The Journey Home

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘My name is Francis.’

  ‘How are you settling in…Francy?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you the great man, so. Now close the door on your way out.’

  At lunch-time the younger men played football against the side of the garage where somebody had painted the crude outline of a goal. I could sense a difference in the attitude of the two mechanics towards me. As I walked back into work beside them they ceased speaking.

  Over the next week Plunkett continued calling me up to his office, enjoying my discomfort as I stood before him and dismissing me again after asking some meaningless question. I’d walk down the wooden steps in dread, knowing that immediately afterwards he would call up any person from the garage floor against whom he had a complaint.

  You could not fart in one corner of that garage without the echo shaking the light fittings at the other end. Daily I noticed the men cooling towards me: the momentary silence in the canteen when I walked in; the way people pushed against me when I tried to balance a scalding cup of tea; the looks of suspicion whenever I offered to help anyone. At first the men had been glad of the extra pair of hands. I had only to lift my head from one job to have somebody else call me over to hold or fetch something. But now they kept their heads down when I passed and I spent most of each day sweeping up. My lack of purpose increased their suspicions. I had been there three weeks when Eddie came into the canteen one lunch-time and nodded towards the door.

  ‘Hano, he wants you upstairs.’

  Somebody laughed from the crowded table at the end of the room. A laugh of contempt. I stayed seated, alone at the table in the corner. Eddie nodded again.

  ‘I’m having my lunch Eddie,’ I said. ‘Tell him to go and fuck himself.’

  Conversation stopped in the room. Though nobody turned I knew they were listening. Eddie waited a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. He had always liked me. He was the only one there who didn’t believe I was a grass.

  ‘I’ll tell him so kid,’ he said. ‘Another funeral in the family so soon.’

  Even as I’d spoken I was terrified, knowing that my mother was at that moment probably wheeling her battered shopping trolley down the aisles of the supermarket, neighbours still consoling her as she chose each item, luxuriating in being able to pay cash again to the bored girl at the check-out. It would not have been so bad if she had simply taken the money when I gave it to her each Thursday evening, but she insisted on telling me how every penny would be spent, like a schoolgirl reporting to her teacher, and thanking me and praising Plunkett over and over. Both the men and myself knew that as we waited Eddie would probably be putting my cards in order, calculating up to the hour what I was owed, placing the notes and silver Plunkett gave him in the narrow brown envelope.

  Half-one came but we still waited. Nobody wanted to miss the end. At twenty to two the canteen door opened and Plunkett entered, looking at his watch.

  ‘A national holiday is it? Feast day of St Clitoris, patron saint of bollox-lazy mechanics?’

  The men shuffled out past him until there was only him and me left in the room. He kicked the door shut behind him.

  ‘I called you.’

  ‘You’re always calling me Mr Plunkett. But you never want anything.’

  ‘Do you think you’re smart Francy? Insulting me in front of my men. You’re not. You’re scared. Scared shitless. Or you should be.’

  He took a small book from his jacket pocket, threw it down on the nearest table and waited till I rose to pick it up. It was my mother’s children’s allowance book.

  ‘Tuesday mornings she comes here and I give it to her. I’m not a hard man wee Francy, I let her keep some for herself when she brings it back. Collateral it’s called. You need security off people as poor as you.’

  I wanted to say it again to his face, like I’d wanted to say it to countless others: teachers, Mooney, the manager in the petrol station, but I hadn’t the courage and he knew I hadn’t. He leaned back against the door, taunting me with his power. I couldn’t stop trembling.

  ‘You’ve had a sheltered life, Francy, too sheltered for your own good. If you knew the work I had to do when I was your age…’

  ‘Selling saucepans on the tick door to door.’

  ‘I’m ashamed of nothing, so don’t try any of your smart-arsed educated sneers. I left school at twelve, shovelled shit on the sites of England, did anything to get that brother of mine through college, to get myself out of the slime. And then when I had cash I came home. Oh yes, I sold saucepans, but that was only the start. A shilling a week, then something bigger, a bed or a table, then a loan. And was I that awful? I gave loans to people no bank would have looked at and if I hadn’t been here most of them would have been sitting on orange boxes. Be smart for once Francy, I saw this place grow from nothing. Oh, not your part, the safe little world, except you’ve fallen from it now. No, but the estates that came later, the people just dumped to fend for themselves. At least I was here; nobody else gave enough of a damn to even exploit them.’

  I wanted to get out. I knew Shay would have. I remembered all the bogus phone calls we had made to Patrick Plunkett, the ridicule in Shay’s voice when the family were mentioned. But Shay was gone and all I had left was fear. I sat and listened.

  ‘Did you ever see men beg Francy? No, of course you haven’t. I see them come in here with their degrees and honours and they’d sweep that floor for nothing if I let them just to feel they were working. And do you know why? Because this is my country, in my image, that’s why. We made it what it is—poor uneducated men like me. We did the hard graft, and now young pups come along with their degrees and their sophistication as though we owed them a living. Well they can do their bit, they can knuckle down to it as it is or they can bugger off elsewhere.

  ‘You had it easy for a while by all accounts, Francy, a nice little temporary state job. Moving around bits of paper and inventing fancy terms for it. But there’s none of those jobs left Francy, there’s just me and my kind now. Now, I’m doing you a favour because your father was from the same neck of the woods as I am. We’re the same stock Francy, we’re both Kerrymen beneath all that Jackeen shite of yours.

  ‘You’ve turned all my da’s old mates against me,’ I said.

  ‘Them?’ he said. ‘Fodder. That’s where your father began. Where he deserved to end up too. You’re different Francy, better. Or is it that you fancy spending your life under a car till someone decides they don’t need you, eh, throws you away like an old sack in a gutter. Eh? Think about it. Oh, they might take you back on in that petrol station a few nights of the week, or maybe you’d fancy working with the kiddies in the silly hats in some hamburger restaurant? But if you don’t work for me you’re not going to get a real job with anyone else in this town if I say the word. Now, can you drive?’

  I nodded, slowly.

  ‘I didn’t hear you boy. I must be going deaf.’

  ‘Not really, not very well,’ I said. ‘A provisional licence.’

  ‘Well, I called you Francy to drive me somewhere. Now I wouldn’t force you to do anything you don’t want. This door behind me is open, you’re a free man to walk out. But if you want to stay you pick up these keys and when I call you you come.’

  He flung the car keys on to the floor. They jangled as they slid across the tiles and under a table. I stared at him. He held my gaze until I had to lower my eyes. I bent down, pushed aside the chairs and found the keys. When I stood up he had left the room. I walked out quietly through the garage, the men turning their heads to stare as I passed. Eddie looked quizzically at me. I moved past him, out into the sunlight where Pascal Plunkett sat in the back of his car, the driver’s door left open for me. I climbed in and started the car with difficulty.

  ‘Where to?’ I asked.

  ‘Just drive, son,’ he said, with a surprising gentleness in his voice.

  They left the shelter of the turf bank and began to cross the brown landscape, skirting the pool
s of black water, manoeuvring their way across the flooded stretches by stepping from tuft to tuft of coarse grass. After a mile the ground improved and they could walk more freely. Their feet were sodden. Katie found it so awkward without her left shoe that she flung the right one away and stepped carefully in her stockinged feet. When they came to rocks or prickly heather he carried her on his back.

  Because it was the only feature in the landscape they made for the dolmen on the edge of the mountain. The ground softened again as they approached and Hano lost his footing and stumbled as he lifted her on to his back to wade through the marsh. He righted himself and drew his foot out of the mud with a popping sound, anxious that the shoe might be left behind. The dolmen itself was built on a small island of solid land. They sat resting with their backs against it. The only sign of man was the high-frequency wires strung out between humming pylons that bisected the sky. Otherwise the landscape looked the same as had greeted druids who tramped here to lay down their dead thousands of years ago. The eye of the dolmen was narrow, one slit of light piercing three stones. Hano walked around to the far side. Somebody had lit a fire between the stones and a mound of black ashes remained like a cremated ancestor. Four crushed lager cans littered the ground and the words ‘Liverpool Football Club’ had been sprayed in white letters on the burial stones. He returned to sit beside her.

  ‘Tell me more about the old woman,’ she said.

  Hano shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Little to tell. It’s from another time, like your Tomas. She’d be long dead by now.’

  ‘Finish the story anyway. You never talk of anything except the times since you met Shay.’

  He paused and looked around him. That fifteen-year-old hitch-hiker sleeping in school yards and telephone boxes and living on slices of corn beef placed between unbuttered bread seemed so distant he found him hard to make real again.

  ‘Well, it was all drummed into me subtly,’ he said. ‘Places like this were meant to be more Irish than the streets I was born in. It was weird, all twisted up in our heads, wanting to blow up the Brits and following their football clubs. All the teachers with bog accents talking about Iosagan and Peig like this glorious shagging kingdom you were excluded from. It was gas, neighbours would call across the hedge to my father, Have you been down home, John? After thirty years they still asked.

  ‘It became like a phantom pain building up, so much so that when I went back with him I thought I’d get this sense of homecoming at seeing the farm. But it was just awkward, it was another world, shag all to do with me.’

  He leaned against the dolmen and kicked one of the Harp cans away.

  ‘So I set out to find it for myself; in places like this, looking for…I don’t know, some sort of identity or something. My father never liked it but didn’t stop me. It’s strange, in Dublin I was tongue-tied but hitching I was like a different person, inventing other names, other lives. I remember sleeping in a shop doorway in Sligo and being kicked awake by a policeman’s boots. The next night in Donegal another policeman was feeding me pints in a jammed pub at two in the morning where some old fiddler was playing.’

  ‘And the woman?’

  ‘We’ll walk on,’ he said, though he had no idea where to go. ‘I’m starving.’

  He carried her back across the marsh. The ground grew firmer as it rose. Occasionally a sheep raised its white face and surveyed them before nervously lurching away on thin legs. He described how he had met the woman that summer hitching back from Donegal. He had told his father he was travelling with school friends, ashamed to admit he had none and knowing he would not be allowed to go alone. He’d followed the chain of hostels around Donegal, meeting the same people in each, enjoying the sensation of independence. Then he got lonely, self-conscious at being alone in the crowded common-rooms.

  He was hitching back through Sligo when he found the wood, an unpaved track up through a state forest. A farmer had left him off on a by-road towards evening and he’d wandered in, expecting the usual long ranks of conifers and pines. But after a hundred yards he’d reached a small gate with a hand-painted sign saying No shooting, no hunting. He crossed the shaky wooden stile beside it and followed a curving avenue upwards. The trees were different here, much older and more varied. He left the path to climb among them. It was like a copper-plated undergrowth which later on she taught him the names for: rhododendron, day lilies, brambles and bluebells. In places the trees were cramped together, branches twisted towards the sun, galaxies of green stems shooting up at their feet. It was growing late and the sun in the west flickering through the tree trunks frightened him suddenly as he ran, waiting for ghosts to appear on all sides.

  He stopped running when he reached the grassy avenue again. A storm had partially uprooted one tree that was bent low over the top of the avenue, its leaves obscuring most of the view. Through the gap beneath he made out the shape of a house and approached cautiously. Beyond the tree the avenue broadened out into a small plateau of an overgrown lawn swamped with clusters of wild flowers. It was a large, single-storey house with two wings converging into an ornate hallway. The windows were boarded up with creepers growing over them. Through gaps in the boards he could see old wooden shutters and beams hanging from the high ceilings and names scrawled on the exposed brickwork. The same person had painted a notice above the hall door: Please do not vandalize. This is my home. The house frightened him. At any moment he expected some Victorian figure to emerge from within. And yet he couldn’t turn back. A fascination made him edge through the bushes at the side and peer down the slope through the basement windows which were not boarded up. He climbed down and, suddenly scared, had turned to find the woman standing above him.

  As they reached the curve of the hill Katie and Hano could see the boundaries of small fields leading to a handful of cottages and bungalows below. He looked back at the bare hillside, trying to decide which way to go when Katie took his hand and began to walk towards the road glistening in the morning light.

  ‘She was a tiny, fragile woman,’ Hano continued, ‘dressed in a yellow oilskin and wellingtons with a small bag on her shoulder. What light was left was slanting by the side of the house so I was in shadow and she was caught fully in its rays. Her hair was short and silver, her features sharp like a bird. She must have been seventy-five or eighty, I’m not sure, but her smile was that of a girl. I knew I was trespassing and waited for her to order me out of the wood but instead she climbed down beside me.

  ‘“People in the village would say you’re either brave or foolish,” she said. “None of them will go in there. When I came here first local girls wouldn’t walk down the avenue at night. Isn’t it strange how old stories cling on. Would you like to go in? Just be careful where you walk.”’

  Hano remembered how, without waiting for a reply, she lowered herself through the cellar window and beckoned him to join her. They walked through the narrow basement rooms and up a crumbling flight of stairs into the hallway that was lit by thin shafts of light through the boards. Despite the fallen timbers and vast cobwebs suspended from the carved wood over the doorways, Hano could imagine how the rooms had looked a half-century before. The fireplaces were still intact, standing with forlorn dignity among the jumble of wood and glass where green creepers curved down through the girders from outside.

  He asked her if it didn’t make her sad to come here and she shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘It’s a mistake to ever get sentimental. The past was both good and bad and anyway it’s gone now. Isn’t today exciting enough?’

  As she led him back down towards the basement he paused on the stairs, unsure of what he felt, but with some instinct making him stare towards the smallest of three cubicles in the cellar. They were each the size of a narrow prison cell with space for a small pane of glass in the wall between them. The sensation disturbed him, a sort of melancholia, an echo of regret. The old woman saw him pause and said:

  ‘You must be sensitive to these things i
f you can feel it too. It happened a hundred years ago. Some money went missing and my husband’s grandfather accused a servant of stealing it. He’d been with the family all his life. The same morning that they discovered that the children had hidden it as a joke, they found him hanging in that wine cellar. The pane of glass in the wall was smashed. They put in pane after pane in the months that followed, but the next morning it would always be smashed. Then they tried to brick it up but the mortar would never dry.

  ‘When I first came here in the 1920s I could still feel his presence in that cellar. My husband’s family never spoke of him, they were sliding away into bankruptcy while the village waited. All sorts of legends had grown up about him but I never felt threatened. I don’t think he wanted to harm anyone. He was just trapped in there and needed to be released. It took me months to overcome my fear but one evening I took their old family Bible and stood on the top step reading it aloud. Every evening for a week I read to him till I began to feel a kind of tranquillity, as if his burden was lifting in some way. But there is still something left, maybe just an echo of that pain growing fainter, or else he’s still trapped, hanging down there, but, if he is, I think he knows I’m nearby and thinking of him. These days I feel his presence some evenings like a form of company. I don’t believe in their God down in the village but I think maybe in another life I’ll meet him and we’ll know each other.’

  It was five years since the woman had told Hano the story.

  ‘Nobody had ever spoken to me like that before, Katie. Nobody since either, except maybe Shay. I never mentioned her to him, I was always afraid he’d laugh. But I think he would have liked her.’

  Hano and Katie had come close enough to the bungalows to hear children playing in the gardens that bordered the small brook. The news was on the radio coming through an open kitchen door. At the sight of people Hano grew tense again, paralysed with fear. Katie crouched behind a hedge and beckoned him down. He strained to hear the radio clearly, unsure if it was the start or finish of the bulletin. Votes were being counted all over the country, both parties claiming they would be able to form a government. The programme finished without mention of him and, though he knew he should have been relieved, he experienced a sense of anticlimax. He felt suspended, not knowing even if the police were looking for him yet.