The barely averted catastrophe outside Dalymount had become an adventure by the time I set her down on the steps to her house. Through the railings below Mrs Darcy appeared from the basement kitchen to ask what all the commotion was about. She was a small, rather hoarse woman with a cackling laugh to whom Miriam introduced me as her rescuer. Three hours later both were still teasing me, coining outlandish descriptions of my forcing a white steed down Connacht Street to sweep Miriam to safety. Their shrieks of laughter increased when Mrs Darcy had finally noticed Miriam’s underwear drying on a clotheshorse in the corner. She claimed that it was her own, purchased by one of her many toyboys who serenaded the house at night and with whom she would elope if she hadn’t the noose of a spinster daughter around her neck.
I had felt at ease with myself that night, which is to say that I felt myself become somebody different from anyone I’d ever been before. No longer simply Cormac’s brother in Dublin or the Hen Boy in Navan. It was only six weeks since I had walked out into the blackness of the Dublin Road, fleeing the contaminating guilt in Lisa Hanlon’s mother’s eyes. But in Miriam’s kitchen the past couldn’t touch me. The way we met was so sudden, so out of character that I had slipped free, laughing as a mortified Miriam gathered up her knickers and bras while Mrs Darcy harangued her for not having brought home some handsome Italian footballer with handmade shoes and a fat leather wallet.
‘Still, it could be worse,’ Mrs Darcy joked. ‘You could be like the poor Dublin girl who handed in a five-thousand-lire note at the bank, received back seventy-five pence in exchange and moaned, “I wouldn’t mind, only I gave him breakfast as well”.’
Miriam had walked me to the corner where there was a burnt-out pub with its roof caved in, beside a shuttered garage and a lock-up for sale. Across the road stood a line of Victorian tenements. A taxi pulled out from the all-night petrol station on Constitution Hill. A pub clock was stopped at twenty-to-six. There is no detail I cannot recall from that first night.
‘Your father, is he dead?’ I asked.
‘He got an Irish divorce – went out for a pint of milk four years ago and never came back. He’s living in Galway with some girl half his age and quarter his intelligence. They met at Knock shrine, he spent half his life praying at Knock. We’d to leave Stillorgan because he wasn’t the best at remembering to send money for the mortgage. I like it better renting here than the Southside. Bus drivers halt between stops for you and nobody would dream of paying the right fare. Mum’s back where she belongs and we’re happy.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. At least I’ll know what to expect. Men always walk away when there’s trouble.’
Miriam’s body leaned into me, forcing me back against the spiked railings. Her face was so close, eyes mischievous and then serious.
‘Are you always this slow?’
Her mouth opened, the freshness of her tongue. Putting her arms around me, drawing me closer into the possibility of being a new person in a new world. Every sensation was filled with newness. My new girlfriend, my soon-to-be wife, my future widow, the woman to whom I wanted to give so much. The woman I had so abysmally failed.
The memories were becoming too painful now as I stood in that deserted passageway in Dalymount. They were also confused because it wasn’t Miriam’s features I saw when I closed my eyes. The skin was black and foreign, but the same sense of anticipation filled me as Ebun’s almost mocking tone returned. Call again, Irishman. The last thing I needed was complications. I had to stay focused and forget Ebun and Miriam and every memory tormenting me. The meagre crowd roared as Bohs forced a corner. I took my place on the terrace to watch the fullback prepare to take it. The crowbar felt heavy inside my jacket. Four o’clock. I had another two hours to kill before burgling my father’s house in Cremore. The fullback swung the corner in. Five million wouldn’t buy him and I was one of them.
Cremore. There had always seemed to be something tranquil and cool even about the name. A tiny nest of 1930s houses dropped onto the slope of a Dublin hillside from an old English chocolate box. Sturdy trees lining grass verges, casting a soft mesh of shadows at night. The city might have sprawled out to encircle this enclave but Cremore maintained its poise and the sense of an ordered world.
At least, that was how it seemed to me just before my fourteenth birthday when my father quickly moved us here from Navan. A fresh start where old wounds and scores were meant to remain, if not forgotten, then at least unspoken. On the day we arrived I had stared out into the garden, confused by the absence of a shed to sleep in, until he beckoned me upstairs and silently pointed to the box-room. It took months to acclimatize to the feel of a house, to footsteps on the stairs and being able to use a toilet at will. Even the air seemed different, fresher than in Navan. My father had told people that he moved to give Phyllis extra space for Sarah-Jane. But it was more complex than just the baby. Because of the bush-fire of rumours circulating around Navan about Cormac and Pete Clancy, Barney Clancy had bluntly advised my father to move if he wished not only to retain their suddenly strained friendship but also his job.
I now realize that in Cremore my father would have felt detached from the pressures of his work. He could attend the feeding frenzy of County Council meetings where his task-force’s plan for controlled development was so perpetually hacked away by private members’ section four re-zoning motions – slipped in under the pre-emptive heading of ‘Matters arising’ – that the councillors rarely reached the official opening item on their agenda. Afterwards he could simply close his folder of unsought advice and return to Dublin where neighbours didn’t know his business or call at the house soliciting favours.
Studying for my Leaving Cert. in the box-room I would hear the putt-putt of his clapped-out Fiat and watch him emerge from the car, holding an emptied flask of tea in one hand and a newspaper that some councillor had discarded in the other. There was always a streak of meanness within him, but by the time we reached Cremore it had become a disease.
It was quarter-past-six now as I stood under the old trees to gaze up at a light behind the drawn curtains in the box-room window. It was possible that the house had been rented out since the robbery. But I suspected that Sarah-Jane had left the light on during one of her random visits, unaware that it would become more of an invitation to intruders than a deterrent.
My father’s house was flanked by two other slightly larger detached homes, set back from the rest of the street and backing onto a new sliproad built two years after we moved from Navan, when half his garden was seized by compulsory purchase order. He had taken it as the ultimate two-finger salute from the planning department in Dublin – perhaps egged on by their counterparts in the main Meath office who resented his section’s autonomy – their joke at the hard-talking culchie’s expense. ‘You’ll never guess where Brogan has moved to. Let’s stick a sliproad right up his arse.’
With the money from the compulsory purchase he had installed aluminium single-glazed windows in the front but retained the original wooden frames at the back. His meanness finally caught up with him three weeks ago, but even had the windows not been half-rotten the intruder would have found some other way in. The Irish Times website report of the break-in stated that he had just returned by bus from the three warrens of bedsits that Pete Clancy inherited from his father – also inheriting my father’s services as poorly paid gauleiter and rent-collector in the process. The thief, if he was one, had him well sussed – the grey-haired pensioner with rent stuffed into his darned socks. But he could have mugged him at the bus stop or in the driveway. Nothing about his house suggested there was wealth worth bothering about inside.
I stepped back beneath the trees until a car passed, then slipped into the driveway. Teatime on Sunday was still a mournful hour when nobody seemed to move about in Dublin. The adjacent houses had been done up in recent years, but my father’s home looked unchanged. Potatoes grew wild – sheltered by a tall hedge in the front garden – with no one le
ft to harvest them. His unused banger seemed part of the vegetation too, with Russian vine tangling itself across the bonnet. I heard a front door open nearby and pressed myself into the tangle of vines. Unfamiliar voices passed down the adjoining driveway on the far side of the wall. Car doors slammed, an engine started and they were gone.
I rang the bell twice, stepping back each time to hide. Nobody answered and not even a curtain twitched, confirming my suspicions about the box-room light. The previous owner had erected a garage door purely for show, with no actual structure behind the gable. I climbed onto the car roof to scale the façade and dropped down into an overgrown side passage littered with planks and cement blocks. My father, the makeshift plumber and electrician, hoarding anything that might one day be useful. This corner of the garden was always his treasure chest, a scene of endless searches to avoid the expense of a visit to the local hardware shop.
The rest of the back garden was laid out in vegetable plots, broken by two plum trees and bordered by a scraggle of rhubarb plants. A hedge grew against the back wall to obscure the sliproad. A crude swing had been constructed from an old tyre attached to a branch. The rear of the house was in darkness, but crowbar marks were still visible where the first intruder had forced the downstairs window. Somebody had tried to patch up the scarred wood, then simply nailed the frame back into place. The second intruders, on the day of his funeral, had simply smashed the glass in the front door and reached in to turn the snib.
From beyond the wall a squeal of brakes came as traffic lights changed. A motorbike halted, its rider revving impatiently as he waited for the green light. I waited too, then – under cover of the noise of cars pulling away – used the crowbar from my pocket to smash the small pane of glass in the back door. Years ago my father had got me to place a discreet hook directly beneath the windowsill to hold a Chubb key. Amazingly it still hung there, though I cut my palm on the broken glass while groping around for it. I unlocked the back door, dripping blood on the step. The cut wasn’t deep, but bled heavily until I tied a dishcloth around my palm to stem it.
I entered the hallway, then stopped. I had never believed in ghosts, but seeing the back of his armchair through the open sitting-room doorway startled me. With every step towards the chair I gripped the crowbar tighter. It was so high that from behind you could never tell if anyone was sitting there. Resting my hands on the clammy leather, I swung it round to confront emptiness. I felt foolish and disappointed as if half-wanting his ghost to be waiting for our showdown now when it was too late.
The dining-room carpet was scorched where the second intruder or intruders had tried to light a fire, but the bookcases had been fixed back. The wall was lined with framed photos. Caddying for Barney Clancy at a pro-am in Portmarnock with Sevvy Ballesteros before the Irish Open. Meeting four different Taoiseigh at sod-turnings and ribbon-cuttings in Meath. The most recent photo looked bizarre. Cut out from the Meath Chronicle, it captured him among a crowd of onlookers as Pete Clancy showed Prince Charles around the Newgrange Neolithic burial chamber during a state visit. The Clancy political dynasty had been founded upon the legendary ruth-lessness of Pete’s grandfather as one of Michael Collins’ most trusted assassins of British spies and sundry collaborators during the War of Independence. My father always toed the official Republican line, but had harboured a secret, irrational fetish for the British royal family. He even took a day off work in 1974 so that Phyllis and he could watch Princess Anne’s wedding on television, spending the previous evening perched on the roof trying to adjust the aerial for better reception.
The way my father stood outside the tomb at Newgrange angered me. Relegated to wait among the spear-carriers and footsoldiers in a vain hope that Pete Clancy might steer the prince towards him for a handshake. But Clancy would have had bigger fish to fry than his father’s retired bagman whose silence could always be relied upon. After the incident with Cormac their relationship was always strained anyway, even if neither would have ever mentioned the rumours about why we had to leave Navan.
I took the photo off the wall, feeling ashamed for him. In his heyday he would have never stood in line like a dog. Barney Clancy would not have allowed him to either, although, there again, it was impossible to imagine Barney having the political dexterity or will to parade an English prince around Meath.
I went upstairs, remembering the light in the box-room. What if someone was there, having ignored the bell and then, after hearing glass being smashed, had already phoned the police? The creak on the stairwell had never been fixed. I listened outside my old bedroom, then – half-expecting the room to look the same – gripped the handle and pushed the door open, ready to flee if someone shouted.
The bedroom was empty. Posters of boy bands and cartoon characters from South Park lined the walls. The single bed was made-up, beside a small desk littered with schoolbooks and CDs. Sarah-Jane’s tempestuous relationship with a bass guitarist eighteen years too old for her was already on the rocks before I vanished. At sixteen she had shacked up with him so as to be on hand to cater to his most wanton male needs – which, according to Miriam, probably consisted of rubbing Grecian 2000 hair-dye into the greying locks encircling his bald patch. The last time I saw her was at a strained party to celebrate both her eighteenth birthday and her baby’s christening, when Phyllis had fumed over her asking me, instead of Cormac, to act as godfather. There again Sarah-Jane was such a mirror image of Phyllis that mother and daughter had been screaming at each other since she could walk. It must have taken my father’s death to persuade her to move back home, safe in the knowledge that Phyllis was unlikely ever to sleep under this roof again. Perhaps I was being unfair. Phyllis and her might have patched their differences up years ago. She had been no dream daughter in her youth, but at least Sarah-Jane never ran away. I just knew that the house was now occupied and I had to be quick.
The pole for pulling down the Stira attic stairs was missing. I found it in the master bedroom where Phyllis and my father had slept. The old dressing table that had belonged to my mother in Navan still stood in the bay window. I glanced into the back bedroom where my sister’s clothes hung in the opened wardrobe and were haphazardly draped over a chair. Her taste in fashion had improved, though probably not her taste in men.
The folding stairs descended with a tug of the pole, allowing me to peer up into the dark attic. Had it been worth risking everything over a hunch? I still didn’t know if I had returned out of vengeance or love. Without the Internet I would have lost touch. For years I’d avoided thinking about Ireland but over the previous six months had found myself obsessively clicking onto websites for Irish newspapers, hoping maybe for a fluke picture of Conor among a group of secondary-student debaters or at the Young Scientist Awards. One visit to a website was enough to reveal how the façade of my father’s generation had fallen asunder – politicians, planners and bankers disgraced. Not just one gilded circle of high-up ‘untouchables’ exposed, but multiplying ripples spreading out from the top to expose how a whole nation had been on the fiddle. Villages where everyone knew each other, yet the local bank had more bogus non-resident accounts under fake names to avoid tax than ordinary accounts.
I had been initiated into the nudge and wink language of that shadow world while playing on the floor of my father’s outhouse, listening to men swap scams in the doorway. But it didn’t seem like cheating back then. It was part of a male world of cigarettes and quiet words in ears, a game of hide-and-seek against anonymous officialdom. It had seemed a litmus test of manhood, like evading Garda checkpoints when driving home after-hours from the pub after having consumed eight or nine pints.
Every night when I had logged on, after finishing work in the bar in Oporto, the names of disgraced businessmen tumbled off the website, from the former Taoiseach down. I kept searching for Barney Clancy, wanting to see him shamed in his grave. But in death, as in life, he seemed the ultimate Teflon man. Then three weeks ago the name Eamonn Brogan caught my eye among the small he
adlines on The Irish Times site.
Although post-mortem results are still awaited, Mr Brogan, a retired planning officer with Meath County Council, is reported to have suffered a heart attack, while tied up with his wife, Phyllis, by a raider who spent several hours ransacking their home in Cremore, off the Old Finglas Road in North Dublin. Mrs Brogan, who had just been discharged from hospital where she underwent an intensive course of chemotherapy, is said to be in a deeply distressed condition and this morning was back in hospital being treated for shock. Mr Brogan was due to be called before the planning Tribunal later this month in connection with decisions made by Meath politicians. He is survived by a daughter, Sarah-Jane, and several grandchildren…
I had sat up in Oporto until dawn, logging onto any other Irish site that might carry details, while in the background the television screened episode after episode of late-night Brazilian soap operas. The Irish Independent report added: According to police Mrs Brogan said that the raider remained silent until her husband’s seizure. He went to Mr Brogan’s assistance but took fright and fled after Mr Brogan cried ‘quick’ when he experienced difficulties in untying the knots. Mrs Brogan managed to untie herself several hours later but her husband was pronounced dead at the scene.
Reading the reports I had experienced a cocktail of emotions. Firstly a giddy sense of release that it was finally over, the father I had loved and hated in equal measure was dead. Then shame at feeling such relief. This was replaced by guilt for having not been here for him or Miriam or Conor. Then, perhaps because I couldn’t handle such guilt, I was overcome with fury at the man who killed the father whose shoulder I had once slept on in a bedroom of rose-patterned wallpaper. The father whom Cormac and I had betrayed and the only person who may have guessed – but would have still kept – my secret.
The Valparaiso Voyage Page 9