Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said.

  ‘She’s doing drugs, isn’t she?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, almost to herself, ‘you can’t save somebody that doesn’t want to be saved. It’s like somebody drowning with the lifeboat on its way.’

  I wanted to help them in some way, but there was nothing I could think of suggesting. And why would anyone want to stop Ellis from cutting loose? It was just the speed of her happiness that worried me, that’s all.

  19

  While I was waiting for Darius to make up the casement window frame, I had a lot of spare time on my hands to restore the boat I was working on. The floor was on hold until the new window was in. So I also had time to slip in a small job for the old woman next door to the Concannons. Her name was Rosie. She was over ninety and I wondered what was the point in putting up shelves for her. It was more about being a hired listener, while she gave me all kinds of valuable information about the Concannons. I could have done the job in an hour, but it went on indefinitely and I didn’t even ask to get paid.

  There was a picture of Michael Collins on her mantelpiece which I first mistook to have been her husband.

  ‘He was in the army? Your husband?’

  ‘I’m not married,’ she said, looking at me as if I was stupid.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Michael Collins,’ she said. ‘The freedom fighter.’

  She told me that she had gone to his funeral as a girl and there were thousands of people at it. She took out a box of newspaper cuttings gone brown with time and began telling me about his life. He was the great revolutionary hero, the Irish Che Guevara. Kevin later told me that Che Guevara was Irish and that he once visited Ireland. He landed at Shannon airport and took one look around and said: ‘get me out of here’ in Spanish, because he would not stand a chance with the place already full of revolutionaries.

  Rosie asked me to hide the suitcase with the Michael Collins cuttings in the attic for her. She complained about the crime rate and how much things had changed over a lifetime. She had a dog named Rusty who looked like a dingo with large triangular ears pointing upwards and said he had come all the way from Australia and walked straight off the ferry up to her house. She told me that this part of the city by the harbour was called Kingstown when she was born. All the piers and the granite monuments were built by the British. They were great builders, she had to admit, and there was nothing like it going up since then, only Tesco. She said the people who built the shopping centre were town killers because all the small shops had been shut down since they arrived. She once owned a sweet shop herself, years ago. Now the town was mostly vacant and semi-derelict with every second shop closed down. The public swimming baths had also been closed for thirty years and she tried to explain to me how little respect Irish people had for public property.

  I had seen some of the old photos of Dún Laoghaire in black and white. Times when people were dressed in old-fashioned clothes and everybody seemed to be waiting for things to happen. Photos of shops with neat displays of goods in the shape of pyramids. Boxes of tea and biscuits and sweets. Drapes in the windows and flower baskets hanging outside and skinny shop assistants in their bow ties and long dresses standing beside the entrance. These were the photographs that Rosie came from, in a time when you could trust people to give things back that were lost.

  She was worried for young people now.

  ‘Ellis,’ she said. ‘She’s the one I’d be concerned about.’

  It turned out that Rosie was not just a neighbour but a great family friend. She had known the children since they were very small and had often been asked to baby sit. They came freely in and out of her house every day after school to play snakes and ladders and throw the ball for the dog.

  ‘Very sensitive child,’ Rosie said. ‘The youngest.’

  Maybe I should have been more courageous. But what could I do to save anyone? I was a carpenter, not a lifeboat man.

  ‘She always missed her father,’ Rosie told me.

  I thought of the All-Ireland hurling medal which I still had in my possession.

  ‘She was the most affectionate child I ever met. Always throwing her arms around me. You really felt close to her, much more than the others.’

  ‘What about her father?’ I asked.

  ‘London,’ she said. ‘Tried to move back in with them once, but that was a disaster.’

  ‘He’s back now,’ I said.

  ‘So I believe.’

  Then she explained the trouble to me and why he was not welcome into the family any more.

  ‘She had to get the guards for him one night. The children spent the night here with me, for their own safety.’

  There must have been some love between them, I thought, if they had three children together. How did things go wrong? Maybe the answer lay in the letters.

  ‘Will you keep an eye out for her?’ Rosie said.

  ‘Ellis?’

  ‘She’s the sweetest thing. I’d hate to think of anything happening to her.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Her brother will look after her.’

  ‘Kevin? You must be joking. He’s mad. Stone mad. I wouldn’t even ask him to look after Rusty.’

  She said he was just like his own father. ‘Very charming. Very playful and very generous. But you never know what he really wants from you.’

  Then she started telling me about one afternoon, when the girls were young, when Ellis was only nine.

  ‘I used to take them swimming. You couldn’t bring Kevin because he always had to be in charge. You had no free will with him around, even when he was a boy. He’d come into the house here and tell me what to do. Very polite and friendly. He’s a good boy, but I could never decide anything for myself when he was around.’

  She told me how she brought the girls down to the sea to do some fishing on the rocks. ‘Crabs and stingrays, that kind of thing.’ She went with two other women from the neighbourhood and their children as well. They got ice cream and minerals, as she called them, with straws. She described buying the green nets on bamboo sticks. The shops all had them hanging by the door. Lots of fishing tackle and buckets and spades. Swimming rings. Goggles. Plastic sunglasses.

  The tide was out, she told me. She had decided they were going to look for starfish. There were two of them, petrified on her mantelpiece. It was rare enough to find one. You needed to go out a long way, she explained, when the tide had ebbed fully and left the land far behind. Even then you had to be very lucky.

  She wanted them to find something they would never forget. A starfish memory to keep all their lives.

  They were wading in the shallow waters, dresses held up, hunched over, looking under rocks and bits of seaweed. They saw crabs running sideways for cover. They saw little darting fish around their feet. Translucent shrimps staring up, waving their tentacles. They saw their own reflection and their own crooked legs, refracted through the water, but no starfish. It was a long afternoon with the bells of the church ringing out from the land and Rosie had gone out further than any of the others when she suddenly came across a starfish lying on the sandy bottom.

  ‘I’ve got one,’ she called to the others and they came running.

  She reached her hand down into the water to pick it up. But then she discovered that it was not a starfish she was holding at all, but the hand of a young man. His dead body was submerged, hidden underneath the seaweed. Only when she pulled at the starfish did his face come up towards her in the water, all ghostly and white, with his black hair waving and his eyes closed as though he was asleep on his back and dreaming underwater with his arms out. His shoes and socks were missing. He had gone barefooted. His chest was bare and the buttons of his shirt had burst open in the struggle of drowning. What she had believed to be a starfish was in actual fact the cold, white, outstretched fingers of a man in his early twenties who had drowned himself by jumping off the pier at Dún Laoghair
e harbour one night and was being delivered back. She held the boy’s hand, ready to dance together across the floor of the sea.

  By then the children were running over towards her, splashing through low water with great excitement. She dropped the starfish and turned around, waving them away.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she shouted. ‘Go back.’

  She could not let them see what she had found. Instead, she ushered them away towards the shore in a great hurry and the children must have been wondering why the search for starfish on a beautiful afternoon had come to such a sudden end. They must have sensed something was wrong. What explanation could she have given them? She had to make sure they saw nothing of this. She sent them home quickly, while she went in search of help. The tide was already turned and coming in to take back the land it had lost. She warned some of the adults along the seafront to keep people away and not let anyone near the spot where the body was.

  How could she have explained it to the children, that people sometimes do this kind of thing to themselves because they’re so out of their minds with loneliness they don’t know who to ask for help? Was there something about drowned people, some dark inspiration that lured the rest of us to come and join them under the sea until we were all holding hands like starfish meeting? If only the boy could have talked to somebody, he might not have ended things in that way, so suddenly, so brutally, with such violence against his own family.

  She found two Garda officers and told them about her discovery. They rushed to the spot where the tide had already begun to rise, lifting the seaweed and waving it around gently. The policemen both waded out in their uniforms to the spot where the dead boy was now beginning to drift away again.

  She felt most sorry for the younger Garda. He was not much older than the boy who had drowned himself. And there he was, having to pull his body out of the water and carry him like a brother in towards the land.

  ‘I knew the family,’ she said. ‘He left a note to his mother saying “I love you all”.’

  All afternoon, parents were hurrying their children home, promising soft ice-cream cones, anything that would keep them away from the waterfront. There were small groups of people standing along the rusted blue railing, keeping a kind of vigil, looking at the body of the young man lying on the cold concrete with a coloured bathing towel over his face. They were whispering the name of the deceased. They were saying that he had left his shoes and socks neatly placed on the pier as if he was only going to bed. They were waiting for the ambulance to come and take him away, saying he was a nice boy and nobody would have expected this.

  ‘Do you think she knew?’ Rosie asked me. ‘Ellis. Do you think she might have suspected something? Do you think that’s the reason she doesn’t come to talk to me any more?’

  20

  One day I got a call from Helen saying she wanted to meet me, privately. She would not tell me what it was about, but I think I had a fair idea. I knew she was going to cross-examine me again about Kevin’s side-stepping. Talk about sampling, he was trying out every woman he met, going nationwide, as he put it. All women, apart from those who were not interested in him, and those he said were not worth going after anyway. He even had a night or two with my ex-girlfriend Liuda, so he told me himself. Maybe I should have been more angry about it than I let on. He shook my hand and congratulated me for finding her, telling me that she was quite a specialist in the sack. Which was fair enough, I suppose, only now I had to go and meet Helen in the city to answer all her questions.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she said, a bit like somebody calling you about a serious medical condition.

  I was in the building supplier’s when I took the call. I stood beside the wood preservatives, trying to hear her voice over the sound of the saw in the yard. I could see the guy from South Ossetia with goggles and headphones on, cutting planks of deal. In fact, the man who imported Liuda from Moldova was also there at the time and I got the impression that he was keeping his eye on me because he thought I should be buying his hardwood mouldings instead of getting them made up at half the price with Darius.

  Helen made it clear that it was very urgent, so I dropped everything and decided to come back later for the stuff I needed.

  I love being in the building supplier’s because of all the talking. They keep asking you questions. How’s it going? Are you up to much yourself? Keeping busy? What’s the gizmo? When I asked one of the men behind the counter what a gizmo was, he answered me in a Russian accent for a laugh and told me they didn’t stock them any more, but I could try the charity shops for a secondhand one. I was only asking because you tend to hear about things in there, new inventions like hammer-fixings and washered masonry nails which I had never seen before and which are very handy for pinning up a plastering mesh. Anything that didn’t require pre-drilling was always very welcome and I suppose we’re all waiting for the day that somebody invents timber that cuts itself to size. The plumbers sometimes pass around blurred pictures on their mobile phones, telling me that they are new flotation devices for cisterns though they look to me more like body parts because I haven’t a clue about plumbing.

  One of the guys at the desk once insisted on rolling up his trouser leg and showing me a big scar across his knee. He had fallen from a bridge and landed in a shopping trolley in the canal. He had been trying to shock-impress his girlfriend one night, but he picked the wrong bridge, one without a ledge on the far side to catch him and stop his fall. He knocked on the kneecap. All plastic, he told me. There was a pin inside that went off every time he passed through a security check at the airport. The doctors said they could remove it, but he was fond of it now and wanted to keep it.

  You could say that the building supplier’s was as good a place to meet people as any pub.

  ‘No bother,’ they all kept saying.

  I knew they were only joking most of the time. You just had to watch out for when they were serious. Some of them said I was all right. Some of them said I was not the worst. Some said there was nothing wrong with me and some said I was the nicest person on earth, which is not really such a compliment because you don’t want to be a walk-over, all conspicuous, with no guile.

  There was one guy behind the desk who kept asking me if I ever laid eyes on the man with the beard, what’s his name, Radovan Karadžić? The man who committed all the war crimes for Yugoslavia.

  In general, the questions were not actually intended as serious enquiries, only as a way of recording your attendance in a roll call, you might say. I enjoyed standing in the line with other men because it made me feel part of the action. You were served by numbers. You picked up a number and waited to be called so you could order your requirements. It’s an old-fashioned system, I know, but the people in the trade still preferred it because they got the stuff at more competitive prices than they did from other mainstream hardware stores. They talked and cracked a few jokes and complained about their work and had a quick chat with Jenny at the cash desk while they were paying or signing the docket. So it was not entirely about getting timber and plumbing needs but also a place where people kept an eye on each other. They would go there to be seen. If you had not been seen there lately, then you had dropped out of sight and become forgotten. They’d be asking if you vanished off the face of the earth. What happened to you? Did you fall off a ladder?

  You had to make sure that you were seen and remembered in this country. There were all kinds of tricks to let people know you were alive and well and not forgotten. Talking and telling stories and asking questions. Doing each other favours, that kind of thing.

  And making noise in the street at night.

  For example, I was on my way home through the centre of Dún Laoghaire one night and I heard a group of women screeching. They were wearing high heels and tea-towel dresses, clustering around one particular young woman in white hot pants, with the orbs showing. At the other end of the street there was a man with a big chest and strong arms and a tattoo around his neck being held back by a
number of other lads. They staggered against the wall with the cash machine and the big lad kept shouting: ‘I just want to talk to her.’ The other lads holding him back, for some reason, pulled his shirt off in the process. When he finally freed himself and ran down the street bare-chested, the women fled, screaming even louder. He failed to catch the woman in white hot pants he so badly wanted to talk to, because she darted away in her bare feet with her shoes in her hands for protection. So he then kicked the telephone box and let out an almighty roar. But it was just a bit of street soap, acted out in public. In the end, they fell into each other’s arms and you could see them with their heads together in the back seat of the taxi as it spun around up the street and the town centre returned to normal.

  There was a security camera mounted on the corner of the bank, recording all this on a small screen. A man in uniform, probably not from here originally either, watching this drama for a living, with his take-away dinner on his lap.

  It’s quite possible that I went into the building supplier’s a bit more often than I needed to, going back again unnecessarily for items that I should have got the last time round. A drill bit. A blade. An extra tin of filler. And maybe it was a way of making sure I was seen, letting people know that I existed.

  I met Helen in a café in the city. There was darkness around her eyes from crying. She told me that Kevin was refusing to meet her. He was not even picking up her messages or answering her emails. He was the walking-away type, but she didn’t want to believe it. For all his great storytelling abilities, he seemed to have no idea how to write a person out of his life, other than disappearing and never looking back.

  ‘Is he serious about this other woman?’ she asked, refusing to mention her name.

  ‘You mean Eleanor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t think so, really,’ I said. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he had already moved on to others long ago.