Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  I ran into an electrician who had been working on the same site with me for a while, rewiring. He was a cool character, in his late fifties, with a goatee beard. He spoke to me in a casual way, indirectly, looking away towards the band. He started telling me about a guy called Dev, saying that he had ‘totally fucked up the place’ and I thought it was somebody working with him on one of the sites. Was he another electrician or what? They all laughed when I asked the question. And that’s how it often is, you say something without even knowing that it’s funny. Until it was explained to me that Dev was the short for De Valera, a tall figure from history that some of the older people talked about as though he was still alive and likely to walk into the pub any minute and order himself a drink.

  The electrician was glad to step in and give a summary of Irish history. I listened eagerly, accepting the facts about internment camps and hunger strikes. He mentioned place names and dates which meant nothing to me but which made some of the women flinch. I suspected that there was still a strong level of sexual attraction revolving around national sorrow, not just where I came from but here as well. They talked about how bad things were ‘up there’ in Northern Ireland. One of the women said it was great to have no more checkpoints and no more dawn raids, not to mention car bombs and kneecapping. But she felt there was something great about those times as well. Lots of passion. Lots of men on the run. She said there was a smell of disinfectant in the air since the Peace Process began, and within seconds they were all laughing again.

  I tried not to ask any more stupid questions and they claimed me as their friend, temporarily at least.

  ‘Anyone gives you any trouble, we’ll burst them.’

  The word ‘burst’ confused me at first. I could only associate it with the phrase ‘bursting out laughing’. They were making me laugh all the time. Everybody was bursting out and cracking up, and I had no idea that I was walking myself into trouble. It came as a complete surprise to me that the electrician would end up trying to burst me a little while later.

  All through the evening, they called each other ‘knackers’, which I first thought was some kind of joke. It was a reference to travellers, people on the move, like the Roma back home. Unlike the settled people who lived in houses, the travellers lived in caravans by the side of the road mostly, or used to, before it became illegal to do so. I had seen them on my journey around the country and was told that they had been displaced by a man named Cromwell, another hated figure in Irish history. ‘Knacker-drinking’ was a term which they used to describe those who consumed their alcohol outdoors in public places.

  From what I could work out, the top most despised people in this country were Dev, Cromwell and Margaret Thatcher. After that it was knackers and scumbags. After that it was people like junkies and drug lords and clampers. Further down the list were the environmentalists and the artists. The person they hated most of all, it seemed, was an old woman in a shawl who was long dead, a woman by the name of Peig Sayers who lived in very poor circumstances on the Blasket Islands and forced everyone to speak the old language, Irish. The most dangerous people of all according to them were the bi-polars, because they could not be easily identified. It was not as though they conveniently lit up green at night like Zombies with their hair falling out. You never even knew when you were in the company of a bi-polar. But none of them were despised half as much as spongers. They could not be trusted for one minute.

  I had no idea which of these categories I would fit into. My problem was not knowing how to judge people here. I tended to trust everybody equally. I didn’t know who to avoid or what streets to stay away from.

  At some point in the evening I started getting on very well with a girl called Sharon. Her hair was streaked with highlights. The trunk of her belly was showing with a diamond stud in the navel. She had quite a few tattoos, on her arms and around the small of her back as well, all pointing downwards. She wanted to know if I had any tattoos or piercings, but I was embarrassed to say I didn’t. There were plenty of guys around with tattoos running up along the side of their necks, but they didn’t seem to interest her.

  Whenever she laughed it was like the sound of gunfire going off and I mistook her initially for an old woman. She kept making me laugh until I had to tell her at one point not to burst me any more. She said my English was very good and started dragging me outside for a cigarette, even though I didn’t smoke.

  That’s when the misunderstanding arose. She turned out to be the daughter of the electrician I had been talking to and he was not really in favour of what was going on between us.

  ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ he whispered to me in passing.

  I think I had more to drink than I could cope with. I completely misread the signals and saw no sign at all of danger.

  The band was playing the Bee Gees number about a man on death row, and maybe I should have taken that as a warning. There was a TV on in one part of the bar with an old movie playing silently without anyone watching because they all knew the story. The Godfather, I think it was. Al Pacino lying to his sister about having her husband killed.

  There I was, being pulled out the back door of the pub to a small grotto which had been erected for smokers. Sharon called it a pagoda. We sat down and instead of smoking she took out a small sachet of pills, wrapped in silver foil. She took one herself and offered me one as well, but I didn’t need it.

  She got up and started dancing to an imaginary techno beat which was far more energetic than the pop ballads coming from inside. She seemed not to be aware of me. Then she came over to kiss me, grabbing the back of my neck and rushing her tongue right into my mouth like a jeep. The other hand reached for my balls.

  ‘Show us your prick,’ she demanded.

  I delayed long enough until she got impatient and searched for my zip. I was totally out of my depth and couldn’t tell if it was more of a rescue than an interference when her father suddenly appeared with two of his friends standing next to him.

  ‘Sharon,’ he roared. ‘Get in here.’

  ‘Ah fuck off, Da.’

  He came over towards us while the other two remained at the door in case they were needed. Sharon had a screaming argument with her father at that point, with me as the main focus. She claimed she was old enough and entitled to screw anyone she liked and that this was not ‘Holy, Catholic Ireland’ any more with people placing an armed guard on their own daughters.

  ‘You’ve got a six-month-old baby, Sharon,’ he said.

  ‘Look, it’s OK,’ I interrupted, beginning to edge away towards the pub door. What I wanted most was for everyone to go back inside and enjoy the music again and be friends. But it wasn’t up to me to make a move.

  ‘You fucking stay where you are, you Polish cunt.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Sharon said.

  ‘He’s only a knacker and a sponger.’

  The electrician threw a punch which sent me right out of the grotto, into a line of bins. Before the full panic set in, I had time to get offended. I wanted to tell him that I have never been to Poland in my life, but my nationality was hardly the issue here. The mistake suited me in many ways because I didn’t really want people to know I was from Serbia. I picked myself up and looked around to see where I should run to.

  But by then it was already over. Sharon was walking away with her father and the two other men, like a team of escorts leading a pop star in through the back door of an arena. She must have been thrilled to be rescued like that. From inside, I heard the sound of applause and whistling and people cheering and the band starting up a number by the Gypsy Kings.

  That’s when I got the phone call from Kevin. It couldn’t have come at a better time and we agreed to meet in a bar across the street, well away from the electrician and his daughter. It felt a bit sneaky, doing a bunk on my work mates, but I didn’t want to drag Kevin into any of this trouble.

  He arrived with Helen and they immediately looked at me with some concern.

  ‘Are y
ou all right?’

  There was a bit of blood on my shirt and they kept asking me what happened. I played it down and told them I had simply miscalculated the situation in the bar. I had no idea that Sharon had a six-month-old baby or that her father was her chaperon for the night, not to mention the other two bodyguards.

  ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like that,’ Kevin said.

  ‘The lads at work brought me there,’ I said.

  ‘Trust me,’ he said.

  They were no friends, he assured me. A true friend was somebody who would put his hand in the fire for you. He explained what was more likely to happen and what it meant when somebody got burst. Briefly, it meant losing teeth. It meant footprints on your face.

  He handed me the money for the materials and bought a round of drinks. He got quite drunk and told great stories which made Helen laugh out loud. Me as well. I liked him. I liked them both together, because they gave me this great feeling of being at home.

  5

  There we were, later that same night, Kevin and Helen and myself. The three of us walking together. Him in the middle with one arm around her and the other around me. Our feet shooting forward in unison. A strange animal with six feet and three laughing faces, two parts male and one part female. Once we reached the car and broke up, each of us stumbled away in a different direction. We lost the balance we had as a unit and had to regain our stability as individuals. He leaned into her, pushing her back against the side of the car to kiss her, but she shrugged him off, saying she was going to concentrate on getting home first. He fell away with his hands against the bonnet in a worshipping gesture. She laughed as she searched for the keys in her bag. She got into the car and turned on the engine while he sank down on to his knees, speaking to one of the headlights. His face lit up white. His eyes shut. Grinning. She shouted at him to get in, and then he cast an enormous shadow into the street as he stood up again.

  ‘Look, I can get a taxi,’ I said.

  There were plenty of empty taxis heading back into the city centre.

  ‘Hang on, I’m bursting,’ he said.

  His back was turned, hunched over as though he was counting out some money. Beyond him, the shutters of some shops, sprayed with graffiti. Then he spun around laughing and began to piss against the side of her car.

  ‘You bastard,’ she shouted.

  I stood back on the pavement trying to pretend I was not part of this. I was embarrassed for her because he started pissing right across the bonnet. She was calling him a fucking animal, but I was not sure if she was really that angry and whether it might all be nothing more than a bit of fun in front of me. She must have known that he would pay to wash the car. He would even try and convince her later that it was an expression of affection. It was his trademark way of doing things in great waves of raging love and generosity. And maybe this was what she liked so much about him, his explosiveness, his talent for surprise. One day they would settle down and get married. Then all this madness would have to come to an end.

  He began pissing right across the windscreen at her. She cursed again, but that only seemed to encourage him. She put on the windscreen wipers and sprayed two jets of soapy water in a counterattack, spreading the mixture of soap and piss across the glass.

  Then I wondered if she was crying because she just backed down and remained silent, looking away into the street because this was not a very good sign for the future.

  Was he consecrating her car or desecrating it? Quite possible that he would not be doing this without me present to witness this balancing act between them. They seemed to be appealing to me like a referee.

  But who was I to judge?

  Hard for me to know where the boundary lay between a joke and an insult. It was only a bit of a laugh, I kept telling myself. They have different rules here that I had not figured out yet. Or was it something else? Was he showcasing his power over her? Over me? Including me in this insane, intimate public act, but also letting me know that I had no right to take part?

  A car sped past with all the windows open and three female occupants in the back seat singing along to the radio. They left a fraction of a familiar hit song on each part of the pavement, in doorways, in alleys, like cats hiding under parked cars.

  And then the electrician turned up out of nowhere and pushed me against the shutters of the shops.

  ‘Where is she?’ he shouted.

  It’s possible that he said other things. ‘You Polish bastard.’ You tend to add things in reconstruction, when it’s all so difficult to believe. The electrician seemed to think that I was alone in the street, because he began to swing punches at my head and claimed that I had abducted his daughter.

  It didn’t take long for Kevin to react. He came rushing over and pulled the electrician away by the collar.

  ‘Get your hands off my friend.’

  There was a struggle on the pavement. Not even a fight but more of a dance. Kevin kicked the electrician right in the groin and forced him to bend over, following it up with a strong punch in the face.

  ‘Kevin,’ I heard Helen screaming.

  Maybe she thought she knew him better than that. She was tied to previous assumptions of his character, unable to understand where this violence had come from. To her it must have looked like something happening far away, beyond her control. Kevin swung the electrician around and sent him falling back against the shutters. The sound resembled the clap of a shotgun, followed by the scattering of pigeons.

  I got the impression that the electrician was being lifted up off the ground. His feet were left hanging in the air. The first part of his body to land was the hip and I could hear it crack on the concrete, like a rare piece of porcelain shattering inside a velvet bag.

  His head was the final part to descend, perhaps in self-preservation. There may have been another boot added at this moment, though I would still like to believe it’s not true. It was quite possible that the addition of this final kick to the head fractionally delayed it from reaching the ground. Perhaps it provided a vital alteration in the angle of fall, bringing it down to the pavement sideways, with the corner of his forehead as the last point of contact. A phase tester came clattering along the pavement.

  There were several more urgent kicks to the head, but then it was over. The electrician didn’t stir after that. The whole thing lasted only a few seconds, as far as I recall. Kevin pushed me towards the car and roared at me to get in. Then he got in himself and slammed the door as if that was still part of the momentum.

  ‘Drive,’ he shouted.

  But instead, Helen got out. She ran over to the man lying on the ground, quite peacefully. Blood had come creeping out of his nostrils. His right hand stretched out on the pavement in a begging gesture.

  ‘Come on,’ Kevin shouted through his teeth, getting out of the car again.

  She kneeled down with some obligation to care for the man on the ground. But Kevin pulled her away, forcing her back into the car, this time into the passenger seat, while he ran around and took the wheel.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t drive.’

  As if being over the limit had become the main problem now.

  ‘We can’t just leave him there.’

  The car accelerated away. I looked behind me, not sure if he was dead or alive any more. Then I heard her shouting at him and telling him to stop.

  ‘You’re a fucking lawyer, for God sake!’

  Kevin continued driving at great speed. After a while he stopped and parked the car in a place where we were looking out at the sea. The lighthouse in the distance, blinking lazily. Some stationary ships out there, waiting to go into port on Monday morning. The usual orange necklace of city lights and a thin drizzle making it look like the ships were drifting away. We sat there breathing, listening, not doing anything but trying to sober up and figure out what to do.

  ‘What’s come over you?’ she said. ‘You just beat the shit out of that man for nothing.’

  ‘I only tipped
him and he fell over.’

  ‘And now you’re doing a runner.’

  ‘Racist bastard,’ he said. ‘He brought it on himself.’

  ‘We have to go back,’ she said.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘You’ve got to call the guards.’

  ‘It was a split-second thing,’ he said. ‘I had to protect Vid here.’

  There’s a pause, but it didn’t seem right to express gratitude.

  Nobody moved. Each one of us trying to roll back what happened. But you might as well try and turn history into reverse. Soldiers taking crimes out from underneath their pillows and carrying them off to secret locations. Bullets popping out of people’s heads. Dead people jumping back to life and walking away backwards.

  We were parked right on the verge of the quay. Any further forward and we would have ended up in the water. They would be lifting us out with a crane in the morning, out from among the floating condoms and beer cans.

  ‘You’ve got to be able to walk away,’ he said. ‘Big mistake to retrace your steps.’

  ‘Did your mother tell you that?’

  She stared at him, extracting a forecast from his words, as though he had become a stranger to her.

  We sat there, looking out at the black water of the port, the dark eyes of deep water staring back at us. We heard the sound of small waves going up and down the granite steps. We waited for the future to come, wondering if he was going to drive over the edge. We might as well have gone underwater as it was, driving away along the floor of the sea, through fields of brown seaweed, with mullet and luminous prawns swimming across the windscreen before us. Speeding through a silent landscape of rocks and barnacles and anchors and suspended lobster pots. I had the feeling that we were only waiting for the electrician to come and join us, limping or crawling up to the car, getting in beside me and putting his seat belt on. Dark worms of blood going in and out of his nostrils. Breathing clogging up in his chest. We would never get rid of him now, I thought. I imagined him speaking calmly, with moisture in his voice, getting ready for this long underwater journey that we were about to embark on together. ‘I was only having the craic,’ he would say, because he really wanted to be friends and keep the conversation going.