Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  I could see that she felt sorry for me. She looked over with such an expression of regret, trying hard to apologise with a tiny smile.

  The main prosecution argument hinged on one particular witness, an elderly man who happened to pass by at the time of the attack. He was relaxed and seemed better with words than any of the legal people. He was delighted to take the stand and had to be restrained from giving excessive evidence which was not directly related to the case. He explained that he had been walking his greyhound dog on the night in question and had witnessed the attack.

  When it came to Barrington’s turn to cross-examine the witness, he asked about the state of the victim after the alleged attack.

  ‘He was within an inch of his life,’ the witness testified.

  ‘Would you mind telling the court why you didn’t call for help?’ Barrington asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the witness answered. ‘I should have done that, you’re right, but you know, you don’t always follow your own best advice. Sometimes you do what is most instinctive, like, the first thing that comes to mind, that is. Which was to go to help the man left lying on the ground.’

  ‘It didn’t occur to you to call an ambulance?’

  ‘In hindsight, looking back, it took a while to sink in.’

  ‘You say he was within an inch of his life, but you then decided to leave the scene. Is that right?’

  ‘I was scared,’ the witness responded. ‘There was blood all over him. I was afraid they would come back and do the same to me.’

  The witness told the court that it was only the following day when he read about the incident in the paper that he realised he had a duty to help with the investigation. He had already identified me to the court as the main instigator, the man who led the attack. He said he was not very good with names, but he never forgot a face. And the main distinguishing feature in this case was my unmistakable face.

  The prosecution were winning hands down. I thought it was over, though Barrington persisted with roundabout questions about what the greyhound man worked at.

  ‘I’m retired,’ he said.

  ‘What was your employment before you retired?’

  ‘Electrical contractor.’

  Barrington then began to take a personal interest in greyhound racing, as though he was the kind of person who would place a bet every now and again, in moderation.

  ‘What’s the name of your dog?’ he asked.

  ‘Slasher.’

  ‘Slasher. That’s a very good name for a greyhound.’

  There was a short burst of laughter around the courtroom. Even the Garda officers present chuckled as much as they could without sounding false. Barrington asked him why he took his dog for a walk at night, and so far away from home. But that seemed like a stupid question, because you had to do that in order to train a dog for racing purposes.

  ‘Has he won any races for you?’ Barrington asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ the witness answered. ‘But he’s come second and third a few times, at Shelbourne Park, like.’

  Then Barrington produced a list from his briefcase and walked over to the greyhound owner.

  ‘Would you do me a favour,’ he said. ‘Could you point out the name of your greyhound on this list?’

  For the first time, the greyhound owner stalled.

  ‘He’s not registered or anything, like.’

  ‘If he’s not registered with the coursing club,’ Barrington said, ‘then how come he’s run track races?’

  ‘He’s a pet. They make great pets, you know.’

  ‘So it’s not true that you have a greyhound by the name of Slasher?’ Barrington asked.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Are you trying to make a fool of us?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘You’re lying to the court, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, maybe I exaggerated a bit,’ the greyhound man said.

  Barrington said he had no further questions. He told me there would be no need for me to give evidence at this point and I was glad not to have to stand in the witness box and speak in front of all those people. Barrington then had a quiet discussion with the judge and the prosecution, after which the greyhound man withdrew his testimony.

  The judge gave his verdict, saying that there was an enormous difference between lying and not telling the truth, but, on balance, the prosecution evidence was no longer credible and he dismissed the case.

  Simple as that. Everybody started packing their documents away and I was more surprised than anyone else, because it ended so quickly.

  There was an expression of unconcealed triumph in Kevin’s eyes, though he kept the celebrations till later.

  ‘Good man,’ he said to me, and then he shook hands with Barrington.

  Helen didn’t share his triumph. She seemed more relieved than anything. Much like me. It took time to absorb the fact that the decision had come down so easily on my side, like the toss of a coin. If it wasn’t for the logo of the harp on the wall, it might have felt more like being in a betting office. There was something so arbitrary about the truth, about luck, about the narrow odds between winning and losing.

  The electrician and his family were standing together at the door of the court in great shock, unable to look at each other. The electrician’s wife put her arm around her husband, in tears, because she believed every word of what he had said in court and must have thought it was a travesty that I could get away with such a crime. I didn’t feel good. It was not possible to shake hands over something like this in the same way that you do after a boxing match. The consequences of this failed trial were still coming my way. The electrician was staring at me with great hatred in his eyes, silently saying to himself that this was not over yet by any means. The look on his face told me that I would be hearing from him again soon.

  13

  What an impression that made on me. The freedom of being out there on the sea. The boat drifting and the waves slapping underneath. The reflection of the sunlight blinding us and the water full of illuminated particles. The coastline slipping further and further away with the tide, everything forgotten, left behind on the shore.

  We yelped each time the mackerel started biting. I could feel the tug, like an electric current running along the line. That weightless tremor in my fingers as they swam upwards, swirling to the surface.

  Talk about mackerel crowded seas. Kevin said they were practically ejaculating into the boat. More and more of them, jumping out of the water with striped black-and-green backs, like spinal X-rays. Their silver bellies flapping inside the boat. Mackerel scales all over my hands and my clothes, even my hair. Plastic bags full of trembling fish when we arrived back on land.

  Our friendship had transformed itself into an undying bond. We went everywhere together. I knew everything about him and he knew everything there was to know about me. We got drunk together and ended up in places where neither of us had ever been before. So much so that at the tail end of a drunken night after fishing he once forgot himself altogether. He turned to me and stuck his tongue deep down into my mouth, just like the electrician’s daughter had done, but then withdrew again immediately. ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ He laughed. This wasn’t like him, he was quick to point out. It was just an experiment. A joke. Never to be repeated. Because this was a purely male friendship, not to be confused with sexual heat.

  It even got to the point where I was in on his deception with Helen. I was there when he started cheating on her. A high-wire act in which he arrived around at my place at night with a woman called Eleanor, pretending to Helen that he was staying overnight with his mother.

  I wanted to tell him about the letter that Bridie had shown me, how he would end up losing Helen if he was not careful, then he would regret it for the rest of his life.

  Eleanor was the kind of person who laughed at everything he said. Her body did all the talking. She wore tracksuit bottoms with the word ‘Pink’ written in large capital letters on her backside, and whe
n she walked along the street, the letters moved, so readable and so illegible at the same time. It powered his imagination. It gave him a new story. And the greater the storyteller, the better the lover, isn’t that so?

  Why did Eleanor not have a place of her own where they could hide away without dragging me into it as a witness? I wondered. Next time I met Helen by his side again, I felt so transparent. She could read the truth in my eyes like a handwritten letter.

  ‘Is he sampling?’ she asked me, while Kevin was up at the bar getting drinks.

  I pretended not to understand, which was my right as a newcomer, to play innocent and underdeveloped.

  ‘He’s screwing somebody, isn’t he?’

  The question left me no room to escape. Even for an outsider who had no business getting involved in their private matters, she had me cornered. He was too good a storyteller to get caught. But my silence was like a full admission. She didn’t need to hear any more.

  I had only just been acquitted and now I began to feel more guilty than ever.

  I continued working on the big job on the floor, coming and going like a member of the family. One day, while I was on my way to the building supplier’s I walked along the main street in Dún Laoghaire and I ran into Rita. She was coming towards me, carrying shopping bags. Just when I was getting ready to greet her and ask her if she needed a hand with the bags, she turned away and looked into a shop window. She must have seen me coming. All I could do was pass her by and carry on as though I hadn’t seen her. She wanted privacy, I thought. Or maybe she had discovered something about me and didn’t want to be seen talking to me in public, because she stood staring with great interest into the window of the men’s dress-hire shop.

  It was only when I collected the materials I needed from the building supplier’s and got back to the house that I found out why she didn’t want to talk to me in public. Spread out across the kitchen table was a report on the suffering inflicted on people even years later by the war which had gone on in my country when I was growing up.

  I didn’t read it through all the way. I was too busy putting down a damp-proof course which had never been thought of when they were building these houses. But I couldn’t avoid the questions turned up by the newspaper article. The full story of these victims had not yet been told.

  I felt that I had been found out.

  Later on, when she made a cup of tea, there was nothing said about us passing each other by on the street. And maybe that was the way things were done here, I thought. They often had no formal language for public places. Such as in supermarkets where people avoided each other as though they were invisible. Even the people at the checkout were unable to say hello, so you were quite entitled to walk around all day as if nobody could see you.

  ‘Did you know there were all these Bosnian refugees living here in Dublin?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yes, I heard that,’ I said.

  She pointed to the article in the paper, left open on the table. There was no escape from the accusation in her eyes.

  ‘They’re still looking for the bodies,’ she said. ‘They were buried in one mass grave at first and then dug up again and hidden in other places in order to conceal the crime. They’re using DNA to identify them, but it will take years. They’ve now found the remains of one body in as much as four different sites.’

  I glanced at the paper once more. There were pictures of some of the Bosnian women who had been given refuge here after the massacre of Srebreniça. Faded photographs of family members who had been killed by the Serbian army while the peace-keeping troops could do nothing to save them. There was a photograph of a boy who survived only because he was hidden under the seat of a bus by his mother, otherwise he would have been killed like his father and all the other men. He had grown up in Dublin, not much younger than myself, living in the same city as me.

  ‘You should read it,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave it out for you.’

  I felt like a war criminal. I crept away back to work, but my heart wasn’t in it. I cleared up for the day and went home. I didn’t take the newspaper with me after all and maybe she didn’t expect me to either.

  Later on, Kevin called to collect me, announcing that we were going down to the Shannon for the weekend to stay with friends who owned a big boat on the river. I told him I would give it a miss, but he was adamant and would not accept my excuses. I would meet all his friends and integrate with lots of women.

  Helen was with him again this time. They must have patched things up between them, because he kept shouting the word ‘suas’ which is the Irish for up. Helen was wearing a pleated skirt and a woollen cardigan with twenty or thirty small buttons. The light reflected off her bare knees.

  Heading out of the city, he drove so fast that he skidded on a roundabout and lost control of the wheel. The car spun around one hundred and eighty degrees and ended up on the grass. There was a smell of burning tyres coming up through the floor and we arrived at a semi-graceful stop, leaving two large streaks cut into the landscaped central island.

  It was nothing really. But the force of being suddenly motionless threw me back to the accident in which my parents had died. I felt I had moved no further ahead in time from that day, still sitting in the back seat with the dead bodies of my mother and father in the front and the enormous wedding cake mashed against the back of my father’s seat. I could feel the hollow silence, the absence of answers coming back from them. Only the trickle of blood emerging from my father’s head and running into his ear and dripping down on the back of the seat, almost the same colour as the flowers we had brought with us in the boot. There was also the sound of a motorbike driving away in the distance. And the sound of the insects buzzing. I could remember the heat building up in the car and the inability to move, as though I was for ever trapped inside my dead family. It was clear to me that I was alive, but I was not quite sure if that’s what I wanted. Waiting and waiting for the sound of the ambulance coming from far away, through the valleys, closer and closer but never seeming to reach us, until they finally arrived and I was taken out first because I was the only survivor. Brought back from the dead, you might say, with the face of a paramedic standing outside and his hands in green gloves reaching in to feel my pulse, asking me if I was conscious.

  ‘Hey,’ Kevin shouted. Then he laughed and put his foot down again, driving away as if nothing had happened, defying his luck. He was thinking only how much he was alive while I was thinking only that I should be dead.

  ‘Fuck,’ was all Helen said.

  We made it down to Carrick-on-Shannon by nightfall. We spent the evening on the boat and I was introduced to all their friends, but there was something strange about this gathering that made me feel very much apart. I had nothing to say to them. I was perhaps still dazed by the newspaper article about Bosnian survivors I had read earlier in the day. I was unfit to integrate. I couldn’t get drunk. I couldn’t laugh. I didn’t even find anything they were saying in the least bit funny and perhaps I was trying too hard.

  The owner of the cruise boat kept accusing one of the women of letting her dog hump his dog. They continued for a while with dog jokes and I told myself to lighten up. But I could not pay attention and whenever they laughed I thought they were laughing at me. They even repeated some of the jokes out of courtesy, with me as a pupil receiving special attention.

  They got drunk and drugged up. They kept shouting ‘suas’ and ‘suas again’. They held a spontaneous competition in which everyone had to pitch a movie idea to a Hollywood producer. They did this with great enthusiasm and somebody started off by making up a story of an exploding dog. A woman arrives at the airport and her dog suddenly explodes and there are bits of the animal all over the place. Police and scientists in white suits rush in to cordon off the area and after a full investigation they discover it’s a new disease. People start exploding all over the city.

  Kevin jumped in next with an idea about a boy going on a school trip to the megalithic site at Newgrange
where he falls on the ground and gets a splinter in his arm which goes septic. Then the Stone Age people come back from the past and kidnap him, so he has to be rescued.

  Most of the pitches were about people chasing each other and people being rescued. Helen had an idea about a woman who goes insane because her husband is cheating on her. She leaves her family and turns into a mad environmentalist crusader, causing all kinds of reckless damage to property and protesting all over the world until her husband finally sees her on TV and has to rescue her in the middle of winter, out in Siberia, where she is just about to get killed by the illegal-logging mafia.

  There was silence all around when she finished, because people were thinking it was not very far from the truth.

  When it came to my turn I had nothing much to offer. I began to make up a story in my head about a car crash in which a family is killed on the way to a wedding, all except for one survivor. It felt so obvious. I was unable to invent anything. I only had real facts to play with. I could do nothing but imagine the same accident all over again, going through the same arrangement of occupants and objects inside the car once more. My father’s head against the window. My mother’s head hanging to one side. And the cake, the big wedding cake mashed against the seat in front of me.

  Then it came to me once again that this was no fiction. For the first time, I realised that the car was actually on its side. The impact of the crash must have flipped it over, because I could suddenly recall the cake beside my head. Why had I never worked this out before? And why had nobody told me? Perhaps they did, but there was so much for me to remember and so much to forget, that I had retained nothing of these details. Only now, by trying to reimagine it and place it into fiction, could I see it clearly for the first time. My mother strapped in by her seat belt with her arm hanging down. The sound of the back wheel spinning, which I had mistaken for insects buzzing and birds squeaking. It could not have been the front wheel, because that would have remained in gear, but the back wheel continued freewheeling for a little while afterwards until it slowly came to a stop or just became inaudible. It was a late revelation, so long after the event itself was placed behind me. The car was definitely on its side. Why else would I have seen the paramedic above me, with the blue sky behind him and his arm reaching down towards me?