Dermot Bolger - The Journey Home

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 at the end of a journey. When the wheels touched the sand there’d be silence, all of us just staring out at the sea. It belonged to nobody, no little bollox in a peaked cap could come along at midnight and turn it off. We’d get out then and throw sand, skim stones, that sort of shite. Git and Eileen could swim so we’d smoke a few numbers waiting for them. And you know, blokes who were half-animal in Dublin would talk to you about things they’d normally be ashamed of, mots they had fancied or nightmares or the future stretching away before them. They were too thick to know how bleeding short it was.’

Like a cancer gnawing inside, the stab of jealousy shocked him and he hated the words even as he spoke.

‘Have you spent a night with someone here before?’

‘What if I did?’

‘Who was he?’

Her shoulders hunched defensively and she became that huddled figure in the flat again. Her voice was hard, almost contemptuous.

‘For fuck sake Hano, what does it matter to you? You’re not a child any more. Aren’t we screwed up enough without raising old ghosts? The past is as dead as Shay, you can’t own it or change it. So don’t explain yourself to me, Hano. I don’t want to know what the fuck you were at in that room back there. And don’t ask me questions, right. You’re still alive, I’m still alive. That’s all that bleeding matters for now.’

She was right, but after what she had seen he still needed to prove himself. But the gesture of placing his arm around her shoulder which would have been so natural a moment before now felt awkward and contrived and her shoulders stiffened beneath his touch. He moved his lips down and while he encountered no resistance, there was no life in her mouth. He knew he should stop, yet like an overwound spring, in his exhaustion and self-disgust, seemed unable to prevent himself—though he knew she would twist away, hurt and withdrawn, with her back turned to him. He laid his head against the wall, his eyes closed, and sighed. The only sound in the hut was of the waves carried in on the damp air. Then, to his surprise, he felt fingers in the dark searching for his hand again.