The Sailor in the Wardrobe

by Hugo Hamilton

  My mother said murder was a failure of the imagination. I could feel the memory of war and fear and regret in her words. She told me she read a famous line by a writer called George Steiner who said history had taught us that you could live a happy life with your family and listen to Bach in the evening and go out the next day to commit the most horrible crimes in Auschwitz. She said Bach was not the problem and hoped I would always have enough imagination left to remember what it’s like to be inside somebody else’s shoes. She said it was not difficult to murder somebody. It was the opposite. It’s hard not to murder somebody. And it’s even more difficult to make up for it afterwards.

  ‘The hardest thing is to un-murder somebody,’ she says. ‘You need a big imagination to be able to do that, to bring somebody back to life. As long as a dead person is remembered by one single person, they are not quite dead yet. You can keep somebody alive for ever in your memory.’

  When I showed Stefan the place where Peggy Flynn was murdered, he didn’t say much. There was nothing for him to say and he just stared at the rocks without asking any questions. I noticed him going quiet in the days after that and it wasn’t long before he announced that he was leaving to travel around the country on his own. My mother was surprised that he didn’t want to talk about the ancient book which he had been sent to collect. She didn’t want to leave it until he came back from his tour, but when she brought up the subject, Stefan seemed to have no interest at all, only in maps of Ireland.

  On the last day before he left, I went swimming with him. I brought him up to a secret place that I had found some time ago and shown nobody else in the world. Up there on the hill, by the big terrace of white houses overlooking the bay, there was a small lane leading down to the rocks. It was overgrown, but I got a stick and hacked a path through, until we came out at the bottom and we could see the whole bay with the long sandy beach running all the way into the distance. We could see crowds of people on the beach and the train running along the coast. We swam off the rocks and I saw that Stefan had a mole on his back, like a birthmark. I could see a thin black line of hair running down from his belly button and disappearing into his togs. His chest was strong and he was a great swimmer.

  We sat down in a sunny place where nobody ever went and we had the whole bay to ourselves. The rocks were hot, like granite radiators. I could smell the dried seaweed around us like the smell of packet soup. When I pushed a rock aside it revealed all the sea crawlers and jumping sand-fleas underneath. Stefan threw a few rocks around just to hear them clacking against each other. We didn’t need to talk, but then he started asking me about my father, wondering why I went along with his rules and why he would still not allow us to speak English. He wanted to know if it was always like that in our house, listening to pop songs on the radio in secret. I could not answer him. I didn’t know how to talk about my father to people outside the family. Other lads all called their fathers ‘the old man’ or ‘the oul fella’, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t know how to be disloyal.

  ‘I don’t speak to my father,’ Stefan told me.

  It sounded like he was encouraging me to do the same.

  ‘I haven’t spoken to him in a year,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘He saw people being executed.’

  I asked him where and he looked out over the water as if he could remember seeing it himself with his own eyes.

  ‘Women. Naked women,’ he said. ‘He was in the war, in the East, in Russia.’

  I didn’t know how to ask him anything else. I wanted to go away for a while and come back with more questions, even though I knew he was leaving and it might be too late. He spoke about his own father as if he was a murderer. I thought of my father and began to wonder if he was a murderer, too, and wanted to kill people for Ireland. I thought of how I would stop talking to him, only that my mother would start whispering into my ear, saying that if I stop talking to my own father, I will not be able to talk to myself either.

  We sat watching a small fleet of yachts coming around by the island, all leaning in the same direction. Above us every now and again a train passed by along the edge of the cliff and disappeared, rushing into the tunnel with a sudden muffled sound. Seagulls threw themselves off the face of the cliff and balanced in the air. In the big terrace of white houses, there was a woman leaning out the window looking far off at the sugarloaf mountain. Stefan told me that he was going to get as far away as possible from his father and from his country. I was afraid of what he was saying. I had never heard anyone speaking so openly about themselves before. He said he had a girlfriend in Mainz and she was very beautiful. He told me that he had slept with her and it was something he would never forget. But it was all wrong, he said, because he had lost all sensation in his heart. He said he felt like a murderer with no feelings. He was like the un-dead and that’s why he had come to Ireland, so he could touch things and breathe again. We didn’t look at each other while he was saying all this. We kept our eyes on the water, on the yachts, and the seagulls who looked like they were imitating the yachts, racing each other at an angle in the air above us.

  Ten

  The harbour is shaped like an Irish harp with the road running straight along one side, a bow-shaped pier along the other side, and a perpendicular pier at the top where the gap opens up for the harbour mouth. All the ropes tying the boats down to their moorings are the strings, sometimes tight, sometimes loose. The road is bordered by granite bollards and looping chains. At the bulging side of the harp, the granite pier is built up with cottages and fishermen’s huts. Most of the sheds are no longer owned by fishermen, apart from Dan Turley’s which is the last one on the pier, closest to the harbour mouth. The bottom end of the harp is the shallow end of the harbour with a slip for small boats to enter the water, while right across from Dan Turley’s shed, there is a crane where larger boats are lowered with straps and you can hear the wood creaking with the strain. They say the harbour was constructed around a natural cove which had been used for smuggling long ago until the road was built. There are small working harbours like this all along the coast, as well as the big ferry harbour with its two granite arms reaching out and a lighthouse at each end. Our harbour is used mostly for pleasure boats now and for fishing, mackerel, lobster and crab. If it rains, we all hang around inside Dan’s shed, smoking and talking, watching the pier being washed clean until it clears up and you can see the steam rising all around. If the sun shines for a while, you can feel the heat left behind in the granite long after it’s dark. Sometimes Packer goes up to the shop and comes back with a half-dozen ice pops to share out and everybody laughs at the way Dan Turley eats his like a small boy, biting off a big chunk and concentrating hard while he’s juggling it around in his mouth before he finally swallows it and gets the brain freeze.

  On Saturdays, every boat from every harbour seems to be out. The whole bay is full of yachts with white sails and coloured, bulging spinnakers, like one big washing line criss-crossing the bay. We’re busy all afternoon, bringing people out to the moorings, rushing for those who give the best tips. Packer knows everybody by name, but he remembers them mostly by some personal feature, like the man who speaks with a deep voice that sounds like applause coming out of his mouth. There’s the man Packer calls The Abbreviator because he keeps dropping vital words and just says luck’ over his shoulder. There’s another man called Banjo because he keeps humming the same tune, always ‘I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee…’ He goes through every variation of the Alabama banjo tune, humming, whistling, huffing and blowing, even deliberately suppressing the melody and just hissing the beat because he can’t stop it coming through some way or another. Packer says he must keep it up even when he’s eating his dinner at home, and he probably gets into bed at night with his wife, still yawning the same bloody tune like some terrible kind of musical motor neurone disease.

  There’s a well-known newspaper journalist with bushy eyebrows who goes out in a small boat that
’s always leaning to one side. There’s a TV presenter who speaks in Irish and English all the time, switching back and forth in mid-sentence like a balancing act between both languages. There’s a man and his wife who go out together in the matching white Aran sweaters and life jackets, so Packer calls them The Coordinates. There’s a doctor with a pipe who leaves a sweet tobacco smell floating after him around the harbour and brings out a big bunch of children from the inner city. There’s one man who is remembered only because he once tied up his launch along the outer pier and came back from a drink in the Shangri La Hotel to find the tide gone out and his boat hanging high and dry on the ropes. There are lots of people who have no boats of their own so they take out our boats regularly, like the man who looks like Henry Kissinger with a fake suntan. The harbour lads say ‘How’s Vietnam going?’ as soon as he’s out of earshot. There’s a woman who goes out to the island to practise singing and the harbour lads start doing scales. There’s a plainclothes policeman who works in the drugs unit who never actually goes out on the water at all and is more interested in coaching football teams, but he comes down to talk to Dan for a while, using all the cool Garda lingo like ‘over and out’ and ‘mission impossible’.

  And then there’s Tyrone with sandy hair and his cigarette in his mouth, carrying an engine in one hand and a bag in the other. The whole harbour seems to fall silent when he is around and you know there’s trouble in the air. This is the man who shouts at Dan, the man who threw the bottle on the island. Only this time he walks by without a word and it’s Dan Turley who is muttering abuse after him.

  ‘There he goes,’ Dan says under his breath. ‘Tyrone the brave. Take a good look at him, lads.’

  Packer says you can smell the resentment on the pier, like old fish bait in the sun, covered in bluebottles. He says Dan is a Catholic from Derry and Tyrone is a Protestant from Belfast, so it’s like having our own mini-troubles right in front of our eyes. Tyrone turns around to give Dan a filthy look. He mutters something back, something maybe with the word ‘drowning’ in it, or maybe it’s just the way we hear it and think everything turns into a curse. He walks away and Dan steps out onto the pier to do a bit of silent Irish dancing after him. And then we’re all laughing because the harbour boys are repeating Dan’s words again until they have to hold their stomachs. We’re on the winning side now and it’s Tyrone making his way down the steps into his boat with the harbour laughter behind him.

  Everybody is out on the water, fishing, sailing, or just drifting, and it’s Packer and me patrolling the bay to make sure none of our boats are in trouble. We forget about the time they tried to cut through our friendship, when Packer would not talk to me. That’s all over now and he says we’re going to do something big to make up for it.

  It all started when I got friendly with Packer at school. One day on the way home, we walked into an amusement arcade on O’Connell Street to try our luck at the slot machines. We couldn’t lose. We were the biggest winners since the beginning of time, putting more and more of Packer’s money into the machines. We laughed every time we were lucky and laughed even more when we lost. We could already feel the envy of others who didn’t come with us that day, because the pennies just kept spitting out for us without stopping. No matter what machine we tried, the symbols lined up for us. It was three lemons or three bars and we kept winning more and more until at one point, we won the big jackpot. It was star-star-star, lined up in a row. Bells were ringing and pennies started cascading out into the tray for us. The women at the other one-armed bandits looked around, wondering why they were sitting at the wrong machine. It seemed like Packer had all the luck in the world.

  Then the manager came running out and one of the women told him that it was her machine, that she had been at it all day long and smoked an entire packet of cigarettes while putting pennies into it. Her name was written on that jackpot.

  ‘Am I right, Mary?’ she said, turning to her friend. She said it was her money in that machine and now we came along, cool as you like, and just stole it from her. Robbers, she called us. So the manager threw us out for being underage. Packer argued with him but there was nothing we could do. He wouldn’t give us the money that we had won fairly and just ushered us out towards the door with all the women sitting at the machines staring at us. Some of them had cigarettes hanging from their lips and ash on their clothes. Some of them had little plastic buckets of pennies between their knees and some of them kept putting pennies into the slot and pulling the arm without looking, as if they couldn’t stop. At the door, Packer turned around and stared back at them all for a moment.

  ‘Vile and ordinary,’ he said slowly and triumphantly.

  They didn’t care. I started laughing and the manager pushed me out. We both stumbled forward into the crowd passing by on the pavement.

  ‘Don’t fuckin’ show your faces around here again,’ the manager shouted, and the people on the pavement stepped away, wondering what kind of thugs we were. Packer said it was the biggest injustice ever. There was nothing we could do, nobody we could complain to, so we started getting our own revenge on the world, going around annoying people and coming home late, locking the train door when people were trying to get on, shouting at the station master and causing lots of trouble until the complaints started going into the school.

  My mother was worried about me becoming a run-along. I would end up being a Mitläufer after Hitler, and the same thing would start all over again, everything the Germans went through with the Nazis. She wanted me to have a mind of my own, to stand out from the crowd and not to be like everyone else, running along after Packer. My father said I had been brainwashed. There was a lot of talk about indoctrination and bad influence. People were being brainwashed all over the Soviet Union, just as they were brainwashed under the Nazis as well. Now they were being brainwashed in snooker halls and coffee shops and amusement arcades all around Dublin. Places like Murrays basement record store and Club Caroline and Club Secret became famous for young people becoming powerless with alcohol and drugs. They were being hypnotized and had no minds of their own. They were dancing like puppets to the music, with no control over their own arms and legs. Onkel Ted had to come out to the house and we sat in silence together in the front room. After a long time, he told me he had been reading a book about crowds and power which described everybody being obsessed with privacy and making sure other people didn’t come too close. People saw each other as a threat, until they were in a crowd, that is, then they felt safe. People who wouldn’t say hello to each other in a million years were suddenly all friends going in the same direction.

  ‘Be careful of crowds,’ he said to me.

  He made the sign of the cross but we both knew that it was too late and I was already lost. I told him I had been brainwashed by my father into speaking Irish. I had been brainwashed into being German as well and now I wanted to be brainwashed out of all that as fast as possible. Come on, brainwash me, I was saying to John Lennon, to Packer, to anyone coming along the street, to any movie that was being shown in the cinema at the time. I needed to live outside my family. I needed to be neutral and I went into hiding, behind Packer. I started to live inside his life.

  My father said I had become a slacker, which is the same as what he used to say in his speeches on O’Connell Street about all the Irish people. He said I had become a borrowed personality, like some garden tool that people lend to each other and never give back. At school, it was no better, with all the brothers and teachers saying I was a nobody and a waster. It was funny because I took it as a compliment.

  One day Brother K started talking to us in class about career guidance. He wanted to be a progressive educationalist and to spout on to us about how important it was to streamline. But it wasn’t long before his talk on career options became a big warning on what might become of us if we didn’t keep working hard. He turned it into a forecast of what we would all end up doing with our lives. He said Metcalf would be sweeping the streets. De Barra – b
us conductor. Hurdail – civil servant. Mac an Easpaig – travelling salesman. He went around the whole class one after the other like a fortune teller, gazing into the future, imagining us in suits and ties, carrying briefcases with brochures for new refrigerators inside. He imagined some of us staring out from the scaffolding on building sites in Birmingham. He said De Pluncead would be a nightwatchman in a place called Chiswick, because he was always falling asleep in class. He said Delaney would be driving one of those red double-decker buses in circles around Trafalgar Square. O Cionnaith – playing football for the British in Doncaster. He said most of us would have to emigrate because we were too stupid to do anything else. We were knowledge-resistant, like waterproof rain-gear, unable to absorb education. Those who stayed at home would do no better. O’Bradaigh – making sausages like his father. Calthorpe did all right because he would become a famous surgeon wearing a bow tie. MacElroy did even better as a nuclear physicist and Lennihan got the best career of all as a pilot, because it meant he would be smoking Rothmans.

  Brother K selected my friend Packer out for special attention, predicting that he would become a Hollywood actor.

  ‘Every class has a Packer,’ he said. ‘Every country has a Packer. Every moment in history has a Packer. He is your Greek God of clever words, the God on whom you pin your empty hopes. You nonentities, you will follow this man over the cliff because he fills the void inside your biscuit-tin heads.’

  When it came to me, Brother K seemed to have nothing left to say. He searched in his head and could not think of any occupation or vocation that would be suitable for me, not even a meat-packer, or a greyhound trainer. He said I would be nothing. A true nobody. A waster and a tramp.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s park benches for you,’ he said, and the entire class let out a roar.