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CHAPTER TWO Monday (#ulink_563a44df-c48e-543e-9b9b-9f064d1f243b)
Hano dreamt of whiteness. Winter time. He was walking from a grey estate of houses down an embankment towards a new road. It had been snowing in the night. Now a single set of footprints curved downwards towards the noise of water. A new steel bridge bypassed the old hunch-backed stone one which was cut off by a row of tar barrels. A circle of Gypsy caravans squatted on the waste ground around it.
Hano knew the place now, the Silver Spoon, the bathing place Shay had often spoken of. The summer evenings when mothers from the West had sat on the grass, watching children in short trousers splashing in the water, their hands holding slices of bread and jam. The footsteps were Shay’s, yet there was no sign of movement in the camp site they led to. Scrap iron, parts of cars, a washing machine with one side dented lay on the river bed. To move was like walking through a wall of ice, cutting into his flesh, amputating the movement from his hands. The Gypsies had left clothes out to dry along the tattered bushes near the bridge which had grown solid with frost, rigid to the touch. How long had he been walking like this, searching for Shay? He passed the clothes and then looked back. A pair of old jeans were stretched between branches. Just above them was a ripped check shirt and then, three inches further up, Shay’s face grinned at him, also made of cloth, completely flat and stiffened. There were no hands, no feet and just a necklace of leaves where his neck should have been. Shay seemed to be trying to speak but his features were too frozen to allow him. Hano reached out slowly to touch the face and as his fingers encountered the icy brittleness of the cloth he shuddered and woke.
Hano tried to focus his eyes in the harsh sunlight reflecting off the bare stone of the bunker and, failing, closed them again, leaning his head back and banging it on the wall. The pain shocked him to his senses and he realized that he was freezing and alone. The memory of the dream disturbed him though the details were already obscure. All that remained was the sensation of eternally searching for Shay. Then the memories of the previous night returned and with them came paralysis. He grew rigid with fear, unable even to turn his head towards the doorway. Somehow he had expected that morning would bring normality, a return of his old world. Katie had placed his jacket neatly over him before departing. He told himself he was relieved that she was gone. There would be no responsibilities left in the hours before they caught him. He could wait here shivering in this filthy bunker or walk outside. It made little difference to the outcome. Yet he huddled to whatever small warmth the jacket and his cramped position gave him. What if they already knew he was there? The squad car parked on the beach; two guards calmly smoking on the bonnet as they waited for him to appear? What if Katie hadn’t abandoned him, but was crammed into the back seat, a burly hand over her mouth? What if the guards weren’t there? He grinned to himself. What if he had to go on, alone and hungry? There was no fight left in him. He stood cautiously up and turned around. The strand was deserted. An autumn sun was trying to thaw out above the cold waves where, in the distance, a local fishing boat bobbed like a toy Russian trawler. He put his jacket on and walked stiffly out, slapping his legs to restore the circulation.
Then he caught a glimpse of Katie bent between the boulders and limpet-covered rocks where sunlight glinted among the green rock pools. He almost shouted in relief but turned instead and waited by the water’s edge till he heard her approach. Relief had given way to defensiveness, like an embarrassed stranger trying to claw some dignity back the morning after a party. He remembered those few mornings when he woke with some girl from work, both toying with life, automatically talking when there was nothing really to say. Now when everything was urgent neither Katie nor he could speak. He realized that he had never really spoken to her until last night, that they had shared the same room dozens of times, muttered the same few words to each other without ever knowing who the other was. He knew she could sense the tension within him.
‘I thought you’d gone,’ he said at last.
She didn’t reply.
‘You don’t have to stay you know. There’s no reason.’
‘I’ll go if you want,’ she said. ‘Piss off and leave you here.’
‘You should have last night. It’s him you always wanted. Why come with me?’
‘Maybe I didn’t come with you,’ she said. ‘Maybe I just came along, you know what I mean.’
Driftwood was strewn on the beach. She moved away to hurl a piece of rotten timber back into the foam. He had always thought of her as retarded for some reason. He remembered the distaste he felt once when drinking by mistake from her cup. She was indistinct to him from dozens of girls he’d seen lining street corners around his home, jeering at passers-by, listlessly watching each day pass, smelling of boredom and adolescence gone stale. It had always puzzled him when Shay called her the country girl.
‘Maybe I just hadn’t anywhere to go back to,’ she muttered after a moment. ‘Maybe I couldn’t take another morning of it, another night. What the fuck do you know of my life anyway? Your friend killed it for me back there, made me so I could never fit in again. Would have been better if he’d knifed me.’
Hano watched a woman in a grey overcoat with a dog approach from the far side of the beach. She was the first person he had seen since the previous night. He shivered, realizing that every stranger was a threat, to be watched and avoided if possible. It was too late to move back to the bunker. Katie had hunched down watching the wood drift back towards her. The waves crashed in, splashing his feet with spray.
‘You scared Hano?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Yeah.’
‘Then I’ll go with you. Because I’m scared shitless too.’
‘Don’t know where I’m going Katie. I’ve nowhere to go.’
She was silent. He imagined Mooney’s desk, the red line being drawn, the unreality of it all.
‘Hano?’
He looked up. Her face was drawn, the hair ragged, eyes tired. She mumbled something and, when he looked blankly back, repeated it again in a whisper.
‘Will you come home with me Hano? Will you?’
‘You know I can’t. They’ll be looking for me.’ He felt a sickness in his stomach as he spoke.
‘Not there Hano—home. They took me from it one night, half-asleep in the back of a car. Miles of darkness and then I remember waking to street lights flashing on and off like a lighthouse beacon when we’d pass under them. Thinking if I screamed loud enough I’d wake and my parents would come. And all the time my uncle’s face staring down at me, his hands stroking my hair and saying in that gruff voice of his, You’ve a new daddy now. A new daddy.
‘You know, I told myself I didn’t miss it. Drinking with the girls I’d make them laugh with stories. The soldier Ryan who slept in a concrete pipe in his field and moved his cattle into the new house the County Council gave him. Old Tomas’s tales, even the way my da…dada used to speak.’
‘But how long has it been…?’
‘Eight years.’
‘Were you ever back?’
‘No. That night with the girls in the car…but I told you, I got scared. You know, at first my uncle tried to talk to me about it but I’d put my hands over my ears and scream. One time he even decided to bring his family down to the grave and I bit his hand when he tried to get me into the car. Can’t explain it Hano, I waited for months in Dublin for them to come for me, then I blamed them, I cursed them. I was eight, Hano. I didn’t want to understand, I just wanted them back.’
Without a glance in their direction, the woman had begun to climb the steps leading from the beach. He became aware of how hungry he was. Katie was looking at him, waiting for him to speak.
‘Why not just go Katie? Why do you need me?’
‘Listen Hano, don’t you think I’ve tried? All those nights I’ve slept out, thinking at dawn I’ll go. Walking down to the carriageway and watching the trucks, waiting till one stopped and then always just standing there, unable to move. There’s an old man there Hano, he could help us.’
‘Your man Tomas? Who is he anyway?’
‘He’s just an old man, a farm labourer. He worked with dada. Two miles into the hills Hano. You’d be safe. He’d take us in.’
England was the place to go. It always had been. The enemy which gave refuge, the dull anonymity of Leeds or Bradford, the digs and building sites his father had flitted between, dreaming always of returning home. If he got away now it might be possible to gain a new identity, start again. Here it was only a matter of time, there would be nowhere to hide. Yet instinctively he knew that he wouldn’t run as he’d done all his life. He had never been bright like Shay but he could be stubborn. He remembered the farewells in Murtagh’s, no longer cardboard suitcases and cattle boats, but green cards and holiday visas. Illegal emigrants melting into the streets of American towns. As the airport posters proclaimed, they were the young Europeans, fodder now not just for factory floors but for engineering and computer posts. But once you left you were gone for ever. Shay had tried to return and failed. Hano knew it would be his last way of keeping faith, as senseless and futile as the night he’d sat beside the tramp in the hospital after the fight.
‘What if this old lad’s not there? He could be dead.’
‘Have you a better idea?’
Hano stood up and, pulling his jacket tighter, shrugged his shoulders. Anywhere was as good as nowhere and it was dangerous to stay here. She touched his shoulder.
‘Do you still hate me?’ she asked.
He shook his head.
‘I don’t even know you,’ he replied.
‘I never knew what hate was till I met you,’ she said. ‘You know, every night walking to the flat I’d pray you’d be out. I’d put my ear to the door to guess whose footsteps were coming down. Shay’s were loud and quick in his old boots; yours were a dreary tread. Every time I heard them I’d pray to God you’d fall and break your neck. You should have seen yourself, opening the door like a nightclub bouncer and mumbling, “Are you coming in or what?” Without you, I thought Shay could be mine. So don’t make me ask you for anything, Hano. But I’ll go alone this time if you won’t come.’
He put his hand hesitantly on her shoulder. She didn’t look up or pull away.
‘I can’t fill his boots, Katie. And I’ve lived in his shadow so long I don’t know what to do without him.’
She touched his hand for a moment and let it fall.
‘He’s dead, Hano, and I don’t want some sort of substitute. You stand or fall by yourself. So don’t lead or don’t follow me, but if you’re going let’s just get the fuck away from here together.’
‘You know if you’re caught with me they’ll probably charge you as well.’
She stared back at him without replying.
‘Another thing,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Where the fuck is Leitrim?’
She smiled for the first time, then turned, and without waiting for him, began to walk towards the edge of the rocks. He looked back once at the bunker and followed her. He took her hand as they fought for footholds among the crevice pools and boulders confettied with seaweed and damp moss, but when they had climbed up to the unpaved cliff walk that mimicked the twists of the rock face he let go of it again, uncertainly.
A seal’s head bobbed below them like a lost football. A lone sea-bird stood its ground on a rock, head constantly brushing the underside of its wing. There were tentative drops of rain. In the silence the horror of the previous night returned and he felt giddy with terror. He kept trying to justify it in his mind but knew it made no sense to anyone except perhaps to her. The images came back with the clarity and detachment of a horror film that seemed to have no connection with him. His past might have happened to somebody he’d vaguely known and lost contact with. When he’d hang back as Shay plunged them into another bout of lunacy, the older lad would say, ‘One day Hano you’ll go wild and leave us all only trotting behind you in a cloud of dust.’ There was no Shay to see it, but Hano knew he had been thrust from his cocoon and could never manage to climb back. He followed the small figure with the cropped black hair along the cliff path knowing that this time was a bonus, with every second worth fighting for.
A single rusted strand of wire ran between them and a sheer drop. A stone wall with tiny flowers clinging to the crevices divided them from the fields on the far side. Before them a tall water tower rose like an upturned pint glass dwarfing the imitation round tower beside it. It had been built as a folly by a landlord in famine times but a century of weathering made it indistinguishable from the real thing. Behind it the cluster of red-bricked Victorian buildings which formed the Portrane asylum began to appear, flourished with turrets and Gothic trappings like the mansion of some cursed inbred clan. Silent as ghosts a stooped line of its patients appeared slowly around the corner ahead of them, a nurse’s white uniform blazing among the shabby greys and browns of their clothing.
When Hano and Katie reached the first couple they drew back towards the safety of their minder. The line stopped and shied away towards the wall until they had passed. The old men’s faces twitched under caps as they watched. The final old woman had a radiant girlish smile and waved back at them from a drugged stupor. Her eyes were the brightest Hano had ever seen. Beside her a bald man in his forties was turning in a constant circle with a slow and perfected step, like a child trying to be dizzy. The others simply looked old, bemused and abandoned. The nurse smiled and motioned her charges into life again. A middle-aged man was doing press-ups on the lawn in front of the hospital. It was impossible to know if he was keeping count or aware that he was being watched. He stretched face down on the grass, gravely raising and lowering his body as though determined to prove his strength or keep the flame of sanity alive in his mind. Katie shuddered and turned away from the wall.
‘Christ, I hate asylums,’ she said. ‘Always remind me of the one at home. A former workhouse it was, a rambling, rundown ruin. It wasn’t just for the sick, you know. It was a dumping ground for anyone they didn’t want, stuck out on the edge of the town. Whenever we had to pass it, I’d beg mammy to cross the road before we reached the gate. I was always scared she’d leave me there. That was her biggest threat, not dada’s strap or the bogeyman but we’ll send you off to the home.’
In Dublin Hano rarely remembered her mumbling more than a few words, and then they had always been of the streets outside. Now that she had begun to talk of Leitrim it was like she’d never stop.
‘The time the nuns in the school asked my uncle to take me to the psychologist was when I ran away first. Three nights kipping out in an old car by the Tolka. All I could think of was the spinsters locked up in that place because they couldn’t be married off and the backward kids shut away so as not to shame their families before the neighbours. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t be like that, it would be all shagging ink blobs and when d’you start using dirty words, but it was the same fear inside me.
‘There was this woman, our next neighbour after Tomas, called Mary Roche. She was twenty-five years in that home before her mother died and some relative back from England found out and signed her release papers. Mammy often brought her in because she could hardly feed herself by then. She lived on crackers, single-wrapped slices of cheese. Anything that came in plastic was good because it was what visitors had brought in for the other patients. If mammy left the kitchen she’d sit with her arms in front of her on the table for hours on end.’
‘What happened to her?’ Hano asked.
Katie shuddered, looking back down the path as if she could still see the line of patients.
‘She was only twenty when it happened. Some carpenter down from Dublin fitting out the family shop. One night her father found her bed empty and caught them in a shed at the back. The carpenter was in hospital a week before he managed to slip out. She was kept locked up. You know I think it wasn’t just what she was doing but who she was with. If it had been the doctor’s son they would have all been indignant and yet delighted. But it wasn’t, so they beat the skin off her back. Once she escaped to Dublin. Her father caught up with her after five days, famished, still in the same clothes, looking for the carpenter’s digs. Doctor O’Donnell signed the committal papers. He’d have signed over his granny’s corpse for a brandy.’
Katie leaned against the stone wall, staring at the hospital as she spoke. Hano put his hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off.
‘The year I was born, Hano, there was a scandal in the town. No papers carried it, nobody spoke to strangers, but people knew. One evening Mary Roche told my mother. They didn’t know I was there, against the side of the dresser, hardly daring to breathe as I tried to make sense of her words. I didn’t understand them all but I understood the terror in her voice.
‘On weekend nights The Railway Hotel stayed open after hours for select customers. When the owner finally got sick of their drunken talk, Doctor O’Donnell would bring a few cronies across to the asylum—the chemist, the draper, a few big farmers with sons at college, the local councillor with his fainne. I could see them all in my mind as she listed them. They’d drag the retarded girls out of the wards to use them as whores. Can you imagine it? The stink of whiskey off their breaths and their laughter billowing down the corridor. Do you want the really funny part, Hano? The punch line? They’d bring in little boxes of Smarties for the girls. The two night nurses stayed quiet, they had jobs and families. It could have gone on for ever only some guard, fresh out of training school, reported the whole thing to his superiors and got transferred to the arse of Donegal for his trouble. The only charges were against the publican for after-hours serving. The doctor got the hint or maybe the inspector got in on the act.’
Hano stood back, afraid to touch her hunched-up shoulders. The man on the lawn had finally stopped. He lay face down, motionless.
‘When I was eight, Hano, they unveiled a statue to some poor wanker who’d been shot at eighteen by the Black-and-Tans. They’d a pipe band, a priest and altar boys, the usual old shite, the FCA strutting round with empty rifles. The organizing committee had a row of seats on a raised platform. As each of their names were called out I could hear my mother trying to hush Mary Roche as she intoned like the response to a psalm, He had me! He had me!’
Katie turned to look at him. Her voice had grown shrill and he saw tears in her eyes.
‘So why the fuck do I want to go back? To that fucking pain? Dada waiting in the square for those bastards to give him a day’s work. You know I worked beside him every evening when I finished school. I can see them still arriving in their cars to survey the lines of workers, their eyes watching me stoop in a child’s frock and a man’s rubber boots to pick potatoes from the muck. I was only eight but I remember the look in their eyes, I knew what it meant. I can still see the leers on the faces of every last bastarding one of them!’
She turned and walked quickly ahead of him, her back hunched as if part of it were broken and all the toughness gone, so that momentarily she looked like the sixteen-year-old child she was.
That first weekend with Shay it was Sunday afternoon before I got home. One event had simply folded into another. I remember lying on the mattress in Shay’s flat after Murtagh’s in the early hours of Saturday morning, the glowing tips of joints passing back and forth. He had the stereo on and the curtains undrawn so that each number was rolled in the street light filtering through the high windows. I remember the outline of his face in the bed above me, the teeth white as he laughed at some joke, the hands folded behind his head on the pillow as he waited for the joint to return. People arrived and departed from the house all night—the strains of music upstairs, the creak of a bed, a girl’s voice on the landing. I don’t recall going to sleep. I just woke next morning, my throat raw, my chest on fire from alcohol. Shay was standing beside the two-ringed cooker near the window wearing only his jeans. He lifted the first pancake on to a plate, smeared it with butter and honey and placed it on the floor beside me.
‘We need food badly,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll be rightly destroyed.’
The house was on the corner of a road in Ranelagh. Across the street a greengrocer piled his goods on to the pavement, the fruit gleaming in the sunlight as he stood in his apron to chat with passers-by. The road curved away in a mass of old trees. The pub on the corner was dark, a Lourdes for quiet men seeking the cure. Shay spread the racing pages of the paper on the table in front of us and accepted whispered advice from the two men on stools at the bar. I drank the first pint slowly, savouring its bitterness on my tongue and I thought of home, my mother in a phone box probably phoning the hospitals.
I knew that what I was doing to them was cruel but somehow it seemed necessary. Every hour away gave me a small thrill of power at making them aware of the difference within me. Maybe I was just afraid to go back and face them, but I think I was so mesmerized by Shay as to be incapable of leaving before he told me to go. I wanted to be a part of the world he moved in, feeling more alive in his presence than ever before in my life.
I’d promised myself I’d go home after the last race when we stood on the steps at Leopardstown that afternoon. Then Shay met a friend who had won a share of the tote. Out of obstinacy he’d refused to take a cheque and we waited to escort him back to town by taxi with a plastic bag full of small notes and coins. Again I swore to leave after we had a drink with him, then after we’d eaten and then on the last bus.
The party was on the far side of Rathfarnham, a girl from the office’s twenty-first. In the hallway of the house she rented with four others Shay found a bottle of whiskey and one of gin. He emptied them secretly into the basin of punch and went round with a spoon ladling it out. A bonfire blazed in the backgarden. Mick sat on a swing, a six-pack between his legs as he rocked back and forth, the glow of a roll-up sweeping in an are through the air. Figures fluttered in the semi-darkness. I collapsed into a hedge and fell asleep. Shay and Mick must have carried me inside to the living-room floor. I woke next morning stiff as a cloth left out on a line in winter, the blanket placed by Shay still over my shoulders. I found him asleep upstairs, his arm around some girl. He woke and winked, untangling himself discreetly.
Scowling, we wandered through street after street of new homes, completely lost in that new suburb at the foothills of the mountains as remote to us as our own had been to our fathers. The brickwork on each house looked too new, too consciously trying to be old, not to seem like Noddy houses. We grumbled in the clean air, among the brightly painted doors and privet hedges, speaking of the poetry of rusting steel, our favourite old factories, crooked laneways decked with glass and graffiti. Families were climbing into cars for Mass, a dog came proprietorially out to investigate and fled to the sanctuary of his porch when Shay knelt to bark at him. After an hour a bus came. An old tramp sat across from us in the back seat playing a mouth organ and banging his feet in time to the tunes. I knew I finally had to go home. I left Shay in the city centre looking for his car abandoned on Friday night and nervously got a bus. I tried to rehearse words to myself, remembering the speeches I made to my father in my mind about the old woman. Now the same phrases come back again five years on. This time I swore I’d say them.
But in the end I said little and they said less, though I could see the hurt in their eyes. My young brother told me they had gone to the police earlier that morning. I kept wanting to explain but as soon as I stepped back inside their house I knew that, like trying to talk about the old woman, it was impossible to bridge our worlds.
But this time I think my father wanted to tell me he understood. I had sensed his attitude to me change the first day I returned from work, but to my mother I was still a child. I could hear her scolding him in the kitchen for not being firmer as I lay in my room. I wanted to go down and apologize but by now it had become more than just a weekend. I was punishing them with my silence just for being what they could not help being. A mother and father I loved but no longer belonged to. It was time to enter my own world yet it seemed I couldn’t make the break without causing them pain and deliberately denigrating the memories that bound us. What had once united me with my parents now seemed ridiculous—those memories of gardens and jockeybacks. From that Sunday I was like a wound inside their house, festering without air, living only for the evenings when I could take the bus to town.
Because now it was Shay that I lived for. In the weeks that followed I didn’t just want to be with him, I wanted to become him. Sometimes it seemed I had almost succeeded. Towards closing time in a pub, if I lowered my head for a moment with his voice still in my ears, I felt physically locked inside his body, seeing through his eyes, sharing his thoughts. At work the girls slagged me for unconsciously imitating his gestures as his key words found their way into my speech. Even Mooney treated me with caution as an appendix of Shay.
Each night spent wandering through bars and parties with him made my home seem more distant. I was split in two, my personality changing each time I opened the front door, the afterglow of being with him reinforcing my isolation in that room where my parents sat trapped before a television. In their company I was sullen, closed in on myself, but once I left I could feel myself change. I would shout and embrace him when he entered the pub and he’d laugh, calming me down like a young puppy. Drink gave me courage to become all my imaginings. I hid behind it, stumbling down alleyways after him, falling, singing, hopping up to ride on his back to shout like a Horse Protestant. I became a jester unleashed, knowing only exhilaration, yet capable of being stilled and made to feel childish by one look of irritation from him.
I longed merely to be allowed to take a blanket and curl up on his floor below the huge bay window. As each evening progressed I’d grow nervy, ordering that last drink for us just a fraction too late for me to reach the bus stop on time, glancing at the pub clock, dying for him to suggest that I stop over. Sometimes he’d be chatting up a girl or just tired and wouldn’t bother and finally I’d have to face the long walk back to my parents’ house, with the night oppressive on my shoulders. But more often he would offer me a mattress and I’d casually accept, trying not to sound too excited.
The night would wind leisurely back to his flat, via kebab shops and snooker halls. Shay kept a small axe under the seat of the Triumph Herald and auctioneers’ signs and advertising hoardings on quiet corners we passed often vanished in the darkness. Back in the flat he’d chop them up, hold a match to the fire-lighters thrown beneath them, and we’d sit across from each other at the Victorian fireplace, talking over dope and tea about our pasts and our plans. Often the front door banged at two in the morning and Mick would arrive with a group of mates. I’d clear the table while Shay searched for the cards. Dealer’s choice for any poker variation; Klondikie, Southern Cross, Ace High, Blind Baseball, Seven- and Five-Card Stud, under a barrage of wisecracks while Ian Dury and Wreckless Eric revolved in the cramped space beneath the sink. If the game flagged he’d throw in a few rounds of In-Betweenies, and we’d dare each other to go for the pot, laughing when somebody lost and had to stoke it.
If dope was plentiful Shay would produce an ornate water pipe from beneath his bed. Slowly it passed along the lips of the gamblers. I’d close my eyes and lean backwards to feel the room lurch and buckle in my mind, white colours merging into brilliant shades that blazed against my eyelids. I’d open them to arguments about who should go for skins to the twenty-four-hour shop. I’d offer to go and stand blinking in the bright shop, feeling like a criminal as I asked for washing powder and sliced ham as well in an effort not to buy the cigarette papers too conspicuously. The boys would crack up when I returned, clutching the bag of shopping guiltily under my jacket. They’d break for coffee and, still slagging me, hold putting competitions on the carpet with those who were knocked out, betting on those who were left.
Some nights people brought bags of magic mushrooms which Shay fried on a pan with oil and salt despite protests from all. They took time to take effect. On the first night I had forgotten them when the colours began to explode. Shay was sleeping in bed. I lay on the mattress beside the embers of the fire like a man strapped to a galloping horse, feeling the drug like a Martian from a B-movie coming alive in my body. For two days at home I still felt them as I sat before the television with my father, frightened to speak or make a sudden move, paranoid that he would notice the twitching I imagined I had developed.
One night Mick fell asleep lying on the side of the bed. Shay took every poster and cartoon off the wall to collect the Blue-tack on the back. He rolled it into a long sausage stretching from Mick’s hands which we joined at his groin up to his mouth. We smeared the tip with mayonnaise and, carrying him gently outside, left him to wake on the front steps. That was the night Justin Plunkett came by with a slab of black from Morocco smuggled in through the diplomatic bag. He was out of place, deliberately slumming it in his expensive leather jacket among the cluster of jeans and grubby sweat-shirts. He left soon after, blown out by the lads’ indifference. On the steps outside he woke Mick.
‘Hey, my man, it’s not cool, you’ll catch cold.’
‘Go and fuck yourself!’ Mick said and, after thinking about it, added to the retreating back, ‘And fuck your politician daddy too’, before stumbling back inside. Then, as always, it was back to the cards, money still passing across that table when dawn greyed the window. Finally Shay would kick them out, curl up on his bed, and I’d lie again beside the fire, knowing that in a few hours I would screw up my eyes in the light and walk with him to work, the smell of drink on our breaths, our stomachs empty, our heads sore, our feet stinking and no love for Jesus in our hearts. And that evening I would turn the corner with a shiver of dread, returning to worried looks —my father’s sunken smile, my mother’s silence, her eyes close to tears—and I’d hate myself for the stab of triumph, as though I could only measure my independence by their growing bewilderment and pain.
The tenant in the room next to Shay’s drifted in and out of institutions. Once he had returned home to his native Galway and after two weeks in an asylum there one morning, instead of medication, they gave him thirty pounds and a one-way air ticket to Manchester. Now meals on wheels came once a day to feed him, harassed social workers calling most evenings. At night we could hear him pacing his flat, perpetually walking in circles. At two o’clock each morning he’d take his dishes out to the front lawn in a basin and wash them kneeling on the grass. He had a key attached with string to some part of his body but rarely managed to find it beneath all his clothes which he wore at once. Most nights when we’d reach the house he’d be standing on the steps, his hands scrambling through his three coats, kicking at the door in desperation.
‘Shay!’ he’d beseech in his Galway accent. ‘Let me in Shay. I’m praying for you Shay, you and your young friend.’
He’d corner us on the step for quarter of an hour, droning on excitedly about how many Masses he’d attended that day and how many miles he had travelled on his free bus pass. Shay claimed that one day there would be plaster-cast statues of him in the glass panels over every Catholic doorway in Dublin, that we should keep the tin-foil containers they left his meals in to sell as future relics. Yet Shay was the only person in that house to rise, at no matter what hour of the morning and with how many curses, to let the shambling figure in. I’d lie on the floor listening to Shay calming him down enough to get him into his room. The other tenants were noises I could rarely put faces to. Their lives were shadows on the landing, the noise of footsteps in the hallway, a locked toilet door, the clink of six packs, a raised television, whispered evacuations on the night before rent day.
In the backyard the landlord had stacked old rotten timbers of doors and window frames from the four other properties he owned along the street. In times of shortages Shay hacked away at them steadily with his axe. I’d hold a torch, shivering in the night air, and listen to the rhythmical chopping while the lights of a hundred bedsits flickered out across the black, abandoned gardens. That’s what I remember most about his small flat, the glowing embers like a bird’s nest as I drifted to sleep, and waking, stiff-limbed and hung-over, to the scent of wooden ash.
One night stands out from those first months when everything was so shockingly new. High up in a warren of bedsits, while far below Rathmines was awash with litter and tacky lights. At two in the morning there were still queues in the fast-food shops, music from pirate stations blaring through speakers where girls knifed open pitta bread, flickering shifts of colour carried through windows on to the street from the video screens above the counters. Traffic jammed the narrow roads where the last old ladies lived in crumbling family homes, taxis outside the flats unloading party goers who shrieked and embraced and then quarrelled about splitting the fare. A tramp was slumped on his bench where he slept each night beside the swimming baths, oblivious to the noise around him.
Earlier in the pub beside the canal I had found myself talking all evening to a girl. It had happened spontaneously, we were both drunk and at ease together, laughing in the ruck of bodies against the bar, teasing each other with the anticipation of what might come. Across from us Mick and Shay were joking with some girls from work. He caught my eye and winked in congratulation.
I cannot remember whose party it was, it was merely a succession of stairs till we reached an attic. Thirty bodies danced in the crowded room where the only light came from candles stuck in bottles. Whoever rented the flat only owned three records which were played over and over. The girl had come with us, she was half-slumped against me as we waltzed until I was almost carrying her. Yet still I raised the bottle we were sharing to her lips, watched the gin dribble down like tears on to her dress. What did she want from me? Would I know what to say to her when I was sober?
But it wasn’t really her I was thinking of as we danced. Above all else I wanted Shay to see, I wanted to prove myself. Steps led up to a tiny bedroom with a low, sloping roof. I kicked the door open where a young boy lay unconscious from drink on the bed. I called back to Shay and Mick who took him between them, carrying him down those long flights of stairs to the back garden where they walked him in circles, his bare feet trailing through puddles, till he woke without a clue where he was. The girl had swayed against me so I had to catch her as we watched them carry him past. I led her in and as I turned to lock the door she collapsed without a sound on to the carpeted floor. Light came from a low window divided by a wooden lattice which threw a shadow across the floor in the shape of a crucifix. In a flat across the street I heard a child crying and imagined a young unmarried mother pacing up and down her few feet of space trying to pacify it before the other tenants complained.
I had to crawl on my knees to find the girl, help her up, manoeuvre her on to the bed. I doubt if either of us got any pleasure. I struggled to stay erect, fumbling in the dark for condoms, trying to undo buttons as people banged on the door; she slept through it, waking occasionally to mumble another man’s name. All I kept thinking of was Shay outside, walking with the drunken figure, knowing that for once it was me up here. I came half-heartedly and lay spent in the dark, holding her clumsily in my arms and listening to the commotion on the stairs. I realized I’d forgotten her name, where she worked. I had sobered up but I was scared now, not knowing how to approach her when she woke. I wanted to ask Shay but knew that would make me feel small again in my mind.
When she began to stir I helped her up, got her dressed, hurried her down to the street outside. She wanted to be held a little longer, wanted some words to make sense of what had happened. I wanted to talk to her, ask her to meet me properly again some evening. We walked to the main road, sat on the pavement saying nothing until a taxi approached and I hailed it, helped her into the back and gave the driver a bundle of pound notes and her address.
The police were leaving when I returned, a siren’s blue light rinsing the pavement as heads watched from windows along the street. Shay had thought the party had everything except a police raid so he’d phoned them. The host was in the hall, screaming at Mick and him to get out. Behind them an old black bicycle was unlocked. Shay mounted it and wobbled down the steps on to the footpath. He shouted at me to jump on to the crossbar. The bike swerved as it took my weight, then nearly unbalanced when Mick climbed on to the carrier at the back. The owner ran behind us screaming, as we weaved along the grass verge till we collided with a tree trunk, got up, left the bike there and walked home. Like a puppy with a stick, I waited for some acknowledgement, but neither of them mentioned the girl and I realized that nothing I could have done in that attic would have made Shay think less or more of me. They would have been as cheerfully indifferent if the girl was walking now along the shadowy roads back to find space beside me on the floor of Shay’s flat. I thought of the silent taxi driver speeding towards the outer suburbs, of what might have been if I hadn’t been afraid it would come between myself and Shay.
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 cobwebshang 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.’
