Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  You’ve heard this story a million times. It’s pretty universal, though every country has its own guidelines for deceit and betrayal. The only problem was that I ended up doing the walking away on his behalf. I became his envoy, more or less.

  ‘Are there others?’ she asked.

  ‘Other women, you mean?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know, Vid.’

  ‘A few,’ I admitted.

  ‘Why the fuck does nobody say anything?’

  She said this with a bitterness in her voice that was not really in her character. There was a seagull calling outside, somewhere up on the rooftops, almost laughing by the sound of it. Making the café seem strangely out of place, more like Dursey Island.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ. You’re covering for him, isn’t that so? He’s your best friend and you can’t betray him. You watch him cheating and you say nothing. You go right along with it. You back him up all the way. You tell his lies for him. Because you have this loyalty pact between you which means more than anything else in the world. It’s like the fucking Masonic lodge, the two of you.’

  ‘I thought it was better for you not to know,’ I said, but that was really cheap.

  ‘You see, you’re lying for him right now.’

  ‘Helen,’ I said, trying to make her feel better, ‘this is nothing. The sampling will stop soon.’

  ‘Just listen to yourself,’ she said with a desperate laugh. ‘You think I can just forget all this and pretend it never happened?’

  I was getting totally mixed up, guessing, muttering, trying to fight his corner for him and getting nowhere.

  ‘He’s made a mistake, Helen. You’re still the only one for him, I’m absolutely sure of that.’

  ‘You’re just living in his pocket,’ she said.

  She was crying now. She tried to hide it by looking away into the street. I could see men coming into the café, frightened by her tears, standing back with shock-waves of self-doubt on their faces.

  ‘What am I doing, Vid?’ she said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve and turning towards me, trying to smile again. ‘It’s not your fault, is it?’

  ‘I hope you get back together,’ I said.

  ‘That’s kind, Vid. Thanks.’

  All it took was a small conversation like this to bring out a spate of forgiveness in her. I tried to cheer her up and changed the subject. I told her about the men in the building supplier’s. There was a funny guy there who kept saying ‘use your head’ whenever anyone was lifting something heavy like a sack of cement. There was a guy from a company called Accurate Plumbing who whistled the same ABBA song every day and I heard one of the other men saying that there was an old Irish proverb which says: Beware of the man with only one tune.

  I managed to get a smile out of her, but I think it was only out of politeness, making up for the interrogation she put me through.

  Trying to stay optimistic, I told her about the small wooden boat that I had begun to renovate in my spare time.

  ‘I met this old man in the boatyard down at the harbour and he said I could have the use of his boat if I was prepared to restore it.’

  ‘I hope he’s not having you on,’ she said.

  I ignored these doubts and told her I couldn’t wait to get out fishing again. No better place to be in the summer, with no cars around you, only the sound of the water under the boat and the odd seagull looking down to see if you had caught anything.

  ‘If you want, I can take you out,’ I said. ‘Soon as it’s seaworthy.’

  I meant both of them, of course. I was full of hope, expecting their arguments to end any day, just like the muscle man and the girl in white hot pants.

  ‘Nothing standing in the way of us going fishing,’ she said.

  I wondered what exactly she meant by that because she asked me to accompany her back to her apartment where all his stuff had been piled into boxes. Socks, underpants, shirts. A leather pilot jacket from the Second World War, given to him by his uncle. His books. A bashed-up guitar with a white soundboard which he had brought with him on a trip around Australia and which was signed by all the people he had met along the way. Hill walking boots. Some computer equipment, leads and things that should have been thrown out long ago. Pictures of them together which had been worth printing out. One particular immortal photo of the two of them out in the open, on a cliff somewhere overlooking the sea, probably taken on delay setting. Him with his arms around her, smiling over her shoulder, with one hand inside her trousers. She no longer cared, or told herself not to care. It was all being thrown out now. Erased, along with all the messages on her phone.

  She ordered a taxi for me, pre-paid. She helped to carry the boxes out. She embraced me and said goodbye.

  ‘Thanks for doing this, Vid.’

  She spun away so I could not see what she was saying with her eyes. By the time the taxi drove off, she had already gone inside again, out of sight.

  21

  What would you have done? With the medal, I mean. I couldn’t just hold on to the thing for ever. I couldn’t leave his father thinking that I had not bothered to hand it over, or that I had kept it for myself, because he was still waiting. What alternative did I have? I had a duty to return it or bring some kind of answer back to him.

  I thought of posting it. I thought of leaving it lying around in Kevin’s new apartment, the place he was meant to move into with Helen. I thought of putting it in with all the family artefacts in the Concannon house for Rita to find. In the end, I decided to bring it back. What took me so long was the knowledge that I was breaking a promise. Even before I got the red box down with the medal inside it, I knew that I had gone into a forbidden zone.

  My problem was not having the language skills to stop things being straightforward, black and white. I was playing the duplicitous game of being myself.

  They told me that he had a job as a caretaker in one of the yacht clubs. He sat there every night, surveying a set of screens watching boats in a yard, occasionally looking out through the window or walking around to see the same view with his own eyes. It’s a job I could have done very well.

  I tracked him down in his basement apartment on a Sunday afternoon. There was a light on and music playing. Traditional music. He coughed as he opened the door. Upstairs, there were people shouting. The main hall door banged. I heard coins falling in the street and somebody cursing in a language I could not understand.

  Strictly speaking, I should have handed him back the box with the medal at the door and left again. But he asked me inside and I didn’t have the heart to refuse. Of course, I also have to admit that I was very curious and wanted to know more about him, about the letters he sent home, about the story of the drowned woman.

  Johnny Concannon was unshaven, with his shirt collar open. He hastily cleared a newspaper off the table and turned the music down. His clothes smelled of smoke. There was a hint of soup in the air also, and mildew. Everything he had owned in his life was here in this underground room where it was always night, it seemed. A single bed with a steel frame, an old Formica breakfast table, two steel chairs with white stars on the upholstery, some books stacked on the floor, his radio on the window sill. There was a small hand-sink on the wall and an electric kettle on a dresser beside it, along with a mirror and some shaving gear. The toilet must have been out in the back, or upstairs, or maybe in the local pub even. Clustered together on the table, there was a loaf of sliced bread and a dented, metal teapot, a bag of sugar, a packet of teabags and a carton of milk. There was also a CD player with a stack of his favourites including Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan and Neil Young.

  Again, I could see the similarity with Kevin, but the expression was less manipulated. His expectations seemed so much more curtailed. He had remained frugal. He asked me to sit down and offered me a cup of tea. And while he was filling the kettle, I looked around and saw the photograph of himself and Rita on the wall. They looked very young, just married, perhaps. Both of them smiling.


  ‘Would you like a drink instead?’ he asked. ‘A drop of whisky?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘Tea would be great.’

  He offered me a Twix, but I shook my head and told him I didn’t eat chocolate or toffee. I watched him pour the tea and remembered what Darius had said about different security zones in Irish families that you passed through with each cup of tea.

  Without anything else to say, I produced the box with the medal from my bag. I didn’t give it into his hand. Instead, I placed it on the table like a piece of neutral information which spoke for itself and still left a degree of ambiguity, maybe a bit of hope.

  ‘He wouldn’t accept it from me,’ I said.

  ‘I see.’

  He looked at it, but didn’t touch it. It contained too much rejection.

  ‘That’s the end of it, so,’ he said. ‘Thanks for trying.’

  He smiled. But I could see the self-doubt in his eyes. He had begun to grasp the impossible. All he wanted was some acknowledgement, some illusion of being welcome, at least from his own son. Entire lives were propped up on illusions like that – half a story, a mere suggestion, a line of optimism in the language.

  I asked him how long he had been away in England. He had left in his twenties, he said, not because he had to, but just following the music which all came from England then.

  ‘It was the thing to do in those days,’ he said. ‘Get out.’

  He had a good job in a bar in Galway and could have become manager eventually. But there was something missing, some feeling that the floor was not solid underneath his life and that everyone around him was disappearing.

  ‘My friends were all gone,’ he said. ‘I thought my life was over if I stayed in Ireland. Then I met Rita in London and we got married and started a family. But things didn’t work out.’

  Perhaps I was the only neutral listener he could find to accept his explanation. I didn’t feel entitled to this information, but I could not just walk away as if it didn’t interest me.

  ‘I should have made more of an effort,’ he said, nodding at the picture on the wall. ‘But she didn’t make it easy for me.’

  He had done reasonably well over there. He wasn’t one of those people who worked on building sites, looking at concrete pouring like porridge into the foundations. His lungs would never have stood up to that kind of work. Instead, he worked in the bars and managed to get a franchise on a pub where a lot of Irish people drank. He did great business. But with Rita working as a teacher, they never saw each other much. And then she decided to move back because she didn’t want her children growing up in England with a man who was drinking so hard all the time.

  ‘She never wanted me to go back with her,’ he said.

  He looked at the space between his shoes for a while. He asked me if I had anything against him smoking a cigarette. He said he had smoked since he was fifteen and it was the only thing that stopped him coughing. It got the immune system working, he explained, though it was probably time to go back to rolling his own.

  ‘She closed the door,’ he said. ‘I came back here for a while to live with her at the house, but she hated me being there. She had such a way of putting me down. I know I did wrong, but some of the things she said were worse than a fist in the teeth.’

  What struck me was how different it might have been if he had stayed here with the family. Even his appearance and his health would have been better. The hunch in his shoulders corresponded to the luck in life. He should have been far more confident, more certain of his place in the world. He should have owned a car and played golf, should have gone on foreign holidays with his wife and children and looked quite different. His life had given him a hardened, outdoor look, as though he had not lived in comfort, as though he had walked a lot and waited for buses in the rain instead of driving.

  After she left with the children, he gave up running pubs and became a caretaker. He managed apartment blocks in various parts of London over the years. He tried his luck in America for a while, and in South Africa, then Canada where most of his older brothers had gone. He wanted to become rich like them and win his family back that way, by arriving home loaded. But it never worked. Instead he always came back to London. Another job as caretaker, not even as flash or as well paid as the earlier ones, but still a good job with a nice basement apartment which was warm, not like this one here.

  He was like a person who had arrived here for the first time. He could hardly recognise the place. Worse than that were the small corners of familiarity which made him feel this country was more hostile than any other place in the world. The landmarks left unchanged must have made it clear how quickly his life had gone by and how impossible it was to change anything that happened back then.

  He told me how his mother had gone to see him in London before she died. At this point he broke into his own language, as though he could only talk about her in his mother tongue, a bit like me being able to remember certain things only in Serbo-Croat. Speaking in Irish, then translating for me instantaneously, he told me that she came to visit him because he and his brothers in Canada were so reluctant to go home. He gave her his bed and slept on the couch and in the morning she had died in her sleep. Maybe she planned it that way, peacefully, in the company of her youngest son.

  He was trying to hide his feelings from me, saying only that there was nothing left for him in Connemara apart from the empty house and his memories of growing up with his seven brothers, the oldest of whom he only met for the first time abroad, after he emigrated himself.

  He asked me if I missed home and if I was thinking of going back. Maybe there was something in my eyes that revealed how similar we were, in between places, neither here nor there.

  ‘You know, I’ve felt loneliness many times in my life,’ he said, ‘but the worst loneliness comes from what you’ve done yourself.’

  It was too hard for him to talk about. Going back over things that he did at my age, when he hardly understood what was going on his own head. Best not to remember anything, to move on and never look back.

  ‘I’m barred,’ he said. ‘I’m not allowed anywhere near the house, or the children.’

  He checked my eyes to see if I would disown him now that he had revealed the worst.

  ‘Believe me, Vid. You don’t want to hear it all. I’ve spent my whole life regretting just one moment of madness.’

  He asked me how the work was going at the house and I told him they were already talking about putting in a new kitchen.

  ‘Looks like I’m there for good now,’ I joked. I had all but taken his place, walking in and out of the family home from which he had been expelled.

  ‘How are they all?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re very well,’ I said with great enthusiasm. I listed off what they were all doing like a great expert on the family. Jane away doing biochemistry. Kevin with his law practice.

  ‘Ellis,’ I said. ‘She’s flapping her wings a bit. But that’s only what you would expect, she has to let go a little.’

  ‘And Rita,’ he asked, ‘is she happy?’

  I told him about her battle with cancer and assured him that she was doing fine, still teaching and getting involved in bits of charity work on the side and just hoping that her cancer didn’t come back.

  ‘She kept all your letters,’ I found myself saying in a burst of sheer good will, and maybe I was trying to open a door for him to come back. I didn’t have the heart to tell him they were all unread.

  Instead we got on to the subject of the drowned woman and he told me the story all over again in his own words, the exact same way that I had heard it from Kevin. At times Johnny broke into Irish again and translated for me, as though speaking in Irish was the only way the memory could be trusted.

  He confirmed the same details, how exactly she was denounced from the altar. The way he had heard it from his mother. The priest had put it up to the men in the congregation to drown her. Because every man in the whole of Connemara was under suspicion
while she was walking around with a baby in her belly and no husband by her side. And if they were not men enough to do that and clear their own names, so the story went, she should have the decency to drown herself.

  He spoke as though it all happened very recently and there was no separation in time, only the distance of a few generations back.

  He told me how her body was said to have been washed up on the island in a place called Pointe, in a spot which was later called after her, but not by name. He described to me how the men must have found her. They used to go walking along the coast looking for items of salvage brought in by the tide.

  ‘Shore-ranging,’ he called it.

  The person who found her must have seen nothing more than a bundle of clothes, perhaps, discoloured by the saltwater and the sun. Only the barking of the dog drawing attention to the shape of a human corpse and the creatures that may have already made the discovery before them. The man would have made the sign of the cross instantaneously. He would have touched nothing and would have called his dog back. He would have examined the body from a safe distance and walked around it in a circle and spoken his thoughts out loud, ending each sentence with half a prayer. He would have seen the bruised feet and the long hair lain across the grey rocks and the damage done to her skin by sealife and birds while in the water. He would have known that she was carrying a child by the swollen belly. He would have wondered what the women would be saying about this and what advice they would have to give on what to do with the body and who it might belong to.

  Once the news was passed on around the island, people would have been asked to keep away. Women and children would not have been allowed to see the tragedy with their own eyes because there was enough of it around, enough drowning of their own to witness this one as well. The body would have been left there, secured with rocks, perhaps, until it was decided what to do with it. There was no policeman on the island at the time and not for a long time after that either. So there would have been no police investigation and no formal identification of the body.