Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘I told her you were on secondment.’

  That was another disadvantage, having to ask him to explain everything, not being able to check out his words before I accepted them.

  ‘You know something, Vid,’ he said to me in the car. ‘That’s what I like about you. You’ve got no guile.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No guile. You’re so conspicuous. Conscientious, honest to a fault.’

  I had to translate those words back into my own language to see what exactly my deficiencies were. It was obviously time for me to pick up some of this guile, but where do you get lessons for that?

  ‘You’re so genuine,’ he said. ‘You have such a forgiving nature. I swear, I’m not going to let anyone take advantage of that.’

  He was a master apologiser. And the world was full of forgivers, queuing up to shake hands with him. Ready to believe anything he said. I’ve seen him doing it so often, with women especially. His hand on his heart, holding out a bunch of damaged flowers from some petrol station. Bashed-up yellow lilies that smelled more like a funeral. Women throwing their arms around him when they should have been turning away. Listening to his twisted-soul explanations when they should have held their hands up over their ears and screamed.

  A handshake will cost you nothing, so they say. The history of this country was not unlike my own, full of handshakes and refused handshakes.

  On the way up, he told me the whole story of the troubles in Northern Ireland. He divided it up for me in a simple way, like a football match between Catholics and Protestants, Republicans on the one side and Loyalists on the other, with the British government as the referee making a right mess of it and giving bogus penalties to one side until the peace process finally came about. It was all about supremacy and looking down on other people, he said, marching through streets in triumph over the losers. He said it was free market capitalism which brought an end to religious and political disputes and allowed people to walk away and go shopping instead.

  The best way for me to make any sense of it was to compare it to my own life. I could not afford to have enemies. I was an immigrant and I had no right to be angry. I didn’t want to be left on the outside. I needed the endorsement of his friendship and was ready to take peace at any price.

  The landscape up north had the same green fields, as far as I could see. Same cattle with black and white patches, chewing the same grass. The road signs were different, missing the translation in the old language. He took me on a quick tour of Belfast city to see the famous murals painted on the gable walls of houses. Pictures of Bobby Sands on the Republican side and King Billy on the Loyalist side. Flags and emblems borrowed from conflict zones elsewhere. Palestinian flags on the Catholic side and Israeli flags on the Protestant side, as though they were still fighting the same war by proxy, far away in another part of the world.

  I thought of the gift from his father which I had hidden on top of my wardrobe. A lump of enriched metal inside the jewellery case. He didn’t know that I still had it, so I asked him about his father and what I should do if I ran into him again. He became reflective once more. The same fist-like frown. The same intake of breath. The delay. The blink. I realised that I was just one knockout punch away. I could feel my back teeth loosening in their sockets. Ready to flinch and get my head down.

  ‘Let’s be clear about this, Vid. My father doesn’t exist. Do you follow me? I don’t want to go over all the stuff that my mother had to endure. He is nothing to us.’

  We arrived at the hotel and saw the wedding guests gathered outside. There was a strong breeze and the women had to hold on to their hats and their hair and their dresses. Lots of cleavage and goose pimples and bra straps. The young men were hunched on the periphery, lighting cigarettes out of the wind. There was a man holding up a video camera in the air, recording everything that moved, even the flowers without petals blown sideways inside the window boxes. There was a door banging at the entrance and the flags on the lawn in front of the hotel were flapping so much, they were almost rigid as cardboard in the gale. The Irish flag and the European flag and the American flag, for some reason, to make sure everyone felt included.

  The bride stepped out of the limousine and embraced an obese teenager with enormous affection. She looked in my direction for a moment, perhaps wondering if she knew me. She had bags under her eyes, probably from all the excitement and not sleeping very well coming up to the wedding, possibly wishing she was just a guest like everyone else.

  The only person Kevin knew was Eleanor. He told her how much fun I could be once I had a few drinks in me. He wanted me to say something, for God’s sake, because people were wondering what was going on inside my head.

  ‘You look a bit like a spy when you don’t speak.’

  But there was no need for me to talk. The woman beside me at the dinner table did all the talking, telling me about all the concerts she had ever been to. Bon Jovi. Britney Spears, twice in America. Bruce Springsteen in Dublin was by far the best value for money because he played for three hours. She told me that she and her husband went dancing a lot lately and that was the cheapest way of getting out of the house these days.

  Everybody said the food was out of this world. The waitress kept putting her hand on my shoulder and offering me extra helpings. Her bosom crashed into the back of my head a few times while she was lifting plates from the table.

  They had different customs here. For example, they didn’t toss coins in the air for good luck and they didn’t barter for the bride with an envelope full of money handed over to her family. Instead they made lots of speeches, full of family information that was lost on me. Jokes and embarrassing stories about the bride and groom when they were children. The only thing that made sense was when the father of the bride talked about people who were absent, in America, in Australia, and somebody who had lost his life in the fight for freedom. Then he sang a song, totally unaccompanied, that made everyone cry, including the woman beside me.

  It’s a beautiful noise.

  I was already drunk by the time the dancing started. Eleanor and Kevin brought me outside to smoke some weed. From then on I was not even in the same country as anyone else and Kevin handed me the key to a room. In the corridor I met the woman who had sat beside me at the table.

  ‘I’m buckled,’ she said, holding on to a radiator for support.

  I passed out as soon as I got to the room. A while later I heard somebody banging on the door. The light came on, blinding me, though I hardly even woke up. I felt sea-sick. The bed was rocking and I tried not to give in to the swirling in my head.

  The spotlight was shining in through the curtains from the lawn at the front of the hotel and when I opened my eyes, I saw him on top of Eleanor. They were right beside me on the bed, rocking back and forth. The bed was squeaking and the headboard was knocking against the wall. She was so close that I inhaled her perfume. I could hear her breath in my ear and her long hair swiped across my face.

  I had been turned into a voyeur, trying to remain still and not let them know that I was awake, listening to Eleanor’s voice accelerating beside me. Tiny, restrained screeches, like the call of a seabird along the coast. He exhaled up towards the ceiling and fell off. I got an elbow in the ribs which I couldn’t complain about because it was not intentional. Maybe I was becoming a participant at last.

  18

  I was kind of expecting this to happen. The place was too small to think you could get away with it for ever. Talk about six degrees of separation. Six hundred degrees is what I needed.

  Who did I run into in the supermarket, doing his late-night shopping with his wife? You have it. The electrician. The man with the broken hip. The man who was beaten up and left for dead in the street. Here he was, right in front of me, leaning on his trolley, doing just fine. The picture of health, as Kevin would say.

  He seemed to be a long way off his beaten track and I wondered if he had moved hou
se out to Dún Laoghaire. This was a real cause for concern, because we would never see the end of him in that case.

  I hardly recognised him at first. I must have passed him by numerous times, brushing up quite close, thinking he was familiar to me but not acknowledging it consciously. Because everybody is invisible to each other in a supermarket, isn’t that so? You have the right to complete anonymity. You don’t see anything apart from the items on the shelves. You could even pass by your own mother, as the saying goes.

  I had a basket of groceries in my hand, intending to do my own cooking from now on. They’d have you living your whole life on sandwiches and take-away food in this country if you were not careful.

  The electrician then came face to face with me in the deep-freeze section. My instinct was to half smile at him out of politeness, mistaking him perhaps for a former boss on one of the building sites. But that was the wrong thing to do. He didn’t smile back. Maybe he was trying to maintain his shopper’s anonymity, and maybe it was still the anger from losing the court case, because he didn’t look very pleased to see me.

  I had to check a second time to make sure that it really was him. He had the goatee beard, though his face seemed rounder. He had a strong suntan and wore a football shirt and a baseball cap, more undercover. In fact, I might have passed them by if it wasn’t for his wife standing there beside him, glaring at me with a jumbo frozen pizza in her hand. She elbowed him, drawing his attention to me.

  ‘Well, look who it is,’ he said.

  I tried to walk past them as if the supermarket was still a polite and safe environment where everybody was more or less equal. But there was too much history between us. I could see the anger rising in her eyes. The audacity of me appearing in the same shopping centre as them, after all that happened. He had the same grimace on his face that I remembered from the court hearing, as though he had something bad in his mouth, as though he had just bitten on a lemon seed.

  What was I meant to say? I tried to pretend I was looking for a particular type of rare frozen vegetable. I avoided glancing into their trolley, which is something I like doing out of curiosity, just to match the items people buy with their faces.

  The trolley was blocking my way. He would not let me pass, pushing me back along the side of the deep-freeze unit. When I tried to escape to the other side, he moved over as well, forcing me to reverse in such a way that nobody would really have noticed anything strange. Other shoppers might have thought I was backing away out of courtesy, or at the most that we knew each other well and were playing a little game.

  ‘I’ll pull your fucking eyes out,’ he said in a growl. ‘You think you got away with this? Well, just you wait, my friend.’

  I almost fell backwards at that point and had to leave my shopping basket balanced on top of their groceries.

  ‘Leave it, Larry,’ she said, holding him back. ‘He’s not worth it.’

  There was no point in me trying to win, so I abandoned the idea of shopping and tried to get out of his sight as fast as possible. As I fled back along the aisle, he picked up a jar out of his trolley and flung it after me. Even though he missed, I could hear the jar glancing off the freezer unit and smashing on the floor with the contents spreading out in a sort of star-shaped, big bang design. Tikka masala possibly. Not something from my basket, anyway.

  ‘Scum,’ he shouted after me.

  What amazed me was that the staff and the shoppers didn’t seem to think there was anything out of the ordinary about this. Everybody just carried on with what they were doing, the music ever-present around them, a song by a man who seemed to have trouble remembering whether or not he had recently told his girlfriend that he loved her. Everyone was looking for deals, two for the price of one, twenty per cent extra and twenty per cent off. By the time I passed by the checkout empty-handed, I heard an announcement being made over the system. ‘Staff call. Spillage. Aisle six, please.’

  I couldn’t help worrying about this chance meeting. I was in a heap over it, you might say, unable to sleep. You could never tell what was coming around the corner, and I felt it was best to stay out of supermarkets. Stick to paninis and kebabs and fish and chips. There was no point in worrying Kevin about it either, so I didn’t mention it to anyone, hoping it would all go away again.

  In the meantime, Kevin had extended the job at the house. I was getting more and more involved in the Concannon household. The joists were down, ready to take the floorboards. Then they realised what a terrible state the casement window was in and asked me to replace the entire downstairs frame. The wood had gone completely rotten over the years with all the salt air coming up from the sea and I agreed with them that it could not wait any longer. It was an emergency at this point.

  It was a job I needed Darius for, because he had the workshop with the equipment to make up such a complex frame. A PVC frame would be out of character. So we got to work and ripped out the old casement window downstairs, placing massive sheets of plastic and plywood across the opening, shutting off the interior in darkness.

  Darius is a pretty decent guy. Always good humoured and funny. He kept talking to the wood while he worked, holding an ongoing conversation with each piece of timber while he shaped it. Whenever things fit, he used sexual analogies, suggesting that he was getting into bed with the wood. Even worse when the thing didn’t fit and it brought out all the curses that he’d heard on building sites over the years since he’d arrived.

  He complained about not getting paid for his work. He hated chasing people for money and said it felt too much like begging. It often took him more time to get paid than it did to do the job itself, and maybe he was using the wrong expressions, like ‘I suppose there’s no chance of a cheque, is there?’ He envied me for having so many friends here. Now and again he reminded me of the offer of going into business together, which was not a bad idea in principle, except that I was no better than him at asking for money.

  ‘I’m a no-good hustler,’ he said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘But you’re well in,’ he said.

  ‘I’m well out, you mean.’

  ‘The Concannons,’ he said. ‘You’re well in with the Concannons, aren’t you? You have Irish friends. Me, I still get drunk in Russian.’

  He was a good bit older than me, but he hung out mostly with other non-nationals from Eastern Europe. He told me that he had been a conscript in the Russian army and you would not believe how hard that was to endure. Very little food. Freezing barracks. Away from home. Endless beatings and pointless cruelty. He said recruits were always committing suicide and he often thought of doing the same. One day a comrade shot himself in the head, leaving a splatter on the walls of the barracks, everybody throwing up in their beds as they woke up covered in blood and the gun danced across the floor on its stock end, away out of the dead man’s hand.

  ‘War might have been better,’ he said. ‘This was just like going to jail for a few years of hard labour.’

  What I began to notice most at the house was that Ellis was ripping loose from the family. She had got through her exams somehow and finished school, celebrating for a while, stalling before deciding on what she was going to do with her life, determined to play her own luck for the time being. Her older sister Jane had already gone to look for accommodation in Limerick. She fulfilled every expectation that her mother had for her. I never got to talk to her very much, but you could see that she was going to achieve things that her mother and father could only dream of. And Ellis was bent on going in the opposite direction, as though there was a rule that no two sisters from the same family could ever reach the same level of success.

  I could see that Ellis needed to break free and conduct a few essential experiments out in the open world. She should have gone travelling all over the globe, couch surfing, going to festivals, all those things her brother did. But she stuck around instead. I saw her once on the street, outside a night club in the town centre. She lifted up her T-shirt and flashed her breasts towa
rds some people across the street. The women on the far side did the same, baring their breasts back, like some kind of fertility display. Or was it a prelude to war?

  Ellis recognised me and called my name, though she seemed completely out of her head. She introduced me to her boyfriend, Diller. He seemed like a nice-enough guy to me, though he didn’t say much, apart from asking who the fuck I was. Then she put her arm around him and told him that I was all right and there was nothing to worry about.

  What I noticed more than anything else was that she was learning how to spit and that she had also changed her accent. It was far more difficult to understand her on the street and maybe she wanted to belong to the real people, closer to danger, away from the protection of her family.

  In the meantime, I had started working on renovating a small boat in my spare time. I suppose it was the closest I would ever get to boat-building.

  I also had an absurd wish to restore the Concannon family to what it once was or might have been. I had fantasies of the family reunited. I was worried about Ellis because she seemed to have run away from home.

  ‘I saw Ellis the other day,’ I said to her mother, quite casually.

  ‘She’s none of your business,’ Rita said.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to be nosey.’

  I was mistaken again, lured into a false sense of security. I thought we had got to know each other well enough for me to enquire about her daughter at least. In fact, I had been given the impression that being nosey was a good thing. Was this not how you made people feel welcome and happy about themselves? Making them feel at home by showing concern and letting them know that we all have our own troubles.

  Maybe she was still bitter at me for not confessing my own secrets. But later on she gave me a smile, like a refund.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, bringing me a mug of tea to make up for it. ‘It was not my intention to get angry with you, Vid. It’s just that Ellis is intent on destroying her life very rapidly right now.’