I ascended into the attic now where it was safe to switch on a light. The raider had been unusually methodical in even looting up here, instead of employing the usual smash-and-grab techniques of petty thieves out for quick cash or jewellery. The rusty filing cabinets from Navan had been forced open and cardboard suitcases smashed apart – although somebody had recently tidied away mounds of yellowing paper into plastic sacks in a half-hearted attempt to restore some order.
It was the website account of the second raid on the day of his funeral that had finally convinced me to come home. This was more a short colour piece than a news report, noting that it was the eighth occasion in as many months when a house was robbed in Dublin while someone was being buried. Relatives were increasingly circumspect about the location of a deceased person’s home when placing death notices in the papers. The Brogan family can be seen as a tragic microcosm of Dublin’s growing violence; the article concluded, having endured this latest robbery during the funeral, the initial break-in that led to Mr Brogan’s death and a recent assault on his teenage grandson, Conor, who – some weeks ago – became another statistic in the ever increasing random street attacks on young Dublin males.
Perhaps my suspicions were paranoia. The second break-in might be the work of ordinary robbers attracted by the lack of obvious security in the house. The attack on Conor, which made my blood turn cold, might be as random as the paper suggested. But something inside me refused to believe that these events were unrelated. Perhaps I was inventing the connection, seeking a justification to come home. But I was the only family member who knew something of my father’s dealings and I could not take the risk of my family being in danger. With the ongoing tribunals several businessmen once close to Barney Clancy might want documents they suspected could be here – destroyed. It was impossible to know if the raider had found the papers he sought among the jumble of Council minutes and planning applications.
Possibly the only way to truly neutralize the past would have been to torch the whole house, which is what the fire in the dining-room on the day of the funeral seemed intended to do. But it never spread, as if the intruder who started it – or a companion who disagreed with his course of action – had stamped it out. This suggested that he wasn’t seeking to destroy evidence but to find something he felt was his by right. Had my father ever thrown anything out, I wondered. There were documents here going back thirty years, memos that Barney Clancy would surely have wished destroyed. But Clancy had died as suddenly – if more pleasurably – as my father, suffering a heart attack in the bath while on a Spanish junket, with stringently denied rumours that an escort agency had supplied a lady to help create a foam from his bubble-bath.
I knelt down to examine the paper value of a life. Bizarrely some of my school copybooks were among the stack of papers. I had never kept them, but it made no sense that he had. There was a photograph of me with him, aged five, in luridly over-exposed colour. I should have felt touched that he had stored up such mementos but I felt angry. Why did he always keep every emotion hidden? How could a man with mastery of the most complex terminology for drainage schemes and housing densities lack the simplest vocabulary for dealing with his son?
Despite his dexterity with plans, my father always stood out in Navan for lacking even elementary woodwork skills. By the age of nine I knew more about timber than he ever would, simply by flitting between neighbours’ sheds until such freedom was curtailed.
Two years after we moved to Cremore my father had summoned me to the attic, grudgingly admitting defeat in his attempts to construct a concealed keep-safe – allegedly for Phyllis’s jewellery – inside one of the rafters. Deliberately ignoring his botched attempt I had hollowed out a new section of rafter, planing the wood until it was wafer-thin, then hinged it back so delicately that nobody could ever guess at the large cavity behind it. I had taken my time, never consulting him as I buried tiny screws in the wood, using my limited skill as a weapon of contempt.
The rafters were cobwebbed now, encrusted with fine woodwormy dust. I tapped repeatedly until a hollow sound betrayed where the hinge was. Two memorial cards fluttered down as I opened it, one for Cormac and one for myself. I picked them up to study the photographs of two strangers, two ghosts, two selves.
There was no money or jewellery inside, but Joey Kerwin’s 1950s IRA revolver was suspended from two bent nails along with some bullets in an old sock. My final memory of my father at work in the outhouse was of a drunken Joey Kerwin arriving and, with great ceremony, presenting my father with a box for Barney Clancy to pass on to ‘the brave lads up the North’. The Arms Trial would have just ended with Charles Haughey and a second Government minister cleared of supplying guns to nationalists under siege in Northern Ireland. I remembered being sent out to play when Barney Clancy arrived and his guffaws through the locked door as he said, ‘Jesus, let’s give the gun to the Brits – it will blow the hand off whatever poor bastard first uses it. You never showed me this, Eamonn, you understand. I rely on you never to show me things that it’s not in my interest to see. Get rid of it.’
Being a hoarder even then my father obviously never did. But otherwise he was a man to follow instructions. I wondered if he ever properly discussed bills with Barney Clancy or where he solicited the donations from to pay them. Not that Clancy wasn’t aware of who contributed what, down to the final penny, but if it came to the blame game his hands would have been untainted. Surely it was a form of sadomasochism for a miser to wade through the wastage in those receipts for unfinished bottles of champagne, rounds of rare brandies costing more than the meal, the endless unPalladianization of Clancy’s Palladian-style mansion on the Dublin Road. Perhaps my father – to whom extravagance was a twice-yearly holiday to the same cheap hotel on Jersey with Phyllis – found a fetishistic thrill in handling Clancy’s bills, his alter ego savouring the flamboyance of dispensing money like a Monopoly player. My father the patsy, who had turned us all into patsies too.
I pocketed the revolver and bullets, then picked up the envelope that had tumbled down with the masscards. There were three pages inside it – the first torn from a child’s copybook. It contained a succession of sixteen-digit codes with dates and initials in brackets. Some had Ltd after them, like SR for Shyroyal, suggesting more than one offshore company. Some bore my initials and others Sarah-Jane’s. The only numbers not crossed off were the last two in Cormac’s initials, though even these initials had been crossed off and then rewritten, as if my father was utterly unsure of what to do. The ink changed from blue to black halfway down and his writing changed too, growing more cramped and spidery in the years that separated the first and last entry.
Of the four account numbers with Cormac’s initials, the first two were underlined, with huge, almost frantic, question marks beside them. Our revenge and perhaps our signing of his eventual death warrant. Cormac had emptied the first account the week before he committed suicide. ‘It was simple,’ Cormac had told me. ‘I walked in, showed my new passport. The cashier was cute, with lovely hands. I was just amazed the poor boy didn’t get wanker’s cramp having to count out fifteen thousand pounds in cash.’
Perhaps my father could have explained the loss of that account to Clancy, who knew of Cormac’s ways. But the closure of the second one, six weeks after my presumed death, must have haunted him. How could he have asked the police to investigate the robbery of money that didn’t legally exist and had been surreptitiously held in the names of family members who didn’t even know the bank accounts existed? Possibly he had covered up the loss from Clancy’s slush fund for years, with Barney Clancy content – once the bills were being paid – not to ask too many questions that might incriminate him. But if my suspicions were correct then the day of reckoning had finally arrived three weeks ago, with tribunals closing in and Pete Clancy desperate to destroy any evidence that could be used against his family.
Our pilfering of that money perhaps explained the cautionary presence of two forms stapled to the
list of accounts. The address on the notepaper was for the same bank I had visited in Jersey. Headed Instructions Mandate and each bearing one of the remaining account numbers, they declared that ‘transactions may be only enacted by the account holder or the other named nominee entitled to draw on the account, Mr Eamonn Brogan, in person and when bearing possession of this mandate’.
A second envelope was Sellotaped to the top of the keep-safe. I opened it. It contained the thirty-year-old articles and memorandum of association of Shyroyal Ltd, with a registered address on the Cayman Islands and the names of four solicitors listed as proxy shareholders. The only name I recognized was my father as company secretary.
The front door must have been opened so quietly below me that the landing light was switched on and footsteps had come halfway up the stairs before I realized it. A male voice called as the footsteps reached the stairwell and whoever it was descended again. There was no way to escape from the attic in time. Two voices talked in the hall downstairs. If they saw the broken kitchen window I was done for. I flicked the attic light off and pulled the Stira folding stairs up towards me, leaving the trapdoor slightly ajar. It certainly wasn’t Sarah-Jane’s voice that I was hearing and it wasn’t her daughter’s either.
I felt trapped as I heard footsteps ascend the stairs again, two male voices kept low like they were intruders themselves. Clancy had come looking for these papers twice already, so why not a third time? The first teenager had blonde hair with a dyed white streak. He wore white jeans with spotless white sneakers and carried several CDs under his arm. The second youth was taller and slightly older-looking, with close-cropped hair and an attempt at a goatee beard that was still a year away from being anything other than downy stubble. The nervous way they stood on the landing made me suspicious. Maybe my e-mail had panicked Pete Clancy into torching the house properly this time. I took a step back so that if they looked up they would see nothing through the gap in the trapdoor.
‘Check the front bedroom, just in case.’
I couldn’t see which of them spoke, just heard the creak of a bedroom door opening. Another light was switched on then quickly turned off again.
‘I told you, Charles, she’d be visiting the hospital.’
Suddenly the landing light was extinguished. There was total darkness until the blonde lad pushed open the box-room door and came into view, framed by the light coming from inside. He stood facing his older companion, watching him approach. They stood in silence, face to face, inches apart. I couldn’t see the taller boy’s face, but the blonde lad stared into his eyes almost apprehensively. Then he let the CDs slip with a soft clatter and their arms were around each other, the taller boy tugging roughly at the buttons on the white jeans. He had his hand inside the younger boy’s briefs now, pushing them both towards the bed. He seemed fully in command, allowing the blonde youth to fall back onto the quilt as he tugged the white jeans down to where they became trapped around the boy’s ankles. They had almost disappeared from the tiny slat of light through which I was watching.
‘When the cat’s away the mouse will play, Conor, eh?’ The older youth who spoke glanced around. ‘God, the space. Makes a change from the lane behind the Oliver Twist.’
‘Who says we won’t be slumming it again there tomorrow night,’ Conor replied as his companion laughed and kicked the door shut. There was a creak of bedsprings, a muffled name I could not hear, then sounds that were no longer mere words.
I was shaking so much I had to kneel down, not caring what noise I made. There was a slight silence below as if they had heard a sound. Then rock music from my son’s bedroom drowned out everything else. What sort of father didn’t recognise his own son, even with dyed hair and after the space of a decade? Conor, whom I had carried on my shoulders across the dunes at Bull Island. Conor, who had been obsessed by the Wombles, who used to stagger into the bed, still half-asleep, looking for a cuddle if he woke from bad dreams. My son, who at least had no scars from his recent attack but was now being sucked off or fucked or God knows what else by God knows who in my old bedroom beneath my feet. The boy called Charles was definitely older, a corrupting bastard taking advantage of him.
I was on the verge of lowering the Stira stairs to kick open the box-room door when I stopped. I was dead, or at least had been to Conor, for more than half his life. I had long relinquished the right to lecture him or anyone. The first song ended on the CD. In the brief silence I heard him moan in pleasure. There was excitement in his voice, a zest at being alive. I sat back against an old filing cabinet, unable to stop trembling, recalling all my fantasies about how I might one day meet Conor again. Those clothes in the back bedroom belonged to Miriam and not Sarah-Jane. But what was my family doing living here, in danger from something they knew nothing about?
Conor laughed below me, begging the youth not to tickle. Childish giggles rose and the sound of a mock tussle, with not even the music drowning out their pleasure. Had they the slightest clue about risks and precautions? I couldn’t bear to listen to this, yet seemed unable to move. So close at last to my own flesh and blood. Conor’s laughter stopped, replaced by a new sound, an intake of breath like somebody who wasn’t quite sure if they liked or were ready for what was now happening. Then I could only hear music again, drowning out his pleasure or pain or protests at what might be going on.
I lowered the ladder and stood outside the box-room door, trying to fathom what was happening in there. There seemed an element of nightmare here, of role reversal, with my father’s ghost staring out through my eyes. My hand paused, inches from the door. What would I see if I opened it? Would I handle the situation better than my father had once done, or despite the distance that I’d tried to put between Navan and myself would I be equally out of my depth? Would Conor even recognize me, with receding dyed hair and lacking the thick black beard that was so distinctive in the masscard?
I kicked the door suddenly, with such force that the hinges shook. The music stopped inside. There was silence, then a petrified voice – Charles’s – tentatively called, ‘Hello?’ I could visualize them sitting bolt upright on the bed, as terrified to open the door as I was terrified that they would do so. But I had simply wanted to make them stop and ensure that Conor wasn’t hurt.
Charles’s voice came again, slightly bolder now. I turned to run down the stairs, knowing I had left the folding stairs there and that my fleeing footsteps would give them the courage to emerge. They had not been inside the kitchen, the back door was still unlocked. I raced across the garden and lunged at the wall, scratching my hands on the hedge as I struggled over. Cars were stopped at the traffic lights. Faces turned as I landed on the grass verge. I thought the drivers might get out and surround me until the police came. Instead the lights turned green and they drove quickly on.
Conor and his friend would not venture past the open back door, too scared that they had been tumbled. The list of account numbers and the Shyroyal documents were in my pocket, but the two masscards still lay on the attic floor. If Conor had cleaned the place up he would know they had not been there before. I could imagine him climbing the Stira stairs with Charles behind him, finding the hinge hanging open in the rafter and turning over the masscards in his hand like pieces of a puzzle he could not even begin to fathom.
Everything changed in Navan on the night Phyllis miscarried. Not that I understood what was happening, but the screams from her bedroom woke me. I was eleven years of age, watching through the chicken wire as lights came on in the house and then in neighbouring homes when her cries continued. Back doors opened and people quietly talked in gardens. More lights were turned on downstairs, then went out as her sobs subsided and my father’s car started before fading from earshot.
A vindictive pleasure initially outweighed my fear. There was nobody I hated more than Phyllis, nobody I wished to hear suffer as much. But this new silence was more frightening than her crying itself as one by one lights were extinguished along the terrace of houses. I had no idea w
here the car had gone. My father could be dead or enacting an elaborate trick to punish me. I just knew that I was too scared to venture alone up to that forbidden house. I no longer thought of it as home. The child who once slept there wasn’t me. He had been somebody quite different, not branded with my unspecified sin. The previous couple of years had conditioned me to life in the outhouse, making me uneasy in company other than my own. Its walls felt womb-like as I lay on the mattress at night, listening to cats on the roof and watching moonlight filter through the chicken wire that my father blocked up for warmth in winter. Although still allowed to eat my dinner in the kitchen, I rarely saw into other rooms in the house. But often in dreams I found myself trapped upstairs, knowing I no longer belonged there and that my father would punish me if he found out.
Therefore when the back door opened slowly by itself, half an hour after my father’s car had gone, I stepped back from the chicken wire, terrified of what might emerge. The house remained in darkness. I could barely distinguish the small shape that seemed to hover on the step. Only when he moved into the moonlight did I recognize Cormac in his pyjamas. He halted at the outhouse, not bothering to knock like he knew that I had been watching all along. When I opened the door we stared at each other. It felt strange to be together without lads jostling around us in the schoolyard or Phyllis hovering to make sure we never spoke.
‘There was blood everywhere,’ Cormac stated, matter-of-factly. ‘Mammy kept crying, “My baby”. I think she’s lost it.’
The Valparaiso Voyage Page 10