Every summer my father made us stay at home and study. When we got our summer holidays and everybody else was free, my father gave my brother Franz and me three days off, but then we had to go back to school in our house to study the next year’s course in advance. He wanted us to be brilliant students and drew up a school timetable for us, with maths and history and little breaks in between. While everyone else was out swimming, we had to do our essays and learn things off by heart. He would phone my mother from the office to ask her how we were getting on. He had a copy of the timetable in his briefcase, so he knew what subject we should be working on at any time. My mother became the enforcer, but then she started letting us get away with it. And one time, when Tante Minne was over on a visit, she took us down to Glendalough for the day and my father was waiting at the door when we came back, saying that we had taken time off and we now had to catch up what we had missed, even though it was after nine in the evening. So then there was a big row between Tante Minne and my father. She said that if he was going to insist on us sitting down to do our homework at that time of the night, in the middle of the summer holidays, then she would not stay there, she would leave and get a room in a hotel somewhere.
After that, my mother helped us to escape. Every time my father rang from the office, she said we were studying like good boys, even though we were outside. By the time we went back to school again after the summer, I hated it so much that I refused to do anything. My mother still helped me out and allowed me to get out of school now and again to go to the pictures in secret. I went to see Alfie and The Graduate, and Valley of the Dolls. But then I was caught and a new door-slamming war started.
My father blamed Packer. My mother wanted everything done without violence, so she sat down in the kitchen with all the sticks from the greenhouse one day and broke every one of them into little pieces over her knee with my sister Bríd crying because my mother was hurting herself, undoing all the lashes back through history. I became unpunishable.
‘Do you want to be a nobody?’ my father kept asking.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘That’s exactly what I want to be, a nobody.’
‘So you want to stop learning,’ he said.
I told him I wanted no more information. I wanted to be blank, without knowledge, which is the worst thing you could ever say to my father because he was a schoolteacher once and he struggled to get an education. He kept saying knowledge gives you strength and I kept saying knowledge made you weak and guilty, until he got so furious that he threw a bowl of stewed apple over my head. My mother had made it from cooking apples grown in our garden. I could see four or five black cloves floating under the surface of the green, semi-solid substance, like mines ready to explode. I saw the steam rising because it was still too hot to serve. He was blinking fast behind his glasses and when I told him I want to remain empty-headed, he picked up the bowl of Apfelkompott in the middle of the table and stood up to dump the whole lot on my head. I could feel the warm pudding sliding down around my ears. I sat there with the rest of the family looking at me while the stewed apple slipped in around my neck and I felt like a hero who had won the argument.
My mother stood up and said she should make Apfelkompott more often since we liked it so much. She was angry and the house was full of door slamming. My father then got the idea that I should go to see a psychiatrist, I was in danger of destroying the family. I refused to go and said it was him who needed a psychiatrist, but then he threatened to throw me out of the house. I had a choice, to go for treatment or become homeless. I was afraid that I was no longer in control of my own thoughts and that I was going mad. I thought I would end up mentally disturbed in an asylum with lots of people who had no power over their own minds. Once I was classified as mental, there would be no turning back.
I know my mother was not to blame for this, because she was not able to go against him. She didn’t want me to lose my imagination, so she begged me to make a compromise, which was not like capitulating entirely. She said I only had to go and talk to the man, no harm would come of that. So I went to the psychiatrist and sat there listening to this man with big lips asking me questions about myself. What does he know about being German, I thought. And when he started asking me stupid questions about what I thought of girls, I told him to fuck off. I thought he would write home and my father would find out he was paying a lot of money for somebody to listen to me telling him to fuck off, but luckily it was a confidential conversation and the letter my father got only informed him that the psychiatrist could make no great progress.
Then one day Packer stopped talking to me. I waited for him as usual in the morning on the way to school, but he just walked past me and got on the train. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t even look at me. He closed the door and I had to get on another carriage when the train was already moving. Suddenly, he stopped being my friend. I saw him every day at school with everybody listening to his stories, everything was still the biggest and the best, but I was no longer included. He pretended I didn’t exist any more. If I approached his group or tried to listen to what he was saying, he just walked away as if he couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me.
I even went to the Waverly Billiard Hall to see if he was there one day after school, but he never looked at me once, just concentrated on his game.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him. ‘What did I do?’
Then he dropped his cue and walked out as if he was never going to play snooker in his life again.
I couldn’t prove it, but I knew that my father must have secretly sent a letter to Packer’s mother to say that her son was turning me into a run-along. Packer was afraid of his mother in the same way that I was afraid of my father, so maybe she told him not to have anything to do with me. Everybody in the world is afraid of Packer’s mother. Once she cut through the television cable with a pair of scissors to make him do his homework. So maybe my father and her got together to cut through our friendship cable, because she got Packer to turn his back on me and walk away without ever looking back. She must have sent a letter back to my father saying that I was turning her son into a monster and a mountebank, because sometimes it’s the run-along that gives a leader the courage to do all kinds of terrible things that he would never even dream of getting away with by himself.
After that I had no crowd to belong to. I heard the boys at school repeating some of the amazing things that happened to Packer and what a great life he was having. But I was no longer part of it. I was walking home sideways again, with my back to the wall. I was a nobody and everybody was looking at me as if I was a dead cat. I knew what it was like to be mentally disturbed and have nothing to say. I had no life and no inner dream and no story for myself.
Every time I think about this, I want to kill my father. I tell my mother that I’m not going to be kept in the wardrobe any more, like his own father, the sailor with the soft eyes. I’m going to break out and escape down to the harbour. If he tries to stop me, I will kill him and make him disappear, like his own father. My mother tells me not to repeat the mistakes of history. If you kill your father, you will kill yourself as well. If you hate your father you will hate yourself for ever. Instead of fighting with him openly, my mother encourages me to find my freedom elsewhere, by going to films, reading books, and not through anger.
So now I’ve become sneaky, doing things behind my father’s back. I go up to his bedroom while he’s out at work. I open his wardrobe and look at the big picture of the sailor with the soft eyes inside. He must feel the same way that I felt when Packer was not talking to me, frozen out. I wonder what he did that was so terrible. Nobody deserves to be locked away from the world like this, and I know what it’s like to be in that wardrobe, because I was trapped in there once as a child. I look at the face of the sailor and wonder why he joined the British navy, and how he is now being punished. It’s hard to get that out of my head. He was a fisherman before he joined up. Now I’m a fisherman, and maybe we’re friends and I’ve
taken his place.
I want to rescue him. I cannot take his picture out, so I do something that will make it less lonely for him in there in the dark. I take the John Lennon disc that my father gave back to me. I can’t ever play it anyway, so I hide it in the wardrobe behind the picture of the sailor. Nobody is going to know it’s there, but it’s a great feeling to have a secret, to know that my grandfather has a friend to keep him company. It’s John Hamilton and John Lennon talking to each other and whispering in the dark. It’s John Hamilton joining the Beatles and singing harmonies along with John Lennon in the wardrobe at night, while my father is trying to get to sleep.
They’re singing, Back in the US, Back in the US, Back in the USSR …
Eleven
One day at school, I got my chance to show that I was not invisible. I made up my mind to do the thing that everybody was most afraid of. The instrument of torture. I decided to steal it.
Without Packer on my side, they kept laughing at my brother and me for being half Irish and half German. It was weird, they said, like a big contradiction, because the Irish got the shit kicked out of them by the British and the Germans kicked the shit out of the Jews. We were innocent because we were Irish and we were guilty because we were German. Victim and perpetrator at the same time. They couldn’t deal with this and said they wanted to kick the shit out of us. I was careful, trying to stay out of sight, walking home sideways with nobody behind me, but then they got Franz. It was as if my brother was part of my weakness. They rammed his head up against the railings of the Garden of Remembrance and he came home with blood down the back of his shirt. My father sent a letter to the school the following day to say nobody had the right to do that. We were living in a free country now and people should be allowed to go about their business without being called Nazis and being punished for nothing.
Brother K had always applied the rule of pre-emptive punishment. He punished the innocent and the guilty together, to prevent revenge attacks and faction fighting going on into infinity. But it seemed not to be working, because everybody was copying his methods. So he smiled and reminded us all of the concept of referred pain. One boy gets a lash and everyone else feels it. Sometimes it was the innocent people getting all the punishment and the guilty ones getting off, but referred pain was still a great deterrent, the lesser of two evils.
Brother K rounded up all the boys who had been involved in the incident and said he would make an example of them. In a big speech, he explained that what happened outside the school could not go on and he was going to punish them so hard that everybody in the whole school would feel the pain. He said he never wanted to read a letter like that from my father again. My brother never wanted revenge. He didn’t like to see anyone punished. He just wanted to put it behind him and move on. But Brother K made us watch each lash. It went on for ever. And when the perpetrators had received their punishment, Brother K called Franz forward and explained that it was his duty to punish him as well. To prevent any bitterness and any further victimizing, he was obliged to give him the same amount of lashes as his tormentors got.
Franz cried, maybe not as much with the pain but with the sheer humiliation. Everybody knew this was unfair. The story went around the whole school and I could see everyone laughing as if it was the funniest thing that ever happened. Franz put it behind him, but I could not move on. Even though I was lucky enough not to be punished just for being his brother, I could not forget the injustice of it. It gave me the rage and I wanted to kill Brother K, to stick an axe into the back of his head. At night I stayed awake and imagined how I would kill anyone who laughed at us, bash all their heads against the railings. I was like my father and I could not stop planning ways of winning. I had to balance the scales. The punishment of my brother had to be put right.
I decided to steal the instrument of injustice. Every day I kept an eye on where Brother K kept it, sometimes in his pocket, sometimes in his briefcase. Then the opportunity came quite unexpectedly when I was going down the stairs to the lavatory one afternoon and spotted Brother K’s briefcase outside the principal’s office with the door ajar. There was nobody around. I knew he would be coming out the door any minute. I knew it was a big crime, bigger than anything that happened before in the school. I was finished if I was caught. But then I went ahead without thinking. I didn’t even have to open the briefcase because the instrument of punishment was sticking out. I put it under my jumper and ran away with the heat rising into my head. I made it down to the bicycle shed where I hid it temporarily. When I got back to my class, everybody said I looked pale and sick. Later on, after school, I went back to the bicycle shed and put it into my schoolbag. I didn’t talk to anyone, just brought it with me to find a safer hiding place. The school we go to in the city is situated right beside the Municipal Art Gallery, so I walked right in and started looking at the different paintings. In the end, I decided to place the instrument of torture on top of the gilded frame of a Dutch woman.
The next day, Brother K started a big inquiry. All classes were called off until further notice, until the perpetrator was found, until somebody owned up and took responsibility for the crime. For two days we did nothing except wait in line to be questioned in an empty room. He called each boy in separately, then sat in silence for a long time, staring at him, hoping that he would break. Brother K had a shiny red face and an upper tooth missing, a molar that left a black gap whenever he smiled. But he kept his mouth firmly shut, with a serious grimace, just waiting. He had all the time in the world, he told me. I heard the buses going by outside and the seagulls on the roof of the school. We waited and waited. I knew he had the power on his side and that I had only the weakness of being always guilty and having no friends in the world. But then I knew I also had some of the power on my side, because he had carried out the biggest injustice ever on my own brother. For once it was good to have no friends and to be totally alone in the world, because it makes you a better criminal. I didn’t have to tell anyone what I had done, not even Franz. I was only waiting for the moment when I could tell Packer, so that he would be friends with me again. He would turn the whole thing into a great legend and tell the story like it was a film. He would introduce me to all kinds of new people, saying here is the man who stole the instrument of torture, the thing that was most hated by anyone who ever went to school.
‘I know you did it,’ Brother K said.
I went red in the face immediately, as if he had switched on a light. I was shaking and started getting sick in my stomach with fear. I was ready to collapse and make a confession. But then I wondered how he could be so sure it was me, unless he saw me actually taking it or hiding it in the Municipal Gallery next door. I said nothing. I guessed that he was saying the same to every other boy in the school, waiting for the guilty person to crack. He spoke my name slowly, then repeated his accusation.
‘You did it.’
‘No I didn’t,’ I said.
‘You’re only making it worse for yourself,’ he said.
I was compounding everything, the lie that covers up the initial crime. It would spiral out of control in a vicious circle of lies and deceit. He stared at me for a long time, then smiled. I even smiled back until he suddenly went very serious again.
‘I’m giving you a last chance to think about it,’ he said.
He finally told me to step outside while he called in the next boy. I was certain that he knew everything just by divine inspiration. I became desperate and thought of ways to undo what I had done. I imagined that none of this was happening, that my brother never got attacked outside school in the first place. I started undoing everything in history as well, all the things that happened during the Nazi times. I tried to imagine that there was no such thing as the Irish famine. No war over the Suez Canal, no invasion of Hungary, no Vietnam. I wanted to be able to stop houses burning. Stop ships sailing out, stop trains leaving the station.
I thought of slipping out to the Municipal Gallery and retrieving the instrument
of torture, replacing it quietly while nobody was looking, leaving it to be found by other boys on the floor of the classroom. But it was too late for that. I prepared a confession. After two days, I was ready to crack. Then Brother K made an unexpected announcement. He said he had drawn up a shortlist of five key suspects. He was not giving out the names yet, in order to allow the perpetrator one last chance to come forward voluntarily. There was still time, he said. After lunch, he would name the five suspects and punish the living daylights out of them so that the pain would be felt all over the school and through the streets of Dublin, down O’Connell Street and out into the suburbs. The pain would go nationwide. Four of them might be innocent, but it was important not to allow the real culprit to get away.
During lunch break, I heard the other boys saying to each other that they would absolutely crucify the guy who did it. If he didn’t own up and save the innocent from being punished, he was going to need a wheelchair. I was caught both ways. I was certain that Brother K was bluffing and that he had no idea who did it. He was lashing out indiscriminately. But the alternative might be even worse, if the boys suspected that I was responsible.
When Brother K finally paraded the five suspects in front of the school, I realized I could get away with it. I had the moral problem of seeing others being punished for my crime, but before Brother K even got a chance to start the punishment, some of the boys in our class got up the courage to protest and say it was a massive injustice. They began to accuse Brother K of acting outside natural law. It was Packer, above all people, who stood up and spoke out.
‘It’s not fair,’ he said. ‘You have no right to punish people without proof. It’s morally wrong.’
Packer became the hero of the day, as if he had taken the instrument of torture himself. He had taken my place and was now going to be famous all over the school, like the leader of some great rebellion, full of courage and selfless inner strength. Others in the class began to back him up, as if he had given them the strength to speak out at last. He had liberated them. It was happening all over the world at the time. There were black civil rights marches in America. People protesting against the war in Vietnam. Civil rights marches in Belfast and Derry too. We could see the trouble coming on TV, police punishing innocent people on the streets who were trying to run away. The British army bursting into people’s houses. Things could not go on like that for ever.
The Sailor in the Wardrobe Page 10