Selected Stories

He was a shabbily dressed man, almost everything he wore having been abandoned by someone else. He had acquired the garments over a period, knowing he intended to make this journey – the trousers of what had been a suit, brown pin-striped, worn shiny in the seat and at the knees, a jacket that had been navy-blue and was nondescript now, the khaki shirt he wore an item once of military attire. His shoes were good; in one of his pockets was an Old Carthusian tie, although he had not himself attended Charterhouse. His name was Donal Prunty. Once big, heavily made, he seemed much less so now, the features of a face that had been florid at that time pinched within the sag of flesh. His dark hair was roughly cut. He was fifty-two years old.

The cars were coming off the boat now, beginning to wind their way around the new concrete buildings before passing through one of them - or so it seemed from where he stood. The road they were making for was what he wanted and he walked in that direction. Going over, the livestock lorry he’d been given a lift in had brought him nearly to the boat itself. Twenty-three years, he thought again, you’d never believe it.

He’d been on the road for seven days, across the breadth of England, through Wales. The clothes had held up well; he’d kept himself shaven as best he could, the blades saved up from what they allowed you in the hostels. You could use a blade thirty or so times if you wanted to, until it got jagged. You’d have to watch whatever you’d acquired for the feet; most of all you had to keep an eye on that department. His shoes were the pair he’d taken off the drunk who’d been lying on the street behind the Cavendish Hotel. Everything else you could take was gone from him – wallet, watch, studs and cufflinks, any loose change, a fountain pen if there’d been one, car keys in case the car would be around with things left in it. The tie had been taken off but thrown back and he had acquired it after he’d unlaced the shoes.

When he reached the road to Wexford the cars were on it already. Every minute or so another one would go past and the lorries were there, in more of a hurry. But neither car nor lorry stopped for him and he walked for a mile and then the greater part of another. Fewer passed him then, more travelling in the other direction, to catch the same boat going back to Fishguard. He caught up with a van parked in a lay-by, the driver eating crisps, a can of Pepsi-Cola on the dashboard in front of him, the window beside him wound down.

‘Would you have a lift?’ he asked him.

‘Where’re you heading?’

‘Mullinavat.’

‘I’m taking a rest.’

‘I’m not in a hurry. God knows, I’m not.’

‘I’d leave you to New Ross. Wait there till I’ll have finished the grub.’

‘D’you know beyond Mullinavat, over the Galloping Pass? A village by the name of Gleban?’

‘I never heard of that.’

‘There’s a big white church out the road, nothing only petrol and a half-and-half in Gleban. A priests’ seminary a half-mile the other way.’

‘I don’t know that place at all.’

‘I used be there one time. I don’t know would it be bigger now.’

‘It would surely. Isn’t everywhere these times? Get in and we’ll make it to Ross.’

Prunty considered if he’d ask the van driver for money. He could leave it until they were getting near Ross in case the van would be pulled up as soon as money was mentioned and he’d be told to get out. Or maybe it’d be better if he’d leave it until the van was drawn up at the turn to Mullinavat, where there’d be the parting of the ways. He remembered Ross, he remembered where the Mullinavat road was. What harm could it do, when he was as far as he could be taken, that he’d ask for the price of a slice of bread, the way any traveller would?

Prunty thought about that while the van driver told him his mother was in care in Tagoat. He went to Tagoat on a Sunday, he said, and Prunty knew what the day was then, not that it made a difference. In a city you’d always know that one day of the week when it came round, but travelling you wouldn’t be bothered cluttering yourself with that type of thing.

‘She’s with a woman who’s on the level with her,’ the van driver said. ‘Not a home, nothing like that. I wouldn’t touch a home.’

Prunty agreed that he was right. She’d been where she was a twelvemonth, the van driver said, undisturbed in a room, every meal cooked while she’d wait for it. He wagged his head in wonder at these conditions. ‘The Queen of Sheba,’ he said.

Prunty’s own mother was dead. She’d died eighteen months before he’d gone into exile, a day he hated remembering. Word came in at Cahill’s, nineteen seventy-nine, a wet winter day, February he thought it was.

‘You’ve only the one mother,’ he said. ‘I’m over for the same.’

Prunty made the connection in the hope that such shared ground would assist in the matter of touching the van driver for a few coins.

‘In England, are you?’ the van driver enquired.

‘Oh, I am. A long time there.’

‘I was never there yet.’

‘I’m after coming off the ferry.’

‘You’re travelling light.’