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 which formed the Portrane asylum began to appear, flourished with turrets and Gothic trappings like the mansion of some cursed inbred clan. Silent as ghosts a stooped line of its patients appeared slowly around the corner ahead of them, a nurse’s white uniform blazing among the shabby greys and browns of their clothing.
When Hano and Katie reached the first couple they drew back towards the safety of their minder. The line stopped and shied away towards the wall until they had passed. The old men’s faces twitched under caps as they watched. The final old woman had a radiant girlish smile and waved back at them from a drugged stupor. Her eyes were the brightest Hano had ever seen. Beside her a bald man in his forties was turning in a constant circle with a slow and perfected step, like a child trying to be dizzy. The others simply looked old, bemused and abandoned. The nurse smiled and motioned her charges into life again. A middle-aged man was doing press-ups on the lawn in front of the hospital. It was impossible to know if he was keeping count or aware that he was being watched. He stretched face down on the grass, gravely raising and lowering his body as though determined to prove his strength or keep the flame of sanity alive in his mind. Katie shuddered and turned away from the wall.
‘Christ, I hate asylums,’ she said. ‘Always remind me of the one at home. A former workhouse it was, a rambling, rundown ruin. It wasn’t just for the sick, you know. It was a dumping ground for anyone they didn’t want, stuck out on the edge of the town. Whenever we had to pass it, I’d beg mammy to cross the road before we reached the gate. I was always scared she’d leave me there. That was her biggest threat, not dada’s strap or the bogeyman but we’ll send you off to the home.’
In Dublin Hano rarely remembered her mumbling more than a few words, and then they had always been of the streets outside. Now that she had begun to talk of Leitrim it was like she’d never stop.
‘The time the nuns in the school asked my uncle to take me to the psychologist was when I ran away first. Three nights kipping out in an old car by the Tolka. All I could think of was the spinsters locked up in that place because they couldn’t be married off and the backward kids shut away so as not to shame their families before the neighbours. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t be like that, it would be all shagging ink blobs and when d’you start using dirty words, but it was the same fear inside me.
‘There was this woman, our next neighbour after Tomas, called Mary Roche. She was twenty-five years in that home before her mother died and some relative back from England found out and signed her release papers. Mammy often brought her in because she could hardly feed herself by then. She lived on crackers, single-wrapped slices of cheese. Anything that came in plastic was good because it was what visitors had brought in for the other patients. If mammy left the kitchen she’d sit with her arms in front of her on the table for hours on end.’
‘What happened to her?’ Hano asked.
Katie shuddered, looking back down the path as if she could still see the line of patients.
‘She was only twenty when it happened. Some carpenter
