I knew that Phyllis was pregnant and the baby lived inside her, but I didn’t know what he meant or how Cormac understood it.
‘Where are they gone?’
‘The hospital in Drogheda. They told me to go into Hanlons but I told Mrs Hanlon I wanted to be down here with you.’
Cormac walked into the outhouse. He had come down here on previous occasions to summon me. But this felt different, like he was an inscrutable visitor and I was his host. He examined the mattress, the makeshift locker where I kept my clothes, the meagre pile of torn comics that my father sometimes rescued from the bin for me.
‘Are you ever afraid on your own out here?’
‘Would you be?’
‘I’m afraid of nothing,’ Cormac retorted.
‘Except Mr Kenny. Everybody’s afraid of him.’
‘I’m the one who broke his canes.’
My whole class was still discussing how some boy had slipped back into school one lunchtime to leave two of Mr Kenny’s canes smashed on his desk.
‘You did not,’ I jeered. ‘I bet that was some boy from sixth class.’
‘A big boy would be seen.’ Cormac quietly sat on the mattress. ‘Nobody sees me.’
He reached into his pyjama pocket to take out a coin. I watched him roll it in and out between his fingers so that it kept disappearing from view. He closed his fingers tight over the coin and when he opened his palm out again the coin had vanished and a tiny lead weight lay in its place. He flicked it across for me to catch. The centre was hollowed out so that Mr Kenny could screw it onto the tip of his cane and create deeper welts when he savagely beat pupils. The lead weight felt like it was going to burn my palm. I tossed it back, scared and awed.
‘Your da got frightened when Mammy kept screaming. He was crying his eyes out too when Mrs Hanlon came in.’
‘I was scared too,’ I said. ‘I hated the screaming.’
‘Do you hate them?’
I didn’t answer.
‘It’s okay, I won’t squeal,’ he said.
‘I won’t squeal on you at school either.’
‘Nobody would believe you. That’s why I can do anything to anyone who hurts you.’
Various school incidents came back to me, for which boys claimed to be incorrectly beaten. A fountain pen stolen from the staff room and located in Slick McGuirk’s pocket. It took all of Barney Clancy’s influence to prevent his expulsion. P. J. Egan squealing like a slaughterhouse pig when beaten after the stink in his classroom was traced to a ham sandwich in his bag with human excrement inside it. Only now did I realize that the scandals always involved boys who had bullied me.
Cormac lay back on the mattress. ‘I made your father get me a magic set for my birthday,’ he said. ‘If you like I’ll show you some tricks. Lie down beside me.’
The last person I had snuggled into was my father a lifetime before. Cormac’s skin felt warm and comforting through his pyjamas; he kept doing tricks with his hands, and I felt the excitement of knowing that nobody could catch us laughing together. I don’t remember falling asleep, just waking to find my father watching from the doorway. Cormac woke, looking far younger than during the night. He seemed lost and bewildered.
‘Brendan minded me,’ he whimpered. ‘I got lonely in Hanlon’s house. Where’s Mammy, Daddy?’
How did Cormac know more about everything than me? Nothing in his demeanour – as he wandered vacantly through school or studiously sat over homework in the kitchen – hinted at how his antennae were picking up every nuance and coded whisper in adult speech. Nothing betrayed the gift for perfect mimicry either, which he revealed on secret night-time visits to the outhouse over the months following my twelfth birthday. I never knew when he would come or often if I wished him to. He was still the interloper who stole my life but I couldn’t hate him. Although I had no reason to do so, I trusted him like nobody else – even Mr Casey, whose propensity to rock the boat frightened me.
Cormac, on the other hand, understood the rules. In Phyllis’s company we stuck to our castes. Even in school we ignored each other. Then twice a week I’d watch him climb out the bathroom window, frightened that he might not have the agility to overcome the obstacle course of flitting from the windowsill onto a waste pipe and leaping fleet-footed onto Casey’s kitchen roof before shinning to the ground.
He brought me sweets stolen from shops and my favourite comics if feeling especially daring or generous. Not that I kept anything in the outhouse, in case my father found them and accused me of theft. My stash was hidden in a hollow treetrunk in the lane, along with photos that were starting to attract and disturb me in ways I didn’t understand. A girls’ sports day in Dunboyne or an ad for bath-soap with a pencil sketch of a woman cloaked in bubbles. A treasure chest I never told Cormac about, consisting of pages from newspapers that I scoured bins for at night, sneaking through gardens, alert to every noise and footfall.
I was terrified my father would find us together, although Phyllis and he had become withdrawn inside their private grief. Neighbours were softer to her now as she lost the brittleness which had made her react to every casual remark like it was an accusation. Since the miscarriage her clothes and make-up had begun to blend with the conformity of other mothers. A vagueness pervaded the house, with only the quantity of fag ends in the ashtray hinting at how long she had been sitting in the one chair before my father came home some evenings to find no dinner on.
Her manner towards me had changed in so far that her previous frequent aggression was gone. Now I seemed little more than a shadow, an unobtrusive lodger to be briefly endured when necessary. But this would change if I was found contaminating Cormac in the outhouse. That was how I felt about myself, like I was a virus that could endanger him. Yet I lived for the thrill of his visits, longing for his bare feet to leave a trail of dew across the outhouse floor that would have dried by the time he crept back up to his room.
‘Lisa Hanlon fancies you,’ he whispered one night, as we lay curled into each other for warmth. ‘She wouldn’t be long whipping her knickers off.’
Older boys in school sometimes talked like that, trying to make their voices sound tough. But Cormac’s whisper was matter-of-fact, filled with certainty. It excited my body in the new troubling way that I tried to hide from him.
‘I bet you’d like her to kiss you,’ he added.
‘Stop it, Cormac.’
‘Girls don’t have willies, you know. They have slots which you put your willie in, and if you’re not good enough there’s a bone inside they can bring down like a guillotine to chop it off.’
‘They have not.’
‘They do. That’s where sausages come from.’
‘Fibber.’
‘Not. How come yours was a cocktail and now it’s a hotdog?’
‘Don’t touch it, Cormac. It’s wrong.’
‘Why is it wrong? If it’s nice it can’t be wrong.’
‘It just is,’ I hissed. ‘You’re too young to understand. Now leave me alone.’
But I didn’t want him to leave me alone and Cormac knew that like he knew everything. He giggled in my ear, singing ‘You ain’t nothing but a hotdog’ in a mock Elvis voice. ‘Do you know what happens after you put it in them?’
‘What?’
‘Talcum powder comes out, and your legs go all queer.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do,’ he whispered. ‘When you get Lisa Hanlon alone make her rub it like this for you.’
Something was moving in the lane, a cat or a marauding fox. Or perhaps it was a plastic bag blown about, brushing against the wall, upsetting loose twigs. A bird whose name I didn’t know called twice in the night air. A distant truck changed gear on the bend of Flower Hill. I thought of the time I glimpsed my father through the curtains. I wanted to tell Cormac how you could kneel down too and lick it. Being older I should have been able to tell him something. But I never spoke and neither did he. His hot hand worked deftly as he hummed in my ear, with e
very outside sound and sensation magnified – the risk of someone finding us, the trouble that we would be in. I thought of Lisa Hanlon’s fingers doing this for me, in her sitting-room with its blazing fire and cool milk at bedtime. How warm it would be in there and how white her skin would be. Something was stirring deep within me, in some port I had never even known was there, a voyaging ship with huge white sails. My legs twitched like a rabbit in a trap. My tightly closed eyes could see only whiteness, the white houses of an approaching white city, with my ship sailing ever closer, the sails bursting, surging towards Valparaiso.
I didn’t return to my hotel after fleeing Cremore. I had to keep walking, trying to control my thumping heart. Memories of Cormac and Conor jostled in my head. I felt cheated, like Cormac had robbed me of my son. Certainly Conor looked more like him at seventeen than he looked like me. I fingered the papers I had travelled halfway across Europe to retrieve, wondering if Conor knew anything of the danger he and his mother could be in.
I wondered how much money still gathered interest in those last two accounts in Cormac’s name. Until Cormac’s revelations about my father I had never wanted to consider properly my father’s relationship with Clancy. But during the week I spent in hiding on the Orkney Islands after the train crash I finally had to confront the reality of how his job with Meath County Council fitted into the dynamics of Clancy’s operations.
After the controversy over the re-zoning of Josie’s old terrace as the site for a shopping centre in the 1970s, Barney Clancy had been careful to place a visible distance between himself and all planning affairs in Meath. He no longer even sat on the County Council, declining to stand for re-election so he could focus on national politics. But this didn’t mean that he could not control the bloc votes of a small but vital clique of councillors, who straddled party lines in a model of ecumenism.
I didn’t know if my father was a stooge or a willing accomplice, but his role was vital. By drawing up a diligent, responsible plan to preclude residential or business development on certain areas earmarked for agricultural use, my father’s task-force kept down the price of those lands. But when eventually sold by the original owners at farmland prices their value could quadruple overnight if a private member’s motion re-zoned them for development. Clancy was in the clear – taking no visible part in the re-zoning and indeed with the planning official known to be his right-hand man vehemently advising against it. This clique could even be reshuffled when residents passionately objected to a re-zoning, so that local councillors sided with their constituents while sufficient councillors from remote outlying realms of Meath – where they still dyed grass blue to hide the congestion of their private parts – were drafted in to steer the re-zoning through.
According to Cormac the not ungenerous developers who acquired sudden fortunes always acted in a more gentlemanly fashion in Meath than at Dublin County Council meetings, where they were frequently known to lean over the public balcony to tick off lists of councillors whose pockets they had lined as they voted. Perhaps it was easier in Meath where – having drawn a blank in pursuit of other high-profile persuaders – most had simply learnt to deal with one senior figure.
Yet I never understood how my father squared this in his head as I often saw him working late into the night in Cremore to craft the most scrupulously comprehensive development plans which he must have known would be repeatedly sabotaged by Clancy’s clique until rendered meaningless. He had always seemed conscientious in his job, hounding any builder who left work unfinished. But perhaps on the day when he let Clancy parachute him in on top of a reluctant County Council he had signed a mental indenture that Clancy made sure was never paid off. Finding the hidden list of account numbers in Cremore had strengthened my instincts that Pete Clancy was involved in my father’s death. But it was still a long way short of proof that would stand up in a court of law. Not that going to the police was an option available to me.
I could anonymously mail everything I had found to Dublin Castle. Tribunal lawyers might not be able to prove where the money in the accounts came from, but – using a court order – they could trace to whom it was paid out. But I would hardly avenge my father’s death by dragging his name through the courts as an accomplice. I could even panic other developers into suspecting that Miriam had leaked the information and might still hold more incriminating material.
I didn’t want Conor to start his adult life under the shadow of having had a grandfather who defrauded the state. There again, as I walked towards town, I didn’t know what I wanted. Brendan Brogan would settle for a trade-off with Pete Clancy. Half the money from those remaining accounts to be somehow paid over to Conor in return for my silence. Plus the provision of a new passport which I desperately needed with only six weeks left before Cormac’s old one went out of date. But there again Brendan Brogan was a cur, grateful for scraps and uneasy when dealing with his betters. Cormac would not have been so easily appeased, refusing to slink about in corners. For years I had longed for revenge upon Pete Clancy. An eye for an eye and a life for a life. I fingered the old revolver in my pocket. There might be only one way to ensure that Pete Clancy never sent thugs to trouble my family again. A perfect murder where the killer had ceased to exist years before.
I didn’t know what Conor would want, because in truth, there was little I knew about him any more. The altered streetscapes around Baggot Street mocked me. I had once queued outside a kebab shop here with a hundred other hopefuls when two job vacancies were announced on the radio. The denim jackets and dressed-down casualness of those days had been replaced by a flaunting, yobbish affluence. The kerb-side was choked with new cars. From a theme bar a chiming of mobile phones broke the once-hick sound of Andy Williams crooning Moon River.
What did I expect? Life to stand still because I had chosen to step outside it? I had cursed the semi-derelict streets here, back when half the city looked like it had endured an air bombardment during some forgotten war. Did I really want to return to the stink of flooded pub toilets in cellars that even rats had forsaken, with a ragged towel on a nail changed twice a year? Ireland had grown up and my son with it. I had no claim over either any more. An English stag party approached, blocking the footpath with fake wigs and plastic boobs tied to their chests. Their boorish voices rankled and made me stand my ground. One shouted as they broke ranks but the others pulled him on. Two Dublin girls sneaked a hostile glance at me, like I had deliberately provoked trouble. I walked on, feeling more alone than in any foreign city over the past decade.
The Georgian skyline of Mount Street looked the same at least. An event was on at the old Peppercanister church. Children milled about the steps, with a small crowd gathering around a police motorcyclist who examined the smashed window of a parked car. A waif-like girl climbed onto the railings behind the church, straining for a better view. From a distance she looked twelve years of age. Only when I reached the corner did I realize that she was a teenage prostitute with the dead eyes of a junkie.
I walked past her companions on the canal, feeling that my head would burst if I didn’t speak to someone. I kept imagining Conor in some lane behind a pub called the Oliver Twist. The indifferent eyes of the girls scrutinized me, keepers and forgetters of secrets. I moved on, flinging the crowbar from my pocket into the canal. I knew where I was heading and how out of place I would look. But it was the only spot in Dublin where somebody had a name for me – even if a bogus one.
I had already passed Lekan, among the huddled bodies in makeshift sleeping-bags outside the Refugee Application Centre, when he called out. ‘Cormac, my man? What you doing here?’ He hunched up stiffly on the tarmac, watching me.
‘I thought you’d appreciate some company.’
Lekan glanced along the queue as if company was the last thing he needed, then drew his feet up and made space for me to hunch down. Some asylum-seekers were sleeping and more talked in a babble of tongues, with some voices loud enough to disturb others who called for quiet. Tension perv
aded the gathering. Passers-by might see them as a single entity, but many seemed to have little in common beyond being washed up in Dublin.
‘Is it always like this?’ I asked.
‘Normally we do not need to queue at night. But people worry because the office refused to open on Friday. Officials say they frightened by too many of us. They want more space. They say they want to help, so they lock us out.’ Lekan rubbed his hands together for warmth. ‘You found somewhere to stay?’
‘A hotel.’ It was hard to get comfortable on the ground. I glanced around. ‘Do you feel you’ll ever go back?’
‘It may not be for me to choose. I could be put on a plane to Nigeria any time.’
‘Even if you can stay here, would you wish to go back one day?’
Lekan shrugged his shoulders thoughtfully. ‘In my heart, yes, but in my mind I know it would be too dangerous. People don’t forgive. It’s cold, Cormac, go to your hotel. You don’t belong here.’
‘I don’t belong out there either.’ I glanced at the late-night traffic on the street. ‘Maybe I don’t belong anywhere.’
‘Neither do half these people,’ Lekan replied. ‘Why do you think they want new lives?’
‘What happens when your old life catches up with you?’
Lekan was silent for a moment. ‘In Lagos I opened a shop for furniture, tables, chairs. Not on Lagos Island, but on the mainland near Shomolu, a district which two gangs controlled. I stood up to them, myself and three others, patrolling our street with sticks, refusing to pay bribes to them or the police. Other traders, they saw what we could do. They say they will join with us. One evening we meet in my shop, talk and talk. The gangs do not come near us. I think they are afraid until I go home. Blood on the floor and the wall. My wife violated and dead, my child dead after watching. A warning to others. It catches up with me every day, what I saw and did.’
‘What did you do?’
‘What did you do?’ he threw the question back, wary now and annoyed at having spoken.
The Valparaiso Voyage Page 11