Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  Who killed her? Was it somebody in the family? Was it the father of the child? I didn’t have any answers to bring back with me after the journey, only more questions.

  For example, I wanted to know if her pregnancy was the result of an act of love or an act of violence. I wanted to know if she was betrayed, whether somebody took advantage of her and whether she was abused, left to the mercy of the church and the congregation who listened silently as her name was called out. I wanted to know why she didn’t run away and escape to London, like so many other women did.

  And another thing. At the exact time of drowning, was there a possibility that the foetus might have carried on living even a fraction of a second longer? Are both heartbeats connected as one and therefore expire as one? Or does the foetus die alone, like the mother?

  23

  Ellis was nowhere to be found. She had disappeared, emigrated to the land of dreams and drugs. I began to think of myself as an agent, given the self-appointed task of rescuing her. I searched for her in places where I had seen her once or twice before, out of her head, sitting on benches with her friends. Down near the harbour in the evening sun, overlooking the bowling green where the old people in white suits quietly play and you hear the clack every now and again of bowls colliding. Next to the hollow with the stagnant pond and the floating beer cans instead of water lilies.

  Down at the harbour, I stopped in front of the Carlisle pier which had been replaced by a new terminal for the super ferry to take all the cars and container traffic. The old pier abandoned, like a grey, derelict arm sticking out.

  The doors through which so many people passed over decades had been boarded up. The windows left open, with pigeons flying in and out. The entrance area in front of the building had been given over to parking spaces. The ticket office had become a yacht sales agency. The curved railway tracks running right up the quay to the boat had been levelled over and the space was being used to store large, expensive yachts in winter. The familiar roof of the station was still there, a triangular front piece made of blue boards, with an oval cut out and a short spire on top. Everything crumbling and fading. Some of the signs pointing the way to the trains for the city were still there, but nobody arrived here and nobody left from here any more. Nobody leaned on the granite wall to wave goodbye or wait for anyone to come back.

  You could see how the pier was built on stilts, with a tunnel allowing fishermen in small boats to pass underneath. You could imagine how the terminal building itself was once considered modern and how the passengers coming through would have been impressed by the size of the halls and the bold, rounded design.

  There was a man I got talking to in the pub who was a ticket collector on the Carlisle pier for years. He remembered it well in thriving times, with thousands of people emigrating every week. He remembered, out of compassion, allowing people on board to say goodbye. He told me you had to be immune to the tears, because otherwise you’d only soak up all that sadness over the years, which he probably did without knowing it. He described boisterous people getting on drunk. ‘Half seas’, they used to call it. He told me about scouts who came over to Ireland on behalf of building contractors in Britain looking for workers, putting tags on men’s coats so they could be easily identified and directed to various sites as soon as they arrived in London or Manchester or Northampton. Girls on the main street in Dublin approached and told of great jobs waiting for them in London, given tickets and identification tags so they could go straight across and work. He told me about the stories of the Irish drinking and fighting among themselves over there and the rough conditions, with men having to sleep together in the same bed and saying the rosary to be safe. The pub was the only place where they could be warm and feel at home.

  More recently, he said, the people who went away were more educated and did well for themselves, even highly talented young lads running the place over there.

  For a long time, nobody knew what to do with the Carlisle pier. At one point, the authorities held an architectural competition for an extravagant new building. The shortlist included a design by the famous New York architect, Daniel Libeskind, which was meant to incorporate a museum on emigration. An impressive design, like the prow of a ship, heading straight out towards the harbour mouth. It didn’t win the competition. But the winning project was never built either. For a long time it was just left as a derelict monument to emigration. And in the end, the only plan they came up with was to flatten it all and have a car park.

  Alongside the pier were all the other monuments and landmarks going back in time. Like the cast-iron fountain for Queen Victoria. The yacht club with the mast and yard arm erected on solid ground. The anchor from the HMS Leinster, which was sunk by a German torpedo with the loss of many lives, recovered from the sea floor and exhibited to remember those terrible days when bodies were brought ashore here. The granite bollards with the blue chains strung between them and the weal marks in the trees next to them from generations of children passing by swinging the chains against the trunks. The buoy into which you donate coins for the lifeboat. Some of the black-and-white pictures show women in long flowing dresses and parasols standing by the bandstand on the pier. Horse-drawn cabbies waiting for passengers to disembark from the old steamer ships.

  And the sheds. Along the sea road, there’s a row of wooden sheds, painted blue and white. They could be seen in many of the old photographs, designed in a time of courtesy when there was an abundance of time. For people sheltering from the rain, before all the traffic on the road. Places where you could sit and watch the mail boat coming and going. The yachts and small sailing vessels like clothes on the line. The sun shining in one part of the bay and the curtains of grey rain lashing down in another. And when the sun came out again and the steam rose from the pavements and the granite rocks, you could step out and carry on walking.

  At one point, the sheds became popular with emigrants coming up from the country who had no money to spend on accommodation or taking afternoon tea in the hotels. Later, the sheds were used by homeless people, even though they were too cold at night. You could see, by the shape of the trees on the seafront, how strong the winds can be around here, turning the branches into rigid manes blown inland.

  The wind did some funny things to the trees and there was no reason to believe it didn’t do the same to the people.

  Later still the sheds were taken over by cider gangs and the druggies, as they were called, leaving needles behind them. They were desecrated over time, even partially burned down. Then it was decided to restore them with great care and I would have loved the job myself. Only now they’ve been closed up with steel bars to prevent anyone from sitting there and looking out at the rain.

  Ellis had lost her foothold and I went around asking people about her. I spoke to a guy who owned lots of snakes and reptiles and kept hundreds of mice for food in a cage at the back of his house. His cat got in one day and let all the mice out. He stood in the street with a snake coming out of his shirt that looked like a tattoo only that it began to move as he talked. He knew Ellis. The girl with black leggings and a little tartan jacket with lots of colours in her hair. The girl in her own world, with earphones inside her hood. He told me that she had not been seen for a while but that she was with a guy called Diller and he was in charge of looking after her.

  It didn’t fill me with confidence.

  The druggies are the real exiles now. They have as much time on their hands as the people in black-and-white photographs. They speak in a slow, swollen language. I’d often see them on the main street, sitting on the low wall outside the church, drinking coffee. Concentrating hard on opening a sachet of sugar. Terribly thin, most of them. They had their own dialect and their own routines, collecting their medication. They seemed to be full of kindness and full of advice, helping one another out. You could see why it would feel good to belong to that group, meeting up in the mornings and putting their arms around each other like real friends, asking how things were going
and if they had slept well. They did things for each other, giving away sleeping tablets and other prescription medicines, lending a bit of money for a few cigarettes. Ghostly shapes in hoods and tracksuits who never needed much food any more, only sleep. They were like a separate ethnic group, living at the heart of the community, but with their own customs and rituals, free from having to own anything, sharing everything around them. I saw one young woman squatting down near the cash machine one day with her jeans around her ankles, looking up in astonishment as though she had forgotten to lock the bathroom door. One of the bank staff came out and said ‘Welcome to Dún Laoghaire.’

  Kevin told me it was a management issue, like everywhere else in the developed world. The epic contradictions of democracy, he called it. He had even seen a man standing outside the door of the church with his trousers down and everything hanging out for all to see, injecting a needle into his penis.

  Ellis turned up at home again one day, but not for long. Working away, preparing for the casement window, I heard a noise upstairs and thought it was Rita. But it could not be her, because it sounded more like an intruder, searching for something, marching up and down the rooms, throwing things around.

  After a while, she came running down the stairs. I tried to stop her and talk to her, but she was in too much of a hurry.

  ‘He works in the yacht club at night,’ I said to her. ‘He’s the caretaker and you just have to knock on the glass and he’ll come out.’

  She had accusation in her eyes, ready to cry, or maybe only waiting for the next hit. I wanted to hold on to her and explain things, but she disappeared again, leaving me alone in the house once more.

  While I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water, I noticed a bad smell when I ran the tap, so I went upstairs and ran the tap in the bathroom as well, to see what was wrong. As I passed along the landing, I saw what Ellis had been up to.

  The letters. She’d opened all the letters which her father had sent home. The entire bundle all over the floor.

  I caught sight of the horrible black ash doors which were open and had the urge to tear them out again.

  The boxes had been removed. Things left all over the place. Letters scattered everywhere. It made me feel I had become involved in some transgression. I stepped back into the bathroom and watched the water running, wondering if it looked a little brown, afraid to taste it.

  I thought of going into the bedroom and quickly clearing up the mess that Ellis made, but it was better that I did nothing.

  Moments later the hall door closed and it was Rita. She was happy with the tin robot man I brought back for her, though I was not sure she believed it came from Belgrade. She seemed to have become quite suspicious in general.

  I’m a slow reader of social situations. It took me ages to work out the implications of my presence upstairs. But I knew it felt wrong. The letters scattered all over the bedroom and Mrs Concannon calling from the hallway.

  ‘Vid. Are you there?’

  I was trapped. She was going to ask what business I had being upstairs. I was going to get expelled from the family in disgrace. I was going to be like her husband, barred from ever coming near the place. Not only that, but Kevin was going to kick the shit out of me. They would call me a treacherous foreigner, an intruder with no respect for privacy. No matter how I tried to explain this, it would look like a great breach of trust.

  ‘Vid,’ she called again.

  I remained silent. I moved around in the bathroom and switched on the bath taps as well. The boards creaked. I had plans for de-creaking the whole house one day because they were so bad in some places. They might as well have been screaming down to her, he’s upstairs, Mrs Concannon, reading all your letters.

  I heard her coming up the stairs.

  ‘Is that you, Vid?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mrs Rita. Mrs Concannon.’

  I left the taps running and stepped out to meet her on the landing. Her eyes stared through me, beyond me. She looked into the bedroom and saw the ransack of her life scattered on the floor.

  ‘The water,’ I managed to say. ‘Don’t drink the water.’

  ‘Who did this?’

  I pretended not to have seen anything, but the letters had finally released their words.

  ‘Was Ellis here?’

  ‘Just a few minutes ago,’ I answered. ‘You didn’t see her?’

  Standing in the door of the bathroom, there was a moment where I thought her suspicion might turn to openness. I wondered if she might begin to confide in me. She was going to sit down and tell me the whole story, why they broke up and what was wrong with the family and why they never talked about their father. Why they never spoke about the drowned woman in Furbo. I could see us going over the whole thing calmly. Sorting out the world and becoming the best of friends. She would send me out to gather her family around her. It was not that she had to have her husband back into her bed or listen to him murdering Dylan songs all night with his Connemara accent. All she had to do was talk to him and let him live on the edge of the family. It didn’t mean she had to surrender. She was not going to lose anything. Nobody was going to think badly of her for showing kindness.

  I waited, but she said nothing. She held everything to herself, hard as hammers. There was a new sharpness in her eyes. An anger that made her look a bit masculine once more. Her lips tightened. She wanted to strike something, somebody, anybody.

  ‘I better take a look in the attic,’ I said.

  She stared ahead, hardly hearing what I said.

  ‘The storage tank. In the attic.’

  Moments later, I came up with the ladder and erected it against the banisters. By then she had gone into the room, hastily clearing all those things back into the wardrobe, trying at the same time not to look at them too closely and see her past in front of her. I ran back down to get a rope to make sure the ladder didn’t slide back on the carpet. She came out to watch me going up, lifting away the stained-glass skylight. I climbed into the attic and made my way over to the tank and sure enough, I was right.

  ‘Pigeon.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said.

  I went back down for a plastic bag and some cleaning materials, the strongest disinfectant I could find. I took the opportunity to run all the taps and flush each of the toilets in the house. Then I went back up into the attic until the whole house reeked of detergent.

  She waited for me on the landing. Her anger seemed to have given in to defeat. Things were falling apart on her. She wanted to know how the hell a pigeon would get in under the roof. I told her I found a hole under the slates, though I had already fixed it. But it might be no harm to have the roof checked out at some point because there was no adequate insulation either.

  ‘The roof,’ she said. ‘Is it that bad?’

  I could hear the vulnerability in her voice now. Behind that steely, schoolteacher tone, there was so much she didn’t understand.

  By then, so I gathered, Ellis had already run off with the money which was contained in the letters. She had met her father in the street and he had told her that he had sent her a gift each time. Each letter had a short note to her, the youngest, with a bit of money. She had never received it. Now the letters were torn open, the money extracted in one large withdrawal. There was not even enough time to read the little note he had sent her, asking how she was getting on, with his address on the top and the money attached with a paper clip. Already, Ellis was spending the contents of these unanswered letters on substances that would help her forget everything.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, Mrs Concannon.’

  I told her the roof was grand and would do for a while longer. I didn’t want to appear as though I was scouting for more work.

  ‘Not immediately,’ I reassured her. ‘Down the line a bit.’

  When I came down the ladder she was still full of suspicion and wanted to take a look inside the plastic bag, just to see the evidence for herself. The contents would confirm my honesty and prove that I did not re
ad through the letters left lying all over her room.

  Her head snapped back with the smell. The dead bird inside looked like a black sponge, almost gone completely liquid, not much more than a thin ribcage, with curled-up claws and dripping wings. The life of a bird decomposing in front of her eyes, slowly converting into gas. Its substance turning back into energy, evaporating into new life forms crawling out of its open beak.

  I told her I had cleaned out the tank thoroughly, but advised her not to drink the water for a few days. I told her to boil everything before using it. Then I went down to dispose of the dead carcass in the skip.

  24

  I was never really given much time to be lonely up to then. It’s only when I got the phone call telling me that they were going to kill me that I began to feel I was on my own. I had fooled myself into believing I was at home here. But my presence was full of doubt after that. I drank doubt-tea. I ate doubt-sandwiches. I felt doubt-doorknobs in my hand and walked on doubt-floorboards. Everything I touched was invalid and full of self-questioning, even the screwdriver became unsure of which way to turn.

  ‘We’ll take you out of your misery,’ they said to me.

  Which I thought was quite funny initially. I tried to take it in the right spirit, as a joke, but I was laughing before the punchline came with a second phone call, just to make sure that there was no misunderstanding.

  ‘You’re fucking dead,’ the voice confirmed, among other things that I didn’t quite get. ‘Say goodbye to your mates.’

  It couldn’t be clearer than that. They were giving away the ending.

  This was the big day. Darius and myself were putting in the new casement window. One of those days when an entire week seems to pass in a matter of hours. It started so well, with me and Darius stopping off at the petrol station for one of those breakfast rolls and coffee. His van loaded up with the frame, everything neatly labelled so there would be no confusion. The two of us eager to get stuck in because we knew this could only be done inside a one-day turnaround.