We stopped on the island. I tied the boat to one of the rocks, wedging the rope into a crevice in the granite, giving it enough slack to allow for the tide to ebb. There was nobody around and we sat down on the rocks and talked.
‘It’s not Dursey Island,’ she said. ‘But it will have to do.’
She had a funny way of twisting words around and she said I laughed like a collapsing building, detonated from inside with a cloud of dust rising and people looking on in amazement.
It was threatening to rain, just one or two drops. She put her arms around me without any notice and kissed me as if she had been inspired by the idea of rain. Our eyes were closed and I can remember thinking that her lower lip was so much bigger to touch than it was to look at. Her teeth disappeared, so it seemed to me, but it still felt like a big smile breaking across her face. She invited my tongue to step across her lips into her mouth. There was no need for any explanation. A kiss was, in fact, the biggest word ever invented in anyone’s mouth that could not be spoken or written down.
‘We’re not doing this to get back at him?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely not,’ she said, laughing.
I put the unhappiness of my questions aside. We must have known it was coming all the way. We loved each other right from the start, only we could not admit it because the friendship with Kevin stood in the way. And maybe this was the reason for all the trouble in the first place, why he lost control, beating a man half to death in the street. Maybe he saw something in our eyes that night that freaked him out.
She didn’t want to look for shelter. She opened her leather jacket, encouraging me to take ownership of the place we were in. We made love together on the island, with the sun going down and a few sporadic drops falling at the same time, making everything more urgent. I was expecting to forget about the entire world, but the opposite happened. As we lay down on the grass, I began to remember things. There was something in this encounter with Helen that opened the door on my memory. The smoothness of her stomach right up against mine. A tiny drop of rain on one of her eyelashes. Her breathing in my ear, much louder than any of the waves exhaling on the rocks close by.
She didn’t press me too much for information. She was a good listener, good at uncovering all those things that were hidden under rocks and crawled out of a man’s memory.
I told her that my father was in the secret police in Belgrade. He worked under a man by the name of Stanišić who was on trial for war crimes. I explained to her that I was not aware of what exactly my father did in his work. From what I gathered, he was a gifted communicator, involved in extracting information from people in police stations.
‘I knew none of this when I was growing up,’ I explained to her. ‘He was the nicest man on earth. A good father.’
‘Tell me about the car crash.’
She left her arm around my shoulder and waited for the story to emerge. I told her about the wedding of my sister, Branka. Long after the war was over, in peace time. The wedding was to take place in the mountains, in a place where her future husband came from and where they were going to settle down because he had taken over an auto-repair workshop that had been abandoned. My father was dressed up in his suit and my mother wore a blue hat and matching blue suit. The wedding cake was in the back seat beside me, special order from one of the best cafés in Belgrade.
The morning of the wedding was hot. The entire village was gathered at the church, waiting. My sister dressed in white. The brass band ready to strike up and begin the great celebrations. I could remember driving through the countryside with a sheet of grease-proof paper over the wedding cake and the sweetness filling the whole car. My father talking, full of excitement because it’s not every day that your daughter gets married. The wedding was to take place in an area which had been badly scarred by the war, a place where people had fled their houses. I can remember passing by burned-out homes and not thinking of anything really, because my mother and father didn’t say a word about why some parts of the landscape looked so empty without cattle or goats.
Then the car just spun out of control and bounced off a wall on my mother’s side. She was killed almost instantly by the impact.
I explained that for a long time I could not actually remember any of this happening, only what they told me afterwards. I must have been knocked out for a while and maybe only now beginning to wake up again.
‘I didn’t even know at the time that the car flipped over on its side.’
It was only more recently that I began to work these things out for myself. Why the cake was thrown into my lap. Why the windscreen was shattered even before we crashed. And the sound of the motorbike starting up shortly afterwards, driving away into the hills like the sound of a mosquito in my ear. Leaving nothing eventually but the back wheel spinning and the sight of blood collecting in my father’s ear.
My father was killed by a single bullet through the left eye. A piece of lead that was reshaped on its passage through his life into a warped grey pebble, buried in a wedding cake that was never cut.
‘Somebody got his revenge on him?’ Helen asked.
‘I’m not so sure,’ I said.
‘Who else would have killed him?’
‘I think it was one of his own people,’ I said. ‘Maybe he was beginning to regret some things after the war and was about to reveal secrets.’
‘Was he present in Srebreniça?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘All I know is that he transferred to the military at some point.’
‘Do you want to find out?’
‘I vowed never to go back.’
We got into the boat again. The tide was so strong that I could only row across the sound between the island and the mainland at a bizarre angle, picking a spot that would eventually bring us on course into the mouth of a small harbour. Otherwise the strength of the current would have taken us all the way down the coast, along the rocks where the train glides through the granite tunnel and comes shooting out of the side of the hill and finally descends down to the level of the beach.
‘We can go there together, if you like,’ she offered, once we stood on the land again.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Back to Serbia,’ she said. ‘And Bosnia. I’ll go there with you and visit Srebreniça.’
We left the boat there behind us, tied up against the pier. The sun had gone down and the lights were on all around us. As we walked away up the hill, she put a cold hand in under my shirt and I had to start laughing, like an entire department store collapsing into rubble and dust.
29
Ellis was pregnant and didn’t know what to do. Helen told me that she had got in contact because she had nobody else to turn to. Her boyfriend Diller had gone missing. Rita had reacted very badly. And Kevin accused her of destroying the family, showing no consideration for the feelings of her mother, who was sick with worry and disappointment.
‘I’m afraid for her,’ Helen said to me on the phone.
Ellis told Helen that Kevin had shouted at her, telling her that being a single mother was no joke at her age, just out of school. She could expect no help from anyone in the family. He described her future life with his own unique flair. An endless cycle of nappies and unhappiness, sitting in front of the TV without any plan, throwing all her intelligence away. Besides, it was insane to bring a baby into the world in such precarious times, when the place was already vastly overpopulated and in crisis management. A baby was the last thing the world needed right now.
‘He’s told her to get a termination,’ Helen said.
‘What do you think?’ I asked, because teenage terminations were not unusual where I came from. But then Helen explained that such operations were not permitted here and she would have to travel abroad.
‘She needs to be allowed to make up her own mind, without any of this blackmail from her family.’
‘Best if you speak to her,’ I said.
Helen had a way of allowing people to discover wha
t was in their own minds without saying a word herself. While she was on her way to meet Ellis, I went to visit Johnny at the yacht club. I knocked on the door and he came down to let me in. He was glad to have company for a while and brought me upstairs to where he sat all night looking out through a big glass window at the boats. There were two screens with the same view split up into two sections, one focusing on the boats that were moored along a jetty, the other showing the boats on dry dock. What appeared on screen was also recorded, in case his memory of events was not believed.
Through him, I had got a few small jobs. He had put in a word for me and I was commissioned to build a series of trophy cabinets and also to mount navigation charts on the walls. It was nice work and I liked being there, looking at all the paintings they had of the sea.
There was one painting that I could not get out of my head. It was of a ship in distress. You could barely see the shape of the vessel in the eye of the storm, pitched at an angle, rolling at the mercy of the waves. A flash of lightning had illuminated the scene for a moment and made the ship look so small, like an insect in the palm of somebody’s hand. There seemed very little holding it afloat against the force of nature. Only an act of faith keeping it from going down under the towering waves. Standing in front of the painting, you could almost hear the shouts of the sailors over the howl of the wind as they tried to maintain control. Blessing themselves with the lurch of each wave. The lash of salt water folding across them, getting worse. You could sense the tension in the ropes. You could hear the groaning of wood. You could feel the ruthless speed at which objects were pulled out of their hands. The wheel spinning. The rudder whipped about like a barn door. The dark, deep water staring at them all around until there was nothing to hold on to but the rails and the cleats and whatever else was fixed. Their families. Their memories. Their own names. Their loved ones, left back on land, praying for their safe return.
I told Johnny about Ellis. Even though I was not really part of the family any longer, I still cared about them.
‘I need to buy her an ice cream,’ he said to me, staring out the window at the sea.
‘How is that going to help her?’ I wondered.
He began talking about a place close by called Teddy’s where you could buy soft ice-cream cones. They were meant to be the best in the world. People came from all over in the summer to queue up outside. Even late at night, after dark, which was strange to me because I always thought ice cream was something for children, consumed only by daylight. Even in the middle of winter, at Christmas, when the sea was lashing across the road and there were bits of broken seaweed blown up against the walls of houses like brown lizards, they still queued up for Teddy’s soft ice cream.
I could verify that it really was the best ice cream in the world, not because I had travelled to that many places where ice cream was sold, but because I believed what people told me until I heard otherwise. Teddy’s was not very far away from the Concannon house, so I tried one for myself and I had to say they were right.
Johnny told me that he bought himself a Teddy’s ice cream on the day that he left Dún Laoghaire for the first time to get the boat across to Holyhead. He never forgot the taste of it. There was so much time to kill before the boat left that he found himself passing by Teddy’s a number of times before he finally persuaded himself to try one. He joined the queue, even though he was a little embarrassed as a grown man, asking for an ice-cream cone. It was not as though they didn’t have ice cream in Connemara, only that he had never had the cone before and the taste of it made him feel like a boy again.
Thirty years had passed and they were still selling the same ice cream now, the very same recipe, and he said it was good that some things had not changed.
‘I thought it was a terrible waste of good money at the time,’ he said, ‘buying such a luxury item for myself.’
He explained that he grew up in a time when any money spent on food seemed wasted. Food was nothing more than a necessity, whereas drink was essential. He wasn’t sure how he had inherited this way of thinking, but most of his friends were the same, even though they loved food and were always starving. They were embarrassed to be seen eating and had a store of phrases to deflect from it. I’d eat a nun’s arse through a hedge. I could murder a steak. I could murder a sushi, anything at all, including the hand that feeds me. They never respected food, only laughed as if it was the enemy of drink.
He was a thin man who had survived on cigarettes and alcohol. Things had changed with all this talk of celebrity chefs and live competitions on how to stuff a chicken on TV. He regretted not knowing how to cook and care about himself.
‘Is it like that where you come from?’
‘People drink a lot,’ I said, ‘and they also love ice cream.’
The location of Teddy’s ice-cream shop is unique, wedged in between the railway and the coast road. Behind the shop is the open shaft where the railway lines run below. Parents coming from the People’s Park hold their children up over the wall sometimes to let them look down. When you cross out on to the coast road you cannot possibly pass by Teddy’s without noticing it. It’s painted blue and has an unusual, triangular shape, the last building squeezed in by the railway and the road. Even though the bathing place opposite has been closed and lying derelict for thirty years, the people still come for ice cream. At one end of Teddy’s is the sweet shop itself where they once sold tea and buns. At the other end, the thin end, there is a small blue hatch where the ice cream is served. The person buying the cone stands on the pavement at a far higher level, so that the woman inside the hatch looks up as if she exists in a subterranean world, down with the commuter trains clattering below. You can hardly see her face, only her hand holding up the cone and taking the money. There is a hum from the ice-cream machine whenever it is switched on and she twirls the cone around, creating a smooth spiral with a neat point.
You have a choice of getting a plain cone or one with a bright dash of strawberry juice or a sprinkle of hundreds and thousands or a cone with a chocolate flake stuck into it, called a ninety-nine. Johnny told me that the Italian man who invented the ninety-nine cone died at the age of ninety-nine, precisely. Belfast, he seemed to recall. He had read that in the newspaper and it was a happy coincidence, did I not think so myself?
All through the summer the people lined up for Teddy’s ice cream. It seemed like a mad place to have children and adults gathering on such a narrow pavement, having to look right and left as they crossed the road when they could only really keep their eyes on the cone itself. People slowed down once they saw cones being carried and took care not to run anybody over, possibly because they wanted one themselves. You’d see a father crossing the street sometimes, delivering four or five cones to his family sitting in the car, handing them in through the windows to his wife and children before getting back into the driving seat. You’d see the mother saying she didn’t want one for herself because she’s on a diet, but then she got a little taste of her husband’s cone and also a great big lick from each of the children’s cones, so she probably ended up with more than you would get in a full cone. Sometimes you saw the mother wiping ice cream off the car seats and off the faces of the children. When the children are very small, the ice cream melts faster than they can eat. It begins to run down the side of the cone and on to their tiny hands and down into their sleeves. I saw a father once taking his child’s entire hand into his mouth to clean it and then doing the same with the other. Some children are good at handling cones and they know when to bite off the end and create a hole in the bottom to suck down the ice cream. Couples love cones and they buy them for each other because eating ice cream is something intimate which you need to do in company. Eating alone makes you look a little guilty, which is what Johnny felt, though he could not explain why. And that’s possibly why people had children in the first place: so they could have a legitimate excuse for buying ice-cream cones.
Another thing. You sometimes saw a cone on the ground
, face down, with the pointed end tragically sticking up and father going back to buy another one just to console the crying child who dropped it. Later on, you’d see a crow with his head leaning to one side, sucking up the white puddle on the pavement with his black beak and flying off with the rest of the cone.
From time to time you heard people say that Teddy’s ice cream had changed over the years and that it didn’t taste the same any more. They must have changed the recipe or watered it down, they said, which is hard to believe because the queue for Teddy’s has never let up in all these years. You could be absolutely sure that the ice cream is every bit as good as before, only that it does not compete with your memory. The taste of the ice cream is never as good as it was in childhood.
‘For a Teddy’s ice cream,’ he had written each time in the letters he sent home. He had included a bit of money for the children. He thought Ellis would have remembered all those accumulated cones when he met her, but then he discovered that the letters were never opened. By the time Ellis got the money she was too old for ice cream and spent it all in one go on drugs.
We heard the lifeboat being called out. Two shots of a cannon in succession, the signal everyone around here associated with trouble out on the sea. Johnny stood up and looked through a pair of binoculars, but there was not much to see and perhaps it was a false alarm, which frequently happened.
I asked him about his house in Furbo. He told me he would love Ellis to have it, but not all the brothers in Canada and the USA were in agreement on whether to sell it or not.
He said it was a great place to be in the summer and if Ellis lived down there she might be very happy, speaking Irish and getting to know the people.
‘Do you know something,’ he said. ‘On the beach at Furbo you would see a lot of sand-hoppers jumping in the summer. Small insects, maybe a bit like fleas, jumping up and down at your feet for no reason at all.’
‘Why do sand-hoppers hop?’ I asked him.
‘Big question.’
Hand in the Fire Page 20
