two children played sailors in cardboard boxes, the single bench along the wall with paint flaking overhead from a once ornate ceiling. An elderly couple rose, the man beckoning with his stick as the women tried to hide behind him.
‘Excuse me sir,’ he whispered, ‘my wife was mugged in Ballybough last year and she’s due to give evidence. Her nerves are bad since and we’re terrified to meet those young men again. Is there nowhere we can hide?’
It was the first time I had ever been addressed as sir. I mumbled guiltily and pushed on, leaving them looking more nervous and ashamed than the offenders casually standing around. I followed the staircase to a high, cold room partitioned by a warren of stacked shelving and three long benches besieged by chairs. No one looked up from their newspapers when I entered, each clerk sunk in those final moments before Carol arrived jangling the three keys from the different locks of her old bicycle like a bell, before Mooney’s brooding presence mooched wordlessly into his inner office and the morning’s work began.
How often in the following months did I enter that room to find a new person standing as I had stood, left to wait awkwardly till someone condescended to look up? I hated them that morning, hated the bowed heads, the odd murmur of voices; hated the same phrases I’d hear over and over: Are you doing the interview? Did you hear there’s a transfer list soon? Yet later, when Shay left, I often did the same, sinking down beneath Mooney’s presence which lit the office like a black bulb draining each breath of life from the room until no one bothered doing one action more than necessary, knowing how he would snap at them for the least step out of line.
Mooney appeared behind me, paused to insert his name on the attendance book and was gone into his office across the room. Though no one moved, I could sense the stiffness entering their shoulders and the relief, like a silent exhaling of breath, when he had passed. His tall, country frame was like a prison warder’s, his lined face lacking sufficient bones to hang the red folds of flesh upon. I watched him slam his door, a black-suited Buddha turned bad, the pioneer pin stuck on his lapel, and from deep within I felt an involuntary shudder.
And then Carol was at my elbow like a diminutive burst of light, gripping it and joking as she led me into the centre of the room and jangled the keys of her bicycle locks for attention. She called my name out to everybody before she had bothered to check it, and suddenly had the clerks scurrying, one showing me where to put my coat, another finding space at a table for me and a third poised to teach me the elemental filing with which I was to pass my days. She was tiny and plump with fading red hair, in her late fifties, as active as Mooney was static, nervous energy bubbling as she shouted commands in her precise south Dublin accent over the dying rustle of newspapers, covering up for her superior with her own workload. She drew the red line in the attendance book as carefully as a heart surgeon with a scalpel, and had clapped her hands for attention when the door behind her opened. She stopped and pursed her lips as a young man strolled in with a leather jacket over his shoulder, then drew a long breath up through her nose, arched her nostrils like a nervous foal, as he approached.
‘Hello, mum!’ He grinned and bent to peck her on the lips before slipping past to take the vacant seat beside me. Shoulders stiffened at the tables like trees bending in a forest. Carol stood frozen in the position she had been kissed. Then she turned and ran towards the inner office. Almost before the door had slammed the white intercom on the wall was buzzing hysterically and continued to do so while it was being answered. The young man grinned again, held his hand out and asked me my name.
‘Francis,’ I said. ‘Francis Hanrahan.’
‘What do they call you at home, Francis or Frank?’
‘Francy.’
‘Good Jesus! Where did you leave the spade?’
He looked at me closely.
‘You’re no more from the bog than I am. Would you settle for Hano?’
The buzzing had stopped. The girl replaced the receiver and called over.
‘Shay. Mooney wants to see you!’
He grinned and rose to stroll towards the door. When he went in people began whispering about the incident in little huddles. What they said I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t listening. I think I felt a mixture of admiration and resentment. His words had made me feel relaxed for the first time since entering the room. I was elated and yet suddenly scared, for if the others seemed content to ignore me, now I felt threatened by his very openness. Suddenly I resented him because he seemed all the things I was afraid to be, because I was certain he’d see through me and ridicule the defences I’d built between myself and the world. I wished he was sitting elsewhere, that I was among some anonymous clutter of silent clerks. Charles, a clerk with a face like a slapped arse, a perpetual white shirt and tie and a nose to judge precisely which arse to lick, leaned over disdainfully and whispered, ‘Dangerous to know.’ I nodded and began filing the cards in front of me, copying the hand motions of the girl on my left side. The door opened and Shay returned to sit beside me. I sneaked a glance at him. He was only twenty-one but looked older. His jet black hair fell slightly down his shoulder, his skin was dark, as if he were descended from an Armada survivor, his hands were fingering a neat moustache. From somewhere I found courage.
‘Well,’ I said tentatively. ‘Was she a panter or a screamer?’
He threw his head back to laugh in that room of whispering clerks and replied, ‘I just said take your false teeth out, Carol, and wrap your gums around that!’
I grinned back at him. We bent companionably down and started to work.
They had walked in silence for two hours through the narrow roads that skirted the back of the airport. Like a discarded prop from a B-movie, a radar dish revolved its head slowly at a crossroads by the perimeter fence. A car rocked in the lay-by, one bare leg swaying against the rear window when they crept past. Beyond the fence, snakes of landing lights slithered through the grass, seeming to merge in the distance where the dark hulks of planes were parked. A security van sped across the concrete between floodlit hangars. Then Hano lost all sense of direction. Katie led as they threaded their way through tiny lanes, bypassing the huge expanse of light where he remembered the village of Swords. Three times a vehicle’s lights sent them tumbling into a ditch. First it was a tinker’s speeding Hiace returning to the camp site they later passed, an island of three caravans in a field of wrecked chassis and upturned wheels stacked like the upturned ghosts of the city’s dreams. The second was a squad car cruising past, and the third time the light stopped and started like a will-o’-the-wisp behind them. He sweated as they climbed in and out of ditches, certain it was the police mocking, herding them like sheep towards a check-point. They watched the headlights beginning to draw level with them as they knelt among the weeds and refuse sacks, his hand squeezing Katie’s, waiting for the doors to open. It was an old farmer so drunk that he fell asleep every few seconds and woke with a start. The car appeared to be driving him home. Shot with whiskey, his glazed eyes looked through them as the car creaked past.
Neither had spoken since she’d taken his hand. He clung to its outpost of warmth, his fingers the only part of him that felt alive. Like a scratched record, the screams from that room echoed in his mind. Could it have really been him? He remembered her fingers dressing him like a child, her hands pushing him from the burning house, his numbness as if cast from stone. Once again part of him longed to be rid of her, to be allowed to sink without trace or responsibility. It wasn’t the shame of what he had done afterwards but the shame of what she had witnessed at the start which haunted him, making him afraid to look at her as they plodded through the countryside. It was better not to think at all, to sink into this numb cocoon where he just had to concentrate on keeping his footsteps steady.
Hano
