Dermot Bolger - The Journey Home

Hano had no idea where they were heading. Each time they reached a crossing he followed her blindly. Two miles beyond Swords they crossed the main Belfast road, quiet at that time, rows of cat’s-eyes dead for want of light, awaiting the noise of trucks in the distance.

She brought him down a side road where a solitary street light lit a row of old labourers’ cottages. A dog padded out from a garden, wagging its tail as it jumped up against him. It was lonely and desperate for attention, following them to the edge of the light and whining mournfully as they were swallowed back by the dark. Without warning, Katie began to whisper like a drowsy person drifting towards sleep.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘this is what I remember best. Did I ever tell you…about being lost out in it, hidden from the world. You know, in Dublin…sometimes I’d lock the bedroom door at night and curl against the wall, but no, it wasn’t the same, you know what I mean, not like I remember it. Too artificial, like, who the fuck were you fooling. There’d be voices on the road, street lights. You knew you weren’t cut off.’

Katie paused. She might have been addressing herself more than him. Hano listened, uncertain what she was talking about. Her voice was harsher, more like her own, when she continued.

‘I killed this feeling, made myself forget. Murdered each fucking memory one by one. Wasn’t going to be like my uncle, like his friends. Jesus, the same accents, same phrases they used forty years ago when they worked the land. They sound so stupid, so fucking pathetic. When you leave something Hano you leave it, you go on, you know what I mean. God, I hated those bastards for always reminding me.’

Hano remembered the evening her uncle came looking for her, the same huge hands his own father had, the same outdoors stance, his awkwardness in the tiny hallway. He said nothing, afraid to break the spell and cast them back into the bickering they had always known. Katie’s voice mellowed again.

‘Funny thing is, you can’t kill it fully. Keeps coming back to haunt me…nights like this. Waiting for dada to put out the gas lamp in his room before I’d get out on to the shed roof. You know, twice he caught me and leathered me black and blue, but I still did it, even when he threatened to tie me to the bed. I was eight but I was in love with danger. Not what you’d think now, spacers or being raped by cider heads, but, you know, werewolves and ghosts waiting for you, trees with malicious spirits you have to pass—all that sort of shite Tomas filled my head with.

‘Two miles it was from the road to our house, the tarmacadam gave out quarter way there. Except from Tomas’s gaff, there wasn’t a light for miles. And every few yards you’d shiver, daring yourself on, because you knew the further you went the longer the journey home would be. And that was the real thrill, Hano, that was fucking it. You know, you’d creep forward, shivering at every bush and shift of moonlight, till finally something—I don’t know, the creak of a branch, a plastic bag in a ditch—set you off racing back through the dark, knowing that whatever the heck was behind you was gaining at every step, was about to touch your shoulder. You’d long to scream but your throat would be too dry, your legs covered in scratches, your clothes caught by briars, but you wouldn’t care. Your lungs were bursting, legs pounding, but Hano, Jesus, Hano, the thrill of it, you know what I mean, the thrill of the journey home. Like being shot through with electricity. All the pills, all the booze, they were nothing to that.’

He remembered her uncle speaking, with his hands awkwardly gripping the leather belt of his trousers. ‘If Katie’s here tell her to come home tonight. The aunt gets worried. She can’t help herself, keeps wandering off.’ Katie stopped and shouted across the dark fields.

‘Not bleeding scared of you now goblins or vampires. Come out if you dare!’

She relaxed her grip and began swaying along the road in front of him, teasing him to follow. And despite what had happened his mood lifted and he laughed, running with outstretched hands to chase her. They could have been any young couple on a midnight escapade as she screamed and dodged his grip, twisting and turning on the road, stumbling against the ditch and blundering on. He ran towards her, forgetting everything. Two dogs outside a nearby cottage began to bark and the chorus was taken up in all the other farmyards along the road as they raced past, occasionally catching hold of each other, more often careering freely along. The moon slipped its moorings of cloud again and threw shadows of leaves like crazy paving on the road before them. She turned to look at him and slipped into a deep ditch, barely missing a clump of nettles. He looked down in panic at her crumpled body lying awkwardly where it had fallen. The countryside was alive with outraged dogs. He climbed quickly in, cupping her neck gently in his palms as he bent to study her face. There seemed no sign of life. He pressed his face closer and suddenly her mouth was open, her tongue burrowing like a saturated animal between his lips. As suddenly as their first kiss had begun it was over, her shoulder pushing him to one side as he lay confused, watching her climb up to the roadway, her face closed, staring ahead as she started to walk onwards into the dark.

It’s strange how a city grows into your senses, how you become attuned to its nuances like living with a lover. Even when you sleep it’s still there in your mind. Out here Cait, it’s a different kind of isolation, a living one. Later on, when I’d walk home at dawn from work in the petrol station, I’d feel a sense of the suburb as being like a creature who’d switched itself off, leaving street lights and advertising signs as sentinels. But out here, even in the dark I can hear the noise of branches shifting, of hunting and hunted creatures. Here nothing really sleeps except with one eye open, alert for danger.

I keep trying to describe that office in my mind. I should know its every mood. Yet there is only a blank when I try to recall it, a dull collage of afternoons staring at an antiquated clock; of childish games played to relieve the monotony, rolls of sellotape hurled across tables, infinite rounds of twenty questions, fencing with the long poles required to open and close windows. In winter two Supersers heated the room. Those nearest the heater were scalded; those further away wrapped their coats around their shoulders and bent their heads under the long electric lights. That first morning it felt like a crypt, but it took time to realize that underneath the silence people were living a subterranean existence with a private language and private jokes, each clerk equipped with his or her own technique of surviving the tedium. I had always thought of work as involving some personal skill. As a child I’d bring my father down his lunch in Plunkett Motors and watch the men hammering out panels or respraying cars. There seemed a purpose to it all, a definite end-product. The figures worked in their oil-stained overalls with a curious dignity, self-assured in their skill.

That’s how I had imagined the adult world. But here there was just the endless procession of blue files and green files to be sorted and stamped. I was earning as much money as my father but was ashamed to tell him what my work involved. After a fortnight I began to imagine some higher official was playing a joke on me, unsorting files at night and putting them back. The names seemed the very ones I had sorted the day before, the details of offspring over eighteen familar before I wrote them down. Shay and Mick had invented a game where they would call out people’s names and addresses and make us guess by their ages what the children were christened. Shay said you could learn to date the fashions in children’s names like the vintages of fine wines.