Bend for Home, The Page 5

  *

  A few days later Una led me by the hand to the convent. They had me decked out in short pants cut off at the knee from my father’s navy-blue guard’s trousers. The arse was huge. As we walked past High Infants, orphans were singing. Una knocked on a door and a nun came out. I ran. I ran across the convent yard, out the gate and down Main Street.

  My mother was behind the counter. I ran into her.

  Dermot! she said.

  Mammy, I called.

  Why are you not at school?

  I don’t want to go.

  You have to go.

  No.

  Why?

  There’s wren boys there.

  What!

  The wren boys are there.

  Una led me back again. When the nun spoke I kept my eyes on the ground. I was frightened of the wren boys. They used come up the village in straw heads and black frocks on St Stephen’s day roaring about Mullahoran and Kilnaleck and Cromwell. Keys rattled in the nun’s skirt. She brought her face down till it was at my level. The skin was white and clear. A little fringe of hair showed round her ears and forehead. The eyes were wide. The crucifix swung.

  Do I look like a wren boy? she smiled.

  She led me into a class. I kept my head down. They were reciting sums in a sing-song voice. Matt Donnelly moved over. Ha-ho, said Raymond Green. I sat down. Look at the buff from the country, someone whispered. The fellow in front lifted his arse as the nun turned to the board. He cracked in my face. A thick foggy smell of fart reached me.

  *

  I went out walking with Miriam beyond Cavan. It was late afternoon, on a Thursday, when we left. The sky was darkening. We went below the terraces on the Dublin road.

  Does this road go to Finea? I asked after a while.

  It might, said Miriam.

  What do you mean might?

  It’s a long walk.

  Can we go there?

  We can.

  Now?

  Yes, she said. Why not.

  Evening fell. The white railings came to an end. We stepped into the country. The haze smelt of May blossom.

  This way, said Miriam.

  Why?

  It’ll be shorter.

  Are you sure?

  Of course I’m sure.

  Do we save miles?

  Oh miles and miles, she said.

  That’s good.

  And so we took various shortcuts to reach the village. We passed a mansion house. A woman carrying two pails of water crossed the yard. A horse fled down a meadow. We went up a cobbled lane and a man spoke to us over a gate.

  Lovely evening, he said.

  Lovely, replied Miriam.

  The nights, he said, are drawing in.

  They are.

  Who’s he?

  He’s one of the Gurns.

  He’s not.

  He is.

  I turned back to look but he was gone. We went on over a rise and walked across high ground. It was an open area of gorse and stones. An ass lifted his head to look at us.

  How many miles more?

  Maybe four, she said.

  Are you sure?

  Five, she said, at the most.

  Five mile is a long way.

  It’s not too bad.

  It’s longer than four mile.

  That’s true.

  And four mile is bad enough.

  We descended into a valley. The roads were small and the ditches full. Swans dipped their heads in a flooded field. Blackbirds sang, then there were crows and fidgetings.

  Are we halfway?

  More than that, she said.

  Are you sure?

  Yes.

  How far is it back to Cavan?

  About four mile maybe.

  Four mile?

  Yes.

  It was a long way back, and the further we went the longer it became. My sister walked beside me and behind me.

  Will the house still be there?

  Of course it will.

  And we can stay?

  We can.

  Where will we sleep?

  On the floor.

  What will Mammy say?

  She’ll not mind.

  All right.

  We stepped in out of the way of a car. She took a stone out of her shoe. A bullock followed us along a hedge. A stream bucketed into a drain. The moon was out.

  Is there far to go?

  There’s not much further.

  Will there be a fire lit?

  Yes.

  And who will light it?

  Charlie Clavin.

  Oh.

  The shadows of trees crossed the road. There was only the sound of our shoes. I took her hand.

  Finea is my real home, I said.

  Don’t you like Cavan?

  No.

  Why?

  Because.

  Because why?

  Just because.

  The moon went behind a cloud. She stopped in the dark. I listened intently. Our eyes adjusted.

  Is that the lights from Finea? I asked, pointing ahead.

  They could be.

  Are they? I demanded.

  She stopped to look.

  Yes.

  C’mon, I said.

  I’m coming.

  I strode on. I’d wait for her then go on again. We turned up a road she said we should go, but the light in the house was gone. Soon enough though another appeared, then another.

  Whose light is that? I asked.

  Charlie Clavin’s, she said.

  And that?

  Coyle’s shop.

  They’re open late, I said.

  They are.

  I wonder why.

  It was a long tiring walk. More lights appeared in the distance. The whole village was alight. We went behind a hill and the village disappeared. When we rounded a bend there it was again.

  C’mon, I said.

  I’m coming.

  C’mon, I said.

  Don’t run.

  I’m not running.

  You were.

  Well, I’m not now.

  Hold on for me, she said.

  I stopped and waited for her. We went by a garage that was not in Finea. We arrived onto a road that was overlooked by rows and rows of terraced houses, with washing flapping and mongrels barking.

  I don’t know this place, I said.

  Sure you do, she said.

  No, I don’t.

  Can’t you see?

  It’s not right.

  What do you mean?

  This is not Finea, I said.

  No, she replied, this is the Half Acre.

  We came round a corner and suddenly we were in Cavan again. It had not been Finea we’d seen at all. It was a great let-down to arrive back to those dark half-day streets, to hear the door open onto the gloom of the hallway, to walk through the white marble-topped tables of the restaurant. My sister turned on the light in the dark dining room. There we were, the two of us, back in the mirror.

  I was trapped in Cavan for all time.

  Chapter 9

  My father was sitting on the edge of the bed. He must have been there some time. He asked me was I all right. I am, I said. He looked at the po on the floor.

  Are you sure?

  Yes.

  I’ll go then.

  I could not wait on him to leave, and he wanted to stay. At last reluctantly he rose. The bed rose. The bile rose in my throat. He passed by the mirror, held the door open and turned.

  Is there anything I can get you?

  No, I said quietly, and closed my eyes, pretending sleep.

  He accepted this regretfully, the door closed behind him with a quiet click. I waited till I heard his feet descending the stairs then I leaned out of the bed and vomited profusely. The door flew open. He ran in. He was short of breath and anxious. He took my forehead in his hand. I was grateful for the pressure.

  Go on, son, he said.

  I pressed down, I pressed real hard down on the palm of his hand as the sp
asms went through me. When I was finished I lay back and he wiped my cheeks and lips with a wet face cloth.

  Why did you let me go, he asked, if you knew you were going to be sick?

  I don’t know.

  Are you all right now?

  Yes.

  I lay back on the pillow. He sat with his back to me and his hands on his knees. We could hear across the roofs the sound of the orphan girls screaming in the Poor Clare Convent as they played during their dinner break. Frank Lee in wide wellingtons came up the entry with the milk for the café in a can. The girls in the bakery were banging dough. Someone emptied a teapot into the drain in the yard.

  Would you like some lemonade?

  No.

  I can’t understand why you didn’t want me to stay.

  It was because I wanted to be alone when it happened. But I didn’t say that to my father. Since I’d got the jaundice I’d got used to doing it by myself. I would hear the disturbance away in the distance, see how my wrists shone and the patterns on the wallpaper wavered. Soon one of my legs would grow indistinct. The body blur. Every smell and sound would leer violently. Then your head disappeared for an instant. That was the moment and you had to concentrate to get it right. To get it over with. I didn’t want anyone else there.

  I’ll take this away, he said, and I’ll be back in a minute. He crossed the floor holding the vessel. I lay there, as the other world came rushing back, feeling like I’d just come out of confession.

  Daddy, I said.

  What’s that?

  I feel better now.

  Good, he said, good.

  *

  It might have been then, or soon after this, there was some other sickness I can’t name. Maybe it wasn’t a sickness at all but some nightmare that visits a body during waking hours. It meant the closing walls again and the body ridding itself of its physical presence.

  There would have been a radio on downstairs in the living room. There was always a radio on in the Milseanacht Breifne. The wireless itself sat in the sitting room above Main Street and a wire from it ran downstairs to the sweet shop, along the wall of the café behind, and eventually into a speaker in the small living room that separated the restaurant from the kitchen. The radio played all day non-stop from the moment Aunt Maisie switched it on at noon when she rose from her bed till the National Anthem blared out onto Main Street bringing another day to an end.

  That night the voice of the announcer came out the window through the green bars, travelled up the entry and reached me in the room above, where I lay weightless and transparent.

  What the voice was speaking of I can’t say. It was adult, male, nostalgic; it could have been James Mason; it might have been Perry Mason; maybe a member of a religious order speaking of acts of charity or a voice about to announce a waltz; whatever it was, it troubled me.

  At first, as always, there was the benign sense of sleep falling while I listened to life going on downstairs. I heard the ladies going away to the pictures and knew my father was down there alone.

  I had this fear that he might tie his bad tooth to the door handle, and push the door. He’d done this once before and when we walked into the dining room he had a bloody handkerchief to his mouth, and the long fang, yellow and topped with black, sat in a saucer. But tonight all was quiet except for the voice on the radio.

  I was walking up Finea then the wrong thing happened, and I screamed. I screamed again. I heard his hurrying steps coming up the stairs and along the landing. By the time he threw open the door and turned on the light he was breathless and pale.

  Where is he, son? he shouted.

  Blessed God, son, he said hoarsely, what’s wrong?

  I couldn’t say. He held the bottom rails of the bed and looked round wildly. His gasps for breath left two pinches of blue on his upper cheeks.

  What is it? he said, where is he?

  But there was no one.

  I was afraid, I said.

  Afraid of what?

  I couldn’t answer.

  I thought, he said, you were being murdered.

  I must have lain down then, and turned my head sideways.

  There’s no one, he said.

  Yes, Daddy.

  I’ll turn the light off now, he said.

  He turned it off but I could feel him standing there in the dark for a long time, watching me, ready for the next scream when it came.

  *

  And another time he caught me walking in my sleep across the landing. He’d been to a whist drive in the side rooms of the Town Hall, and then on to see Frankie Brady in the Ulster Arms for a few bottles of Guinness, and then he’d let himself into the dark hall and caught sight of me standing in my pyjamas by the altar at the top of the stairs.

  What are you doing up there? he asked.

  I didn’t reply.

  Dermot? he said.

  I put a hand out and touched the walls and began to feel my way down the steps. He approached me warily.

  Are you asleep? he said, and his voice reached me from another dimension.

  I struggled best as I could to stop going wherever I was going. I really wanted to go on very much to that first place and there was a sense of loss in not reaching it. Now I was losing it very fast.

  What’s wrong? my mother said from somewhere below.

  I caught him, said my father, just in time.

  Dermot? she said.

  Don’t wake him, he advised. They say you shouldn’t wake them suddenly.

  I could feel the world taking shape around me, the bloody head of Christ on the altar, the pink cups of plastic flowers, the white curtains on the windows that opened onto the flat roof, and then I saw my mother in a blue housecoat, her glasses luminous, her face shining from Nivea cream, and my father standing ghost-like below me, with one hand flat on my chest.

  Where were you going? she asked.

  I was going nowhere, I replied.

  You’re at home now, she said.

  That’s right, agreed my father.

  He led me back to bed.

  You were sleepwalking, he explained, as he pulled the sheets to my chin. He sat on the bed with his hands on his knee. His shadow was comfortable and benign. He lit a cigarette and tapped the ash into the grate of the small black fireplace.

  You’re a great walker, he said.

  *

  A few years later it was him I would meet on the stairs, a thin gaunt figure in a pyjama top open onto his chest, and pyjama bottoms that reached to just below his knees. He was, he thought, on his way to the barracks. I led him back to bed as he had once led me.

  Where I was for the night he found me I can’t say. But most nights we set off for Finea. That was how we always met, somewhere on the landing or on the stairs, thinking it was the bridge or the barracks, always at one remove from consciousness, in a twilight world where certain journeys had to be completed out of an obscure sense of duty and longing.

  Chapter 10

  My father met people through Miriam, through whist drives, poker schools, the Ulster Arms and the Farnham Hotel.

  His closest friend in the long run was Frank Brady, one of the Brady Family who ran the Ulster Arms. Frank then was in his late twenties, my father in his early fifties. Frankie had a pale laughing face, a brilliantined quiff and long painterly fingers. He always had a Daily Express in his sports-jacket pocket. He had trained as a pastry chef in Glasgow but now spent his days working behind the bar in his family’s hotel.

  They played cards over the bar and drew bottles of stout. They chatted about horses and jockeys – Joe Sime, Des Cullen, Lester Piggott. Mid-conversation Frankie would fall asleep, his chin would drop onto his chest and the night would continue for a while without him, then he’d suddenly re-enter the conversation as if he’d never left it.

  My father won a pair of Clark’s black shoes at a whist drive in the Town Hall, and he brought them up to the Ulster Arms to show Frankie.

  Well, Jack, said Frankie, they’re a neat pair.
<
br />   They are.

  After closing time he came home with the box neatly wrapped under his arm. He entered the kitchen. My mother was ironing sheets.

  Take a dekko at that, he said.

  Maisie undid the wrapping.

  I won these at whist, he explained.

  She opened the box. Inside were a pair of brown mud-spattered shoes, without tongue or soles.

  The curse of the crows on Frankie Brady, said my father.

  *

  The business premises had large canopies over the shop windows and above the gate that opened into the entry. Over the years I painted them all kinds of colours.

  The shop sold the produce of the bakery. Inside the shop was a small room where all the cakeboxes were stacked. There were a few small tables where people sat having ice-cream soda with spoonfuls of ice cream in tall glasses. To the left you went out to the toilet, past the room under the stairs where Croney slept. Straight on through was a door with a glass porthole that opened into the public tearoom. Beyond that was the private dining room that was never private, for beyond it was the kitchen and the scullery and the waitresses were always on the go.

  A door in the kitchen opened onto the yard. An entry ran the length of the house. Opposite the kitchen was the old bakery in which eggs in barrels of brine, boxes of margarine and bags of flour were stacked. Further up the yard was the new bakery. One corner of it contained a vast coke oven that could take four trays at a time. Above the old bakery was a long slatted attic – once a storeroom – with a galvanized roof. It was filled with antiques and books from my Great Aunt Jane’s time in France at the turn of the century, when she was au pair to two girls whose family suffered a grave scandal. The father murdered the mother. And later the sisters broke up over a man. Then a Hollywood film was made about the affair.

  Great Aunt Jane, who taught domestic economy in the Technical School, never married, and started the Breifne with a small loan from John Brady, draper, grandfather of Frank Brady. It was one of the few large businesses (maybe the only one) opened by a woman in the newly formed Free State. And it thrived. She in turn left it to her nieces – Maisie and Winnie – so it passed on through the female line, and perhaps in time would have continued on to my sister Una or Miriam, if circumstances had not changed. But anyway.

  It was a wonderful attic. First I found an elderly silver-bearded Santa standing in a scattering of yellow straw in a tall cardboard box. Later I’d learn that he went into the shop window at Xmas to nod at passers-by, and with a quick bow, dispense innumerable favours. In London, later still, I’d meet men from Cavan who’d turn sentimental at the days they spent in front of the Breifne asking Santa for things. He stopped there for a couple of weeks saying yes to everyone, then on the dot of twelve midnight on Christmas Eve Aunty Maisie would take him in and up he went to the attic to hibernate for another year.