New Town Soul

by Dermot Bolger

  Again, it felt like a test, and again, I did as instructed because at that moment nothing felt real. It didn’t feel like me reaching in through that window, or at least like any version of me I had previously known. It was like a glimpse into another world without rules. The alarm set off by the smashed window was ear-shatteringly loud. Outside the pub on the corner of Capel Street, the bouncers were speaking into walkie-talkies. At any moment the police could arrive. I knew that what we were doing was totally wrong, yet I let myself get carried along by Shane’s madness. I threw the guitar into the back seat and barely managed to climb back into the car before Shane sped off with my door only half closed. A truck was approaching. We were directly in its path and seemed bound to crash but at the last second Shane turned up a pedestrianised street. He made an illegal left turn so that we were driving back up towards the cinema complex on Parnell Street. It was only half an hour since I had sat on the steps there with Niyi, but it felt like an age ago. During that time a girl had died, a car had been hot-wired, a shop window rammed, a guitar stolen. Yet I couldn’t stop laughing, because Shane was laughing too. He swung right at the cinema and up Parnell Street, with both of us punching the roof and Shane shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Spur up the horses. Make haste to the Eagle Tavern and the Hellfire Club! This is what it feels like to truly be alive!’

  ‘To the Eagle Tavern!’ I shouted back, and then the exhilaration left me as I realised the consequences of what we had just done. I wanted to ask him where the hell the Eagle Tavern was, but I said nothing because I felt sick and tricked by Shane. Most of all, I felt scared. I looked across at him, wondering how this could be the same boy who had helped me to study history in his room just a few hours ago. The boy who had actually looked too scared to enter the ruins of the Hellfire Club on our school retreat. What if he killed someone at this speed? I was out of my depth here, and had no idea where we were going. No wonder Geraldine had tried to warn me about him. Shane seemed to be in a world of his own as he navigated a maze of streets that brought us further and further into the north side. I knew the north side of Dublin – I just didn’t know it personally. I was no snob. I knew its reputation was probably undeserved, but crashing a stolen car at midnight down some street off the North Strand certainly wasn’t the best way to get acquainted with it.

  ‘Stop the car,’ I demanded. ‘Shane, stop the damn car.’

  He glanced across at me and smiled. ‘I don’t know what you’re worried about, we can’t go much further. This heap of junk is nearly out of petrol.’

  ‘I want to go home, Shane.’

  ‘Sometimes you need to leave home to find out who you really are. Now just sit tight till I park this yoke where nobody will find it until morning. And fasten your seat belt. I can’t always be minding you.’

  We passed some blocks of flats and old red brick terraces. There was a large park to our right and a railway bridge ahead of us. After that, we were out onto the coast road at what I reckoned was Clontarf. Traffic was light, and there was nobody about except the odd person walking their dog. I could see across the water to the Poolbeg lights and then my view was interrupted by the shape of an island close to the shore.

  It was Bull Island, a nature sanctuary formed by the slow build-up of sediment against the harbour wall. A wooden bridge led out to that wilderness. We were almost past the bridge when Shane swung onto it and accelerated, speeding across the narrow planks. The tide was out, with a thick expanse of mud on either side of us. Nobody lived on this wilderness of sand dunes, with meandering paths through its wild grass. Shane was pushing the engine to its limit, the car bouncing on the old planks. If we met a vehicle coming the other way we would not be able to stop. Maybe Shane didn’t want to stop. Maybe he intended to kill us both out here in the darkness, away from the necklace of lights on the Clontarf Road that were growing ever more distant in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘For God’s sake, slow down,’ I shouted.

  Shane chuckled. ‘I am more acquainted with the devil, but for your sake I’ll stop. Now hold tight!’

  We were now approaching the old concrete pier that stretched out into Dublin Bay. For a moment I thought that Shane planned to keep going across those rough stones, but then he turned violently left so that the car shot down a slope and we were driving on sand. The wheels sank down and got stuck and the car swung around. We came to a sudden halt, facing back the way that we had come. It took only a few seconds for the car to stop, but those seconds seemed to stretch into an eternity as I thought of the crash in which my father had died. I tried to catch my breath, unsure of whether I wanted to assault Shane or open the car door and run for my life. But when I looked across at Shane, he was laughing.

  ‘That’s what I call being alive,’ he said. ‘Can you feel the buzz? Can you feel it in your veins?’

  ‘We could have been killed, you moron.’

  ‘Stick with me, kid, and you’ll never die.’ Shane opened the driver’s door. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just follow me, all right? A bit of trust wouldn’t go astray here.’

  ‘You’re insane, Shane; do you know that?’

  ‘Grab that guitar. We went to enough trouble stealing it. Now come on, there’s a view I want to show you.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Thomas

  August 1932

  Thomas McCormack reaches across to raise the volume of the jazz music and stares into Jack O’Driscoll’s young face. ‘Sweep Molly up in your arms while you have the chance,’ he says, ‘Let’s risk another spin around the floor before my mother comes back.’

  He watches the servant boy whirl the teenage maid across the room with vibrant, laughing steps. Molly and Jack are making up the dance as they go along, thrilled to be holding each other, thrilled at the illicit feel of dancing when they are meant to be scrubbing and slaving for their fearsome employer. But every corner of this house already gleams so much, the lace curtains brilliantly white, the rooms so spick and span that Thomas doesn’t know what is left for the servants to clean. However his mother rules the family home with such an iron fist that fourteen-yearold Thomas keeps a careful watch at the window for her return from the Blueshirts rally in Blackrock Town Hall.

  His mother doesn’t know that he possesses this sinful jazz record. He acquired it yesterday on his visit to old Dr Thomson, where he had lovingly examined all the foreign place names printed in gold leaf on the doctor’s radiogram. The doctor had surprised the boy by placing this jazz record on his gramophone. Thomas had been unsure whether to listen because the priests in his school regularly denounced jazz as the devil’s music. But the doctor had only laughed when Thomas said this and talked instead about changelings and Russian dolls and dangers to the soul, stuff that Thomas had not been able to follow.

  The lure of the jazz record had proven hard to resist, because ever since his mother left the house today Thomas has been taking turns with Jack O’Driscoll to dance with the kitchen maid.

  The record ends again and Jack steps away from Molly with a mock bow. He turns to Thomas. ‘We may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb,’ he says. ‘Have one last dance; I’ll keep watch.’ Molly is laughing, her face flushed with excitement as Thomas links his hands with hers and the music starts again.

  ‘I could dance forever to this,’ she says. ‘I’d happily still be dancing here in this room in seventy years’ time.’

  Thomas swirls her around, knowing that he is not half as good a dancer as Jack O’Driscoll. Being servants, Jack and Molly are his social inferiors, but Thomas feels closer to them than he feels to his two older brothers. His eldest brother, Frank, has a confident adult stride as he patrols the yard each morning. Frank is the master-in-waiting who will inherit this house. The middle brother, Pete, is a harder worker, but – being a year younger than Frank – will forever be condemned to work for his elder sibling, trapped in the limbo of being neither a servant nor a man of property.

  But it is their moth
er who dominates the dairy, and everyone was expected to know their place. Thomas’s place is not to be dancing with servants but on his knees praying. He was four years old when his father’s body was washed up on the shoreline – an incurable alcoholic said to have lost his footing when stumbling home drunk. Some neighbours darkly whispered about suicide, because he was mocked in the taverns of Blackrock and Kingstown for letting his wife wear the trousers. But at his funeral, the priest had predicted that his youngest son would be ordained and bring new souls to God in the foreign missions. His mother had clung onto this notion ever since, knowing that Thomas’s vocation would banish any scandal about his father’s death and bring the family great respectability and status in the neighbourhood.

  Thomas twirls Molly around the room now. He loves the feel of her in his arms, but what is the point of liking a girl when everyone knows that he is destined to be a priest? Besides, it is obvious that Molly only has eyes for Jack.

  ‘Is there any sign of the mistress?’ Molly calls out to Jack and then whispers to Thomas, ‘No offence, but your mother is the scariest person in the world.’

  ‘I know someone scarier.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Old Joseph, who works for the nuns in Sion Hill.’ Molly shivers in his arms at the thought of the hunchback who arrives at the dairy every morning to collect milk for the convent in a donkey-cart. Joseph has slaved for the nuns for longer than anyone can remember, doing odd jobs and running their piggery. Jack laughs at the window.

  ‘Old Joseph is harmless,’ Jack says, ‘he’s just astray in the head.’

  Thomas knows that the crippled mute is what his mother calls ‘an incurable idiot’. But every morning when Joseph enters the yard, Thomas can sense the man staring fiercely at him, his mouth agape as if awaiting the right moment to break a lifelong silence. That stare always unnerves the boy, as though Joseph is the one person who can see into his soul and is silently saying, you’re no priest, you’re a heathen who longs to travel the world.

  ‘He gives me the creeps,’ Molly says. ‘I’d hate to be alone with him.’

  ‘Sure, he wouldn’t have the wits to harm a fly,’ Jack says again.

  ‘Well, he gives me the creeps too,’ Thomas replies, glad to take Molly’s side. ‘I often think he’s spying on me when I’m out for a stroll. All of a slap I feel goose pimples down my back as if unseen eyes are watching me.’

  ‘That would be your mother wondering why you’re not working,’ Molly teases him.

  ‘Did I tell you about last week?’ Thomas holds Molly as close as he dares in his arms. ‘Jack and I were off lying in the sun, having a smoke by the train tracks on Booterstown Marsh. We were messing about with a knife and we said we’d become blood brothers. Jack had nicked his palm and I was about to do the same when Joseph came charging out from the reeds, grunting like a madman and scattering us with a hail of stones.’

  ‘Maybe he was jealous,’ Molly says, ‘maybe he wants to be your blood brother. I mean, you and Jack both look an awful lot like him.’

  She is teasing them both but Thomas can see that her eyes are really on Jack O’Driscoll, who shakes a fist at her in mock anger.

  ‘You mind your tongue, or we may tie you up and dump you in his piggery,’ Jack says. ‘Joseph loves those pigs. If a pig is sick he’ll sit up all night nursing it. The only thing he loves more than nursing them is slitting their throats when the time comes with his black-handled knife.’ Jack runs a finger across his own throat and then steps back from the window in alarm. ‘Look out, here’s the missus striding up the avenue.’

  There is a great scattering. Molly and Jack run for the back stairs that lead to the kitchen and Thomas snatches up the jazz record to hide it inside a leather-bound Lives of the Saints that he was meant to be reading. He hears his mother entering the hall, with her loud voice summoning his two brothers from the yard. He should go down to greet her; they are due to travel to Booterstown Church where he is serving as an altar boy at evening devotions. But he can still snatch ten minutes of freedom if he runs down the back stairs and slips out into the yard where the milk churns are stored.

  The yard is quiet – not like at dawn, when he is always woken by the creak of donkeys and carts, the noise of voices and hobnailed boots. He hears his brother Pete calling him from inside the house, but he ignores the shout. Instead he sprints for freedom down the dusty length of Castledawson Avenue to where it joins the Rock Road. Here, tram tracks glisten in the evening light. If he could follow the tracks they would lead him into Dublin city, with its factories and teeming slums, its bird markets and street hawkers. If he could sneak away he would watch ships being loaded on the quays by bow-legged sailors who swap stories about foreign ports while pigtailed Chinese cabin boys barely older than him spit out gobs of chewed tobacco like grown men.

  The drone of an engine disturbs his thoughts as he stares down the Rock Road. He glances up, amazed to see an aeroplane swoop over the rooftops and playing fields of Blackrock College. The plane is directly overhead, the pilot in goggles tilting his wings to look down at the boy. Thomas begins to chase after the plane which swoops across the Rock Road and over Emmet Square towards the railway line and the coast. The magic of seeing a plane makes him forget about keeping his clothes clean to serve at benediction. If the pilot made a bumpy landing by the train tracks and offered to take Thomas on a short flight, where would he wish to go? With a shock, Thomas realises that he would wish to travel as far as the plane could take him; to all the foreign cities painted in gold leaf on Dr Thomson’s radiogram; to places where nobody knew that his mother had declared he had a vocation; to places where he might see the world, not as a priest but as an adventurer.

  Thomas stops running when he reaches the coastline because the pilot has flown carelessly on, swinging out in the direction of Bull Island, which the boy can see across the bay. He is breathless, his trousers streaked with dust, his polished boots scuffed. Watching the plane become a speck, he is shocked by the vehemence of his wish. But he feels that the air is filled with voices if he could only hear them, the voices that might have whispered from Dr Thomson’s radiogram, voices of distant cities calling out to him to find the courage to leave home.

  There is a shout behind him and Jack O’Driscoll appears.

  ‘That was a close shave with your ma,’ Jack says with a grin. ‘Your brother Pete is on the warpath.’

  They walk back companionably towards Castledawson Avenue. But Thomas tries not to look over-familiar with the servant when he spies Pete waiting for him.

  ‘Are you deaf, Thomas? Where were you dashing like a Zulu?’

  Thomas glances back across the Rock Road, imagining the aeroplane wheeling over the sand dunes of Bull Island – that wilderness which his mother has promised he will be allowed to explore on some Sunday excursion by horse and trap, a mysterious heaven of oystercatchers and pale-bellied Brent geese to which he knows she is too practical to ever bother bringing him. He shrugs, sheepishly. ‘Sure, where have I to go to except home?’

  EIGHTEEN

  Joey

  November 2009

  Shane stepped out from the car into the darkness of Bull Island. The wind was whipping sand up onto our faces and the clouds threatened rain, but he seemed to instinctively know which path to take. I didn’t want to be left alone with that stolen car, so, awkwardly carrying the blue guitar, I tried to keep up with him, scrambling for my footing amidst the rabbit burrows and crumbling sandy tracks. We were in complete darkness, and after a few moments I lost sight of Shane and had no idea which direction to turn. Then Shane called my name, so softly that I barely heard it above the wind. I turned to see his outline standing on the crest of an enormous dune.

  His back was turned as he calmly waited for me to join him. A shaft of moonlight broke through the clouds as I struggled up to the top. The view from there was breathtaking. All of Dublin Bay stretched before us: Howth to our left with its clusters of winking lights and then, amid its dark clif
fs, a slow flash from the Baily lighthouse. But Shane’s eyes were fixed across the Bay, staring towards the Booterstown marsh, then Williamstown, and Blackrock and Seapoint and Monkstown, towards that South Dublin coastline that I thought I knew well, but that I had never seen like this before, beautiful and out of reach.

  ‘As a child I longed so much to come to Bull Island,’ Shane said, ‘but I could never persuade my mother to bring me. Sometimes you need to travel away from your home, Joey, before you can see it properly. When I want to see Blackrock in its entirety, this is where I come, because from here I can see every pinprick of light and imagine every life ever lived there and every life to come. Those are the lights your dad was rushing home to on the night he crashed, Joey. Your dad is one tiny part of Blackrock’s story, but there are thousands of others with no one left to remember them. Four hundred shipwrecked souls were washed up on that shoreline in one night, poor conscripts who lost their lives when trapped in the holds of two transport ships battered against the rocks at Black-rock House. Their bodies lie in an unmarked pit in the tiny burial ground behind the Esso garage on the Merrion Road. Two summers ago I used to sit there because I had no one to talk to. Now sometimes I sit there just so I can talk to the dead.’

  ‘Nobody can talk to the dead,’ I said.

  Shane turned to look closely at me in the moonlight. ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Because it makes no sense.’

  ‘Three girls spent hours getting ready to go out tonight, clowning around, laughing, bitching. One of them is now lying dead in a morgue. Does that make any sense? It could have been you or me, Joey.’

  ‘Killed by your crazy driving.’

  ‘No, killed by random chance, by the throw of a dice. Life is a gamble, Joey; death can come to claim us at any second. Driving across that wooden bridge, I could hear that special sound.’

  ‘What sound?’

  ‘The sound of how life is so finely balanced.’ Shane stared out at the waves, his voice barely audible. ‘I could hear our tyres bumping along the planks. I could hear the wing-beat of disturbed night birds, and rabbits bolting for cover and foxes raising their heads to listen. I knew what they were listening to because I heard that rustle too.’