New Town Soul

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘Do you want to go back?’

  Geraldine returned his look. ‘Don’t tell me you’re too much of a wimp to prove that boy a liar?’

  Shane didn’t know if the glint in her eye was meant as a tease or a dare, but it was enough to ensure that he would not back down now. He would explore every room in this house until it was Geraldine who begged him to turn back. A tiny path ran along by the side wall and ended at a rusted iron gate with barbed wire on top. This gate was impossible to scale but some stones had tumbled down from the wall, leaving enough footholds for them to climb it. An old black cat, a half-wild stray sitting at the far end of the wall, observed them unblinkingly. From the top of the wall they could see the grounds of Blackrock College on one side and the car park of the Blackrock Clinic on the other, but when they jumped down into the garden itself they could see nothing except a jungle of sky-high brambles and bushes that covered the slope which led down towards the basement of the old house.

  Empty flagons were scattered around the bushes, along with smashed bottles of spirits and cigarette butts. But all this rubbish was in a corner right beside the gate. It was as if even the people who held illicit drinking parties here had kept their distance from the house. Shane hoped that Geraldine would lose her nerve, but it was she who led the way, hacking a path through towering clusters of nettles. Finally a gap appeared amid the bushes and they raced down the rest of the slope, only able to stop when their outstretched hands slammed against the basement wall, with loose pebbledash crumbling beneath their fingers.

  The kitchen windows looked dark, as branches pressed against them. The glass panes were spider-webbed with such long cracks that they resembled secret maps. Catching his breath and nursing his scratched arms, Shane gazed in through the windows at the basement where his grandfather had worked as a boy. It looked forboding in the twilight. The Rock Road was only a hundred yards away, but as Shane looked back up at the tangle of bushes they had pushed their way through, it felt as if they had entered a timeless place.

  Then, through the silence, he heard a sound that chilled him: a distant drip, as if a falling droplet of water had rippled a still surface. He looked at Geraldine, but she seemed to hear nothing. If Shane was alone he might have turned back. But he wasn’t going to let Geraldine away with calling him a wimp. Geraldine looked scared too, but she was equally determined not to be the one who backed down. Gazing into this dark kitchen unnerved her, however, and she knew that unless she acted immediately she would be too paralysed with terror to continue.

  ‘Lift me up,’ Geraldine whispered, pointing to a small window that was slightly ajar. ‘I bet I can squeeze through.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to?’ Shane asked.

  ‘You’re an awful scaredy-cat, do you know that?’

  Shane bent down to lift her up. Inch by inch, the iron frame opened, with her fingers turning brown from the stardust of rust. There was a cloying stench of stale air when she put her head through the window. Geraldine was halfway inside now. She felt a sudden terror that if she fell forward and sprained her ankle, she might not be able to get back out. She wanted to tell Shane to lift her down, but when she turned her head to speak she was overcome by a sensation of being swept forward against her will by an invisible torrent of water. She put her arms out in fright and lost her balance, falling through the window and landing on the kitchen floor. It was bone dry and the sensation of drowning was gone. But she felt so breathless that she could not answer Shane’s frantic calls. He immediately scrambled his way in through the window, concerned only for Geraldine. He cut his elbow on the frame, and she heard him wince as he landed beside her.

  ‘Are you OK, Shane?’

  ‘Never mind me – what happened to you?’

  They could barely see each other in the gloom. Any light entering the kitchen was tinged in green because of the tangled vegetation growing against the window. Shane switched on his torch, startling her with its strong beam. She had wanted Shane to enter this house with her as a test of his courage, but just now she longed to be back home. The torch beam picked out a small door at the far end of the kitchen. Shane rose to open it and shine his torch into a narrow passageway that sloped sharply down towards what looked like an empty cellar. Again he heard the drip of a solitary drop of water, the sound amplified by the narrow walls. The coldness of that passageway scared him. He slammed the door shut. Geraldine gasped as the noise echoed through the basement. ‘Do you think anyone heard?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he whispered. Both of them had the sense that they were not alone here, but did not wish to scare the other by talking of ghosts. ‘Drug dealers could be using this place as a base,’ he added, not believing this himself but needing to find some concrete reason to explain his sense of fear of being overheard. ‘We’d better keep our voices down.’

  He switched off the torch and Geraldine gripped his hand because the kitchen seemed so much darker without it. Both of them glanced back at the window. They were scared but neither wanted to climb back through the window just yet. Reluctantly, they left the kitchen and entered a corridor paved with large flagstones. A mouse scurried past and Geraldine suppressed a scream. She wondered what other creatures had made their homes in these rooms. Shane switched back on his torch, covering the beam with his fingers so that only thin shafts of light filtered through. It was enough for them to see that there were no stolen goods or stashed drugs in this corridor; no cigarette butts or dusty footprints or other clues that criminals were meant to leave behind. The only sign of life came from huge spiders in the thick cobwebs that brushed against their heads, leaving Geraldine terrified that a spider might get tangled up in her hair.

  They reached the start of a flight of stairs leading up to the main hallway. Both felt less scared now and became convinced that Simon Wallace was lying, because it seemed obvious that nobody had entered this house in years. Still, the further they explored, the further they were going away from the small window that was their only escape route.

  ‘My grandad once worked here,’ Shane told Geraldine quietly. ‘This is where he met his wife-to-be when they were our age.’

  ‘You’re making that up.’

  ‘No, it’s true. He once told me that they had their first kiss sitting at the top of these stairs.’

  Shane had invented the last bit, but Geraldine looked at him strangely and then walked up into the darkness to sit on the top step and stare back down at him. He knew that she was waiting for him to follow and realised that she had been waiting for weeks for him to kiss her. He walked slowly up each step, trying to look cool but knowing that he was failing miserably. When he reached her, she made space on the top step. They both peered around at the hallway, lit by a dim gleam of light through the fanlight above the locked front door. A dilapidated staircase led to the bedrooms on the first floor. Shane shivered – not just from the cold and dark, but also because of the odd sensation that he had been here before in a dream. Geraldine was smiling at him.

  ‘Maybe you’re not such a wimp after all,’ she said.

  ‘We can say that the first and last case in our investigation agency is solved and officially closed.’

  ‘It’s S. W. A. L. K.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Geraldine laughed. ‘Why are boys so stupid? You don’t know anything. It means “Sealed With A Loving Kiss”.’

  Geraldine stopped laughing then because her eyes were serious. She and Shane had earned this moment. Maybe they had not explored the entire house, but they had proved themselves far braver than Simon Wallace. They could enjoy their first kiss and maybe their second and third, and after they were finished could walk hand in hand back down to the kitchen and leave, laughing as they raced down the Rock Road like a real couple at last. Shane leaned forward and just as their lips were about to touch they heard it: a faint crackling hiss of jazz coming from somewhere inside the house.

  The music dissolved into a quiet babble of static, as if someone was search
ing for a clearer radio signal. Then the tune resumed, clearer now – with a haunting clarinet. All thoughts of kissing were abandoned. They longed to flee, but Shane seemed hypnotised by that music. It made no sense, but he had the notion that if he opened a door he might glimpse the young ghosts of his grandparents dancing slowly to the tune.

  Geraldine hissed at him to come back but he ignored her as he crept across the bare floorboards in the hallway. Rather then be left alone, she followed him past the main staircase and down a side passageway towards where a door was open just a crack. Light came from within this room, so faint that they had not seen it previously. Someone was in there.

  Shane stopped in the doorway, mesmerised by the light and the music. Geraldine joined him and they peered through a tiny gap in the open doorway. The room contained no stash of stolen banknotes or slabs of heroin, just an old man hunched over an ancient radio. The flames from two candles wedged into bottles were so faint that no trace of light filtered through the tattered blankets that he had placed across the window so as not to betray his presence to the outside world. They stared in at his few possessions: a small pile of books, a tiny gas stove and a saucepan, a sleeping bag on an old mattress, two jars of pills, a battered armchair, a half-finished loaf of bread, a coffee jar and a few cracked plates and cups.

  The old man had his back to them, trying to get the radio signal as clear as possible. Then he stood up and, throwing back his head, began to dance, almost as if in slow motion. He laughed as he twirled round. For a minute his ancient limbs seemed to defy time and almost defy gravity. Then he stumbled and fell backwards, startling Shane and Geraldine who were too scared to move. From the way that he landed, utterly still with his head thrown back and his eyes closed, they could not tell if he was alive or dead.

  FOURTEEN

  Joey

  November 2009

  After we left Mrs Higgins’s house, Shane and I got a 46A bus into Dublin. Because my phone battery was dead, I was unable to call Mum about my change of plans and I had felt shy about asking Mrs Higgins for permission to use her phone. Shane was the only student I knew who refused to carry a mobile. By the time we reached O’Connell Street, the main shops were closed, with only amusement arcades and fast food restaurants open. You needed to mind yourself at this hour. Rooting in your pockets for change or simply looking lost could lead to an unprovoked attack.

  A gang was gathered under the portico of the General Post Office. They ranged in age from twelve to eighteen and all looked foreign: African, Asian and Eastern European. They stopped talking to watch us approach. My survival skills had taught me to avoid eye contact in these situations, to make myself as invisible as possible. I didn’t like their menacing silence, but if we could just manage to walk another few feet beyond them, the danger point would be passed.

  However, as we reached them, Shane deliberately shouldered the tallest black youth, knocking him back into the others. The youth angrily straightened up and pushed Shane. Suddenly we were surrounded by a mêlée of foreign faces. Yet I might not have existed. Their focus was exclusively on Shane. He kept shoving people aggressively. His movements, his attitude, his half-mumbled jibes to insult them reminded me of a gangsta rapper. The youths responded with equal aggression: there was a tense vibe in the air. Passers-by gave us a wide berth, anxious to avoid getting caught up in what seemed like an ugly row. Shane used his elbows to clear enough space to raise his fists in a boxing stance. Crouching, he said something in a foreign tongue that caused the muscular youth towering over him to throw back his head and laugh. This started off the others laughing too, and amidst their shared hilarity I suddenly saw them differently – not as a dangerous gang, but a group of pals play-acting, squaring up to each other in jest. Shane put his arm around my shoulders.

  ‘This, gentlemen, is my mate Joey Kilmichael, songwriter and guitarist extraordinaire. Joey, meet the guys.’

  I shook hands as Shane introduced them. But it was impossible to keep track of their names or their country of origin. At first I thought they had nothing in common, but after a while I realised that they were linked by the fact of no longer possessing any family. They were child refugees who had reached Ireland alone. At some stage, parents in Zaire or Somalia had realised that, while their entire family had little chance of asylum, no Western government could turn its back on a solitary child washed up on their shores. All seemed to have reached Ireland by sea. Some remembered their parents paying couriers who locked them into dark containers loaded into the hold of ships and others claimed to remember nothing, perhaps because their parents had warned them that the safest way to survive was to forget, that if you had no identity there was nowhere to which you could be sent back.

  The Irish government made sure that they were fed and clothed, had schools to attend and a room in a hostel. But there was a difference between a room and a home, which was why they sought each other out at night. I realised, too, why Shane looked so relaxed among them. Of course he was no refugee and would collect an inheritance on his twenty-first birthday. But, like them, if he woke from a nightmare at night there was no one to whom he could turn for comfort.

  As we walked down Henry Street I felt out of my depth. Some lads spoke good English, but others knew only a few words or had accents that I could not make out. Bouncers outside amusement arcades eyed us warily. We reached the huge cinema complex on Parnell Street, its steps thronged with cinema-goers. Few of us had the price of a cinema ticket and, even if we had, I suspected that we could never have agreed on one choice.

  The youngest boy, Niyi, sat on the steps and silently listened to music on his MP3 player while the others stood talking in a babble of tongues. He was with the group yet seemed utterly apart in his private world. I sat beside him because I also felt lost. Niyi ignored me at first, then removed the tiny earphones and silently handed me one earpiece. He replaced the other one in his own ear. I followed suit so that we could share the rap music blasting out at full volume.

  A security guard emerged from the plate glass doors to move us along. The others reluctantly moved off, shouting back at the guard. Niyi rose and I rose too. Our heads close together, our fingers keeping the earphones in place, we followed the group onto Capel Street. The song ended and the boy removed his earphone. I did likewise and handed mine back to him. He accepted it silently, making no attempt to catch up with the others. Music blasted from a pub on a corner, where girls queued to get past the bouncers. My mother would be worried that I was not home by now. Down a side street I could see a music shop with an expensive-looking blue guitar occupying pride of place in the window. I wanted to pause and admire it, but Niyi had already moved on, anxious to keep the others in sight. I caught up with him and he broke his silence.

  ‘So, he found you too.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Shane.’

  ‘What do you mean by found?’ I asked.

  ‘Before he finds me I never go out after dark. Too scared. I know no one and it is always cold here. Even Irish people are cold behind their smiles. My mother warned me; be careful.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of everything.’

  ‘Where is your mother now?’

  He looked at me with sudden hostility. ‘You a policeman?’

  ‘No. I was just asking.’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  We walked on in silence then, because I didn’t know what to say. Ahead of us, the other lads were shouldering each other and scrambling to kick an empty can. Shane was laughing in their midst. I had never before considered what it must be like to feel buried alive in a sealed container in the dark hold of a ship, never certain if you would see daylight again and then to emerge halfway across the world, knowing absolutely no one. I had read reports of such voyages in newspapers, but something about Niyi’s manner told me that I had yet to earn the right to ask him what his own journey in Ireland had been like.

  ‘Sorry for the stupid questions,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘You O
K.’

  ‘How do you know Shane?’

  ‘He knocks at my door in Dún Laoghaire one night. I am lying on bed listening to music. Nobody ever knocks on my door so I ignore him, but he refuse to go away until I answer. Shane is standing there, grinning. “Come on out,” he says, “you can’t stay in every night.” “Who the hell you be?” I ask. “What the hell you want? Where the hell you come from?” He just keeps smiling, saying, “Let’s go, let’s smell the sea air.” At first he scare me – I think he want something, you know – but he just good guy. Bit crazy, but good. Through him I meet the other guys.’

  ‘Are they good guys?’

  ‘They OK. They give me something to do at night so I no longer feel always alone. But I never know how Shane knocks at my door. The only other people who knock are social workers, always asking questions.’

  The others had reached the quays and were waiting to cross onto Capel Street Bridge. Good-natured taunts were being exchanged with three teenage girls beside them, dolled up for a night out in impossibly short black cocktail dresses. Traffic was heavy. If the lights changed, the others would get across the bridge before us and we might lose them.

  ‘Do you want to catch up with your friends?’ I asked.