The Journey Home

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘Every year the same,’ she said. ‘Patrick Plunkett never forgets us.’

  I told her the handwriting was done by a machine. Patrick Plunkett probably never even saw them.

  ‘Don’t you be always running that family down,’ she whispered sharply. ‘How could he do everything by hand and he a minister in the government?’

  ‘Junior minister,’ I said.

  ‘Hasn’t he the car?’ she pointed out, as if to a child. ‘He never forgets us.’

  She stopped speaking as we heard my father’s footsteps slowly descend the stairs. After dinner he fell asleep before the television like an old man. I had bought my two sisters skateboards and could hear them practising on the pavement outside. My mother came in with a blanket and placed it over his legs, and we sat on either side of him, neither of us speaking as his breath became laboured. Whenever I looked at her, she lowered her eyes. I sat there till he woke, pretending to be absorbed in the television programme.

  Did he know all along? That’s the question which haunted me every morning I went in to see him shrunken more into himself in the bed. Was he pretending he might get better for our sake or had he somehow anaesthetized himself from reality?

  I still don’t know. There was an unreality about his plans for when he had recovered. Not only did he intend to continue things he had been doing prior to getting sick, but now he spoke of taking on larger projects that he had never mentioned before. The whole back garden was to be redug and potato beds laid again; a back kitchen was to be added to the house; a holiday home beside the old farm in Kerry was to be purchased—even though every penny the family had was slowly wasting away, like his diseased liver. Yet no matter how farcical his plans, his eyes always blazed into mine as he spoke, with complete conviction.

  I had always disliked that bedroom which the sun never entered until late in the evening, filled with the noise of children and dogs from the neighbouring gardens, but now I dreaded entering it as though stepping into a crypt. If the day was warm my mother would light a fire in the dining-room and I would help him slowly down the stairs, one step at a time, his body smelling of the room where he had lain. He would sit by the fire and answer the same three or four questions she always asked him. Near the end his answers grew blurred and frequently out of sequence. But if either noticed, neither of them said so.

  And what of my mother? Did she know she was soon to be a widow? To see the father I had loved and grown apart from waste away was a torture, but never to be able to speak of it was worse. Sometimes when the children were at school and she went into the kitchen after turning the television on loudly, so that he and I were both forced to watch the idiotic movements of cartoon figures on the screen, I would wonder—as the eldest son, as the heir—was it my duty to speak, to break the torpor the house seemed to languish in? Yet even I was terrified to say the words that would finally take away the possibility of hope.

  I felt the need to question him about all sorts of half-understood memories, pieces of my own childhood; and further back to his own school-days which ended at fourteen, the names of great uncles and grandparents, the history of fields and rocks that I remembered from my one visit to the farm. I no longer wanted to see him just as a parent, but to imagine him at my own age out on a hillside some dark night, or taking the boat to Liverpool during the war, the ammunitions factories; the money orders sent to his new wife serving as a maid in a house in Rathgar, the weekends home when they had taken the single-decker bus out to that place I called home—a warren of green fields then with its tiny village—and walked through the whitethorn blossoms along laneways to the field where white crosses marked the outline of the first houses to be built.

  We had not spoken like this since the quarrel over the old woman had driven us apart like the breaking of some invisible taboo. Our lives since then had been like two dialects of a lost tongue growing ever more incomprehensible to each other.

  It was during his third stay in hospital for radiation treatment that my mother asked me to go with her to Pascal Plunkett for the first loan. I had just returned from working in the petrol station.

  ‘Who else have I to turn to?’ she asked.

  I sat facing her at the kitchen table.

  ‘That bollox,’ I said. It was the first time I ever cursed in her presence. I could see how upset she was by it.

  ‘He’s your daddy’s employer,’ she told me. ‘The money for the food you ate as a child came from him. Don’t think you can start calling him names just because you’re bringing a few shillings in. Pascal’s a hard man, but he gave your daddy work when nobody else in this country could. Before him it was money-orders coming home from England. He kept this family together; we’d have had to sell this house in the early days and move over there if it wasn’t for him.’

  I apologized awkwardly.

  ‘Then you’ll come down with me so?’ she said, hopefully. ‘For Sean’s sake. For Lisa’s.’

  In the garage below Plunkett’s office each of the mechanics came over to ask about him. They had already had two whip-rounds and sent the money up. Plunkett appeared on the stairs and beckoned her. He eyed me for a moment before I turned away and walked out among the new cars in the forecourt. Eddie the foreman came over. He knew, like everybody else, why she was there. It was a relief to be able to talk openly to another person.

  ‘How’s the da, son?’

  ‘Fucked.’

  ‘Does he know it?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. He shook his head and smiled as though I had made a grim joke.

  ‘Tell him I’ll be over soon.’

  My mother called me and I went back in. Plunkett was standing beside her at the foot of the stairs. Eddie walked beside me towards them.

  ‘That bastard takes a pound of flesh every time,’ he said. ‘You know that?’

  I nodded as he slipped away into the garage.

  ‘Shake hands with your daddy’s boss, Francy,’ my mother said, as though addressing a child.

  I nodded to Plunkett. His palm was sweaty as he gripped my fingers hard and seemed reluctant to let them go. Perhaps he was too used to keeping everything that came into it.

  ‘He was very understanding,’ my mother said as we crossed over the carriageway. ‘Two hundred pounds just like that.’

  ‘At what per cent?’ I asked.

  She looked hurt as though I had insulted a close relative.

  ‘He’s a generous man, Mr Plunkett,’ she said. ‘I’m sure many people take advantage of him. And he’s given me more hours cleaning in the undertaker’s. From six to eight each evening. You’ll keep an eye on the little ones won’t you? Anyway, when your daddy’s back at work we’ll pay this off without blinking.’

  The newspaper man outside the supermarket was packing up the unsold copies, while the tea in the plastic top of his flask cooled on the pavement. I had turned to enter the glass doors when she stopped me.

  ‘You couldn’t expect him to have that much cash on him on a Friday morning? No, he gave me a note for Plunkett Stores. I can buy what I like there and use the rest as credit whenever I come down again.’

  Plunkett Stores was a quarter the size of the supermarket, the prices a good 15 per cent dearer. I wheeled the trolley for her while she chose each item carefully to sustain a family of five children for the week ahead. The cashier rang a small buzzer when she handed her the note, and after a moment a man my own age in a suit came down from the office, looked over the note and initialled it. We put the groceries into plastic bags and he held the door open for us. My mother thanked him repeatedly as she left. He smirked condescendingly at me above her stooped back, then let the glass door swing shut.

  After ten more days my father was sent home from hospital. I arrived in from work and my mother came rushing down the hallway. She looked almost youthful, her face radiant.

  ‘He’s home again,’ she whispered. ‘Last night in an ambulance after you left for work. Daddy’s home.’

  ‘But the next cours
e of treatment,’ I said. ‘Why…?’

  ‘The doctors say he’s got a touch of pneumonia. It’s too dangerous to continue the treatment till he’s better. So he’s home.’

  She paused while the joy left her voice and doubt replaced it.

  ‘Is that good news or bad news?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s good, ma,’ I lied. ‘The best.’

  His lungs were burning after the first half of the treatment but he was so delighted to be home that he rarely complained of the pain. Even in those ten days he had grown more sluggish. The old man who relieved me at half-six in the morning in the petrol station shook his head when I told him.

  ‘That’s it son,’ he said. ‘It’s reached the stage where there’s nothing more they can do for him now. Any excuse to get him home for a while with the demand for beds. It will be faster now. I saw it all with the missis.’

  ‘What do I do now?’ I asked him.

  ‘You wait,’ he replied.

  ‘Do they know?’ I asked.

  He looked at me as he took the keys from my hands.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Whatever the doctors had told him in the hospital he had twisted round into a message of hope. His story had changed now. There would be no full recovery. He would just have to live with the fact he had this and maybe once a year for the rest of his life he would have to go back for treatment. And yet he must have known the truth because early on that first week I arrived home to find paint and brushes in the hall. I painted the front door and the windows as I was asked, while my mother knelt inside, shampooing the carpet in the sitting-room that was still used only for visitors.

  They were preparing themselves for the invasion which soon began: the uncles and aunts arriving from Kerry and Donegal; the bottles of Guinness and the ham sandwiches; the talk of events forty and fifty years past. Sometimes he would begin to nod in the chair, the untouched glass of Guinness he could not drink, but which was still poured for him, going flat on the arm of the chair. The room would go uncomfortably silent, the relations awkward, before he jerked back awake to ask the same question he had asked five minutes earlier. The room would breathe again as the same answer was eagerly delivered.

  ‘You will be down for the Christmas, won’t you? We’ll have a few glasses in Farrell’s,’ they’d say as they shook his hand, and his eyes would turn bright at the thought.

  ‘Will we? Do you think?’ he’d ask with a sense of wonder in his voice, and they’d laugh.

  ‘Sure we’ll order them on the way back,’ his brother would say, ‘and what with the good weather coming in, you won’t feel the time flying.’

  They were good people. I wished that they were mine but they were not. Whatever world they and my father came from had died among the rows of new streets built here, and I was cut off from that past as surely as if ten generations stood between us. I know they cried silently, driving out through the long darkness of the Irish countryside, leaving behind their brother to die in this alien world.

  The petrol station was owned by one of the largest firms in Europe. Those of us who worked nights paid no tax, no insurance. Those who demanded such things were easily got rid of. There was no shortage of workers. From half-eleven to half-two was the busy time. Often the four pumps would be engaged at the same time while a queue of local people who had climbed the hill for milk and biscuits were pressing their money into the two-way hatch. Drivers had to pay in advance, but there was always the danger that if you were distracted they would keep pumping after their limit if you didn’t cut them off. Then, from half-two on the weekday nights there was almost no business. I would cradle my head in my arms, sitting on that stool among the humming cables, or watch the video screen switch between the six cameras positioned around the station. Sometimes, if business was very quiet a taxi driver would come in at three or four to have his car washed.

  Always there was the danger of robbery. Some weeks before I joined, two youths had arrived with an empty can, paid two pounds to have it filled and then poured it into the hatch. They held a lighted match in the air above it and asked politely for cash. Often by five o’clock I would not have seen a person for over an hour. Dawn would begin to break over the tombstones in the cemetery across the carriageway and I’d think of him, lying awake in pain in that bedroom, while she slept or lay awake holding his hand, praying to her litany of saints, believing like a child that their names alone could shield him from harm. Then the old man would come. I’d unlock the door to let him in and stand out in the yellow light of the courtyard, breathing in the fresh air before climbing the carriageway, up by the stream and the dairy, to the village.

  ‘It’s like time standing still back there,’ I said to the old man one morning. ‘Nobody willing to talk about it, nobody wanting to face the truth.’

  ‘Death isn’t something you believe in,’ he told me. ‘Up to the very last, deep down you think it won’t get you. I could see it with the missis. We both knew and yet…it was like we were each waiting for something, the cavalry on the hill I suppose. It made no sense, we hated ourselves for it, but we clung to that…right up to the last few hours.’

  He gave a short laugh like an exhaling of breath.

  ‘Then there was nowhere to hide,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we said anything; I don’t suppose there was anything to say. All the words—we’d said them too often, elsewhere. We’re all scared of it, son, and we’re right to be.’

  I looked at the cigarette I was smoking and stubbed it out beneath my heel. The old man was gazing across at the cemetery.

  ‘It’s like a train,’ he said, ‘and sometimes when I wake at night I can hear it coming.’

  My mother would have risen, despite my protests, to have a breakfast ready for me and, when the children had left for school, I’d climb into the lower bunk of the bed in my old room with the sheets still warm from the body of my younger brother, having arranged a blanket clumsily over the curtained window.

  I gave all my wages and dole to her except ten pounds, but twice more during his final illness I made the journey with her to Plunkett Motors, shook that sweaty hand and endured the stare which seemed to say: Soon I will own you too. Once the Junior Minister himself was there. He stood sympathizing with my mother in the forecourt for five minutes. Eddie came over and put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘There’s a man on the horns of a dilemma,’ he joked grimly. ‘Your da gave him number one in every election. He’s wondering now whether to hang on or bring the government down before he snuffs it.’

  ‘Just because my old man dies it doesn’t mean his vote can’t live on,’ I said, watching my mother fawning over him. ‘I’m sure they’ll see to that.’

  ‘There’s this story,’ Eddie said. ‘Before the last election, Plunkett and two of his election workers are up in the cemetery at midnight registering people for the vote. Patrick’s writing down this yellow fellow’s name he’s after coming across who used to own the Chinese take-away up there in the village. “Ah Jasus Patrick,” says one of the workers, “he’s not even Irish.” Plunkett looks up indignant and says, ‘We’ll have no racism here. He’s as much right to vote as anyone else in this cemetery.”’

  I grinned bitterly. My mother had finally let go of the minister’s hand and was walking towards me.

  The doctor came each morning when his surgery was over. He had been born in the village long before the estates were built. My father had been going to him for forty years. He was a gruff man, racked by illness himself. He never lied about my father’s condition, neither mentioning recovery nor bringing any note of finality into the talk. Early on, when I was showing him to the door and for some reason my mother had stayed behind in the room he simply said, ‘You know, of course.’ I nodded and he drove off, a list of calls neatly written on the slip of cardboard in his breast pocket.

  I began to stay later in the petrol station each morning. The old man was the one person I felt I could talk to. Once, I asked him what it had been li
ke.

  ‘The daughters came home from England,’ he said. ‘The son was all set to come from America, but sure what was the point. He works in some nuclear processing plant over there. I said to him on the phone your mother’s bad enough without her seeing you glow in the dark if the lights go out.

  ‘I’d have sooner not had them around at all in the end.

  There was something morbid about it, sitting in a circle not knowing what to say, just waiting for it to happen. They made the missis nervous. I knew she was worrying about all the trouble she was causing: the plane tickets, people to mind the grandchildren, the expense. In the end she felt like a nuisance for still being alive. I would have preferred just the pair of us.’

  He paused, remembering.

  ‘So would she.’

  A car pulled in and the old man leaned over the small microphone. His voice was distorted by a loudspeaker outside as he asked the driver to pay in advance.

  ‘When did you move out here?’ I asked him suddenly.

  ‘Forty-eight,’ he replied, taking the money in. ‘The first estates. Around three years before your houses were built.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘We were just poor,’ he said, ‘and wanted to be left alone to lead our own lives. We still are and still do. That’s the only history I know. The rest isn’t worth a wank.’

  It was a time my father rarely talked of. He was always trying to get me to be part of another world, another history. Only once had he told me about borrowing a lorry off a friend, loading up everything they owned, all their hopes, heading off into the fields, into nowhere.

  I remembered an Italian film I’d once seen. It was set in a town after the war where everyone was a refugee, everyone dispossessed, pushing their belongings in handcarts with their children plodding behind. In my mind that’s what it was like: leaving a ruined landscape behind, leaving that country from the history books, starting afresh with nothing; building a world not out of some half-imagined ideal but from people’s real lives and longings.