unless you absolutely have to. Make no decisions whatsoever. Perpetually pass on responsibility. Remember that no extra work you do, even if you stay till midnight, will ever find its way on to your record. Only your mistakes will be marked down, black marks on your file for ever. Any innovation will be seen as a threat by those above you. Therefore those who do least, who shirk all decisions, will always progress. It was why Mooney, who spent his day brooding behind an Irish Times at his filthy desk, now commanded his own section, while Carol, who ran and fetched, who kept the office running single-handed, blundering her way through the work he refused to touch, would never progress beyond being his useful assistant. She had committed the fatal mistake of making herself indispensable and would remain there till Mooney finally retired and some white-shirted graduate came in to modernize the office over her head. I had been wrong to imagine work as an adult world. The same old roles of childhood were played out there. As we walked up the steps I wondered suddenly would I be there till sixty-five, learning to rise the ladder and lick higher arses? The thought frightened me more than the unemployment I had known a week before.
Back in the office Shay and Mary played games to spin out the afternoon. If Mooney was safe from them, Carol rose to their bait every time. At half-four, Shay cocked his head like an Indian tracker, then clicked his fingers. Mary had reached the Ladies before Carol even opened Mooney’s door. I watched Carol discreetly check the locked door as Shay and Mick bent their heads dutifully down. She pretended to examine the stacked shelves beside the toilet, shifting uneasily from foot to foot as the minutes passed. Beside me Shay and Mick took bets and softly hummed ‘Singing in the Rain’, until after a quarter of an hour Shay raised his head, touched my shoulder lightly and switched his humming to ‘Here We Go, Here We Go’.
‘Is the post ready, Paula?’
‘No, Carol. I’ll have it finished in five minutes.’
‘What have you been doing all afternoon? Must I do every little thing in this office myself?’
She clenched her fists against her scarlet face and skipped up and down like a child with a rope as she screamed ‘There’s none of yous good!’ Shay watched her flee the room and race across to the toilet in the pub, then picked his watch up.
‘Fifteen and a half minutes,’ he told Mick. ‘You jammy bollox.’ He passed a pound across the table and rose to tap three times on the door. Mary emerged with the paper, glanced around surreptitiously and used it to put the clock on five minutes.
At five to five we stampeded down the steps. The weekend, which had been the worst time of the week when I was unemployed, suddenly stretched joyously before me. I stood enjoying the late spring sunshine. Shay had left just in front of me.
‘Good luck mate,’ I shouted. ‘See you Monday.’
He waved back and then paused.
‘What’s your hurry?’ he said. ‘Fancy a pint? Celebrate your first week of survival.’
He stood a few feet from me, happily indifferent to whether I came or not. I thought of my mother at home, my father due in from Plunkett Motors at half-past five, washing his hands in the deep enamel sink, my little sisters running in and out the kitchen door behind him. I didn’t want to admit to being expected home.
‘Ah, I’m a bit skint. Had to work a back week, you know yourself.’
‘Jasus, there’ll be enough times when I’ll be broke. Get into the car for fuck’s sake if that’s all that’s wrong with you.’
They would wait till the Angelus came on the television, neither praying nor speaking till the chimes stopped, then they’d cover my plate and leave it in the oven. There would be no questions asked when I got home, just silent hurt filling the room of plywood furniture.
A battered Triumph Herald was parked by the prison wall like a relic from Black-and-Tan days. ‘My only love,’ Shay said, patting the canvas roof, and with great difficulty managing to lower it. The rusty bodywork had received more blows than a punch-drunk boxer. After four attempts the engine reluctantly spluttered to life and we moved off towards town. I felt both guilty and elated, filled with a sense of liberation. And perhaps because we had spoken earlier of our home place, all the way to town we talked of travel, each charting more mythical journeys across the European continent. Paris, Berlin, Lisbon; places that to me were just names from subtitled films glimpsed when my parents went to bed, but for Shay they were real. He spoke of them like women he would one day sleep with.
That evening was my first glimpse of Shay’s Dublin. It was like an invisible world existing parallel to the official one I had known, a grey underworld of nixers and dole where people slagged Shay for actually having a job. One summer he’d worked as a messenger boy on a motor bike and knew every twisted lane and small turning. I kept intending to go home after each place we visited but then he’d suggest another and we’d be gone. There was no premeditation, the evening just drifted on its own course. I’d imagine my mother’s plain cooking gradually stuck to the plate, the meat drying up, the shrivelled vegetables. Then Shay would park another pint in front of me and that would put an end to that. I began to see how Shay survived the office without bitterness or hatred. To him it was just a temporary apparition, eight hours of rest before he entered his real world.
At nine o’clock Shay insisted on buying me a Chinese meal, joking that the seagull’s leg refused to stop twitching. By then I was talking as I had never talked since I sat in the old woman’s caravan, living off every word he spoke, making him laugh with stories about my father’s boss. But I shied away from any reference to my home, ashamed of it suddenly as I envied his freedom, his experience, his accepted adultness. Two girls sat at a nearby table. Occasionally one glanced across at him.
‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Will we give it a lash? It’s up to yourself.’
I got frightened of being caught out. I was not a virgin but was terrified of the direct approach. My few successes had been scored hurriedly after dances, brought to a messy climax, before bolting as though from the scene of a crime. If we approached I knew I would be tongue-tied. I hesitated and, trying to feign an experienced air, suggested they might not be the type. He grinned at them and gave a mock wave of his hand.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Cute country girls in their bedsits. They may have lost their virginity but they’ll probably still have the box it came in.’
But it was obvious I was nervous and when they rose to leave he blew a kiss after them and suggested we play snooker instead.
The hall was a converted warehouse with no sign outside. The old man behind the counter was watching a black-and-white television. He greeted Shay like a son and asked him to mind the gaff while he slipped out to the pub. The walls had been whitewashed once but only vaguely remembered the event. We chose the least ragged of the vacant tables. Shay broke, then leaned on his cue to look around the semi-derelict room.
‘I used to live here after I was expelled from school. Old Joe had great hopes for me but I knew I hadn’t got it. The place is in tatters now but no wankers come in. I tried a few of the new ones. Deposits, video cameras, and toss-artists who think a deep screw is a mot with a BA. Fuck this, I said, I must be getting old.’
It was ten o’clock when we left. The old man still hadn’t returned but occasionally men left a few quid behind the counter as they wandered out. ‘Is it cool?’ Shay asked. ‘You sure you don’t have to head home?’ I lied again and followed him through the feverish weekend crowds beneath the neon lights, then down towards a warren of cobbled laneways off Thomas Street. The pub we came to looked shut, the only hint of life being a fine grain of light beneath the closed shutters. A tramp passed, stumbling towards the night shelter. He mumbled a few incomprehensible words, one hand held out as though his fingers were cupping a tiny bird. Two children sleeping rough watched us from the doorway of a boarded-up bakery. Shay tapped three times on the steel shutter and I had the sensation of being watched before it swung open. A middle-aged Monaghan man with an old-fashioned bar apron beckoned and welcomed Shay by name. The downstairs bar was thick with smoke, countrymen nursing pints, a figure with a black beard gesturing drunkenly in the centre of the floor.