But it was more than just the squalor of each flat we tried that was wrong, it was their size as well. There was room for only one and, without a conscious decision, we had begun to think of the place as being ours to share. It had grown naturally into an unspoken understanding which I never dared mention. Already the girls in work regarded us as a pair, always leaving the seat beside me free if Shay had not yet come in. Whenever he phoned in sick Mary would tease me in the Irish Martyrs lounge about pining for my boyfriend.
‘What do you think Mick?’ she’d asked. ‘Are the pair of them bent or what?’
Mick would raise his pint and pause, shaking his head in earnest thought.
‘Don’t know about Hano, but I have my suspicions about Shay,’ he’d say. ‘There’s always a fierce taste of shite off his penis.’
I’d laugh with them, but when I would try to define our relationship in my mind, though I shied away from the word, for me it was as close to love as I had ever known. Not in any physical sense, not implying possessiveness. But, for me, Shay was freedom and life; he was everything I never had the courage to be. I have no idea what he saw in me. Maybe some younger version of himself, kicking a football between cars on those streets where horses were raced along the pavement, dreaming of leaving, still tied to the parents he never mentioned.
Was I his past, what he was escaping from? There were parts of his mind I never knew what went on in. I remember one night in a pub shortly after I met him. Two blokes from Coolock were acting tough, trying to wind up Mick because of his Donegal accent. Shay said nothing, smiled up from his pint and let them believe he was from the bog too. Finally their girlfriends arrived and the two lads went to leave. Shay waited till they had reached the door before calling. They stopped and looked back. Shay spoke slowly as though instructing a child: ‘You roll it down over your dick!’ They were about to go for him when the entire bar broke into spontaneous applause. Then one of their girlfriends giggled. They turned and vanished meekly through the door. Shay took a sip of his pint.
‘That’s what gives me a pain about this city,’ he said.
‘Everybody who comes from it is so cocksure of themselves, they think they’re all so street-wise. That’s your charm Hano, you’re the most uncool guy in the world.’
It was the only time I heard him make any comment about me and I couldn’t figure out if it was a compliment or an insult.
By the end of that fortnight we had looked at twenty-seven bedsits. The last one we saw overlooked the canal between Rathmines and Ranelagh. It was a narrow room divided in two by a plywood partition that split the window in half. Even after Shay told him he was not interested, the landlord insisted on showing off his prize feature, a new shower unit with a meter in a tiny cubicle to be used by all twelve flats in the house. He spoke of the money it had cost him, like a father after giving away his daughter at a wedding. At any moment I expected him to produce an umbrella and invite us to stand under it. We finally got away from him and crossed the street to where plastic bags floated as gracefully as swans on the dark water.
‘It’s about time you began paying rent, you bollox,’ Shay said. ‘We could get a good gaff with a bit of space. I’m sick of looking at these single rooms. Are you into it?’
‘All right,’ I said, trying to keep my voice as casual as I could. On the far bank youths were drinking from plastic cider bottles outside the timber encampment of old people’s chalets. We followed the tow-path down towards Baggot Street. I remember an early cluster of prostitutes chatting under a bridge and passing a tramp with a cardboard box who was digging himself in under the roots of a tree for the night. And I can still see the half-moon of Shay’s face when he paused beneath the branches to light two cigarettes and pass one down to the unshaven figure who grunted his thanks before we resumed our discussion about the plywood mansions we could now afford to look at.
But if anything the double flats were worse. The best of them was a single room with a kitchen bar in one corner, two cheap chairs, a sofa and what had once been a small corridor down to the bathroom converted into a narrow bedroom with two bunk beds. One could smell the toilet at the end without opening the door. A young couple with a child arrived when we were leaving. The rent the landlord quoted them was twenty pounds a month dearer than he had asked from us. The girl’s eyes had a glazed look, like a refugee shunted between transit camps. I knew that no matter what he asked they would take it.
Despairing of flats, we tried for a small house off the South Circular Road. Behind the run-down terrace the grey blocks of Fatima Mansions rose. Only weeks before the families there had forced the heroin pushers out with marches on their flats at nights. I remembered a photograph of one banner in the march carried by The Concerned Criminals Against Drugs.
Paint had been spilt on the roadway outside the house to let and green and blue tyre tracks careered off in all directions. Across the road three boys looted a rubbish skip, a toddler nonchalantly smashing the bottles they threw down against the kerb. Every second house had a weathered For Sale sign; one was handwritten with just the words ‘Five thousand pounds and it’s yours’. We both recognized the estate agent who arrived in his red Saab. We’d seen him in Murtagh’s once or twice with Justin Plunkett. He kept nervously glancing back at his car as he led us in. Sooty black footprints led down the stairs to the front door. We followed them up to the bedroom where we discovered somebody had just ripped out the fireplace. The estate agent sighed.
‘Well, it’s cheap,’ he said, ‘and we never had any trouble before. It could make a really cool bachelor pad for you guys.’
‘Isn’t that kid fierce young all the same to be driving a Saab?’ Shay remarked at the window. We followed the estate agent out at our leisure. The kids had stopped emptying the skip and were watching him wide-eyed as he held possessively on to the door handle of the untouched car and tried to get his breath back.
‘You just can’t trust a word some guys say,’ Shay reminded him as we walked off.
After that Shay seemed to lose his enthusiasm for house hunting. He was sick of landlords, sick of agents. In his flat he sat beside the twin bars of an electric fire when it was cold, no longer bothering to chop wood in the yard. The atmosphere in his room had changed. I called less, sensing that not even I was welcome. I couldn’t bear to spend time at home and began to walk each evening around the streets of that suburb where we were both reared.
That was how I noticed the sign above the bookies in the old village. I told Shay about it at work. It was where he had placed his first bet. He laughed at the thought of living back there. Katie, were you one of the girls sitting on the carriageway wall that evening, watching vacantly as the car turned under the metal bridge? It was my first time there with Shay. I began to see the same streets through his eyes.
We were early and cruised through the estate he had grown up in. Ponies were tethered on the green, the telephone box so smeared with graffiti it was impossible to see into. He paused outside the house where his parents still lived. I don’t know how long it was since he had been back, but that night I knew he liked the idea of returning home. We drove back up the main street where coach horses had once halted. The shopping centres ringed the crest of the hill—before us Plunkett Auctioneers; behind us Plunkett Stores; down a lane to the left Plunkett Motors; and, beside the Protestant church across the bridge, Plunkett Undertakers on the right to complete the crucifixion.
The atmosphere of that old street was different from the other places we had seen. It was just before dusk when it’s quiet and the air is clear high above the city. The row of shops dated from when the village only had two streets. There were three rooms to the flat up a long staircase. From the window we could see over the roofs of the abandoned cottages across the road into the old graveyard behind them. I remembered that road vaguely before the dual carriageway split it in two. A small stone bridge over a stream where lorries now thundered by. The sweet shop next door hadn’t changed since then, the same
rows of comics arranged on twine in the window, the antiquated cash register that had held my six-penny bits after Mass on Sundays. We stood together gazing out past the cottages at the graveyard. Through the Gothic arch of the ruined church wall the shopping centre rose like a space-age monster. People were starting to stroll towards the pub across the road.
‘Sanctuary at last,’ Shay said. ‘We’ll open a massage parlour for the punters downstairs, install Mary as a madam, and call it “The Winner’s Enclosure”.’
The bookie stood behind us, amused at Shay’s talk. He was no professional landlord, merely a man with a space to spare. We took it there and then and arranged to move in on the Friday. We paid a deposit and he gave us the keys at once. After all my plans I was leaving home to go only a quarter of a mile and Shay somehow was coming home. When the bookie left we sat on in the twilight, congratulating ourselves, remembering things that had occurred on that road when we were children.
Shay offered to drive me home but I wanted to walk back across the bridge. My father sat in the dining-room like a grey puppet someone had draped on a chair. It was near bedtime, my mother stood at the back door calling my young brothers and sisters who were playing in the gloom. I walked past her into the garden that had grown up again in the last three months, choked with weeds and nettles, and wondered how I would find the words. It was late at night when I broke the news. I no longer wanted to hurt them but the words seemed harsh and awkward. As soon as they were spoken I felt occluded from their home. My mother cried like I was going to Australia. My father sat quietly, trying to calm her.
‘Hush Lily, he’s growing into a man now. It’s natural. We can’t hold him back.’
Yet his eyes betrayed his bewilderment and now it was I who was the stronger. I felt no satisfaction in that realization. I climbed the stairs to my room, my actions already seeming to belong to another life. My brothers were sleeping in their bunk beds. I lay awake for a long time memorizing the sounds of the house. The jangle of milk bottles, him drawing the chain on the front door, her voice calling from the kitchen, their footsteps together on the stairs. That bedroom where I had been born enclosed me with its warm familiarity. I wished I could have been gone at that moment without the hurt farewells always brought.
On the Friday night Shay called with his car. We carried my clothes out in plastic sacks, a cardboard box full of records, a handful of photographs and some books. As a child on summer holidays when my father went to work I would stand on the doorstep till he reached the corner, waiting for him to turn and give a final wave before vanishing from sight. That evening it was him who was left awkwardly there watching the car move slowly towards the bend. I twisted in the seat to wave to him and suddenly noticed how much weight he had lost. He stood stooped beside my mother, his hand raised like a geriatric child.
Next morning I woke to the noise from the bookies below, the girl’s voice on Extel reciting the non-runners and form. The odds were repeated like litanies at Mass as the punters shuffled in or gathered on the pavement outside. I pushed open the window to experience the sounds of the street, women pushing their washing up to the launderette, the barking dogs, a car nosing into a parking space. I sat taking it all in while Shay cooked breakfast. He emerged with a tray and a racing page. Sunlight filled the street. Below the window a girl laughed. We ate quietly, listening to the punters chatting. The weekend stretched before us, a kaleidoscope of possibilities.
‘Here we are again,’ Shay said, ‘back to nowhere. The fuckers will never find us here.’
I dream of clay, I smell of earth. Katie, where is this place where I’m watching you take three pills from your pocket. Now you place them in your palm, lift your eyes to the screen and stare. Swallow, sit back and soon you will begin to scream. The double horror bill flickers before you, a hand breaking forth from a grave to grab the leg of the single mourner. You scream and scream until the usher picks up the four of you with his torch. The daylight startles you in the lobby as you are pushed out. Across the road the cabs wait, coloured beetles with round legs. The driver puts the paper down as you all cram in. ‘Where to, girls?’ The wall of laughter begins again. Before he throws you out you manage to say, Just out into the middle of the road and do wheelies!’
You go along now, the time for thought has gone. Some nights you do not get home. Once your uncle came searching for you, you heard footsteps at night entering the empty factory. He paused when he found the group, cider bottles spilt, a scent like herbs. When you heard his voice you turned cold, like a joint of meat in a butcher’s fridge. He waited for you to come, embarrassed, gruffly calling. If the two boys had not appeared he might have turned away defeated. One sniggered, releasing him back into his own masculine world, a fist catching the side of the youth’s skull before he pulled you by the hood of your duffle coat like that child again screaming, being torn by him away from your home. You did not come home for three nights after that, sleeping in back sheds and cars, fighting off attacks with your nails, while he stalked deserted factories and closed parks. When you heard he had stopped and gone home you returned, ravenous and jaded, by yourself.
What do I remember most about the three months spent living with Shay? Sunday mornings with the trees in Phoenix Park still drenched with dew, light glistening in the hollow as we drove towards the cluster of lads togging out for a match at the Fifteen Acres. The golf course in the foothills of the mountains where the old man who took our money listened all day to opera on a ghetto-blaster or leaned placidly on the wall to watch golfers curse as they waded through the treacherous marsh that served as a fairway on the shorter holes. At the ninth a figure in wellingtons always emerged from the swamp, a token club in one hand, the other offering a selection of balls for sale. He was there even when we played at seven in the morning and, leaving the money under the door, were finished our round in time to drive down for work. Evenings devising a miniature putting course that wound through all the rooms of the flat, teeing off from beds and behind chairs. The week he spent teaching me to drive at dawn each morning on Dollymount Strand. The evening, a week later, when I caught him trying to tear a piece off my provisional licence when he was stuck for roach paper. And nights just doing nothing, drinking coffee and smoking tipped cigars, letting the darkness envelope the room as we lazed in armchairs.
It was an oasis of curious tranquillity. Faces remained from our childhood: the old headmaster who lived on the corner, the red-faced doctor long past retirement age. Any excuse in those days would cause Shay to go sick from work—once he stayed at home to watch Playschool. As I sat among the clerks I’d see him in my mind leaning out the flat window at four o’clock to wave the flex of the electric kettle and call Coffee girls? Coffee? as the convent emptied and the men milling outside the bookies grinned up at him. I don’t know how he did it, but twice I arrived home to find a school bag embroidered with rock stars’ names in the hall and opened the kitchen door to catch a flash of light brown thighs before the green uniform was quickly pulled down. We were far enough from town not to be disturbed by unwelcome guests, but still only twelve minutes drive from the city centre. The distinctive drone of the Triumph’s engine became famous on that street in the early morning hours.
One night we met a Spanish girl holidaying in Ireland. We had been at the races that afternoon, winning for once, drinking shorts between races to celebrate. Food kept being postponed as we left the Phoenix Park and began to drink around town. By ten o’clock we were in Murtagh’s, giddy on our empty stomachs, rolling numbers on the Formica tables. The girl was drinking by herself at the bar. She might have been twenty-two or three. Only a cool and seasoned traveller could have nosed out that bar and found her way past the shutters on the door. After a time I realized that Shay wasn’t listening to me anymore. He finished the number he was rolling, walked over and offered it to her. She laughed and shook her head. I saw him bend down to catch what she was saying. They talked on in gestures and then she came over. We communicated in sign lan
guage and broken English.
At closing time Shay pointed first to the door, then placed his palms together and laid his head sleepily on them, leaving the choice to her. She kept laughing as she imitated him with the palms and the cupped head in the Triumph Herald on the way home. There was a bottle of whiskey in the flat. It died a brief death. I could hear his bed shaking through the wall as I undressed alone, and then without warning the noise of Shay being sick.
‘I’m sorry,’ he kept repeating. ‘No food today. Jesus it’s all over your skin and all. Wait, I’ll get a cloth. Never happened before. Really sorry. Really.’
It was the only time I ever heard Shay embarrassed. The girl kept trying to play it down. ‘It okay, it okay,’ she was saying, ‘you lie down now, lie down.’
The last thing I heard was the bed jangling. I woke with a filthy hangover the next morning and noticed the front door open from the top of the stairs. There was a curious scent from Shay’s room and flies were buzzing near the bed. Shay was naked, deep in sleep, with one hand limply hanging down towards the floor. The girl was gone, having pulled the sheet neatly down to his waist. On the centre of his white chest lay a slender, curved, light-brown turd.
The Journey Home Page 9