A Sort of Homecoming: A Novel

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Chapter One

Advent

I'm the last passenger to deplane.

    `Happy Christmas, safe home,' says the ancient Aer Lingus hostess at the cabin door. I respond by repeating something she said over the PA as we were taxiing in, `See you again soon.'

    Bitch of a line at immigration control. The plastic jacket of my passport is torn from frequent flying. I open it (nothing better to do). Skipping over the thorny Irish text, I read the blurb in English on the inside cover,

The Minister of Foreign Affairs requests all whom it may concern to allow the bearer, a citizen of Ireland, to pass freely and without hindrance and to afford the bearer all necessary assistance and protection.

Well, who'd mess with an Irishman after reading that? A lot of good the Minister of Foreign Affairs — search me who it is now: I think another coalition has collapsed in my absence, part of the fallout from that Fr Golden scandal — a lot of good Mr Micky Minister did me back in September when I got detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act at Heathrow.

    Five fucking hours the British cops had me in that windowless cube. Not that I can blame them too much for taking their time (I may be a hater, but I'm nothing so obvious as a Brit-hater). My story sounded pretty implausible — a twenty-two-year-old Irish guy, carrying enough traveller's cheques to buy a sackful of Semtex (the drug or the explosive), claiming that he had no business in life other than flying. I would have stopped me. Maybe I should haveobeyed my friend Roderick de Brun's First Law of London: wear a tie going through Heathrow. But I'm not much good with laws.

    I turn to the laminated main page of the passport. It says my forenames are Tomás Michael. But it's more accurate to say that those are his names — the chubby-cheeked, round-shouldered, ugly duckling seventeen-year-old there in the photograph. The Heathrow heavies had a hard time believing that boy was me. I have a hard time believing it myself.

    So who am I now? You can call me Tom — don't even think of calling me Tomás — but mostly the world calls me by my surname, my essential name, my true title: Iremonger. I love its snarl and swagger. That name is the best part of my inheritance, better even than my grandfather's money. And I'm more of an Iremonger he ever was; certainly more of an Iremonger than my father. The name has been waiting for me.

    I flick through my visas. Okay, I've got stamps for Helsinki, St Petersburg, Belize, Tangier, Toronto, to name but a few, but they tell only half the story. Barcelona, Trieste, and Los Angeles have left no imprint on these harp-watermarked pages. There's no mention of the trip I took from Athens, Greece to Athens, Georgia. Copenhagen might as well not have happened. Arriving in an EC city these days, the immigration cop barely nods when you wave your Burgundy-red passport. You're cleared for the States before you leave Irish soil. What is the world coming to?

    I relish that chu-chink of arrival. I need it. Right now, for example, I think I was in Florence this summer. I distinctly remember watching a fire-eater perform on a narrow street near the Uffizi. But maybe I'm getting mixed up with the time I went there years ago with my parents. Maybe this time I did no more than touch down and take off. I've done a lot of touching down and taking off again these last six months.

    Maybe I'll buy myself a video camera for Christmas, among other treats. In the New Year I don't want any of this confusion. After all, I'm having the time of my life.

    The line has moved quickly. I expect to get a stolid nod from the bald, plain-clothes cop standing beside the Tensa-barrier bollard when I hold up the harp — he must have seen a hundred thousand of these today — but to my surprise he takes it from my hand. He compares me with the boy. I guess he recognises me from the poster (coming up real soon). He must pass Iremonger going home every day.

    `Where are you coming from?' he asks.

    I shrug. `Everywhere, I guess.'

    `You sound like you're coming from New York, but you can't be that slow getting off a plane. So be more specific, sonny.'

    He's got the dress-sense of a bachelor farmer; I guess they're not called plain clothes for nothing.

    `Paris.'

    `I'd believe it,' he grunts.

    I take the escalator. All the way up are illuminated posters of folk singers and sentimental tenors dressed in knitwear. Imagine, this is the first taste of Ireland foreigners get when they deplane. If I were Taoiseach I'd ban this crap. Not that I'm ever going to be Taoiseach. I believe one of the requirements of the job is that you are prepared to live in Ireland. I am not. I know too much. I know, for example, that if these wispy-bearded old bastards, the Padraig Pearse Project, had any guts they wouldn't be calling their CD An Emerald Welcome but something like IRA Forever! Time to come out of the provo closet, lads. Must be quite a crush in there.

    For a stretch at the top of the escalator all that divides Arrivals and Departures is a glass wall. I stop and watch this guy in stone-washed jeans walk onto a pathetic replica of the Ha'penny Bridge — gateway to the departure gates. Part of me, most of me, wants to smash the glass and follow him. See, I have my own project. The Tom Iremonger Project. That's what I've been up to for the last six months — an anti-odyssey acting out the Iremonger philosophy, which I've been honing for close on five years.

    The philosophy runs something like this: make the present moment a work of art. Fuck sitting in dark recording studios or in a poky room writing a book (I have been, since graduating from Trinity, a post-literary individual, and even there I tried to stick to criticism as much as possible). Dive deeper into the present than you've dared to before. Wake up and realise that the only thing worth investing in is living. And don't let the past and the future, the bully boys of existence, push you around. That means, for one thing, taking a pretty dim view of tradition. In my opinion, tradition gets away with murder. Tradition needs to be questioned in a windowless cube in the bowels of Heathrow airport on a regular basis. Take, for example, Christmas. Why do we all have to come back, like some refugee crisis in reverse, to see our folks during this miserable mid-winter week? I'd much rather breeze back into Dublin, unannounced, for a weekend in June or July, a time of year when I find the place approaching the condition of bearability. But no. Everybody has to have their Christmas in December. Even me. Charming.

    But I do have the poster to look forward to, my poster. According to my friend Dylan Carraig-Dubh — yes, son of Carmel Carraig-Dubh, the Ireland on Sunday social columnist — it's at the end of the long corridor that leads to baggage reclaim. He saw it when he came home from Manhattan for a few days last October. At least eight strangers I've met on my travels — and not all of them Irish — have told me they've seen it too. Only last night a girl from Cork walked up to me in Godot's on rue Mouffetard and asked me if I was the guy in the IDA advertisement. I shyly confirmed that I was; it turned into a one-night stand. My father mentioned on the phone — I think it was the call I made to my parents in August — that several of his former colleagues at American Machines have noticed it also; he joked that he felt like taking a trip to London just to see his son.

    I see myself, Iremonger illuminated, as soon as I turn the corner. A red paisley tie (Oscar's, £29) offsets the dark-blue tailored suit (Louis Copeland, £499). I carry a cell phone in one hand, a copy of The Irish Times in the other. The other me walks faster, weaving around other passengers. The day after the photoshoot in June I saw that image circled on a contact sheet, but I left Dublin too early — graduating in absentia — to see the polished product, embossed with copy. But I can see it all now. Our Greatest Resource, reads the slogan at my feet. The creatives from Ascendancy have done one hell of a job. I bet they'll get some kind of industry award for this.

    I stop right in front of the poster (out of the corner of my eye watching other passengers do a double-take at its living reflection as they walk by). I take a close look at my face, at my flawless post-adolescent skin, sky-high cheekbones, young-god jaw, guilt-free eyes, pleasure-ready smile. It's odd to think that all this time I've been away, no matter what I've been doing — getting tied down in the Italian Alps, hallucinating in an isolation tank in Toronto, partying with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Venice Beach, and flying, flying, flying — I've also been right here, not moving a two-dimensional muscle, staring confidently at every arrival, welcoming the world to Ireland.

    Sure, I do wish I were the poster boy for a cooler product than the Industrial Development Authority — the Ray-Bans hanging around my neck, for example. But I can live with it. Ultimately I'm advertising myself. If Cara, the Aer Lingus in-flight magazine, is to be believed, a quarter of a million people will have seen me in the last few days alone. As Dylan said to me one night in New York, only half-joking, `You're entering the collective unconscious, Iremonger.'

    If that's true, it applies to Mainie too. Mainie Doyle, one of my oldest flames. She's the model in the female version of the advertisement, the other half of the campaign. Ascendancy placed her in Cara. This has been the first time I've flown Aer Lingus since leaving Dublin in June, so I checked her out as soon as I got seated on the ground at Charles de Gaulle (I haven't seen her since June either). There she was, in between an article on Romy Dorgan, the Wall Street arbitrageur from Mayo, and an advert for Kells (Sacred for Centuries), the new cream liqueur.

    Mainie wears a sleek beeper and sparkly Celtic brooch. She looks great. True, they've elongated her a little; Mainie doesn't quite have the height for the big time, a fact that has never fazed her since she's never been hungry for a career on the catwalk; it was just one of those sidelines in her ever-busier life that brought her, as usual, further success. Mainie has the Midas touch. No, Mainie has the Mainie touch. I had forgotten that. I had forgotten how evil she can look, especially with a tad of distortion. Ascendancy was right on the money with Mainie Doyle. One look at those big black tax-free eyes and executive vice-presidents will be lusting after Ireland as a location. CEOs will be lining up to invest in those bold, arching, mannish eyebrows. That ahead-of-schedule smile will be responsible for many a white elephant. Mainie's is a face that will launch a thousand joint projects. And she'll be proud, very proud. See, that's the difference between Mainie and me: she believes in what she's selling (besides herself), she believes in the Industrial Development Authority. Mainie Doyle could very well be Ireland's Greatest Resource. Hell, she even wants to come back and live here.

    I checked her out several more times during the flight — nothing much else to do. Your copy to take away, it said on the cover of the magazine. I took it.

    Baggage reclaim is insane, mental. You'd swear they'd discovered gold in the Dublin Mountains. The departure gate at Charles de Gaulle was nothing compared to this: I recognise somebody every thirty seconds, and sense I am recognised every three. Not a problem. What gets me is that, in a sense, I know everybody here, I recognise every face. Just the other night in the Chelsea Hotel I was giggling at an advert on cable TV. It was for a product called Galway Morning, a soap you will not find in any Irish bathroom. The camera crew had obviously gone back in time to shoot the commercial. But what really cracked me up were the actors with their in-your-face Irish faces: flaming red hair, freckles by Jackson Pollock, eyes so twinkly I swore they'd been smoking the same stuff I was. These airport faces are not clichés, but they are emphatically Irish. I can't say what the common denominator is. Perhaps it is their heart-sinking familiarity. I'm surrounded by the plain people of Ireland.

    Despite the crowds, there is no shortage of baggage carts (no expense has been spared to get everyone in and out of the country efficiently), but I don't need one. I'm travelling light — just this Coach carry-on and one suitcase — because I'm not staying long. The rest of my wardrobe is back in Paris, in my apartment on rue du Guignol (in the troisième, two blocks from the Pompidou). I share it with a rich kid from Orange County, Step Purchas, who claims to be writing a screenplay on Jim Morrison's last days, though share might not be the right word: I've spent no more than twenty nights there since June.

    Christmas lights, pine sprigs and ribbons are festooned from the ceiling. In the middle of every baggage carousel stands a Styrofoam snowman. I find the carousel advertising the baggage from flight EI 407. It looks like luggage from a Milan flight is still circulating, so I hover at the edge of the crowd. Our snowman holds a sign saying Hurry Up — I'm Melting!

    Somebody taps me on the shoulder. Don't tell me it's that engineer from Kildare I sat beside on the plane. Quite the charmer when I'm up in the clouds, in my element, I easily form these air-friendships; but they have no weight on the ground, for me at least. First Rule of Cool: don't end a journey with more baggage than you started with.

    I turn around. It's Roderick de Brun. Coincidence? Not in my world, sweetheart. Things like this happen all the time, particularly at airports. Airports are my local pub.

    `So it's true — Iremonger's home. Slaughter the fattened calf.'

    `It's the very least you could do.' I smile.

    Usually when Irish guys go away they lose weight — I know I'm leaner than ever before — but not Roderick. He looks exactly like he did six months ago: a combination of the well-fed barrister his father is and the rugger-bugger Roderick used to be. But Roderick, who is even taller than I am, carries it well. Girls find his girth a turn-on. I won't deny it, the guy's got presence. A few years back, Roderick came that close to being cast as the piano player in The Uncommitted, this (pretty crap) movie about a bunch of Southside guys who form a jazz band. They were crazy not to pick him. If it weren't for his congenital geniality, I think Roderick would be a kind of rival Iremonger. As it is, he is my long-time partner in crime, a founding member of the mad pinting gang, of which Dylan is the other essential element. God knows how long Roderick has been flying, but he's still looking pimp, wearing his signature oval Oliver Peoples glasses, and a new gilded toque.

    `I like the hat,' I say.

    `I like the jacket,' he replies.

    He's talking about Nico. Nico is the name (the secret name) of my black leather jacket. You've got to give a name to something you love. And this was love at first sight. I saw Nico in the window of a vintage clothes store on Perry Street in Greenwich Village last August, and realised I'd been looking for her for years, probably ever since I heard that Leonard Cohen song `Famous Blue Raincoat'. Well, Iremonger's defining item of clothing ain't torn at the shoulder: it's in mint condition. Nico is a 1950s Swedish motorbike cop's jacket with detachable lambswool lining. $850 I paid for her, and I would have paid double. She's been on my shoulders every day since. This jacket is my second skin. My one true love.

    `So what the hell are you doing back?' Roderick asks me.

    I shrug. It's an evil question. `It's Christmas,' I say. And that's a bad answer. I'm not satisfied with that answer. Christmas means nothing to me, yet here I am — in Dublin. And that's not all, that's not the whole story ... Spit it out, Iremonger: I have come back on the return portion of the ticket I flew out from Dublin on in June. I found it last week in a torn Diaspora Travel disposable wallet I thought I had disposed of in Aix-en-Provence.

    `I heard there was no way you would be back, Tom.'

    `What exactly did you hear?'

    `Well, a number of things. Someone said you were on location with Wire Wenders in Alice Springs; Vogue Fitzgerald told me that you were in a drug rehab facility in Santa Cruz, California; last week Dylan was adamant that you would be spending the holidays with Isabelle Adjani's sister in Cannes; there was even briefly a rumour that you had died in Egypt.'

    I can't help but smile. I love this stuff. I live for it. The more gossip, the more fictions, the more myths out there about Iremonger the better. If it could be bought, I'd gladly spend my whole inheritance on the power of bilocation. As it is, I have to settle for the odd morning when I half awake in two places — head in London, say, body in Los Angeles. But the sensation lasts no more than a few seconds. Before long all of me is falling out of somebody else's bed in Islington. But it's sweet while it lasts, that spatial déjà vu. Must be the drugs.

    Roderick is still going on about how neat it is to have me back. So I change the subject,

    `Enough about me.' Those words don't come easy. `How was Argentina, for god's sake?'

    `Excellent. I had this nightly gig at the Ulysses Bar in Buenos Aires. I learned how to ride a horse. I slept with one of Borges's granddaughters. I ate a lot of steak.'

    `So no regrets about not doing King's Inns?'

    Maybe you'll get the import of that comment if I tell you that Carmel Carraig-Dubh, in one of her more generous moments, called Roderick's old man `one of the living legends of the Law Library, the tort king of Dublin'.

    Roderick gives me a steely smile. `No way.'

    `How long are you back for?'

    `Oh, a month at least. I got one of those McGowan visas in the lottery.'

    `You did that?'

    `Yeah, I sent 1,150 letters to the post office in Danforth, Maryland. It did the trick.'

    `I should hope so. But why are you sticking around for a month?'

    `You're not fit to be an American unless you've got clean blood and clean lungs. Got to get those tests done before the interview. That's on the 22nd of January. Then I'll be off to validate. What about yourself?'

    `Well, let me see. I picked up two hundred Rolands in duty-free this morning. That might last me till New Year's Day.' (Right now I'm T - 192.)

    Roderick smiles. `Which conveniently means that you'll still be here for Mainie's party.'

    I put on a sceptical expression. `Yeah, but I'm not sure I want to go. Christmas in Dublin is going to be difficult enough without a Mainie Doyle affair.'

    This is an excellent improvisation, if I say so myself, because I have no idea what Roderick is talking about. There's a chance he's just kidding — I usually know about parties on other continents, in alternative universes — but I can't take the risk of showing up my ignorance of what, axiomatically, would be a major social event. All of a sudden, I have something pretty close to a purpose in Dublin. If that party's on, I must be there.

    `You know, it's a gas seeing the two of you in those adverts, the poster especially.'

    `Isn't it just?'

    `It's like you're watching over us or something, Iremonger.'

    Adopting a heavy Polish accent, I respond, `Young people of Ireland, I love you.'

    Roderick chortles; sometimes I think he really is meant for the Law Library.

    `Listen,' he says, `it looks like fresh blood has come onto my carousel, I'd better go. I hope you're in the mood for some mad pinting later on.'

    I smile. That's exactly the mood I'm in, now that logical old Roderick mentions it. For a moment it almost feels good to be back. `I have no commitments.'

    `Very funny, Iremonger. Anyhow, here's the deal: I'm going home to lick this jet lag, but I'll be meeting Dylan at six in Keogh's.'

    `I'll be there.'

    `Excellent.'

    Roderick's gold-threaded toque bobs through the impatient crowds. I squeeze and BS my way to the edge of my carousel. I light up a Roland. This is a serious cigarette, sweetheart — unfiltered, densely flavoured, refreshingly addictive. You should try one. The brand has only been around about a year; I'd never heard of it till last June. The day I left Dublin I was riding the RER into Paris and saw an advert above the sliding doors. Le Mort du Fumeur, the copy read. I bought a packet in Relais H as soon as I got to Les Halles. After a couple of drags I was ready to convert.

    A frizzy-haired woman caresses a navy-blue suitcase, but lets it move on. I don't want to see her fingering mine. I guess I'm a little touchy about my luggage. Blame it on Las Vegas. In Las Vegas my suitcase didn't show up. Not on the next flight, never. A caseful of Hugo Boss, Donna Karen, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani — gone (thank god I was wearing Nico). As I speak some baggage handler from Iraq is probably changing into designer threads in the locker room at La Guardia. The cheque from Maverick Air didn't come close to covering the loss. Some items I will never replace. Now I know how Hemingway felt when that suitcase full of stories was stolen.

    I light another Roland. Fewer and fewer items of luggage are coming through the rubber curtain. Most of the Paris passengers, my air-brothers and -sisters, have deserted me and headed for customs. The latest Heathrow sortie is surrounding me. All that's left on the carousel is the sad baggage — cases held together with string and masking tape, bags that look like they landed on Lockerbie, coffin-ship trunks. Maybe their owners are in a state of denial. The same beat-up box marked FRAGILE has passed me by six times. It's times like this you notice all the faded ID tags smoothed into the rubber of the conveyor belt. This is not fair — in terms of airline logic, Iremonger logic, my case should have been the first one out since I was the last passenger to check in. But something tells me my suitcase is coming in on the next flight, or may be spending the night in Paris. If that's so, I'd gladly swap places.

    Forget it — here it is. And I tell you, it's nothing to write home about, this suitcase. I really must go back to Galleries Lafayette and replace the leather-trimmed Louis Vuitton I lost en route to Vegas. In the last month I just haven't had the time. Instead I've been using this synthetic St Brendan I left Dublin with in June. As one edge nudges my shin, I reach down, grab hold of the case (feeling the tug and slide of the rubber current), flip over the tag — a finicky habit of mine — and see my father's symmetrical writing:

IREMONGER
29 CEDAR-OF-LEBANON RD
OWENSTOWN HILL
CO. DUBLIN
REP. OF IRELAND
PH: 353-1-2889434

The rubber current is beginning to win; hurriedly I haul the case off the belt.

    My taste in EC customs is similar to my taste in cable TV — it's the blue channel for me.

    I'm clean, I swear. There was a time in my late teens (ah, those early Iremonger days) when I got off on smuggling a little hash back from London or Amsterdam, but not any more; I've lost that innocence, I'm afraid.

    I find myself eyeing one of the customs men — I'll flirt with anyone — daring him to stop me, delay me. Is it too late to get arrested under the Offences against the State Act? Some people would say that I am an Offence against the State (and I'd take it as a compliment). Maybe the authorities could hold me for the maximum seven days. Christmas in Dublin Castle might be more fun than Christmas in Owenstown Hill.

    I get the dreaded nod — yes! I hope they look inside every one of my Paul Smith socks. For the first time in my life, I would welcome a strip search. Anal examination? Be my guest — it would be less painful that the interrogation I'm going to get from my mother. Maybe I should blurt out that I've just swallowed ten little bags of smack, then later tonight plead insanity and ask to be deported.

    I put my carry-on down on the counter and start to unzip it. But my heart sinks when the man in blue waves a negating finger. Looking at me close-up he says with a leery smile, `You're the fella in the IDA ad, aren't you?'

    Too readily, I confess.

    I walk around the flimsy wall that divides customs and the entrance to the waiting area. My heart — that uncool organ — is thumping as I reach the threshold. Its sliding doors are frozen open by the volume of arrivals.

    I cross over, and feel like I've walked on stage. But this is not the feeling I got the last time I actually did so, strutting down the runway at the Smirnoff Young Designer of the Year Show back in May, one of the highlights of Trinity Week. This is more like the fear I felt walking on stage for the first time — doing my bit part in the fourth-year production of Julius Caesar at Berchmans, St John Strongbow sneering in the wings. And I don't like that. I don't like it at all. I will not put up with any hassle from the past on this trip.

    The waiting crowds are disturbingly well-ordered. No one, not even a small child, is out in front of the chrome barriers; nor is anybody stepping over the blue lines marking the passenger exits. For a moment I think I've landed in Switzerland, until I see a no-nonsense ban-garda (a cutie) to my right. Heads bob in anticipation. Countless eyes check me out. At first I think it's the poster. Then I realise it can't be. Most of these people, wrinklies and babies, won't have seen it, won't have walked the via dolorosa from air bridge to baggage hall — they are the ones left behind. So they must mistake me, momentarily, for their brother, son, lover, whatever. Though I'm not actively looking for them, I'm uneasily aware that I haven't made eye contact with my parents.

(Continues...)