‘Don’t you tell me how I can or cannot punish my own son!’
‘Punish him for what? He’s been two years down in that blasted shed. If his poor mother was alive…’
The voices were so loud I thought they were in the garden. But when I checked through the chicken wire I could see Mr Casey in the dining-room window, with my father looking like he was only moments away from coming to blows with him.
‘It’s no concern of yours, Seamus.’
‘It’s a scandal to the whole bloody town.’
‘There’s never been cause of scandal in this house.’ Phyllis’s voice entered the fray, suddenly enraged. ‘Just work for idle tongues in this God-forsaken town.’
The more they argued, the more frightened of retribution I became. I looked up to see that their voices had woken Cormac. He entered the back bedroom and sleepily looked out of the window. By this time I didn’t begrudge him owning my old bedroom. He looked perfect in that light, gazing down towards the shed, with his patterned pyjamas and combed hair. I was sure he couldn’t see me in the dark but he began to wave and kept waving. We never really spoke now. Phyllis discouraged contact at home and at school we had nothing left to say to each other. The adult voices threw accusations at each other. Cormac stayed at the window until I forced my hand through a gap in the chicken wire, scraping my flesh as I managed to wave back to him. Then he smiled and was gone. When the voices stopped I lay awake for hours, with the memory of Cormac’s body framed in the window keeping me warm as I waited for vengeful footsteps that never came.
It was half-nine before Ebun stirred. Niyi had made coffee and quietly left a mug on the floor beside me, before relaxing his vigilance long enough to disappear down the corridor to the bathroom. That was when I became aware of Ebun languidly watching me slip into my jeans. I hurriedly did up the zip.
‘You slept well,’ I remarked.
Ebun curled her body back up into a ball, lifting her head slightly off the pillow. ‘Where do you go now, Irishman?’
‘I have business in Dublin.’
‘Have you?’ It was hard to tell how serious her expression was, but I found myself loving the way her eyes watched me. ‘I think you are a criminal, a crook.’
‘Crooks generally find better accommodation than this.’
‘Do they? Are you married?’
‘Are you?’
She turned her head as Niyi returned. ‘I think he is a gangster, like the men who smuggled us onto their truck in Spain. He has their look. I think we are lucky not to be killed in our beds.’
The man admonished her in their own language, glancing uneasily across, but Ebun simply laughed and turned back to me. ‘I don’t really think you are much of a crook, Irishman. I should know, after the people we have had to deal with.’
‘This is stupid talk,’ Niyi butted in.
‘I enjoy a joke,’ I told him.
Ebun stopped smiling and regarded me caustically. ‘I wish to dress. It is time you left.’
I stood up to pull on my shirt, thrown by her curt tone. When I arrived in Ireland yesterday I had been nobody, a ghost, ready to do what had to be done and disappear again without trace. The last thing I needed was attachments, but I found myself lingering in the doorway, not wanting to leave just yet. ‘Thanks for taking me in.’
‘Forgive us for not being used to your customs,’ she replied. ‘We didn’t make you queue.’
Niyi muttered something sharply, caught between embarrassment and relief that I was going.
‘She means no harm,’ he said in English. ‘But in Nigeria I did not live this way. I had a good job in my village, yet here I must queue with gypsies.’
‘They have the same rights as us Yorubas,’ Ebun contradicted him from the bed. ‘None.’
Niyi accompanied me out onto the landing and had already started down the stairs when I glanced back. Ebun’s expression was different in his absence as she quietly called out, ‘E sheé. Thank you for last night. Call again, Irishman.’
Her words caught me off guard. I was unable to disguise my look of pleasure from Niyi who escorted me down to the front door.
‘Thank you again. Ò dábò.’ He shook my hand formally, as if entreating me to ignore Ebun’s invitation and regard our encounter as finished. He watched from the doorway until I reached the corner into Dorset Street.
There were more cars heading into town at this early hour than I remembered. Walton’s music shop still stood on North Frederick Street, but the shabby cafe on the corner was gone, with workmen even on a Sunday morning swarming over steel girders to erect new apartments there. The bustle of O’Connell Street felt disturbing for 10 a.m. Tourists moved about even in late autumn and there was a striking preponderance of black faces compared to ten years ago, although one could still spot the standard fleet of Sunday fathers queuing at bus stops. I would probably be among them if I had stayed, although, approaching seventeen, Conor would be too old for weekly treats now, more concerned about having his weekends to himself.
Those separated fathers on route to exercise their visiting rights were a standard feature of the streetscape in every city I had lived in over the past decade. Too neatly dressed for a casual Sunday morning as they felt themselves to be on weekly inspection. Their limbo in Ireland would have been especially grim, with divorce only just now coming into law. Existing in bedsits on the edge of town with most of their wages still paying the mortgage of the family home, arriving there each weekend at the appointed hour to walk a tightrope between being accused of spoiling the children or neglecting them. Living out fraught hours in the bright desolation of McDonald’s or pacing the zoo while the clock ticked away their allotted time.
I knew that I could never have coped with such rationed-out fatherhood. It was all or nothing for me and the only gifts that my gambling could have brought Conor were disgrace, eviction and penury. My feelings for the boy had grown more intense as my love affair with Miriam died. Died isn’t the right word. Our marriage suffocated instead inside successive rings of guilt and failure, disappointments and petty recrimination. The pale sprig of first love remained buried at the gnarled core of that tree, but it was only after the axe struck it that I glimpsed the delicate lush bud again when it was too late. One final gamble, a lunatic moment of temptation had cast me adrift from them like a sepal.
Ten years ago when I flew out to visit Cormac in Scotland there was graffiti scrawled in the toilet in Dublin airport: Would the last person emigrating please turn out all the lights. Half the passengers on that flight were emigrants, fleeing from a clapped-out economy. I had been on protective notice for two months already at that stage, knowing that soon I would receive the minimum statutory redundancy from the Japanese company I worked for in Tallaght who insisted on blaring their bizarre company anthem every morning. Together our workers lighten up the world…
The world needed serious lightening up back then, with life conspiring to make us bitter before our time. Mortgage rates spiralled out of control and the Government cutbacks were so severe that Miriam’s mother died in lingering agony on a trolley in a hospital corridor with barely enough nurses, never mind the miracle of a bed. Miriam didn’t know that it was only a matter of time before we would be forced to sell our house or see it repossessed because of my gambling. There were many things Miriam didn’t know back then, so much she should not have trusted me to do.
At seven Conor knew more than her, or at least saw more of my other world. The places where us men went, places men didn’t mention to Mammy, even if she dealt with them in her work. Our male secret. Bribed with crisps to sit still while I screamed inwardly as my hopes faded yet again in the four-forty race at Doncaster, Warwick or Kempton. ‘What’s wrong, Daddy? Why is your face like that?’ ‘Eat your crisps, son, there’s nothing wrong.’ Nothing’s wrong except that half of my wages had just followed the other half down a black hole. Nothing’s wrong except that I kept chasing a mirage where more banknotes than I could ever count were pushed
through a grille at me, where Conor had every toy he ever wanted, Miriam would smile again and the shabby punters in the pox-ridden betting shop would finally look at me with the respect that I craved from them.
No seven-year-old should have to carry secrets, be made to wait outside doorways when a bookie enforced the no-children rule, see his Daddy bang his fists against the window of a television shop while his horse lost on eleven different screens inside. I lacked the vocabulary to be a good father, gave too little or too much of myself. I simply wanted to make people happy and be respected. I hoarded gadgets, any possession that might confer status. I loved Miriam because she could simply be herself and I wanted Conor to be every single thing that I could never be.
Possibly Miriam and I could have turned our marriage around if I had been honest to her about my addiction. Perhaps we would now radiate the same self-satisfied affluence as that Dublin family yesterday on the stairwell of Lisa Hanlon’s house. I might even have been around to disturb the intruders at my father’s house, with him still alive and all of us reconciled. Father, son and grandson. The pair of us taking Conor fishing on the Boyne, watching him walk ahead with the rods while my father put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You know I’m sorry for everything I did, son.’ ‘That’s in the past, Dad, let’s enjoy our time now.’
How often in dreams had I heard those words spoken, savouring the relief on his lined face, our silence as we walked companionably on? The sense of healing was invariably replaced by anger when I woke. The only skills my father taught me were how to keep secrets and abandon a son. There was never a moment of apology or acknowledgement of having done wrong. Nothing to release that burden of anger as I paced the streets of those foreign towns where I found work as a barman or a teacher of English, an object of mistrust like all solitary men.
In the early years I sometimes convinced myself that a passing child was Conor, even though I knew he was older by then. The pain of separation and guilt never eased, drinking beer beside the river in Antwerp or climbing the steep hill at Bom Jesus in Braga to stare down over that Portuguese town. It was always on Sundays that my resolve broke and several times I had phoned our old number in Ireland, hoping that just for once Conor, and not his mother, would puzzle at the silence on the line. But on the fifth such call a recorded message informed me that the number was no longer in service. I had panicked upon hearing the message, smashing the receiver against the callbox wall and feeling that the final, slender umbilical cord was snapped. I didn’t sleep for days, unsure if Miriam and Conor had moved house with my insurance payout or if there had been an accident. Miriam could have been dead or remarried or they might have moved abroad. Yet deep down I knew she had simply grown tired of mysterious six-monthly calls. She was not a woman for secrets or intrigues, which was why she should never have married me.
I crossed the Liffey by a new bridge now and found myself wandering through Temple Bar, a mishmash of designer buildings that looked like King Kong had wrenched them up from different cities and randomly plonked them down among the maze of narrow streets there. I bought an Irish Sunday paper and sat among the tourists on the steps of a desolate new square. The inside pages were filled with rumours of the Government being about to topple because of revelations at the planning and payments to politicians tribunals, along with reports of split communities and resistance committees being formed in isolated villages that found themselves earmarked to cater for refugees.
I stared at the small farmers and shopkeepers in one photograph, picketing the sole hotel in their village which had been block-booked by the Government who planned to squeeze thirty-nine asylum-seekers from Somalia, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia into its eleven bedrooms. Racists, the headline by some Dublin journalist screamed, but their faces might have belonged to my old neighbours in Navan, bewildered and scared by the speed at which the outside world had finally caught up with them. The village had a population of two hundred and forty, with no playground or amenities and a bus into the nearest town just once a day. A report of the public meeting was stormy, with many welcoming voices being shouted down by fearful ones. ‘You’ll kill this village,’ one protester had shouted. ‘What do we have except tourism and without a hotel what American tour coach will ever stop here again?’
This confused reaction was exemplified in the picture of a second picket further down the page. This showed local people in Tramore protesting against attempts to deport a refugee and her children who had actually spent the past year in their midst.
There were no naked quotes from the South Dublin Middle Classes. A discreet paragraph outlined their method of dealing with the situation. There were no pickets here, just a High Court injunction by residents against a refugee reception centre being located in their area, with their spokesman dismissing any notion that racism was involved in what he claimed was purely a planning-permission matter.
Two Eastern European women in head-dresses sat on the step beside me, dividing out a meagre meal between their children. I closed the paper and, leaving it behind me, located a cyber cafe down a cobbled sidestreet which was empty at that hour.
My new Hotmail account had no messages, but there again whenever I left a city I was careful to leave no trace behind. I got Pete Clancy’s e-mail address from the leaflet in my pocket, sipped my coffee and began to type:
Dear Mr Clancy,
‘Help me to help you’, you say. Maybe we can help each other. Your problem in the next election could be how to know you have reached the quota if you’re not sure that you have all the magic numbers. Your father once joked that death should not get in the way of people voting. It need not get in the way of the recently deceased talking either.
Fond memories,
[email protected]
I stared at the message for twenty minutes before clicking ‘send’. It was a hook but also a gamble, pretending to know more than I did. What would Clancy make of it – a local crank, a probing journalist shooting in the dark, a canvasser for another party trying to snare him? Some party hack might check on the messages for him, scratch his head and just delete it. But I figured that the odds were two-to-one on Clancy himself reading it and five-to-two that the word ‘Shyroyal’ might capture his attention.
I had only heard it once in childhood, when Barney Clancy turned up in a gleaming suit, slapped his braces and joked to my father: ‘This is my Shyroyal outfit. Sure isn’t Meath the Royal County and don’t I look shy and retiring?’ Something about his laugh made me glance at him as I came up the path, after running a message for Phyllis, and something in my father’s eyes made me look away, knowing it had a buried meaning not meant for the likes of me.
By the age of twelve I had learnt to pick the lock on the filing cabinet, opening the drawers gingerly at night, uncertain of what I hoped to find there. Secrets that would make me feel special, photos of my mother or some other token to break the loneliness. The letterheads were torn off the sheaf of paper in the top drawer but, even at that age, I recognized them as bank statements for something called Shyroyal Holdings Ltd, with an address on an island I had never heard of. The rows of figures meant nothing to me, but I could read the scrap of writing on the cigarette packet stapled to them: Keep safe until I ask for them. It was unsigned, but I would have recognized Barney Clancy’s handwriting anywhere.
Not that I had considered the statements as suspicious back then. Funds were constantly being raised for the party on the chicken-and-chips circuit or by good men like Jimmy Mahon at church-gate collections. This seemed just another component of the adult world where important people were making things happen for the town. If I hadn’t previously overheard Barney Clancy’s joke to my father the Shyroyal name would not even have registered. Indeed, at the time I just felt disappointment that nothing belonging to my mother was actually concealed in the drawers.
Even today I couldn’t be certain if my suspicions were correct or the product of a need for revenge. I could barely even recognize the country outside the cyber cafe win
dow and felt doubly a foreigner for half-knowing everything. I found myself thinking of Ebun again, how she had looked calling out from her bed this morning and how Niyi too had looked, staring back at us both.
The cafe was starting to fill up. I finished my coffee, collected my bags from the bus station, found a hardware shop open on a Sunday where I could purchase a crowbar and booked myself into an anonymous new hotel on the edge of Temple Bar. It was important that I shaved at least once a day to ensure that black stubble didn’t clash with my hair. Lying on the bed afterwards, I repeated the name Brendan out loud, as if trying to step back inside it. I remembered how Miriam and Cormac used to say it, the way Phyllis had twisted the vowels, and tried to imagine Ebun pronouncing it. But each time it sounded like a phrase from a dead tongue last spoken on some island where the only sound left was rain beating on bare rafters and collapsed gable ends.
During the first fortnight after the train crash a sensation of invisibility swamped me. All bets were suddenly off, because not even bookies could collect debts from a dead man. Our endowment policy ensured that once my death was confirmed, the house belonged to Miriam with the outstanding balance of the mortgage written off. A company scheme in work meant that, because I died while still employed by them, my Japanese masters would have to grudgingly cough up a small fortune. That was before taking my own life assurance policy into account, not to mention the discussion in the newspapers that I carefully read every day about a compensation fund for victims. My name was there among the list of the missing. There was even security footage of me splashing out on a first-class ticket at the booth ten minutes before the train left Perth. Death had finally given Brendan Brogan some cherished status. He was virtually a celebrity, but he wasn’t me any more.
The Valparaiso Voyage Page 7