The Journey Home. Dermot Bolger

main street, shivering in the afternoon light. The schoolgirls have been released in trails of bright colours. From outside the clothes shop you watch them come. Who was the girl who laughed among them a few months ago? Another stranger inhabiting your body in limbo. The security guard’s uniformed back turns as you slip past into the shop. A voice of metal crackles inside his walkie-talkie as the skirt fits neatly underneath your own. Like arrayed ghosts the clothes hang on racks. An assistant laughs as he chases after her down through the tunnel of clothes and you are gone through the unguarded shop door. Back to twilight, back to warmth, a dozen items laid out on a floor. The young fence lifts them up, hands one back as worthless. He leaves in their place a variegated row of pills, a thin, dung-coloured slab in a tiny plastic bag, a trace of white powder. He retreats from you with patent leather footsteps.

      When you speak now it is in a private slang, birthdays and older girls’ dole days your only reference points. Your landmarks bordered by a bus to town, a view of sky through corrugated iron, a black road leading inexorably home. One night you sit with two friends by the low carriageway wall where the woodland once stood. A child behind you with his father’s axe is chipping away at a young sapling surrounded by mesh. Two youths stop in a stolen Ford, they coax and the three of you climb in, voices singing from the back seat. The last remaining red light is broken. The car shoots on like a released prisoner, but to you, half-stoned, it could be in slow motion. By Mother Plunkett’s Cabin it flies, twisting down towards the ancient castle. Overgrown branches whip against both sides of the windscreen, the girls shrieking as the wheels cascade through the flooded hollow. Chained dogs grow frantic inside each farmyard as the car skids against the side gravel and veers sharply right. They slow near the snakes of landing lights laid out around the airport, the flickering reds, the rows of coloured bulbs rising up to meet the belly of the dropping plane. But you have grown quiet now, watching the moon keeping track through the hedgerows. The songs and voices do not penetrate. What nightmare journey are you remembering? What night when he cradled your head in his arms as you cried in the seat; what car that sped under a canopy of branches away from that house; what names of dead parents whom you called out for? If you spoke now how would your voice sound; if you yearned for home which direction would you turn? The car speeds through a tunnel of trees, the shuttered moonlight between the trunks distorting your features so you look like two different persons.

      Hano let her walk ahead of him, silent now like he remembered her from the city. The cliff walk led to a small cove with the ruins of a burnt-out store. Somebody had torn the election posters pasted on the concrete blocks over the windows so that only strips of the candidates’ faces were left. Katie paused, then chose a clay path across the deserted golf course towards a hollow crammed with caravans and shabby wooden chalets. Summer was past, the grass grown tall again after the trampling of sandalled feet. They huddled in the porch of a chalet with their backs against the flaking white wall in the morning sunlight. With his finger, Hano traced the name ‘Sunnyside’ in forlorn black letters on the door.

      Katie pressed his hand and slipped around the side. He gazed anxiously back at the flags on the greens as the tinkle of breaking glass came. There were footsteps on wood, rusty bolts dragged back and then he was inside, searching with her for food and warmth, anxiously drawn every few moments to peer through a broken window.

      It was musty in the chalet, the spartan furniture riddled with the pinholes of woodworm. They found two blankets, wrapped themselves up and waited for darkness. Both knew how vital it was to get away but were paralysed by fear, reluctant to make a decision as though the night could somehow protect them. Outside a wind was blowing up. Far off” they heard a tractor and later the noise of music and slogans being broadcast from a speeding van. Towards noon a dog barked as a woman called its name. They rarely spoke until hunger drove them out in the afternoon to plunder the empty caravans. It made little difference what he did now but he still shivered at each smash of glass.

      Back under the blankets they shared what little they had found: a crushed bar of chocolate, stale biscuits, a can of beans they opened and ate cold. Katie had discovered a small radio. He hesitated before turning it on, wanting to prolong the time when he could at least pretend he might return to his past. It ranked second in the news bulletin after the report of a low morning turn-out at the polls. The party spokesmen were trying to twist the turn-out to their advantage: the government claimed it proved the people had not wanted an election, while the opposition blamed the level of apathy on disillusionment with the current administration. Both predicted that their supporters would be out in the evening. The longer they waffled on the more Hano allowed himself to hope it had all been some bizarre nightmare.

      Then the details of the fire were given, with rhetorical condolences by the same spokesmen. Since morning the government had been turning it into a late campaigning ploy, knowing the opposition wouldn’t dare interrupt the saga of one family’s grief after two tragedies in a single week. The Junior Minister spoke of being glad of the burden of office at the present time, that the responsibilites of state were shielding his mind from the awful grief in his heart. When the votes were counted and the country’s future secure he would return to his native countryside and mourn among his own. Hano could see Patrick Plunkett in the studio, lips pursed over the microphone, eyes dry as he calculated the chances of bringing home the third seat with his surplus that would ensure they couldn’t deny him a full cabinet position next time. The gardai were following a definite line of inquiry but Hano’s name was not mentioned on the air. He switched the set off.

      ‘Fuck them,’ Katie whispered beside him. ‘We’ll get away. Tomas will hide you till you decide what to do. He has to be alive. I can feel it. He has to be.’

      It could only be a matter of time. When his name was broadcast her uncle would realize. The police would check her old home even though she had never gone back before. But where else did he know outside Dublin? A blurred succession of roadways he had hitched on; the farm his father had come from; the small wood belonging to the old woman. Katie lay calmly beside him like a different person from the one he had known.

      ‘Home?’ he said uncertainly.

      ‘That’s all Shay ever spoke of,’ she said. ‘Trying to get home from Europe at the end; I never thought of going home till he began talking about it.’

      Shay had simply arrived back saying nothing to him and Hano had never dared to ask. Automatically he made a note to ask Shay now and winced, cursing his memory for letting him forget. He felt sickened after the voices on the radio.

      ‘Never spoke about it much to me,’ he said.

      ‘Coming home, trying to fit back, that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘If you asked him he’d clam up, stare into space. One night I said to him that when I was stoned I started thinking they’d sucked the air out of Dublin, you know what I mean, and people around me were opening and closing their mouths with nothing coming in, nothing going out.

      ‘It sounded bleeding thick when I said it but he just rolled another cigarette and stared out the window. Then he started talking about nights up in the loading bay of a canning factory in Denmark when he’d look down from the hoist at four in the morning on the workers below, nobody speaking, the limbs just moving automatically. He said he’d start thinking the conveyor belt and the loading machines were alive, that at half-seven they’d stop and the arms of the men would keep on moving back and forth till some cunt remembered to press a switch.’

      Those months Shay spent in Europe puzzled Hano like an oppressive weight. He didn’t know why they were important, but if he could fathom what happened there he might understand why he was here now. He had the facts that Shay had finally told him on the last night, but they alone could not explain his unease. It hurt to have to ask Katie what he had said as if it somehow gave her possession of part of Shay. He leaned his head against the wall and listened to her.

      ‘Often, you know, I wasn’t really sure what the fuck he meant by things. Once he said you could never go home. It was some old Turk in a hostel filled his head with it.’

      Hano listened to her describing Shay’s bed with three others in the dormitory, the steel locker, the piece of wall for the pin-ups and photographs, the Yugoslav woman who served them meals on metal plates without a smile. He remembered the easy boredom