‘You lived with this lad, didn’t you?’
‘We shared a flat, yes.’
‘A search warrant has been issued. But it’s one for your flat. We found this on him and God knows what else they might find if they go through the place.’
‘That flat is clean as a whistle.’
‘So you tell me. But it wouldn’t look too good for Shay – or for you—if we found speed there or mescalin or morphine sulphate or maybe even a few gay magazines, vaseline, K-Y jelly, two beds made up as one. Shay’s parents seem a nice couple. It would be a nasty shock for them. Even your own mother…’
He let the sentence hang. I should have felt angry. Instead I felt foolish like the day I had sent Jennifer to Mary. When something is dying it rots all over. The detective was more uncomfortable than I was.
‘How much do they pay you for this job?’ I asked.
He held his hands open with what could have been the shadow of a smile or a frown.
‘The art of the possible.’
‘What’s happened to my statement?’
‘I don’t recall a statement. Would you like to make one?’
‘I’d like to go now.’
‘You left the door of your flat open,’ he said. ‘One of the cars picked up some clothes. I’m not sure if they’re yours or your friend’s.’
The shoes were mine, the shirt and jumper had belonged to Shay. He walked with me through the hallway and out on to the gravel. I could see the mechanics across the road in Plunkett Motors, Eddie under a car with only his head sticking out, Sean and Matt smoking in their overalls. Inside the corrugated iron doors of the garage somebody was respraying the bonnet of the BMW.
‘A week,’ he said, as if to himself, ‘is a long time.’
Then he was gone and I was by myself. Two hours before I had lain in bed, luxuriating in the thought of the weekend. It could have been weeks ago. Wearing a dead man’s clothes, I walked slowly through the village, if village it could still be called. Plunkett Motors, Plunkett Undertakers, Plunkett House, the ugly faˆade replacing the Georgian mansion that once stood there. I surveyed the twisted wreckage of the main street which had been bought and sold by the Plunkett brothers: a mishmash of shapes and plastic signs; the ugliest fountain in the world which would be switched off after the election; the grotesque metal bridge over the carriageway. Home.
I had known every corner of it. Home. The small post office that closed for The Kennedy’s of Castleross; the old man in the wooden bicycle repair hut; the cobbler with the tiny glasses in the old cottage; the stooped gardener behind the high walls of the last big house they had demolished; the mystery of the picture house; the haunted cabin by the stream where the old man was said to live and where a long-dead dog barked if you approached; the last green pump; the vanished woodlands in autumn. Home, before the Plunketts came. Home, before the family shops were bought or intimidated out; before the planning laws were twisted in the heady sixties; before the youngest TD in the Dail and his brother bought the lands that were rezoned. Home, where my mother would kneel that evening in the funeral parlour which would receive Shay, thanking the man who paid her the wages of a slave. Home, where a detective spoke without looking at you; where crowds pushed themselves flat against the sides of buses; where queues were already forming both inside and outside the prefabricated community centre for Patrick Plunkett’s clinic – respectful, worried faces, hoping for a reference there, a claim here, a word with the guards or health inspectors: the subtle everyday corruption upon which a dynasty was built.
And walking through it last Saturday morning I realized I loved that home more than any place in the world for no reason that I could explain, except that I was a part of it and so was Shay. Now suddenly, with his death, part of it seemed to have died too. That morning all the defiant strength seemed to have ebbed from the village, the ordinary courage with which people survived in the face of indifference. There was just the anxiety left, the worried shoppers pulling home their trolleys, the parents waiting for the State car, desperate for favours.
I didn’t want to go back to the flat. I didn’t want to meet anybody. Perhaps I felt that if I walked far enough the sick empty feeling would be gone, perhaps I would stop seeing Shay tumbling through the air; I could pretend for a little longer that I had not fallen for it all, I had not sent Shay racing down those stairs to his death. But I couldn’t. There was no corner of that suburb where I didn’t see Shay, no group of youths in which I didn’t hear his laugh. I had to turn back, to face my own conscience. Back by the graveyard he had loved, by the tiny lane with the last of the old cottages, back to the crowds outside the bookies, to the women with the prams of washing. Back to you Cait, waiting at the locked door. Waiting for whom? Your hands were jammed down in your jeans’ pockets and your eyes said it all – why Shay and not me? I let you in without speaking and made tea because it seemed the thing to do. We both sat in that living-room letting the cups go cold. After a while, maybe half an hour – time that day seemed to have no meaning – I told you about it, the doorbell, the death, the detective, all in a flat even voice. Just the facts, with no attempt to say how I felt myself. There was silence after I finished, then you looked up.
‘And you let them,’ you said. ‘You just stood here, above it all and let them! You were his friend and you let them. You let them! Let them!’
I had to push the chair back or you would have scratched my eyes out. I covered them with my hands and let you pull at my hair as you screamed. In the end I used my fist to send you staggering back across the room. You fell against the wall and sneered.
‘Friend? A friend would have been down the stairs with him, a friend would have called a warning, done something. You think you’re great ‘cause you went to the police. You can keep your fucking police and your fucking inquests, but I’ll murder that bastard.’
You didn’t need to accuse me. All that morning I had been accusing myself, remembering the beating Shay got by the carriageway, my own cowardice. I got up and walked into my bedroom. I never heard you leave.
They took the small lane that led away from the village, crossed over the main road and were gone down a tunnel of trees. The edges of the road were scarred by the tyre tracks of trucks that had passed up and down to the chemical dump. It was too late in the evening for them now. There was no traffic as they walked towards the entrance of the wood. The ruins of a tiny gate lodge stood like a skull in the undergrowth, thick brambles covering the walls, trees and moss reclaiming the stone. There was a smell of wild garlic as they entered the forest path.
The gate to the wood was covered with rust, the bottom bar had broken in two. They climbed over the stile and began to walk up the curving avenue. It was like that evening over a half decade ago when he had first walked here, watching the light like a living object through the leaves. The grass was overgrown, still damp after the previous night’s rain.
‘Last winter,’ the woman said, ‘it snowed heavily. I did not come here for a month. A sheep-dog found its way in and gave birth to five pups in a badger hole. She was so weak she was unable to run away when I found her. She lay trying to cover the five starved pups. Further up in the trees I found a donkey. Some farmer had decided it was not worth keeping and let it loose in here. It was as bloated as the dogs were thin. All it could find to eat was moss. There is no water here. It was dehydrated. I came each day, carried up what I could. The dogs survived but the donkey was too far gone. When it died a farmer in the village approached me.
‘“I’ll take it off your hands, mam, if I can bring the lorry up the avenue.”
‘“What do you do with the meat?” I asked him. He hummed and hawed for a long time. “Dog food,” he said; and then, “corned beef for the third world”. He could see how upset I was and kept explaining how the cooking of it killed any germs.
‘“Would you eat it?” I asked him, and he looked insulted.
‘“Do you want the carcass moved or not, mam?”
‘“Would you eat it?” I asked him again, and he looked around even though the street was deserted.
‘“I wouldn’t even eat my own beef, mam.”
‘I left the donkey alone. Each time I came back a little more of him would be gone. I think even the dogs had some. But it was better that way, more natural, part of the real cycle. When only the skull was left I buried it.’
There was a stone wall built against the bank. It was covered in moss. Katie ran her hand against it as sensually as if it were skin. She was carrying the parcel with the food inside it. She rarely spoke but he knew she was not unhappy. They walked in silence till they came to the old tree with its broad canopy of branches. Beyond it he could make out the corner of the house. This was the moment in dreams when he had always flown, had woken bathed in that wave of warmth. Hano knew this time there would be no flight, no figure would appear from the corner of the house. They moved on in the evening light until the whole house came into view. The wood was slowly reclaiming it. The shutters had fallen through on the great window to the right of the hallway, and he could see the rafters hanging down from the ceiling. He walked closer and peered through the hole in the floor at the cellar beneath. He shivered involuntarily and turned away. Katie was behind him. She stared silently down at the jumble of stones and wood in the two cell-like rooms exposed below.
‘If we walk around the back there is a way in,’ the woman called. They followed her down what had once been the lawn, through overgrown bushes by the side of the house. The window of the cellar gaped in the wall as they passed the remains of what had been outhouses. There was a sort of courtyard at the back with an exposed doorway. They walked down a bare passageway. Below them was a crumbling stone staircase. He knew the others could feel it too, the sense of overwhelming pain that emanated from down there.
‘It’s strange,’ the woman said. ‘It feels like fifty years ago; like something has come back.’
Katie stared into the darkness below and then bent down to search among the piles of old papers and brass pots on the floor. When she stood up, Hano saw that she had a few pages from a torn bible in her hand. The edges were brown as if the rest of it had been burnt. He put a hand out to stop her as she began to walk. She ignored it and descended into the dark. He could barely hear the words as she read from the page. It was the psalms, that much only he could recognize. She had reached the bottom and turned to look back up at him. Her eyes were scared. He knew she was feeling stupid and exposed. Her voice faltered and then she began to read again, only it was so dark that he knew she was reciting from memory now. There was a noise in the darkness below, faint enough to be an echo, a sound like the wingbeat of a tiny bird. She continued reading as Hano heard the beating slowly ascend the stair, drawing closer until it seemed to merge with his own heartbeat. There was a sensation of lightness, of flight, though his feet were firmly on the ground, and then it was gone past him, up the corridor, dissipating into the evening air. Katie had stopped reading. She let the pages fall and cleared a circle on the floor around her with her foot. She smiled up at him.
‘It’s time you came home, Francis.’
The woman handed him the bag she had been carrying. He turned to thank her but she had waved and was gone. Katie called again, kneeling to open her own bag and produce a blue candle. She struck a match, lit it and stood up, cupping the flame with her hand as he walked cautiously down.
That night I began to tour the bars where we used to drink, early in the evening, before they were cluttered with noise – the time Shay liked them best. I followed the route we had taken the first night after work a year and a half before. Two had changed their names, new interiors replacing the scarred wooden counters, strings of soft-focused lights pock-marking the ceilings, snatches of Beatles’ songs that lasted a few seconds, the barmen suspicious of a solitary drinker. Murtagh’s was empty downstairs, the front door open at that early hour. I sat at the long table, noticing for the first time how faded and cracked the paintwork was. In what countries were they now, those twenty friends who rolled joints at that table with him on nights when music was a presence in the blood?
I abandoned his haunts before anyone who might know Shay came in, and walked home half-drunk down streets I had followed on the nights when he was gone. Beyond Phibsborough and the canal. Remembering the loneliness I had felt then, each landmark like a station of the cross I’d pause at on my way back to the empty flat. The scent of bread near Cross Guns Bridge; the rusting barges where grey swans nestled among the scum of cider bottles and floating debris; the crumbling silos of the deserted flour mill. But all those nights I had had at least the hope of his return. Now there was just the memory of that car, the thud as a body was flung through the air, the empty sickness that refused to leave my stomach.
I went home and stood at the darkened flat window to stare down for hours at the spot where he’d died. Blood still stained the road. It was too dark to see it but I was convinced I could. Do you know what I wanted Cait? I wanted him. Not alive; I knew there was no hope of that. No, I kept saying: Shay, I’ll not be frightened if you’re here. If you can come back, even just for a second, do so. Give me a sign, anything to tell me you’re not just rotting flesh in a box supplied wholesale by Pascal Plunkett.
When I was a young boy I had loved a girl. I wrote her a note and hid it beneath my pillow, convinced that if I wished hard enough in my mind it would vanish and appear beneath hers. Now I was like that child once more, standing at the dark window, praying for a sign which never came. There was nothing except my own tiredness, the sickening aftertaste of drink and a numb, futile anger.
There should be no removals on a Sunday but I knew the party could not resist the photo opportunity. All day I sat alone in the flat, watching the photographers begin to gather outside the undertakers next to the Protestant church. The crowd was still small when the hearse arrived: less than half that which had gathered for my father’s removal. Then I had stood down there in a black suit and tie, taking over the duties of a diligent man. Now I remained at the window. There was nothing more I could do for him. They had him neatly in their power at last. One brother was in the office joking with the bored chauffeur; the other mourning professionally, gathering votes with a handshake.
I watched Patrick Plunkett posing with the bewildered parents and could see the morning’s headlines already: A Tragedy For Two Families, parents unite in grief. They were talking as the lens zoomed in on them. From his face, I knew Shay’s father had found himself apologizing for his son’s death. The professional smile was reassuring him. I could almost read the lips. ‘Poor Justin, he’s been on sedatives ever since.’
Tomorrow the first preferences of all there would flood again into the Plunkett stronghold. I only realized I was banging on the glass with my palms when the crowd began to look up.
While the cortège was crawling its way out on to the carriageway and along the awkward route to the far side of the street, I walked over the metal bridge to be there before them. I didn’t think I would be able to go in, but when the service began I ventured hesitantly up the steps. I knew the chauffeur well, an oldish, quiet widower who lived with four children in the West. I remembered my father organizing a collection for him in the garage when his wife died years before from cancer.
‘Drugs, wasn’t it?’ he asked when I paused outside. ‘An awful thing that, everything to live for and yet they still take them. Wandering around like zombies in the daylight. Patrick Plunkett’s talking of launching a personal crusade against them in the new Dail. You should have seen poor Justin’s car. I drove it myself up to Pascal’s house after the respraying.’
I went in past him. I had not been there since my father’s funeral and not for six years before that. But Shay and I must have shared this place often without knowing it. The long snakes of schoolchildren brought over class by class to hymns and confession. How many hundreds of times had I passed him in that whirling school yard, the seagulls swooping down for bread as th
e teacher drilled us behind a 1798 pike? How far we had come and now here we both were again.
At the end of the service mourners filed up the main aisle to console the family before slipping back into the shadows at the side. I wanted to go up, I knew it was an insult not to, but I felt excluded from the circle of people. He was murdered, I had watched him die, and yet if I had screamed it at the top of my voice not one person there would have believed me.
In the porch, more mourners were shaking Patrick Plunkett’s hand than were clustering around Shay’s parents. I stared at him, wanting him to know that I knew, wanting to damn him to hell, to tear at him with my fists. He looked up and when he saw my angry gaze he replied with a slow, steady smile for ten or fifteen seconds above the heads of the crowd. It was the smile of one who knew that knowledge was a cheap and not very valuable commodity. The smile of somebody confident that everyone had their price. And instead of being cowed by my stare his smile reminded me that my turn could be next.
In the end it was I who dropped my eyes, and when I raised them again he had already climbed into the back seat of the State Mercedes, which the other drivers were waving into second place in the procession behind the black car carrying Shay’s family. The photographers were gone, the crowd starting to disperse. At the turn on to the carriageway I watched the State car indicate left and swerve into the fast lane, away from that place.
Why did I go back to Pascal’s house? I told myself that I wanted revenge, I wanted the head of Justin Plunkett. If the chauffeur was right then that was where I would find him. But I was also terrified and intensely alone. In the midst of my anger I was scared. I remembered Patrick’s smile which seemed to say you have not been forgotten. I walked back out through those half-built fields along the North Road into the countryside to Kilshane Cross, the plastic bags of litter burst open in the ditches, the slip-streams of big trucks blowing through my hair. I tried not to think of you Cait, as I walked, but your voice haunted me, shrill as you screamed. I wanted to be away from those memories, to escape those thoughts, just to walk forever out through the cold dusk: a numb creature moving through the dark, a man longing to turn to stone.
The Journey Home Page 32
