The Journey Home. Dermot Bolger
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he walked down for the early shift. You hear the smudging sound of the brush over his boots before they descend the stairs. The routine, that is what is vital for him, the pretence that there is still something to be done. The front door closes and you know he will walk to the mobile shop with the same dilemma, ten cigarettes or a newspaper. You rise quickly before he returns, the situations vacant column always the winner. You will try to have finished your breakfast when the footsteps restart in the hall and hurry to the door before he spreads the page of close type over the Formica to stoop like a man holding a mirror to the lips of a corpse.
Hope, Katie. That is what he pretends to have. You cannot bear to watch the bowed head, the finger moving steadily to the bottom of each column. You reach the school long before the lessons start. Remember, you ran here so eagerly once. Now it is no more than a sanctuary from the despair of that house. There is a wall to smoke behind. A girl says, ‘Are you game? The Bounce?’ And you slip quickly back out that gate, skirting the road he will take at half-past nine to the Manpower office, not going in if the same girl is on the desk as the day before, afraid he will lose face by appearing too eager. You run down by the side of the Spanish Nun’s, past the green and gold of the Gaelic Club, by the mud-splattered row of caravans, till you find the gap in the hedge and are running fast across the overgrown car-park to reach the vast cavern of the abandoned factory.
Here is education, here you belong. A dozen girls are gathered in the dripping shell where their sisters once bent over rows of machines. Here at last there is no pretence, no talk of imaginary futures. Sometimes they sit in near silence or play ragged impromptu games; sometimes boys come. Somebody lights a cigarette, somebody has pills. A small bottle passes down a corridor of hands till it reaches you. You hold the capsule in your hand, a speckled egg to break apart. You pause, then swallow. Hope. Four-letter words punctuate the jokes you laugh at. A girl leans on your back in tears as laughter almost chokes her. There are colours to watch. The concrete refuses to stay still. There is warmth. A circle of faces to belong to. The sound of a chain being pulled from a gate, the engine stops in the van. The girls by your side pull you on as the unformed security guard unleashes the dog. You race exhilarated across the grass, the sky twisting and buckling. You can hear barking behind you and the girls begin to scream. The wall rushes at you, automatically you jump. The sharp surface grazes your knees before hands pull you clear and down on to the path beside the carriageway. The footsteps are racing now; you join them—a flock of pigeons circling back towards the estate.
Hano and Katie had followed the weak scraggle of street lights which petered out beyond the green with its pub next to the closed-down swings beside a battered caravan in the tiny amusement park. To their left a new estate of white council houses slept with an unfinished look, out of place among the fields. On their right through the blackness they could breathe in the sharp tang of sea air blowing across the expanse of sucking mud exposed by the low tide. The road wound upwards through moonlit golf courses and the flaking paint of holiday chalets, until it levelled out into a car park on the very brink of the cliff. Hano stood with his arm around Katie when they reached the edge, mesmerized by the scene below. The whole of Dublin was glowing like a living thing sprawled out before his eyes, like the splintered bones of a corpse lit up in an X-ray. Hours before he had still been a part of it, one cell in a vibrant organism. Now up on this headland where Katie had led him he was cut off and isolated from the lives below. She stood almost indulgently beside him while he gazed, then took his hand again to pull him on through the dark. He panicked for a moment when her form vanished before him, thinking she was intent on some suicide pact, before realizing that she had begun to climb carefully down the black and seemingly impossible rock face towards the foam flashing below them. She gripped his hand, never speaking or looking back, but instinctively choosing the correct path along the slope. Once she slipped and as his arm was jerked forward he heard the noise of pebbles tumbling down to vanish into the sea below, but she didn’t cry out though her leg must have been grazed. She was up a second later, nimbly finding footholds in the rock face again. The sea wind blew into their faces, stinging his exhausted eyes, but keeping his limbs awake. He focused his mind solely on reaching the strand alive, no longer wishing to think of the events which had led him here, or the promise of what might happen when he reached solid earth again. His life, as he had lived it, was finished, but there would be time for decisions later; now it was enough to be led. Her warm hand brought him through the teeth of the night, where swaying lights winked across the water, neither judging nor demanding, but human and alive, a tiny embryo of hope.
She stopped and his momentum sent him careering against her back. They had reached the bottom. Without speaking, they walked across the sand which parted beneath their feet, slowing them so they seemed to move in a dream. A dark outline against the V of the cliffs took the shape of a concrete bunker as they approached. On both sides steel shutters glinted in the dark from the closed toilets. There was a narrow exposed entrance at the side of the shelter and a large open space at the front overlooking the sea. Most of the bench against the wall inside had been hacked away, but occasionally a strip of wood still ran between the concrete supports. When Hano struck a match he saw the walls covered in graffiti before the wind choked the flame. Sand and litter had been blown in across the floor and from one corner the smell of urine lingered. Yet when he squatted below the open window at the front there was shelter from the breeze. Katie was standing beside him, leaning on the concrete sill to gaze out at the waves.
‘How do you know this place?’ he asked.
‘What does it matter?’ She replied and huddled down beside him in silence. But after a moment he heard her voice.
‘Seems like a lifetime,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know, so fucking long ago. Often lads would steal a car at night, arse around the streets in it, looking for a chase. But sometimes, you know, they’d just drive out into the country. You’d be with them in the back, killing time, seeing what the stroke was. I loved it and hated it…brought back things I didn’t want. We were so spaced you wouldn’t think I’d remember any of it. But I know every laneway here like the veins on my wrist. They’re the only shagging things that do seem real.’
Katie laughed and leaned against him.
‘Last day I went to that kip of a school some teacher starts looking over my shoulder. We’d taken tablets the night before and things seemed to be shooting across the room. My eyes kept jerking round to follow them and I couldn’t hear a word the old biddy was saying. She screamed at me and when I looked up she was like some bleeding ghost you know, all the features indistinct, out of focus, like. But they were all that way by then…figures from another world, days rolling together in a blur, nothing real about it.
‘But I remember every second driving out here—it was vivid, Hano, you known what I mean. One time we almost drove as far as Leitrim. I was shouting directions from the back, like a lost animal finding its way home. I got frightened when we got close, screaming for them to turn the car round. They thought I was fucking cracked. “Faster,” I kept shouting as we sped back. “Faster! Faster!” Just like that little girl running through the night again, only this time I was racing away from her.’
She was silent and, just when he thought she wasn’t going to continue, her voice came out of the darkness again.
‘No matter where we went we always wound up here on the coast. I don’t know why. Walking down the pier in Rush in the dark or outside the closed-down amusements in Skerries. The cove at Loughshinny or out along the arches of the railway bridge. Out here was my favourite, around Portrane and Donabate. Watching dawn break, you know, all sea-birds and grey light over the water.’
Her voice softened as though the litany of names were soothing her. The edge of hysteria was gone that had always been present in the flat, except for the nights when she just sat sullenly for hours wrapped up in her duffle coat.
‘What happened when you reached the coast?’ he asked, taking his jacket off and spreading it over both their shoulders. They leaned close together as she searched in her jeans for cigarettes, lit two and handed him one. He watched the red tip burning upwards towards her lips as she inhaled.
‘Fuck all,’ she said. ‘That’s the funny bit. All the screaming and slagging stopped when we hit the shoreline, like we were