‘The old bat,’ she muttered without looking at him. ‘With her layers of make-up. My mother would never have allowed her inside the front door like that.’
With Shay gone the flat was too big, the rooms too empty, the evenings too long. It is hard to describe that loneliness. I was his sidekick, our old haunts had no magic without him. I found that I no longer belonged there. In Murtagh’s they would ask if I had any word from him, then dry up having nothing more to say to me. Mostly I drank alone in the early evenings before the pubs got too crowded, a single man feeling conspicuous and awkward. Then I’d walk in and out of the bars, always pretending to be searching for someone. Often mates of Shay would hail me, but I’d panic and push on with a wave, unsure of myself alone with them.
There were so many nights of walking home alone, the strange melancholia of passing through back streets on a Saturday night away from the noise of laughter and glasses, prolonging the time before my lonely return. The steel shutters on the shops, the litter blown about, a steel moon reflected in a gutter filled with rain. And always keeping up the pretence of going somewhere, queuing outside phone boxes as though I had someone to ring. I hated the last bus full of couples and gangs of youths. I’d walk instead, taking the short cut home by the prison and canal, the scent of bread from the small bakery filling my nostrils as I passed.
That summer the workers had been sitting in at the closed flour mill. When their men were jailed for contempt of court, the wives and children slept in tents on the grass verge beside the offices on the canal. A lone garda car always kept watch as the women sat talking beside the bonfire. Cider drinkers had killed a young boy on the tow-path earlier in the year, stripped him and tied him to his bicycle before they pushed him into the water. It was dangerous to walk there but it was the way Shay had always come. It was my way of keeping faith with him, a gesture as futile as that of the women camping below the blind plate-glass eyes of the multinational.
All the way home I’d keep thinking a letter would have come. Surely he had written and it just hadn’t arrived. I’d get in around one o’clock, convinced that there’d be something in the hall, some late post, some letter delivered by mistake to a neighbour. I knew it was crazy and hated myself for daring to believe such a thing, but every night I ran the last few yards home and cursed myself afterwards and cursed him. I rarely turned the lights on, walked in the darkness from room to room. I’d lie on his bed, trying to imagine where he was at that moment. His absence was like a phantom pain inside me. Once the phone rang at three o’clock in the morning. It’s him, I thought: he knows that I’m sitting here thinking of him. It was a wrong number, a young girl looking for someone. I kept saying ‘What? What?’ as she tried to explain until she got frightened and hung up on me.
And then there was work, completely torturous now. I’d never bother cooking for myself. I lived from chip shops and Chinese take-aways, growing so haggard-looking that Carol began to worry about me. There was a huge kindness within her that you rarely saw when she was shouting commands and covering up for Mooney. Some lunch-times she’d grab me before I could go to the pub and serve me home-made soup from a flask with her own brown bread in the office.
Up to a decade ago, married women were not allowed to keep their jobs. I sometimes wondered what decisions she had had to make: did she lie awake some nights not wanting another dawn? But it wasn’t just her work that tied her down. Carol’s father had been a doctor in south Dublin, Mary once told me. He had died when Carol was eighteen, having just moved his family into a large house which had cost every penny he had. Carol was the eldest, the only one who could bring in a wage. She saw her four brothers and sisters through school, cried at their weddings, and nursed her mother through fifteen years of illness. She kept the house brightly painted the way her father would have wished, and would sit in the freezing kitchen at night, having only soup for her dinner, cycling discreetly on the old bicycle from Deansgrange in the rain. She had lived alone there for the past twelve years, nephews calling reluctantly on Saturday afternoons, her family rostering her between them at Christmas and Easter. I’d always seen her charging through the office like a flame of energy. But now she sat quiet and concerned, watching me eat with the same instinctive care she had shown for her brothers once, reassuring me over and over that she’d put a word in with Mooney to have my temporary contract renewed.
But with Shay gone Mooney could turn all his antagonism against me. From the time I signed on each morning he was watching. I’d sweat as I sensed him at my back, knowing I had to make the work in front of me stretch till five o’clock. And the girls in the office made my loneliness worse because it was like they were not addressing me but some after-image Shay had left in his place.
It was only a matter of time before the letter addressed to me was left in the attendance book. And yet, sitting among the clerks, it seemed that my life there would continue for ever: an infinite succession of dull afternoons lit by the brief joy of a cheque every second Thursday and the relief of the weekend. And when I found it there one Monday morning as the rain lashed down outside, I was still shocked. Mary came in behind me and touched my shoulder. We both knew what it was without opening it.
‘The old bollox,’ she said. ‘He could have renewed that for another nine months. He’s getting back at Shay through you.’
Mooney was a constant presence that morning, a smug grin on his face. I tried to remain impassive, knowing that Shay would have. I worked as slowly as possible, yawning and stretching my arms as I gazed at the clock. But they were petty gestures, he had me by the balls and we both knew it.
‘He’s nothing to pin on you,’ Mary said, trying to console me in the pub. ‘Personnel keep your name on the computer. If you’re still out of work in six months, you’ll probably get back in for another spell. But sure shag him anyway. Why don’t you just take off? Find Shay if you can. There’s fuck all for you here. I wish to God I had before I had a child. You’d get work in a factory easy enough in Germany. You couldn’t be any worse off than you are here.’
I considered it during the two weeks I worked out my notice. But would I ever meet up with Shay? How many thousands of Irish men and women were moving like a retreating army across those frontiers? If Shay had written now I would have gone to join him at once. But I was frightened of making the journey alone, scared of losing the small hold I had on life here. I still clung to the hope that one day he’d return to the flat and it would all begin again.
But during that fortnight I changed my mind. I joined the huge queues in town at the passport office and sought out the house where Shay had been reared to sit drinking tea with his parents. They too had no address for him. One night they’d received a phone call from Munich and later a card with a postmark from Hamburg. Apart from that there had been silence. I promised myself nothing, just paid over my money and waited for the passport to arrive.
Most weeks somebody would be celebrating a birthday or being transferred to another office. After work on Thursday the clerks would gather in the local pub and the hard core would remain on until closing time. I seemed to be expected to fill his shoes and most Thursdays I played along, aping Shay’s jokes and imitations, trying to keep the evening afloat and vibrant as he had once done. And towards closing time the talk always returned to him: the Christmas when he had kicked down the canteen door; the morning he’d pretended to Carol that anal intercourse was a clue in the crossword; the day he put the live chicken in the cramped space between the new tiles and the old ceiling. I’d drink on, warm and united in the comradeship of the group, till we spilt out on to the midnight streets, singing as we made our way back to some girl’s cramped bedsit.
But always the fun was jolted out of the night by the interruption of the journey. We’d sit on the floor around an electric fire, opening six-packs and trying to get back into the happy ambience of the pub. But slowly the conversation froze back into the endless dissection of work and promotion, character assassination and g
rudges. Some nights a girl might happen into my arms, more often I would drain my last bottle and slip out, glad now to avoid a night spent with eight others on a square of carpet, and the collective straggle into work next morning.
The final Thursday night came when it was my turn to receive the card with the kisses and good wishes. At two in the morning I left the bedsit we had adjourned to and walked back through the Phoenix Park. It could be dangerous at that hour when furtive men sought each other. Often their footsteps would follow yours, you’d glance over your shoulder to see their eyes, both menacing and menaced.
I got a taxi at the North Circular Road gate, paid him off at the top of the carriageway and walked through what was left of the old village. Up the steps of the ancient graveyard the Neather Cross stood, indistinct in the shadows. I slipped through the laneway beside it and had reached the front door when a slight figure stepped from the shadows. For a moment I thought Shay had returned. I moved forward quickly and found Colm, my younger brother, with his anorak hood pulled up over his head. He was shivering. I think he’d been standing there for hours.
‘It’s da,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to come, Francy. They’ve taken him into hospital.’
I walked beside him, across the metal bridge, through the streets I had played in as a child. There was a sick feeling in my stomach as though life was starting to slip away from me. My mother sat at the table in the kitchen. She had been crying. Sean, who was twelve, sat awkwardly on one of the chairs, not knowing how to console her. I sent both boys to bed, took her hands in mine, and let her tell me in her own time.
‘He used to complain now and then about a pain,’ she said. ‘But sure he hadn’t mentioned it for months. Only that I walked into the bathroom while he was washing…God knows if he’d have ever done anything. Like a little ball it was, all raw.’
She paused. I lit a cigarette and placed it between her fingers for her.
‘He was afraid to go near a doctor, son, kept thinking it would go away if he ignored it. You know how Pascal Plunkett is about sick days. Took me hours to persuade him to go down to O’Rourke in the village. He sent him straight home for his clothes.’
She looked fiercely at me.
‘He’ll be okay son, won’t he? He’s an awful man, an awful man.’
I felt numb as I lied for her sake, eventually reassuring her enough to get her to go upstairs and lie down. I came back down and walked out into the garden. It was overgrown again after that summer. I should have known all along what was wrong, but I’d fooled myself just like he’d been trying to do. It would have had to be more than tiredness; my father was too much a country man to let that garden go wild. I would like to think I felt sorry for him and for her. Later on I did, but that night all I felt was the sense of being trapped. Then, when it was suddenly too late, my heart yearned for those autobahns that Shay had spoken of.
My mother had loaned my bed to a neighbour. I knew she would never ask her for it back. I closed the door and spent the night on the sitting-room sofa.
Next day at work I felt like a ghost. Already I seemed excluded from so many conversations. Soon I would be a memory, in time just a name. Mary called me out and asked me to escort her to the bank. All the way down past the prison wall the autumn leaves were piled up in multicoloured drifts, a low sun slanting into our eyes. On that walk we never mentioned leaving, we just shuffled along through the banks of leaves like schoolchildren on the mitch, and when she grabbed a pile and flung them at me I filled my arms with leaves and threw them back. We chased each other in and out of the trees, stems clinging to our hair and clothes.
I think I loved her that day as we lingered outside in the warm air. Mary with the docker’s tongue; Mary who’d slipped vodka into my mineral on my first day; Mary generous on Thursday and broke by Monday. I realized that if I was sacked, she was sentenced to be left behind.
People were expecting me to join them across the road for a final drink at five o’clock but I knew this walk was my farewell. I kissed her timidly on the lips before we went back in. At ten to five I slipped on my coat and went while Carol was in Mooney’s office. Most of all, for some reason, I didn’t want to have to say farewell to her.
The nights you could not sleep. Sheets damp beneath your face, a sleeping cousin’s warmth against your back. Remembering. That is the first mistake: to remember, to think back. Go on, move out into the crush of bodies spilling from the car across from the petrol station. Factories sleep like well-fed adolescents, snug in the warmth of security lights. There is a hole in the wire, the gravel tearing at your fingers as you crawl through to where lines of rusting train tracks slumber in the siding. Steel scrapes against steel until a lock snaps, two cardboard boxes selected with vodka and whiskey. Then the long slide down to the canal bank and the shouts when you are out. Run, Katie, run; don’t think, don’t look back. Your uncle cannot catch you now no matter how you might wish him to. An estate of new houses nestles between the crossed arms of the cemetery. You break into the old part, the boxes planked down on a slab, and soon there is just the sensation of fire in your throat and that blessed numbness swirling inside your head again. One wants you to and you kiss him, then push his hands back when he starts. You slip past him and begin to run, dodging your way through the ramshackled tombstones. Your body tingles as he pounds behind you, his doc martins crunching over wreaths and stones and you look back over your shoulder, wishing this chase could just go on and on. You let him catch you by the curved railings, the shaved head bending down towards your own. And you are far away from the others now where only the dead can witness. White breasts in a graveyard lowered on to a moon-greyed tombstone ‘…who fell asleep in the year of our lord, 1831…’ So gentle now when he is alone but still you will not let him. Just touch him there with your fingers and soon it will be over. He will strut back to his mates, a huge, simple child of violence. Let him go, let him invent this conquest to put against each cold morning when he will wake and walk across the green, without work, without cigarettes, clenching the useless strength in his fists to prove to himself he is still alive.
You lie on the slab when he has gone, the shapes of yew trees swaying above you. If you could melt down into the soil without pain or thought would you ever rise? Better not to think. You lift yourself, adjust your jeans and blouse. Someone has lit a fire; it helps to guide you back. A bottle explodes within its heart, the fragments smoke-brown. Two skinheads have begun to shout curses at the dead. A sole decked with steel studs sparks against a granite slab. A line of green-gold urine splashes on a mounted photograph. A stone smashes when it falls, a name splintered into two, and everyone is kicking out now against the sculpted inscriptions over bones that lie, even more futile than them, bereft of flesh or habit, mutely in the soil.
The hospital was due for closure. But being run-down made it seem more human. My father had never missed a day sick in his life. His illness was like a vice not to be spoken of. On the first evening I told him I’d move home till he was well again. He nodded apologetically, then leaned forward in confidence, his voice seeming to lose strength.
‘They won’t tell me how long I’ll be here,’ he said. ‘It could be weeks before I’m back and you never know with Pascal Plunkett; you can never trust him.’
‘Twenty-five years, da,’ I replied. ‘He can hardly quibble over a few weeks now.’
He leaned back against the pillow, fretting.
‘You don’t know him, son. You don’t know his breed.’
‘Don’t worry, da,’ I reassured him. ‘I’ll hold the fort.’
‘Just till I’m up,’ he said. ‘It won’t take long.’
When my mother came nervously into the ward, I left them to be by themselves, to say in private whatever words their fears allowed them.
The clocks went back the Sunday I brought my possessions home. When I explained the situation to him, the bookie gave me back the deposit and the week’s rent in advance.
‘I’ll miss the pair of
you,’ he said. ‘There were some queer scents emanating from up there but you were good lads.’
The queues had grown longer in the employment exchange, the heave of bodies more desperate when the doors opened. I was shunted from hatch to hatch till all the forms were sorted out. I had grown used to having money in my pocket but suddenly every purchase had to be carefully considered. Sometimes in town I met clerks from the office who invited me to parties, but now I felt excluded from that comfortable circle.
It was an old school mate who told me about the petrol station. I walked out along the carriageway to it one afternoon. The manager showed me over the pumps, the floor safe for the money, and gave me three night-time shifts starting at the end of the week. When he told me the wages I knew why it was black. Even if I was doing sixty hours there it would have been hard to survive. The next Wednesday morning I put the thin wad of notes in my back pocket and stayed up walking around town till it was time to draw the labour.
My father came home after four weeks, having finished the course of treatment. All he said was that it was like his insides were burnt out. He felt the cold more now that it was harder to walk, and cursed the fact it might be another month before he returned to work.
Christmas came, and he spent the morning in bed. My mother fussed, getting a fire going in the sitting-room for him. She rearranged one of the cards more predominantly on the mantelpiece.
The Journey Home Page 13
