Two Eastern European women in head-dresses sat on the step beside me, dividing out a meagre meal between their children. I closed the paper and, leaving it behind me, located a cyber cafe down a cobbled sidestreet which was empty at that hour.
My new Hotmail account had no messages, but there again whenever I left a city I was careful to leave no trace behind. I got Pete Clancy’s e-mail address from the leaflet in my pocket, sipped my coffee and began to type:
Dear Mr Clancy,
‘Help me to help you’, you say. Maybe we can help each other. Your problem in the next election could be how to know you have reached the quota if you’re not sure that you have all the magic numbers. Your father once joked that death should not get in the way of people voting. It need not get in the way of the recently deceased talking either.
Fond memories,
I stared at the message for twenty minutes before clicking ‘send’. It was a hook but also a gamble, pretending to know more than I did. What would Clancy make of it – a local crank, a probing journalist shooting in the dark, a canvasser for another party trying to snare him? Some party hack might check on the messages for him, scratch his head and just delete it. But I figured that the odds were two-to-one on Clancy himself reading it and five-to-two that the word ‘Shyroyal’ might capture his attention.
I had only heard it once in childhood, when Barney Clancy turned up in a gleaming suit, slapped his braces and joked to my father: ‘This is my Shyroyal outfit. Sure isn’t Meath the Royal County and don’t I look shy and retiring?’ Something about his laugh made me glance at him as I came up the path, after running a message for Phyllis, and something in my father’s eyes made me look away, knowing it had a buried meaning not meant for the likes of me.
By the age of twelve I had learnt to pick the lock on the filing cabinet, opening the drawers gingerly at night, uncertain of what I hoped to find there. Secrets that would make me feel special, photos of my mother or some other token to break the loneliness. The letterheads were torn off the sheaf of paper in the top drawer but, even at that age, I recognized them as bank statements for something called Shyroyal Holdings Ltd, with an address on an island I had never heard of. The rows of figures meant nothing to me, but I could read the scrap of writing on the cigarette packet stapled to them: Keep safe until I ask for them. It was unsigned, but I would have recognized Barney Clancy’s handwriting anywhere.
Not that I had considered the statements as suspicious back then. Funds were constantly being raised for the party on the chicken-and-chips circuit or by good men like Jimmy Mahon at church-gate collections. This seemed just another component of the adult world where important people were making things happen for the town. If I hadn’t previously overheard Barney Clancy’s joke to my father the Shyroyal name would not even have registered. Indeed, at the time I just felt disappointment that nothing belonging to my mother was actually concealed in the drawers.
Even today I couldn’t be certain if my suspicions were correct or the product of a need for revenge. I could barely even recognize the country outside the cyber cafe window and felt doubly a foreigner for half-knowing everything. I found myself thinking of Ebun again, how she had looked calling out from her bed this morning and how Niyi too had looked, staring back at us both.
The cafe was starting to fill up. I finished my coffee, collected my bags from the bus station, found a hardware shop open on a Sunday where I could purchase a crowbar and booked myself into an anonymous new hotel on the edge of Temple Bar. It was important that I shaved at least once a day to ensure that black stubble didn’t clash with my hair. Lying on the bed afterwards, I repeated the name Brendan out loud, as if trying to step back inside it. I remembered how Miriam and Cormac used to say it, the way Phyllis had twisted the vowels, and tried to imagine Ebun pronouncing it. But each time it sounded like a phrase from a dead tongue last spoken on some island where the only sound left was rain beating on bare rafters and collapsed gable ends.
During the first fortnight after the train crash a sensation of invisibility swamped me. All bets were suddenly off, because not even bookies could collect debts from a dead man. Our endowment policy ensured that once my death was confirmed, the house belonged to Miriam with the outstanding balance of the mortgage written off. A company scheme in work meant that, because I died while still employed by them, my Japanese masters would have to grudgingly cough up a small fortune. That was before taking my own life assurance policy into account, not to mention the discussion in the newspapers that I carefully read every day about a compensation fund for victims. My name was there among the list of the missing. There was even security footage of me splashing out on a first-class ticket at the booth ten minutes before the train left Perth. Death had finally given Brendan Brogan some cherished status. He was virtually a celebrity, but he wasn’t me any more.
I was free of all responsibilities, shunting quietly across borders on another man’s passport. Not that my initial decision was clear-cut. In the hours after the crash I wasn’t sure what I had wanted, except perhaps to make Miriam suffer a foretaste of what it might be like to lose me. Little enough beyond recriminations still held us together. But I knew that her anxiety would be intense as she listened to reports of the crash and prayed for the phone to ring, aware I was supposed to be on the train.
Rarely had I experienced such a sense of power. For months I had helplessly waited on word of the factory closing. At night I had kept dreaming of horses that I knew had no chance of winning, but next day I would back them in suicidal doubles and trebles, waiting for that one magic bet to come up that might buy me space to breathe. By night I woke in a sweat, thinking that I’d heard the doorbell ring with a debt-collector outside. By day I hovered inside the doorway of betting shops in case some neighbour passed who might mention seeing me to Miriam. On buses I found myself incessantly saying to Conor, ‘I bet you the next car is black,’ ‘I bet you we make the lights before they turn red,’ ‘I bet you…I bet you…I bet you…’
Brendan Brogan was a man who couldn’t stop betting. But wandering through Perth on the morning of the crash I had the bizarre sense of having stepped outside myself. I wasn’t that pathetic gambler any more. Suddenly I was the man in control who could choose when to release Miriam from her anxiety by phoning home. I imagined the relief in her voice and, with it, an echo of her earlier love. Yet once I made that call my new-found power would be gone. I would have to explain my getting off the train before it started, how I had chickened out of meeting Phyllis in Glasgow. I would return to Ireland to face the hire-purchase men and money-lenders, the pawnbroker who held all of Miriam’s mother’s jewellery which she believed I had put in the bank for safe keeping, and my seven-year-old son baffled by the civil war fought out in the silences around him.
I knew that my not phoning her was cruel and petty, but it was also a confused attempt to reach Miriam by letting her understand powerlessness. It was not that I hadn’t wanted to tell her about my childhood, but I had never found the words that wouldn’t make me feel dirty by discussing it. Her mind was too practical to understand why people had done nothing. But the hang-ups were totally on my part. I could never cope with her lack of guile and she had felt hurt by how I clammed up on nights when the memories turned my knuckles white.
Before Conor was born I genuinely believed I had outgrown that hurt. But the older he got the more I found myself forced to relive my childhood, imagining if Conor ever had to endure the same. Surely at some stage my father must have felt this same love for me as I felt for Conor, an overwhelming desire to protect him at any cost, to kill for him if necessary. Yet every time Conor laughed I remembered nights when I cried, with every meal he refused to eat I recalled ravenous hunger. Carrying a glass of milk up the stairs for him in bed I remembered creeping from the outhouse to cup my hands under the waste pipe from the kitchen sink. What father simply abandons his first child? On some nights Miriam would find me cradling Conor in bed, his sleeping cheeks smudged by my unexplained tears. I would want to go to Cremore where my father now lived and punch his face, screaming, ‘Why, you bastard, why?’
I did actually mean to phone Miriam from Perth after I had scored my point. But somewhere along the line