filled with tortoises making love and nuns in rubber boots.
I felt sick and yet had never felt better as I gazed from the window at the tumbledown lane outside. The sleeping children had gone. A man with a cardboard box and a blanket jealously guarded their spot. Far below, Dublin was moving towards the violent crescendo of its Friday night, taking to the twentieth century like an aborigine to whiskey. Studded punks pissed openly on corners. Glue sniffers stumbled into each other, coats over their arms as they tried to pick pockets. Addicts stalked rich-looking tourists. Stolen cars zigzagged through the distant grey estates where pensioners prayed anxiously behind bolted doors, listening for the smash of glass. In the new disco bars children were queuing, girls of fourteen shoving their way up for last drinks at the bar.
And here I was lost in the city, cut off in some time warp, high and warm above the crumbling streets. I think I slept and when I woke the owner was shouting time from the foot of the stairs. The singer had stopped and accepted a joint from the nearest table. The lad beside me who had been eyeing the guitar stumbled up to grab it, closed his eyes and began to sing:
Like a full force gale
I was lifted up again,
I was lifted up again,
By the Lord…
He wore a broad black hat with a long coat and sang with his eyes closed, living out the dream of Jessie James, the outlaw riding into the Mexican pueblo, the bandit forever condemned to run. He opened his eyes again when he had sung the last refrain, handed the guitar back apologetically and moved down the stairs towards his dingy Rathmines bedsit. I thought of home suddenly, the cremated dinner, my parents waiting for the dot on the television, exchanging glances but never asking each other where I was. I felt guilty once more and yet they suddenly seemed so distant, like an old photograph I’d been carrying around for too long.
‘You alive at all Hano?’ Shay’s voice asked. ‘You don’t look a well man. A tad under the weather I’d say. Listen, there’s a mattress back in my flat if you want to crash there. And I’m after scoring some lovely Leb.’
‘What about your wheels?’
‘Leave them. Not even Dublin car thieves are that poor.’
Home, like an old ocean liner, broke loose from its moorings and sailed in my mind across the hacked-down garden, further and further through the streets with my parents revolving in their armchairs. I could see it in my mind retreating into the distance and I stood to wave unsteadily after it, grinning as I took each euphoric step down after Shay towards the take-away drink hustled in the bar below and the adventures of crossing the city through its reeling night-time streets.
Hope. A four-letter word. Hope. Mornings are the worst Katie. You wake when your cousin rises, tumbling into the warm hollow she has vacated on her side of the bed. Two years older than you, she dresses quietly for her work in the fast-food restaurant in town. She arrives home each Thursday with sore arms, tired feet from dodging the assistant manager and ten pounds more than on the dole. When she is gone you lie on, luxuriating in those private moments alone in that room. Then you hear his footsteps start through the wall beside your head. Rising at the same time he did when he walked down for the early shift. You hear the smudging sound of the brush over his boots before they descend the stairs. The routine, that is what is vital for him, the pretence that there is still something to be done. The front door closes and you know he will walk to the mobile shop with the same dilemma, ten cigarettes or a newspaper. You rise quickly before he returns, the situations vacant column always the winner. You will try to have finished your breakfast when the footsteps restart in the hall and hurry to the door before he spreads the page of close type over the Formica to stoop like a man holding a mirror to the lips of a corpse.
Hope, Katie. That is what he pretends to have. You cannot bear to watch the bowed head, the finger moving steadily to the bottom of each column. You reach the school long before the lessons start. Remember, you ran here so eagerly once. Now it is no more than a sanctuary from the despair of that house. There is a wall to smoke behind. A girl says, ‘Are you game? The Bounce?’ And you slip quickly back out that gate, skirting the road he will take at half-past nine to the Manpower office, not going in if the same girl is on the desk as the day before, afraid he will lose face by appearing too eager. You run down by the side of the Spanish Nun’s, past the green and gold of the Gaelic Club, by the mud-splattered row of caravans, till you find the gap in the hedge and are running fast across the overgrown car-park to reach the vast cavern of the abandoned factory.
Here is education, here you belong. A dozen girls are gathered in the dripping shell where their sisters once bent over rows of machines. Here at last there is no pretence, no talk of imaginary futures. Sometimes they sit in near silence or play ragged impromptu games; sometimes boys come. Somebody lights a cigarette, somebody has pills. A small bottle passes down a corridor of hands till it reaches you. You hold the capsule in your hand, a speckled egg to break apart. You pause, then swallow. Hope. Four-letter words punctuate the jokes you laugh at. A girl leans on your back in tears as laughter almost chokes her. There are colours to watch. The concrete refuses to stay still. There is warmth. A circle of faces to belong to. The sound of a chain being pulled from a gate, the engine stops in the van. The girls by your side pull you on as the unformed security guard unleashes the dog. You race exhilarated across the grass, the sky twisting and buckling. You can hear barking behind you and the girls begin to scream. The wall rushes at you, automatically you jump. The sharp surface grazes your knees before hands pull you clear and down on to the path beside the carriageway. The footsteps are racing now; you join them—a flock of pigeons circling back towards the estate.
Hano and Katie had followed the weak scraggle of street lights which petered out beyond the green with its pub next to the closed-down swings beside a battered caravan in the tiny amusement park. To their left a new estate of white council houses slept with an unfinished look, out of place among the fields. On their right through the blackness they could breathe in the sharp tang of sea air blowing across the expanse of sucking mud exposed by the low tide. The road wound upwards through moonlit golf courses and the flaking paint of holiday chalets, until it levelled out into a car park on the very brink of the cliff. Hano stood with his arm around Katie when they reached the edge, mesmerized by the scene below. The whole of Dublin was glowing like a living thing sprawled out before his eyes, like the splintered bones of a corpse lit up in an X-ray. Hours before he had still been a part of it, one cell in a vibrant organism. Now up on this headland where Katie had led him he was cut off and isolated from the lives below. She stood almost indulgently beside him while he gazed, then took his hand again to pull him on through the dark. He panicked for a moment when her form vanished before him, thinking she was intent on some suicide pact, before realizing that she had begun to climb carefully down the black and seemingly impossible rock face towards the foam flashing below them. She gripped his hand, never speaking or looking back, but instinctively choosing the correct path along the slope. Once she slipped and as his arm was jerked forward he heard the noise of pebbles tumbling down to vanish into the sea below, but she didn’t cry out though her leg must have been grazed. She was up a second later, nimbly finding footholds in the rock face again. The sea wind blew into their faces, stinging his exhausted eyes, but keeping his limbs awake. He focused his mind solely on reaching the strand alive, no longer wishing to think of the events which had led him here, or the promise of what might happen when he reached solid earth again. His life, as he had lived it, was finished, but there would be time for decisions later; now it was enough to be led. Her warm hand brought him through the teeth of the night, where swaying lights winked across the water, neither judging nor demanding, but human and alive, a tiny embryo of hope.
She stopped and his momentum sent him careering against her back. They had reached the bottom. Without
