We got to the party and Packer frightened everyone with the lobster and his story of near-drowning. He cooked up the lobster and told everyone that when they went into the boiling water alive, they were not screaming, only singing an Irish lament. He talked as if he was never going to get a chance to speak again, telling everyone what it was like to drown and what it was like to be brought back to life. He was making up for all the years of silence that he would have endured as a dead person if he hadn’t freed himself from the lobster pot in time. I knew that drowning was like having no friends. I had kept him alive, because that was the whole idea of friendship, that he was carrying the glory and I was carrying the secret.
They made him get out of his wet clothes and offered him a girl’s dressing gown with his hairy legs sticking out underneath and his tanned chest open. We drank and ate tiny offerings of lobster. Packer had his arm around one of the nurses and she was feeling his pulse to make sure he was not still shaking. Somebody put on a record of a woman who sang in a high, wailing voice, like a slow, exhausting musical scream that went on for a long time until she eventually calmed down again at the end. I admired the life in her lungs. Later on they told me the band was Pink Floyd and I made myself remember that name. I got talking to one of the girls at the party myself and when it was time to leave, she asked me to come back for breakfast in the morning on my own so we could listen to the song again together. She looked into my eyes and told me that she was born on the same day that Stalin died. And then it was myself and Packer again, out on the empty streets with only the birds beginning to sing around us. The two of us lying on our backs with our arms and legs stretched out, right in the middle of the main road. The two of us walking back down towards the harbour as if he had to see the place one last time so that he could turn his back on it for good. He wanted to look out over the sea to watch the sun coming up. So we sat on the rocks waiting for the first glow in the sky to the east, yellow, then pink, then orange, then blue. The tide was gone out now and the shoreline looked exhausted, draped in black seaweed. We could see the curvature of the world. We could see the grass turning green on the island. The seagulls were flying overhead, hundreds of them coming up from the south and silently flying across the bay. We saw the lighthouses fading away to nothing as the sun came up like a hot coal over the horizon, and I knew that one of these days, very soon, I would earn my own innocence.
Twenty-one
Everybody is going over to England now to work in factories. Packer and I decided to write off to some of the addresses in Norfolk, to companies like Smedleys and Ross Foods Ltd. Packer says you can work as much overtime as you like and make a packet. England is where the money is. We both get letters back from Ross Foods inviting us to work in their factory near Norwich for three months. So it’s goodbye to the harbour, because we’re going over to Norfolk and then we’ll head down to London to do what we like with our own money. In London, we’ll be free because nobody will give a damn who we are and what we do with ourselves.
When we arrive at Ross Foods we get a bed with a straw mattress which you have to beat into shape before you can lie on it. We all sleep in Nissen huts, hundreds of beds lined up on both sides under the arched roof where you can’t even stand up straight at the side, only in the middle. It’s very hot inside the huts, and when the sun comes up in the morning, they say, you’ll boil to death in your sleep. Packer is already making jokes and entertaining everyone, saying some of the Irish lads are liquefying in the heat, like decomposing bodies.
Somebody says the Nissen huts were left over from the war, when they flew bombing missions over to Germany from air bases close by. Somebody else said it was where German prisoners of war were kept. Sometimes we can hear air force jets flying overhead, like the sound of thunder claps echoing around the flat landscape. I’ve never heard them before because they don’t have those jet fighters in Ireland. Packer said we have De Valera and Irish neutrality to thank for that, because otherwise we would have joined NATO after the war and the West of Ireland would be full of airfields. The bogs would be buzzing with jet fighters and the seas would be full of destroyers.
Everybody is complaining and joking about the lack of sleep. Snoring neighbours. Farting friends. Smelly socks. It’s become a national pastime for the Irish to complain about the raw deal they are getting from the British. They complain about the hard work, even though they love being here, making money. Some of them refer to the foremen as Brits, because they can never forget history. But we’re making money and there’s nothing to spend our money on, apart from Mister Kipling apple tarts in the canteen. The personnel department of Ross Foods keeps our wages safe until the day we leave.
It’s very different from working at the harbour. This is a real job where the foremen wear white coats and trilby hats. You can spot them a mile away. Some of them are good fun and make jokes, while others talk like cowboys and give orders in a Norfolk accent that Packer and all the other Irish lads have started imitating. There are lots of hard men around. Shapers. Lads who don’t say very much and look mean all the time, as if they’ve been in lots of fights and we should be afraid of them. But everybody is so bored with the mindless work of the pea factory that they all have to talk to each other in the end, just to pass the time. The women working there are mostly from Norfolk and their jobs are easy, sitting at a conveyor belt and picking out all the bad peas, throwing them on the floor so we can sweep them away. The machines do the rest. There are graders that shake all day and night, sorting out the different sizes of peas. My job is sweeping away the peas on the floor into a drain. Packer has got the job of lining big wooden bins with black plastic sacks before they are filled with peas and sent into a massive refrigeration vault. It’s all easy work, but we’re already dreaming about peas. I see nothing but mountains of peas in my sleep.
There’s one foreman that I like because he’s a little younger than the others and I see him talking to the girls sitting at the conveyor belt. He takes a brush in his hands like a guitar and starts singing: ‘A whiter shade of pale’, even though nobody can hear him with the noise of the machines all around him and it looks like he’s got no voice. He’s only miming. All the women and girls laugh silently, miming at him with their hands, throwing peas at him to shut him up. Sometimes the girls sneak up behind him and put peas down his neck, moving their hips while he’s not looking.
There are a lot of Ugandans working for Ross Foods, mostly medical students from London. You don’t see them in the canteen very much, because they are trying to save every penny they earn, even more than us, maybe to send money home. They don’t even smoke because that’s a waste of their earnings. Packer and I get talking to some of them and they tell us that Ugandan women are the best in the world at moving their hips. Ugandan women have Venus hills like no other women in the world. They want to know what Irish women are like when they move their hips, so Packer tells them that Irish women shake all day and all night like the pea graders, with breasts like the hills around Tara and Venus mounds like the Macgillycuddy Reeks. We tell them the Irish word for sex, which is bualadh craiceann: beating skin. Packer tells them the Irish word for prick is deabhailín and they tell us that the Ugandan word for bollix is Kabula.
So then the Irish lads all over the factory are calling each other Kabulas and deabhailíns. ‘You fucking Kabula’ is what you hear all the time, but they’re all joking. It’s the Irish way of being friendly, insulting each other. Once, one of our lads got into an argument with one of the lads from Uganda and said he would cut off his Kabula, but it came to an end very quickly when the Ugandan medical student said he would cut off the Irish lad’s Kabula and stuff it down his mouth.
Another one of the Irish lads has got a job working on the weighbridge. He weighs the trucks coming in loaded with peas and weighs them going back out again empty. He’s got the best job in the whole place and everybody envies him, sitting in the sun all day, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the next truck. I think everybody woul
d prefer to be in the factory with all the other people, where the action is. But they still call him a lucky Kabula for having so little to do, even though I think he’s bored stupid and lonely out there when there are no trucks coming in. At the weekend, when all the office staff have gone home, he leaves the window of the weighbridge open, so that the Ugandans can go in and call their relatives. They queue up and talk away all night to their families back home, telling them what a great place England is. Nobody has anything against England or the fact that they were colonized like the Irish. It doesn’t bother them to be working for the people who occupied their country. They just think it’s nice to get reparations and make free phone calls. None of the Irish guys feel like phoning home that much, only one or two of them who pretend to call their girlfriends back in Dublin, but Packer says they’re probably just talking to their sisters.
This is one of the best places in the world, away from my father’s rules and away from the rules of school. I’m escaping from the wardrobe at last. I’ve been promoted to a job as fork-lift driver, lifting pallets and stacking them up. I’m responsible for driving the big cartons full of peas into the freezer, into the antarctic. When you drive back out again it’s like returning to the tropics. Sometimes Packer jumps onto the back of the fork-lift truck behind me to get a lift back to his station, and in the pallet yard outside I have races with other fork-lift truck drivers, chasing each other around like the film Bullitt, racing through alleys of empty pallets stacked up like skyscrapers.
The job at Ross Foods comes to an end very suddenly. Some of the people are very bored doing the same thing all day and all night, working three shifts in a row or just sleeping and working and eating apple tarts until they start going mad. Some of them decide to walk to the nearest town and see if they might be let into a pub. Packer wants to go with them, but we’re on the late shift and we want to hold our fire until we get down to London. We’re back in the Nissen huts trying our best to sleep on the lumpy straw mattresses when the lads come back from the pub, drunk and singing, boasting about all the girls they met and the great time they had with them. They describe their hips and keep shouting at the Ugandan lads who are all asleep.
‘English women have the best hips in the world,’ one of them shouts.
‘Wow, man,’ another one says while the Ugandans are waking up, sitting up on their elbows, blinded and bleary with sleep, begging them to switch off the lights.
‘Your Kabula goes on fire just watching them,’ one of the Irish lads shouts as he moves his hips.
‘Shut up, you fucking Irish deabhailíns,’ the Ugandans say. By then everybody is annoyed at being kept up. One of them has started getting sick outside the door of the barracks and everybody is moaning.
‘Would you mind puking somewhere else,’ Packer shouts.
You can see that young people are like old men when it comes to sleep. There is anger all over the hut after and a fight breaks out, with one of the guys in his underpants trying to expel the drunken people. Eventually they leave and go up to the weighbridge where they can drink a bit more and phone their girlfriends in the middle of the night and everybody in our hut goes back to sleep.
But it’s not long before we’re awake again, because one of them has come back, this time with a shovel in his hands. We can hear him shouting outside.
‘You fucking British bastards.’
It’s almost dawn now, and there is a terrible cracking noise. Massive holes have been stabbed through the side of the barracks and now the sun is shining in, like a new torch beam through each hole. We can hear him shouting and cursing the British, running at the Nissen hut as if he’s some kind of croppy boy coming back to get revenge with a pike in his hands.
‘Aaaargh,’ he shouts each time like he’s still in the comic books, and then he collapses with laughter.
He’s made about eight or nine holes already before anyone can get out there and take the shovel off him. Two lads in underpants, one purple, one white, take the shovel into the hut and hide it under one of the beds. But the damage is done. Packer says the place looks like a fuckin’ upturned colander. When the rain comes, we’ll all be soaked. Outside the drunken guy finally falls down asleep in the sun until one of his mates pulls him in like a dead man.
Next day, there is a big inquiry. It’s like the time I robbed the instrument of torture at school. The manager with his trilby hat comes down to inspect the damage and then calls everybody into the canteen for a general meeting where he makes a speech in his English accent. He says he’s suspending all casual work until he finds out who sabotaged the hut. He doesn’t seem to be that angry, just disappointed. He says he cannot have this kind of destruction going on and he’s quite happy to fire everybody in the plant if he doesn’t find out who the culprit is. The people who did it must own up. Otherwise nobody will work again and everybody goes home.
The machines in the factory continue working and the foremen do all the essential jobs that we were doing before, as if they didn’t need us in the first place.
Then there is another meeting in the barracks, where the Ugandans say it’s for us to sort out. They’ll cut off all our Kabulas and stuff them into each others’ mouths if they lose their jobs. It’s an Anglo-Irish problem and they should be left out of it, everyone agrees. Everybody starts discussing what to do. But the drunken vandal who did all the damage wants to stay, along with his friends. He’s at university and he needs to work right to the end of the pea harvest so he can get enough money to keep himself through the year, like the Ugandan medical students. So the drunken lads who caused all the trouble have a great plan. They ask if anyone would like to volunteer, to become a paid scapegoat. They intend to make a collection which would pay for the repair of the hut as well as giving the scapegoat a huge bonus as well.
Everybody is talking about it all morning, but nobody really wants to go home. And then Packer asks me if I would like to volunteer with him. He mentions the money we would be getting and how we could be on the train later on that same evening. I tell him I like the work at Ross Foods and I would rather stay. I never want to go home again, because here I can just be myself, a fork-lift truck driver. But Packer says we can feck off down to London, and there’s a rock concert coming up in Reading. We could be listening to Pink Floyd instead of working with peas. All we have to do is act the criminals for a few minutes, look guilty and contrite, say we’re sorry and it will never happen again.
We are sitting in the manager’s office. He’s sitting behind his desk with his trilby hat resting on a stack of papers in front of him and a red ring around his forehead where the hat made an impression. First of all, he says he’s glad that we owned up to the crime. He lets us know how much we will have to pay to repair the damage, but none of that worries us because we’ll get all of that back with bonuses. He tells us that we will never be invited to work at Ross Foods again as long as we live, but that doesn’t worry us either, because there’s plenty of work to be found in England and I’m already thinking I’ll get a job in a bar, or on the buses, or better still in a cinema where I can get in to see the films for free.
I tell myself this will be over soon. It’s just a formality. Embarrassing as it is, the manager will soon have to give us our money and throw us out. But then he leans back in his chair, staring at us for a long time, fixing on Packer and then fixing on me as if he’s not quite finished with us. I can’t look him in the eyes because I feel guilty. He’s one of the nice people and I talked to him once when he came around inspecting the factory, asking me what I was going to do with my life and laughing when I said I didn’t know.
Now he’s staring into my eyes, like a magnifying glass burning a blade of grass in the sunlight.
‘I didn’t expect this from you,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry,’ is all I can say in reply.
‘But why?’ he asks. ‘Why did you do it?’
Packer tries to brazen it out, shrugging his shoulders. He’s more defiant and therefore a
ctually looks like he damaged the hut intentionally. Maybe I’m still resisting guilt. The manager seems unwilling to let us go without getting some kind of an answer, something that will undo the offence of this vandalism, as if the money to repair the hut is not enough without some kind of an explanation.
I have to imagine that I was the person who carried out the crime. Unlike the trial in school around the instrument of torture, this time I have to pretend I’m guilty. I tell him that we were drunk in town and that we don’t know what came over us. But then he wants to know what pub we went to and what we drank. We don’t know the name of the pub and he asks so many questions in rapid succession that I am in danger of giving myself away.
It’s like an interrogation, only the other way around. It’s become tortuous, sitting there in his office pretending to be guilty, afraid that any minute he will find out that we’re innocent, afraid that I will blow it all and retract my own confession. It’s like a trial in reverse. Except that when you’re guilty you can put your hand up and own up to it. Go on, put me in prison. Execute me, whatever. If you’re guilty, you can come clean, acknowledge your crime and take the punishment.
‘Is it something you have against the British?’ he asks.
‘No,’ Packer and I both say at the same time. ‘No, it’s nothing like that, honestly.’
The manager is after the truth. He wants justice. He’s like a judge waiting to announce the sentence and I wonder about the whole idea of taking on guilt that doesn’t belong to me. I am reminded of how my mother was shamed in front of the world after the war and now I’m being shamed myself. I realize how strange this is, when a person is put on trial, how the judge declares that he will never commit this crime himself. It’s the judge who goes on trial. When the Nazis were put on trial at Nuremberg, the world gave an undertaking never to do the same again. When they executed Eichmann in Jerusalem, they gave an undertaking not to repeat his crimes. It’s not the criminal who is on trial now but the rest of the world. It’s the Nazis who have put us all on trial for eternity.
The Sailor in the Wardrobe Page 22
