Dublin Palms

by Hugo Hamilton

  The good news was too good to believe. There was talk of a cease fire in the North.

  It was hard to stay in the house that night. A relief to be on the street. I walked past the cluster of shops, through the place that looked to me like Canada, where people sat in their living rooms without embarrassment. I went through the school, up across the golf course, the mountains were black against the clear sky. All I could think of was to keep moving. I went up the hill by the spire called the Witch’s Hat, it was a folly from the famine time. I walked back around by the view that kept my mother in Ireland. I heard the first morning train below me. On one side of the bay there was a sheet of white light laid out on the water, on the other side there was a blur of rain, the distance before me seemed enormous and tiny at the same time, a limitless world inside a box.

  I walked back along the route of secret lanes, an alley between two houses no more than a metre wide, by the small harbour. I came to the bathing place and stood for a while watching the waves. On a crop of rock where people dive in the summer, their bodies bending in a majestic fold before they straighten out and enter the water. I looked down into the surging tide and understood the concept of vertigo. In a book by a Czech author, I had read that the scary part is not the fear of heights or the view of death below, but the decision for life being left entirely up to you. Can you trust yourself?

  How welcoming the sea is to a person in doubt.

  What interested me was not so much the waves lashing in across the rocks but the water being withdrawn again. The sheet of white wash jumping up was impressive, far more dramatic every time was the furious sucking back out, each wave receding more urgently than the force that flung it inwards. It was this requisition, this payback, the demand for the return of what was so freely borrowed that I found compelling. No matter how far the foam spread in a white apron across the stone benches all the way into the changing kiosks, where people folded away their clothes, hiding watches in shoes, money in underpants, the volume of water being repaid appeared to be far greater than the amount given. I got so involved in watching this process of offering and retracting that I saw nothing but the emptying. It seemed to me that while everyone was still asleep, the earth was steadily being depleted, everything was running out, the ground I stood on was bankrupt.

  The sun was up by the time I got back. They were having breakfast. I kept them out of school. I packed a small suitcase, got them into the car, told them we were going on holidays. I helped Helen into the passenger seat, she didn’t want to be told any plan. I had some money that my mother gave me. I drove without knowing where I was going, nowhere far enough. Rosie said we were driving to Brazil. Essie said we were going to France first. I said we were going to Australia.

  Helen smiled.

  Her hands were resting on her belly, we brought only the most essential belongings. The thought that we were living on an island, that we would inevitably reach the west coast and would have to turn back at some point did not occur to me, it only mattered to be moving. We stopped for sandwiches, we gave an apple to a horse, we spotted a wild beehive in the wall. I was surprised the car kept going, it was overheating. I pulled into a garage to put water in the radiator, the fuel gauge was faulty, always full.

  I wanted Helen to see the house where I once stayed in Connemara, the singer I had gone to visit, the man who refused to touch money. I thought his way of life would restore ours. His language would soothe my mouth, his singing would bring us back to life.

  It took a while finding the place, the last house at the end of the road, facing out to sea. The landscape was left intact, just as I remembered, full of rocks and seaweed laid out. By the time we got there, it was late afternoon, the sun was going down. The fuchsia hedges were overgrown along the path, not yet in bloom, the house had been abandoned, the blue door left open. We walked inside and saw a few bits of furniture, the fireplace, a picture of the pope and the president. I showed them the room where I stayed, the bed was still there, covered in fallen plaster, the ribs showing in the ceiling.

  We were like a family coming back after years to find our stuff scattered around. Some empty beer cans on the stone floor, things had been written on the walls. In a small window looking out over the ocean, Helen leaned with her belly against the whitewashed wall. There was nothing out there only blue distance. In the kitchen, there was a dresser with some cups hanging on hooks, a butter knife with the yellow handle partially broken off, a plate made of brown glass, some electricity bills. I picked up one of the bills and showed it to Helen, the name written in the shadow language – O’Flaithearta – final reminder. We smiled at the idea of walking away, who knows where he was gone, he owed nothing to a place abandoned, only his silence left behind.

  She put the back of her hand up to touch the side of my face. She kissed me for all the people gone away. I didn’t know what she was saying with her eyes, was she thinking we should also be leaving? She made a joke out of it. She threw her arms out and spun around the stone floor in a circle – at least we’ll have somewhere to go.

  I told the children this was where we were staying for the night. She told me not to scare them, don’t worry, she said, we’re going to a hotel, with a bubble bath. We tried a couple of places in Galway, they were all booked out, we looked like a family arriving out of nowhere, with no prior arrangements made. We went to the Atlantic Hotel. I had stayed there before for work, I spoke in the shadow language to the man at the reception desk, my mouth was fine.

  We were at the back of the building, overlooking the car park. The light was entering like moisture into the room. There were three beds, the covers were brown, like curtain material, the sheets felt as though they had just been taken in off the line, not completely dry yet. Rosie slept outstretched, one arm across Essie’s face, I moved it twice, but it sprang back into position each time, Essie slept unbothered in a curl.

  There was a racoon in the extra bed, eyes open.

  We stayed awake.

  Helen asked me to sing a song. I said it might wake the children, the racoon, what about the other guests, next door, the hotel was silent. There was no quiet kind of singing, no way you could whisper a song, only belt it out. She said there was nobody listening but her, and the baby, she placed my hand on her belly, her head on my chest.

  I sang in the ghost language.

  A song about being asleep and not wishing to be woken up. She asked me the meaning of the words and I translated them for her. The sound coming up through my chest was like the engine of a boat, she said, it made her feel she was heading off to the islands.

  We heard a door closing. Somebody letting us know the morning was still far off.

  She was whispering. There was a brightness in her voice as she spoke about Canada. I had a map in my head of the town by the lake where her family lived. She told me how the Great Lakes were formed, they all learn this at school in Canada, she said, my sisters will tell you how the shifting ice left the lakes behind like negative mountains. The grain elevators look like some geological feature pushed up out of the earth at the same time, their reflection goes deep into the lake.

  She described her sisters – Molly, Maggie and the youngest Kate. They had such a great laugh together whenever they met. It was hard to get a word in, she said. She went silent. For a moment I thought she had fallen asleep.

  If we were going, she said.

  Where?

  She sat up as though she was talking to the far side of the room, the racoon.

  I’m not saying – let’s go, she said. I’m only saying, if we were thinking of going, if things get out of hand and we need to leave, that’s all I’m saying.

  Canada?

  We could put in an application.

  You want to go.

  I don’t want to leave, she said. The children are happy. They have their friends. Your mother, she said, you can’t go, I know that, you have got to stay for her.<
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  I didn’t say anything.

  No harm making an application, she whispered.

  It was not something that required an answer. It was a thing she must have thought of many times before and wanted to say out loud for once in the middle of the night to put it out of her head. She said we might as well get value for money in sleep and lay down again. I had no intention of sleeping, I didn’t want to find myself getting up again, having to resume.

  What put her to sleep kept me awake.

  I imagined walking down to the salt mine, the water sleepy, the reflection of a cargo ship, the sound of steel, out of time. The Canadian flag flying on the wharf. I would become a new person, everything would be newly said, nothing known about me, nobody following, nobody waving, nothing owed. My children would speak to me with a new accent. We would drive to Algonquin, we would pull into a service station, buy ice cream, sunscreen, mosquito repellent. I would get lost in hardware stores. I would disappear in underground shopping malls. I would find myself on the streets of Toronto in the snow, a man invented.

  Would I miss my country – which country?

  I thought of where we were, in a Galway hotel, the streets empty. I thought of the mossy walls, the stone bridges, the force of the river flowing, how many cubic metres of brown water pass by in one roaring night, how long has the lake been emptying itself out into the sea and it never will. I thought of the rain across the islands, the waves slamming into the cliff, the baby inside her was going to rescue us.

  The hardest thing for Helen is telling her mother over the phone that she is closing the Fitness Café. She says she is looking for a buyer to take it over as a going concern, there is a lot of interest. I hear her say she has now become a journalist. The business has become too much, along with running the family and having the baby.

  I have managed to put in a new phone extension beside the bed, so she can sit up with lots of pillows and make her call to Canada before going to sleep.

  I hear her say that writing articles for the Sunday paper takes up most of her time now. She has begun interviewing well-known people about their lives. It’s a great way of getting to know the country, she says, all the different personalities and their habits, some of them are polite, some of them are in a rush to get it over with, anything for a bit of publicity. A theatre manager she interviewed one afternoon refused to turn on the light, they sat in his office as it was getting dark, he told her he had lunch with Beckett five times, over twenty times with Pinter, once with Friel. The Archbishop gave her a slice of apple tart. The head of the Irish Management Institute told her he liked walking around the house in his underpants, she put that into the article and it caused a terrible row, his wife said they were going to sue the paper.

  She tells her mother I published a short story in a Saturday paper. The story describes the palm trees that manage to grow in Ireland because of the Gulf Stream bringing mild winters. Palm trees that are not even real palm trees. False palm trees planted along the coast, unaffected by the salt in the air. Outside hotels, on golf courses, in church grounds, even in graveyards. They have long leatherette leaves that often get tangled around the rotating blades of a lawnmower.

  Of course, the story is not really about palm trees. It’s about a couple with two young children having an argument about where they want to live and where they belong. The story ends up putting us into more debt. There are so many things to pay off, the money I get for the story is spent three times over, once when I receive the acceptance letter from the editor, a second time when the story appears in the paper, once again when the cheque arrives a month later.

  Helen tells her mother she has sent everything by post in a rolled-up baton, along with a note, the news will be ancient history by the time it arrives, she laughs, a drawing one of them made of me on the roof of the house.

  Her mother has no news apart from the usual, the friendship war with Nessa is getting out of hand. Her new friend from Prague had been invited to Nessa’s fiftieth birthday party. Helen’s mother was left off the invitation list. Vera showed her the card with gold lettering. Her best friend from Ireland was trying to steal her new best friend from Prague.

  Nobody was going to get the better of Helen’s mother, not Nessa, not her sister with the bunch of keys back in Ireland, not any of the people her children got married to.

  She is the Irish woman who lives in the house overlooking the salt mine. She walks into the bakery saying what a lovely morning it is to the police officer ahead of her buying a box of doughnut holes. She says she has come to collect Nessa’s fiftieth birthday cake, the girl behind the counter says it was meant to be delivered. Helen’s mother talks around them with her smile. She persuades them to put the cake in a large box. She doesn’t want it to be put in the trunk, she watches them carefully placing it into the back seat of the car, the birthday cake for a party she is not invited to. She drives away, looking around at the cake like an obedient child. She swings around the courthouse square, there is a flaw in the clock shaped design of the town, she takes the wrong exit and finds herself going north towards the cemetery. She drives past the shrine to the salt Madonna, she ends up at the harbour, the salt mine.

  Helen’s mother, inventing roads that don’t exist. She imagines there must be a road leading past the grain elevators back to the beach and the ice cream parlour, she is mistaken, finds herself driving out along the pier instead. The interior of the car is filled with the smell of baking. She feels the pain of being excluded, this friendship war. She cannot find a place to turn around. She pulls the handbrake and steps out of the car. The noise of the salt loading is familiar, but it’s never been so close, the industrial screech, the clang of metal, the salt is getting into her hair. In between the pier and the hull of the salt ship, there is a floating collection of objects that fills her with abhorrence. She doesn’t hear the red truck pulling up behind her, the man with Sifto-Salt written across his chest.

  His soft voice – Lady.

  What is a woman from Ireland doing on the pier, staring with disgust and fascination at the debris floating in the water, and the back door of the car left open?

  He sees the cake on the seat and says – happy birthday.

  She smiles and makes a joke of it – what do you take me for, do you think I’m fifty?

  He gets into her car and turns it around for her, pointing in the right direction. She drives back through the town, out along the rural route, across the railway tracks where she once got stuck in the snow. She comes to the estate where Nessa lives, in along the oval drive up to the porch, no cars parked outside. She pulls up and gets out. She is in no hurry. She opens the back door of the car, reaches in to lift out the cake, steadies herself, closes the door with her bottom. Her blue leather shoes crunch along the gravel. The cake has a nice weight. She places it down carefully on the porch. She takes off one of her gloves, blue to match her shoes, with cloth buttons in a row along the side. She lays the glove down beside the cake. She steps back to admire the inspiration of this delivery. She turns and takes the same number of crunching blue steps back to the car. She puts her seat belt on, drives slowly, no dust behind her.

  My mother sat in a chair by the window with her coat on. She had a light beige scarf tied around her neck and her handbag on her knees, her hands lying flat down on top of the handbag. Every day she sat there waiting. Greta got her up in the morning, she insisted on washing in cold water, Greta gave her breakfast, she didn’t eat very much. She asked for more tea. Greta brushed her hair and got her coat on, tied the scarf loosely, put her handbag in her lap.

  Everybody is waiting for the war to end.

  She has been sent to a small garrison in Bohemia to spend the remaining days of the war. It is situated to the north of Prague around two hours by truck, the garrison is surrounded by Czech resistance fighters. She is the only woman there. The morning has been clear and sunny. An empty oil drum has been brought
out to burn documents. All day the fire in the yard has been blazing, men carrying out files and throwing them on top. Bits of blackened paper flying up like birds gliding across the roof and out into the country, nesting in trees. The smell of charred paper is in all the rooms, you can’t open a window, it’s in her clothes, in the uniforms of the soldiers, in the coffee.

  By evening, the fires are reduced to a glow. It begins raining and the glow disappears. There is a knock on her door. An officer has come to speak to her. He is polite, she cannot let him into her room. He mentions that she is the only woman in the garrison, it will not be good to be there when the Russians arrive, they are no more than an hour away. The distance to the German border is around two hours, even with the roads packed full of traffic heading west it will be hard to stay ahead. At great risk to himself, he gives her a chance to escape. He points to an ambulance parked by the main gate. She says nothing. It has been there since she arrived, never moved once. He tells her the ambulance will be going out on a call, it will instantly merge with the stream of refugees, he gives her a time, no bag, he says no more than that.

  Running from the flag?

  She sits in her room waiting. When the time comes, she gets up and puts her coat on, her hat, her scarf. She leaves everything else behind. She walks out into the corridor, there is no light on, she sees the ambulance parked by the gate, the rain is so heavy it leaves pools in the yard. At the foot of the stairs, she waits for a moment. It’s wrong at that moment to think of her sister, of her family, of home, none of that helps, she is alone. She goes along the side of the buildings, under the wooden awning to stay dry. She gets the sodden smell of burned papers. Coming up to the door of the garrison command, she hears voices inside, the telephone ringing, officers leaning over a desk, the officer in command talking to Berlin, the words – standing fast. She remains unseen passing the window. Her eyes kept on the ambulance. The door springs open behind her, the light runs out onto the square like a bright hand searching. She pulls herself in with her back to another door, her breath stops, her body shrinking to a sheet. The flat shape of a woman in a brown coat, with a heart so loud it can be heard in the ground, up through the shoes.