Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  As she placed the cigarette box back into her bag, she revealed that her father was not the kind of person who owned a cigarette case, let alone a full packet of cigarettes. He had taken it from a dead British officer after an ambush. He had inherited the charm of the silver cigarette case and passed it on, like so many other monuments left behind in this country from that time, so she told me, like the railway tracks and the granite harbours and the obelisk in the shape of a ‘witch’s hat’ on the hill which was built for no reason during the famine times.

  My first history lesson. I was grateful to her for it. It gave me the feeling of belonging here, a feeling of friends and enemies going back a long time. It made me think I had lived here all my life, with uncles and aunts talking about me and waiting to hear from me. You can read as many history books as you like about this country, but it all sounds like fiction unless you have something tangible to link it up to.

  The taxi never came. As she got up to leave, she told me it was nice to have got the chance to meet me. The next time she came down, she had no idea that we had met before, which allowed me to pretend I never heard her story and I could be welcomed all over again.

  More often it was Nurse Bridie who came down to get away from the ‘insatiable maniacs upstairs’, as she put it. I recognised the squeak of her white shoes on the floor. She sat down and tried hard to get me to talk. She asked me why I had come to Ireland and what dark secrets did I have hidden behind my eyes. She wanted to know if there was anything I missed about home, apart from the weather and the cakes. She wanted to know if I had a girlfriend, and when I shook my head, she didn’t believe me.

  ‘You’re so innocent,’ she said to me a number of times, which made me think I was completely transparent.

  She told me lots of things about the nuns in Ireland. She said they were savages, most of them. She had gone to school with the sisters of ‘no mercy’. She said the nuns had always employed the most vulnerable. There was a young boy working in the kitchens who got a pot of boiling chip oil spilled over him. ‘You should have heard him screaming,’ she said. ‘Blisters the size of cups on his neck. When they tried to remove his shirt, the skin came off like red silk lining. Mass. That’s what they offered him as compensation.’ Then she warned me to leave before it was too late.

  ‘Get out before they pour boiling oil on you.’

  She blew me a kiss each time, just as a joke. Then I heard her shoes squeaking away again. I knew there was a sadness being suppressed by her laughter, like a cut under the skin that would not heal. But it was hard for me to ask her what it was.

  When I stopped working there she said she was not surprised that I would break her heart and walk away, it was the story of her life. She invited me for a farewell drink. We met in a pub close by and she seemed older out of uniform, or younger, it was hard to say. More motherly, perhaps, and also more fragile, more like a girl. Sitting with her coat on and her handbag beside her, she stirred her vodka and tonic with a plastic stick and did all the talking, because I had nothing to say and didn’t know what questions to ask. She placed her mobile phone on the table beside her drink and watched it for a while to see if it would ring. She started crying and I could not work out what to do in a situation like that where she was not my mother or my sister. She ended up putting her hand on my arm to comfort me instead. She opened her handbag, searching for a tissue to wipe her tears, but then produced a letter which she asked me to read.

  Dear Bridie, it said, it is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter.

  It was written by her fiancé around thirty years earlier. I read it slowly all the way through, moving my lips across every word. He was breaking it off with her, so I gathered. They were intended to get married. The date had been set for the wedding and the families notified. At the last minute, he changed his mind and explained that he was not ready for it, because he was still drinking too much. He was not fit to be married to her. He didn’t deserve her love and the only thing left for him to do was to leave the country and emigrate to America.

  I suppose each country has its own rules for love and dishonesty. Different ways of disappearing and walking away from the past. Different measurements for loneliness and happiness. I wanted to track down the man who wrote the letter and tell him that he had made the biggest mistake of his life. But it was no longer possible to intervene because time had turned us all into distant observers.

  She told me that she had a baby shortly after he left, but that she had been persuaded to give it up for adoption. She had tried to make contact with her son in recent years, but he had not wished to meet her. She asked me if I thought he would be good looking and intelligent, so I said yes, of course. She wanted to know if he might have red hair like her and then she answered all her own questions, assuring herself that her boy was happy in his new family and better off not looking back. Even though he was grown up by now, living his own life, she still spoke of him as a baby. Staring straight into my eyes, she said she hoped he turned out a bit like me, in fact, which made me think of myself as her son, promising to do my best.

  She’d been holding on to the farewell letter ever since, refusing to get off the bus at the terminus, dreaming back and forth along the same route for ever.

  ‘Go for it,’ she said to me, putting the letter back into her handbag. I wondered if these were the exact same words she had spoken to her fiancé, just to be big-hearted and to make sure they parted as friends with no hard feelings. She pushed me with her elbow, unable to sit beside me any longer. Then she stood up to embrace me.

  ‘Come back and see me sometime.’ She smiled through red eyes. Then she sat down and looked at her phone to see if anyone had left a message. She waved with both hands and told me to take care of myself, so I walked out the door, away across the street, not even watching for the traffic on the wrong side of the road, as though it was impossible for me to get killed.

  3

  To be honest, I never expected to meet him again. The city was full of carpenters, so it was a surprise to get the call early one evening saying he wanted to discuss a small job at his mother’s house. What was even more strange was the urgency. We had to meet right away. And then it was all quite informal, with no clear lines between work and friendship. Normally you keep those things separate, so I thought. You might go for a drink after the job is finished, if everybody is happy. But he started everything in reverse. He wanted to go for a drink even before I had time to prepare a proper estimate.

  By then I was working full time for a small building company. My plan eventually was to get into business on my own, so I was happy to take on small jobs in my spare time. I had got to know a Lithuanian carpenter by the name of Darius who had his own workshop and a van. My own range of tools was very limited and he lent me some of his whenever I needed them.

  Kevin picked me up and brought me over to his mother’s house. A beautiful, spacious family home on a terraced street leading down to the sea, not far from the nursing home where I had worked. It was clearly in need of some repair and as he parked the car, he called it Desolation Row, after one of his mother’s favourite songs.

  He left me standing in the kitchen while he went upstairs calling his mother. But then she came in from the back garden wearing gloves and holding a pair of shears in her hand, looking at me as though I had just broken in and couldn’t find my way out again.

  ‘And who are you, if I may ask?’

  The confusion was soon cleared up when he reappeared and introduced us. She took her gloves off to shake my hand.

  ‘Vid Ćosić,’ he said and she repeated the name slowly: Choz-itch.

  Next thing we were standing upstairs in his mother’s bedroom, talking about fitted wardrobes. I asked her what she had in mind and she mentioned black ash.

  ‘Black ash,’ I said, trying to warn them off with a smile. ‘In a bedroom. Might end up looking a bit like a funeral parlour.’

  There was silence in the room. I had said something wrong. Hi
s mother sighed like a slashed tyre. She wore a very serious expression and perhaps she was in mourning, I thought to myself. In fact she hardly smiled even once during the meeting.

  ‘Black ash is very dignified,’ Kevin said, helping me out.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, as soon as I realised my mistake. ‘It depends on how it’s done. Like, what kind of ash were you thinking of, veneer or solid ash, stained?’

  I thought it was a travesty putting any kind of fitted wardrobes into a room like this. It was an old period house and they would never look right. But that’s something you learn after a while. You couldn’t be honest. You had to make allowances for taste and be prepared to say that black ash was an elegant choice, even when it was the most revolting material you ever had the misfortune to work with. Besides, there was no changing her mind. She had seen something in a magazine. Floor to picture rail in black ash veneer was what she wanted.

  They must have known I would be very competitive, because they didn’t seem to have anyone else in mind for the job. The cost was not much of an issue, or the timescale. I made it clear to them that I could only take it on in my spare time.

  ‘I’ll need a bit up front for the materials,’ I said.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘How much?’

  ‘I’ll have to price the stuff and get back to you.’

  ‘Just let me know.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said, because that seemed like a good, neutral sort of phrase to me.

  And that was it. He was already rushing me away to the nearest pub for a drink. While he was waiting for his girlfriend to turn up and go to dinner with him, he filled me in on his mother’s personality. You could see that he admired her and also feared her a little, like a schoolboy. She was a schoolteacher, he explained, so you had to earn your smiles. She could be a bit severe at times, but she was actually very funny underneath the exterior, so he claimed. Quite street wise, too.

  He gave an example which sounded more like a warning. His mother had been attacked in the street recently by a junkie who was after her handbag. She managed to distract him by saying the next thing that came into her head. ‘They knocked down the wall,’ she said. Her attacker looked all around in confusion. Who? What wall? By then he had completely forgotten about the handbag and fled empty-handed.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Kevin assured me. ‘You’ll get on great with her.’

  It was not the kind of job you could easily price for, because there were other factors involved. Payment in kind. He knew I was trying to get a foothold in this country and encouraged the idea of me getting into business on my own. He started explaining the rules, telling me how to run my own future, giving me all kinds of advice on how to get started.

  I felt so accepted. You see, when you’re not from around here, it often feels a bit like gate-crashing, like you’re at a party and people are wondering where you come from and who invited you. You take everything at face value and you can easily get people wrong. It’s often hard to make a call between good and bad. So it’s great to have somebody looking out for you. Somebody on your side who’s going to let you know what’s coming your way.

  He even introduced me to his girlfriend, Helen. She shook my hand and recalled talking to me briefly on the phone. It was good to see her in person. You could understand why he would have fallen in love with her. The energy in her eyes. The open smile. She started asking questions as soon as she discovered where I was from.

  ‘Belgrade,’ she said.‘I love Balkan music. All those high-speed trumpets and drums.’

  It made me feel homesick for a moment to meet somebody who was so interested in my country. She said she had a few CDs from that region and that she would love to go there sometime.

  ‘I’d give anything to hear the music live.’

  They were quite well informed about Yugoslavia and what happened during the war. There was nothing much that I could add to their knowledge, only to confirm that Milošević and Karadžić and all these people had fucked up the place and left a terrible stain on the map. What more can you say than that?

  They wanted to know about my family. So I told them how my parents had died in a car crash. Long after the war was over, we were on our way to the wedding of my sister when the accident happened, somewhere in the countryside. Both parents were killed instantly and I was very lucky to be alive, if that’s how you would put it. I was able to attend the funeral, but I suffered head injuries which had me in and out of hospital for months afterwards. I was having great trouble with my memory ever since.

  The truth is that I didn’t want to remember anything. I’ve read stories about women who suffer from voluntary blindness after repeatedly witnessing terrible things in war. They cannot bear to see any more horror and lose their sight as a form of sub-conscious self-protection, so it seems. Their faculties close down in an attempt to shut out the worst. Maybe it was a bit like that for me. There were certain things from childhood that I didn’t want to know any more. You could say it was voluntary memory loss. Except that it was much simpler to tell everyone I had received head injuries in a serious car accident and suffered from amnesia.

  I liked to think of myself beginning all over again here, with a clean slate. I had no life before I arrived and could hardly remember a thing.

  ‘Why did you pick this country, of all places?’ Kevin asked, though I don’t think he meant it like that.

  ‘It’s a very friendly place,’ I said, trying to say the right thing. ‘And quite neutral.’

  ‘Neutral?’

  I hesitated and told them I had been to Germany for a while, but it didn’t suit me there. Not that I had anything against Germans, just that I was under pressure to say something good about this country. I said I found people here less judgemental, more forgiving perhaps, more open to mistakes in history.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Helen said, smiling.

  They fell into a brief argument among themselves, as if I was absent. Some older debate which I could not fully understand. Only in the tone of her voice could I tell that she was defending me, putting words into my mouth. Then they stopped, as if it didn’t really matter all that much. He laughed and put his arm around my shoulder.

  ‘Another quick one.’

  It struck me that I had forgotten to mention my trip down south.

  ‘By the way,’ I said. ‘I took your advice and went down to Dursey Island.’

  She seemed surprised by the mention of the island. I saw her staring at him, but he was turning something over in the back of his mind and didn’t want to look up.

  ‘Dursey Island,’ she said. ‘You sent him out to Dursey Island?’

  ‘Where else?’ he said, finally answering her eyes.

  ‘Out on the cable car with the sheep?’

  ‘Not exactly with the sheep,’ I replied, just to clarify that point.

  ‘And was it raining with the sun shining at the same time?’

  But she was not really waiting for an answer from me. She was looking only at him. I remained silent, because they might as well have been sitting alone together, on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the ocean. They continued staring at each other and I felt as though I had walked right into their bedroom.

  4

  Some days later I phoned him to agree a price for the job at his mother’s house. He laughed at one of my linguistic errors. I said it would cost ‘twice as less’ as I had initially estimated. He pointed out the mistake and offered to meet me later on that same evening with the start-up money so that I could buy the materials and begin the job the following morning.

  It was a Friday night and I was out drinking with some of the lads from the site after work. The building company I worked for was a medium-sized operation with about a dozen or so core workers. Home renovations. I spent my time hanging reconditioned doors, putting in new saddles and repairing architraves, replacing damaged floorboards and skirting boards. The builder kept getting my name wrong and called me Vim. I corrected him a number of times and tol
d him it was Vid, but he insisted on changing it back to Vim. Some of the workers had other names for me, like Video. Because my first name was so short and they were unable to shorten it any further to, say, Pat or Joe, the only thing they could do was to lengthen it, giving me versions like Viduka, or Vidukalic, or Videolink, sometimes Vid the Vibrator, or Vim the most effective detergent against household germs. The builder said he was keeping me on, not because I was a good carpenter but because I finished things. He could find any amount of carpenters who were better skilled than I was, but I had a way of completing the job that made it look done. I think some of the other workers were irritated with me for being so neat, but that didn’t stop them from bringing me with them after work on the razz, as they called it.

  I was sucked into the rush-hour of their celebration. It felt like the world was going to come to an end at any moment and they were compelled to make the most of it, like a big farewell party. They had a store of phrases and excuses to justify being young and not dead yet. They were determined to live it up by any means, to make up for all the bad times behind them and maybe all the bad times ahead of them as well. They kept predicting the amount of drink they would take and how much fun they would have. There was no question that they were having the time of their lives, but I always had the feeling that, instead of living in the moment, they were more interested in getting away from the real world, stepping back and talking everything up into a big story, like people watching their lives pass in front of them.

  Don’t ask me what the name of the place was, I can’t remember. It was a traditional kind of bar with three men standing on a small stage with guitars, belting out songs which most of the people in the pub knew by heart, old and young.

  There was a song about a woman called Nancy Spain. It had to do with a ring she had been given, but which seemed to have gone missing. Every time it came around to the chorus, the whole pub joined in to ask the big question, where was the ring that had been given to Nancy Spain? Did she lose it? Did she give it away? I asked some of them around me who she was and what happened to the ring, but they had no idea. They were on the same level of ignorance with me, though they knew instinctively the question could not be answered. Some things exist only in the form of enquiry. They could relate to the idea of the lost ring and were just very happy to mime the action, pointing at the ring finger and repeating the gesture of giving it away each time the chorus returned.