Dermot Bolger - The Journey Home

‘What are you trying to prove Hano?’ she whispered. ‘That you’re better than them, or the same or different? You don’t need to. Listen, this place is full of ghosts for me. Git and Mono, they’re both doing time now. A vicious attack—no reason for it, no excuse. They shared a needle with some junkie inside. They’re locked in the Aids unit, wasting away, waiting to die. Beano’s up in St Brendan’s after burning every brain cell out. Six months ago the world looked up to them in terror. Now the kids on their street wouldn’t want to recognize them. Burned out so fast, Hano, like violent, brutal stars, you know what I mean. Never heard them laugh those last days, just sitting there, no brains, no words, slumped on the canal. “Hey Beano,” I said last time I saw him, “remember the night we crashed the car up in Howth?” He looked through me like that drunk back along the road. They’re gone now Hano, like dada walking across fields to work, Tomas with no light in his cabin. This place was theirs Hano, let them rest here. We’ll find our own maybe, somewhere.’

Then she leaned back until her head lay snugly against his chest and, rolling on to her side, drew her legs up against his and was still. Hano could feel the frustration draining from his body and knew that he was tumbling downwards into a warm drowsiness where sleep would come, as unstoppable as the waves below, crushing on to the wet strand, fainter, and fainter, and faint…

Hano dreamt of whiteness. Winter time. He was walking from a grey estate of houses down an embankment towards a new road. It had been snowing in the night. Now a single set of footprints curved downwards towards the noise of water. A new steel bridge bypassed the old hunch-backed stone one which was cut off by a row of tar barrels. A circle of Gypsy caravans squatted on the waste ground around it.

Hano knew the place now, the Silver Spoon, the bathing place Shay had often spoken of. The summer evenings when mothers from the West had sat on the grass, watching children in short trousers splashing in the water, their hands holding slices of bread and jam. The footsteps were Shay’s, yet there was no sign of movement in the camp site they led to. Scrap iron, parts of cars, a washing machine with one side dented lay on the river bed. To move was like walking through a wall of ice, cutting into his flesh, amputating the movement from his hands. The Gypsies had left clothes out to dry along the tattered bushes near the bridge which had grown solid with frost, rigid to the touch. How long had he been walking like this, searching for Shay? He passed the clothes and then looked back. A pair of old jeans were stretched between branches. Just above them was a ripped check shirt and then, three inches further up, Shay’s face grinned at him, also made of cloth, completely flat and stiffened. There were no hands, no feet and just a necklace of leaves where his neck should have been. Shay seemed to be trying to speak but his features were too frozen to allow him. Hano reached out slowly to touch the face and as his fingers encountered the icy brittleness of the cloth he shuddered and woke.

Hano tried to focus his eyes in the harsh sunlight reflecting off the bare stone of the bunker and, failing, closed them again, leaning his head back and banging it on the wall. The pain shocked him to his senses and he realized that he was freezing and alone. The memory of the dream disturbed him though the details were already obscure. All that remained was the sensation of eternally searching for Shay. Then the memories of the previous night returned and with them came paralysis. He grew rigid with fear, unable even to turn his head towards the doorway. Somehow he had expected that morning would bring normality, a return of his old world. Katie had placed his jacket neatly over him before departing. He told himself he was relieved that she was gone. There would be no responsibilities left in the hours before they caught him. He could wait here shivering in this filthy bunker or walk outside. It made little difference to the outcome. Yet he huddled to whatever small warmth the jacket and his cramped position gave him. What if they already knew he was there? The squad car parked on the beach; two guards calmly smoking on the bonnet as they waited for him to appear? What if Katie hadn’t abandoned him, but was crammed into the back seat, a burly hand over her mouth? What if the guards weren’t there? He grinned to himself. What if he had to go on, alone and hungry? There was no fight left in him. He stood cautiously up and turned around. The strand was deserted. An autumn sun was trying to thaw out above the cold waves where, in the distance, a local fishing boat bobbed like a toy Russian trawler. He put his jacket on and walked stiffly out, slapping his legs to restore the circulation.

Then he caught a glimpse of Katie bent between the boulders and limpet-covered rocks where sunlight glinted among the green rock pools. He almost shouted in relief but turned instead and waited by the water’s edge till he heard her approach. Relief had given way to defensiveness, like an embarrassed stranger trying to claw some dignity back the morning after a party. He remembered those few mornings when he woke with some girl from work, both toying with life, automatically talking when there was nothing really to say. Now when everything was urgent neither Katie nor he could speak. He realized that he had never really spoken to her until last night, that they had shared the same room dozens of times, muttered the same few words to each other without ever knowing who the other was. He knew she could sense the tension within him.

‘I thought you’d gone,’ he said at last.

She didn’t reply.

‘You don’t have to stay you know. There’s no reason.’

‘I’ll go if you want,’ she said. ‘Piss off and leave you here.’

‘You should have last night. It’s him you always wanted. Why come with me?’

‘Maybe I didn’t come with you,’ she said. ‘Maybe I just came along, you know what I mean.’

Driftwood was strewn on the beach. She moved away to hurl a piece of rotten timber back into the foam. He had always thought of her as retarded for some reason. He remembered the distaste he felt once when drinking by mistake from her cup. She was indistinct to him from dozens of girls he’d seen lining street corners around his home, jeering at passers-by, listlessly watching each day pass, smelling of boredom and adolescence gone stale. It had always puzzled him when Shay called her the country girl.

‘Maybe I just hadn’t anywhere to go back to,’ she muttered after a moment. ‘Maybe I couldn’t take another morning of it, another night. What the fuck do you know of my life anyway? Your friend killed it for me back there, made me so I could never fit in again. Would have been better if he’d knifed me.’

Hano watched a woman in a grey overcoat with a dog approach from the far side of the beach. She was the first person he had seen since the previous night. He shivered, realizing that every stranger was a threat, to be watched and avoided if possible. It was too late to move back to the bunker. Katie had hunched down watching the wood drift back towards her. The waves crashed in, splashing his feet with spray.

‘You scared Hano?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Yeah.’

‘Then I’ll go with you. Because I’m scared shitless too.’

‘Don’t know where I’m going Katie. I’ve nowhere to go.’

She was silent. He imagined Mooney’s desk, the red line being drawn, the unreality of it all.

‘Hano?’

He looked up. Her face was drawn, the hair ragged, eyes tired. She mumbled something and, when he looked blankly back, repeated it again in a whisper.