She said she felt lucky to be still among the living and I agreed with her. It was good to be alive.
She was still young and beautiful and strong. It happens sometimes that I think of the most inappropriate things, maybe because I feel so out of place and away from my own rules. I thought of the phantom silicone breast wobbling in my hand. I could not help seeing her naked in front of me, with one breast missing completely as though it had been ripped away. A surgeon’s gash like a red zip across the left side of her chest. For some reason, I thought one breast was as good as none. It was only as a pair that certain things worked. Only in companionship that breasts mattered, like two eyes or two ears or two hands. It was a question of balance. These were some of the absurd thoughts I had in my head but which I didn’t express, even though we were looking at each other in such an awkward way and there were plenty of silent moments for me to fall into with words that were not fit to be said.
‘I hope,’ I said nervously, ‘I hope you will get the all-clear soon.’
‘Thanks, Vid,’ she said.
And maybe that’s the true certificate of belonging, when somebody allows you to worry about them and be happy that they’re still alive.
10
The big job on the floor was well under way. It was a change from working in restaurants, I can tell you, or standing around as a security guard in a pharmacy all day, trying to keep a gang of children from storming the place. Even worse when there was nothing going on and I had all this time to think about myself and what was about to happen.
Even if the work at the Concannon house didn’t exactly make sense to me, I was happy to be doing it. Turning around the floorboards was not what the house needed most. I could have suggested a million other improvements on which she could have spent the Irish rancher’s money, like insulation for example. The casement window downstairs was like a sieve, letting the gale straight in from the sea across the living room. The house had great charm, though it could be a big, draughty place. And cold. And damp. The walls could have done with dry-lining to improve the energy efficiency rating. Not to mention the touches of mould, black patches left behind the book case, at the backs of the sofas.
I got on with it and forced all doubt out of my head. Sometimes it’s better to carry on and not ask too many questions, otherwise you’d never even get started.
There were two large rooms in question, with interlinking wooden doors. Out of curiosity, I asked some of the neighbours on the terrace, like the old woman next door, for instance, if they also had the floorboards running the same way. It turned out the Concannon house was unique. A one-off. It seemed that the original builder must have acted on a specific request to run the floors laterally in the rooms downstairs. The hallway was done as normal, lengthways up to the front door. Upstairs also, running towards the casement window. The houses were over a hundred years old and took a decade to build. And here I was, almost a century later, soaking up good money to put things right.
I began with the skirting boards and then loosened the floorboards at the edge of the rooms, working in reverse order. Reading history backwards, you might say. Retracing your steps. You could not avoid doing some damage to the outer boards. But that didn’t cause me too much concern, because this was all going back in a different order. You should have seen the savaging the plumbers had already done to some of the boards when they put in the central heating pipes and the radiators. They should have been brought back by the ears to look at what they did. No need for that kind of destruction.
Once I got the outer boards up, it was easy to get a hammer underneath to lift the next one with minimal damage. Even better with a small angled crowbar.
I de-nailed each plank as I went along. It was great to hear the squeak of nails, like the cork coming out of a bottle. Some of them were almost fused into the wood. It was hard not to do some damage because it was tongue and groove, gone quite dry over time, breaking off in big splinters. In any case, it could all be repaired and filled in later. I stacked the planks carefully in the hall, by the door. I found all kinds of stuff under the floor, like a bit of domestic archaeology. Ancient cartons of cigarettes that the original workmen must have left behind. Craven A – such an appropriate brand name. Nibbled at by rodents. Old beer bottles. Some coins. A black dice. Hairclips and combs and a knitting needle which had fallen down through a hole in the floor. Empty cement bags from long ago. A dead rat that had dried out with time and looked more like a dusty leather glove.
The biggest part of the job was getting the joists out and turning them around. The simplest thing was to cut them along the wall. They were set in across little supporting walls built up in the middle, which was great, because it meant some of the wood could be re-used. The outer walls were full of granite boulders, so I was not going to touch them, apart from injecting damp-proof fluid into cavities. Ultimately, I would have to construct a new foundation, an inner wall up to floor height, just inside the main walls, leaving sufficient room for ventilation. Otherwise they would have serious problems with condensation.
It was all new to me. I needed advice. Darius had never done a job like this either, so I decided to check it out with some of the local builders who knew these old houses.
There was a bar in Dún Laoghaire where I could discuss the matter casually with experts. The advice centre is what I called it to myself, because you could find experts on all subjects there. It was like an Almanac, run by three elderly brothers, frequented mostly by older men sitting on the bar stools and women in the snug, singing songs on a Sunday night. They left the Christmas lights up all year round. They had a portrait of Jack Charlton behind the bar and also a plaster cast of Laurel and Hardy joined at the shoulders. The men’s toilets were out in the yard. Follow your nose, they said to me. Apparently the women’s toilets were in the house next door, where two of the brothers lived and where they had a full-size snooker table upstairs in the living room.
There was an expert on everything from rat catching to cleaning materials – leather, tiles, linen, you name it. Experts on all kinds of bygone practices such as stippled ceilings and embossed wallpaper. The women were experts on jiving and Sinatra lyrics and celebrity data going back decades, before I was even born. They could still remember darning socks and seeing horses on the streets. And periwinkles. One of them remembered a woman selling periwinkles on the main street, something only the Chinese people eat now and which you saw them collecting on the shore sometimes.
They were all experts on soccer and current affairs and history, and they had a way of reducing world events down to size.
‘Do you see those bar stools?’ one of men said to me one night. ‘They’ve survived two world wars.’
When it came to building matters, the advice could be conflicting. Once I outlined the project to them, turning the floorboards around in a house that was constructed over a hundred years ago, the entire pub got into the discussion, barmen and all, even the women.
‘God love you, son.’
‘They want me to run them back to front,’ I explained.
‘Ah here, you need your head examined.’
They could only assume that I was getting handy money for it. Some of them said they wouldn’t touch it for love nor money.
‘It’s a folly,’ one of them said.
‘Better you than me, Gunga Din.’
I wondered if that was meant to convey something else. A message about the family I was dealing with, more than the job itself. Some hint that what I had undertaken, nobody else in his right mind would even attempt. As a warning, one of them began to recount a story of doing a job in a house nearby where he was treated ‘like one of the family’. Everybody laughed. I didn’t know what was so funny, until I realised that being treated like one of the family was maybe not always the best thing you could hope for.
‘Jesus, can we not talk about something else for a change?’ one of them eventually muttered. Because they were also experts on other things like scandals and
corruption and crime, solved and unsolved murders going years back, serial killers, in particular DNA evidence and sexual crimes which they read about in the newspapers and seemed to know off by heart. They could reconstruct the details and the timeline in each case with forensic precision.
At times I felt that I had crossed over to the other side. Whenever they started talking about a particular crime, describing some mutilated body or the mysterious circumstances around a death, I felt I was a suspect. I kept nodding, letting on that I was just as concerned about the crime rate as they were, but I always felt guilty and ready to confess.
Kevin reminded me from time to time not to reveal anything about the Concannon family in public, because the news had a way of travelling ahead of you in this country. You said something in one bar and it was there before you reached the next bar. The big gossip jump, he called it. Besides, with my position working at the house, I was entrusted with some very personal information which was best kept close to my chest. The rules of friendship included a code of client confidentiality.
‘And don’t let my mother interrogate you either,’ he said. He made it sound like a security issue and I assured him I was not likely to spill anything.
But it was hard to sidestep his mother’s questions. In the afternoons, Mrs Concannon, or Rita, as she wanted me to call her, would sometimes make a pot of tea and put scones on a plate in the kitchen in order to get information out of me. It was worse than being at the Garda station because there you had the right to remain silent.
I think she was a little disappointed because I had so little to tell her about myself. As if the family trust into which I had been received had not been reciprocated on my part.
‘Both my parents were killed in a car crash,’ I told her, but it sounded like a prepared statement at this stage. ‘I survived the crash, but I spent months under observation for brain trauma.’
‘But you must remember something about your family, your childhood?’
‘I wish I could.’
‘Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘That’s incredible.’
‘I can remember getting my first job in a petrol station,’ I said. ‘I remember somebody asking me for a litre of petrol in a can that held only a half litre, so the petrol went all over the street.’
‘Everybody remembers the smell of petrol,’ she said dismissively.
The information was of no value to her. She stared at me, hoping I would crack under the pressure. I could have told her about coming home from school on the bus when I was a boy, falling asleep and waking up with an erection when it was time for me to get off. The unwanted erection. Every time it came to my stop, there was this thing I had to hide with my schoolbag in front of me.
‘You must have relatives back home. Are you in contact with them at all?’
‘I have an older sister, Branka,’ I said. ‘We keep in touch by email.’
‘Don’t you need to go back and see her?’ she asked. ‘Go and visit your parents’ grave? See where you grew up? Your friends?’
‘I had good friends in Belgrade,’ I said. ‘It’s a great place for the night life and the music.’
There was something utterly irrelevant about my answers that frustrated her. It seemed to make me less trustworthy. What person has no family and no memory at all of his background, like there was a fire and all the archives got burned? I didn’t like making her angry, but you have to understand, she was still on chemo treatment.
‘I think there’s something you’re not fucking telling me,’ she said.
‘Honestly, Mrs Rita,’ I said. ‘I really have no memory of anything.’
‘Vid, there’s obviously something you don’t want to talk about.’
‘I swear. My sister keeps telling me things but I have no recollection at all myself, I’m afraid.’
‘What you need is a girlfriend,’ she said, smiling bitterly at her own failure to extract anything. ‘She’ll make you remember, all right. Wait till you see. Some nice young Irish girl will get it all out of you.’
There was something very stern about her eyes that looked almost masculine. What made her angry was my inability to enter into the common trade of personal information. The practice here is to give a bit and then you receive a bit in return. People tell you their misfortune, like a short-term investment, expecting immediate returns. I could see that I was a big let-down, because I possessed so little by way of family calamities, only the obvious fact that my parents were no longer around and that I had left my home country behind.
I tried to make up for my lack of gossip by doing her other small favours. I went out of my way to fix a silver teapot which she had got as a wedding present. Even if the marriage had not lasted, the silver teapot was still in existence. But the wooden knob on the lid had cracked and broken off, making it impossible to lift the hot lid, except with the aid of a spoon. So I fixed it temporarily. I screwed in a replacement knob, made from the black dice which I had found under the floorboards. It looked a bit funny, I would admit, but it had the number six facing up. She laughed and gave me the word for that part. The finial, she called it. Originally, it was made of pear wood, same as the handle. I asked Darius to turn a new finial for me, but for the moment, she had the dice coming up lucky each time she made the tea.
We got on fairly well together. She came in occasionally to check my work and asked me to take a look at a spot in the foundations to see if it was dry rot. I put her mind at rest. It was nothing but white dust emerging from the cement.
Then she laughed at me because I had black marks all over my face. The floorboards were covered underneath in a fine black fur from a hundred years of coal fires, smoke and soot which was sucked down by the ventilation.
One day, I noticed that she had changed her hair and thought it would be impolite not to mention it. The colour was a more sandy shade, and she looked really well, I thought. So while I was in the kitchen later that afternoon, I remarked on it discreetly and told her that she had picked a good colour, very natural.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
As we were talking, I told her that my mother once changed her hair colour when I was a boy and I couldn’t recognise her. The only way that I could be sure it was my own mother was by going up close to her and closing my eyes and smelling her arm.
‘I thought you couldn’t remember anything,’ she snapped.
I had gone too far. Her hair was none of my business and I returned to being a worker again. She was making it clear that I was not really invited to take part in the free trade of information. She stared with her schoolteacher eyes, scaring the living daylights out of me, as though she already knew everything about me and was only waiting for me to come clean and confess the whole thing. She was not going to stand there with her backside to the cooker listening to me blathering all kinds of innocent stuff from my childhood that was of no use to her. Hard facts, she wanted. The full story, with no lies or half-lies. She didn’t want excuses. She didn’t want compliments. She didn’t want me begging for sympathy and saying I was in hospital and had a valid reason for not remembering anything. She wanted the cold blue information laid out before her. If there was any conversation to flow between us, it would be strictly on her terms. Not something given freely or volunteered, but more like minerals extracted from a mountain.
11
Coming up to the date of the trial, Kevin appointed a senior counsel to the case and brought me into an office in the city centre where I was introduced to a man named Barrington. He was older and more weary. We were left alone together and he asked me to sit down while he examined the file for a couple of minutes, then looked up with his eyes wide as possible, frowning like an accordion across his forehead.
‘Vid,’ he said, shaking his head as though he would have a problem with my name in court and needed something more respectable. ‘Is that the short for something?’
‘No, it’s just Vid.’
‘David, maybe?’
‘If you like,’ I said.
‘We have a problem, Vid. The prosecution say they have another witness.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I said.
‘Why’s that?’
‘He was alone,’ I said, with great certainty. ‘The electrician. There was nobody else around, just him and us.’
He stared at me, then dropped the file out of his hands. I realised that what I had just said was self-incriminating.
‘We’ll see how things go in court and make a decision on whether to call you as a witness.’
He pointed out to me that I could not be compelled to give evidence.
‘My understanding is that you’re from Serbia and that your memory isn’t the best.’
‘That’s true,’ I said.
He glanced down at the file again in despair, assessing the severity of the charges and the extent of the electrician’s injuries.
‘We’ll do our best,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to predict how this will go. You could end up facing a jail sentence, Vid. We would apply for the Probation Act, of course, but who knows? This is a very serious case.’
‘What about my residence permit?’ I asked.
‘That will not be affected. If convicted, you may serve time in prison, and you will have a criminal record. But you won’t be deported, if that’s what you mean.’
‘So I’ll be free after that,’ I said.
‘Yes. Unless the victim comes after you for damages, but that’s very unlikely. You have no money, no property?’
‘No,’ I said.
And that was it. The meeting was over and I was back out again walking down the street with Kevin. I felt the outcome of the trial had already been decided, but Kevin remained upbeat. He wanted me to show more confidence on the day.
Hand in the Fire Page 7