‘Take the sad immigrant look off your face, Vid. That’s never going to work.’
He said this in an invented accent, somewhere between Polish and Russian. It made me wonder whether he really had made the anonymous phone call to the Garda station in that accent. What else was he doing when he disappeared that night and left us waiting? I put these suspicions out of my head. I didn’t want to believe it. I went back to work and tried to concentrate as much as possible on the job.
Now and again I had short conversations with his sisters, Jane and Ellis, while they were coming and going. Jane kept to herself a bit more. She was stern and very studious. She was at university and had already received notification of a research fellowship in Limerick and would soon be moving out altogether. Ellis was just about to finish school. She was friendlier and also prettier, like her mother, with great dark curls falling around her face.
Ellis was meant to be studying for her exams, but she seemed to spend most of her spare time smoking dope in her room, as far as I could gather. She also got very depressed from time to time, her mother once told me. I was making a terrible noise, cutting the joists with the electric saw and sending the smell of sawdust all over the house, but Ellis took the volume even higher. She blasted off something simultaneously depressing and uplifting by Curt Cobain or even Leonard Cohen, just to piss her mother off. At other times she would sit silently in her room and it was only the radio in the kitchen, beaming obscene doses of happiness back up the stairs with boy-band lyrics, somebody appealing to his girlfriend to keep her mouth shut because it was far better for everyone concerned when she said nothing at all. Music wars all over the house, until Ellis eventually couldn’t take it any more and came halfway down, leaning over the banisters, breaking a self-imposed vow of silence and shouting at her mother to turn off that ‘fucking shite’ immediately. It was wrecking her head and there was nothing as depressing as those Irish boy singers.
Another time, Ellis came to inspect my work and told me right out that what I was doing was utterly useless. She walked across the joists, balancing like a tightrope walker. How could I stop her? She said the fireplace looked funny, out on its own, built up on blocks like a doll’s house. She sat on the beams with her bare legs dangling, asking really stupid questions, like why did I come here and why did I decide to become a carpenter and get stuck working in this fucking house?
One evening, while her mother was out at a book club and Kevin and I were having a quick beer before going out drinking, Ellis made a lunge at me. Without warning, she came straight across the kitchen to embrace me.
‘I love you,’ she said, clasping her arms around my neck.
What could I do? Difficult to push her off me as if she was disgusting. Even more difficult to sit there and do nothing. I felt she was calling for help, begging me to save her from something.
‘I love you. I love you. I love you.’
Kevin stood up and prised her away.
‘I’m sorry about this, Vid.’ Then he took her upstairs, gently but forcefully leading her by the arm.
He spent over twenty minutes up there talking to her. I could hear her crying.
Did she expect me to liberate her? Escape with her out to the west of Ireland and live a sustainable existence, all organic and home grown? Getting stoned on nature, with the curls around her face and the sound of Nirvana?
‘She’s only a child,’ he said to me later on.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not your fault, Vid.’
In the pub, he explained to me that she missed her father. She was tormented by the fact that she had been abandoned by him. She had gone for counselling all through her teenage years, but none of it helped. The absence was destroying her. She had built up dream images of him in London. Fantasised about him coming back with toys for her. Waited for him by the window at night, listening out for his footsteps in the street.
It struck me that, apart from the wedding photos which were stored away upstairs in the bedroom, I still had not come across a single photograph of their father anywhere in the house.
‘You see, Vid, we’re afraid she will throw herself at any man in the hope of finding a father.’
What was that saying about me?
I’ve never liked asking questions. I think the main reason for this is that it might invite too many counter-questions. I prefer to wait for people to tell me things, because the information has a way of finding you in the end.
And sure enough, later on that night, as we went for a late walk after the bars were closing, the real revelation came in its own time. It came looking for me as we stood on the pier together.
We were on the lower ledge. We passed by people drinking and some girls screeching like herons, as he put it. We passed by the bandstand where I had taken some photos of Liuda. We came past a brass plaque on the wall which had been erected in commemoration of the writer Samuel Beckett but which didn’t mean very much to me until Kevin told me about it. The plaque was there to mark the place where the writer was supposed to have had an epiphany, but which he may have had somewhere else altogether, only that the pier seemed more convenient. He read out some of the writer’s words, which were inscribed on the plaque, and pointed out some of the features mentioned in the text that were very close to us, such as the lighthouse and the wind gauge. The extract ended with the words ‘clear to me at last…’
‘They missed the point,’ Kevin said, with some irony in his voice. ‘They left out the most important part of all. Either they didn’t understand what the writer meant, or else they were afraid to put it in because people walking up and down here in the summer would be freaked out.’
’…clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most…’
He spoke about the dark and how it was kept under. We walked all the way up to the lighthouse.
‘There is a place on the Aran Islands,’ he began. ‘It’s called Bean Bháite, which is the Irish for drowned woman.’
We were not facing each other but standing side by side, an easier way of coming to the truth. He spoke straight out across the water, in the same wide arc as the light of the lighthouse, swirling around the bay in a circle.
‘I’ve been there,’ he said to me. ‘On Inishmore, the largest of the islands. It’s in a place not far from the harbour at Kilronan. A woman’s body was washed ashore there once and they remembered it ever since by calling the place after her.’
He told me that he was related to the drowned woman on his father’s side.
‘She was an aunt,’ he said. ‘From Furbo, in Connemara, where my father is from. Nobody knew if she drowned herself or whether she was drowned by somebody else. She was the subject of controversy at the time. She was pregnant and not married. The priest in the local church denounced her from the altar. He said that if the men in the area were not men enough to drown her, then perhaps she would have the decency to drown herself.’
He didn’t want me to talk to his mother about it, but it was possibly an explanation for the darkness in his family. All the trouble with Ellis came from their father’s side. But was it also an explanation for himself, I asked myself.
The place where his aunt was found was not signposted or written down on any of the maps. Not like the Black Fort on the edge of the cliffs, he explained, where visitors went. The spot remained pretty much anonymous, remembered only in folklore by the event itself rather than by the name of the woman whose body was found there. Something unspeakable about her death which entered into the memory of the landscape.
‘If you look at the maps,’ he said, ‘you can see how the tides would have brought her body from Furbo directly across Galway bay, out to the eastern coast of Inishmore.’
I imagined the parish priest speaking from the pulpit on a Sunday morning to denounce her. I remembered some of the things that Nurse Bridie told me and what happened in her lifetime, giving away her baby and never seeing her own son again. The story Kevin told
me seemed not unlike the way the secret police operated in my own country and the paralysis that people felt in the face of authority.
If the men were not fit enough to drown her, then perhaps she would have the decency to drown herself. The words would have been spoken in Irish, he told me, sounding even worse in the old language.
From what he knew, the sea normally returns a drowned body nine days after it enters into the water and goes to the bottom. There is another likely time for it to be found, at twenty-one days. The returning body is often badly damaged, at times even partially decomposed and attacked by sealife. There are tests that could be done now to establish whether a person died before they entered the water, but these were not conclusive either. It was also difficult, even now apparently, to prove with complete certainty whether injuries to the body were suffered before drowning or after. People searching for drowning victims often kept an eye out for birds congregating in one place on the water. Was it possible in this case that the tides brought her across the bay more swiftly and that she was spared this mutilation?
‘The sea shows no mercy,’ he said.
I thought of her lying on the rocks where she was found. Her hair possibly the same colour as the seaweed, jumping with sea-lice. Her face, translucent and green as marble. Her dark eyes enlarged, maybe missing already, black cavities staring out with terror at the sky above her. The wind creating a sad, hollow note across her open mouth, her lips also perhaps the first to go missing and her teeth showing in a crying grimace. Her body cut from the rocks where the sea finally delivered her back to land. Raw bites and flesh-wounds which no longer bled. Her clothes torn. Bare feet swollen. White limbs laid out by the tide in a design of further disgrace.
Who knows? Perhaps there was one final touch of dignity, with one protective arm held lightly across her round, exposed belly with the child inside.
The big question remained unanswered after all this time. Did she drown herself or was she drowned by force? Was this a case of suicide or a case of murder, in other words? Because she seemed to have been drowned by force of the priest’s words.
These things could only be answered by their absent father.
12
The day in court went like this. First of all Kevin and I met in a café nearby because he wanted to give me some encouragement before walking up to the Four Courts. I was nervous and distracted, unable to concentrate, looking away at the giant basket of freshly baked, steaming scones on the counter. I was wondering why the staff didn’t let them cool down on a tray first, because they were turning back into dough under the soggy weight of each other. Then I saw that most of the staff were immigrants, like myself, so they must have been following the way things were done here for years without questioning.
‘Barrington is going to blow this thing out of the water,’ Kevin said with such confidence. I felt a lump in my throat. I couldn’t speak, so I coughed instead.
What the prosecution claimed was absurd. Unable to identify who actually assaulted him in the street, the victim had picked the easiest target available and accused me, along with another unidentified non-national, of jumping on him in an unprovoked attack. He would claim that his daughter had rejected me and that I had used this as a motive to seek revenge against him. It was easy for him to find out my name and address from other workers in the building trade. His witness would testify that he saw me grab the electrician by the throat and hurl him against the hoarding, then kicking him repeatedly in the head and chest. After breaking his hip in the fall and spending weeks in hospital, he would give evidence that his quality of life had been seriously compromised as a result.
Our defence would be to insist that his identification of me was flawed and that I had no motive for the assault.
‘It’s riddled,’ Kevin said, but he was only giving me false hope.
He winked at me and I became aware once more that I was doing him an enormous favour, standing in for him as a substitute. He would never forget this sacrifice. It placed our friendship on to the level of soldiers in action, ready to lay down their lives for one another. How many million medals were handed out for bravery to people who had no choice but to lose their lives in defence of their comrades? I felt the knot of friendship tightening and could not allow myself to forget that it was he who defended me on the night in question, that without me there would have been none of this trouble in the first place.
He was wearing a beautiful suit. I had never seen him look so handsome before. Helen turned up as well, though he seemed surprised by this and asked her what she was doing there. He made it clear to her that they could not sit side by side in court or even pretend that they knew each other.
‘If he takes the rap for you,’ she said to him in a low voice, ‘we’ll never be able to forgive ourselves.’
I was so happy that they had come to support me, separately, even though neither of them would play any part in the hearing itself. Helen wore a light brown linen jacket and a matching skirt which allowed you not to think too much of any movement underneath as she walked ahead of us.
My own suit was bought on eBay for half nothing. Made by Savile Row. The fit was not entirely right, but who was going to notice? By the time we walked along the quays and approached the entrance to the court, the suit began to feel too big. Passing by the people standing in anxious groups outside, smoking and whispering, staring at everyone in order to read their own future, I could only imagine what countless other lawbreakers had worn the suit before me, sweating at the crotch and answering to God knows what terrible crimes.
We met up with the defence lawyer in a consultation room. My mind went blank as Kevin and Barrington discussed the chances. They talked about the character of the presiding judge and Kevin seemed to be very optimistic. He said the judge might be on my side, but Barrington was not so sure. He looked grim and didn’t seem to hold out much hope at all.
‘We have significant difficulties,’ he said.
The case before mine drew a lot of attention. It dealt with two young intruders who had broken into a villa overlooking the beach and terrorised the occupants, hanging the family dog in an execution ritual. The defence claimed that the men were not responsible for their actions because they had taken too many drugs. It was quite sensational, judging by the presence of reporters from the newspapers and by the severity of the sentence and the reaction in the public gallery.
There was an Irish harp on the wall of the court. It was there to remind those present what country they were in and under what jurisdiction this court was convened. It seemed to reinforce the understanding that any person outside the law was an enemy of the people, excluded from their respect. Floating above the judge’s head, the harp was basically saying that there was nothing better in the world than being Irish and anyone who brought this into disrepute was an offender and would be removed from the community.
From what I was told, the Irish had always been the innocent people who had things done to them in the past. They had never meant any harm to anyone else. They were loved by everybody all over the world. So it was a shock each time a crime came before the court that the Irish were now doing things to themselves that no oppressor would ever have dreamed of. All the people in court seemed Irish to me, the men in suits, the judge, the prosecution, the victim and his family of supporters in the gallery were all so Irish that I felt I didn’t stand a chance.
The judge was not bad, I thought. He had a strong suntan and seemed fair-minded, though he got suddenly impatient and sighed heavily after he asked me how I pleaded.
‘I’m innocent,’ I said.
‘I asked you if you plead guilty or not guilty?’
Barrington then announced that I was pleading not guilty and told me to repeat that out loud.
The Garda officers gave evidence of receiving an anonymous phone call from a male with a foreign accent, after which they found the victim lying in the street. They also gave evidence of arresting me after being positively identified by the witness
. The electrician was there with his goatee beard and he put on a pair of steel-framed glasses to look a bit more intellectual. When he got his chance in the witness box, he said he was frightened even now, seeing me in court. He confirmed that he had picked me out in a line-up and that there was no doubt in his mind that it was my boot that kicked him repeatedly in the head. He claimed that he drank very little due to a potential diabetes problem and that he was a family man, not the type who sought trouble. What surprised me most was that his daughter was there in court, corroborating everything her father said when it was her turn in the witness stand. Barrington got a chance to question them, but their memory was flawless. The only thing that he was able to establish was that the victim could not have been on his way home, but the electrician said he only wanted to stretch his legs a little.
Most of the time, I kept glancing at Kevin and Helen, sitting apart from each other as if they had split up. It made me sad for them. Kevin seemed to have no fear of being identified. The electrician must have been so drunk on the night, I thought, that he could make no connection with Kevin, even though he sat behind him in the public gallery. It happens sometimes that you have great difficulty recognising people, like a shopkeeper you know well who leaves you tormenting yourself when you see him out of context.
I was distracted throughout the whole proceedings, thinking about Helen and Kevin. For their sake alone, I was hoping that I would not be convicted.
I remembered seeing her coming into a bar one night to meet him. She had been caught in a shower and was soaked to the skin. Her hair stuck down on her forehead. She came up behind him and put her hands over his eyes, winking at me, then allowing her cold red fingers to be prised apart slowly. When he turned around to embrace her, she sneaked a freezing hand underneath his shirt so he jumped. She brought the rain inside with her, on her face, on her red cheeks. She wiped a drop from her nose with her sleeve and shook the water out of her hair. She looked to me like she had lived her life outdoors, in caravans maybe. She had a husky voice that night, and drank a hot rum. Other men were looking at her all the time and this may have been a disadvantage, as though she wished that she was more ordinary and attracted less attention.
Hand in the Fire Page 8
