The Journey Home. Dermot Bolger

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