The Journey Home. Dermot Bolger
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stared at the ground.
‘He’s dead Katie, and I can’t bring him back for you. You know I’m a poor substitute. Now for Christ’s sake leave me in peace. What more do you want of me? What more?’
The clouds reined back the moonlight and he turned to walk forward, listening as the other footsteps gradually caughc up with his. They plodded on, neither looking at the other until he heard her voice, again almost inaudible.
‘Don’t want fucking nothing,’ she said. ‘Just be your fucking self.’
Suddenly her warm hand hesitantly touched his and found its way in between his numb fingers. He closed them over her knuckles and, when he dared to glance down, saw her face was screwed up, scanning the darkness in front. He didn’t want the squad car to return. Though nothing could lie ahead but capture, it didn’t seem important now that she was ready, for a time at least, to share whatever would come.
Katie or Cait—whoever you are. Can it be just three nights since we lay in that ditch, since you followed me mutely out the black roads? I’ve grown so used to darkness, have learnt to see things better here. That hole in the corner where the ceiling has collapsed and creepers, like the limbs of a giant spider, descend to wrap themselves around the smashed wooden rafters, or the daddy-long-legs which stumbles drunkenly towards the beam of the torch shaded by my hand. The fire has crumbled into a nest of ash. What light escapes my fingers filters across the downy weeds left after we cleared the stone floor and catches a few loose strands of your hair.
I never knew you could be at peace until I saw you asleep. Not the Katie I knew back on those streets. I’m half jealous Cait of whatever world you dream of where you belong so well. Last night a sound woke me in alarm. You had laughed in your sleep. You did it again. I looked down and in the half-light could see the faintest of smiles. I’ve never asked you where you dream of—the city, the country—which world at night becomes your home. I feared ghosts here when I was younger, before I learnt to fear the living. Now I love this darkness, the kiss of winged insects blundering against my skin; the faint drip of water from a broken gutter; the sighing of branches.
There’s so much I want to tell you, the parts you know and those you don’t. If you were awake I’d never have the chance, even if I could be this honest. You’d interrupt me, dispute facts, want your version to be told. So now even if you can’t hear I’ll tell you anyway Cait, tell those few strands of hair lit by a torch. Just this last time I’ll bring Shay back to life before we move on.
I know it was him you loved, who you came to see each evening when we stared each other out at the doorway, but I don’t think you ever knew him, not the Shay I met first, the figure who vanished into that continent. You loved the man you met when he came home, but I mourned the part of him that was left behind among those autobahns and bahnhofs. Because I loved him too Katie, loved as a brother, loved him selfishly for daring to be what I was afraid to be myself.
Where does our story begin? The first morning I crossed the park to work? No, even before then our paths would have crossed. How often did our parents pass on the main street of the village while the labourers’ cottages were being bulldozed and the estates, like a besieging army, began to ring the green post office, the pub with the skittle alley, the old graveyard with its shambling vaults? But my parents and Shay’s would not have mixed, being from different worlds, with different sets of experiences. I think of my parents, younger than I can really imagine them, taking the single-decker bus out beyond the cemetery, returning, as they thought, to the familiar hawthorn bushes and streams, to the sanctuary of the countryside. Shay used to laugh about how his father cursed the Corporation for casting them out into exile, complaining about bus fares to work in the brewery he had always walked to, bewildered by the dark lanes behind his house without the shouts of neighbours or the reassuring bustle of traffic.
Years later my father told me that the Church of Ireland built my estate, some half-arsed scheme for a Protestant colony among the fields. They couldn’t fill it from their own flock so the likes of my parents were allowed to pay their deposit and transport their country habits from bedsits along the canal back to the laneways again. A place of streams I’m told it was, each in turn piped underground as more people came. Once a row of gardens collapsed to reveal the water running underneath.
They planted trees in the image of their lost homeland, put down potato beds, built timber hen-houses. I woke to the sound of chicks escaping through the wire mesh to scamper among rows of vegetables. A dozen streets away Shay must have woken to the noise of pigeon lofts, that city man’s sport, backyards ringing with displaced Dublin accents. Briefly we played in the same school yard before he was expelled, though neither of us remembered the other. We spoke of it in awe as from another century; the monstrous thug of a vice-principal wasting with cancer among his array of canes; the tricolour flown from the mast beside the concrete steps; the screeching of seagulls which hovered, waiting for boys to be drilled into lines and marched to class, before swooping to fight over the littered bread. I wish I could remember Shay there, those all-important two years older than me, among the swarm of lads stomping after a plastic ball. But I can recall little beyond a hubbub of noise; the stink of fish from a ten-year-old who helped his mother in the processing plant each evening; the twins who shared one pair of plastic sandals for a week, each one barefoot on alternate days. And the ease with which, among such crowds, I could remain invisible. I can still repeat the roll-call of nine-year-old future factory hands and civil servants, but it’s myself that I cannot properly recall. I was like some indistinct embryonic creature, a negative through which nobody had ever shone light. Was I happy or sad? I have no memories of being anything more than a sleepwalker feigning the motions of life, living through the black-and-white rays of the television screen.
Each evening my father came in from Plunkett Motors, took his spade from the shed, and joined the chorus of rural accents across the ruck of hedgerows. I’d hide among the alder bushes bordering the hen run to watch the men dig and weed with the expertise of country hands, while my mother washed clothes by hand in the sink, light from the open kitchen door filtering through the lilac. I felt that square of earth was home, a green expanse formed by the row of long gardens. I’d pull the branches close to me while across the suburb Shay played among the red-brick terraces built by the Corporation. The gardens there were tiny with hardly space for a shed. Shay’s gang would scatter with their football if a squad car showed, then resume their games on the next concrete street, voices still calling when only the vaguest shapes could be seen dodging between the street lamps.
We grew up divided by only a few streets so you’d think we would share a background. Yet somehow we didn’t. At least not then, not till later when we found we were equally dispossessed. The children of limbo was how Shay called us once. We came from nowhere and found we belonged nowhere else. Those gardens I called home were a retreat from the unknown world. When the radio announcer gave the results of the provincial Gaelic matches the backs would straighten, neighbours reverting to county allegiances as they slagged each other. And remember, if you feel like singing, do sing an Irish song, the presenter of the Walton’s programme urged and, as the strains of ‘Kelly, the Boy from Kilane’ and ‘The Star of the County Down’ crackled from the radio, all the stooping figures who knew the words by heart hummed them in their minds, reassured of who they were no matter what incomprehensible things were occurring outside.
As long as I remained among the hens and barking dogs I too could belong, but each walk home from school by the new shopping arcades, each programme on the television religiously switched on at half five in every terraced house, was thrusting me out into my own time. I began bringing home phrases that couldn’t fit in that house when we still knelt for the family rosary. I hid photographs of rock stars beneath my mattress like pornographic pictures, wrote English soccer players’ names on my copy book feeling I was committing an act of betrayal.
When I was twelve my father brought me back to the farm bordering the Kerry coast where he had been born. I stood awkwardly in my city clothes, kicking a football back and forth to my cousins across the yard. None of us spoke as we eyed each other suspiciously and waited for our parents to finish reminiscing. Next morning before dawn he took me out to the milking shed lit by a bare bulb. I never saw him so relaxed as when he bent