White Hitachi

The White Hitachi is the battered van that becomes Patrick Mullaney and Tee-J’s home, transport, and mobile store of illicit goods. Its changing uses trace the brothers’ precarious passage from an illicitly occupied apartment to winter homelessness, a visit to the clampers’ yard, and a methamphetamine deal. More than a vehicle, it is the unstable shelter on which their attempts at a better life depend—and the machine that keeps carrying them toward consequences Patrick already fears.

Shelter on Borrowed Time

For a stretch, Patrick believes he is doing well by Tee-J: the younger brother has his own bedroom in an executive apartment overlooking the Shannon, in a complex whose apartments are empty for the season. The brothers settle in for a “prize November,” watching DVD box sets and eating pizza every night with the heating turned full blast. The White Hitachi is not yet their home; they have gained access to the apartment by way of its balcony. A forgotten swimsuit, stiff with dried river slime, turns up there, and Tee-J’s fascination with it troubles Patrick for reasons he cannot name. Their comfort is real but borrowed, and it ends when Ukrainians arrive with tyre irons. Tee-J wants to fight; Patrick knows there is no advantage in taking them on. The brothers are back living out of the van.

The word “Again” gives that return its weary force. The Hitachi is not a first escape from hardship but the familiar fallback after another temporary arrangement collapses. Patrick remembers the apartment’s seven hundred and fifty square feet, French doors, balcony, extractor hood, power shower, and underfloor heating against the much harsher reality of life on the road. The contrast makes the van’s role plain: it can keep the brothers moving, but it cannot give them the security of a home.

The Van as Home

The brothers spend the winter driving the Hitachi to quiet places. On one outing they go past Boyle, through the hills and forestry land, and on to Keash, where they park and climb up to explore the caves. A tourist sign says that a high king of Connaught was raised and cared for there by she-wolves; Tee-J responds with a crude sexual joke, and Patrick rebukes him as low-class. The scene sets the van against the deep time and folklore of the landscape: the brothers arrive in a vehicle that offers shelter for a night, then wander among caves associated with an ancient royal childhood. The excursion provides a pause, not a way out of their circumstances.

Their homelessness is also measured against ordinary buildings. In a coffee shop in Carrick, Patrick is struck by the solidity of the walls. When they sleep in lay-bys or in the Hitachi, a strong wind makes the van’s walls give and return like a melodeon. He pats the coffee-shop wall, marveling at how solid it is. The physical difference between a fixed room and the van becomes a measure of exposure: in one, the walls hold; in the other, even the weather seems to press in. Not long afterward, Tee-J takes the notion of making off with a guard’s wife’s Isuzu Trooper, another turn in the brothers’ cycle of precarious movement.

Seizure and the Cost of Shelter

At the clampers’ yard, Patrick tries to deal with the White Hitachi’s seizure. He tells the kiosk attendant that it was taken while he had gone to the doctor with his daughter, who has spina bifida; he says her handicapped sticker is lost and that he had to carry her home in his arms. The attendant states the price, and Patrick protests that the van is not worth it. He presses the point by asking whether the clampers are licensed by the council and whether the council knows how they treat fathers of children with spina bifida. His appeal does not recover the vehicle. The van’s value to Patrick is not simply what it might fetch: it is the shelter and transport on which he and Tee-J rely, even as the cost of reclaiming it exceeds what he can manage.

The loss brings Patrick to the juvenile detention unit without even the price of a bottle of Coke for Tee-J. He can at least take comfort in the Hitachi’s remaining three-quarters of a tank of petrol and the DVDs hidden under the boards. These concealed goods connect the van to the brothers’ petty theft and make it a storehouse as well as a living space. As Patrick parks in the visitors’ car park, he sobs uncontrollably; afterward he wipes his tears away beneath a massive white summer sky that makes him feel headachey, out of sorts, and clairvoyant. He anticipates that nothing good is coming. The small reserves in the van cannot soften the emotional force of the visit or change the brothers’ immediate predicament.

When Tee-J leaves detention, he has little choice but to walk the dual carriageway or get into the Hitachi with Patrick. He comes to the car park beside him, while a polo-shirted figure waves emotionally from the doorway. For ten minutes Tee-J says nothing. The van is again the place where the brothers resume being together, though not through any clean resolution: the silence eventually gives way to their familiar exchange of insults. Their return to the same vehicle makes reconciliation practical and uneasy, grounded in the absence of another place to go.

A Mobile Base for the Next Risk

The Hitachi carries the brothers to Doggie Mannion’s duplex in a holiday-home scheme across the lake. They need food, and Patrick knows the visit unsettles them; Tee-J asks whether they really have to go. Doggie is outside on the patio in a yellow dressing gown and swimming trunks, and Tee-J urges Patrick to take it easy. Inside, Doggie leads them toward a back room as the smell grows stronger. Less than half an hour later, the Mullaneys are heading back toward town in the van with two hundred euro from the DVDs and seventy-seven rocks of freshly cooked methamphetamine, packed into eleven baggies of seven rocks each. The vehicle links a familiar source of money—the stolen DVDs—with a far more dangerous new cargo.

Their plan is to try to sell some of the meth in Roxy’s car park. Tee-J reads from Doggie’s internet printout about the drug’s sexual effects, while he has already begun smoking a rock using a Diet Coke can with holes cut into it. He promises not to drink and not to get into a fight; Patrick predicts the likely cycle of a bust, bail, and summons, and imagines explaining in court that Tee-J has gone to England. The Hitachi is their means of reaching town, but its mobility cannot separate them from the risks they are carrying. The town below appears full of promise as they descend the dual carriageway, even while Patrick can already see the danger gathering around them.

Mechanical Failure and a Narrowing Future

By the end of the episode, the van has become part of a catalogue of pressures closing in on Patrick. Enya’s father may come after him; the guards may react to the meth circulating among the crowd below in Roxy’s; wire cutters left in the back of the Hitachi could help put Patrick back in Castlerea prison. His teeth are falling out, his hair is greyer, he has chest pains, and he and Tee-J still lack a roof over their heads. Patrick doubts Tee-J will stay out of fights and sees only a half-chance of peace and rest. These are not separate from the van’s condition: the White Hitachi is “set fast to its tracks,” and the tracks lead in one direction only.

The vehicle is also audibly failing, making fairly severe choking sounds. Patrick nevertheless reckons that if he can get the exhaust sorted, the van will be one hundred per cent. That confidence is a practical, limited hope rather than a remedy for the troubles surrounding them: a repaired exhaust might keep the Hitachi running, but it cannot undo the drug deal, restore stable housing, or ensure that Tee-J avoids another arrest. The van’s battered persistence mirrors Patrick’s own habit of looking for the next repair, even as the road it carries them along seems increasingly difficult to leave.