The Sailor in the Wardrobe

by Hugo Hamilton

  Everybody was arguing openly now. Some of the boys were talking about the Geneva Convention. Others were talking about the final court of justice, quoting bits from The Merchant of Venice and The Mayor of Casterbridge. In the middle of all this, people jumped up and began shouting, saying it was a return to barbarism and lynch law. Summary judgment.

  ‘It could have been anyone,’ somebody said.

  The whole class was on its feet. I jumped up as well and Brother K was suddenly overwhelmed by dissent.

  ‘Maybe it was me,’ I shouted, and they all thought it was the best joke ever, because I was the last person they imagined as the culprit.

  ‘Yeah,’ they started saying after me. ‘I did it. It was me, brother.’

  Brother K was finally forced to back down. He didn’t give in easily and turned on Packer instead.

  ‘Behold, the true culprit,’ he said. ‘Masquerading as a liberator.’

  It was Brother K’s only way out. He wanted to turn the rest of the class on Packer like wolves, hoping they would tear him apart. He suspended the punishment of the five suspects, hoping the class would take out its pre-emptive revenge on Packer instead. He resumed the classes and everything went back to normal. He was waiting patiently for the perpetrator to seek recognition for his crime. He was certain it would not be long before the real culprit would step forward into the light.

  Nobody ever owned up and nobody ever guessed the truth. In the end, they all believed it was Packer who had done it, only that he still wouldn’t admit to it openly. The more he denied it, the more they believed it was him, because they needed to solve this mystery and decided he was their revolutionary folk hero. He remained silent whenever they asked him, as if he was above praise. He had the integrity of a real leader, they said, the person who refused to take the glory for himself. Only the great people in this world have such an assured vision. He became untouchable and I think even Brother K began to respect Packer’s inner strength and leadership.

  I had the power of the real knowledge on my side. I carried the secret with me that could have shattered Packer’s character in front of the whole school. I could have spoken up and declared him a fake. I could have said he was an impostor, a mountebank, a false hero living on the courage of his people. I could have reduced him to a tumbled statue from a forgotten empire, like Nelson. I could have told Brother K and all the schoolboys to follow me out onto the street, all the way into the Municipal Art Gallery next door, and pointed to the painting of the Dutch woman. There is your instrument of torture. But I didn’t want that glory for myself. Instead, it became part of my secret life, part of the underground life that I lived in hiding. It was Packer who remained the hero, and even though he still refused to talk to me, it was a consolation to know that he needed me to keep this secret, even though he didn’t know it. He was carrying the glory and I was invisible.

  There was a lecture given by a great art historian in the gallery one day and we got the afternoon off to attend. He explained the origins of the Dutch movement of portrait painting. He called it the golden age of Dutch genre painting. He explained how they had an obsession with painting women writing letters or reading books. Everybody thought it was very boring altogether and there was only a snigger at one point when the art historian mentioned a famous painting called Woman at Her Toilet. He didn’t have much to say about the Dutch woman with the gilded frame, except that it was interesting that there was so little furniture in the background. I was staring at the painting and everybody must have been wondering why I was so interested, as if I saw some hidden meaning in this Dutch portrait that no art expert had yet noticed.

  I kept going back into the gallery on my own. I stood in front of the painting and thought about the instrument of torture hidden on top of the frame. I wished I could have told people and created a story of liberation around myself. I kept reminding myself of things that my mother told me and could never tell the world either, secrets that she kept in her diary, because that was her only real friend in life.

  There was another painting I came across in the gallery, even more interesting than the Dutch woman. It was the beheading of John the Baptist. I knew it had something in common with my own story and the way I was unable to move on in time. John the Baptist was kneeling down at the centre of the painting with his eyes closed, his neck exposed, hands behind his back. To the right behind him, a soldier, dressed in flowing clothes, swinging the sword. It made me understand the power of an artist, the secrets they carry in their heads and the way they can slow a moment in life to a standstill. I could not stop thinking about the agonizing, endlessly revolving movement in this painting. The soldier’s arms were full of strength and tension. You could see his muscles tight with action and the sword only two seconds away from slicing through the neck of John the Baptist. You could foresee the next moment clearly when his head would fall to the ground and roll away, while his decapitated body surged with a fountain of blood through the severed neck. You could stand there in front of the painting, waiting, hoping it would not happen, thinking somebody could say something and it could still be stopped at the last minute. You could stand there knowing exactly what was coming next, but the sword would never reach that point.

  I looked at this picture like a big film on screen. I stood in front of it and thought of Sophie Scholl when she was sent under the guillotine in Munich. I thought of the trains going to Auschwitz. I thought of bombs stopped in mid-air over cities. I thought of guns pointing at heads. People waiting with hoods over their heads in police stations up North. That quiet moment in the street before a car bomb goes off, before the timing device changes everything beyond recognition. I thought of the Enola Gay in mid-air, like a stationary Air-Fix model in the sky over Japan. I was stuck in that revolving moment of history, paralysed and unable to move forward in time, unable to live in the aftermath and still wishing I could hold everything up like an artist. I was forever stuck in this pre-calamity, this pre-beheading, this pre-gas chamber moment when everything was fine, but already too late.

  Then one day I heard that Packer was injured in a motorbike accident. He had broken his leg and was in hospital. Some of my class went to visit him and said he was having a great time with all the nurses laughing at his jokes. I started thinking of going to visit him myself, but I was afraid that he would not talk to me. It was my mother who encouraged me to go and see him. She knew that I had become invisible and told me to walk into the hospital and not care.

  So that’s how I walked into the ward and Packer seemed shocked at first when he saw me. He didn’t know what to say. We shook hands and he smiled at me. Instead of talking about what happened between us, he started telling stories. He sat up in bed with his leg in plaster, with lots of signatures and little drawings on it, most of them made by girls. There was chocolate and fizzy drinks and flowers everywhere. He said he had been given morphine and it felt like he was rolling around in his bed like a marble, down onto the floor, into the steel bedside locker beside him with the door closing behind him. He never said a word about the fact that he had cut me off. We never spoke about that and just became friends again as before.

  All that is over now and I have begun to pretend that nothing ever happened. Since then Packer has been trying to make up for the silence, including me in everything he does, getting me the job at the harbour. But something has changed, as if I can never fully trust friendship again after that. I can never tell him anything about myself and I have decided to remain in hiding. And maybe that’s what friendship is, this uneasy pact between two different people, between the person who carries the glory and the person who carries the secret. It’s as if he needs me now as much as I need him. It’s the pact of heroes and followers, of pop stars and fans, of idols and admirers. It’s the pact between the artist and the person he paints, the pact between the storyteller and the person who lives inside the story.

  So now that’s all in the past. It’s Packer and me working together at the harbour, sitting in
a boat, drifting away and looking up at the clouds, listening to the sound of hammering somewhere in the distance. We see Tyrone coming out of the harbour, bringing a group of models out to the island along with a photographer. We follow them at a distance and see them setting up on the island with Tyrone sitting in the background drinking a small bottle of whiskey. We watch them for a long time being photographed in their swimwear, changing behind a canvas screen and coming out in new costumes. One of them has to hold a basket full of mackerel. One of them wears a bathrobe, leaning back on the rocks, almost falling off the edge into the water and showing her legs. Another one in a leopard-skin swimsuit and a straw hat, chasing after the goats. Another picture of two girls together in miniskirts and high boots feeding seagulls.

  When Tyrone arrives back in the harbour with the models, I can hear Dan Turley muttering and cursing because he’s jealous that Tyrone got the job of bringing the models out to the island. Tyrone is younger and more handsome, and looks like the kind of man who hangs around models all the time, laughing and offering them cigarettes. Tyrone helping the models with their bags. Tyrone holding a model’s hand and assisting her out of the boat, as if she’s stepping out of her dress. Tyrone getting his picture taken with a big smile on his face and his arms around all the girls.

  When the models come up the steps onto the quay, I hear one of them saying that she’s covered in mackerel scales and feels like she’s slept with a dead fish. They look pale and thin, as if they have not eaten in days. They put on some new lipstick and more perfume to cover up the smell of fish and petrol and seaweed all around the harbour. They try to look like they belong on solid ground again and have nothing to do with the sea, but they stumble on their high heels and have to hold on to each other as if their legs have been turned to jelly by the waves. Maybe they’re not feeling very well after the journey back across the bay in the small boat. Packer tries to talk to them. He’s not afraid of women and has things to ask them. He wants to know what magazine they’re going to be in, but the models are not very friendly. They won’t answer him and maybe they think boys shouldn’t be so interested in women’s fashion magazines.

  One of the harbour boys then takes a dead mackerel from the fish box and holds it out in front of his groin. He starts walking around with the tail end of a mackerel wiggling out in front of him, showing his floppy mackerel mickie off to the world. The models look at him in disgust. They say we’re a pack of little perverts. Gurriers. One of the models even gets sick over the side of the quay at the sight of the harbour boys running around with blue and silver mackerel mickies in their hands. Mackerel mickies with green stripes and black zigzag designs. Dangerous-looking mackerel mickies with rigor mortis. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Dan Turley grinning, because now we’ve all become run-alongs after him, making a big joke of Tyrone and his models. Mackerel mickie boys running around yelping and laughing, chasing each other around in circles until one of the models is forced to smile.

  But then I notice that Packer has not joined in. He stands back with his arms folded, just watching. He wants nothing to do with this because it’s all just vile and ordinary.

  Twelve

  All the news on radio and TV is about Northern Ireland and about Vietnam. There are lots of new words and phrases being invented, like sectarianism, direct rule, internment without trial. Meaningful dialogue, terrorist suspects, strip-searching, inhuman and degrading treatment. You could learn good English by listening to the news, because everybody is trying to find better ways of expressing what’s going on and how they feel about things. They have to find new alternatives for words like evil and bloodshed and shock and horror, because the words often become meaningless. They come up with versions for things like containing the situation, weeding out individuals, descending into violence. There are new terms like arms caches, safe houses, plastic rounds, dawn raids, Nationalist concerns and Unionist positions. From Vietnam we are learning words like defoliation, infiltration, heavy pounding and carpet bombing. You can also learn geography and we have the echoes of exotic names in our heads, like the Ho Chi Minh trail, the Falls Road, Da Nang, Divis Street Flats, Portadown, the Tet Offensive and the Ardoyne. In Vietnam, they’re using a substance called Agent Orange to get rid of all the forests where the enemy can hide, and in Northern Ireland they’re leaving no stone unturned to root out the perpetrators. One day my mother found orange specks on the sheets hanging out on the line and was alarmed that Agent Orange could have started drifting that far across to Ireland on the clouds. She was afraid of war coming back again. But then my father examined the sheets when he came home and said it was nothing, only our own bees occasionally relieving themselves in the air as they flew out over the garden.

  There are lots of other things happening as well. New things being invented, new food in the shops, like yoghurt. People were talking about a very fashionable new fruit called avocado. There’s lots of new music on the radio by the Rolling Stones and Perry Como and Bob Dylan singing about ‘No direction home’. Everything is moving forward into the future. Everybody loves air hostesses and nurses. There are new models of cars like the Commodore and the Cortina. And this summer, it’s obvious that things are never going to be the same again in Ireland or anywhere else, because I saw a photo on the front cover of the Irish Press one day of a woman in a white miniskirt and white boots and a broad white hat, lifting her weekend case onto a train while a nun in a black habit was waiting patiently behind her.

  Packer sometimes talks to me about how he’s going to get a sports car. One of these days, he says, he will be driving a white, open-topped, two-seater. He’s going to grow a moustache and speed about the place and get a twenty-foot boat so we can sail around together. He talks about what’s going on in Northern Ireland and says his mother comes from up there and that she was once hit by the lash of a drumstick on the street when she was only nine years of age. She was standing by the railings, watching the Orange Parade going by, when one of the drummers lashed her right across her neck and she still has the scar.

  On TV, we watch the Loyalist Protestants march through the streets on the twelfth of July, celebrating their most important day, the day that King Billy won the battle of the Boyne. They are called the Orange Order and they march through Catholic Nationalist areas of Belfast with Lambeg drums and flutes called fifes. My father makes a joke about them and says they’re worse than Agent Orange and they could defoliate the entire rainforest with their noise. He worked up there for the British army, just after he qualified from university as an engineer, and says the sound is deafening. They use flexible drumsticks and some of them will play those things for twelve hours until their hands are bleeding with hatred. They beat those drums every year to ensure that nobody forgets about their history. It’s the only way to keep your memory alive, that is to make as much noise as possible, my father says. The bigger the drum the less likely it is that people will forget.

  My mother says it’s the British Loyalists and the Irish Nationalists telling each other that they have a longer memory. She watches the marchers and cannot understand why there is so much trouble about it, with people rioting and setting buses on fire. She says it’s not such a bad thing, men marching around with drums like massive bellies in front of them. But my father says she’s making a big mistake, because the Lambeg drum is an instrument that is intended to offend Catholics and remind them that they don’t belong in their own country.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ my father says. ‘You can’t always put Irish history through the German sieve. It’s Loyalists marching against the Nationalists, just to antagonize them. It’s people who refuse to be Irish making noise to drown out the people who want to be Irish.’

  ‘Why don’t they join in with them?’ my mother asks.

  My father smiles and it’s clear that she’s using German history to try and resolve what’s happening in Ireland today. She is always making comparisons, saying that the Irish think with their hearts and the Germans think
like the horses, only with their heads. She tries to stay positive and keeps asking why the Nationalists don’t just get one or two drums of their own and join in. She thinks they are all children up there in different gangs and if they could only come together they would have a great time in one big band. My father tries to explain that the Nationalists have been kept down for years and that the Loyalists want everything for themselves. The drummers are the playground bullies who want to torment everyone else and remind them that they are the favourites with the British teachers.

  ‘Why be offended?’ my mother asks. ‘You can only be offended if you want to be.’

  ‘It’s aggression,’ my father says. ‘Naked aggression, deliberately walking through Catholic areas to provoke them.’

  My mother keeps trying and I like the new way that she has found to argue with my father, a kind of talented optimism that drives him mad. She thinks you can win people over by capitulating, by being so friendly that the aggressor has nothing to fight against. She always told us not to be interested in winning, never to strike back, never to become like the fist people. She says they should invite the Loyalists into their areas and tell them they are welcome to march down their streets and make as much noise as they like. They should invite them into their houses for cups of tea and make little cakes for them with hundreds and thousands on top, because sooner or later the kindness will spread and they will stop getting any fun out of provocation. They both want the same thing in the end, don’t they, they both want peace. Who cares what flag you’re waving? In fifty years’ time, she says, they will all be marching together and it will be like one of those great street festivals they have in Rio de Janeiro, like the Fastnacht carnival in Germany, with people dancing all day and all night, and visitors coming from around the world to join in. It will be the festival of forgiveness, the festival of kindness winning over aggression.