The Journey Home. Dermot Bolger
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promised myself I’d go home after the last race when we stood on the steps at Leopardstown that afternoon. Then Shay met a friend who had won a share of the tote. Out of obstinacy he’d refused to take a cheque and we waited to escort him back to town by taxi with a plastic bag full of small notes and coins. Again I swore to leave after we had a drink with him, then after we’d eaten and then on the last bus.
The party was on the far side of Rathfarnham, a girl from the office’s twenty-first. In the hallway of the house she rented with four others Shay found a bottle of whiskey and one of gin. He emptied them secretly into the basin of punch and went round with a spoon ladling it out. A bonfire blazed in the backgarden. Mick sat on a swing, a six-pack between his legs as he rocked back and forth, the glow of a roll-up sweeping in an are through the air. Figures fluttered in the semi-darkness. I collapsed into a hedge and fell asleep. Shay and Mick must have carried me inside to the living-room floor. I woke next morning stiff as a cloth left out on a line in winter, the blanket placed by Shay still over my shoulders. I found him asleep upstairs, his arm around some girl. He woke and winked, untangling himself discreetly.
Scowling, we wandered through street after street of new homes, completely lost in that new suburb at the foothills of the mountains as remote to us as our own had been to our fathers. The brickwork on each house looked too new, too consciously trying to be old, not to seem like Noddy houses. We grumbled in the clean air, among the brightly painted doors and privet hedges, speaking of the poetry of rusting steel, our favourite old factories, crooked laneways decked with glass and graffiti. Families were climbing into cars for Mass, a dog came proprietorially out to investigate and fled to the sanctuary of his porch when Shay knelt to bark at him. After an hour a bus came. An old tramp sat across from us in the back seat playing a mouth organ and banging his feet in time to the tunes. I knew I finally had to go home. I left Shay in the city centre looking for his car abandoned on Friday night and nervously got a bus. I tried to rehearse words to myself, remembering the speeches I made to my father in my mind about the old woman. Now the same phrases come back again five years on. This time I swore I’d say them.
But in the end I said little and they said less, though I could see the hurt in their eyes. My young brother told me they had gone to the police earlier that morning. I kept wanting to explain but as soon as I stepped back inside their house I knew that, like trying to talk about the old woman, it was impossible to bridge our worlds.
But this time I think my father wanted to tell me he understood. I had sensed his attitude to me change the first day I returned from work, but to my mother I was still a child. I could hear her scolding him in the kitchen for not being firmer as I lay in my room. I wanted to go down and apologize but by now it had become more than just a weekend. I was punishing them with my silence just for being what they could not help being. A mother and father I loved but no longer belonged to. It was time to enter my own world yet it seemed I couldn’t make the break without causing them pain and deliberately denigrating the memories that bound us. What had once united me with my parents now seemed ridiculous—those memories of gardens and jockeybacks. From that Sunday I was like a wound inside their house, festering without air, living only for the evenings when I could take the bus to town.
Because now it was Shay that I lived for. In the weeks that followed I didn’t just want to be with him, I wanted to become him. Sometimes it seemed I had almost succeeded. Towards closing time in a pub, if I lowered my head for a moment with his voice still in my ears, I felt physically locked inside his body, seeing through his eyes, sharing his thoughts. At work the girls slagged me for unconsciously imitating his gestures as his key words found their way into my speech. Even Mooney treated me with caution as an appendix of Shay.
Each night spent wandering through bars and parties with him made my home seem more distant. I was split in two, my personality changing each time I opened the front door, the afterglow of being with him reinforcing my isolation in that room where my parents sat trapped before a television. In their company I was sullen, closed in on myself, but once I left I could feel myself change. I would shout and embrace him when he entered the pub and he’d laugh, calming me down like a young puppy. Drink gave me courage to become all my imaginings. I hid behind it, stumbling down alleyways after him, falling, singing, hopping up to ride on his back to shout like a Horse Protestant. I became a jester unleashed, knowing only exhilaration, yet capable of being stilled and made to feel childish by one look of irritation from him.
I longed merely to be allowed to take a blanket and curl up on his floor below the huge bay window. As each evening progressed I’d grow nervy, ordering that last drink for us just a fraction too late for me to reach the bus stop on time, glancing at the pub clock, dying for him to suggest that I stop over. Sometimes he’d be chatting up a girl or just tired and wouldn’t bother and finally I’d have to face the long walk back to my parents’ house, with the night oppressive on my shoulders. But more often he would offer me a mattress and I’d casually accept, trying not to sound too excited.
The night would wind leisurely back to his flat, via kebab shops and snooker halls. Shay kept a small axe under the seat of the Triumph Herald and auctioneers’ signs and advertising hoardings on quiet corners we passed often vanished in the darkness. Back in the flat he’d chop them up, hold a match to the fire-lighters thrown beneath them, and we’d sit across from each other at the Victorian fireplace, talking over dope and tea about our pasts and our plans. Often the front door banged at two in the morning and Mick would arrive with a group of mates. I’d clear the table while Shay searched for the cards. Dealer’s choice for any poker variation; Klondikie, Southern Cross, Ace High, Blind Baseball, Seven- and Five-Card Stud, under a barrage of wisecracks while Ian Dury and Wreckless Eric revolved in the cramped space beneath the sink. If the game flagged he’d throw in a few rounds of In-Betweenies, and we’d dare each other to go for the pot, laughing when somebody lost and had to stoke it.
If dope was plentiful Shay would produce an ornate water pipe from beneath his bed. Slowly it passed along the lips of the gamblers. I’d close my eyes and lean backwards to feel the room lurch and buckle in my mind, white colours merging into brilliant shades that blazed against my eyelids. I’d open them to arguments about who should go for skins to the twenty-four-hour shop. I’d offer to go and stand blinking in the bright shop, feeling like a criminal as I asked for washing powder and sliced ham as well in an effort not to buy the cigarette papers too conspicuously. The boys would crack up when I returned, clutching the bag of shopping guiltily under my jacket. They’d break for coffee and, still slagging me, hold putting competitions on the carpet with those who were knocked out, betting on those who were left.
Some nights people brought bags of magic mushrooms which Shay fried on a pan with oil and salt despite protests from all. They took time to take effect. On the first night I had forgotten them when the colours began to explode. Shay was sleeping in bed. I lay on the mattress beside the embers of the fire like a man strapped to a galloping horse, feeling the drug like a Martian from a B-movie coming alive in my body. For two days at home I still felt them as I sat before the television with my father, frightened to speak or make a sudden move, paranoid that he would notice the twitching I imagined I had developed.
One night Mick fell asleep lying on the side of the bed. Shay took every poster and cartoon off the wall to collect the Blue-tack on the back. He rolled it into a long sausage stretching from Mick’s hands which we joined at his groin up to his mouth. We smeared the tip with mayonnaise and, carrying him gently outside, left him to wake on the front steps. That was the night Justin Plunkett came by with a slab of black from Morocco smuggled in through the diplomatic bag. He was out of place, deliberately slumming it in his expensive leather jacket among the cluster of jeans and grubby sweat-shirts. He left soon after, blown out by the lads’ indifference. On the steps outside he woke Mick.
‘Hey, my man, it’s not cool, you’ll catch cold.’
‘Go and fuck yourself!’ Mick said and, after thinking about it, added to the retreating back, ‘And fuck your politician daddy too’, before stumbling back inside. Then, as always, it was back to the cards, money still passing across that table when dawn greyed the window. Finally Shay would kick them out, curl up on his bed, and I’d lie again beside the fire, knowing that in a few hours I would screw up my eyes in the light and walk with him to work, the