The Journey Home

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘You are halting the Junior Minister for Justice on state business. Take down that guard’s number, driver.’

  Afterwards he invited me in for a last drink and giggled like a schoolboy as he imitated the guard’s embarrassed and frightened apologies. He had made himself sound exactly like the minister and, as I discovered, the minister, when he lost his temper, sounded exactly like him. Although Patrick Plunkett rarely came to the garage itself, often in the evenings he would appear at the house. The two brothers would go into the drawing-room, leaving me to sit in the kitchen with the government driver and listen to the low murmur of voices.

  Although the minister’s name never appeared on any business documents it became obvious to me that he was a silent partner in all of Pascal’s ventures. Sitting in that kitchen waiting for them to emerge, I began to piece together a thumb-nail sketch of their lives from what I had heard there and from what my mother had told me.

  Patrick had been two years a national schoolteacher in the suburb when his elder brother returned from England in the early sixties with capital and ambition. Soon he had Patrick selling encyclopaedias to the parents of his pupils, checking up on their home backgrounds to give Pascal leads for his new business of selling door to door. In those days the two brothers were inseparable. Although Pascal was a year older, my mother said they looked like twins. At dances girls had problems telling them apart. But soon they were rarely to be seen at dances. They moved into lodgings with an old bachelor on the North Road where the light in the living-room was still burning no matter how late you passed the house.

  By 1966 Pascal had opened the garage and found others to go from door to door for him. The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising that year was the making of them. From his native Mayo they dragged up their grandfather, Eoin, who had been thirty-eight during the rising and was eighty-eight then. They brought him around the estates to meet the people. One night when we were drinking heavily, Pascal described him to me. Eoin had come to Dublin in 1916 looking for work and joined with Connolly’s men only on the morning of the rising. He had stuck to his new leader’s side and even helped to carry Connolly down when he was shot on the roof of the GPO. Before arriving in Dublin he had known nothing, but he came out of the internment camp in Wales a confirmed socialist. Wounded six times in the War of Independence, he had not died. Pascal used to repeat this bitterly. If only his grandfather had been killed I think he felt they could have both won seats.

  After the dust had settled in 1923 he was still a socialist and still spoke out as one. They gave him medals reluctantly and eventually a pension, but he was not there in the carve up of jobs and power. At the time of the Graltan affair in Leitrim, he too had been denounced from the pulpits as a Bolshevik. Graltan on the run had often hidden in his house, and when he was deported to America the newspapers cried out for Eoin Plunkett to be dispatched as well. He survived, the aura of holiness around his Easter medal protecting him, until one night the locals set fire to his house. The brothers’ mother had died giving birth to Patrick and their father had brought them to live with Eoin. After the fire, their father cursed Eoin, took the only suitcase and went to England. The sons never heard from him again. Eoin took them to his sister’s house in Kerry near where my own father was born, left them there and was arrested and sent home when trying to board a boat to join the International Brigade in Spain. In 1939, when his grandsons were in their late teens, the police came for him again. He came out of the Curragh Internment Camp, a grey-haired man of sixty-seven, when peace was declared.

  The brothers always resented the poverty they grew up in when they knew how easy it would have been for Eoin to secure a well-paid niche. He could barely walk when they got him reluctantly back up to the city but they quickly learnt how much he despised their new activities. Eventually, in desperation, each evening before they took him on their rounds of the estates they would remove his false teeth so that the people mistook his tirades against the snugness of the new state for the standard pieties they expected.

  They shipped him home when the bunting came down, and in the next election Patrick Plunkett slipped into the last seat on the twelfth count. Eoin died as the first bombs exploded on Derry’s streets. They forgot to remove the tricolour from his coffin when they lowered it down, and shovelled the clay on top of it. The local priest claimed a bedside conversion. I always wondered if he had prised the teeth out first.

  In April the party had an emergency Ard-Fheis, giving rise to speculation of a snap election. At the last minute Patrick Plunkett was dropped from the list of speakers. That night, after the leader’s speech he arrived at Pascal’s house. I could see he had been drinking heavily. The brothers withdrew into the drawing-room, muttering angrily to themselves. After an hour Patrick emerged from the drawing-room and told his driver to go. Through the open door I could hear Pascal on the phone placing a bet with someone. I had been idling in the kitchen for hours, waiting to be told to go home. When I heard the receiver being replaced I reached for my coat and was zipping it up when Pascal came in.

  ‘You’re working late tonight Hanrahan,’ he said, his manner abrupt as always in his brother’s presence. ‘Drive us back into the city.’

  I could smell whiskey like a fever in the back of the car as I drove. It was after one o’clock when we got there, the streets almost deserted with the burger huts closed and the nightclubs still churning out music. We drove by Liberty Hall, crossed the river and cruised along Burgh Quay. Near the public toilets they beckoned for me to stop. Three youths leaned on the quayside wall, watching for men, obviously for sale. The eldest might have been sixteen. I could sense the brothers staring at them before they motioned me to move on.

  Maybe twenty-five years ago it had been impossible to tell them apart, but the grooming of political power had lent Patrick a veneer of cosmopolitanism at odds with his brother’s instinctive raw aggression. That night though, as they sat impassively behind me, it was like the polish had slipped away and they were one again. I drove slowly, with a sickness in my stomach, along the quays and down alleyways where dirty children huddled in groups with bags of glue and plastic cider bottles. Some spat at the slow car, others watched with mute indifference. Neither man spoke beyond instructing me to slow down or drive on. At times we moved at a funeral pace and those badly lit alleyways could have been some ghostly apparition of a dead city which we were driving through. Murky lanes with broken street lights, the ragged edges of tumbledown buildings, a carpet of glass and condoms, of chip papers and plastic cartons and, picked out in the headlights, the hunched figures of children and tramps wrapped in blankets or lying under cardboard, their hands raised to block the glare of headlights.

  Twice we paused where a figure lay, down a laneway between the ancient cathedral and the ugly squatting bunkers of the civic offices, before I was ordered to stop. Patrick Plunkett was bundled up in an old overcoat and hat. In the semi-dark of the car he could have been anyone or no one. This is what death looks like when it calls, I thought, watching him in the mirror, a black figure with no face. Pascal got out and approached the youth on the ground who tried to shuffle away when he bent to talk to him. He was perhaps eighteen. I saw him shake his head repeatedly before Plunkett produced two twenties and a ten pound note from his wallet which he held up and then placed carefully back among the wad of notes. Both were still for a moment before the youth picked himself up and folded the blanket under his arm. Plunkett caught his shoulder and, after arguing briefly, the youth turned and carefully hid the filthy covering behind some rubble in the lane.

  He sat between the two brothers in the back. I could tell from his face in the mirror how scared he was. He wanted to ask them questions but was intimidated by the brothers’ silence. Occasionally Pascal murmured to him, reassuring the youth as you would a frightened animal, or called out directions to me. Otherwise we made the journey in silence.

  I thought I knew North County Dublin until that night. I know we passed near Rolesto
wn and much later I glimpsed a signpost for The Naul, but generally the lanes we travelled were too small to be signposted. Two cars could not have passed on them and I had to negotiate by following the ridge of grass which grew down the centre. Just when they seemed to peter out they would switch direction. At one crossroads another set of headlights emerged and began to tail us, and this was repeated again and again until we too caught up with a procession of tail lights streaking out into the darkness ahead of us.

  The cars slowed almost to a halt and we turned off the tarmacadam and were bumping our way across gravel and then grass. In the field ahead of us a semi-circle of light was formed by the headlights of parked cars. We took our place and those behind followed until a rough circle of blazing light was completed. Men stood about in the grass. Patrick Plunkett addressed me for the first time since leaving the city.

  ‘Get out!’

  He climbed into the driver’s seat and donned the chauffeur’s hat from the glove compartment which I had never been asked to wear. He slammed the door and fixed his eyes through the windscreen on the trampled floodlit grass. Pascal had got out and was standing beside the open boot with the youth who was now stripped to the waist and shivering. Pascal was rubbing liquid from a bottle on to the youth’s chest. He handed it to me with a sponge and plastic container of water, then placed his hand on the youth’s shoulder to steer him out into the circle. From the far side of the ring of lights I saw a second youth being led out, as scared looking as the first. I knew the man at his side, a wholesale fish merchant named Collins from Swords who occasionally did business with Plunkett. He called out jeeringly:

  ‘Is that the best you can do Plunkett? You must have fierce weak men up in the city.’

  ‘Are you sure a grand won’t bust your business Collins?’ Plunkett called back. ‘I know it’s a lot of money for a small man like yourself to lose.’

  The two youths eyed each other, desperate to make a deal between themselves. But even if they had tried to run they would have been pushed back into the ring by the circle of well-fed men who were closing in around them. A referee, stripped to his waistcoat, was rolling up his sleeves.

  ‘Where did you get him?’ he asked Plunkett.

  ‘Back of Christchurch.’

  ‘And yours?’ He turned to Collins.

  ‘Knackers. Camped out near The Ward.’

  ‘Fifty pounds to the winning boxer. I want twenty-five each off you now.’

  He turned to the youths.

  ‘Nothing to the loser. Do you understand? No using your feet, you break when I tell you and the first to surrender is out. Now you’ve got five minutes.’

  We returned to the boot of the car. Plunkett put a jacket over the youth’s shoulders and fed him instructions on how to weave and hit. Two men approached us and he walked off to cover their bets. The youth kept glancing at me as though I were his jailer. I wanted to tell him to run but I was too terrified, afraid that if he did escape I would be thrust into the ring in his place. The winning purse was less than the smallest bet being placed around me. The laughter and shouting, as if by an unconscious signal, died down into a hush of anticipation. Plunkett returned and pushed the youth forward.

  ‘Fifty pounds son. Fifty smackers into your hand. Don’t let me down now.’

  I walked behind, noticing that Patrick had left the car and was standing unobserved a small way off from the crowd. A man staggered over to offer me a slug of Southern Comfort and thump me on the back.

  ‘Good man yourself,’ he shouted in my ear. ‘I’ve a hundred riding on your man, but watch it, them knackers fight fierce filthy.’

  There was a roar as both youths entered the ring. They circled cagily while the referee encouraged them forward. For over a minute they shadowed each other, fists clenched and raised, tongues nervously exposed. The crowd grew angry at the lack of action. They cursed and called the fighters cowards. Then the Gypsy ducked low to get in close and swung his fist up. He caught the youth above the eye as he moved back and flailed at the Gypsy who danced away. It had begun.

  There were no gloves, no rounds, both fighters punching and clinging to each other as the men around them screamed, until after five or six minutes the Gypsy was caught by a succession of blows and fell over on to the ground. I expected the referee to begin a count but Collins just pulled him up and wiped the sponge quickly over his face. Plunkett grabbed the water from me and raised it to his fighter’s lips.

  ‘Don’t swallow, just spit,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a long night.’

  Then they were thrust back into action, a graceless, headlong collision of blows and head butts. Both bled badly from the face. More frequently now they fell and the fight was stopped for a few seconds. After half an hour, the Gypsy got in under his opponent’s defence and rained blows against his rib cage. He stepped back and the youth fell, doubled up on the ground. He kept trying to stay down as Plunkett pulled him up.

  ‘Me ribs mister, they’re broken, broken.’

  ‘Get back in there. I’ve money riding on you. Finish the cunt off or you’ll leave this field in a box.’

  The youth stumbled forward with one hand clutching his side. Money was flowing on to the Gypsy. He approached, grinning now through the blood, sensing that his ordeal was nearly over, but as he swung his fist the youth caught him with his boot right in the balls and, as he fell to his knees, again in the face. There was a near riot of indignation among the crowd around me, their sense of fair play abused. Both youths knelt on the ground while the referee shouted at Plunkett:

  ‘Once more Plunkett and I’m giving it to Collins. Do you hear me?’

  The youth rose reluctantly and looked back to where I stood. I lowered my eyes and walked towards the gate of the field. I could bear to watch no more. To the south the lights of the city were an orange glow in the sky. The wind blew against my face. A tree was growing by itself in the ditch. I pressed my face against its cold bark, remembering suddenly the old woman’s story of the oak trees in her wood that she would embrace to find strength in times of crisis. I closed my eyes and I could see her, not as that ancient figure I had abandoned, but a young mother in the early light running between trees. I saw her so clearly, as if her image had always been locked away inside me, part of the other me I never allowed myself to think of. I wanted him back, the person I kept nearly becoming – in her caravan, with Shay in the flat. From the shouts behind me I knew that the Gypsy was finishing it. Every eye would be watching the final grisly moments before clustering round the bookmakers. I wrapped my whole body against the base of the tree. I had nobody left to pray to so I prayed to it and to her and to me: to the living wood itself, to the old woman of the fields, to the memory of someone I had almost once been.

  When the noise died down, I turned and walked back. The youth was lying against the side of the car. He was crying. I found his clothes, helped him to dress. I wanted to ask him his name but it seemed too late to do so. I helped him up and opened the back door where the brothers sat.

  ‘Put him in the front,’ Pascal shouted.

  I eased him gently into the passenger’s seat and started the engine.

  ‘Leave us home,’ Pascal said, ‘then dump that tramp back where you found him. Bring the car into work at lunch-time. One word about this and your family will be living on sawdust.’

  I let them out at his house. Both slammed their doors, disgruntled and, now they were alone, bowed their heads together to discuss the fight. I drove into the city. The Mater Hospital was on casualty. It was almost dawn but still the benches were jammed with drunks, with lonely people hoping to fool their way into a bed, with girls in party dresses who cried waiting for word of their friends behind the curtains. He hadn’t wanted to go in and, if I hadn’t sat there, would have stumbled his way back to his blanket hidden in the laneway.

  Even the nurses were shocked at his appeareance. They called him in ahead of those waiting. When he rose I pushed whatever money was in my pockets into his hand. I k
new that Plunkett had given him nothing. He looked at me but we did not shake hands. I watched the nurses help him on to the bunk and, staring back at me with mistrust, pull the curtain shut.

  It was daylight outside. I thought of my brothers and sisters. At twelve o’clock I would be waiting at the garage to drive him, but now I left his car there and walked the two miles home in some futile gesture of penance, even though I knew that nothing would be changed.

  This is where I first find you. Child in a duffle coat, girl with cropped hair. Where you have lost all sense of yourself. ‘Be like them,’ you keep repeating in your mind. ‘It’s dangerous to think; don’t listen to that voice. They were different men in different times.’ So why then do his eyes bring the memories back. Mournful eyes staring from the window of a cabin, as dark always as that kitchen had been, the same musty smell of regret. The trembling hands, the rasping breath, so unlike the silent figure ingrained in your past, but it’s the eyes that are haunting you. How they turned when you lifted the latch after racing in your one dress across the field to pause for a moment, shyly at his door. The same red mesh of burst blood vessels, the same shrunken resignation. Stop thinking Katie or you are lost; go back inside or they will talk. Trucks pass on the carriageway, their slipstreams blowing through your hair. Can you not hear the girls calling, whispering about you at the entrance?

  The stink of urine from one corner, figures huddling in that dark. Slats of light run down their faces where the corrugated sheets have slipped. The time for pills has gone. A candle is lit, a teaspoon warmed. The next girl straps up her arm. She pinches for a vein, a tapestry of bruises from the wrist up. Her lips enter the circle’s light, her eyes still left in the dark. You watch the shared syringe exhale into reddened flesh. Her head lifts back, the neck now caught, white skin bound up in the knot. Your turn will be soon, the next girl strips off her jumper, divining fingers seeking the vein like a blue river underground. Stay and you will still belong. Don’t close your eyes, don’t see his face again.