If my mother was out I’d leave a small pile of notes for her with my brothers and hurry away, lingering in the streets until I knew Shay had left for work and you would be gone from the flat. Then I’d come back, make myself coffee and sit with the lights off, looking down at the children still playing on the street in the darkness, and think of Shay circling that empty factory where dogs ran along the wire fence, their breath turning to vapour in the moonlight.
My lunch-times in work were still spent in the Irish Martyrs Bar, but now I drank more from habit than pleasure. The jokes Mary and Mick cracked were the same ones I had laughed at a year before, but I couldn’t fit back into that cosy world. I knew that it was only a matter of months before the same letter was left in the attendance book and I realized I would welcome it this time. Sitting back in that child-like office I knew that I was ready to leave those streets behind me at last. When Shay wanted to move again I would go with him, out into the grown-up world of Europe.
I remember it was late on a Friday afternoon in midsummer. The office windows were pulled down and the noise of the cars below could be clearly heard. A fresh breeze was blowing in, and a giddy feeling of weekend euphoria swamped the room. The clock had been pushed on ten minutes when Carol went into Mooney’s office after the break, and work had almost stopped while we kept an eye out for her return. The lads at the bottom table were playing twenty questions, the girls in the centre giggling as they discussed the previous night’s party. When I stared across at Mary she caught my eye and held it. Like herself and Shay had spent years doing, we played statues, not moving a muscle, daring the other to laugh first.
A cigarette was burning itself out in a long worm of ash beside her and Mick was muttering blue jokes to distract me, but neither of us moved. Ten minutes had gone by when the noise in the office instinctively ceased and, like Shay used to, I nodded towards the Ladies. Mary stood up, grabbing her cigarettes, but Carol had spotted her and almost trotted to reach the door of the cubicle and shut herself in before Mary had time to leave the table.
We laughed and argued about which of us had moved first. Then Mary took down the attendance book to rule out the pages for the week ahead. I collected a new pile of slips and began collating the information on to the ledger before me. Time passed more quickly when we bothered to work. The court had finished for the weekend below and I thought about wandering down to the solicitor’s room for a smoke, but decided it was too much effort. I leaned back to yawn when something puzzled me.
‘Mary?’ I asked across the pile of books on her table. ‘Do you think Carol’s trying to outdo you? How long is she in there?’
Mary looked at her watch and then at the altered clock.
‘Twenty-five minutes. Maybe she’s going to sit in there for spite till five.’
Her voice was doubtful. We both looked over towards the door. Mary rose and tentatively knocked on it.
‘Carol, are you all right?’
There was no reply. She knocked harder and put her ear to the wood. The girls at the table noticed and asked each other if they had seen her leave. Mary banged louder and tugged at the handle. It was locked.
‘Hano, go into Mooney’s and see if she’s there,’ she told me.
I knocked and entered. He sat in that perpetual twilight, his desk littered with papers. Although he picked one up when I entered, I knew he hadn’t been reading anything. He seemed to have just been sitting in some suspended state, without thoughts or emotions, waiting for the outside office to clear before going home to whatever strange woman had married him. He snapped at me that he had no idea where she was. As I closed the door I could see the sheet of paper being lowered, the eyes rising up to remind me of an old frog waiting with infinite patience beside a pond.
Everybody had gathered around the door of the toilet. When I told Mary that Carol wasn’t with Mooney she asked me to break the door down at once. Behind us the girls muttered excitedly. They knew Mooney would be furious at not being asked first. There was only a thin bolt holding the door shut. It almost gave at the first kick. I stood back and heard the silence behind me as Mooney’s door opened and his footsteps approached. I ran at the door and kicked it again. The wood splintered and there was the jangle of metal falling to the floor as the door swung open with such force that it hit the wall and flew back again. In the second it was open I saw Carol slumped on the toilet seat. Then, slowly, this time as though being opened by an invisible hand, the door swung backwards once more. Her head was resting against the wall of the narrow cubicle, her eyes closed as though asleep, but her face was horribly twisted. A pair of faded red knickers hung between her outstretched legs beneath which a small pool of liquid had gathered. As I kicked the door I had sensed Mooney only a few inches behind me but when I turned he had miraculously drifted to the back of the crowd. I looked at him for a command but he lowered his eyes as Mary rushed in and knelt beside the pathetic figure.
‘She’s still breathing, Hano. Phone an ambulance quick.’
Mooney stepped back out of my way as I went into his office and dialled the number on his antiquated heavy black phone. When I returned the girls had laid her on the centre table. She was alive, but nobody was sure if she knew where she was or what was happening to her. Mary leaned over her, whispering. It was hard to make out the words but I swore I heard I’m sorry. Two of the girls had begun crying, one of them in near hysterics. I asked Mick to take them down into the canteen. Those of us left stood awkwardly around in silence. Mooney remained in the corner near the smashed door. All the blood seemed drained from his face and it looked as if one push would shatter him into thousands of dry, crumbling pieces. Within minutes the ambulance men had appeared, professional, reassuring. They lifted her on to the stretcher and automatically Mary and myself followed them down to the ambulance. The siren started as soon as we began to zigzag our way through the evening traffic. They had placed an oxygen mask over her face and strapped a cord on to her wrist that led to a machine. A blip moved languidly across its screen and then, as we reached the hospital entrance, it ceased with a sudden loud buzzing. The assistant thumped on her chest, but she was gone. Mary had been holding her unshackled hand since leaving the office. Very gently the man separated them and folded Carol’s arms across her chest.
‘Do you know the name of her next of kin?’ he asked.
Mary shook her head.
‘Had she any?’
‘Sister and two brothers in Dublin. One sister somewhere in America she was always talking of visiting. Since the day I started work she was talking of visiting her, only she was afraid she’d be in the way.’
It was half-six when we left the hospital. From habit I suggested a drink but was glad when Mary declined. I think we both wanted to be alone, not to have to talk. Though we were going in the same direction we parted at the gate and I took the long way through side-streets until I was certain her bus had come. I thought of Mooney, guessed that he would still be in that office above the court-house, sitting with his frog-like stare. Suddenly I felt pity for him and decided to take a taxi back.
The cleaner, on her hands and knees in the hall, looked up in surprise when I entered. I realized he had told her nothing. Without speaking, I went up to the main office. It was eerie in the evening light with the high windows still open so that papers had blown on to the floor. The toilet door was still open, as though nobody had had the courage to touch it. Carol’s cardigan was draped over a chair, Mary’s spent cigarette still intact in the ashtray. Mooney’s door was half-open and I pushed it with my hand to look inside. At first I thought it was empty and was about to turn when a slight movement inside caught my eye.
‘Is she…?’ he asked.
I nodded and stepped into the gloom. He seemed to belong there, at one with the dull mahogany furniture, the wooden presses and rows of dark filing cabinets.
‘Thirty years,’ he said. ‘Thirty…’
He looked shrunken in the semi-darkness. If he left that desk and walked
on to the street outside he would be a dwarfed insignificant figure sliding around the darkest corners. Then I realized that I had never seen him outside this building, had never even arrived or left at the same time as him. He bowed his head down and his bald forehead looked like a knob of polished wood. Even his fingers, stretched like a keyboard player’s on the table’s edge, seemed crudely carved.
‘Your wife,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t you phone her?’
‘Thirty years…’ he began again in a low voice and then, as if only hearing my words, stopped and looked coldly up.
‘What wife, boy?’
‘Your wife might want to know.’
His head rolled back. It was the first time I had heard him laugh, an unearthly bitter sound from deep in his throat.
‘Wife, boy? What wife, you fool? I have no wife. No wife, no son, no daughter. I have this desk, boy, this room. Soon I won’t even have that.’
His head rolled down again. Without wanting to, I began seeing Pascal Plunkett in that chair. His words filled me with a sense of horror, like an innocent who stumbles into a haunted room. The previous winter the pipes had frozen and a workman was dispatched from the maintenance section to clear the damage. He had left a wrench on top of one of the filing cabinets and it had remained untouched, a subject for countless memos ever since. In the light, filtering in over my shoulder from the main office, its silver steel shone among the dull browns and greys.
‘But the photographs on your desk? I’ve seen them.’
‘A godchild in England, boy. I send a present every birthday and she sends a photograph.’
‘But the stories, the schools…’
He just looked at me and I shut up. How many had known or guessed? I remembered the vague smile that crossed Carol’s face whenever a problem occurred in the office and she’d say Mrs Mooney will have the dinner burnt tonight. That’s why he never left this place on time. I suddenly imagined him stalking through the main office with the lights out, touching the seats where the girls had sat, reluctant to leave his kingdom and venture out under the huge night sky. He lowered his head again.
‘Carol…one time it might have…
It was hard to catch what he was saying. My eye was drawn back to the shining wrench. I wanted to be rid of the thought but it persisted. If I approached now as I had so often dreamed of doing a year ago and raised that piece of metal above his head, would he look up, welcoming it, his eyes urging me to bring it down and end the pain locked inside that room? Would what had once been dreamed of as a gesture of revenge become one of compassion? I thought that he was sobbing but when he lifted his eyes they were dry and cold.
‘What do you want, boy?’ he demanded. ‘Work is finished. Go back to your pup friend.’
That familiar, contemptuous voice released me from the spell of the room and any pretence of kinship. I was about to call him a pathetic old bollox. Once fear would have stopped me, but now it was simple indifference that made me walk silently out, past the cleaner who stood in the main office, through that old doorway, and down to the park where a crescent moon hung above the rich clumps of trees.
There were thirty-one of us at the grave side. She was buried after eleven o’clock Mass in Deansgrange. Mooney was in before any of us that morning. Occasionally the buzzer went and Mary disappeared into his office. Apart from that we never saw him. At ten o’clock she came out with a pile of annual leave forms.
‘As many of you can go as you like. But take your time coming back, he’s taking a half-day’s annual leave off yous.’
Mary sat down in Carol’s old seat as I put my coat on. I asked her if she was coming.
‘He won’t allow me, Hano.’
Once she would have cursed his spite but now she only put her head down. I didn’t know that Shay was coming, but as the cortège reached the cemetery I saw him slip from the queue at the bus-stop across the road and join the small scraggle of mourners. It was too close in time to my father’s death for me to feel comfortable at a grave side. I left when the priest began to intone his prayers. Shay caught up with me and we walked in silence down through the ugly ranks of stones, glancing at the names of the dead, watching the occasional widower set out for his morning’s work, carrying flowers and water in a plastic bottle. I knew Shay was wondering where Mary was. I felt I should make some sort of an excuse for her and yet I said nothing. Once we would have gone to the pub and I would have found my way back to work unsteadily at five to two, suffocating the room with the smell of peppermint. But that morning we just parted at the cemetery gates with a few words. I got a bus back to town, and Shay—I’m not sure what he did. There were bits of his life which didn’t fit any more.
I left him behind, I left the hotel, Katie, the streets were buckling around me.
I had no idea of where I was going, Just knew that I had to keep travelling.
It was late with few trains running, I thrust the note at the bored cashier.
‘Anywhere,’ I said, ‘that it will take me.’ He picked the night train to Berlin.
The carriage of the train was empty, Its lights sped across the flat night,
And stopped along anonymous platforms With names that I could not pronounce.
When we reached the customs check-point, I no longer knew which country I was in.
Infinte lines of tracks stretched out, With containers rusting down sidings.
I felt that I was suffocating, And went to pull the window down.
A guard was shining his torch along The iron wheels of the train.
I clutched my passport like an icon, Trying to breathe the icy air
But his face came back into my mind And sickened me with nausea.
I longed to feel clean again, Wanted a sense of belonging back,
My reflection was staring at me From a carriage window opposite;
So old, so stale with experience. I can’t explain why I panicked,
Why I felt if I stayed I’d pass Through infinite cities into nothingness.
I just turned the handle and jumped, Ignoring the guards shouting after me
And dodged past shunting goods wagons To scale the floodlit iron gates.
I found myself racing through woodland, Towards the lights of trucks on an autobahn.
Then veered, and stumbling into the forest, Came to what looked like a ruined mansion.
It was a building where Jews had been shot, Its shell preserved as a monument.
Through the night I smoked cigarettes Leaning against the bronze plaque,
Turning a green passport over in my hands, Remembering the person I had been once,
And all I could think of till dawn Was ‘Hano will be there when I return.’
Two weeks after Carol’s funeral, Shay lost his job as night security man. I am not sure why. Maybe he tired of the provocative wiggle of Alsatians’ arses; maybe the long hours spent alone in the darkness were slowly turning him inwards; maybe the firm turned over people before they got too familiar with any job. One morning he just came home and didn’t go to bed. It was a Saturday. I heard him come in and sank back to sleep. When I woke again at eleven, he was sitting by the kitchen window, staring down at the usual cluster of men outside the bookies. The ashtray was littered with butts, smoked down to the tip. He didn’t reply to my greeting and I knew he’d been sitting there since eight o’clock. If I had left and returned that evening I think I would have found him in the same position, his hand rising and falling from his lips even though the cigarettes had long been exhausted.
I remembered how special Saturdays used to be. Three cross doubles picked over breakfast, the air of relaxation after a night’s drinking. Now an atmosphere of gloom possessed the flat and I didn’t bother even trying to talk. At noon you came, Katie. I let you in silently, and just as silently you took your place beside him at the window, lit one of his last cigarettes and followed his gaze over the row of dilapidated cottages. He never acknowledged your presence, but that morning you both seemed almost one person, fi
tting perfectly together. Now it was like I was the intruder. I slammed the front door as I left, cursing you, swearing it was all your fault, that you had dragged him down to your level of despair.
When I returned you were both gone. Coffee had been made. I took the cup you’d drunk from and smashed it in the sink, using a piece of wood to pound it into a thousand fragments. Every curse I ever knew was hurled at those ragged splinters of delft. When I was finished I took his cup, raised it above my head and then, slowly, brought it down under the jet of warm water, dried it carefully and waited for him. Dawn had broken before he returned. The noise of the door woke me in the grained light and I went out. He was climbing the stairs stiffly, too exhausted to even curse.
‘You okay?’ I asked.
He dragged himself to a chair, bent down to take his shoes off. He looked so old in the grey light that it was impossible to believe he was only twenty-two.
‘I was walking home,’ he said, ‘around a quarter past twelve. I was after two pints in Murtagh’s and had stopped for a piss at the Black Church when the squad car pulled up. What are you up to at this hour, boy? I told him I was walking home. You never heard of taxis, boy? I said I was broke. Do you work atall or are you one of them spongers living off the rest of us? I ignored him, Hano, and started walking on. The squad car crawled along behind me till I reached The Broadstone. Then he flung the back door open. Ah sure get in, boy, we’re all Irishmen together. I’ll give you a lift some of the way. They drove out to Rathfarnham, Hano, the foothills of the fucking mountains. Knocklyon, the last place on God’s earth. I was squeezed between two of them in the back. Then they let me out. Don’t go mistaking a church for a piss pot again, boy. I’ve been walking Hano, ever since. Walking. Fucking walking!’
The Journey Home Page 25