Two young girls in the garden were running in circles around a baby who stared impassively ahead. Their mother was hanging washing on a circular line. A paperback lay open on a deck-chair on the concrete path. The eldest girl might have been thirteen. Katie surveyed her carefully and then, with a sudden pressure on his arm, beckoned him to keep still and slipped away into the ditch. He crouched down petrified, wanted to call her back and yet afraid to be heard. Katie vanished through the undergrowth and shortly afterwards he caught a glimpse of her jacket among the bushes at the rear of the house. The woman would soon be finished with the clothes. She was bound to go indoors, to find the intruder. The final peg closed over the sheets and she turned, picking up the plastic basket. Hano watched her walk into the kitchen.
On every part of their journey they’d left a cumbersome trail. Now this was the final indignity. A man appeared in the next garden with a basin of water. He placed it beside his car and rolled his sleeves up, calling to a youth who appeared at the window. Hano waited for the woman’s screams to alert her neighbours, knowing that he wouldn’t run, that he’d be caught too trying to rescue her. The woman re-emerged and beckoned quickly to the girls. They vanished into the kitchen. Hano tried to stop his hands from trembling. The kitchen door burst open and the girls ran out holding slices of bread in their hands. He breathed out and was knocked over by a sudden thump on his back. He swung round, fists raised to protect his face, and found Katie laughing at him. She was wearing white sneakers that looked too small for her and carrying biscuits and cheese in her hands.
‘She was that close,’ Katie whispered. ‘Only a door between us. Come on, let’s go.’
She limped slightly in the shoes, sharing the food with him as they walked back towards the desolate mountainside.
From then on Pascal Plunkett rarely went anywhere in the daytime without me driving him in his BMW. In the fields beyond St Margaret’s he had received planning permission to build two small terraces of houses. To reach them I had to turn off a narrow country lane and manoeuvre the car down a mud track with the tyre marks of earth movers deeply scored into its surface.
When Plunkett was in his office I spent my time out of the men’s way in the garage forecourt cleaning the spattered mud from the car. Some days I still took lunch in the canteen there, a litany of licking noises trailing me as I left the room. But mostly I ate at the bar in Mother Plunkett’s Cabin while he drank his ritual two neat Paddies from the fresh bottle placed at his elbow which he then topped with water before going over the previous night’s takings with the manager. The pub was in two sections: the bar in front paved with flagstones like a scene from The Quiet Man, with old black-and-white photographs of Kerry lining the walls; the door of the cabaret lounge at the back was in the shape of a horseshoe and the green carpet had a design of gold stetsons and wagon wheels.
I was surely the worst driver he could have chosen. My only experience had been at dawn in Shay’s Triumph Herald and frequently in those early weeks the BMW would cut out at traffic lights or I’d finally have to get out and let him park it in some narrow space. My inexperience with everything amused him: those inept sagas of reversing and stalling were the first occasions I had seen him in good humour. I’d watch him in the mirror letting me sweat until he decided to show me how to do it. Surprisingly he was a good teacher, better than Shay. I would think of the business clients he was keeping late as he sat beside me in the front until I had got the procedure perfect. A fortnight after I began driving him, in a sudden burst of confidence I came too quickly out of the driveway of Mother Plunkett’s Cabin and had to swerve up on to the ditch to avoid an oncoming car. I slammed on the brakes and glanced nervously in the rear-view mirror. Pascal Plunkett was looking delightedly back at the furious motorist who had stopped behind us and was climbing out of his car. He hit me on the shoulder.
‘Would you look at the sour face on that cunt. Drive on young Francy and stick to the road this time.’
All the way back into the garage he kept chuckling to himself and impersonating the motorist’s indignant face until by the time we pulled into the forecourt I too was bent over the wheel with laughter. When he went inside I realized with a chill that for the first time since going to work for him I had enjoyed my morning.
I was spending less time in the garage and people elsewhere were getting used to me. In Plunkett Stores I glowered at the baby-faced manager who fidgeted nervously whenever I was there, terrified that I was discussing him with Plunkett. One evening my mother told me she had been there and he had insisted on pushing the trolley for her around the shelves. The men in the pub and on the building site were more casual and I began to make friends among them. I carried on a nervous but intense flirtation with the receptionist in the auctioneer’s. The only place I hated was the undertaker’s where some evenings when I walked in my mother would look up with pride from where she knelt with her bucket and scrubbing brush. My wages were better than in the Voters’ Register but still not enough for her to give up work or stop making that weekly journey from his office to the post office and back. It was something she never mentioned though once I saw her across the street waiting for me to leave the forecourt before sneaking into his office.
Sometimes I gripped the wheel of his car with anger when I remembered my mother’s face that day; yet in a curious way I had begun to admire Pascal. It was like he was a river in torrent and I wasn’t strong enough to resist being swept along by the current. Since the confrontation in the canteen I had done everything he had asked without question, and he in turn had never raised his voice to me. I was seeing a side of his character which few people knew. As I drove along he would mimic with a vicious accuracy those people who managed his businesses. I saw how much he played along in the role which others had cast him in. He would storm off the building site, shouting back angrily at the foreman, and slam the car door, shouting for me to drive on. When we reached the tarmacadam I’d glance in the mirror and find his eyes waiting to spot mine, alive with amusement as though looking for applause for his performance.
He was gaining my trust slowly, introducing me to his empire, ensuring that everyone treated me with respect. I was like a fish, cautiously moving out from under a rock, and he was an angler gaining my trust, luring me further and further out. I had been driving him for a month when he orchestrated my next compromise. It was a morning in March and I was sitting in the car waiting for him to finish a meeting with two of his men, O’Brien and Flynn. They drifted from premises to premises, occasionally bouncers in the Abbey, sometimes even standing in for chauffeurs at the undertaker’s. But mostly they just came and went after a few words with Plunkett. They were tough men whom I rarely spoke to. Even to be in the same room as them made me feel nervous. They came out of the garage and had climbed in the back of the car before I realized what was happening. I turned around.
‘You’re driving us today, Francis,’ O’Brien said. ‘Take a left at the lights there and just keep going straight.’
I drove towards Ballymun, listening to them casually discussing football behind me and admiring the women on the footpath. At the roundabout by the shopping centre they told me to go left and then turn in, across a rubble-strewn car-park till we stopped outside one of the tower blocks.
‘Will you be long?’ I asked.
‘You’re coming with us kid,’ O’Brien replied, and when I hesitated he half-pulled me from the car.
Neither man spoke as we waited for the lift in the hallway. Two women came out with prams and we got in. It smelt of urine, the walls covered with IRA slogans, a crude picture of a penis painted on the inside of the doors.
‘Time to earn your keep kid,’ O’Brien said. ‘Just like the rest of us.’ From inside his pocket he produced a small pistol and pushed it into my hand. I was shaking so much I couldn’t hold it. Flynn bent down to pick it up.
‘I don’t like it,’ he said to O’Brien. ‘Fucking working with kids. There’s no need for him or for a shooter here
.’
‘You take your money, you take your instructions,’ O’Brien replied sourly, taking the gun from me. He opened it to show me that it was empty, gripped my right hand firmly and placed it between my fingers. The lift stopped. He put his body in front of mine in case anybody was looking and stepped out into the empty corridor.
‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘There’s nobody going to get hurt unless you fuck up. You just hold it inside your jacket so they can see a bulge. All you have to do is stand at the door and pretend to look tough – if that’s possible. If the boss says you’re to come along it’s nothing to do with us.’
The lift behind me was closing. If I had run I might have reached it. I didn’t. I turned and walked between them.
When the young woman opened the door slightly at his knock, O’Brien put his weight against it so that she fell back on to the floor. She scrambled up in her dressing-gown. She looked maybe twenty-two or three, still pretty but her face had lost its glow like a cake gone stale in a shop window. Her husband sat in a string vest and jeans on the sofa, his moustache making him look older.
‘Ah Jesus lads,’ he said. ‘Could you not pick somebody rich to rob?’
His wife backed away towards the sofa. He rose and put his hand protectively about her shoulder.
‘If there’s robbers here don’t look in this corner,’ Flynn said. ‘I’m just collecting for what we’re owed. Ask your missis.’
She kept her head down while her husband looked at her.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh God.’
‘What money? Jesus Christ Maria, what money do you owe them?’
His hands were shaking her now. She shook him off and stared into his face.
‘Open your eyes Mick will you. Where do you think the money came from when Sharon was sick? You kept saying you’d be back at work when you were better. It wasn’t much, Mick—only three loans of a hundred when we were desperate. Remember the time I told you the welfare gave me for the ESB. The fuckers gave me nothing. Nothing. I’d nowhere else to go. It’s been eight months since you worked Mick. She was sick, you were sick. I kept thinking I could pay it back from the housekeeping when you got your job back.’
The man seemed to have forgotten us. It looked as if he was about to strike her. Then he stared at Flynn.
‘I didn’t know mate. Honest I didn’t. I had a fall, off a scaffold. Been on disability ever since. You’ll get it back, every penny. Just as soon as I’m well.’
O’Brien walked over to the small play-pen in the corner, set back a few inches from the wall that was discoloured by damp. The tiny girl inside it looked up at him with curious brown eyes. He looked back at me as though waiting for a nod from his boss, then picked the child up by the leg. He walked towards the balcony door with the screaming child. Her mother tried to run towards them but Flynn pushed her back on to the sofa and produced a steel bar from inside his coat. O’Brien turned the key on the door and stepped out into the air. He held the frantic child by one leg over the balcony and said in a calm voice:
‘I’m going to count to fifty. After that you won’t need to worry about her being sick again. Move once from that sofa and it’ll be so much daughter under the bridge.’
The woman kept screeching her child’s name like a prayer. The father just sat there, hands crossed over his chest like a laid-out corpse. Inside my jacket I gripped the gun. I was leaning against the door. If I’d tried to stand by myself I think I would have fallen. At thirty the woman ceased screaming and took her eyes off the balcony to stare desperately at me. I didn’t want to look at her but I couldn’t lower my eyes. We stared at each other as the count continued, our eyes filled with terror and disbelief. She was pleading with me, knowing there was no mercy in the two men. At fifty we both closed our eyes. O’Brien walked quietly back in and replaced the child in the play-pen.
‘Twelve o’clock tomorrow. Don’t be late,’ he said, making his way towards the door. Flynn followed him. The woman had begun to sob. The men left the room and I was left staring at her. She looked up.
‘Go on!’ she screamed. ‘Go on you bastard!’
No one spoke in the lift on the way down. O’Brien reached in and took the pistol from my jacket. The doors opened.
‘A messy business,’ Flynn said, almost to himself. ‘No need for shooters or half of that carry on, whatever the fuck Plunkett’s at.’
I had the car door open when it came over me. I raced down towards the tower block wall and vomited violently at the side of the steps. The men waited inside the car. My hands were so unsteady it took me several minutes to start the engine. We were almost at the garage when O’Brien spoke.
‘I’ve two little ones myself’ he said. ‘She was never safer than in my arms. Even if he told me to I wouldn’t have dropped her.’
When I got home that night I climbed into bed. My sisters had moved in with my mother, my brothers into their room and I had the box-room to myself. I could hear children playing on the street outside. All I wanted to do was sleep, to stop trembling and forget that young woman’s face. I felt dirty, as if my body was consumed by leprosy. If I reached beneath the bedclothes I’d feel my skin peeling and rotten. I wanted to be back there, still with that gun in my hand, only loaded this time; wanted to aim it at O’Brien and Flynn; wanted to return to the garage, climb those wooden steps and aim it again at the wrinkled skin on Plunkett’s face. In the darkness I could feel my finger squeezing the trigger and see his head explode in slow motion, splattering blood over the white wall behind him. I pulled that trigger again and again and still I couldn’t feel clean.
I heard my mother listening out on the landing, anxious that I had eaten no dinner. I pulled the blankets over my face in case she came in. I told myself that I had a choice: I could flee the country, I could go to the police and tell them everything. But I knew I couldn’t, knew that even the couple in the flat wouldn’t back me up. And if I left I knew my mother’s eyes, my sisters’ voices would follow me anywhere I went. I tried to recall the figure who’d wandered through the night-time streets with Shay, but it was someone so different from the person who lay sweating in bed that it was too painful to think about. I woke next morning with sore eyes and a twisted feeling in my stomach. My sister Lisa was in the room holding a breakfast tray.
‘Mummy says I’m to give you this and thank you for the lovely new dress and the shoes you bought for me. Well, she bought them, but you paid for them.’
She paused and peered more closely at me.
‘Your eyes look real cranky, like an old fellow’s.’
I got dressed, avoided my mother, closed the front door quietly and walked to Plunkett Motors.
I drove him in silence to the building site and the pub. At three o’clock that afternoon Eddie came out and told me to go to the office. Pascal Plunkett had a brown envelope on his desk. He counted out twenty ten-pound notes and ten fives and laid one of each in front of me.
‘Don’t be fooled by sob stories,’ he said. ‘That’s the first lesson. People can always get it when they need to. That’s yours, take it.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘You were there. You were a part of it. Whether you like it or not Francy you’ve earned it.’
We stared at each other, like those old games of statues in the Voters’ Register, only this time it was deadly serious. In the end it was I who lowered my eyes and picked the money up. At the door I turned and asked bitterly why, if he was such a tough man, hadn’t he got the full three hundred back. Pascal’s laugh was different from the one I knew in the car.
‘I did Francy, but sure I loaned her back fifty. We don’t want to lose a good customer, do we?’
He was still laughing when I closed the door. Later that evening I put the fifteen pounds in a collection box for old people in my local newsagents. The girls behind the counter were stunned into silence but it didn’t make me feel any less cheap as I walked on through the darkness towards the place I once called home.
> At home I had grown more sullen. My sisters began to avoid me whereas once they had tumbled into my lap when I returned. At times I ventured back out to the pubs and snooker halls where Shay had reigned but I always felt uncomfortable, knowing that to people there I had been Shay’s friend and nothing else. Sometimes I just walked the streets; sometimes I drank. Occasionally I hid in doorways to avoid meeting people from the Voters’ Register and having to talk about the past.
Plunkett could sense the change in me. He knew how isolated I had become. I had grown to hate the hours lingering in the garage forecourt away from the men, and was happy when he suggested a more flexible arrangement. I began to come in at noon to drive him to Mother Plunkett’s Cabin. Often, after the rounds of premises and the visits to offices in the city, I would find myself back in the Abbey for the last hour of opening time, drinking at the bar while the awful strains of a local talent contest came through the wall of the lounge. By now I too had acquired a briefcase and kept receipt books and invoices in it to remind him of them. But basically my job was still to drive. I’d finish each night by unsteadily driving those last two miles into the countryside, and having deposited him in his hallway I would return through dark half-built lanes to my mother’s house and wake next morning, hung-over and sullen.
In working hours Plunkett was often silent in the car but he mellowed with drink each evening. Once as I drove him home we came to a garda check-point. I had rolled the window down nervously, knowing that I’d been sitting with Plunkett over a bottle of whiskey since eight that evening, when he leaned forward from the back seat and spoke in a more cultured accent:
The Journey Home Page 18