Dermot Bolger - The Journey Home

What time is it Katie? It stops when you pass into the twilit hangar of the old factory. Intimate afternoons of pills and laughter. Choices are discussed. One girl talks of pregnancy, the independence of a flat and an allowance. Another speaks of England, a bedsit shared with an older sister. Someone repeats stories of council bed-and-breakfasts in Bayswater: Asian children crammed into one room; breakfast a fried egg and a slice of bread in a plastic bag. None speak of the land outside, concrete melting into greenery that stretches away decked in alien foliage. Now all that is real for you begins here. The cold sitting-room light is forgotten; your uncle’s fist clenched around the nun’s neat handwriting; a television with the sound turned off; the steel rivets of accusations, his shame at your expulsion. What is his name, can you even remember? Good. What is your own? Even better. One girl disappears with a youth into the gloom where cobwebs hang from girders and torturous water drips at the far end of the cavern. ‘Are they?’ you ask. ‘No,’ somebody laughs. ‘She has a vampire’s teabag in.’

Outside light is glaring. You lurch across the carriageway, past the old cobbler’s bypassed by the builders, by the gothic bare-stoned mansion ensnared by Corporation terraces, up the hill of the main street, shivering in the afternoon light. The schoolgirls have been released in trails of bright colours. From outside the clothes shop you watch them come. Who was the girl who laughed among them a few months ago? Another stranger inhabiting your body in limbo. The security guard’s uniformed back turns as you slip past into the shop. A voice of metal crackles inside his walkie-talkie as the skirt fits neatly underneath your own. Like arrayed ghosts the clothes hang on racks. An assistant laughs as he chases after her down through the tunnel of clothes and you are gone through the unguarded shop door. Back to twilight, back to warmth, a dozen items laid out on a floor. The young fence lifts them up, hands one back as worthless. He leaves in their place a variegated row of pills, a thin, dung-coloured slab in a tiny plastic bag, a trace of white powder. He retreats from you with patent leather footsteps.

When you speak now it is in a private slang, birthdays and older girls’ dole days your only reference points. Your landmarks bordered by a bus to town, a view of sky through corrugated iron, a black road leading inexorably home. One night you sit with two friends by the low carriageway wall where the woodland once stood. A child behind you with his father’s axe is chipping away at a young sapling surrounded by mesh. Two youths stop in a stolen Ford, they coax and the three of you climb in, voices singing from the back seat. The last remaining red light is broken. The car shoots on like a released prisoner, but to you, half-stoned, it could be in slow motion. By Mother Plunkett’s Cabin it flies, twisting down towards the ancient castle. Overgrown branches whip against both sides of the windscreen, the girls shrieking as the wheels cascade through the flooded hollow. Chained dogs grow frantic inside each farmyard as the car skids against the side gravel and veers sharply right. They slow near the snakes of landing lights laid out around the airport, the flickering reds, the rows of coloured bulbs rising up to meet the belly of the dropping plane. But you have grown quiet now, watching the moon keeping track through the hedgerows. The songs and voices do not penetrate. What nightmare journey are you remembering? What night when he cradled your head in his arms as you cried in the seat; what car that sped under a canopy of branches away from that house; what names of dead parents whom you called out for? If you spoke now how would your voice sound; if you yearned for home which direction would you turn? The car speeds through a tunnel of trees, the shuttered moonlight between the trunks distorting your features so you look like two different persons.

Hano let her walk ahead of him, silent now like he remembered her from the city. The cliff walk led to a small cove with the ruins of a burnt-out store. Somebody had torn the election posters pasted on the concrete blocks over the windows so that only strips of the candidates’ faces were left. Katie paused, then chose a clay path across the deserted golf course towards a hollow crammed with caravans and shabby wooden chalets. Summer was past, the grass grown tall again after the trampling of sandalled feet. They huddled in the porch of a chalet with their backs against the flaking white wall in the morning sunlight. With his finger, Hano traced the name ‘Sunnyside’ in forlorn black letters on the door.

Katie pressed his hand and slipped around the side. He gazed anxiously back at the flags on the greens as the tinkle of breaking glass came. There were footsteps on wood, rusty bolts dragged back and then he was inside, searching with her for food and warmth, anxiously drawn every few moments to peer through a broken window.

It was musty in the chalet, the spartan furniture riddled with the pinholes of woodworm. They found two blankets, wrapped themselves up and waited for darkness. Both knew how vital it was to get away but were paralysed by fear, reluctant to make a decision as though the night could somehow protect them. Outside a wind was blowing up. Far off” they heard a tractor and later the noise of music and slogans being broadcast from a speeding van. Towards noon a dog barked as a woman called its name. They rarely spoke until hunger drove them out in the afternoon to plunder the empty caravans. It made little difference what he did now but he still shivered at each smash of glass.

Back under the blankets they shared what little they had found: a crushed bar of chocolate, stale biscuits, a can of beans they opened and ate cold. Katie had discovered a small radio. He hesitated before turning it on, wanting to prolong the time when he could at least pretend he might return to his past. It ranked second in the news bulletin after the report of a low morning turn-out at the polls. The party spokesmen were trying to twist the turn-out to their advantage: the government claimed it proved the people had not wanted an election, while the opposition blamed the level of apathy on disillusionment with the current administration. Both predicted that their supporters would be out in the evening. The longer they waffled on the more Hano allowed himself to hope it had all been some bizarre nightmare.

Then the details of the fire were given, with rhetorical condolences by the same spokesmen. Since morning the government had been turning it into a late campaigning ploy, knowing the opposition wouldn’t dare interrupt the saga of one family’s grief after two tragedies in a single week. The Junior Minister spoke of being glad of the burden of office at the present time, that the responsibilites of state were shielding his mind from the awful grief in his heart. When the votes were counted and the country’s future secure he would return to his native countryside and mourn among his own. Hano could see Patrick Plunkett in the studio, lips pursed over the microphone, eyes dry as he calculated the chances of bringing home the third seat with his surplus that would ensure they couldn’t deny him a full cabinet position next time. The gardai were following a definite line of inquiry but Hano’s name was not mentioned on the air. He switched the set off.

‘Fuck them,’ Katie whispered beside him. ‘We’ll get away. Tomas will hide you till you decide what to do. He has to be alive. I can feel it. He has to be.’

It could only be a matter of time. When his name was broadcast her uncle would realize. The police would check her old home even though she had never gone back before. But where else did he know outside Dublin? A blurred succession of roadways he had hitched on; the farm his father had come from; the small wood belonging to the old woman. Katie lay calmly beside him like a different person from the one he had known.