Dublin Palms

by Hugo Hamilton

  On the phone to her mother, Helen described the house we bought as though it was in Canada. It was on a corner site, it had a big front garden, not on the bus route. One of the bedrooms at the back looked out over the sea. Rosie and Essie would be able to see the lighthouse when they went to sleep.

  It was built on a slope, the house was back to front, the hall door was blistered by the sun, the back door was dark. It needed to be rewired, the fireplaces in the bedrooms would have to be blocked off, it had no heating, no curtains, no light fittings. The roof had no insulation. We sat in the car in the evenings looking at our future. We walked down the slope to the front door, we stared in the window at the empty living room, a faded estate-agent brochure, some dead flies on the windowsill.

  In great bouts of exaggeration, I set out to put Helen’s business on a sound footing. I looked for decent premises to accommodate the yoga courses. The small front room in a downstairs flat was no longer adequate for the size of her classes. She was getting a lot of new clients. Brought on by the contract she had with the radio station, a slot every morning, teaching listeners how to relax and do shoulder rolls while they were sitting in traffic.

  I looked at lots of commercial premises and eventually came across a studio space in a terraced house. It seemed perfect. It had a side entrance, changing areas, bathroom, cloakroom, a big room with a concrete floor. There was plenty of parking. I spoke to the owner. His name was Bardon. He lived upstairs, he had corrugated white hair, he wanted guarantees, he didn’t trust me until I told him where I went to school. I let him know that I had a secure job in the native basement. We would be great tenants, I promised, absolutely no parties, it was not residential, to be used for yoga only, quiet people breathing in and out, I said. I told him I came from the area, I gave him the address where I grew up, I had just bought a house close to my mother.

  He wouldn’t go down on the rent. He wanted me to sign a three-year lease, he used the word copper-bottomed.

  He promised to put in a carpet.

  The place worked out fine for the time being. Helen would have preferred a wooden floor, even with the carpet, the clients needed to put down towels because the concrete floor felt cold. There was plenty of space. They could stretch out and do the folding crucifix without touching each other’s hands. The problem was the damp. The heating made things worse. The place smelled of mildew, you got it coming in the door. Helen had to spray the corridor and the main room before the clients arrived, the heavy air of perfume and human breath. There was condensation on the walls. The carpet had the thickness of corduroy trousers, rubber backed, it began sweating underneath. At one point, Helen called me to say there was something growing in the corner. I went down to find a section of the carpet covered in mushrooms. I got the hoover out and mowed it like a lawn.

  I complained to Bardon upstairs, he came down and told me to open a window, we had the place overheated.

  It was never going to work. Already, we began talking about somewhere more suitable, a brighter, more inviting kind of place in a better location.

  I took more and more time off from the dead basement, not getting much written. Searching for better premises, with a secure lease. Helen was talking to potential investors. It all looked promising. I avoided those meetings. I showed too much enthusiasm. My words were warped with idealism. Ecstatic ways of describing the business potential – immense, out of this world, it’s going to be an edifice.

  Our view of the world was full of reckless belief. I trusted Helen, she trusted me, I believed her, she believed me, we talked each other blind with optimism. I was doing it to set her free. She was doing it so I could speak.

  I had no idea how to measure the future. My ambitions were born incoherent. I had grown up inside a preposterous family venture. My childhood, our German-Irish home in a seaside place in Dublin was a giant exaggeration, full of overreaching and unreasonable calculations. My mother and father backed each other up with misguided courage that never matched the country we walked in. Their expectations were fantastic, like building plans that got swapped for faraway places.

  I ignored the episodes of doubt breaking out in my teeth. I shaved off my beard. I felt the cool breeze around my chin as I walked around the city at night.

  One day, I persuaded myself to go back to the dentist. He was nearly in tears when I asked him to take out the dead tooth. He flicked his head towards the chair. He began to examine my teeth once more. He spent some time admiring his own work, the crown he had put in, it was like asking him to remove a priceless piece of art. He smiled, holding his little stainless-steel mirror in the air as he explained to me once again that it was no longer part of my living body. Blaming a dead tooth was like blaming a piece of furniture. It was as dead as a dead tree, how can a piece of oak feel pain? What I was experiencing had to be caused by something else, something missing in my life, perhaps, some grief I could not speak.

  You want it removed, he said.

  Please.

  He said nothing more. He gave me an injection and went about the extraction with sad resignation. Like he was removing a language from my mouth that he loved, we both loved. He handed me the extinct tooth with some blood attached, said I should bleach it if I was going to keep it as a souvenir. His eyes were full of restraint, once again he would accept no payment, for what, for something gone, something missing? I carried the tooth in my back pocket. I practised smiling sideways to cover the gap. I experienced phantom pain from time to time. Pain where the pain used to be.

  By the time I get the keys to the house it’s summer. Helen is in Canada visiting her family with the girls, her mother booked the tickets. I drive back from the solicitor’s office with my elbow out the window, wearing my billowing white shirt.

  This is my turn. My sweeping overstatement, my great family extravagance. I carry fantasies of arrival. Fantasies of home and never moving again. Getting to know everybody on the street, trading bits of gossip, watching cookery programmes on TV, inviting people for dinner, staying up late and singing my heart out in my own house.

  I park the car down the sloped driveway. I get out and turn the key in the lock. Closing the door behind me, I listen to the silence inside the house. I am happy to stand in each room and allow the walls to get to know me, gently letting the wooden floors get used to the weight of my presence. I hear the creaks. I feel the handshake of doorknobs. I open the windows. The dusty stillness of the rooms begins to move with the noise of traffic entering from the street. A draught comes in to flip the estate-agent brochure off the windowsill, bringing the house to life. I hear my feet on the stairs. I stand in the children’s bedroom watching the sea, the lighthouse will be coming on for them at night, ships will cross right by their beds.

  Filling rooms is like writing a book. I get bits of furniture from the auctions, things given to us by my mother, I hang the glass art angel from Cologne up by the door. I find second-hand curtains for the bedrooms, a bargain mat for the hall, a wicker chair for the bathroom.

  The carved bass mouth is there on the mantelpiece. A voice going right through the house, speaking encouragement. Beside it, the carved ear listening to me working.

  I have put in the heating, I’ve connected the phone, I rewired the house, somebody helped me with the fuse board.

  My lungs are full of dust. My eyes are red, I eat a sandwich that tastes of varnish, I drink mugs of tea with the scum of sawdust. I get to know the faces at the hardware suppliers. I love building materials more than words. My hands buzz with the grip of drilling. My hair, my face, my arms are caked to the elbows in bits of cement, sealant, emulsion, my mind is under the floorboards. I can’t help laughing at one point because I find myself using the sick bowl to mix a bit of plaster.

  3

  It was the morning of their school concert. Helen got them dressed. Their grey chequered uniforms and blue cardigans were too big, intended to last an extra year or two. There w
as trouble because Rosie wanted her hair not to be done in plaits the same as Essie’s, some screaming in the kitchen. Essie ran away into the dining room and took it out on the piano. Two of the most vital keys were out of tune, bruised notes undermining a piece that was meant to be played with vigour. The piano had been left to us by the aunt with the bunch of keys, when she moved her family into a house too small.

  Helen stood at the door waiting.

  She wore a peppermint dress, her tweed blue coat, a bead necklace from her mother. You rarely saw her using more than a touch of make-up, that morning her face was a shield, you couldn’t go near her. She didn’t talk. She didn’t eat much. She kissed them goodbye, said she would do her best to get to the concert – we’ll go somewhere nice afterwards.

  Good luck, I said to her. It sounded more like farewell. Everything in my words began to contain the accidental opposite of what they were intended to mean. Our eyes avoided each other.

  She was going to a meeting with the investor, he was bringing his lawyer with him. They wanted to see the accounts. She carried a bright red ledger under her arm, a schedule of bookings, takings from the café, bank statements, the outstanding debts, a list of creditors. It was me who kept the books, I should have been there to explain them, but that would not have improved anything. Through the venetian blinds in her office, you could see her laying out the documents across the desk, they sat on either side, ready for the audit.

  The assembly hall was full. The man sitting next to me was from Chile, his accent was soft, he told me his wife was a translator of European trade and legal documents. Everybody was talking, mothers and fathers, grandparents, all reaching like periscopes over each other’s shoulders to admire their own. Rosie and Essie were standing in line by the stage. Essie saw me waving. Rosie was saying something to the boy next to her, he laughed and elbowed her, she punched him back. The man from Chile had a camera with a zoom lens, his daughter was in same class as Rosie, he took some shots of them together, said he would send them to me.

  The high wooden ceiling had heavy exposed beams, there were three tall stained-glass windows facing the street and plaques along the walls in memory of sailors, this is where they met and prayed with their families after they returned from their journeys. A balloon had become trapped beyond the wooden beams, some cobwebs that could not be reached either, the floor was white marble with black dots. One of the teachers clapped her hands, she had curly hair, a round motherly face, the noise died down. The junior infants were first to come on, all waving, in their faces you could recognise their mothers, in some of them you could see exactly what they would look like when they were eighty.

  They sang a song about happiness. One of the girls sang louder than all the others, one of the boys kept pulling at his blue tie, another boy stood with his hands over his eyes and had to be reunited with his mother, a girl in a dream suddenly joined back in with the chorus – happiness. The applause lasted a long time, mothers smiling at each other, shaking their heads, one of them said the word – hysterical. After the group filed off again, one boy was left on the stage as if he was lost on the street, he had to be led away by the hand.

  When Rosie and Essie came on, they didn’t see me, they were looking for their mother. A man sat down at the piano, his girlfriend was the teacher conducting the group, they sang – here comes the sun. I had heard the song in the house for weeks, but I was euphoric hearing their voices in a choir together singing about the long winter coming to an end and the sun arriving at last, something overwhelming about children telling adults everything is going to be all right.

  I was worried about Helen. Under questioning in her office, trying to explain a set of financial records she didn’t have much control over.

  The concert finished off with happy birthday. It included an extended list of names, all the children with birthdays falling in that month. They served tea and sandwiches and cakes afterwards. Paper plates got mixed up, left behind on tables with nobody claiming them. I had some tea. I continued talking to the man from Chile, he said he missed the weather. He invited me around to visit him, he sat on his front porch every evening with a beer, even in the middle of winter, looking at the cars going by, waiting for the sun to go down.

  We called the investor only by his full name – Maurice Delaney. He liked to crack a joke when he arrived, placing people at ease, some comment about himself not being fit, sometimes it was the joke about the man with a stammer taking the piss out of the man without a stammer. So much depended on him, we laughed, we wanted him to be happy. He used aviation language, gave the impression of a pilot in control, busy but relaxed, patient to a point, he had the habit of looking at his watch while you were talking. He clapped his hands to let you know when a meeting was over. He never made notes, preferred to keep everything in his head. His smile was not thrown around aimlessly. His eyebrows were shaped in arches, something boyish, affectionate, a deep voice, like somebody on the radio, the way he said the words – up and running.

  We were never invited to his house, he never came to ours. No obligation for us to be socially compatible, he didn’t want friendship to unbalance business arrangements. I never found out what music he liked. Once I heard him driving off with the car windows down – the power of love – I would have switched that off. He wore a yellow shirt, but that was fine, no need for us to be identical.

  We didn’t know much about him, only that he was a good businessman. He had business interests in France as well as Ireland. He had grown up in Singapore, to Irish parents, his father was an architect. He came back and went to school in Ireland, he graduated in business studies in Austin and lived for a while in Texas. That’s all we were told. His private life never came up, it had nothing to do with me.

  Early on, after the business was set up, he pulled me aside one day to let me know how much he valued my honesty, he used the word partnership. Holding me briefly by the elbow in the car park at the side of the café, he said he admired me for staying at home to take care of the family, not abandoning Helen to run the whole show by herself like a lot of other men might do. It was the flight plan for any good business, he said. His male-to-male tone made me feel approved.

  You’re a good man, he said.

  Perhaps he was trying to figure out why I agreed to be a good man, what was in it for me, or was it a warning, reminding me to remain a good man?

  In the office that morning, the investor became agitated. He had no time for his own jokes. He ignored the plate of pastries Helen served on her desk. Out of politeness, the lawyer took a cream doughnut, he was an older man, there was a softness in his eyes, from Kilkenny. White icing sugar on his suit, some cream on his face, Helen handed him a box of tissues.

  The information was laid out on her desk, bank statements, invoices paid, invoices unpaid, the ledger was full of numbers, like scattered tea leaves she had no idea how to interpret. I had spent a week going over them, hoping they would look better. My experience of bookkeeping came from my previous job in the native basement, where music and language had no price, the total mattered only in relation to what was lost.

  Our projections were unrealistic. Even if the café was packed all day and the classes upstairs were going right through the night, the figures would never have added up. The business held no profit. Helen had given a personal guarantee on the rent for ninety-nine years, she had borrowed to meet her portion of share capital. We were tied up in debt. Any advice I gave her was not based on sound commercial principles, but on the memory of a café we used to go to in Berlin.

  Maurice Delaney took no part in the running of things, his development company carried out the necessary alterations on the premises. Capital acquisitions were installed on credit – the most up-to-date Italian coffee machine, the furniture, the lighting, the sound system, the showers, the sauna, lounging chairs in the changing rooms, mirrors like in a theatre dressing room surrounded by lights. There was a wonderful neon
sign over the door which took me ages to get designed – The Fitness Café. All in all, the place turned out well, people said it was classy.

  Every figure was being questioned, each entry in the bank statements cross-checked with the takings. It was as if they were scrutinising not only the trading results but the validity of our lives, our family, everything we stood for, what kind of people we were. The figures would reveal more about our attitude to the world than they did about the short history of the business. After some quick mental calculations, the investor said the books were a disgrace. Were we giving the money away, he asked. Feeding the people of Dublin cake for free, yoga for nothing, the accounts were littered with contradictions.

  Christ, he said, you haven’t even paid the architect.

  Helen said she had offered instalments.

  He lost his temper. How hard was it to keep proper financial records? Any girl in national school would do better.

  It’s as simple as cleaning the toilet, he shouted.

  Helen tried to explain.

  This is not just incompetent, it’s fraudulent.

  Maurice, please, the lawyer said.

  He put his hand on the investor’s arm, maybe to remind him of his luck, his portfolio of properties, how easy it was for him to give Helen a break, not to turn her out like a criminal.

  Her mind went blank.

  She was expecting another baby. She was beginning to show, her breasts were enlarged, she walked more slowly, she was on the phone to her mother a lot. It seemed like an act of disloyalty, betraying the ground rules of business. This reckless family pact myself and Helen made one day with the afternoon sun central across the floor of the front room. Turning our backs on the calculated world. In the middle of a recession, quitting my secure job at the native basement to write a book while she was running the business and having another baby. We were avoiding the truth, as if the book and the baby were timed to come into being at the same moment, to save us.