gushing in a thrill of excitement. Then one morning something else happened, more current, belonging to that cloistered world he was now excluded from. People still asked me how he was but he was spoken of in the past tense like a man who had passed away. A new girl started. To her he was just another name among a hundred who had worked there once.

  Personnel sent him two letters before the resignation form. He ignored them all. The final letter of dismissal contained a cheque for his superannuation. He was back to his best form, excited and joking. Even then I kept thinking he wouldn’t leave.

  ‘What will you do?’ he asked one evening.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I hadn’t allowed myself to think beyond his departure and after the first night he never pressured me to go.

  ‘Talk to the bookie. He’s an honest bloke. All he really wants is the space filled. He’d probably knock a bit off the rent for you. I’ll leave you some bread. It’s not fair of me to run out on you like this.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you’ll need it more than me.’

  I could no longer put the question off.

  ‘When are you going Shay?’

  It was the first time I had brought myself to mention the subject. He looked relieved that I had asked him.

  ‘Saturday morning. No long farewells, eh.’

  That left four days. On the Friday I phoned in sick. He cooked a huge breakfast. I opened the windows and we sat down to eat. Twelve weeks had passed since the Saturday morning when I had sat listening to the punters talking on the road outside. The street was deserted except for one old woman with a shopping trolley. Shay made some joke but neither of us laughed.

  After breakfast we drove out into the countryside and parked at the bridge in Knocksedan. He led me down through the overgrown river valley, across wire fences and hidden tracks to the reservoir. An old man was hunched by the water’s edge, black hat down over his face, watching three youngsters fish. He grunted at Shay, an animal sound as we pushed on through the wilderness. I had always seen Shay on city streets. It surprised me how well he knew his way in this jungle of bushes and trees. He led the way upwards towards an overgrown mound. We stood on its dome and looked around.

  ‘Man-made,’ he said. ‘See how circular it is. Before the time of Christ they built it with stones and clay. I used to mitch from school out here, bring some girl out who’d go sick from class to swim in the river with me. Two hours getting them to take their dresses off for five minutes in the water.’ He grinned. ‘But it was worth it. You know, some evenings I’d climb this mound by myself in the dusk and it was as though you could almost hear it saying to you: “I know you. I know everything you will ever feel. I have felt it all before. Whatever you will do I have seen men do. Wherever you go I will have seen them go.” I brought this Argentinian girl out here once who claimed she was psychic. She shivered up here and ran down, said she felt blood, that it had been used for sacrifices.’

  He was standing, gazing back down the river valley. The sun had gone behind a cloud and it was suddenly cold. It felt eerie listening to him come here to say goodbye to something that I couldn’t understand.

  Justin Plunkett had agreed to buy the Triumph. We drove out to his apartment in Clontarf at five o’clock. The ministerial Mercedes was parked in the courtyard. Justin came out to the door of the block in a mourning suit. The white collar of his shirt was standing up where he had been fixing the black tie. He looked tense.

  ‘Jesus mate,’ Shay said. ‘Have we called at a bad time? Is it somebody in the family?’

  ‘You’re okay Seamus,’ he said. ‘Listen, I can’t ask you in just now. The old man’s in a bad way inside.’

  ‘Is he sick?’

  ‘Ah no, nothing like that. Hassle in the constituency. The chairman of the East’s Residents’ Association and the mother of Tommy O’Rourke who has that pub in the village are after both kicking the bucket yesterday. One’s being brought to the church in the East at six, and the other to the church in the West. We can’t work out who’s going to get the bigger crowd. We’re trying to figure out which one he should go to and which I should attend in his place. Eh, either way you’re going to insult somebody. Two fucking stiffs in the one day. God I hate fucking stiffs.’

  He paid us in cash, crouching down as he peeled notes from a wad without taking it from his pocket. We caught a bus back into town. We were both in drinking form. Having accumulated enough money for his trip, Shay seemed intent on leaving most of it behind. The pubs were empty in that lull between tea-time and evening when we began. They filled up as we wandered from bar to bar, meeting more of his friends, becoming a larger and larger procession.

  He was like a whirlwind all night, sweeping people up in his wake, sending them reeling off again. I sat on the stool next to him at every counter, drinking like never before, wanting the night to last for ever. We met Mick near closing time. They embraced and sang ‘Bandiera Rosa’ till we were thrown out. Five of us wound up somewhere off Capel Street, bar men roaring at us to leave long after closing time. We exited
with half-finished pints in our hands, finished them in one gulp and hurled the glasses into a doorway. The buildings kept swerving before my eyes, the pavement was unsteady. A pound note was blowing along the ground. I stamped on it.

  ‘Here, Shay,’ I said. ‘For when you’re skint some night in Germany.’

  ‘A good-luck charm,’ he said, accepting it. ‘Not to be spent on women or drink. I’ll keep it, Hano. I mean it.’

  There were road-works being carried out on the quays. Shay stole a flashing lantern and shoved it up his jumper.

  We lost the last two of his friends and wandered up by Christchurch with only Mick at our side. A guard stepped from the porch of the cathedral.

  ‘What are you at, boys?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, guard,’ Shay replied innocently, his jacket illuminated every three seconds. The policeman took it from him for safe keeping, laughing as he told us to wander on home. We headed back down Dame Street. One moment Mick was there, the next he was gone.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said, and Shay led the way into the first Chinese restaurant. They refused us service and we wound up in an old German place we used to visit whenever we felt rich. The waiter was dark-skinned, like Heathcliff gone wrong. One could never quite understand what he was saying. I ordered Chicken Maryland with roast potatoes, chipped potatoes, sauted potatoes, fried potatoes and baked potatoes. They brought it out on a huge plate with one sprig of parsley. I said it was perfect, then fell asleep with my head in it. They helped Shay to clean me up, called a taxi to the door.

  I don’t remember the journey home, only paying the man off at The Bottom of the Hill pub. There was an old cobbler’s there, the last remaining cottage in a block surrounded by the carriageway. It looked incongruous, with one pony tied outside and a single tree bereft of leaves. I lay on the low wall and got slowly sick before rolling over to look at the stars. I could still go, apply for a passport and follow him. I knew that Shay was thinking the same. Neither of us spoke.