New Town Soul Read online

  new town soul

  New Town Soul was written by the author as part of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council’s ‘Place and Identity’ Programme of Per Cent for Art commissions for 2008-2010 funded through the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government

  Novels

  Night Shift

  The Woman’s Daughter

  The Journey Home

  Emily’s Shoes

  A Second Life

  Father’s Music

  Temptation

  The Valparaiso Voyage

  The Family on Paradise Pier

  Collaborative Novels

  Finbar’s Hotel*

  Ladies Night at Finbar’s Hotel*

  Plays

  The Lament for Arthur Cleary

  Blinded by the Light

  In High Germany*

  The Holy Ground

  One Last White Horse

  April Bright

  The Passion of Jerome*

  Consenting Adults

  From These Green Heights**

  The Townlands of Brazil**

  Walking the Road*

  The Consequences of Lightning**

  The Parting Glass

  Poetry

  The Habit of Flesh

  Finglas Lilies

  No Waiting America

  Internal Exiles

  Leinster Street Ghosts

  Taking My Letters Back

  The Chosen Moment

  External Affairs*

  Editor

  The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (UK)

  The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (USA

  Night & Day: Twenty Four Hours in the Life of Dublin

  (*Available from New Island

  **Available from New Island under the title The Ballymun Trilogy)

  Born in Dublin in 1959, Dermot Bolger’s nine novels for adults include The Woman’s Daughter, The Journey Home, The Valparaiso Voyage and most recently The Family on Paradise Pier. He is the author of over a dozen stage plays, including The Lament for Arthur Cleary, which received The Samuel Beckett Award. His eight volumes of poetry include External Affairs and he devised and edited the best-selling collaborative novels Finbar’s Hotel and Ladies Night at Finbar’s Hotel, which were published in a dozen countries. The editor of numerous anthologies, including The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, he has been Writer Fellow in Trinity College, Dublin and Playwright in Association with the Abbey Theatre. This is his first book for a young adult readership.

  www.dermotbolger.com

  new town

  soul

  DERMOT BOLGER

  First published 2010

  by Little Island

  an imprint of New Island

  2 Brookside

  Dundrum Road

  Dublin 14

  www.newisland.ie

  Copyright © Dermot Bolger 2010

  The author has asserted his moral rights.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-111-2

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-310-9

  MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84840-311-6

  All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

  British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  New Island received financial assistance from

  The Arts Council (An Comhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland

  For my sister, Deirdre, with love

  ONE

  Thomas

  1932

  The music of a jazz record on the gramophone fills the doctor’s study. Thomas tries not to listen to the music as he feels the cold stethoscope against his skin, but the saxophone solo overwhelms him, conjuring up images of foreign cities and adventure.

  Old Dr Thomson removes the stethoscope and stares at the boy’s anxious face.

  ‘No need to look scared, Thomas. With a heart like yours, you’ll live forever.’

  ‘Fr O’Connor says that jazz is the devil’s music; it can inflame terrible passions and steal your soul.’

  The doctor laughs. He crosses the book-lined study to raise the volume of the music.

  ‘How can any type of music be bad, child? Souls can be stolen, but not by something as innocent as jazz.’

  ‘How then?’

  The doctor turns, his eyes serious. ‘Have you ever heard of a changeling?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Some mothers believe that dark spirits can steal their babies while they sleep and replace them in the cot with malevolent beings who are neither truly alive nor truly dead. Changelings.’

  ‘Do you believe in changelings, doctor?’

  The old man shrugs. ‘I’ve been a doctor for fifty years. My family were doctors here in Blackrock for five generations before me. Two hundred years ago my grandfather’s grandfather was called to the Hellfire Club. A young servant boy had found his master with his throat cut. The man was notorious in Blackrock. He was the last of the Dawson family – you know, the people who owned Castledawson House. He was a rake. He’d gambled his way through a fortune and was in the final throes of consumption, unable to stop coughing blood. Do you know the Hellfire Club?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a burned-out ruin now. You can still see what’s left of it in the Dublin hills. It was used by rakes who drank in the notorious Eagle Tavern in Dublin. People say Dawson had grown sick of it: toasting the devil’s health with raw whiskey mixed with melted butter in front of a blazing fire, until the merciless heat and alcohol made the drinker pass out. Whole estates were gambled away there yet he couldn’t stop himself being lured up there to the games of cards and dice that were played amid oaths and blasphemy and the constant invocations for the dark lord – Beelzebub, Lucifer – to appear in the guise of a black cat.

  ‘Nobody would gamble with Dawson any more, because he had nothing left to bet with, but some say that he had one final wager with the devil. No one knows what happened on that morning when Michael Byrne, his servant boy, came to collect him up at the club, but old folk in Blackrock claimed that Dawson made one final wish and tricked Michael Byrne into making a wish too. They used the relics of a saint to make their wish, fragments of bone that had been in Dawson’s family for generations. It was believed that those relics had the power to grant one’s most fervent wishes. But desire has a dark side; no wish comes without a price. They say that Michael Byrne later had those bones carved into the shape of gambling dice. If Byrne wished for gold, he got his wish, because he had the devil’s own luck with cards and dice ever after. No one knows what Henry Dawson wished for, because Michael Byrne always claimed that when he found his master, Dawson’s throat had already been cut with a black-handled knife.’

  ‘Did Byrne do it?’ asks Thomas. ‘Murder his master?’

  ‘Some folk claimed he did. Others said that Byrne had become a changeling when he returned to Blackrock after that day; because there was something about him utterly different from the starving servant boy who had set out to fetch his master. I still have my grandfather’s grandfather’s medical notes about the case. He considered that the boy had become mentally unhinged at finding the body. If he had somehow become a changeling, it was not in the way that peasants mean. My great-great-grandfather wondered if the boy’s soul had been snatched in some way. It seemed to him as if other beings were lodged inside his body, dead souls gazing out through the boy’s bewildered eyes. Does that make sense to you, Thomas?’

  ‘No.’

  The doctor smiles. ‘And you a
re undoubtedly right, Thomas; such stories are myth and superstition. All I can say for certain is that jazz will not harm you. Still, whatever you do in life, never let anyone snatch your soul.’

  The record ends. Thomas hears the soft putt, putt of the needle as the disc keeps revolving amid a hissing silence.

  ‘How could anyone snatch my soul?’

  ‘By making a pact with you; by promising you your heart’s most hidden desire. What do you desire most, Thomas?’

  The boy rises and lovingly examines the foreign place names printed in gold leaf on the doctor’s radiogram next to the gramophone: Cairo and Hilversum, Helsinki and Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen. He is mesmerised by the thought that if he turns off the record and twists this dial, then indistinct voices from across the world would fill the room like ghosts whispering. Thomas does not want to express his overwhelming desire to travel the world, because he will never be free to do as he wishes. Turning away he notices a carved wooden doll on the sideboard.

  ‘Open it,’ the old doctor says.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Dr Thomson picks up the wooden doll to reveal how it comes apart in the middle. Inside the first doll there is another doll, slightly smaller but an exact replica.

  ‘I bought this from an émigré in Paris,’ the doctor says, ‘a White Russian fleeing the Bolsheviks. In Russia these are called matryoschka or nesting dolls.’

  The doctor reveals a succession of other carved dolls inside the first one, each one fitting inside the previous one, until twelve of them are lined up along the sideboard.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ Thomas says.

  The doctor nods. ‘But oddly cruel. Imagine what it must feel like to be a doll within a doll, to lose your own identity and spend your life in darkness sandwiched between replicas of yourself, knowing that another face has been placed over yours. Thankfully dolls do not need to breathe, because these dolls would suffocate.’ The doctor begins to fit them back inside each other. ‘I suspect this is what my grandfather’s grandfather meant by being a changeling, someone forced to be part of a chain after some person or power has snatched their soul. Addiction, compulsion, desired – these are all forms of slavery. Go home, Thomas. Tell your mother your chest is fine. But take this record as my present.’

  ‘Fr O’Connor wouldn’t like me owning a jazz record. He says I’m going to be a priest.’

  ‘Life rarely works out as we expect, Thomas. You don’t know what you will be. But whatever dangers lie ahead for you, they will not come from jazz music. Keep your soul safe, Thomas; because once it is stolen it can never truly be your own again.’

  TWO

  Joey’s Father

  1993

  Music pounds from the speakers in my dad’s speeding car. Not the mindless throb of synthesisers or the robotic vocals of smart blondes managed by dumb men, but a rough cut of tracks from his long-anticipated debut album. Those unfinished songs keep him company on his long drive home to us in Blackrock, his mind buzzing with improvements to the lyrics as he speeds around each sharp bend. Night drives are part of any singer’s life: routes like this deserted country road across the Dublin mountains. As Dad puts his foot down, the lines of cat’s eyes that loom out from the darkness make him feel like he is inside a computer game.

  He has just finished gigging in a hotel in a remote Wicklow glen. His amp was barely able to drown out the incessant thump of a karaoke machine in the public bar. Thirty spellbound fans had crowded around him afterwards, demanding to know when his album, New Town Soul, would finally be released. Hot Press magazine had tipped it to be the hottest debut of the year. But Hot Press had been tipping it to be the best debut for the past three years. Different record companies have signed him up and then released him, unable to prise the master tapes from his hands. Dad cannot give fans a definite release date, because he keeps tinkering with arrangements, striving to create the perfect sound that will grant him immortality. He refuses to settle for anything less than a sound which will ensure his voice lives on forever – like Kurt Cobain before he shot himself; like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye before others shot them; like Buddy Holly and Richie Valens before they unwisely boarded rickety aeroplanes; like Jimi Hendrix before he asphyxiated on vomit and wine; like Jim Morrison before junk clogged his brains and veins; like Phil Lynott before the laureate of Dublin could barely find a vein on the soles of his feet to inject into; like the other immortals that my dad listened to, convinced that he was destined to be counted among them one day.

  When he releases New Town Soul, he knows the crowds will be ten times bigger, but tonight it has been enough that a few hardcore fans turned up to hear his masterpiece in progress. It is a dark country road, but Dad has no intention of wasting money we cannot afford on a hotel. He can be parked outside our tiny cottage in a Victorian terrace before dawn. He knows every shortcut from the endless gigs, from the night-time drives home. He is about to pass the ruins of the Hellfire Club where rakes once drank and toasted the devil. Just beyond that there will be a turn for Tibradden. From there a necklace of neon lights will guide him down into Whitechurch and along the Blackglen Road, past Sandyford Industrial Estate and the N11 and onto Newtownpark Avenue in Blackrock. From there it will be a left turn onto Frascati Road and then Temple Road. He will need to swing onto the main street of Blackrock, with the seafront and the abandoned baths just a few hundred yards away beyond the train tracks. Then he will swing into Brusna Cottages – the small culde-sac where my mother waits for him in a king-sized bed so large that it barely leaves space in the cramped bedroom for the cot where I sleep fretfully, getting my first teeth.

  However, this is a journey home that he is never to complete. I like to imagine that at two a.m. a faint echo of the crash somehow wakes me. A sound that only a baby can hear: the sound of my future turning upside down. Does Dad take his hand off the wheel to raise the volume? Does he glance up to see something blocking the road as he rounds the bend – a sheep straying off the mountain, an old man in a black hat brandishing a raised stick or the ghost of Henry Dawson running from the derelict Hellfire lodge shrieking, ‘My soul is truly damned!’?

  That’s how I imagine it all, but I can be certain of only two things: firstly, that when Dad crashes through the windscreen, hundreds of shards of glass explode onto the tarmac around him. I like to imagine each shard reflecting a different image of him, like a cascading slideshow during the eternity of the few seconds that it takes for the windscreen to shatter.

  The second fact is that although his car becomes a contorted concertina of twisted metal at the entrance to the forest that now surrounds the Hellfire Club, his music system still works. Because when a passing motorist finds his body up there near the summit of Montpelier, the mountain landscape is silent except for his car speakers blaring out the songs that I will spend my childhood longing to hear – my dad’s foiled attempts to gain immortality.

  THREE

  Joey

  September 2009

  You can do this, Joey, I told myself. Don’t panic, don’t show them that you’re scared. You’re not the first guy to ever walk down a busy school corridor into a new classroom full of strangers. But I was scared because not only was I changing school, I was also hoping to change my life. It was eight days after my sixteenth birthday. I had a new school uniform, a school bag filled with new books and a head filled with bad memories of last being in a classroom. In my previous school I had been bullied and ridiculed, but here in Stradbrook College I was going to keep myself to myself. This was my plan. The plan only lasted as long as it took me to meet Shane O’Driscoll.

  Even if I had been the coolest guy on the planet I’d feel nervous walking into an unfamiliar classroom, crammed with faces that already knew each other and shared in-jokes and nicknames. But I wasn’t cool: I was probably the uncoolest guy I knew. When God was doling out coolness I must have popped out to the bathroom or else I had been standing at the heavenly queue where you complain about being short-changed in th
e looks department.

  I tried to conceal my nervousness as a shoal of faces turned to scrutinise the new boy in the doorway. Their glances were more dismissive than curious, but there was no hostility in anyone’s eyes. I was too ordinary for them to bother interrupting their first-morning-back-at-school chatter after the summer holidays. I could already spot some cliques. In one corner, a few apprentice goths consoled each other at having to wear their school uniforms again. In another corner, sporting jocks compared bruises picked up on the rugby pitch as they swapped tales of vitamin supplements, iron-pumping and dubious sexual conquests. Two potential applicants for Young Scientist of the Year were examining what was either an old science paper or the blueprint for a homemade nuclear bomb. But the vast majority of my new classmates in Stradbrook College looked fairly laid back. The place was ethnically mixed and co-religious. It seemed to have just about everything except a single classmate who enjoyed the music I liked playing. I was an expert on the musical tastes of everyone present, because over the previous two weeks I had hacked my way into their Facebook pages. It meant that I knew who was dating whom, who was no longer dating whom and who was rumoured to secretly want to date whom. Indeed, the web was so littered with candid pictures of my new classmates clowning around at parties over the summer that I could even put names on most of the students present.

  Nobody in this classroom could do the same with me, because even if they had bothered to Google me, they would not have found me online. I had taken down my Facebook page some months previously. It was not the constant cyber-bullying from the boys in my old school that had got to me, but the boringly repetitive nature of their insults. Even when it came to character assassination, nobody in the all-male school I’d attended had had enough spark to leave an original comment. I don’t want to give the impression that I had been some type of oddball loner in my previous school: I’d been popular enough there in a dorkish way, or at least I’d encountered no great hassle until I entered that talent contest. I had learned to blend in on the edge of cliques so that it looked like I belonged. But, in truth, I never fitted in, and not because I was any sort of geek. I didn’t fit in because my former classmates bored the pants off me. They were obsessed with football and manufactured bands and with throwing shapes like poor imitations of third-rate, bad-ass, notvery-fly-for-a-white-guy rappers.