Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  The engine started up again. I can remember thinking that he was going in the wrong direction, reversing instead of going forward. He drove in a rage once more, this time parking outside her place, rushing us away inside, into her basement apartment.

  ‘Stay there and don’t move,’ he said.

  Then he disappeared again. We heard him walking away. Where to, we had no idea. We stood looking at each other. After a moment, her hospitality returned and she asked me to sit down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  ‘I’ve never seen him do anything like this before,’ she said, more to herself.

  To calm things down she started making tea. Then she put on some music. Balkan wedding music, of all things. She was trying to make me feel at home, but the music was so familiar that I was overwhelmed by homesickness and horror simultaneously.

  I was instantly reminded of my sister’s wedding, the wedding that never took place because of the car accident on the way. The violence in the street had brought back everything I had been trying to leave behind. Now the music was returning me to the same fatal scene in which my parents had died, repatriating me to the country I had just escaped from. But how could I explain that to her? In any case, neither of us were really listening to the music, only staring at the floor, silently going over what had just happened and wondering what was laid out before us.

  She said it was probably best for me to spend the night there and prepared a place for me to sleep on the sofa.

  When Kevin finally returned, he looked at the two of us with great suspicion, as though we had been talking about him all this time.

  ‘What’s that music?’ he asked.

  ‘Where the fuck were you?’ she demanded.

  It took him a while to answer. He went to the fridge first and took out a beer, then began to open it with his teeth, just to annoy her, it seemed, because she flinched and said, ‘Jesus, will you get an opener, Kevin.’ Then he took a long drink before he finally spoke.

  ‘The less you know, the better,’ he said.

  ‘I want to know what’s happened to that man,’ she asked.

  ‘He’s outside, waiting for you,’ he said to me.

  ‘Christ,’ she said.

  ‘Only joking,’ he laughed. ‘He’s alive and well. In the best of health, as a matter of fact.’

  She turned and disappeared into the bedroom. He went in after her and they continued arguing, occasionally shouting at each other, sometimes mentioning my name.

  I hated being involved in all this and felt like slipping out, making a run for it. I imagined the police arriving any minute. I even thought of leaving the money that he had given me to start the work.

  They were arguing for a long while. At times they went silent, but then she raised her voice once more, calling him a thug and telling him not to touch her.

  ‘It’s the pissing,’ I heard him say to her. ‘That’s what’s getting to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t fucking care, do you?’

  ‘Come on, Helen. Admit it. You’re only worked up because I did a wee-wee on your car, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Wake up, Kevin,’ she said. ‘Think of what you have done. Assault, that’s what they will call it. You have just put your entire career in jeopardy and you think it’s funny.’

  He paused. He seemed to be reflecting on what she had said.

  ‘Look, Helen,’ he said, finally, ‘I’m sorry for doing a wee-wee on your car.’

  ‘Asshole,’ she shouted.

  Then he came out grinning while she slammed the door behind him. I suppose you could say it was a victory for him, sort of. Even though he got kicked out of the bedroom by his girlfriend, he was still able to claim that he had won. The world was falling apart around him, but he was happy holding on to the last laugh. He didn’t say anything more to me, just sat down in an armchair and dozed off, buried in sleep with a smile spreading across his face.

  6

  Next morning he stood above me with the sun behind him, ready to leave. He had a glass of water in his hand, which he drank down and put on the table with a clack, the equivalent of saying, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ There was no looking back. No retracing steps. No time to reflect on what had gone by.

  ‘Mental, last night,’ he said.

  I couldn’t make out why he was not more concerned. But this was a new day and it was time to put everything behind us. Within minutes I was sitting in his car, speeding over to his mother’s house.

  ‘Listen, Vid. What happened last night – don’t give it another thought.’

  My reading was that these things never go away.

  ‘I work with them,’ I said. ‘They know me, those guys.’

  ‘He’s not dead,’ he said with great confidence. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘What if they go to the police?’

  ‘You’ve done nothing against the law, Vid.’

  ‘Yes. But what about you?’

  ‘Look. This is important,’ he said, pulling in to the side of the road for a moment. ‘You cannot mention my name. I can’t be dragged into this.’

  He had done me a favour and now it was my turn to return the favour, to put my hand in the fire for him.

  ‘You’re doing a job at my mother’s house, that’s all you have to say. If they come looking for information, you call me. Say nothing. They cannot force you to answer any questions until you have your solicitor present. You understand that?’

  He drove on with the windows open and his elbow out, coaching me, assuring me that everything would be fine.

  ‘You remember nothing, right?’

  He smiled at me, placing his hand on my neck.

  ‘OK, my friend.’

  We were tied to each other now, though I couldn’t work out whether he needed me or whether I had become a dead weight around his shoulders.

  He stopped to buy a newspaper, flicked swiftly through the pages, then showed me a small report on the incident which described the victim as a man in his early sixties who was the subject of a serious assault. He was recovering in hospital and the Garda were appealing for witnesses. They were looking for two attackers, believed to be non-national, of Polish extraction.

  ‘They have it all arse-ways,’ he laughed, throwing the paper into the back seat.

  As he moved on again, I noticed that he had time to examine every woman we passed on the street. He spoke quite openly about what he liked and disliked, what turned him on and what he would never touch in a million years. He started telling me about his life, about Helen, about his family. Disposing of his biography, so to speak, in a single breath, like something he needed to leave behind rather than something he had grown into over the years.

  I heard somebody once say that your childhood runs after you like a little dog. He started telling me things about his family that he wanted to get away from, confiding in me as an outsider who could be trusted, knowing that I would keep it all to myself.

  His parents had met in London. They were probably hippies who couldn’t find enough drugs and rock music in Ireland and left the country. They were the last generation to leave on the boat, he explained, before cheap flights took over. People who felt stifled and compelled as much by the habit of leaving as by the excitement of arriving anywhere else. It was in the blood. They just did what so many did before them. He began his life growing up in England and only returned when he was around nine years old. With the troubles going on in the North, he explained, and the mistrust of Irish accents on the streets of London, his mother decided to make a go of it back in Dublin. Over the years, he had lost any trace of his English accent. And maybe this was why he understood my position so well. At school, he learned what it was like to be excluded and tried to mix in and camouflage himself. He did his best to be Irish. He was aware of the inadequacies that come with being a stranger and denied the early part of his own childhood, ignoring the dog running after him.

&nb
sp; ‘Never look back, my friend.’

  He would repeat this phrase many times more. It was inscribed on every thought, on every decision he made.

  ‘You’ve got to be able to walk on out of it,’ he said. ‘Believe me. You can’t let yourself be dragged down.’

  He was speaking out of my mouth, as they say. I agreed with everything he said for my own personal reasons, which had all to do with leaving and never going back again. He must have seen something in my situation that could perfectly explain his own, the story of his life described in mine. Like me, his aim was to escape. Only, he made it look like fun. All the bad things erased. Everything full of optimism and enterprise. Everything converted into a laugh. You could tell what made him so attractive to women, for instance, not only his striking good looks but also his ability to magnify the world around him into a great story.

  His mother’s name was Rita, and right from the beginning I could see that he adored her. She was a born schoolteacher and you could hear the chalk grinding when she spoke. Her word was always final, with no remission. End of story. She had seen everything in life, including drugs and sex and anything young people could invent. It was all being repeated over and over down through the generations, just a new treatment, new lingo, new energy and new boredom. She took in the news and current affairs as though she could see it all coming. She reacted in the same way to her own misfortunes with stoic detachment, as though they were happening on the far side of the world.

  He told me that she had a long memory. If you did something to her, she would never forget. For example. His little sister was initially called Eilish, after his aunt Eilish. But there had been a falling out, something unforgivable was done, and his mother changed the baby’s name to Ellis.

  He said his father was a ‘waster’ from Connemara who had ‘fucked off’, leaving Rita to bring up three children on her own back in Dublin. She’d had the good fortune to inherit a house and was helped out by her brother, a priest, but it had not been easy to keep the family going. His father was the classic emigrant, the person who walked away but kept on singing about going home.

  ‘Homesickness,’ he said. ‘It’s like a disease. A psychiatric condition that people used to pass on to their children at birth.’

  He could remember his father coming back from time to time on a visit. The family had tried to make a go of it once when Kevin and his sisters were small, but he left again, back to London. Kevin could recall him singing with his eyes closed. Speaking the old language, talking in Irish to his friends. But then he finally disappeared for good. The only contact after that was talking to him on the phone once or twice, before the money ran out in whatever coin box his father stood in. The line would go dead and all he would hear was the crackle of the rain on the other side.

  ‘Thing of the past, really,’ he said. ‘Homesickness. All that seeping nostalgia. It’s like polio. Or tuberculosis. Very rare these days.’

  His father had written himself out of the family history. I was being written in. And maybe that’s what I longed for most, to be pasted into the family scrapbook, whatever the consequences. He was claiming me as his friend, offering me this precious information, but also conscripting me as a foot soldier, sworn in by an unspoken oath of loyalty.

  When we arrived at the house, he introduced me to both his younger sisters, Jane and Ellis. His mother made a pot of tea and put some fresh scones on the table for us. I felt more like a guest than a worker. Kevin gave them my biography so as to avoid too much interrogation from his mother. Belgrade, parents died in a car crash, memory loss after the accident, came to Ireland to get a new start. No further questions.

  ‘Tragic, what happened there,’ his mother said, being polite.

  Then he disappeared again and I began working upstairs in the bedroom. First of all I smashed up an ancient free-standing wardrobe which was listing to one side. I stacked the broken pieces in the back garden to be used for firewood. After that, I ran around to the local building supplier’s to collect some batons so I could start framing up for the new wardrobe, which was simple enough. It was not such a big job. The black ash panels were to be delivered during the week. I reckoned the whole thing would not take much more than a week or two in my spare time.

  Later, while I was fixing the batons to the wall, his mother brought me a mug of tea and some biscuits. She was curious to see how I was getting on. And when I was finished, I made certain to clean up after myself, so that she would not end up walking on splinters in her bare feet at night. I brought the plate and the mug back down and placed them in the sink.

  ‘You’re a bit of a perfectionist,’ she said to me. ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Not often you get that around here.’

  ‘Ah well. I do my best, I suppose.’

  She owned a collection of tin, wind-up toys. A little boy on a bicycle. A duck on wheels with a windmill on his head. Tin mice. Tin frogs leaping and a tin carousel with tin children swinging. She showed them to me and allowed a few of them to spin around the kitchen table. I had to stop the duck on a bike from falling over the edge. We got talking, because these toys were not sold in the shops here on safety grounds, because of the sharp metal parts, bits of blades bent over to hold them together. But they were still found in markets and shops all across Europe where I come from. For adults only. Parental guidance, that kind of thing. I promised her that if I was ever back home in the near future, I would buy her one to add to her collection.

  During the following week, I worked away at the shelving and began to discover a little more about the family. I’m not the kind of person who pries into other people’s business. I’m quite discreet. I do my work sort of blindfolded, you might say. But when you’re in somebody else’s house, you can’t help noticing things.

  In the bedroom, her stuff was all temporarily stored on the floor. It wasn’t just a wardrobe she was after but a place to keep her documents. They were stacked up on top of each other against the bay window in boxes and large envelopes and folders tied with ribbon. Bits of newspapers from another time. Photographs. Wedding albums. All the evidence of her life, which she possibly didn’t want to look at very often but slept with every night, alone in the same room. It was now exposed on the floor, waiting to be put away again as soon as I had the new wardrobe finished.

  I didn’t look at any of her personal things. I swear, it’s not like me to do that. But one evening, a bundle of letters fell down. The ribbon around them must have come undone and they were scattered all over the floor. It looked as if I was nosing through her stuff, and I had no option but to pick them up and put them back so they were in exactly the same order, as far as possible. Letters with her name on them. Rita Concannon. His mother came from the time of letters, before all the new technology took over. Even though she still looked quite young, the letters seemed to put her way back into an ancient era of handwriting and lots of time between things being sent off and delivered.

  The letters, I could not help noticing, were sent from England, all sealed, all unopened, all unread.

  What is it about letters in this country? I asked myself. An email or a phone message could be easily ignored. But letters seemed to have such substance. They were real. You could hold them in your hand, as I did, briefly. I wanted to know more about the person who sent them. I wondered if they had come from the absent father, the man who had excluded himself from the family. What terrible words did they contain and why were they never even opened? All those far-away things inside your head that can only be written down in a letter.

  What a cruel archivist she was to keep them unread. She was the perfectionist, I thought, storing these precious handwritten letters, gagged and sealed, with no right of reply.

  Anyone who lives in a foreign place must ask themselves that question all the time: Have they been forgotten? It made me wonder about myself. I was hoping that my presence here was not like this one-way correspondence, that I was not just a worker
and that they would miss me, if I had to leave for some reason and not return again.

  7

  The Garda officers came looking for me on site around lunchtime. With all the other workers eating their take-away food and staring at me, they asked me to confirm my name and address. Was my real name Vid or Vim? Was I a Polish national? They suspected I was trying to conceal my identity and wanted to see my passport, evidence of my work permit, which I did not have with me at the time and which I agreed to provide as soon as possible. But they needed to see it immediately. They were polite and took me to my apartment and then on to the station for further questioning.

  At the station, they asked me to cast my mind back to a particular night and tell them whether I had been involved in an assault in which a man had been seriously injured. They gave me the date and the location and an approximate band of time in which the assault had taken place. They wanted to know about my movements on the night in question and asked me if I had made an anonymous phone call to a particular Garda station alerting them to the crime. They informed me that a man with a foreign accent like mine had reported seeing the victim lying in the street but then refused to identify himself. I told them I had not made any such call and that the incident had nothing to do with me.

  ‘That’s very strange,’ one of the officers said. They explained that the victim had claimed I was known to him, that we had met in a nearby bar on the night in question and that I had been seen in his company by several witnesses. It was reported that I had accosted his daughter and then subsequently, on the same night, assaulted him on his way home. He was recovering from multiple injuries, including a broken hip and a broken jaw. He was pressing charges against me, as well as another unknown Polish national who had yet to be identified.