Dermot Bolger - The Journey Home

Each morning the crocodile of clerks looped its way through the crowded hallway down to the narrow canteen. We drank tea and talked the gossip and rumours of the office while through the window above the door a garda sergeant called out the names of those charged. It seemed an invisible world to the clerks: they pushed their way past junkies trembling on the steps, past clusters of hard chaws supporting the walls or mothers burdened with children and infinite, helpless patience. Only Shay would nod, pausing to joke with some old lad drinking a bottle of milk on the stairs. Once when we came out they were bringing in a tinker girl. She was no more than fifteen, in the first bud of womanhood. It took four officers to carry her into the courtroom, her body twisting in a grotesque, sensual dance. The clerks paused and then turned to mount the stairs to the dusty shelves while her screams echoed through the building.

What else can I tell you about? The gnawing, all-consuming hatred of Mooney who rarely spoke, confident of his power as he placed his hand on some girl’s shoulder to enjoy the tremor of unease that rippled forth. I’d imagine his tongue lightly wetting his lips each time an increment form came on to his desk, or a temporary position came up for renewal. His days were spent making neat reports to personnel on every mistake, drawing black marks with a sensual pleasure. A black-and-white photograph of his wife and two children stood on his desk. Occasionally he would mention them in his Monaghan accent to some new girl, his brow knitting with anxiety about their progress through college, his tongue lolling over their achievements like a lullaby. Then an hour later he would stand behind her, screeching about her overuse of sellotape.

Six months before I joined a girl was tested for cancer. The hospital decided to keep her in but she insisted on taking a taxi back to the office first. Everyone was at lunch so she left a note for Mooney on the back of a blank voter’s form before returning to the surgeon’s knife. She woke up without her breast, but slowly recovered, painfully learnt to face the world, to venture out and then return to work. On her first morning back she was sent to personnel. On the desk lay the offending voter’s form in a blue folder with a report on the abuse of official stationery.

And finally there was Shay, like a light switched on in a projector. When he came in the office seemed to burst into life. He’d steal some girl’s cigarettes and make a show of passing them round, give mock radio commentaries of the Blessed Virgin landing at Knock, secrete sticks of incense in the filing cabinets. Above all he drew people out, spending days, if a new girl came, just getting her to talk. He had worked there for three years before I began and knew every nook where one could hide, every trick to waste a half-hour. The curious thing was that he was the one person Mooney kept his distance from, cautious because he could not put him into any slot. They measured each other like chess players: Mooney, a grand master baffled by the seemingly ridiculous moves his young opponent made; Shay, knowing that the more outrageous his actions were the more Mooney would stall, terrified of being tricked into making any decision.

Most of the girls queued for lunch in the small coffee shop across the road where Carol held court with tales of neighbours in Deansgrange and former clerks who had gone to the bad. As I hovered outside on my first morning Shay took pity on me, whistled softly and nodded across the street towards the Irish Martyrs Bar & Lounge. There an inner circle met. Mary, the longest serving clerk, scapegoat for Carol’s tantrums and humours, and Mick, quiet and small, grinning to himself as he wolfed his way through pints of Guinness. The bar was jammed in an uneasy truce between policemen and criminals, nodding familiarly as they waited to be served by the old barmen. When I complained that it was my first day and I was afraid to drink, Mary reluctantly bought me an orange juice and then spiked it with vodka when my back was turned. That lunch-time I began to see the humour behind their serious faces.

Mick was the occupant of a Rathgar bedsit, expelled from college after three years of playing pool, degreeless and a disgrace to his strong farmer father, but with a highest snooker break of seventy-six, a love of German films and a poker fixation. He rarely spoke till the afternoon, as he nursed each morning’s hangover in. Mary had just passed the wrong side of thirty. She had joined after school, intending to stay for a year and never managed to leave. Even that first day I knew she never would go now. She told the bluest jokes in her Liberties accent as she spent every penny she had on you, but rarely mentioned her three-year-old child at home, never spoke of the daily struggle to cope alone. Between them Shay sat, egging them on as they mocked the size of each other’s sexual parts while surreptitiously pouring drink into me.

At two o’clock they helped me cautiously back up the stairs, Mary shovelling mints into me to disguise the smell. After every few steps they’d pause to agree how awful they were, then burst out into laughter again. That first afternoon passed in a hazy blur, wedged in between Shay and Mick hiding me at the bottom table. The room swayed in a welter of flying sellotape and blue jokes, the elbows of the lads prodding me whenever I teetered towards laughter.

It seemed unreal when I got home again to face my mother’s eager questions. I stood in the shorn garden trying to sober up, suddenly resentful of Shay with his permanent position. He was safe in a job for life. All they needed to give me was three days’ notice. He knew the rules while I was being led blindly down. But soon I realized I was not. Shay kept beside me as the first week rolled on, his intuition so refined he could warn me the instant before a door opened or a buzzer rang. And the work was so tedious that despite my apprehension I was drawn in, fascinated by his cool good nature, his audacity. Some mornings Mary gave him a conspiratorial wink and he’d disappear until break time when he discreetly emptied the baby Power in their cups at the top of the table, slipping the empty whiskey bottle back into his pocket before Carol arrived. In the afternoons the voices of solicitors and policemen wafted through the air vent as we blew smoke from the joint out the downstairs toilet window; his eyes amused at my terror whenever their footsteps came near. And gradually I learnt to surrender my trust to him. He kept me always just the right side of the line, teaching me how to look busy by perpetually carrying a pile of files as I wandered through the room or by stacking work up in front of me to create the appearance of speed.

By the Friday I knew everything about the job that needed to be known. My hands could file the forms away in my sleep. Indeed, when I closed my eyes on the first nights I automatically saw piles of registration forms being ticked and passed from tray to tray. The forms came in cardboard boxes that were carefully stored and returned. Those boxes that had burst open were burnt. That afternoon Shay beckoned me out to the landing. Below, the guard was calling out the last few cases before the weekend. Without looking down I could sense the crush of bodies piling against the court door. Shay selected four of the sturdiest cardboard boxes and reefed them apart with an expert left foot. He handed me two and we were gone. The incinerator was two concrete slabs placed against the wall of the old prison. We burnt each box individually, dutifully standing over them until the last one turned to ash. That was when he told me about the girl with one breast.

‘Mooney made Carol do his dirty work, of course. She had visited young Eileen in hospital twice a week. I found Carol up there that lunch-time, her cardigan over her shoulder, eyes raw with crying.’