dogs I too could belong, but each walk home from school by the new shopping arcades, each programme on the television religiously switched on at half five in every terraced house, was thrusting me out into my own time. I began bringing home phrases that couldn’t fit in that house when we still knelt for the family rosary. I hid photographs of rock stars beneath my mattress like pornographic pictures, wrote English soccer players’ names on my copy book feeling I was committing an act of betrayal.
When I was twelve my father brought me back to the farm bordering the Kerry coast where he had been born. I stood awkwardly in my city clothes, kicking a football back and forth to my cousins across the yard. None of us spoke as we eyed each other suspiciously and waited for our parents to finish reminiscing. Next morning before dawn he took me out to the milking shed lit by a bare bulb. I never saw him so relaxed as when he bent with ease to squeeze the teats, glancing back proudly, urging me to grasp the teats of a huge lurching cow I was frightened of. For the first time I felt the division between us.
I didn’t understand it then, but I grew up in perpetual exile: from my parents when on the streets, from my own world when at home. Once Shay told me about visiting his uncles and great aunts left behind in the Liberties. They welcomed him like a returned émigré to the courtyards of squalid Victorian flats and led him around the ramshackled streets choked with traffic, pitying him the open spaces of the distant roads he played on.
How can you learn self-respect if you’re taught that where you live is not your real home? At fourteen I tried to bridge the gap by journeying out into my father’s uncharted countryside. I’d rise before dawn to cook myself breakfast and when I ate at the kitchen table he would come down to place money on the oilcloth beside me and watch from the doorway as I set off to find Ireland. I arrived home with reports he couldn’t comprehend: long-haired Germans in battered vans picking up hikers; skinheads battling outside chip shops in Athlone. Then came the final betrayal of something even he couldn’t define when, at fifteen, I chose the first friend of my own. ‘That old Protestant woman’ my father always called her, though she had not been inside any church for half a century.
Looking back, my life was like a candle, briefly sparked into flame in that old woman’s caravan among the fields, and extinguished again until I met Shay. The years between speed up—the new intimacy of class-mates in the months before exams; nights studying in each other’s houses; weekends stumbling home drunk on two pints from town. I had been a loner before, so used to solitude I didn’t understand what loneliness was. But that last year in school I felt enclosed in the company of friends, finally seeming to belong somewhere.
On the night of the final exam we walked out to Mother Plunkett’s Cabin at Kilshane Cross, were barred before closing time and staggered home through country lanes off the North Road in hysterical laughter. After that I rarely saw them again, the release from school shattering our intimacy, leaving us half-embarrassed when we met, reliving the same stale memories. That autumn passed into winter. Sometimes I cadged the money for dances; mostly I just walked the streets putting off my return home. Some mornings polite rejections of my application forms for work lay like poisoned fish washed up on the hall floor, but normally I stared down at an empty, mocking square of lino, and began the same futile rounds of the industrial estates.
I thought my father would never let the garden run to seed even as he grew older, but that year after school I watched it happen without comprehending. The world of the gardens had changed. Where neighbours once kept the city out with hedgerows and chickens, now they used broken glass cemented into concrete walls. A decade had worked its influence. The alder bushes were gone, the last of the hens butchered. Patios had appeared with crazy paving, mock Grecian fonts made of plastic, and everywhere, like a frozen river, concrete reigned. Porches had sprung up bearing ludicrous names, Ashbrook, Riverglade, The Dell, each neighbour jockeying to be the first to discard their past. Only our garden had remained untouched, the potato beds becoming overgrown and the roof caving in on the felt-covered hut where my hands had once searched for eggs in straw.
Every evening that winter my father’s face was like ash, gathered from a burnt-out half-century and spread in a fine crust over his bones. His eyes were more jaded than any I had ever known. He’d come home from work with stories of Pascal Plunkett’s moods, collapse into an armchair by the television and stare at his idle eldest son. He said little and I learnt to match his words. We sat in a silence broken only by my mother’s fussing, while outside the weeds and nettles choked his dreams. Sometimes he’d cough and, looking up, ask me to chop everything down. ‘Tomorrow,’ I’d say. ‘I’m tired now.’ I would mean to put on his rubber boots, take the tools hanging between nails in the shed and walk out as I used to watch him do, but those photocopied rejections seemed to have sapped my strength. I sulked instead, brooding on the few words that passed between us, although it wasn’t what he said that hurt but the disbelief in his eyes when I’d mention all the places I had tried for work. In the end I just said nothing. The present made no sense in his world. He stared blankly at the evening news while they carried the victims of the bombings and hijackings away in black plastic sacks.
Christmas froze into January. Blue nights alone in the overgrown garden, making tea in the kitchen at three in the morning. That year had become a posthumous existence. At night I’d smoke joints in the bathroom, leaning on my toes to blow the smoke out the window, constantly alert for an opening door. I seemed to have lost the power to sleep, gradually losing track of the everyday world. February came and then March, fresh weeds squeezing through the dead grass.
At two o’clock one morning I walked down the garden, wading through weeds like a field of barley. Lines of new extensions stretched on both sides, a lone light burning in a garage twelve doors down. I thought of Jews hiding in cellars, snatching only a few seconds of air before dawn. Now I slept while others worked, rose in the afternoons, seemed to come to life only when darkness came. I had fallen from the cycle of life, with no longer the will-power to struggle. The queues each Tuesday afternoon, men pushing like a human battering ram against the door of the employment exchange. The letters posted out sending one hundred people for interview for a single job that I had to attend in case they checked up and cut my assistance. The fear of daring to hope in case it turned to bitterness when I was turned down; the hatred of leaving the bed and having to face the empty letter rack in the hall.
I turned to go back inside and saw my father standing at the gate beneath the are of bare lilac bushes. At first I thought it was an apparition from the past. He had pulled on a white shirt and a pair of trousers held up by ancient braces. I walked towards him in the blue moonlight, both of us embarrassed, neither knowing how to talk.
‘What’s going to happen to you, son?’
His voice was low, humble with bewilderment. I would have liked to touch his shoulder, to somehow reassure him. Looking at him I knew that I would leave home soon, that only poverty was keeping me there. Ever since our fight about the old woman in the fields we had both lost the simple ease which had once existed between us. I knew that he was thinking about days further back, times I’d waited beside the lilac bushes wanting to feel important, hoping he’d ask me to fetch some tool from the shed. I longed to say, Tomorrow dad, we’ll take those tools down, fix up the garden the way it used to be. But I couldn’t. I had to turn away.
‘I don’t know. You go back to bed now. I’m just getting some air.’
He shook his head and I watched him turn and walk up the path. There was a nettle swaying near my hand. I pressed my fingers over it. It stung badly, but at least the pain felt real.
Then one morning, grey and ordinary, a letter from the Voters’ Register’s office came. The offer was a temporary position starting on the first of the month. I felt there should be bands marching from the kitchen, majorettes turning somersaults on the lino. Instead my mother was scrubbing floors in Plunkett Undertakers, my brothers and sisters were at school. Happiness seemed to underline my isolation. I went out into the street hoping to meet
