Even when he repeated the instructions they still didn’t register. My father had to bundle the blankets up into my arms before I started moving. I could hardly see where I was going. The stairs seemed endlessly steep in my terror of tripping. The hallway was empty. In the kitchen Cormac sat quietly. There was no sign of Phyllis. Eighteen steps brought me to the door of the outhouse. My father walked behind me, then suddenly his footsteps weren’t there. I undid the bolt, then looked back. He had retreated to watch from the kitchen doorway, framed by the light. I couldn’t comprehend his expression. A blur ofblue cloth appeared behind him. Phyllis hung back, observing us. He closed the door, leaving me in the gloom.
I turned the light on in the outhouse and looked around. Anything of value had been removed to the box-room after the break-in some months before. The place had become a repository for obsolete items like the two rusty filing cabinets – one still locked and the other containing scraps of old building plans, a buckled ruler and a compass. Among the old copies of the Meath Chronicle in the bottom drawer I found a memorial card for my mother, her face cut from a photo on Laytown beach. One pane of glass in the wall was cracked. The other had been broken in the break-in and was replaced by chicken wire to keep cats out. The darkness frightened me, yet I turned the light out again, wanting nobody on the street to know I was there.
Casey’s kitchen window looked bright and inviting. The back of our own house was in darkness, but I knew The Fugitive was on television in the front-room, with Richard Kimble chasing the one-armed man. Cormac would be lying there on the hearthrug, savouring every moment of my favourite programme.
I listened to the beat of a tack hammer from the lean-to with a corrugated roof, built against the back wall of Casey’s house. It was answered by other tappings from other back gardens, like a secret code. The official knock-off time marked the start of real work for most of our neighbours who worked in the town’s furniture factories. They rushed their dinners so they could spend each evening working on nixers, producing chairs and coffee tables, bookcases or hybrid furniture invented by themselves. Sawdust forever blew across the gardens, with their tapping eventually dying out until only one distant hammer would be left like a ghost in the dark.
Hanlon’s cat arched her back as she jumped onto our wall, then sprang down. I miaowed softly but she stalked past. A late bird called somewhere and another answered. The back door opened. My father appeared with a tray. I hunched against the wall. He entered and stood in the dark, not wanting to put the light on either.
‘Bread and cheese,’ he said. ‘And you’re lucky to get it.’
‘When can I come in?’
‘Not tonight.’
‘Has he got my bed?’
‘He has a name. My wife decides who sleeps where from now on.’ He put down the tray and stood over me. ‘Don’t make me have to choose, Brendan. If you do you’ll lose.’
‘I hate her. I want them to go.’
‘She’s going nowhere, Brendan. I’ll make this family work if it kills me. A man needs a wife. I can’t mind you alone. You understand?’
I didn’t reply and he didn’t expect me to. He sat on the edge of his old desk for what seemed an eternity. Perhaps he was the most lost of us all that night, torn between desire and guilt, remembering simpler times when he was fully in control, the monarch of this makeshift office. I just know that I never felt so close to him again as during that half-hour when he sat as if turned to stone, until Phyllis’s voice finally called from the kitchen.
‘Make yourself a bed,’ he said. ‘Let’s have no fuss.’
As he stood up his hands fiddled with something in the dark. When he opened the door I saw in the half-light how he had removed his belt and held it folded in half. I watched through the chicken wire as he walked up the path, elaborately running the leather belt back through his trouser loops and fixing the buckle as she watched. He nodded to her. They went in and I heard the heavy bolt on the kitchen door.
The glass doors opened in the hospital foyer. An ambulance, with its siren turned off and blue light flashing, had pulled up outside. The porter disappeared through a doorway while staff bustled about, allowing me to slip away unnoticed. The beggar was gone. I crossed Dorset Street – a blocked artery of Dublin which had always refused to become civilized. Shuttered charity shops and gaudy take-aways. Pubs on every corner, alleys leading down to ugly blocks of flats. People walked quickly here, trying to look like they knew where they’re going.
Where was I heading, with just two bags waiting for me in a luggage locker at the bus station? But what other sort of homecoming had I any right to expect? I was putting more than just myself at risk by being here, but even without my father’s murder I always knew that one day I would push the self-destruct button by turning up again.
I crossed into Hardwick Street and passed an old Protestant church that seemed to have become a dance club. Across the road a tall black girl stood at a phone box, smoking as she spoke into the receiver. I don’t think she saw the two Dublin girls emerge through an archway from the flats, with a stunted hybrid of a fighting dog straining on his lead. At first I thought they were asking her for a light, until I saw the black girl’s hair being jerked back. She screamed. I stopped. There was nobody else on the wide bend of footpath. Music blared from a pub on the corner. Two lads came out from the flats as well, as the black girl tried to run. The Dublin girls held her by the hair as the youths strolled up.
‘Nigger! Why don’t you fuck off back home, you sponging nigger!’
There were four of them, with the dog terrifying their victim even further. One youth grabbed her purse, scattering its contents onto the ground – keys, some sort of card, scraps of paper and a few loose coins which they ignored. They weren’t even interested in robbing her. I knew the rules of city life and how to melt away. But something – perhaps the look in the black girl’s eyes, which brought back another woman’s terror on a distant night in this city – made me snap. I found myself running without any plan about what to do next, shouldering into the first youth to knock him off balance.
I grabbed the second youth around the neck in a headlock, twisting his arm behind his back. The girls let go their victim in surprise, while the dog circled and barked, too inbred and stupid to know who to bite. The black girl leaned down, trying to collect her belongings from the ground.
‘Don’t be stupid, just run, for God’s sake, run!’
‘Don’t call me stupid!’ she screamed at me, like I was her attacker. One girl swung a hand at her, nails outspread as if to claw at her eyes. The black girl caught the arm in mid-flight, sinking her teeth into the wrist. The first youth had risen to leap onto my back, raining blows at my face as I fell forward, crushing the youth I was still holding. I heard his arm snap as he toppled to the ground. He screamed as the first youth cursed.
‘You nigger-loving bastard! You cunt!’
My forehead was grazed where it hit the pavement, with my glasses sliding off. Their aggression was purely focused on me now, although the second youth was in too much pain to do much. I heard running footsteps and knew that I was for it. But when the thud of a boot came it landed inches above my head. The youth on top of me groaned and rolled off.