The Journey Home

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘It was a middle-aged couple, French or German, he didn’t know which. They leaned against the wall to take pictures of the coffins being lowered on ropes and then, when everybody had walked away and the grave was covered by a green canvas, they came in. They were bent over the grave when my uncle looked back. He thought at first they were praying, Hano, then realized they were reading the inscriptions on the wreaths. The man raised his camera again, there was a last click and they just drove on to the next spectacle.’

  She shook her head, the saturated bag slipping off on to the grass. It was growing dark, time to move on. Just keep moving, that was all, imagining yourself one step ahead of the posse. A light shone through the trees before the bridge. As they approached they made out the plaster-cast statue of The Virgin. Our Lady of Lourdes, the inscription read, Marian Year, 1954. A spotlight had been placed at the feet of the crude image. Every village still had one, like an appendage of the past. All summer, crowds, abandoning faith in ordinary hope, had been gathering to watch such statues dance and sway and deliver cryptic messages. The eyes stared back at Hano, still and lifeless.

  ‘It must be out of order,’ he said.

  It was an old joke, neither laughed. They crossed the bridge where a farmer was buying petrol at the one pump outside the hotel. An American in tweeds with a white bawneen on his head sat in the window over his dinner, the smell of steak wafting through the rain. Hano wanted to stand and breathe it in. He stopped outside the circle of light shining on the roadway. Katie tugged his hand, urging him onwards. There was nowhere to hide from the lights of cars now, they just climbed on to the mound of grass against the stone wall till each one passed.

  Where the road levelled out again they found the dancehall. The front door, below the For Sale sign, had been bricked up. The remains of a few posters hung there still. Somebody had painted FUCK O in large white letters and been too apathetic to finish the message. The car-park to the left had never been tarmacadamed. The rutted surface led down towards a row of granite boulders and bushes bordering the water’s edge. They walked around the side. There was no annex built on. The door moved inward under his shoulder and they were in the remains of a kitchen. Through the serving hatch he could see into the main dance floor. He broke the dividing door with his boot and led her in. What light remained filtered through the high windows along each wall where the glass had been smashed and iron bars jutted against the night sky. A ragged sign hung over the low stage, the barely distinguishable gold letters proclaiming Welcome to the Crystal Ballroom. A raised area had been railed off for tables, the wall behind it covered in scrawled names and curses. A few coloured tiles were still in place on the floor where an occasional chair lay, twisted and upturned among the black puddles. The light fittings had been stripped from the ceiling and leads of flex hung like worms burrowing through wood.

  Hano thought suddenly of his father, forty years before, cycling to a place like this, the black bicycle left against the wall, the slice of sweet cake passed out through the serving hatch with the mineral. How many girls had waited along those walls like his mother had stood once? How many lads had looked for courage?

  ‘Can you feel the ghosts?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t feel fucking nothing,’ Katie muttered, pushing past him to pick up a chair and sit huddled on the dance floor. Their voices echoed in the emptiness.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What if she isn’t there? What if even the wood’s gone?’

  ‘Don’t know Katie. Maybe…maybe it’ll be as well if she’s not. She’d be changed, different from what I’d told you. Maybe we’re better off never to arrive anyway, just keep travelling till we’re caught, quit pretending we can stop.’

  ‘I’m cold, Hano.’

  The lights of a passing car swept along the top of the wall and plunged them back into darkness.

  ‘You could go home, Katie. Tell them I forced you to come with me.’

  ‘Where the fuck is that?’

  He wanted to put his arms around her but there was so much coldness and pain in those hunched shoulders that he was afraid to touch them. Her hands were folded tightly against her stomach and her head bent down almost touching the plastic rim of the chair. Her feet were placed apart among the jagged stars of glass on the floor, water dripping from them to form a fresh pool beneath the chair. In the indistinct light she was like a figure in an old painting lost behind the grime of centuries of dust. He walked towards her and bowed slightly.

  ‘I’m not very good at this, but would you like to dance?’

  She looked up. Hano stared back solemnly at her.

  ‘You asking?’

  Her voice sounded as suspicious as any girl’s had ever been in that cavernous hall. He nodded. Katie rose awkwardly, holding him at arms length as they began to shuffle through the debris. He hummed every tune that entered his head, ones he knew and those without words which came to him, murmuring anything to keep them revolving in slow circles, drawing closer to each other until her arms were draped over his shoulders and he half-carried her as they waltzed.

  ‘Katie…’ he whispered.

  ‘No. Don’t call me Katie, My real name…they gave me, the one I changed in the city. Call me Cait. I’m tired of Katie…tired.’

  She laid her head down and they continued shuffling. Even his voice had stopped now. There was only the shuffle of their feet crunching the glass beneath them into the floor. Outside he heard the rain beat against the stone walls of the hall, the wind tearing at the loose sheets of metal still tacked to the windows. The noise made the darkness of the dance floor seem warm and trance-like. He stopped moving as though afraid of being hypnotized.

  ‘Can I see you home?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked up. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name’s Francis. Can I see you home, Cait?’

  ‘Please, Francis. Please.’

  The wind had chopped up the surface of the lake. They could see white flashes through the bushes and rocks. There were fewer cars now. He tried to give her his jacket though it was soaked, but she refused and, wrapping her own around her, began to walk.

  At five to twelve on the Thursday night I crossed the metal bridge. In the shelter below a young couple were standing motionless with their arms around each other, waiting for my footsteps to pass inches from their heads. As I reached the flat old Mrs Finnegan who lived above the next shop opened her hall door and beckoned to me.

  ‘There’s somebody after breaking into your flat,’ she said. ‘Some dark fellow in a hat. I was just putting the bottles out when I saw him trying to force the door. I think he’s inside now. Will I phone the guards for you?’

  I searched hesitantly for my keys with her standing a few steps behind me. She had spent two hours keeping watch; now she was determined to miss nothing. The door seemed closed as usual, but when I opened it cautiously and peered up the stairs I could discern in the moonlight the outline of a figure sprawled at the top of the stairs outside the landing door. Maybe it was because he was the last person I had seen sleeping rough, but I was sure it was the young tramp I had left at the Mater Hospital, that he had traced me here and come seeking shelter or revenge. I felt exposed and guilty but also angry as if I was being forced to carry the sins of the Plunketts.

  I motioned for Mrs Finnegan to remain where she was and, picking up a sweeping brush from the hall, ascended the creaking steps one at a time. The landing was in darkness except for a diminutive pair of luminous hands suspended a few inches from the intruder’s head so I had to grope at the wall to press the light switch in with a soft, inhaling click.

  ‘Listen, you can’t sleep there mate,’ I said.

  The figure raised a battered hat from over his unshaven face and screwed up his eyes in the light.

  ‘Nothing personal Hano, but you look an awful prick standing with a sweeping brush in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Holy-for-fuck
! Shay, is that you?’

  He was dressed in a long overcoat of coarse black wool, with heavy boots that an LDF recruit in the forties must have abandoned, and a black rimmed hat which made him look like a preacher in some mid-west road show who knew there was no God. His eyes were circled and exhausted, his face darkened with the stubble of travel. A rolled-up sleeping bag served as a pillow and a travel clock kept time on the floor beside him. On the newspaper beside him there was a half-eaten loaf of bread, a penknife, a packet of cheese, and, incongruously, an unopened bottle of champagne. He laughed as he rose to embrace me. It was only then that I remembered Mrs Finnegan. I looked down.

  ‘It was only him was it?’ she said in disgust and walked back, disappointed, to her book beside the window.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d still be living here, Hano. Were you at a party or what?’

  ‘No, I was at work.’

  ‘Work? Has Mooney got you digging up the dead and registering them for the vote?’

  I said nothing, I didn’t even want to think about Plunkett. I wanted to suspend reality as long as possible, to pretend everything was the same as the night Shay had left. When I asked him why he’d come home he grinned.

  ‘You’ve obviously never tasted Dutch beer Hano. Would you believe that I got homesick. I got this little thrill in my stomach tonight when I saw the lights of Ireland flickering in the distance. I imagined the last person on to the plane would have turned them all out.’

  With a plop the wall timer plunged us back into darkness. Shay thumped it with his fist and jammed it with a broken match. He caught me staring at his haggard face and in turn stared curiously back at my own.

  ‘Why did you really come home?’ I asked.

  ‘Is this a fucking inquest or what?’

  For a moment Shay’s face became guarded. In spite of my euphoria I could sense a change in him. His features had an older look and tiredness made his eyes seem watchful and serious. But there was something more than that, though it took me weeks to realize it, as if something inside him had broken and left him with a perpetual sense of unease which he was incapable of shaking off. I could see his eyes also taking me in, shocked by the traces of bruising.

  ‘Kid, you look worse than I do,’ he said. ‘Have you another lodger or are you going to ask me in?’

  I unlocked the door of the flat and Shay drop-kicked the sleeping bag into the corner of the living-room. I suddenly wanted to tell him how much I had missed him, how I had not been living here, how my father had died, about Plunkett. But the thought of that name chilled me, He produced a single battered key from his pocket.

  ‘Couple of months back,’ he said, ‘I was after getting kicked out some factory and kipping up on the third bunk of a hostel dormitory. Don’t ask me why, the bottom one was empty. The head wasn’t functioning too well, I suppose. Middle of the night I rolled off. I’d have probably lain there till dawn if some good Samaritan hadn’t picked me off the concrete floor and tucked me into the bottom bunk. Then he took my wallet as a tip. I went through my gear in the morning and the only things I still owned were my passport, an Irish pound note a certain person gave me on Capel Street Bridge and a key to this front door.

  ‘Tell you a joke, Hano. Later on I went to the Irish embassy in The Hague and finally this ninth secretary agrees to see me – late thirties, ultimate career woman. Oh no, she says in a Foxrock voice, I’m afraid it would be impossible to help you financially. We’re here to help young Irish people in every possible way—except financially. Well, I think about it for a minute, then I look at her and say, “Actually I haven’t eaten for a day and a half so I don’t suppose it would be possible to suck on your tit for a few moments?”’

  ‘How did you get home then?’

  ‘Listen, I got fucking home, that’s enough,’ he said sharply and closed his eyes. He opened them apologetically. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’m knackered. And I meant to write to you, every single day I meant to write to you. Right now I’d be heavy into a bed. I remember vaguely what one looks like so I should be able to find it.’

  Pressing the champagne into my arms and leaving his coat, hat, boots and jeans in an untidy procession on the floor behind him, he fell in through the doorway of his old room. And before I had time to turn the lights off and set the clock I could hear snoring through the wall. I pulled the blankets over me and, for the first time in weeks, slept deeply myself, as though I too was an emigrant returning from a nightmare journey.

  The storm which had been forecast swept across the city that night. I was aware of it in my sleep with the drowsy pleasure of being wrapped up listening to the torrential rain outside. The first phase blew itself out as I lapsed in and out of dreams, waiting for the alarm to finally ring. Time seemed suspended in a sleepy cocoon that went on indefinitely until finally the door was swung open, flooding the room in an are of light, and I woke fully to the smell of fried bacon. For a moment I thought I was in my mother’s house and then remembered that Shay was home as he stood silhouetted in the doorway with breakfast on a tray. It was twenty-five to one on the clock beside the bed. I would be late for work. I had one hand out to rise when he immobilized me by placing the tray down on my lap. The shock of seeing him in the morning light was almost as great as it had been on the darkened stairs. The stubble had been removed and the neatly clipped moustache occupied the centre of attention again. Only the hair that had grown long and shaggy seemed out of character with the stylish figure who had left seven months before. It was wet from the rain. He saw me looking at it and placed a wisp in his mouth.

  ‘Doesn’t taste half bad when you’re starving in some railway station. You bollox, you never told me you’d changed jobs. I killed your alarm, you were sleeping too beautifully. I phoned Mooney to report in sick for you. Think I finally freaked him out. He said you’d left five months ago and he heard you were working for Pascal Plunkett. I told him Plunkett couldn’t be a bigger bollox than he was.’

  ‘What did you do then?’ I asked, trying and failing to keep the fear from my voice. Shay looked at me curiously.

  ‘I phoned your man Plunkett, told him you were sick and would probably be in tomorrow. He’s one weird character. He boomed down the phone at me, Who are you? He sounded like Fu Manchu at the end of those films they made in Wicklow, I shall return! I said I was your flatmate and he slammed the phone down.’

  He paused and stopped grinning.

  ‘If you have any choice, Hano, stay away from that family.’

  I could imagine Plunkett’s rage as he stormed up and down the office. I knew I would have to face it tomorrow. But suddenly, as I lay with breakfast in front of me and the old taste for misadventure returning, I didn’t care. I laughed, realizing how long it had been since I had made that sound. I felt like a tree must do in spring when the sap begins to rise. Shay pulled the curtains. The rain had stopped and the sky looked fresh and blue outside, waiting to be conquered.

  ‘I take it you didn’t ask Mooney for your job back?’

  ‘I’d starve first,’ Shay said. ‘It’s no harm you got the bullet. You could be there till you drop without ever learning more than that E comes after D.’

  ‘It’s a big cold world outside.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you telling kid?’ he said.

  He paused. I think we were both remembering that unreal world, the long table of clerks, the clock put forward, the wage cheque every other Thursday, the snug boredom of permanent people who could never be sacked. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘No, “The Winner’s Enclosure” is your only man. No hitches this time Hano. We’ll even get Carol in a corset posing in the window. Fuck them all, eh.’

  We joked on as I finished breakfast and then over cigarettes I told him about my father and what I felt I could about Pascal Plunkett. We had the radio on. There was talk of the government falling again. It seemed as if the electorate trusted nobody anymore, were terrified to give either party power. Suddenly Patrick Plunkett was interviewed.
‘No one is more tired of elections than me,’ he said, ‘after two in the past eighteen months. But if we go to the polls, this time the people will give us the mandate we need. A strong government for a strong people: one party, one voice, one nation.’

  He bladdered on with the usual shite like that. Once Shay wouldn’t have bothered listening but I noticed his attentiveness as the voice droned on, his face uneasy again, drained of light. I pulled the plug out and stared at him.

  ‘I hate this country,’ he said. ‘What the fuck did I come home to this kip for.’

  He took a roll of clean notes from his jacket pocket, peeled some off and threw them on the bed for rent. Once I would have asked him where he’d got the money from but now I said nothing as he picked the tray up and left. I dressed, standing beside the window. Although the cloudburst had cleared, the tail-end of the wind was still blowing itself out. The bushes behind the tumbledown cottages across the road were twisted double, the huge metal bridge beside them creaking like a ship about to slip its moorings. The radio had said that trees were down all over the country, roads had given away under flooding, the Dodder had burst its banks, everything that wasn’t solid had been torn apart. Now as I gazed out at the power of the wind I was suddenly scared. Shay shouted from the kitchen.

  ‘Will you get up for fuck’s sake Hano! You’d swear you were looking for compensation after an accident. Come on and I’ll roll something I brought home in my jocks to put us in the mood down the Botanics.’

  I laughed as I walked out to the kitchen but I was still scared.

  Our strolls in the Botanic Gardens had always been an oasis of tranquillity, but to go there that afternoon seemed like lunacy. Over forty trees had blown down in the arboretum overnight, and though the wind was dropping they were still reluctant to allow us in. One tree had crashed through the wall into the oldest part of the cemetery and smashed a dozen faded headstones. Workmen in yellow oilskins were using chain-saws to clear it. The Tolka had also burst its banks and the lower half of the gardens was under water. The conduit where I had followed my father’s bier in my mind was a swirling torrent, covering the pathway, crashing down through trees and sweeping the smaller plants away. Even to light the joint in the wind was difficult. I inhaled. It was the first time in months I had tasted hash. It made me feel sick and I handed it back to him.