Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  He would have walked as far as the People’s Park and sat down on one of the blue benches. He would have seen the neatly kept flowerbeds. He might have walked in a slow circle around the octagonal bandstand and come back again. He would have leaned on the blue railings and stared out over the water, looking with excitement and impatience into his own future. Smoking a cigarette which he didn’t really want. Grieving as much as anything, because leaving was like bereavement, losing all your friends overnight. In the old days, they used to hold a wake for the person going away, as if they were already dead.

  He would have heard the boat claxon going off. He would have seen the passengers gathering at the Carlisle pier and also those who were saying goodbye, grouping together by the wall to watch the ship going out. He would have passed people who were crying, young women trying to smile as they turned around to wave. Women with infectious tears hidden in their handkerchiefs.

  I’ve stood there and imagined them all leaving. Johnny Concannon in the crowd.

  He would have moved with the general flow up along the wooden floor of the pier, hearing the shipping staff calling for passengers to have their tickets ready. He would have seen the sign for ‘Passengers Only’, both in English and also in his own language. Paisinéirí amháin. When it was his turn to cross the gangplank, he would have seen the gap between the pier and the boat and caught sight of the water below. He would have heard the squeak of the boat pressing against the rubber fenders. And just at the entrance to the boat, he would have read the sign ‘Mind Your Head’ because the door was low and tall men had to bow their heads going in.

  And once he was on the boat, he was surrounded by talking and laughter and smoke and people trying to find a place to sit down and store their luggage safely. Families. Clusters of friends. Women banded into groups from their own parts of the country, settling down in corners as though they were going to be on that boat for the rest of their lives. Some of them dressed in mini-skirts and styles already picked up from abroad. Others still wearing the clothes that their mothers would have chosen. Young girls no more than seventeen with handkerchiefs still in their hands, looking at the men at the bar in the hope that they would cheer things up. Some of the men wore open collars and had cigarettes hanging from their lips, looking indestructible. Some of them were drunk and staggering on their feet before the boat had even left. Some of them had Elvis haircuts and some of them had long hair and colourful hippy clothes and somebody must have had a guitar.

  He would have noticed the throb of the engines, shuddering through the metal. A knocking, grinding noise as the boat drifted away from the pier. Ropes splashing into the water and dripping as they were gathered up and coiled on deck. He would have heard the door of the boat being pulled shut with a loud bang. He might have gone up on deck to see all the people waving from the shore.

  All the sadness left behind. In the walls. On the pavements. In the blue benches. Stored in the granite like the warmth of the day still radiating after the sun had gone down.

  He would have inhaled diesel fumes. He would have watched the lighthouse going by so close he could almost put his hand out to touch it. He would have felt the first lurch of the boat on the tide and seen the gulls hovering after them and thought they were tied with strings. He would have watched the land receding slowly, reduced to the size of a postcard. To the size of a postage stamp. To the size of a single line of farewell, neatly written along the horizon before the land dropped out of sight.

  16

  So there I was, carrying a father’s gift to his son in my bag.

  I arranged to meet Kevin in order to hand it over, wondering why they had not run into each other already in such a small world. How could he possibly miss meeting his own father? You could hardly walk down the street without being spotted.

  I had been chosen to bring them together. It was a great mission, something to be done with tact and discretion. It was clearly not possible to give it to him in some bar like a packet of peanuts. ‘Here, this is from your dad.’ That would be the wrong thing to do, because you’d only have everybody asking him what was inside and enquiring into his private family business.

  I waited for a better moment, later, on the way to a party.

  ‘Kevin, I have this thing to give you.’

  But he was concentrating on something else entirely, walking fast, planning the next part of the evening.

  ‘Vid,’ he said to me. ‘This place we’re going to. I want you to slip in first. Check it out. Have to make sure she’s not there.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Helen.’

  So then I became involved in a more uncomfortable mission, going into a house undercover and searching through the guests to make sure that Helen was not present. He could not afford to see her face to face.

  ‘Wouldn’t be good, right now. Emotionally.’

  He called it the Helen-check. I went in, searching through the faces, staring women in the eyes as if I wanted something from them, eliminating them in a kind of identity parade. Some of them were quite hostile, silently asking me what the fuck I was looking for. I smiled back awkwardly at them, muttering ‘I thought you were somebody else’, but they didn’t like being mistaken for another woman. I kept wanting to see Helen all the time. There was nobody I wished to see more than Helen, but she was nowhere around. I even waited to make sure she was not hiding in the bathroom.

  Back out on the street, I gave Kevin the all-clear and picked up my bag with the gift from his dad, still un-given and unopened, because he was too busy to receive it and was already pulling me inside. It was even less appropriate to hand it over while he was talking and dancing and chatting up women and getting so stoned and drunk that he eventually fell down between two sofas and had to be woken up and resuscitated with more beer so he could walk home. He had not scored, as he put it himself, but he didn’t see it as a failure because he was only concerned with getting out of his head from now on.

  On the way home, he leaned on my shoulder, still talking. He wanted to go back to my place, because it was not possible for him to go back to Helen so late in the night. We walked along a row of small red-brick houses, designed in such a way that the hall door led straight into the living room and the occupants could hear every word that people said on the street, all the voices going by entering right into the house. He stopped for a piss and I was sure the people inside could hear it in their sleep, cascading against the wall and spreading in a frothy delta across the pavement.

  There was no better moment than this, I thought. I waited till he was finished and took out the gift. I understood the magnitude of the moment, what it meant to him and to his family, what it meant to me to belong to this reunion.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said, handing it to him at last.

  ‘Aw. Thanks.’

  ‘No. You’ll see. Just open it.’

  He took off the wrapping paper and found a shiny red box inside, a case that would normally contain an item of jewellery, with velvet interiors like a coffin and a lovely click when the lid shuts down. For half a second it looked as though I had given him an engagement ring.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’

  ‘It’s from your dad,’ I said, smiling.

  He looked shocked. I thought it was the weight of feeling pressing down on him. But his eyes began to narrow and his frown tightened into a fist. He took in a deep breath through his nose and looked away. Then he dropped the box out of his hands and as I looked down, his arm came swinging towards me so fast that I had no time to escape the blow.

  It was the first time I really noticed that he was left-handed. I had seen him holding a pen in his left hand, writing upside down from the top of the page to make sure he could see what he was doing. But the left-handed punch came as a complete surprise. I was totally un-ready for it. I had miscalculated all the signals once again.

  It was anger, not reconciliation. Not the great welcome home I had expected him to give his father at the end of all
this absence. Not the open door, back from oblivion. He kicked the gift across the street and I heard the object inside skitter away with a dull clang, some kind of ancient coin. The black-and-mauve wrapping paper glided out of his hand like a tropical bird coming to land on the street behind him.

  I staggered back against the window of one of the houses. My bag had a hand-planer inside which I had bought from somebody that evening. It dug into the small of my back and rang against the bars which had been erected outside the window like a prison to keep intruders out. My head hit one of the bars, though I felt nothing at the time, only the shape of his knuckles imprinted on the side of my face.

  ‘You fucking Serbian cunt,’ he shouted.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought you were my friend,’ he said. ‘I’ve done everything for you and this is how you repay me.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said. ‘What did I do?’

  The anger in his face was familiar to me. I had seen it before, but had always thought of him as my protector, on the same side. I could not understand what my transgression was.

  ‘Never, ever, interfere with my family. I fucking warned you about that.’

  ‘This is no offence,’ I pleaded.

  ‘I thought I could trust you,’ he shouted.

  ‘I was trying to help. It’s from your dad, Kevin.’

  My words came in a stammer, out of breath. His words came in a spin, a power drill going into masonry.

  ‘Well, let me tell you this, you little Balkan creep. We don’t need your help. How dare you even think you can start intervening, Mister Fix-it, Euro-fuck? Go home and fix your own bloody country.’

  He was crying. Or did I just imagine that? He stared at me for a moment with his chin quivering, then walked away, not even turning back.

  How could I have got it so wrong? How could I have become so intoxicated with my fantasy role as mediator? And how quickly I had turned from being his best friend into the most hated person on earth.

  I felt the warmth of my own blood going down the back of my shirt. The collar was sticking to my neck. There was an old woman looking at me through the window. She pulled back the curtains and then jumped away once she realised that I was looking in at her, with blood on my face and hands, a horror scene unfolding right in front of her own house.

  ‘Are you all right, son?’ she mimed from behind the safety of the glass and the metal bars.

  I nodded and she went away, but the curtain continued moving and I knew she was still watching, turning me into a victim.

  The weight in my bag became more apparent to me now. Along with my anger. The impact of his fist had introduced a strange, dizzy kind of energy into my body, releasing a stored rage of my own, like a shout escaping from inside my head.

  How could I allow this to happen? Was I not entitled to stand up for myself? I wanted to get even and thought of running after him, swinging the bag and giving him a blow on the head from behind. Pinning him face down on the street with my knee on his back, taking out the newly bought plane, which they swore to me was not stolen goods, and hitting him with it again and again. Opening up his skull, shaving off the top of his head without stopping until his mind came lifting out in a bright mess of colour and violence.

  This is how he repaid me for taking his place in court. This is how I will repay him for his betrayal. It was the moment of vertigo. At school, we read a book by a Czech writer that explained how it was not the fear of falling but the voice of emptiness calling you. It’s the same feeling that you get when you hold a newborn infant in your hands. The same feeling you get every time you look at the spinning blade of an electric saw. It’s the fear of doing exactly what you tell yourself not to.

  I went over to pick up the red jewellery box. I hardly understood what I was doing. The item inside turned out to be a medal of some sort. I placed it back into the box, folding the wrapping paper neatly around it once more. It was only later that I found out the significance of this gift, after I showed it to the experts in the local bar some days later and they explained to me that it was an All-Ireland hurling medal.

  ‘Galway colours, that wrapping paper.’

  His father had been a great hurling player who played for Galway before he left the country. This was a precious medal. Years later I met a woman who had lived for some time in a place called Hammersmith in London and found one of those medals under the floorboards when she was doing up the house. It was like an archaeological treasure.

  For Kevin’s father to part with it would have been like a chieftain handing on his spear or his favourite feather for safe-keeping into the future. A moment of immortality. This medal contained all the feelings, all the pride, all the cheering as he stepped up to the winning stand to receive it, still out of breath from the game and the excitement.

  I felt the full blow of rejection as I examined the medal in my hand. The weight of it and the sudden loss of friendship keeping me under. I hid the medal away on top of the wardrobe in my bedroom and tried to forget about it, but it continued glowing in the dark along with something in me that was not welcome any longer.

  That was it. I refused to work for them any more. To hell with them all, I said to myself. They can put the floor back themselves.

  The following day I spent walking instead. All that friendship was worthless currency now and I knew exactly how his father must have felt. I understood how hard it was for him to return and meet people from his own family. All the guilt he must have felt over leaving them. All the songs begging him to come back. All the friendships he left behind and had to remake abroad. All those difficulties with language and accents, as though his own words sounded like a translation. I knew what it was like, mishearing things. Misreading people’s thoughts. Looking over your shoulder to see who was listening before you allowed yourself to speak.

  He must have come home expecting more than this. He must have been hoping for a foothold and felt instead that he was more of an exile here on his own doorstep than he had been anywhere abroad. There is no such thing as returning, I thought, only going further away.

  17

  He’s going to regret this, I kept saying to myself. He’s going to stand there one evening looking at the sun going down and feel the moment of remorse. He’s going to say that friendship means more to him than anything else in the world. He’s going to look for me and he’s going to look for his father.

  I had withdrawn my labour indefinitely and maybe that’s what brought him around. I went missing and his mother must have been asking if the job had been abandoned now with a big hole in the middle of the house.

  It was easy for him to make it up to me. He did it with great exaggeration. He turned it into an oversized gesture which was funny and serious at the same time. He came to find me and went down on one knee. Up there on the hill overlooking the bay where he brought me fishing after winning the court case. I was walking along in my own emptiness, feeling a bit like one of the seagulls gliding on the updraught over the coast. The sea below me, looking like the texture of boiling milk from that height, bubbling at the edges on the beach.

  There he was, kneeling on the path with his head down. At first I thought it was somebody doing up his shoelaces. Only when I got closer did I recognise him, genuflecting like a courtier in front of the Pope, with his hooded jacket around his shoulders and his hand stretched out towards me.

  Well, what can you say to that? It was audacious and original, so that’s what counts. Full of imagination. The big smile. The eyes slanted in supplication, so innocent. He bowed his head right down low as I approached, waiting for me to shake his hand and tell him to get up for Jesus sake and stop acting the clown because it was impossible for me to hold on to my anger under these circumstances. He stood up and embraced me with his head down, colliding against my chest. Walkers passing us by with their dogs sniffing around our legs must have thought we were lovers. Then he moved back, leaving two hands resting firmly on my shoulders, looking straight into my eyes. Hi
s breath was mint and coffee.

  ‘I’ve been to hell and back over this, Vid.’

  He drew me over to the bench with one arm left around my shoulder.

  ‘Are you on the level?’ I asked.

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘You’re not arsing me?’

  ‘Listen, Vid. I don’t deserve your friendship after what I’ve done. But I’m here to apologise. I’m going to make this up to you a million times over. Even if it takes me a lifetime, my friend.’

  What can you do? I felt like a complete sucker, getting my shoelaces tied together. It occurred to me that I was a bit like the character of Gulliver, more internally out of scale though, tied down with all these promises of friendship. Maybe this was the way things were done here, I thought. You make a friend, you hit your friend, then you shake hands and achieve a closer, superior grade of friendship than ever before. He made it epic. I could hear the optimism in his voice and didn’t want to be excluded from it.

  It had nothing to do with work. I could have gone back to the sites. I could have done more security work at the pharmacy any time. I could have gone into business with Darius. People were coming up and asking me to fit them in, so I could even have set up my own workshop, if I wanted to. It was not just the money. I was not an opportunist, here to make a quick stack and fuck off again. It was the friendship, the family, the idea of belonging that mattered to me. To be honest, I didn’t have the guts to see it any other way. I couldn’t afford the bitterness. I couldn’t afford to be alone.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re going to a wedding. Belfast.’

  He was that confident. Within half an hour we had gone to my place to collect some clothes and were driving north. No looking back.