The Journey Home

by Dermot Bolger

  One Tuesday evening it rained non-stop. We hadn’t bothered to put the television or radio on. When the showers stopped at half-seven there was a scurry of feet on the road outside, the noise of men’s voices and cars pulling up. Shay went to the window and cursed out loud.

  ‘Not again,’ he said, ‘not all this shite so soon again.’

  I looked down over his shoulder. Party officials were racing between lamp-posts with ladders, jockeying for position, those standing below handing up the same old tired posters. A few feet from our eyes a man in a business suit was fixing a poster of Patrick Plunkett below the street light which formed a halo over his face. It had been a miserable petty day filled with miserable petty events. I could think of none more suitable on which the government could fall for the third time in two years.

  ‘Who will it be this time Shay?’ I asked. ‘The Soldiers of Density, The Warriors of Cuchulainn or The Progressive Shan Bhean Phochters?’

  He laughed at the idea that it might matter. The Sucky-Fucky-Five-Dollars government would replace the Five-Dollars-Johnny government for another few months before the electorate got sick of them. No party won elections any more; people just got sick of seeing the same smug faces in power and switched them round for variety. I remembered as a child my father coming home on an evening like this, a coloured poster in his hand for each front window of the house. He’d harass my mother to get them up quickly, uncertain at what time Pascal Plunkett would make the rounds of his employees. Elections had been rare then, posters printed specially. Now they just put them in storage. Often nobody bothered taking them down. Like leaves in autumn they fell in their own time.

  ‘I need a drink,’ Shay said. ‘Three weeks of this! Will we go?’

  All the way into town it was the same, rival workers fighting for the best positions on lamp-posts. Two derelict shops in Phibsborough were being transformed into advice centres, the first loudspeakers being mounted on to the roofs of cars. In Murtagh’s the clientele were quiet, election weary, dreading the hype and noise of the weeks ahead. Justin Plunkett came in, more soberly dressed than usual, had a few curt words with his troupe of ladies in the corner from The Clean World health studio and hurried off. He nodded to Shay who shrugged his shoulders. Mick came in and told us he had had three phone calls already from party workers in Donegal offering him a lift home to vote on the big day. We caught the last bus, the conductor frisking each youth who boarded it at the stop beside the waste ground at the cemetery. When we reached the flat I remembered the last election.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, drunkenly. ‘The phone. Let’s do them one by one. Go on, Patrick Plunkett first.’

  During the last campaign each candidate had put leaflets through the door informing us they were available to solve our problems night or day. At four o’clock one night we’d collected all the leaflets from the hall, filed them into alphabetical order and dialled the home numbers. Shay’s voice had been iceberg innocence. He apologized profoundly for disturbing them at that hour, spoke of his admiration for the great work they did, said that he was in a serious dilemma about who to vote for and wanted to know whether they had any objections to gay people.

  ‘Oh, no. No,’ each candidate said. ‘We’re available at all times to help all our constituents.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so relieved you said that,’ Shay would reply while I fell about the floor. ‘My friend and I here are stuck together and we were wondering if you could pop over with a bucket of cold water.’

  He’d slam the phone down and break his shite laughing while I read out the promises listed on the next card.

  But this time Shay shook his head and suddenly I sobered up and was glad. That flat was still our tiny Ark. The thought of hearing a Plunkett’s voice there filled me with foreboding, like a cold wind rushing in to destroy whatever warmth we had managed to retain in our lives.

  Now I’ve exhausted every memory, there’s nothing left that I’ve held back. Sometimes when I seem to sleep the faces are so real I could touch them. Was it a Friday evening centuries ago that I stood at the court-house to watch the girls wheel their bikes from the shed? A new girl with red hair whose name I didn’t know mounted her push bike and waved back to the crowd. Her slim ankles bare, the outline of panties through her white jeans. She stood on the pedals to get going, her whole body curved against the sun. On the pavement behind her two old women were approaching, cautiously holding hands in case they might fall. And, behind them, two girls carrying a cheap locker to furnish a bare bedsit down some side lane. They laughed as I passed, like they’d exposed something personal. Nothing seemed to happen, so why has the moment stayed locked, almost the last one left in my mind, routine then, even dull, but now so extraordinarily overwhelming. It seemed all so clear a moment ago, the girl’s red hair, the mole on the old woman’s lip, all I had to do was reach out to touch them. And what seems inexplicable is that none of us spoke. We shared the same space grudgingly, each passing through that moment in time.

  I can bear this loneliness, Can lie here through eternity.

  If there was fire I’d welcome it, To lose myself in its pain.

  Just one square of light like a window boarded up,

  Just a sense that someone has waited here in the past.

  And just the final torment, the pain that can’t be endured,

  This perpetual sense of waste, Of words too late to be uttered.

  The three weeks before last Sunday passed, as always at election time, with a confetti of cards littering the hallway. Newspapers discussed the grip of election fever while the nation shambled apathetically on: housewives with children trying to dodge candidates outside supermarkets; unemployed men ignoring all knocks on the door and cursing every crooked bastard in power, knowing in their hearts that when the time came they would troop to the polling stations to re-elect them. The tally men, sitting beside the election agents, would number the names as they were crossed off, and later trace them back to the numbered ballot papers. There were ways of finding out who voted for who and there would always be favours needed to survive: the reference for the daughter; the hospital waiting list; the cert, that had to be signed.

  Mooney was at the summit of self-importance now. The phone rang all day with party officials seeking clarification of boundaries. The huge map on his wall had been redrawn so often that it resembled the wrinkled face of an old man.

  On the morning before the last election, trees had been planted in the green space between the carriageway and the first line of houses. Twelve hours after the polling stations had closed, the Corporation workmen returned to uproot them. Now the workmen were back landscaping the verge. A crude fountain, resembling a garden hose stuck between two rocks, was constructed where the old horse trough had once stood, below the bridge on the main street, until the Plunketts had knocked it down. Bored photographers took photographs of Patrick Plunkett opening it. Before they arrived, party workers took down the crude posters an unemployed candidate had stuck up. We found them dumped over the wall of the ancient graveyard. Shay climbed in to rescue one and stuck it on the kitchen wall. It read: Hush—five TDs sleeping!

  Last Thursday evening, Katie, there was a knock on the door. Shay was cooking in the kitchen before leaving for the airport and nodded for me to get it. Justin Plunkett pushed his way quickly into the hall, annoyed at being seen by me.

  ‘Is he here?’

  I pointed and followed him upstairs. Shay came into the living-room with a pan in his hand.

  ‘I need you, Seamus. Get your coat,’ Justin told him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen, I haven’t time. I’ll have you back in time for your flight. Just get your coat.’

  ‘We agreed you’d never call here.’

  Justin glanced angrily over at me.

  ‘I’ve no time to argue,’ he hissed. ‘I shouldn’t even be here myself this time of all times. I’m a man short. Just get your coat and come on.’

  Shay considered for a moment, then lowered t
he pan, picked up his jacket slowly and went with him. Dinner was half-cooked. I walked into the kitchen, breathing in the smell of flour and eggs. New potatoes were boiling in their jackets, stalks of celery cut up on the table. But the place felt violated, like a home after being ransacked by thieves. I was hungry but I couldn’t touch the food there. I turned the cooker off and walked across to the Chinese take-away in the village.

  An hour later Shay returned. I heard your screams first, Katie, then the sound of a key turning. You cursed him as he pushed you up the stairs. Your hair was tousled from struggling, your jacket ripped and there was blood on Shay’s neck from your fingernails.

  ‘Let me go back, you fucking bastard!’

  He shoved you towards the chair by the window and you ran at him blindly, clawing with your hands as he caught you and pushed you back.

  ‘You’ve no fucking right, I want to go bleeding back.’

  I remembered the Gypsy girl carried into the court room beneath the Register’s office. You had the same sensual fury, the same glaring eyes. You looked around for something to smash, cursing him and me. Shay blocked the top of the stairs, never speaking or taking his eyes off you.

  ‘What are you so high and mighty for, you bollox,’ you shrieked at him. ‘It’s you that was selling it, you that was ripping us off! They’re my friends; I want to go back. Good Jesus, how can I face them again? They’ll kill me if the men don’t return!’

  I took my coat and left. Shay moved to one side without looking at me. His face was white. You had sat down at the table and as I closed the front door I could hear you sobbing. The light was drying up outside. I walked down the tiny laneway by the cross. Two punks sat on the steps of the old graveyard, a half-empty plastic bottle between them. A bus turned up from the village, its lights blazing like a galleon in full sail. Far off, loudspeakers blared out slogans in the estates. I didn’t want to go back to the flat, not that night, not any night.

  I walked for three hours, remembering how I’d paced those same streets on the nights when I worked for Plunkett, taking different routes but always ending up outside the bookies, gazing up, longing to be back in there. When I returned at eleven o’clock, it was because there seemed nowhere else to go. I let myself in and slowly climbed the stairs. The lamp in the corner was lit. Shay sat by the window in a sweatshirt. He looked jaded. He gestured towards his closed bedroom door.

  ‘She’s asleep at last. Don’t talk too loud or you’ll wake her.’

  I pulled a seat from the table and sat back to front on it.

  ‘You don’t like me very much any more, do you, Hano?’

  I couldn’t answer him. I lowered my head until my forehead was cooled by the wood of the chair.

  ‘Don’t like myself either.’ He sighed. ‘You think you can fool yourself, you can pretend things don’t matter. You can say that’s the way the world is run, if you don’t want to get left behind you’ve got to be a part of it. You can even be like a guard at a prison camp, justifying yourself by saying you’re doing nothing in comparison. But it’s all a crock of shite, Hano, you can’t fool yourself, even when you try as hard as I did.

  ‘It was supposed to be my way of getting back, on the cops, this country, that joke of myself. Remember him? The laid-back dude arsing around, thinking the world was a cuddly place.’

  ‘I loved him, Shay,’ I said, ‘I miss him.’

  ‘Never saw it through before, Hano; I made sure I never did. Always kept it impersonal, Boy’s Own stuff, feeling big because of the risk, walking past the fuckers in customs. I suppose that’s what it’s like for the bomber pilots, eh, high above it all, just little clean bursts of flame like flowers exploding below them. Collect the stuff from some hotel bedroom, conceal it, take the risk at the airport, drop it at a new pick-up point, a pub toilet, the rubbish bin in a park. Collect your money for the next drop. Your only contact a phone call on the Wednesday. Never see anybody this side; never see where it goes. Finally know you’ve made it. You’re the cool clean hero you dreamt of as a child.’

  I looked up. Shay was staring at me as he spoke, wanting me to look back.

  ‘Remember when Justin was just a joke, eh? Those poker sessions slagging his leather jacket. It was like I’d never known him, Hano. You could smell the fear when he walked in, the power he held. Was hard to see anything at first in the gloom with just the noise of water dripping. Then the shapes started coming closer like hunted animals through the dark. Jesus, Hano, if you’d seen them. Mostly they’d money but some tried to barter goods. He’d two men with him who did the work. He just smoked cigarettes and nodded occasionally, standing back in the shadows, putting a value on some item. Normally one of his cronies oversaw it, you could see he didn’t trust the two men. I was the look-out, keeping watch at the doorway out over the car-park.

  ‘I mean, it wasn’t real Hano, it was some fucking nightmare. One girl had a camera she’d stolen. She kept saying It’s worth enough! It’s worth enough! But Plunkett shook his head. She tried to grab a bag from one man’s hand but the other yanked her back by the hair, pushed her over to one side. She stood there, unable to leave but afraid to go back, holding up the camera for Plunkett to see, pleading to him with her eyes. Then I saw Katie, waiting in the queue. There was a puddle on the concrete floor. She stepped into it when the line shifted and stood, waiting patiently for it to move again. Her eyes were down, Hano, her hand clutching a bundle of crumpled notes. And she never looked up, just shuffled forward in turn.

  ‘I remember a film I saw one night on the box above some bar counter in Holland. It was in Dutch so I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I recognized the black-and-white newsreels. We’ve all seen them: train stations; people with stars pinned to their coats waiting to be loaded on to a truck. They had the same lifeless look, you know, that numbed indifference, that she had in her eyes when she reached the two men and held the money out.

  ‘I grabbed her shoulder, Hano. She screamed, looking at me in terror like an apparition from another world. Let me go, she kept saying, Let me shagging go! The men were confused, they looked back at Plunkett. Quit messing Seamus, he said. Don’t handle the merchandise. You want to fuck her it’s your own business, but not on my time. I began to pull her screaming towards the doorway. I could see her mates huddled together, whispering among themselves. Let her alone, Mister, or I’ll split you, one of them called. Cheap meat Seamus, Plunkett said. Back to work and I’ll fix you up with any of them later.

  ‘Katie was trying to bite my hand and I wrapped her in a headlock. The men were advancing, spreading out to cover both sides. I knew one was armed with a gun and kept trying to keep my body between him and Katie. They were almost at me when Plunkett spoke. I don’t like it. Take the gear, let’s go. They turned, just like that, picked up the suitcase at their feet and suddenly everybody had forgotten about me. Katie’s friends clustered around the men, frantically holding up money, radios, credit cards. I dragged Katie through the doorway, past the driver smoking on the bonnet, as Plunkett slipped out ahead of the horde. Seconds later the engine started. I looked back, half-way across the car-park, and saw the two men climb in as the car gathered speed. Girls were running behind it, screaming, trying to climb on to the bonnet. The lights came straight at me, swerved at the last moment and headed for town.’

  Shay took out another cigarette. The ashtray beside him was overflowing with butts.

  ‘Were the men called O’Brien and Flynn?’ I asked.

  He nodded, surprised as he struck a match.

  ‘I don’t like myself much either,’ I said. ‘When I was a kid my daddy would shake his head and say, Be anything you want, but no son of mine will ever work for a Plunkett. I don’t know how much he knew about what went on, Shay. He’d never hear a word said against them. He had a wife, five children, all the commitments of the world, but he’d look at me and say, No son of mine.’

  Outside there was a shout and then footsteps. A siren in the distance startled my nerves. I cros
sed to the window and closed the blinds as if I could keep the world out. Shay looked at the bedroom door.

  ‘It took me hours to soothe her…like I’d torn her from her mother, or something. I thought it was just the drugs, but it was more than that, it was like she was terrified of being different, of standing out by herself. You don’t like her much, do you Hano?’

  ‘I don’t really know her.’

  Shay looked down and shrugged his shoulders, trying to decide whether to tell me something or maybe just to understand it in his own mind.

  ‘Never told you much about Europe, did I?’ he asked.

  I shook my head and Shay paused, remembering.

  ‘First few months were great, all the freedom I ever dreamed of. Even after I got the shit kicked out of me in the field I was still together. I knew I’d built up enough money to survive a month or two, but I was concussed after it, shaken, like. Few nights later I fell out of that hostel bunk and everything was taken. But I still thought I’d get fixed up; I even got taken on at another factory. I was only there a morning before the manager came down. You’d be surprised how quickly word gets round a city about a trouble-maker.