‘You know something Hano?’ Shay said. ‘I missed this kip. It’s strange isn’t it, you don’t even need to like a place to miss it. Just look around you – this is a ghost town now, and there I was in the heart of the future, if you like; not actually homesick but hauling around this incomplete feeling. I mean, how can you leave somewhere when it’s walking around inside you?’
We reached the V in the road by the wrought-iron gates of the torn-down orphanage. Three youths were climbing over the wall. One hurled an empty flagon back on to the littered grass. For the first time Shay began to speak about those final months. I let him talk on, not daring to interrupt in case he stopped again. He described the things I knew first: the workers’ dormitories, the autobahns, the railway stations. Then he paused, remembering. We were passing the petrol station where I used to work, another anonymous figure waiting for dawn among the banks of video screens inside. Shay laughed, an ironic, bitter sound.
‘One factory in Germany was so bad,’ he said, ‘that we had to sleep in communal tents in the grounds. We were the lucky ones, the Irish workers; we had some rights, we were part of Europe—even if they couldn’t figure out why they had let us in. If you had seen the way they were treating the Turks you’d understand what I’m talking about. One girl from the local town was seen talking to a young Turk at a night club and nobody in the canteen would sit beside her. I saw young Germans from the office spitting when she passed in the street.
‘The harvest had to be canned as it came in, so we were working twelve-, fourteen-, eighteen-hour shifts. It was a bumper crop; people were being forced to work impossible hours. We used to catch frogs and put them in the tins hoping that whoever found them would sue the company. There were eleven of us Irish lads, so needless to say there had to be a strike. We weren’t actually looking for much, we were just pissed off with the way we were being treated. There were a load of Brits there, they came out at once and most of the others joined in the next day. The Turks were the last to come out, they were the worst paid and had the most to lose. We made it one of our conditions that they received equal pay with the rest of us before we’d go back. The place was swarming with company officials from Bonn within a day. It would have been over in half the time had they agreed to pay the Turks.
‘It was great crack actually. Before then none of us had really mixed much. We knew we had them by the balls; the fruit was starting to rot in the containers outside. Two days after the company gave in the Turks invited some of us over to their tent. It was designed to sleep a hundred people but had a hundred and seventy crammed into it most nights. The drink was flying, some men had wives and kids in Turkey and started passing around photographs. The leader of the Turks must have been nearly sixteen stone. He had a tiny moustache and the saddest face I ever saw. I’d never seen him smile until that night, but he was in great form. He went out into the field for a piss and when he didn’t come back after quarter of an hour the Turks started murmuring among themselves. I went out to see what was keeping him.’
Shay paused again. He pulled his jacket closer and stared in at the overgrown tail-end of the cemetery falling down towards the river.
‘It must have taken at least six of them to overpower him. He was built like a heavyweight boxer. I heard the moans and had to search with my hands to find him in the wet grass. His arm was twisted awkwardly behind him, obviously broken. I lit a match, Hano, and could hardly distinguish any features on his face. It was smeared with thick blood except for his mouth which kept opening in a small, round O. I was still staring at him when they caught me. The first kick got me in the back and I kept my arms over my face and tried to curl into a ball as the boots came in on all sides. They stopped after a few minutes. I was a European: the police might get involved if they went too far. Here’s the bit I can’t forget Hano, where it all starts to fall apart on me. I heard them moving off and had half-risen when one turned and, despite somebody calling him in German, ran back. His boot caught me just above the eye and as I keeled over I heard him shout, You’d give that scum the same pay as us, would you, you Jackeen bastard. It wasn’t the bruised ribs Hano or the blood streaming down my face; it was his accent. Pure, unmistakable bog Irish.’
We had reached the new bridge over the Tolka. Ahead of us the dual carriageway stretched up to the old village. He pointed down towards a pile of rubble where I could still make out the outline of four mud walls near the swirling water.
‘My mother used to bring me down here through the woods,’ he said, ‘before they built the carriageway. Her sister’s buried in the cemetery. And always as a bribe we’d go down into that old woman’s cottage for a wafer of ice cream. Remember wafers? Was that this century or last I keep asking myself?’
When he mentioned it I suddenly remembered that cottage, the half-door, the shop in the woman’s sitting-room. I understood the bewilderment in his voice. It did seem like a distant century: my dead father in his shirt sleeves; my mother pushing a pram as I ran excitedly ahead of them.
I walked up that long curve of carriageway with Shay, remembering the vanished icons buried in my past: an old green pump; a half-buried granite milestone; religious processions to the holy well that was now forgotten and boxed in by houses. As I listed each one I found he remembered them too, that we did share a past. And I realized that it wasn’t the bright streets of the city centre that had brought him home, but this invisible, unofficial city which we both inherited.
When we crossed the high metal bridge Shay climbed up on to the railing. For a second I thought he was about to hurl himself into the path of the trucks below. Instead he jumped to his left on to the old graveyard wall. He scrambled over it and jumped down, then grinned and beckoned me to follow. We walked through the broken indecipherable headstones and into the ruins of the old church. It had been roofless for over a century. Through the half-tumbled-down gothic windows, curtained by ivy, we could see the lights of the houses around us. Shay lit two cigarettes, handed me one and lay back on top of an old vault.
‘Remember the stories from school?’ he asked. ‘The secret tunnel from here out to Dunsoughly Castle, the grave robber who died of fright in a vault here when he caught his coat in the lid he had screwed back down. What do you say? I doubt if the kids tell them to each other in school anymore. We caught it Hano, the very tail-end of one place and the start of another. And it’s fucked me up till now. But I don’t want to drink or smoke or travel or fuck any more. I just want to lie here in my own home place which no longer exists except in my head.’
He sat up and tossed the cigarette away.
‘Hey, we’ll go home Hano before the Plunkett brothers rezone this and build an amusement arcade here.’
One morning, a fortnight after I had quit working for Plunkett, Shay came into my room and threw a letter in a brown envelope on to the bed. It wasn’t a bill we figured, so it might possibly be a rebate cheque. He cautioned against haste in opening it, the longer it remained sealed the more interest might be accumulating inside. I propped myself up with a pillow and we smoked two cigarettes each before deciding it was safe to open it. It was from Dublin Corporation, offering me a temporary position again for six months while they were updating the new register of voters. I had to confirm my availability to Personnel and report to a Mr Mooney on Wednesday. It was the same letter word for word that I had received a year and three months before. I looked at Shay while below us the girl’s voice started announcing the day’s runners and riders. He emptied his pockets on to the bed, then picked up my trousers from the floor and turned them upside down. A pound note and some silver tumbled on to his few coins lying in solitary opulence on the bedspread. Rent was due on Thursday, the first ESB bill had arrived that morning. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Phone the fuckers,’ I said.
It was uncanny to walk back through the door and see the same benches with the same faces bent over the same newspapers. Nothing had changed, or so it seemed at first. Then I noticed Carol was missi
ng and it was Mary who drew the red line and gave out the orders for the day. I took my old seat inside the door; Mick nodded and tossed a roll of Sellotape at me. The newspapers were lowered like a fleet of ships surrendering as Mary vanished into Mooney’s office.
‘Where’s Carol?’ I asked Mick.
He raised one finger to his head and twisted it.
‘Out sick for the past month,’ he said. ‘There’s talk of Mooney retiring and they had some computer engineer in looking over the records to start designing a new system. She still has herself convinced she’d be taking over from the old bollox. She started staying on with wads of work after we went home. I don’t know who she was trying to prove her worth to: Mooney wouldn’t notice if she was here till midnight; none of us could give a fuck; and I doubt if anyone in Personnel could find this hole on a map. They found her asleep here one morning.’
My life had changed so much since I had last sat in that office and yet, like a schoolboy returning after the summer holidays, by the afternoon it felt like I had never been away. The same petty jokes were in currency; the same rows over whose turn it was to do the shopping for lunch; the same expectations of transfer lists were whispered across tables. It’s impossible to describe the sense of unreality about that office, how the real world halted outside its high windows. Even the noise from the court below failed to penetrate the old walls. The world of O’Brien and Flynn, Shay’s story of fists and boots in a German field, the slow moving human snakes in the employment exchange, they could have all happened on a distant planet. Once I’d been terrified of Mooney; I had carried hatred home in my heart. Now, after Pascal Plunkett, all I saw was a pathetic old bastard. I watched him coldly when he came out that morning and knew he sensed the change within me as he avoided the table where I sat.
A week later Carol returned. Subdued in herself, she wandered between the two offices like a displaced person. Although he had tormented her, she asked about Shay with genuine concern. I felt sorry for her now. The graduates with their jargon and computers were waiting to bring the office into the twentieth century. Till Mooney went she was useful, keeping the office turning. I knew she would be left, a curious anomaly, spinning out her final working years, unwanted and unneeded, in her pensionable job – left behind as her family had left her; living in two rooms of that crumbling ruin in Deansgrange. She was convinced that in her absence Mary had been plotting to take her job, and now rarely spoke to the younger woman. Each lunch-time she locked herself in the office rechecking the figures done when she was away, desperately searching for the reassurance of mistakes.
Lamenting his sold Triumph Herald, Shay began to wander back towards town in the evenings and arrive home laughing and stoned like in the old days. He’d rush into my room and hurl pillows and shoes at my bed until I’d finally get up and sit with him in the kitchen, smoking joints and swapping jokes for hours. There was an intimacy about those conversations when we were relaxed and jaded. Ideas became tangible in ways I could never recapture in the morning, when I’d curse him as the clock jangled through my sleep and I’d stumble in late for work to be nursed back to health by Mary’s ironic tongue and the baby Power in our tea she now sent me across to the pub each morning to buy.
One night of torrential rain, Shay accepted a lift home from Justin Plunkett and I woke in a sudden sweat when I heard his voice, remembering the feel of his uncle closing in behind me. I lay awake reliving it until I heard the door slam, then pulled on a pair of jeans and went out. Shay was sitting at the table, wasted from the bottle of whiskey Justin had purchased. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders before going unsteadily towards his room.
Whatever money he had on his return was gone, and he was anxious for work of any kind. Over the next month he worked his way through the usual jobs: a late-night kebab shop that lasted four days; washing dishes in a restaurant; helping out a mate on a furniture van. He had been working for two nights as a kitchen porter in a top hotel when he called the chef an animal for spitting into the soup. Half an hour later, as he was scraping pots with his hands buried in boiling water, the assistant manager threw his wages into the sink and gave him two minutes to be off the premises before they set the bouncers from the disco in the basement on to him. The Friday after that I arrived home to find him dressing to go out.
‘New job Hano,’ he said, pulling a second jumper on. ‘Security man up in a factory in Raheny. Black economy like the rest of the shagging city.’
He was given no uniform, no radio and no form of identification, and said his major fear wasn’t burglars but trying to convince the police he worked there if they ever stopped. Two Alsatians paced around the boundary fencing. They growled but would not attack him as long as he kept between them and the building. They were trained only to assault anything that moved between them and the fence. He had no key to the factory and nowhere to shelter from the rain except beneath the overhang above the side door. He spent his nights peering in through the wire shutters over the windows and trying to guess what was manufactured there. The security firm’s brochure described it as Twenty-four-hour Personal Protection. At the end of his ten-hour shift a young student came to relieve him. They had to wait until the dogs were at the far side of the building before switching places. When he came home the first morning I asked him what it was like.
‘Ever spent ten hours looking at an Alsatian’s anus?’ he asked, throwing his jacket on the chair and yawning. ‘Look on the bright side. In Amsterdam they’d probably have charged me a hundred guilders for the privilege.’
Over the following weeks I began to see less of Shay. Mostly he would still be in bed when I came home. He’d rise when I had finished eating and we might sit together for an hour before he began his journey to work. The next morning he would stumble in just before I left for the Voters’ Register. We’d nod and go our separate ways.
One evening I arrived home to find you, Katie, seated at the table in the kitchen. You stared up at me blankly when I entered, as though I were the intruder. Besides taking an instant dislike to you, there was little more I thought except that Shay’s taste had deteriorated. The girls he had always brought back were open and uncomplicated. The flat was an adventure for them; they talked and laughed openly. But you sat in your coat, hunched up as if trying to fit into the smallest space. Your black hair was tightly cropped which gave your face a stern, almost aggressive look, and you refused to say a word back to Shay until I had left.
The next evening you were there again in the same seat, with your coat still on. Shay was rolling a joint on the table, you watched him intently, then lifted your eyes to stare at my face as if daring me to stay. I sat down and took the joint when Shay passed it to me. I looked between the pair of you, trying to understand what was happening.
Remember Katie, how you said you despised me on those nights you called to the flat? I grew to hate you too, to hate your long possessive ring of the bell, your sullen face which stared at me but never spoke till we reached the kitchen. In the next weeks I cursed you as often as you ever cursed me. Some evenings you called when Shay was out, both of us brooding in silence, watching the television with the sound turned off. Every few minutes you’d ask, Are you sure you don’t know where he is? Your voice full of suspicion as though I were hiding him in the next room.
Those few rooms were my Ark. I had built a life there with Shay, lost it and managed to reclaim it against the odds when he returned. Now you were there each night, intruding on its intimacy like a cold wind breaking up a fire. It was not that I wanted Shay exclusively to myself; I had welcomed a dozen girls through those rooms. But they were different.
There had been vast breakfasts cooked in the mornings, Shay teasing them as he turned pancakes expertly. There had never been accusations or tears, more often than not he had let the girl choose him. They were walked to the bus-stop, kissed when the bus came, and rarely seen again. I had come to see them as part of the atmosphere of the new flat, like the mammoth poker sessions back
in his old one.
With you, it was as if you brought in all the tension of the streets outside each time you came. But I was fooling myself when I blamed you. The tension was there already, branded deep inside Shay by Europe and as deeply inside me by Pascal Plunkett. Even before you came the flat had ceased to be what it was: the past was the past, and Shay and I had grown into different people.
Once I had always understood him, but now I couldn’t fathom his relationship with you. You seemed to be constantly in that kitchen, either sullen, or else laughing in a high-pitched, hysterical voice as if on something. Through his bedroom door I could see the bed neatly made and he never brought you in there in my presence. I used to wonder cruelly if he took you on top of the table because you never seemed to leave it.
Sometimes, just to avoid you, I’d wander up to my mother’s house, but I felt uncomfortable there too. If she had asked me straight out about Pascal Plunkett I might have overcome the feeling, but instead she chattered on nervously about my job or my sister’s forthcoming confirmation, wondering if I could get a day off to be there instead of her father. The whole period of my life when I worked for Plunkett hung like a sheet of ice between us. She knew he never gave money back and since that day he had avoided having to meet her. He wouldn’t visit the undertaker’s on the evenings she scrubbed the floors there, and if he did accidentally confront her when she worked late he was nervous and kept his head down. I knew he was terrified about what she might know, that the small world he ruled totally could be sniggering behind his back. I had thought I could escape him but he had even taken away the house where I was born. I couldn’t enter it without being reminded of the morning when I had staggered home, my face bruised by his hands.
The Journey Home Page 24