the road where Carol held court with tales of neighbours in Deansgrange and former clerks who had gone to the bad. As I hovered outside on my first morning Shay took pity on me, whistled softly and nodded across the street towards the Irish Martyrs Bar & Lounge. There an inner circle met. Mary, the longest serving clerk, scapegoat for Carol’s tantrums and humours, and Mick, quiet and small, grinning to himself as he wolfed his way through pints of Guinness. The bar was jammed in an uneasy truce between policemen and criminals, nodding familiarly as they waited to be served by the old barmen. When I complained that it was my first day and I was afraid to drink, Mary reluctantly bought me an orange juice and then spiked it with vodka when my back was turned. That lunch-time I began to see the humour behind their serious faces.
Mick was the occupant of a Rathgar bedsit, expelled from college after three years of playing pool, degreeless and a disgrace to his strong farmer father, but with a highest snooker break of seventy-six, a love of German films and a poker fixation. He rarely spoke till the afternoon, as he nursed each morning’s hangover in. Mary had just passed the wrong side of thirty. She had joined after school, intending to stay for a year and never managed to leave. Even that first day I knew she never would go now. She told the bluest jokes in her Liberties accent as she spent every penny she had on you, but rarely mentioned her three-year-old child at home, never spoke of the daily struggle to cope alone. Between them Shay sat, egging them on as they mocked the size of each other’s sexual parts while surreptitiously pouring drink into me.
At two o’clock they helped me cautiously back up the stairs, Mary shovelling mints into me to disguise the smell. After every few steps they’d pause to agree how awful they were, then burst out into laughter again. That first afternoon passed in a hazy blur, wedged in between Shay and Mick hiding me at the bottom table. The room swayed in a welter of flying sellotape and blue jokes, the elbows of the lads prodding me whenever I teetered towards laughter.
It seemed unreal when I got home again to face my mother’s eager questions. I stood in the shorn garden trying to sober up, suddenly resentful of Shay with his permanent position. He was safe in a job for life. All they needed to give me was three days’ notice. He knew the rules while I was being led blindly down. But soon I realized I was not. Shay kept beside me as the first week rolled on, his intuition so refined he could warn me the instant before a door opened or a buzzer rang. And the work was so tedious that despite my apprehension I was drawn in, fascinated by his cool good nature, his audacity. Some mornings Mary gave him a conspiratorial wink and he’d disappear until break time when he discreetly emptied the baby Power in their cups at the top of the table, slipping the empty whiskey bottle back into his pocket before Carol arrived. In the afternoons the voices of solicitors and policemen wafted through the air vent as we blew smoke from the joint out the downstairs toilet window; his eyes amused at my terror whenever their footsteps came near. And gradually I learnt to surrender my trust to him. He kept me always just the right side of the line, teaching me how to look busy by perpetually carrying a pile of files as I wandered through the room or by stacking work up in front of me to create the appearance of speed.
By the Friday I knew everything about the job that needed to be known. My hands could file the forms away in my sleep. Indeed, when I closed my eyes on the first nights I automatically saw piles of registration forms being ticked and passed from tray to tray. The forms came in cardboard boxes that were carefully stored and returned. Those boxes that had burst open were burnt. That afternoon Shay beckoned me out to the landing. Below, the guard was calling out the last few cases before the weekend. Without looking down I could sense the crush of bodies piling against the court door. Shay selected four of the sturdiest cardboard boxes and reefed them apart with an expert left foot. He handed me two and we were gone. The incinerator was two concrete slabs placed against the wall of the old prison. We burnt each box individually, dutifully standing over them until the last one turned to ash. That was when he told me about the girl with one breast.
‘Mooney made Carol do his dirty work, of course. She had visited young Eileen in hospital twice a week. I found Carol up there that lunch-time, her cardigan over her shoulder, eyes raw with crying.’
I was drifting slowly into friendship with him, the very casualness of it disguising its grip. I had stuck close to him at first simply to learn the rules of work but even after five days it had become more than that in my mind. There was a sense of excitement being in Shay’s presence. His friendship made no demands; it was simply given, asking nothing in return, making no attempt to conscript you to any viewpoint or take sides in the petty office wars. The discovery that we were from the same suburb was made not in terms of common links but of differences.
I remember once as a child missing the bus stop at the village and being carried up the long straight road into the Corporation estates in the West. I was terrified by the stories I had heard. I could have been a West Berliner who’d strayed across the Iron Curtain. When I was eight the new dual carriageway made the division complete, took away the woodlands we might have shared, made the only meeting point between the two halves of the village a huge arched pedestrian bridge. He listened incredulously when I confessed to not having been in the Bath Wars, then described how each summer’s day the boys in the West would gather on the hill overlooking the river valley that had miraculously survived between them and the next suburb. Below lay the only amenity for miles: a filthy, concrete open-air pool. On the far hill the enemy was massed with strict military ranks observed. Daily pitched battles were fought for possession of the muddy square of water. That Friday by the prison wall Shay lifted his shirt to show me the scar left on his back from the evening he was captured on a reconnaissance mission and beaten with a bicycle chain. I think now of Ernie O’Malley escaping through the gate that stood behind us that day, both wars a struggle to reach adulthood. To Shay the scar was as much a part of growing up there as Black-and-Tans smashing doors was to his grandfather. I told him instead of my world of hen-runs and potato beds, of opening the back door one night to find a hedgehog trapped in the light, pulling its head in and squatting for hours till it could escape into the dark.
Shay had left home when he started work at eighteen, and perpetually moved from bedsit to bedsit since. I envied him for having made the break. The world he spoke of was magical—late-night snooker halls and twenty-four-hour kebab shops where the eyes of a waitress at four in the morning were lit by Seconal, walking home from a poker session to a flat at dawn with thirty pounds in change. That Friday afternoon I desperately wanted his friendship, wanted his respect, wanted to become a part of his world. I tried to lie and invent experiences but found I hadn’t the confidence.
Instead I tried to prove my manhood by cursing Mooney and speaking of the hatred already building in me. It was contagious in that cramped office where no one knew who would be reported next. Only once had I been inside Mooney’s inner office where the blinds were kept drawn, giving the room an air of perpetual twilight. An old-fashioned lamp with a metal shade burned on his desk, highlighting his joined fingers, and a white circle of disordered papers stretched away into the dusk at the table’s edge. Leather-bound volumes coated with dust lined the walls except for the space behind the desk where the largest map of the city I had ever seen was hung. The political boundaries had been drawn and redrawn on it as successive governments reshaped the constituencies to their advantage. Once a year when Mooney went reluctantly on holiday with his wife and children, Carol worked in a frenzy to make sense of the papers before his return. I had been sent in to deliver two completed folders and Mooney had ignored my knock and my query about where to leave them. Only when I was leaving did he speak. I see everything in this office, he intoned. I turned. In the lamplight it was impossible to see his eyes, only the joined hands motionless on the desk. They picked up the nearest paper, dismissing me. But as I cursed him by the wall of the jail I realized Shay was the only person who didn’t share in the collective orgy of hate. For him it would have given Mooney a stature he didn’t deserve.
He kicked at the ashes, enjoying the last few breaths of air.
‘Listen Hano, that’s his world up there. Do you not think he knows how they hate him? I tell you, the man gloats on it. Not only has he got them for eight hours a day, but before work, after work; every waking hour they spend discussing how they hate him makes him the axis of their lives. He lives off it for fuck sake, it gives him importance. Just ignore the cunt. That’s what really kills him.’
Shay