The Journey Home

by Dermot Bolger

  I had never heard Shay talk for so long before, for months I had hardly heard him speak at all. Now it was like a wound opening and the pus pouring out. He had stopped and was looking over my shoulder. His bedroom door was open and you were standing there, wearing one of his shirts. Your legs were bare, thinner than I thought they were. I’d no idea how much you had heard. You closed the door again with a soft click. It was half-three in the morning. Shay borrowed a pillow and a blanket from my room. I slept for a few hours, then stumbled into work.

  I smell of clay, I dream of earth,

  Remembering until there’s nothing to forget.

  Where is this place?

  One high square of fading light,

  Old bits of glass and stone,

  Dry leaves that have blown in.

  Somebody was here before me,

  I’m waiting for someone to come.

  My leather belt feels like flesh

  That has begun to rot.

  How long have I been lying here?

  My memory is choked

  With flashes from the past

  Hurtling by like cars

  Towards a city I can’t reach.

  Now I’ve no past left

  That hasn’t been burnt out

  And I lie in this oblivion

  Without even knowing my name.

  God, if you were ever there

  what more is left to recall?

  It’s all got jumbled up.

  A girl somewhere with cropped hair

  Someone waiting for me once.

  Every memory’s been sucked

  Till my mind’s a shrivelled ghost.

  I want to pass on!

  I want…Oh Jesus wait:

  There is a last memory I can’t escape.

  A roadway, morning from a window,

  Birds that never sang,

  Down streets that were abandoned,

  I must have had some destination.

  Then it’s night, suddenly like that;

  Beneath Dalymount’s lights

  the pitch greener than green.

  But there’s nobody inside,

  The stadium gates left open wide.

  The city strewn with abandoned cars,

  Bronze statues gazing down

  As I stared, willing them to speak.

  Why was there no one around?

  Two voices I couldn’t hear were calling

  like night birds in distant buildings,

  Holding me back with their cries.

  The night turned black,

  The moon dim as a tunnel’s mouth.

  I drifted towards that host of light

  But their voices weighed me down.

  When I woke I was trapped

  In this black void.

  I smell of clay, I dream of earth,

  Remembering until there’s nothing to forget.

  Where is this place?

  One fading square of light high up,

  Eternally out of reach.

  Faces that I cannot name

  Run like a film through my skull.

  God, when will the reel snap

  The spool spin wildly by itself

  And let me escape?

  I smell of clay, I dream of earth,

  Remembering until there’s nothing to forget

  Somebody was here before me,

  I’m waiting for someone to come.

  Everything seemed unreal at work the next day. The clerks’ voices buzzed around me from another world with their clichés about interviews and transfers. At break I stood on the stairs, gazing down at the mill of faces crushed against the court door. I was trying to remember two youths with cardboard boxes laughing as they sneaked away. You were gone when I got home, Katie. I didn’t ask Shay where. He was edgy. I knew he was waiting for Justin Plunkett to call.

  All that evening canvassers were knocking on doors, lists of voters in their hands, immune to whatever abuse they received. Others skulked along, careful not to touch the bell as they dropped little cards with messages, printed to resemble a handwritten note from the candidate: Sorry you were out when I called. Please remember I am always at your service. A mobile advice clinic for Patrick Plunkett tore down the street blaring martial music, the young woman driver ignoring the men who put their hands out for a joke as a recording of Plunkett’s voice announced his availability within. Every time I heard footsteps on the pavement I moved to the curtain. Shay sat impassively at the table. I knew my movements were beginning to irritate him but I was unable to remain still. When the doorbell rang Shay placed his hand on my shoulder and nodded towards the bedroom.

  ‘This is between him and me, Hano. Don’t get involved.’

  I watched him go down to open the door. It was two elderly women campaigning. Once Shay would have played along, gently sending them up before moving in for the kill. Now he just shook his head and closed the door. He was turning to go back up when someone put his finger to the doorbell and held it there. We both knew who it was. He looked up at me and, after a moment, I obeyed, walking over to the unlit bedroom and lying down to listen. They climbed up together, Justin Plunkett’s voice as brash as ever, mocking the canvassers who were trudging door-to-door for his father – and whose children, in a few years’ time, would walk those streets for him. But it was no longer the words of a friend, more the small talk of a boss about to come to business. Shay said nothing. When they reached the top of the stairs I heard Plunkett shout, his tone suddenly as raw as his uncle’s.

  ‘Don’t do that to me again. Ever! You hear Seamus? Are you fucking crazy or what? Over some fucking chick. And then you don’t make your flight. You don’t like getting your hands dirty is it? You’re a part of it, man; you bring the stuff in. What do you think I do with it? Pour it down the toilet?’

  ‘I want out Justin. Full stop.’

  Shay’s voice was calm but I knew he was fighting to control his temper. Justin Plunkett backed off.

  ‘Right, Seamus. Listen, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called on you last night. I was a man short, I even had to go out myself, this week of all weeks. Look, it won’t happen again. I promise. You’re a good courier. Let’s leave it at that. You’ve missed this week’s run but I’ll give you a cut anyway. We’ll set it up again for next week. Will you do it?’

  ‘You heard me, Justin. I’m through.’

  ‘You going chicken on me Seamus?’

  There was no reply. I could imagine Shay staring at him.

  ‘Only joking Seamus. We were friends long before this and we’ll be friends long after. I’ve never asked you to do anything you didn’t want, but just do this last run for me. You’re pulling out without notice, leaving me badly exposed. Just one more run Seamus and we’re through.’

  Again the only reply was silence. Plunkett was growing impatient.

  ‘Listen Seamus, just because of some tart you want to…’

  I heard the scrape of a chair being pulled back and a thud against the wall beside me. The sentence wasn’t finished. When Shay spoke he was just a few feet from my head. I heard Plunkett’s breath as he was pinned against the wall.

  ‘Don’t fucking annoy me Justin. I’m out, do you understand? You needn’t worry about me going to the police or anyone else, but you go near that girl again with your shit and I’ll come fucking looking for you. In person. Right?’

  This must be life to a blind person I thought, only having the words, sensing the fear, having no other clues to what was happening. But instinctively I felt the grip on Plunkett’s jacket being relaxed, his weight easing from the wall. Justin laughed nervously.

  ‘Take it easy, Seamus. It’s cool. My mistake. It’s bad to do business with friends. You want out?’

  Shay still didn’t reply. I knew he hadn’t released the jacket fully.

  ‘You’ve got out. Come on. No hard feelings. Hey listen, you want your wheels back. I mean, no offence but they’re a crock of shite. I only took them off your hands as a favour. They’re no us
e to me. Come over later this evening, we’ll have a beer and you can take them away. A parting gift right? We’ll have a laugh about this in Murtagh’s some night. Come on. Friends?’

  In the silence a loudspeaker outside began to hail the virtues of Justin’s father. I could imagine Justin holding his hand out with his father’s same professional smile. Shay must have finally taken it.

  ‘You’ll be over?’

  Justin’s voice moved further away, heading for the stairs.

  ‘I might.’

  ‘I’ll expect you so.’

  When I heard the front door close I waited for a moment before coming out. Shay was coming up from the hallway.

  ‘Will you take it?’

  He smiled wryly.

  ‘You can step on my blue suede shoes, but leave my Triumph Herald alone. I’ll buy it back.’

  He counted a slim roll of notes in his bedroom.

  ‘Have you twenty spots?’ he asked.

  I gave it to him and he put it with his own money in an envelope with Justin Plunkett’s name on it.

  ‘No more obligations to nobody from now on. It was good here once Hano, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was the best, Shay. It still could be. Remember, the massage parlour? “The Winner’s Enclosure”. It’s never too late. I’d be bouncer. We could install Katie as a madam now that Carol’s gone. A bit young but it would certainly keep her off the streets.’

  Shay grinned at me. I’d forgotten what his grin looked like. We joked about the future until you knocked on the door, Katie. You were shocked by my smile when I answered. It was the first time you ever asked could you come in. You seemed embarrassed by the previous night and felt the need to offer some excuse for coming back.

  ‘It’s just that…I’ve nowhere to go,’ you said. ‘I’ve nowhere else where I really belong any more.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Shay said, ‘none of us have.’

  We left you behind us when we went to Clontarf for the car. I waited for Shay outside the apartment block. The car was parked fifty yards down the road. Through a line of trees I watched Justin come to the door. He smiled and said something but Shay shook his head. Justin handed him the keys and closed the door and Shay waited a moment before pushing the envelope through one of the letter boxes. The car had a full tank of petrol. We parked in town and went searching for Shay’s old snooker hall. The old man was gone, the dusty crates of orange bottles carted away. A girl in a bow-tie kept watch beside the computer screen. A monitor above her head showed the tables upstairs.

  ‘There’s a five pound deposit,’ she said. ‘You’ll be a half-hour waiting.’

  ‘What happened to Joe?’ Shay shouted above the disco music. She looked at him, baffled.

  ‘The old lad who used to own this gaff?’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know. He died I suppose. Cancer I think it was.’

  We found another place along the quays and played four or five frames. Two friends of Shay’s came in, a gay couple who hadn’t even known that he had got back from Europe. They slagged him and he laughed, tossing his head back. It was like the Shay I first knew, woken from suspended animation, like the stories of Oisin I once learned. We wandered back to their flat in the markets and Shay found a deck of cards. He cleared everything from the table and rubbed his hands.

  ‘Straight poker,’ he said. ‘Jacks or higher to open. No butter vouchers in the pot.’

  In the narrow cobbled street below, refrigerated lorries hummed in the night. Watching the lads, relaxed and open as they leaned against each other on the sofa and laughed with Shay, it seemed impossible that men such as the Plunkett brothers had ever existed. I leaned back in the chair in exhausted exhilaration and let their warmth banish the pain of the last six months.

  It was three o’clock when we left, our pockets rich with silver. I expected to find you still there, Katie, but you had gone home. There was a young couple across the road, squatting down beside a fire in the roofless cottages. Not cider drinkers or vandals, just a broke boy and girl putting off the moment of returning to their separate houses. Shay made a noise at the window and threw down a packet of twenty cigarettes. The girl ran to get it as though it were a hundred-pound note. Shay turned and his face was radiant. I don’t have the words to describe it. Not physically beautiful or just happy, but suddenly young. We didn’t talk much, we were both too tired. He touched my shoulder for a moment on his way to his bedroom.

  ‘Hey Hano,’ he grinned, “The Winner’s Enclosure.” We’re skint but we’ve made it here at last.’

  After the drunken turmoil of the village the road seemed even blacker. The rain began again, heavy sodden drops thudding against his wet flesh. Hano no longer bothered to brush them from his eyes, so that he stumbled along as though underwater, with the dark shapes around him unfocused and unreal.

  Was it only two nights since he had walked the roads of North Dublin with her footsteps following his into the darkness? Now he could no longer distinguish them, but through the rain felt he could hear a faint humming as if a song without words was coming from deep within her throat. He knew she could sense it too, that they were going home in a way that they had never gone before. Even though nobody waited there for them, when they reached the wood there would be no place left to return to. Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created for yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were. The cars had stopped. Even the dogs, sheltering in the outhouses of the farms they passed, no longer ventured into the teeming rain to bark at their presence. They would never be more alone.

  ‘I loved him Francis,’ Katie said. ‘Big and gruff. Packy, they’d called him in Leitrim; Uncle Pat in Dublin. Part of me never believed they were dead. When others said, your parents are with God, I knew they were lying, but when he said it, I just felt sorry for him. If I could have said goodbye to them Francis, it would have meant…would have been a moment when one life stopped and a new one began. But there wasn’t…I’m sorry Francis…had to go back to find they were gone, find there was nothing to go back to. I…do you pray?’

  If she couldn’t see, she sensed him shaking his head in the blackness.

  ‘I did. I wish I could still. But not to their God, not since the day they left. But to my mother. And not really pray but talk; you know, tell her things in my mind. Never had nobody to tell things to again…could never shake the feeling she was there, somewhere, aware of things.’

  The surface of the road was uneven with pools of water lurking beneath their feet. Lights of houses shone across the flat expanse of poor land. In a hollow the empty windows of a ruined mill kept watch. Two hours after they left the village the road curved down towards a small stone bridge. Hano recognized it as the bridge with the light. He grasped Katie’s hand and began to pull her on, excitement replacing his exhaustion. The road veered right beneath a clump of trees, then twisted left again, allowing him a glimpse of the street lights of the woman’s village. There was a Spanish feel to that old row of sleeping buildings: the four pubs, two with petrol pumps outside, one an undertaker’s, the shop unchanged for half a century. They walked up by the side of the old national school. The main road through the village had been widened. A lorry sped past at high speed towards Donegal, splashing water over the loose gravel outside the shops. A cat crept from a doorway, paused to watch them and then moved on, leaving stillness in its wake.

  It must have been half-two in the morning. Half a decade had passed since he’d stood there, yet never had he felt such a sense of coming home. Every memory was vivid now; he’d only to cross over and slip up the side-road past the single street light at the crest of the hill to reach the site of the caravan. He didn’t dare imagine that the caravan might be there itself. How old had the woman been? She would be over eighty now if alive, living on a tiny pension, buffeted by storms in winter, searching for dry wood to keep the stove burning. Like Katie with Tomas, he hoped she was dead rat
her than in a hospital ward. She belonged out here, away from drips and charts.

  Lately there had been raids on old people throughout the West. Men in vans arriving at four in the morning, breaking down doorways, beating pensioners up, searching for the discoloured hoards of banknotes hidden beneath beds and carpets. It was an act of faith to imagine she could have somehow survived. Katie was waiting, staring towards the lights of an oncoming car which lit up a row of new bungalows. Automatically they stepped back till it had passed, then he took her hand and led her up the side-road, by a field of sleeping geese which stirred at their footsteps, towards the street light shining on the white walls of the farmhouse, and beyond into the darkness by the graveyard. There was an overgrown turn to the left, a row of bushes hiding the field from view. He walked slowly towards them and saw his ark, his old caravan with the windows broken and the door open in the rain. Katie’s hand touched his shoulder as he lifted his head, welcoming the coolness of the rain that ran down his cheeks. Then, in the silence, a dog barked.

  The noise was indistinct, like a ghost calling, but it came again as Katie pushed him forward. They’d gone past the bushes now, the field open before them with a long dark shape in the corner beyond the abandoned caravan. Suddenly a door was thrown open and, framed in the square of light, they saw the tiny figure in boots and a yellow oilskin gazing out. By her feet, an old dog was barking and swaying back and forth. Hano remembered the cries of the injured cat on his first night. He climbed over the gate, pausing for Katie, and began to run. The dog was growing more excited, the old woman still staring out into the dark. Her face had a quizzical look, child-like in its delicate bone structure. When he reached the corridor of light thrown across the grass he stopped and walked nervously forward. The woman stepped forward uncertainly and then smiled.