Dublin Palms

by Hugo Hamilton

  Martina and Helen had gone to the same boarding school, they regularly escaped out the window and changed their clothes in a telephone box and went drinking in the city together, sitting with their legs crossed. Both had revolution and misconduct in their bones, different ways of applying it in life.

  I overheard Helen talking about Canada, telling Martina and others in a group by the fireplace how couples drove along the gravel roads of Ontario with a crate of beer in the back seat and all the wheels off the ground. A couple were recently found dead in each other’s arms, a single car collision, they had driven into a tall beech tree on the way out to the peach orchards. I heard Martina saying it was easier to get airborne in a parked car on Ventry beach.

  At one point, the couple on the floor got up and Helen caught them going into the bedroom where the children were asleep. My mouth was numb. I heard Helen shouting, flinging their shoes out into the street after them, the dog next door was barking continuously.

  I got talking to a journalist.

  He asked me if I played chess.

  Long ago, I said. My father taught me.

  My wooden mouth began telling the journalist that my father could not bear to be beaten. He turned the chessboard upside down in anger one day when he realised I was winning. The same thing happened to a chess champion in a Russian novel, his father flipped the board up in a rage, mirror families in Ireland and Russia.

  You must be good, the journalist said.

  Not at all, I said.

  He invited me to come around one evening for a game. His house was on the same street, a redbrick terrace beyond the furniture auctions.

  He kept staring at Helen.

  She was wearing a powder blue, crêpe-de-Chine skirt she had got in London while she studied drama. The fabric was thin as a glove, slightly burred to the touch, it gave her just enough freedom of movement.

  Helen found herself agreeing to a bet. She stood with her spine straight, she had her mother’s shrug – what do you take me for?

  Martina clapped her hands – I dare you.

  To demonstrate how unchanged and fit her body was with all the yoga, Helen took up the challenge of getting into the baby high chair. The high chair no longer had any function other than to act as a drinks counter, the children had grown out of it, it was not accepted back into the cycle of furniture auctions next door and there was nobody with a baby to pass it on to. Martina said it was not humanly possible for a mother to fit into a high chair that two of her children passed through and that still had dark remnants of their mashed potato stuck in the grooves.

  Look, Martina said – black as a bog.

  Helen lifted her powder-blue skirt above her knees a fraction and began to climb up on the table. From there, one foot after the other, she stepped into the high chair, rocking like a canoe, held by the hand for support on each side.

  The journalist was getting ready to catch her.

  Martina said – go on, girl.

  One of the other women said it was unwise, the man in tennis shoes said nobody in California would try it, I didn’t say a thing, I watched and admired her.

  It took Helen a while to slip each leg into place, it was a puzzle of bones and knees. There was a vertical bar at the centre intended to prevent the child from slipping out, one leg on either side. It’s like fitting into a wooden corset, Helen said – they’ll have to cut me free. Followed by some jokes going around the room about corsets and Helen mentioning the fact that she once had a job in the corsetry department at Harrods in London, where it was not only women who bought them.

  Slowly, she managed to sink down into position. Her black velvet shoes were still on. She had one leg on each side of the dividing safety bar. Everybody was applauding. The crêpe-de-Chine skirt was halfway up her thighs, a brief view of white. In one hand, she held a beaker of wine, in the other she had a handmade wooden rattle. The rattle was constructed as two halves of a hollow egg with a kernel inside. A wooden shell clacking freely up and down a stick with rounded stoppers at each end that babies had been putting into their mouths for years, it came from Germany, pre-war, before Hitler.

  On Sunday night, while I sit at the foldable desk in the empty front room, I hear Helen in the hallway on the phone. She is telling her mother in Canada that we met some very nice new people, a journalist and his wife, John and Audrey – he edits the education supplement, sometimes the health supplement, she is from England, a schoolteacher now a full-time mother, thinking of changing her career. They are both extremely interesting, Helen says, nothing they don’t already know. They live in a terraced house to themselves, one daughter, a dog, lots of paintings and ornaments. She says I go there to play chess with John, he usually wins, though not always. Audrey calls around during the day, you can have a nice chat with her about growing up in England.

  There is no other news.

  The shopkeeper tried to short-change her again but she’s up to him. The yoga classes are going well, but the front room is too small for that many people, nobody knows where to put their legs any more. Helen is thinking about hiring a separate venue. Her picture was in one of the Sunday papers, she has posted it over to Canada rolled up in a baton.

  Our car windows got smashed one night, right outside on the street while we were asleep, we heard nothing.

  I hear her saying that my mother is ill, she has been diagnosed with cancer. Both of my mother’s older sisters – Marianne in Salzburg and Elfriede in Russelsheim – have already died from cancer. My mother says it’s her turn now, everybody in a row. There was talk of surgery, but she doesn’t want any of that, my sister Greta is looking after her.

  And the children?

  New words. Essie was heard saying – I hate consequences. Rosie keeps using the word – sundown, we have got to get home before sundown. They drew human faces on the potatoes, we couldn’t peel them.

  Listening to Helen speaking on the phone to Canada comes close to writing a novel. It has that first-hand honesty I want, nothing invented, just the latest news. If I can write the way she speaks, I will be happy, all I need is to faithfully put down every word. Now and then, I have the urge to hand her a note with a missing detail, such as the zoo, don’t forget the zoo. Tell your mother about the lion we saw asleep, he opened one eye, then he opened both eyes, then he raised his head a tiny bit, then he went back to sleep. Later we heard him roar behind us and we ran away, Helen told me to stop scaring them. And the conversation we had on the way home in the car about the most dangerous animal in the world – hyenas or leopards?

  Or humans?

  The latest news from Canada. They have begun building the new public swimming pool in the town and found some human remains. The town council discussed removing the remains to another location but there were so many it was eventually decided to leave them in their original resting place and cover them over with the new pool. The whole town is built on bones. Helen’s family home is situated on ancient burial grounds, to catch the spidery lightning storms over the lake.

  Helen repeats enough of what her mother says, I can work it out and imagine the rest.

  Her mother was invited to dinner by the judge across the street, his house is enormous, ten rooms and a tiny picture window in a Rapunzel tower under the roof, a crescent-shaped driveway with an oval lawn in front. The spare ribs were a bit awkward. There was a bowl of water on the table for people to dip their fingers into, it had a greasy surface sheen. The judge was interested in everything to do with Ireland, he wanted to know about horse racing and river fishing, and a castle where he once stayed in Connemara.

  I place them in a dining room interconnected with the sitting room. The judge at the top of the table with Nessa on one side and Helen’s mother on the other, two best friends, his favourite people. The entire gathering eating spare ribs and the dog sniffing underneath, a cool nose like a wet finger pointing. The judge throwing something acr
oss the room behind him like a bad thought, some judgment in the past that sat badly on his conscience. The dog scampering with the sound of beads across the wide maple floorboards and sliding to a stop below the window overlooking the lake, the bone held upright between his paws, chewing sideways. Helen’s mother not eating very much, just a bit of dignified coleslaw she could manage with a fork, persuaded at the end of the evening to sing a song – The Kerry Dancing.

  I have a longing to live in Canada.

  Brought on by what is happening in the north of Ireland. The news is full of new words being invented to express outrage and incomprehension. The tattered black flags are still hanging around the country. Shrines with photographs of dead hunger strikers. The inflammation is spreading. The hot breath of freedom. Songs about rivers running free, people singing in fighter voices, strumming the guitar like a weapon. And the drumming.

  I want to take my family away to a landscape where you can begin again without memory. Only the memory of the people who were there before us. Cities where everything I grew up with will be out of range, where I can forget where I come from. No borders inside my head.

  My mother sat up waiting for me. She put down the book she was reading and looked up when I asked her if it was possible that as a child I had seen houses on fire.

  Houses on fire? By night? While we were crossing the street. I must have been around six years old. I have a perfect memory of flames coming out the windows and the sky glowing orange, smoke like a big grey coat with long arms coming down the street. I remember holding my mother’s hand, my brother Gerd on the other side with a rucksack on his back, my father ahead of us with my sister Gabriela, limping as he carried the suitcase, he stopped to switch hands. We were coming from the train station, I saw it with my own eyes, a terrace of houses in flames, five or six storeys high. The smell of burning interiors, horsehair sofas, wooden toys, paintwork bubbling. There was a hum coming from the fire engines, the ladders extended, a crowd of people watching, some in their nightclothes with blankets around their shoulders. My mother was pulling my hand and telling me not to look, maybe that’s why I remember it so well.

  Was it possible I never saw this fire?

  Had I received the memory from her? Had she passed on the duty of remembering to me? Her fear of flames. Her inability to feel settled. Her readiness to leave at any moment. Her language of alarm, her looking back, her mistrust of glass.

  Going up the stairs, I linked her arm. There was no hurry. She rested on the first-floor landing to catch her breath. On the second landing, she stopped again.

  She began to tell me about the time she was bleeding, during the war, when she was haemorrhaging and was taken to hospital, then she stopped as though it was too difficult to talk about.

  What is it?

  Another time, she said.

  Greta came up to help her into bed.

  They talked about the butcher, Mister Dunne, he was in hospital. My mother had suggested getting a card to wish him a speedy recovery, Greta said it didn’t look good, he had cancer. There was a handwritten sign in the window of the butcher shop, apologising for the inconvenience, due to illness the premises would remain closed until further notice. The wooden block was washed off, the knives were stored in neat rows and the knife holder worn by the butcher like a holster at the side of his blue apron was put away behind the counter. The S-shaped hooks were hanging along the steel bars, only three or four bits of plastic parsley and two plastic red tomatoes remained in the display cabinet, a blue light was left on.

  Greta showed me the card with all the signatures she had gathered. She had gone around to the fish shop, the barber, the pub on the corner, the flower shop, they all wrote greetings calling him Napper. We never knew that was his name. To us he had always been the butcher, Mister Dunne. We didn’t think it was right to start calling him Napper after all this time, that would be like pretending we knew him better than we did, more as friends than as customers. We didn’t know how he got the nickname, did he like being called Napper?

  Would he feel insulted if we called him Napper?

  Nor did we know until then, only because Greta had a conversation with him while he was signing the card with flour on his hands, that the baker’s name was Jim and that he played golf, his wife Marie who served behind the counter couldn’t bear going to Spain, she didn’t play golf, she said it was like Spain without golf beside the ovens all day. The baker said Napper was a great butcher, one of the best.

  Nor did we know, that the barber who cut my father’s hair until he found a barber in the city who could speak the native language, the same barber who cut my hair and my brother’s hair and once said we looked like two plucked chickens, was a night fisher. He told Greta that when he finished for the day he would drive down the coast to one of the long beaches in Wexford where nobody went and sit on a fold-out chair with the waves at his feet and a light at the top of the rod. Sometimes he cooked the fish, plaice or black sole, there and then, with a beer, a couple of them went down together, he told her, they called themselves the night herons.

  Nor did we know, that when the man in the fish shop started his business, my mother saw him selling fish from a pram on the street when she first arrived, he was told by the priest to go in and out of the church through the penny door at the side, the main door was for rich people. Look at him now, my mother said, they must be begging him to come in the front door, one of his sons is a psychiatrist in London, another son has taken over the business, wearing a boater and a white apron.

  What else did we not know?

  We were latecomers to our surroundings.

  The information Greta gathered on her card-signing tour of the shops was known to everyone ahead of us. We had been so caught up with houses on fire and the Berlin Wall and Nazi trials and cities left in ruins. Even the bakery in the Rhineland town where my mother came from was destroyed by a surplus bomb dropped on the way back from a night raid on Cologne. These things were irrelevant where we lived, nobody knew any of the people killed lining up for bread.

  I stood in the hallway and heard them talking upstairs. A game they played every night. My mother sat down on the bed and Greta pushed her over so that she fell backwards and began laughing like a young girl. Her quiet, inward laugh. She got herself up and Greta pushed her back down a second time until they were both laughing. Then Greta pushed her down one more time and she went to sleep.

  Helen was asleep by the time I got back, a bare knee left outside the covers. I took out the sick bowl and began making oatmeal cookies for the following week. The recipe was taken from a Mennonite cookbook that came from Canada, some of the pages were stuck together with ancient pastry. Enough to last until Wednesday. Laid out on racks to cool, ready to be placed into tins in the morning. The smell of night baking brought a warm shock of happiness, it drifted up the hallway into the bedroom, into the empty front room, past the public telephone by the door, all the way upstairs.

  The windows of the recording studios are boarded up. You ring the bell, it takes a while before somebody answers. The narrow hallway has a series of framed photographs of legendary singers, many of them signed with thick markers, a country star from the Midlands with a white smile. You go in through a heavy door insulating the studio from all external sound of traffic. Another double glass door into the recording booth.

  The silence is pure. More than silence. A place demanding to be filled with sound. The dull black padding along the walls is like the inside of a coffin. A cough stops dead around you. A spoken word dies in your mouth. Every tiny noise is sucked away, all that remains is clear ambient sound. The engineer breaks in over the speakers like a voice from another galaxy, it’s hard to see his face behind the dark glass screen.

  The place is dusty, splashes of coffee on the carpet. Empty cartons of juice stuffed behind a radiator. The remains of an Indian takeaway left on top of a speaker unit, things that have no bearing
on the sound. The recording engineer is dressed for the beach in shorts and sandals, his shirt open to the waist, he speaks to me as though I have come to record a rock band – groovy.

  I am there with a native singer from Cork who has put music to a poem in the shadow language about two swans on a winter lake. The backing track is made up of remote guitar strumming and traditional uilleann pipes. Drones and chanters recreating a humming in the reeds around the lake. There is love between the swans, their white necks reaching, lightly touching down on the frozen water.

  The singer has a moustache. To me, he looks Turkish, like the shadow men I worked with in Berlin, it gives him a broad smile. He can switch easily between singing in Irish and singing the blues. While the song is being recorded, he wears the headphones half on his head, one over his right ear, the other on his forehead.

  After the recording session, I briefly slipped into the German library. Going home I fell asleep on the train and woke up at each station as though I was being assaulted, the flounder book leaped out of my hands.

  Audrey was there when I got home.

  She had time to hang around, allowing slow afternoons to slip into early evenings with a gin and tonic. She had joined several yoga courses, beginners and advanced. I was used to women in leggings coming through the house, slipping through the kitchen to the bathroom at the back. The outlines of Audrey’s salmon-pink leggings were more intimidating in a confined space. She kept looking to see if I was looking.

  Her husband John came to join us after work. Four of us having a bottle of wine. Audrey sat in a cross-legged position on the floor, with her back to the bookcase. John sat in the armchair with his legs stretched out, wearing a tweed jacket. Helen spoke about expanding her yoga courses, she was intending to get a brochure printed and John offered to take the promotional photos, no charge. He was a good photographer, he had shown me his darkroom, mostly it was Audrey in a swimsuit with their daughter Lucinda, on a beach in the west.