Dermot Bolger - The Journey Home

I was drifting slowly into friendship with him, the very casualness of it disguising its grip. I had stuck close to him at first simply to learn the rules of work but even after five days it had become more than that in my mind. There was a sense of excitement being in Shay’s presence. His friendship made no demands; it was simply given, asking nothing in return, making no attempt to conscript you to any viewpoint or take sides in the petty office wars. The discovery that we were from the same suburb was made not in terms of common links but of differences.

I remember once as a child missing the bus stop at the village and being carried up the long straight road into the Corporation estates in the West. I was terrified by the stories I had heard. I could have been a West Berliner who’d strayed across the Iron Curtain. When I was eight the new dual carriageway made the division complete, took away the woodlands we might have shared, made the only meeting point between the two halves of the village a huge arched pedestrian bridge. He listened incredulously when I confessed to not having been in the Bath Wars, then described how each summer’s day the boys in the West would gather on the hill overlooking the river valley that had miraculously survived between them and the next suburb. Below lay the only amenity for miles: a filthy, concrete open-air pool. On the far hill the enemy was massed with strict military ranks observed. Daily pitched battles were fought for possession of the muddy square of water. That Friday by the prison wall Shay lifted his shirt to show me the scar left on his back from the evening he was captured on a reconnaissance mission and beaten with a bicycle chain. I think now of Ernie O’Malley escaping through the gate that stood behind us that day, both wars a struggle to reach adulthood. To Shay the scar was as much a part of growing up there as Black-and-Tans smashing doors was to his grandfather. I told him instead of my world of hen-runs and potato beds, of opening the back door one night to find a hedgehog trapped in the light, pulling its head in and squatting for hours till it could escape into the dark.

Shay had left home when he started work at eighteen, and perpetually moved from bedsit to bedsit since. I envied him for having made the break. The world he spoke of was magical—late-night snooker halls and twenty-four-hour kebab shops where the eyes of a waitress at four in the morning were lit by Seconal, walking home from a poker session to a flat at dawn with thirty pounds in change. That Friday afternoon I desperately wanted his friendship, wanted his respect, wanted to become a part of his world. I tried to lie and invent experiences but found I hadn’t the confidence.

Instead I tried to prove my manhood by cursing Mooney and speaking of the hatred already building in me. It was contagious in that cramped office where no one knew who would be reported next. Only once had I been inside Mooney’s inner office where the blinds were kept drawn, giving the room an air of perpetual twilight. An old-fashioned lamp with a metal shade burned on his desk, highlighting his joined fingers, and a white circle of disordered papers stretched away into the dusk at the table’s edge. Leather-bound volumes coated with dust lined the walls except for the space behind the desk where the largest map of the city I had ever seen was hung. The political boundaries had been drawn and redrawn on it as successive governments reshaped the constituencies to their advantage. Once a year when Mooney went reluctantly on holiday with his wife and children, Carol worked in a frenzy to make sense of the papers before his return. I had been sent in to deliver two completed folders and Mooney had ignored my knock and my query about where to leave them. Only when I was leaving did he speak. I see everything in this office, he intoned. I turned. In the lamplight it was impossible to see his eyes, only the joined hands motionless on the desk. They picked up the nearest paper, dismissing me. But as I cursed him by the wall of the jail I realized Shay was the only person who didn’t share in the collective orgy of hate. For him it would have given Mooney a stature he didn’t deserve.

He kicked at the ashes, enjoying the last few breaths of air.

‘Listen Hano, that’s his world up there. Do you not think he knows how they hate him? I tell you, the man gloats on it. Not only has he got them for eight hours a day, but before work, after work; every waking hour they spend discussing how they hate him makes him the axis of their lives. He lives off it for fuck sake, it gives him importance. Just ignore the cunt. That’s what really kills him.’

Shay grinned and began to walk back towards the office, teaching me the golden rules of survival and promotion. Do nothing unless you absolutely have to. Make no decisions whatsoever. Perpetually pass on responsibility. Remember that no extra work you do, even if you stay till midnight, will ever find its way on to your record. Only your mistakes will be marked down, black marks on your file for ever. Any innovation will be seen as a threat by those above you. Therefore those who do least, who shirk all decisions, will always progress. It was why Mooney, who spent his day brooding behind an Irish Times at his filthy desk, now commanded his own section, while Carol, who ran and fetched, who kept the office running single-handed, blundering her way through the work he refused to touch, would never progress beyond being his useful assistant. She had committed the fatal mistake of making herself indispensable and would remain there till Mooney finally retired and some white-shirted graduate came in to modernize the office over her head. I had been wrong to imagine work as an adult world. The same old roles of childhood were played out there. As we walked up the steps I wondered suddenly would I be there till sixty-five, learning to rise the ladder and lick higher arses? The thought frightened me more than the unemployment I had known a week before.

Back in the office Shay and Mary played games to spin out the afternoon. If Mooney was safe from them, Carol rose to their bait every time. At half-four, Shay cocked his head like an Indian tracker, then clicked his fingers. Mary had reached the Ladies before Carol even opened Mooney’s door. I watched Carol discreetly check the locked door as Shay and Mick bent their heads dutifully down. She pretended to examine the stacked shelves beside the toilet, shifting uneasily from foot to foot as the minutes passed. Beside me Shay and Mick took bets and softly hummed ‘Singing in the Rain’, until after a quarter of an hour Shay raised his head, touched my shoulder lightly and switched his humming to ‘Here We Go, Here We Go’.

‘Is the post ready, Paula?’

‘No, Carol. I’ll have it finished in five minutes.’

‘What have you been doing all afternoon? Must I do every little thing in this office myself?’

She clenched her fists against her scarlet face and skipped up and down like a child with a rope as she screamed ‘There’s none of yous good!’ Shay watched her flee the room and race across to the toilet in the pub, then picked his watch up.

‘Fifteen and a half minutes,’ he told Mick. ‘You jammy bollox.’ He passed a pound across the table and rose to tap three times on the door. Mary emerged with the paper, glanced around surreptitiously and used it to put the clock on five minutes.

At five to five we stampeded down the steps. The weekend, which had been the worst time of the week when I was unemployed, suddenly stretched joyously before me. I stood enjoying the late spring sunshine. Shay had left just in front of me.

‘Good luck mate,’ I shouted. ‘See you Monday.’

He waved back and then paused.

‘What’s your hurry?’ he said. ‘Fancy a pint? Celebrate your first week of survival.’