‘Well,’ I said tentatively. ‘Was she a panter or a screamer?’
He threw his head back to laugh in that room of whispering clerks and replied, ‘I just said take your false teeth out, Carol, and wrap your gums around that!’
I grinned back at him. We bent companionably down and started to work.
They had walked in silence for two hours through the narrow roads that skirted the back of the airport. Like a discarded prop from a B-movie, a radar dish revolved its head slowly at a crossroads by the perimeter fence. A car rocked in the lay-by, one bare leg swaying against the rear window when they crept past. Beyond the fence, snakes of landing lights slithered through the grass, seeming to merge in the distance where the dark hulks of planes were parked. A security van sped across the concrete between floodlit hangars. Then Hano lost all sense of direction. Katie led as they threaded their way through tiny lanes, bypassing the huge expanse of light where he remembered the village of Swords. Three times a vehicle’s lights sent them tumbling into a ditch. First it was a tinker’s speeding Hiace returning to the camp site they later passed, an island of three caravans in a field of wrecked chassis and upturned wheels stacked like the upturned ghosts of the city’s dreams. The second was a squad car cruising past, and the third time the light stopped and started like a will-o’-the-wisp behind them. He sweated as they climbed in and out of ditches, certain it was the police mocking, herding them like sheep towards a check-point. They watched the headlights beginning to draw level with them as they knelt among the weeds and refuse sacks, his hand squeezing Katie’s, waiting for the doors to open. It was an old farmer so drunk that he fell asleep every few seconds and woke with a start. The car appeared to be driving him home. Shot with whiskey, his glazed eyes looked through them as the car creaked past.
Neither had spoken since she’d taken his hand. He clung to its outpost of warmth, his fingers the only part of him that felt alive. Like a scratched record, the screams from that room echoed in his mind. Could it have really been him? He remembered her fingers dressing him like a child, her hands pushing him from the burning house, his numbness as if cast from stone. Once again part of him longed to be rid of her, to be allowed to sink without trace or responsibility. It wasn’t the shame of what he had done afterwards but the shame of what she had witnessed at the start which haunted him, making him afraid to look at her as they plodded through the countryside. It was better not to think at all, to sink into this numb cocoon where he just had to concentrate on keeping his footsteps steady.
Hano had no idea where they were heading. Each time they reached a crossing he followed her blindly. Two miles beyond Swords they crossed the main Belfast road, quiet at that time, rows of cat’s-eyes dead for want of light, awaiting the noise of trucks in the distance.
She brought him down a side road where a solitary street light lit a row of old labourers’ cottages. A dog padded out from a garden, wagging its tail as it jumped up against him. It was lonely and desperate for attention, following them to the edge of the light and whining mournfully as they were swallowed back by the dark. Without warning, Katie began to whisper like a drowsy person drifting towards sleep.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘this is what I remember best. Did I ever tell you…about being lost out in it, hidden from the world. You know, in Dublin…sometimes I’d lock the bedroom door at night and curl against the wall, but no, it wasn’t the same, you know what I mean, not like I remember it. Too artificial, like, who the fuck were you fooling. There’d be voices on the road, street lights. You knew you weren’t cut off.’
Katie paused. She might have been addressing herself more than him. Hano listened, uncertain what she was talking about. Her voice was harsher, more like her own, when she continued.
‘I killed this feeling, made myself forget. Murdered each fucking memory one by one. Wasn’t going to be like my uncle, like his friends. Jesus, the same accents, same phrases they used forty years ago when they worked the land. They sound so stupid, so fucking pathetic. When you leave something Hano you leave it, you go on, you know what I mean. God, I hated those bastards for always reminding me.’
Hano remembered the evening her uncle came looking for her, the same huge hands his own father had, the same outdoors stance, his awkwardness in the tiny hallway. He said nothing, afraid to break the spell and cast them back into the bickering they had always known. Katie’s voice mellowed again.
‘Funny thing is, you can’t kill it fully. Keeps coming back to haunt me…nights like this. Waiting for dada to put out the gas lamp in his room before I’d get out on to the shed roof. You know, twice he caught me and leathered me black and blue, but I still did it, even when he threatened to tie me to the bed. I was eight but I was in love with danger. Not what you’d think now, spacers or being raped by cider heads, but, you know, werewolves and ghosts waiting for you, trees with malicious spirits you have to pass—all that sort of shite Tomas filled my head with.
‘Two miles it was from the road to our house, the tarmacadam gave out quarter way there. Except from Tomas’s gaff, there wasn’t a light for miles. And every few yards you’d shiver, daring yourself on, because you knew the further you went the longer the journey home would be. And that was the real thrill, Hano, that was fucking it. You know, you’d creep forward, shivering at every bush and shift of moonlight, till finally something—I don’t know, the creak of a branch, a plastic bag in a ditch—set you off racing back through the dark, knowing that whatever the heck was behind you was gaining at every step, was about to touch your shoulder. You’d long to scream but your throat would be too dry, your legs covered in scratches, your clothes caught by briars, but you wouldn’t care. Your lungs were bursting, legs pounding, but Hano, Jesus, Hano, the thrill of it, you know what I mean, the thrill of the journey home. Like being shot through with electricity. All the pills, all the booze, they were nothing to that.’
He remembered her uncle speaking, with his hands awkwardly gripping the leather belt of his trousers. ‘If Katie’s here tell her to come home tonight. The aunt gets worried. She can’t help herself, keeps wandering off.’ Katie stopped and shouted across the dark fields.
‘Not bleeding scared of you now goblins or vampires. Come out if you dare!’
She relaxed her grip and began swaying along the road in front of him, teasing him to follow. And despite what had happened his mood lifted and he laughed, running with outstretched hands to chase her. They could have been any young couple on a midnight escapade as she screamed and dodged his grip, twisting and turning on the road, stumbling against the ditch and blundering on. He ran towards her, forgetting everything. Two dogs outside a nearby cottage began to bark and the chorus was taken up in all the other farmyards along the road as they raced past, occasionally catching hold of each other, more often careering freely along. The moon slipped its moorings of cloud again and threw shadows of leaves like crazy paving on the road before them. She turned to look at him and slipped into a deep ditch, barely missing a clump of nettles. He looked down in panic at her crumpled body lying awkwardly where it had fallen. The countryside was alive with outraged dogs. He climbed quickly in, cupping her neck gently in his palms as he bent to study her face. There seemed no sign of life. He pressed his face closer and suddenly her mouth was open, her tongue burrowing like a saturated animal between his lips. As suddenly as their first kiss had begun it was over, her shoulder pushing him to one side as he lay confused, watching her climb up to the roadway, her face closed, staring ahead as she started to walk onwards into the dark.
It’s strange how a city grows into your senses, how you become attuned to its nuances like living with a lover. Even when you sleep it’s still there in your mind. Out here Cait, it’s a different kind of isolation, a living one. Later on, when I’d walk home at dawn from work in the petrol station, I’d feel a sense of the suburb as being like a creature who’d switched itself off, leaving street lights and advertising signs as sentinels. But out here, even in the dark I c
an hear the noise of branches shifting, of hunting and hunted creatures. Here nothing really sleeps except with one eye open, alert for danger.
I keep trying to describe that office in my mind. I should know its every mood. Yet there is only a blank when I try to recall it, a dull collage of afternoons staring at an antiquated clock; of childish games played to relieve the monotony, rolls of sellotape hurled across tables, infinite rounds of twenty questions, fencing with the long poles required to open and close windows. In winter two Supersers heated the room. Those nearest the heater were scalded; those further away wrapped their coats around their shoulders and bent their heads under the long electric lights. That first morning it felt like a crypt, but it took time to realize that underneath the silence people were living a subterranean existence with a private language and private jokes, each clerk equipped with his or her own technique of surviving the tedium. I had always thought of work as involving some personal skill. As a child I’d bring my father down his lunch in Plunkett Motors and watch the men hammering out panels or respraying cars. There seemed a purpose to it all, a definite end-product. The figures worked in their oil-stained overalls with a curious dignity, self-assured in their skill.
That’s how I had imagined the adult world. But here there was just the endless procession of blue files and green files to be sorted and stamped. I was earning as much money as my father but was ashamed to tell him what my work involved. After a fortnight I began to imagine some higher official was playing a joke on me, unsorting files at night and putting them back. The names seemed the very ones I had sorted the day before, the details of offspring over eighteen familar before I wrote them down. Shay and Mick had invented a game where they would call out people’s names and addresses and make us guess by their ages what the children were christened. Shay said you could learn to date the fashions in children’s names like the vintages of fine wines.
Each morning the crocodile of clerks looped its way through the crowded hallway down to the narrow canteen. We drank tea and talked the gossip and rumours of the office while through the window above the door a garda sergeant called out the names of those charged. It seemed an invisible world to the clerks: they pushed their way past junkies trembling on the steps, past clusters of hard chaws supporting the walls or mothers burdened with children and infinite, helpless patience. Only Shay would nod, pausing to joke with some old lad drinking a bottle of milk on the stairs. Once when we came out they were bringing in a tinker girl. She was no more than fifteen, in the first bud of womanhood. It took four officers to carry her into the courtroom, her body twisting in a grotesque, sensual dance. The clerks paused and then turned to mount the stairs to the dusty shelves while her screams echoed through the building.
What else can I tell you about? The gnawing, all-consuming hatred of Mooney who rarely spoke, confident of his power as he placed his hand on some girl’s shoulder to enjoy the tremor of unease that rippled forth. I’d imagine his tongue lightly wetting his lips each time an increment form came on to his desk, or a temporary position came up for renewal. His days were spent making neat reports to personnel on every mistake, drawing black marks with a sensual pleasure. A black-and-white photograph of his wife and two children stood on his desk. Occasionally he would mention them in his Monaghan accent to some new girl, his brow knitting with anxiety about their progress through college, his tongue lolling over their achievements like a lullaby. Then an hour later he would stand behind her, screeching about her overuse of sellotape.
Six months before I joined a girl was tested for cancer. The hospital decided to keep her in but she insisted on taking a taxi back to the office first. Everyone was at lunch so she left a note for Mooney on the back of a blank voter’s form before returning to the surgeon’s knife. She woke up without her breast, but slowly recovered, painfully learnt to face the world, to venture out and then return to work. On her first morning back she was sent to personnel. On the desk lay the offending voter’s form in a blue folder with a report on the abuse of official stationery.
And finally there was Shay, like a light switched on in a projector. When he came in the office seemed to burst into life. He’d steal some girl’s cigarettes and make a show of passing them round, give mock radio commentaries of the Blessed Virgin landing at Knock, secrete sticks of incense in the filing cabinets. Above all he drew people out, spending days, if a new girl came, just getting her to talk. He had worked there for three years before I began and knew every nook where one could hide, every trick to waste a half-hour. The curious thing was that he was the one person Mooney kept his distance from, cautious because he could not put him into any slot. They measured each other like chess players: Mooney, a grand master baffled by the seemingly ridiculous moves his young opponent made; Shay, knowing that the more outrageous his actions were the more Mooney would stall, terrified of being tricked into making any decision.
Most of the girls queued for lunch in the small coffee shop across the road where Carol held court with tales of neighbours in Deansgrange and former clerks who had gone to the bad. As I hovered outside on my first morning Shay took pity on me, whistled softly and nodded across the street towards the Irish Martyrs Bar & Lounge. There an inner circle met. Mary, the longest serving clerk, scapegoat for Carol’s tantrums and humours, and Mick, quiet and small, grinning to himself as he wolfed his way through pints of Guinness. The bar was jammed in an uneasy truce between policemen and criminals, nodding familiarly as they waited to be served by the old barmen. When I complained that it was my first day and I was afraid to drink, Mary reluctantly bought me an orange juice and then spiked it with vodka when my back was turned. That lunch-time I began to see the humour behind their serious faces.
Mick was the occupant of a Rathgar bedsit, expelled from college after three years of playing pool, degreeless and a disgrace to his strong farmer father, but with a highest snooker break of seventy-six, a love of German films and a poker fixation. He rarely spoke till the afternoon, as he nursed each morning’s hangover in. Mary had just passed the wrong side of thirty. She had joined after school, intending to stay for a year and never managed to leave. Even that first day I knew she never would go now. She told the bluest jokes in her Liberties accent as she spent every penny she had on you, but rarely mentioned her three-year-old child at home, never spoke of the daily struggle to cope alone. Between them Shay sat, egging them on as they mocked the size of each other’s sexual parts while surreptitiously pouring drink into me.
At two o’clock they helped me cautiously back up the stairs, Mary shovelling mints into me to disguise the smell. After every few steps they’d pause to agree how awful they were, then burst out into laughter again. That first afternoon passed in a hazy blur, wedged in between Shay and Mick hiding me at the bottom table. The room swayed in a welter of flying sellotape and blue jokes, the elbows of the lads prodding me whenever I teetered towards laughter.
It seemed unreal when I got home again to face my mother’s eager questions. I stood in the shorn garden trying to sober up, suddenly resentful of Shay with his permanent position. He was safe in a job for life. All they needed to give me was three days’ notice. He knew the rules while I was being led blindly down. But soon I realized I was not. Shay kept beside me as the first week rolled on, his intuition so refined he could warn me the instant before a door opened or a buzzer rang. And the work was so tedious that despite my apprehension I was drawn in, fascinated by his cool good nature, his audacity. Some mornings Mary gave him a conspiratorial wink and he’d disappear until break time when he discreetly emptied the baby Power in their cups at the top of the table, slipping the empty whiskey bottle back into his pocket before Carol arrived. In the afternoons the voices of solicitors and policemen wafted through the air vent as we blew smoke from the joint out the downstairs toilet window; his eyes amused at my terror whenever their footsteps came near. And gradually I learnt to surrender my trust to him. He kept me always just the right side of the line, teaching me how to loo
k busy by perpetually carrying a pile of files as I wandered through the room or by stacking work up in front of me to create the appearance of speed.
By the Friday I knew everything about the job that needed to be known. My hands could file the forms away in my sleep. Indeed, when I closed my eyes on the first nights I automatically saw piles of registration forms being ticked and passed from tray to tray. The forms came in cardboard boxes that were carefully stored and returned. Those boxes that had burst open were burnt. That afternoon Shay beckoned me out to the landing. Below, the guard was calling out the last few cases before the weekend. Without looking down I could sense the crush of bodies piling against the court door. Shay selected four of the sturdiest cardboard boxes and reefed them apart with an expert left foot. He handed me two and we were gone. The incinerator was two concrete slabs placed against the wall of the old prison. We burnt each box individually, dutifully standing over them until the last one turned to ash. That was when he told me about the girl with one breast.
‘Mooney made Carol do his dirty work, of course. She had visited young Eileen in hospital twice a week. I found Carol up there that lunch-time, her cardigan over her shoulder, eyes raw with crying.’
I was drifting slowly into friendship with him, the very casualness of it disguising its grip. I had stuck close to him at first simply to learn the rules of work but even after five days it had become more than that in my mind. There was a sense of excitement being in Shay’s presence. His friendship made no demands; it was simply given, asking nothing in return, making no attempt to conscript you to any viewpoint or take sides in the petty office wars. The discovery that we were from the same suburb was made not in terms of common links but of differences.
The Journey Home Page 3