Bend for Home, The (8 page)

My brother Tony was getting married in Brighton. My father and mother done out in their fineries left for London via Holyhead where they would stop in Pimlico with Aunt Bridgie.

They were gone a long time. I had the world to myself. I ate my breakfast with Una, said goodbye to her at Con Reilly’s gate then stowed my bag behind the Town Hall and headed off on a long mitching tour of various places in and around Cavan, sometimes heading out the now defunct railway line on a cabby car that we arm-wrestled through the Loreto woods and on to Butlersbridge.

The cabby car, known as the up-and-downer or back-breaker, which used bring the railway-menders up the line, now sat in a shed at the disused station in Swellan. We lifted the cabby car onto the tracks, about five of us, and sat up. This was the Swellan gang. In the old days to join them you had to lie on the sleepers and let the Dublin train race over you. Now the trains were gone and only the cabby car remained. But the line was still intact. Snowball Walsh put on a railwayman’s cap belonging to his father. With the first push of the hand-bar the cabby car took. We headed down the line singing Davy Crockett.

We cut timber for an old lady that lived along the line and she in turn gave us buttermilk. Her false teeth sat steeping in a bowl on the window. We brought her coal leavings from the station in the cabby car and sat around her sooty hearth. Swallows leapt out of the eaves.

You don’t like the school, she said, and her whiskers silvered.

No, ma’am.

I never liked it either. She drank her mug and clasped her knees. And I don’t like the town. I’m content here.

She appraised us. What’s your name?

Healy.

And yours?

Hickey.

Do you see this eye? she said and she pointed at one brown iris. We inspected the pupil. I was cutting a bush, she continued, and a branch
spun back on me and the thorns shot into the socket. So now I can’t see on my left side. That eye, she said, has its back to the world.

She leaned forward and sighed.

But there was no pain, she added, no pain.

That’s good, said Ollie Smith.

Now, any day you don’t want to go to school you come out here, she said, and I’ll find things for you to do.

She waved us away. We headed on to the next house, cranking the bars that turned the wheels along railway lines that had lost their sheen. Two white-haired brothers lived in a granite house with a stave of aerials shooting from the roof. Inside, Burl Ives was singing. They gave us various jobs. We watered the potatoes. We herded cattle from one field to another, filled old baths with water and stacked turf. The brothers mended radios in the kitchen and let us listen in on things from abroad. The table and floor were stacked with blue batteries.

The men ate cold pork with their hands and explained that they had been reared in the two drawers of the dresser.

Ernie was reared in that drawer, and I was reared in this, said one brother. Isn’t that right, Ernie?

That’s right, Walter, said Ernie, but don’t be a silly-billy now.

They oiled the cabby car and gave us crab apples.

How far are you going today? Walter asked us.

We don’t know, I said.

Well you could go on that thing, if you were fit for it, to Clones, he explained.

Could you?

You could. You could. As a matter of fact, on a good day you might reach the sea. Isn’t that right, Ernie?

That’s right, said Ernie. Then he laid a damp hand on my arm. Did I see you talking to Mrs White down the line?

Yes, I said.

How does she do it? he said to himself. How does she do it? That’s what I’d like to know. Then he spun on his foot and looked towards Mrs White’s. Was there any mention of us?

No, I said.

No, Ernie repeated. Nothing?

She didn’t mention you.

I suppose she didn’t. He stood on the sleepers and contemplated her house. I suppose she didn’t.

The brothers gave us a push and we headed for Butlersbridge via Loreto. Each time we took the cabby car we ventured further. We sailed along to Kansas City, taking in Delaware along the way. We hit Tombstone. And Black Creek. And passed old railway houses and dilapidated farms. Your arms grew tired on the slopes. Snowball Walsh gave the orders. We pushed and pulled till we reached the crest, the last few inches were hell, then getting to the top we cheered and took off at a nice hectic rate past old crossings and hoardings, singing
Davy,
Davy
Crockett,
king
of
the
wild
frontier.
White numbers tacked to trees flew by. We sat in a ditch eating wild strawberries and blowing cotton.

When we arrived to a bridge over which a road passed we pulled up smartly, then came to a stop under the cold damp arches. We listened for the approach of a car. We put our ears to the granite walls and heard rain steeping. Then, if there was nothing coming, we struck out into country and spread our wings.

Other times with the Cavan town crowd I’d go down to the haunted house at the nun’s lake. It was called Lavell’s. There was a noose still hanging in the barn, the skulls of cattle were thrown across the grounds and a small harmonium sat in a sunny room on the first storey. We sank onto the old rusty beds and unravelled fishing lines.

There were apple trees out the back and cutlery still in the kitchen drawers. There was a dresser of blue plates with an alarm clock tilted back on one leg. We washed the cutlery and old plates in the lake and set out places on the kitchen table. We lit rushes with petrol and sat them in large fruit cans. Then we ate our sandwiches.

The last man who’d lived there had killed himself. We frightened ourselves with stories about him. There were three suits hanging in the wardrobe, a case packed for going away and a hatbox filled with old bills. Someone had been in the First World War. His letters were stowed in an oilskin bag. We searched the rooms for a gun. We tapped the walls for hidden passages. Through the grounds elderly cows with large horns wandered. They fed unceasingly. The noise of their eating filled the dark house.

One day a farmer found us sitting in the barn taking turns with catapults to shoot down jam jars. In the orchard we had a fire burning rubbish.

I saw the smoke, he said.

Good day, I said.

Good day yourself, he answered. So what are you doing here?

We’re on holidays, said Matti Donnelly.

You are in my hat. Do you think I’m a gom? He entered the house. By God, he said, what’s been going on here?

The linoleum floor was swept, the delft laid out and the windows cleaned.

Well I’ll be damned.

He came out and sat on the collapsed wall.

Are yous thinking of stopping long? he asked and put a cigarette in his mouth.

We said nothing.

I just thought I’d ask, he added, smiling to himself.

We’re boy scouts, said Ben Gaffney.

Boy scouts, be God. Are yous in the band?

We are, I said.

Very good. Very good. He shook a stone out of his Wellington. I have a gammy leg, he explained. Then he studied us. Are you not afraid of auld Lavell? he asked. He pointed at the beam. That’s the very place he hung himself. See that lake? He pointed over the rushes. A nun astray in the head came down the hill and walked into it. A Sister Concepta. I dragged that water for her myself. And she came up black as peat. Then there was the jockey. But that was before my time. There was a
race-course
here, if you can believe it, and bedad he fell in and drowned.

He stood.

And that was the end of the racing. He studied us. Would you be young Smith?

No, said Ollie Smith.

You have the head of your father, he said. Well I’ll be off. Boy scouts, be God.

Goodbye, mister, said Matti.

He touched his nose with his index finger. And if anyone asks, I didn’t see ye. Right? He tipped his forehead. Take care now.

He headed off on his bad leg through the orchard striking nettles with a stick as he went. We talked of the nun, the jockey and old Lavell. We dropped lines into the lake for pike and walked through the swishing reeds. On the way back from there Ollie Smith let up a kite on the Gallows Hill. It whooshed into the air with a bark and drifted over the town. That was the signal to say we were mitching. The boys saw it from the Brotherss school.

Then we headed down the Cock Hill, round the Pound Archway and along River Street. At a signal we darted across Bridge Street, up Abbey Street and into the Market yard by the monastery where Owen Roe O’Neill was buried. We studied the broad brown bones under the collapsed tombs. Shoulder blades, said Matt Donnelly, that’s what they are. We climbed over the gate into the back of the Town Hall. We waited there till the lads came streaming down from the Brothers’. Then we took our bags and headed home, ducking pellets Paddy Ronaghan was shooting with a pellet gun from his bedroom window. Ping! Ping! The pellets flew like sparks across the Market Square.

I heard my father had fallen ill in Brighton. He had suffered a blood ulcer. Una and Miriam stood for long hours on the phone outside the post office trying to get through to the hospital. Telegrams went over and back. Bridgie wrote to say he had collapsed in the hotel after the wedding.

I wrote him a letter telling all about school. By now the lads I used mitch with had all been caught so most mornings I headed off alone. Sometimes I’d go ahead of Una and slip up Con Reilly’s archway, through Burke’s yard and over the fence back into our garden. Then go on my hunkers under the windows of the bakery, and shoot into the old shed and up into the attic. Once I made my way down the entry, in the lower door and went upstairs back to bed. But mostly I headed into the country. Up by Billis and out by Behy Lake. Through the rocks at Shantemon, where the Reilly clan once had their main castle in the territory of Breifne. Sitting in a ditch I listened for the angelus bell before I made my way home for dinner.

Always afraid of being caught, and yet going further.

Then one day a woman in the shop reported me. I’d been seen walking the edge of the woods along St Patrick’s College. When I came in at four that afternoon with my bag Maisie shrieked. She chased me up the entry. I stayed above in the nun’s graveyard till night fell. I slipped the latch of the kitchen door and listened. Stepped into the dark dining room. There was no one there. I took ham out of the fridge and ate four slices.

There he is, said Maisie.

Don’t you know that Daddy is sick? said Una.

Go straight away to your bed, shouted Maisie.

They took the radio away so I couldn’t listen to Luxembourg. The room was full of reprimanding voices. Next morning Una walked me to the gate of the school.

I won’t go, I said.

You’ll have to.

I’ll be killed, I said.

Go on.

I won’t.

So she walked me to the door of the classroom and told the head brother I’d been missing because my father was sick.

Maisie would suddenly appear in my room at dawn.

Get up for school you, she’d say.

Una and myself ate in the dining room alone. Miriam was in the shop. Una watched me from Town Hall Street to make sure I’d gone through the gate. The brother I feared was waiting for me in singing class. I turned to speak to someone behind me and he busted my eardrum and bloodied my nose. Maisie was outraged. I walked round the Brothers’ like a zombie. They kicked football in the yard and I sat in the Jack’s reading the
Beano
and the
Classic
comics.

I kept hearing things that weren’t there. This sudden screech would shoot through my skull. Sometimes there were thunderings. Other times a sort of drone. Then a sort of bewildering silence as if you were there in the world alone. The echo of the blow persisted for weeks. The brother knew he’d done wrong and tried to be nice to me. When he’d arrive to take his place behind me at choir practice in the cathedral he’d flash a confused adult smile. His lower lip would tremble. Father A. B. McGrath pushed a bright-stockinged foot down on the pedal of the organ. We sang down into the empty church.

The silence descended. The deafness from the blow came back. We were all singing but I heard nothing. Then as if someone had pressed a button back the voices returned.

After school I went up to the handball alley and played there with Eamon Smith and Dag Carroll and the bus-drivers and Irish soldiers and house painters till night fell. Una would come up to collect me and Mr Smith would say, Let him have just one more game. Just one more, Una. In the dusk we could hardly see the ball. Your hand toughened. The palm was like leather. You learned how to skim the walls. How to let the ball swerve off your cupped hand so that it made no sound.

On Saturday mornings I was in the alley on the Barrack Hill by ten, came down for my dinner at one, was back by two and stayed till eight, maybe nine.

Instead of dreaming of Finea before I slept I began to dream of games of handball. In dreams I made perfect serves that stayed flush to the left-hand wall, or ran round the corner of the back wall and fell dead. I took butts with a neat underhand that left the soldiers astonished. I picked shots out of the air and killed them. I knocked balls on the hop dead. Then one morning I woke and came across the landing and met my father on the three steps.

Blessed God, he said and he took me in his arms. I thought I’d never see you again.

He dabbed his lips with a handkerchief. My mother in a canary-yellow outfit stood by a case in the hall. Her eyes were running. She took off an ostrich hat that Lady Ashton Smith, a cousin of the queen, had bought her.

Were you good? she asked me.

I was, I said.

Una stood silently by.

Was he?

Yes, lied Una.

My mother put on her working clothes and went into the kitchen. My father and I walked up to the garden and sat under the ivy on a seat he’d made.

I was sick, he said.

He put an arm over my shoulder. His face was thin and blue.

I’ll soon be playing for Cavan town in handball, I said.

Good man, he said.

That night Maisie told what had happened to me at school. She said something should be done about it.

Go up, she said to my father, and complain.

He was reluctant.

It might do more harm than good, he said.

If you don’t go, said Maisie, I will. Surgeon Maloney saw his ear, she persisted, and said it was a terrible thing to do to a child.

All right, he said.

The following morning my mother put his ten packet of Players on the breakfast table as usual, he smoked his first fag and broke into a terrible fit of coughing. Then he walked me to school. He smoked another fag on the incline and broke into another fit of coughing. We entered the school yard together. Everyone stopped playing. They looked at us. My father was nervous. He scuffed his nose with the hanky and put a hand on my shoulder. Head Brother Ultan, who was strolling in prayer, turned and saw him. He gathered his wide black skirt and came towards us. Brother Augustine left down his scythe in the field, and put on his black vest and approached. He was a tall, big-shouldered man with veins like hawsers in his neck, wide ears and holy demented eyes.

And who is this? asked Head Brother Ultan.

It’s my father.

Well, you go and play, Dermot, while myself and your father have a word.

I’m afraid my son must tell you what happened him.

So what happened you, Dermot?

Brother Augustine hit me, I said, and I had to go to hospital.

I see, said Brother Ultan.

It’s not good enough, said my father.

Brother Augustine appeared. There was a silence.

This, said the Head Brother, is Brother Augustine. This is Mr Healy.

He shook my father’s hand.

I’m sure you’re aware what you did to my son, said my father.

I’m sorry, he said. I lost my temper.

He worked his mouth as he often did, his forehead shone and he moved his hands off each other.

I’m sorry, he said.

Go and play now, Dermot. And you carry on, Brother Augustine.

I moved towards the makeshift goals. Someone dribbled a ball in my direction. I stood with my foot on it. Brother Ultan touched my father’s shoulder and the two men strolled through the playground. Brother Augustine, head bowed, walked out to the field. He threw off his dark vest and with long strong swoops of the scythe began to mow the grass again. I could hear the tick of the sheaves as the blade cut through them. His muscled arms were unnaturally white. He stopped
a moment and looked at me looking at him. His eyes pleaded with me for forgiveness. I looked away.

The first time I took acid I thought I was in heaven. I was in my twenties living in Denbigh Street, Pimlico, in London at the time. I remember walking along the sparkling Thames till we reached the Henry Moore sculpture opposite the Tate, but it was not the sculpture I was interested in but the actual plinth itself.

Acid does not like art.

I was working in an insurance office – the Westminster County Insurance building that looked down on the hippies who were stretched out below Eros in Piccadilly Circus in the late Sixties. The morning I got the job I stood with the director by the tall windows that overlooked the goings on in the Circus.

I pity them, he said, looking down on their bandanna’d heads. Within a year I was back among them.

Each morning I’d put on my pinstripe suit, say good luck to the County Cavan men I shared the flat with, and head off to work through Rochester Row, across Victoria Street, under the portals of New Scotland Yard, past the registry offices of Caxton Hall where stars got married, into Green Park and up the Mall to my offices on Piccadilly Circus. Here, my immediate boss trimmed my long business letters of poetry, censored undue familiarity and curbed weather reports.

I ate Irish dinners in Ward’s Irish house, drank a pint of Guinness and watched Francis Stuart, the novelist, sitting alone at another table. Afterwards, fell asleep at my desk with the phone cradled to my ear. At Christmas I danced the daughter of the Scottish peer who was a director of the firm. Myself and Aunt Bridgie, my mother’s sister, and her companion, Leo, would frequent the Irish Club in Eaton Square. When my mother came to visit we all went off to see Danny La Rue. She thought he had wonderful dresses. And on the way home we walked into Steptoe, and my mother dug her fingers into my arm. Anyway.

Sebastian, a student from Oxford, came to live on the floor below us in Denbigh Street. Around that time we had never succeeded in getting drugs. Once I’d bought some tablets outside Ward’s.

The Cavan men and myself sat in the room listening to the Beatles waiting for it to happen. Nothing did. The next evening I accosted the pusher in Piccadilly.

Hi, I said, that was bad dope you sold us.

That’s nothing to do with me, fellow.

You sold it to me.

Well I bought it off someone else.

They were aspro.

I thought they were acid.

Well, they weren’t.

So what do you want me to do?

You shouldn’t be selling bad stuff.

Hi, listen to this, he said, calling to some other pushers.

I said, It’s wrong to be doing that.

Listen to this, he said, we got a religious maniac here.

Soon, with Sebastian’s encouragement, I was taking LSD every Wednesday at seven, and again on Friday evening. One Friday night myself and another Irish fellow dropped two tabs. I was wary of him because he had done me some wrong in the past but he was high, laughing, and so I trusted him. We sat there, in my small room, marvelling.

I’m sorry about what happened, he said, back then.

Forget it, I replied.

I just want to apologize.

Never mind, I said.

I just wanted to get it out of the way, he continued.

All right.

I did wrong.

Leave it.

It was my fault.

OK.

Do you understand me? he persisted.

Yes, I said, wishing he would stop.

Say you do.

Look,
stop,
I said.

What’s wrong?

I don’t want to hear about it

We sat a while in the trembling silence.

You don’t forgive me, he said sadly.

I turned away, seeing not him, but Brother Augustine, beseeching me.

Let’s go for a walk, I said.

OK, he answered and he seemed to cheer up.

We headed off, an inch at a time up Denbigh Street. We stopped at each streetlight. Stopped in awe as a police car drove past. Held each other at the traffic lights and when it came to green we raced over. Beneath Vauxhall Bridge the river thundered. We walked to the far side but could go no further. When we were halfway back across the bridge he suddenly grabbed my hand.

Look into my eyes, he said.

I looked into his eyes. I saw there a horrendous image of myself.

I’m sorry, he said, imploring me.

Immediately I heard this plea I turned and fled into the traffic. Cars braked, there was the screech of tyres, horns blew. I fell, picked myself up and ran. A taxi driver shouted at us. I ran till I reached Denbigh Street. He caught up with me at the door. And again I saw it – his face was cut in two. I looked at him and tried to put it back together again. I tried to match the eyes, to correct the corners of the mouth, to set in place the twin nostrils. But this line of severed flesh had lowered one side of his face below the level of the other.

Don’t say it, I said.

I won’t.

We climbed back to the room. We talked a little, played music and slowly the marvelling returned. And just when we might have been reconciled he said he was going. I didn’t want him to go. But he wanted to walk home across London. When he left this fear – unexplainable and known to many – possessed me. It would leap out of the unknown and the familiar in the years ahead.

Next morning I was back at my desk. At the memory of the night before, and at the thought of how I threw myself into the traffic, I grew bewildered and a little terrified. As the day wore on, some comfort returned. The humdrum office work restored me. The clerks, in their shirt sleeves, talked shop. The director’s secretary looked impeccably sane as she shared the lift with me down into the basement.

I searched through old files with the enthusiasm and concentration of a scholar. On the other side of the basement wall was the gents in Piccadilly underground. Through the grills I heard the toilets flush, and the attendants complaining. That other world going on without me. The horrors withdrew and secreted themselves in small compartments in my frontal lobes, lay dormant in various brain cells, from which, some day soon, they would emerge enraged and virulent, like parasites that had multiplied during their short hibernation in the recesses of my subliminal self.

I could hear them battering away at my identity and ego. Away you fuckers, I’d say.