Dermot Bolger - The Journey Home

He stood a few feet from me, happily indifferent to whether I came or not. I thought of my mother at home, my father due in from Plunkett Motors at half-past five, washing his hands in the deep enamel sink, my little sisters running in and out the kitchen door behind him. I didn’t want to admit to being expected home.

‘Ah, I’m a bit skint. Had to work a back week, you know yourself.’

‘Jasus, there’ll be enough times when I’ll be broke. Get into the car for fuck’s sake if that’s all that’s wrong with you.’

They would wait till the Angelus came on the television, neither praying nor speaking till the chimes stopped, then they’d cover my plate and leave it in the oven. There would be no questions asked when I got home, just silent hurt filling the room of plywood furniture.

A battered Triumph Herald was parked by the prison wall like a relic from Black-and-Tan days. ‘My only love,’ Shay said, patting the canvas roof, and with great difficulty managing to lower it. The rusty bodywork had received more blows than a punch-drunk boxer. After four attempts the engine reluctantly spluttered to life and we moved off towards town. I felt both guilty and elated, filled with a sense of liberation. And perhaps because we had spoken earlier of our home place, all the way to town we talked of travel, each charting more mythical journeys across the European continent. Paris, Berlin, Lisbon; places that to me were just names from subtitled films glimpsed when my parents went to bed, but for Shay they were real. He spoke of them like women he would one day sleep with.

That evening was my first glimpse of Shay’s Dublin. It was like an invisible world existing parallel to the official one I had known, a grey underworld of nixers and dole where people slagged Shay for actually having a job. One summer he’d worked as a messenger boy on a motor bike and knew every twisted lane and small turning. I kept intending to go home after each place we visited but then he’d suggest another and we’d be gone. There was no premeditation, the evening just drifted on its own course. I’d imagine my mother’s plain cooking gradually stuck to the plate, the meat drying up, the shrivelled vegetables. Then Shay would park another pint in front of me and that would put an end to that. I began to see how Shay survived the office without bitterness or hatred. To him it was just a temporary apparition, eight hours of rest before he entered his real world.

At nine o’clock Shay insisted on buying me a Chinese meal, joking that the seagull’s leg refused to stop twitching. By then I was talking as I had never talked since I sat in the old woman’s caravan, living off every word he spoke, making him laugh with stories about my father’s boss. But I shied away from any reference to my home, ashamed of it suddenly as I envied his freedom, his experience, his accepted adultness. Two girls sat at a nearby table. Occasionally one glanced across at him.

‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Will we give it a lash? It’s up to yourself.’

I got frightened of being caught out. I was not a virgin but was terrified of the direct approach. My few successes had been scored hurriedly after dances, brought to a messy climax, before bolting as though from the scene of a crime. If we approached I knew I would be tongue-tied. I hesitated and, trying to feign an experienced air, suggested they might not be the type. He grinned at them and gave a mock wave of his hand.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Cute country girls in their bedsits. They may have lost their virginity but they’ll probably still have the box it came in.’

But it was obvious I was nervous and when they rose to leave he blew a kiss after them and suggested we play snooker instead.

The hall was a converted warehouse with no sign outside. The old man behind the counter was watching a black-and-white television. He greeted Shay like a son and asked him to mind the gaff while he slipped out to the pub. The walls had been whitewashed once but only vaguely remembered the event. We chose the least ragged of the vacant tables. Shay broke, then leaned on his cue to look around the semi-derelict room.

‘I used to live here after I was expelled from school. Old Joe had great hopes for me but I knew I hadn’t got it. The place is in tatters now but no wankers come in. I tried a few of the new ones. Deposits, video cameras, and toss-artists who think a deep screw is a mot with a BA. Fuck this, I said, I must be getting old.’

It was ten o’clock when we left. The old man still hadn’t returned but occasionally men left a few quid behind the counter as they wandered out. ‘Is it cool?’ Shay asked. ‘You sure you don’t have to head home?’ I lied again and followed him through the feverish weekend crowds beneath the neon lights, then down towards a warren of cobbled laneways off Thomas Street. The pub we came to looked shut, the only hint of life being a fine grain of light beneath the closed shutters. A tramp passed, stumbling towards the night shelter. He mumbled a few incomprehensible words, one hand held out as though his fingers were cupping a tiny bird. Two children sleeping rough watched us from the doorway of a boarded-up bakery. Shay tapped three times on the steel shutter and I had the sensation of being watched before it swung open. A middle-aged Monaghan man with an old-fashioned bar apron beckoned and welcomed Shay by name. The downstairs bar was thick with smoke, countrymen nursing pints, a figure with a black beard gesturing drunkenly in the centre of the floor. Two old women sang in a corner, one lifting her hand with perfect timing at regular intervals to straighten the man beside her who was tilting on his bar stool. Nobody there was under fifty, no one born in the city that was kept out by the steel door.

‘Gas, isn’t it?’ Shay said. ‘Knocknagow on a Friday evening.’

He gazed in amusement, then headed downstairs to the cellar. Here the owner’s son reigned, the father never coming closer than shouting down from the top step at closing time. Four women with sharp, hardened faces sat in one corner drinking shorts. The dozen people at the long table shouted assorted abuse and greetings at Shay as he grinned and waved two fingers back to them. He called for drink and introduced me to his friends. I began to suss how the locked door kept more than the industrial revolution out. The girl across from me was rolling a joint; the bloke beside Shay passing one in his hands. He took three drags and handed it on to me. The pints arrived. I dipped into the white froth, my head afloat. Two of the women in the corner rose and ascended the stairs, bored looking, stubbing their cigarettes out.

‘The massaging hand never stops,’ Shay said. ‘Pauline there left her bag behind one night so I brought it over to her across the road in the Clean World Health Studio. She was clad in a leather outfit after skelping the arse off some businessman who was looking decidedly green in the face as if he’d got more for his forty quid than he bargained for.’

‘Forty quid?’ I joked as the next joint reached me. ‘Well fuck Father Riley and his bar of chocolate.’

It was to be the first of numerous nights with Shay in haunts like that, always tucked away down crooked lanes. I think he had a phobia about streets that were straight. But that night in Murtagh’s stands out because everything was so new and spinning faster and faster. It had all reached a blur when the young man in the check suit appeared, with features so familiar I drove myself crazy trying to place them. As he spoke he clapped his hands like an American basketball player, his body perpetually jiving as if linked to an inaudible disco rhythm. Shay frowned slightly when he saw him approach. He was the first person there Shay seemed to tolerate more than like. The young man slapped Shay’s shoulder and shook hands with me with a polished over-firm grip.