Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  He had been told that they do it because they’re happy. He had always believed that explanation. The sun breaks out and they jump around the place in a spontaneous sand-hopper festival. It had nothing to do with procreation or courtship rituals or survival instincts. Nothing to do with who jumped the highest or the longest or most frequently. He said there would be a scientific answer one of these days, like the one for weasels dancing in fields with similar delight at sunset, or so it was thought until they were discovered to have a parasite in the brain. Scientific facts make a fool of us all, he said. He preferred to believe in his own continued sand-hopper survival.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to say this to Ellis,’ he said. ‘Will you tell her when you meet her? Tell her they jump because they’re happy.’

  At that point we heard a helicopter flying overhead, so there was something going on out there on the water. He could not leave his post, so I said I would go and have a look.

  ‘Tell her to come and see me,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy her an ice cream.’

  As I walked along the harbour, Helen called to say that Ellis had not turned up to meet her. She had waited for an hour and she was hoping that nothing had happened to her.

  I could only make assumptions based on my short time here in this country and what I had been told so far about the place.

  I began to run towards the spot where the helicopter was flying low over the water. Half-running, at least, trying to convince myself to calm down and not worry until something had happened. Premonition man, that’s who I was, always waiting for things to end badly.

  People were standing by their parked cars, stopping to have a look without turning the music off. I kept running, not as far as Teddy’s, but away up along the pier, past the band stand and the brass plaque for the great Irish writer who talked about keeping the darkness under.

  It was a calm night. The sea was flat and black. A few night walkers along the pier, looking over the wall at the helicopter hovering some distance away from the lighthouse, outside the harbour walls. The sound of the engine and the blades slicing through the air, coming and going, sometimes louder, sometimes more distant. The lifeboat was there as well, circling around, but the helicopter stayed in the same place, shining a strong searchlight down on to the surface of the water, concentrating on one single area.

  Somebody must have reported seeing something in the water. One of those night walkers. The lifeboat moved in wider turns and the helicopter cast the beam on to the stage below for the men to get a better view. There was a small crowd of people gathered around at the top of the pier, watching. I asked what was going on and one of them shrugged. I tried to sound impartial, like a casual bystander, but they must have noticed an edge of concern in my voice.

  ‘Drowning is the worst way to go,’ somebody muttered.

  I waited for a while until it was over. It was hard to see what was going on, but then the helicopter flew away and the lifeboat returned. There was an ambulance waiting on the shore with a blue light flashing around the Carlisle pier. I was in time to see them transferring a body on a stretcher from the boat to the ambulance. I asked one of the lifeboat men if they had made any identification but he didn’t answer me and maybe I had the wrong way of putting that kind of question because everyone else around me seemed to know already without asking. Then there was a glimpse of the face, uncovered for an instant as they lifted the stretcher into the ambulance and the crew taking over confirmed the situation with their own instant checks. A hand slipped out for a moment from under the covering, not very different from the hands of the paramedics in their white plastic gloves, only lifeless.

  Her face looked so different in the yellow light, so pale and unrecognisable. But then it came to me that her hair was too short and it could not be Ellis after all. Definitely not a girl. Definitely not Ellis, I virtually said out loud. I heard the Garda speaking about a young male and you cannot imagine how I felt in that moment with my worst fears being proved wrong. I was so elated that I could no longer see the reality of what was in front of me or think of this man’s family and their grief.

  The silence at the harbour was punctured by the sound of messages on the radio of the Garda motorbike. The officer cleared the way for the ambulance and they were gone quite suddenly with a small yelp of the siren, leaving a number of people behind them, shifting on their feet and moving away reluctantly, coming to terms with what they had seen.

  I looked around with something like happiness in my eyes. It was hard for them to understand my frame of mind because I was like a sand-hopper, you might say, unable to keep myself from jumping.

  30

  One thing was certain, I was bound to meet Kevin again at some point. The world was too small for us not to come face to face one last time. I still held out hope that he would see things in a big-hearted way, blessing myself and Helen with his generosity. Sooner or later, we would all pick up from where we left off, I thought, the greatest comeback in the history of friendship.

  The big surprise to me was the circumstances under which we would meet. You could not have foreseen the family reunion coming in such an unlikely and tragic way. It brought the Concannons all back together at last, but not as would have been hoped.

  Much of the detail has been kept in the Garda reports. Re-constructed in the early hours of the morning by various officers in uniform and plain clothes. Everything recorded and gone over many times to be certain. By which time, of course, everything had already happened and could no longer be reversed.

  My own recollection was not very reliable, so they understandably had to support their evidence by other means. Was it the fear I brought with me to this country or something picked up since I arrived? I had also brought too little judgement and guile with me to be in a position to influence the facts in my favour. I had no interest in clearing my own name any more, so I answered their questions with too much honesty and neutrality for my own good.

  Initially, so I told them, I thought it was the lifeboat men coming after me. I was happy as a sand-hopper and I imagined that they had some issue with the spring in my step as I walked away from the drowning tragedy. There were other indicators which I must have ignored at the time and which were more relevant to the investigation than I thought myself, such as the sound of car doors banging.

  Only when you’re being asked questions in a Garda station do you begin to realise all the notes you should have been taking at the time of the incident. You should be taking notes from morning till night in case you ever get involved in something. Because you sometimes underestimate the danger. I should have learned to mistrust my surroundings a little more. I should have been more aware of footsteps behind me.

  They seemed quite friendly at the beginning. Three of them, a bit younger than myself. Some signs I should have interpreted as unwelcome, but I deliberately eliminated them from my thoughts, because you had to let things happen before you started worrying about them, isn’t that so? They all wore hoods over their heads. They were all able to spit without moving. One of them carried a bottle of coke, holding it in his fingers by the cap, twirling it as though he didn’t care if it dropped. I was not fooled and knew there was something stronger added, otherwise he would not have been passing it around among his friends and not even complaining about the backwash when he got it back. There was also something about their faces that was unusual, some icy glaze in their eyes that reminded me of a husky dog, with gleaming blue gas rings around the black pupils.

  They were not night walkers either, nor did they seem to have any pressing need to get anywhere. They seemed to have an abundance of time on their hands. They knew my name, even though they got it slightly wrong and called me Vim. They knew where I was from, which was more important.

  ‘Hey, we just want to ask you something.’

  They formed a small tribunal of enquiry around me, while I backed up instinctively against the nearest granite wall for support. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that they had come t
o take me out of my misery, though I didn’t let on and carried on being polite because I actually liked the look of them and would not have called them scumbags myself.

  They began by reminding me of the situation outside the bar in which the electrician rescued his daughter from me when she was only a young mother with a six-month-old baby.

  ‘You tried to rape her didn’t you?’

  At this point I laughed involuntarily. I loved the exaggeration and tried to answer in the same spirit.

  ‘Yeah, sure I did.’

  One of their heads came flying towards my face. I honestly thought it had detached itself from the neck as it cracked across my left cheek. I only had enough time to turn away so that my nose didn’t get the full force of the impact. There was a blinding flash across my eyes, like the headlights of a car coming straight at me.

  The head that struck me seemed to reattach itself to the body it belonged to and the urgency of the moment calmed again. I was left holding my broken cheekbone, wondering why they didn’t carry on and get it over with, complete the job they had come to do. It turned out that they had supplementary questions to ask me about the exact circumstances around the electrician getting the shit kicked out of him on the street.

  ‘Who was your friend with you that night?’

  ‘Is he Polish?’

  I refused to be drawn into this questioning and didn’t answer one way or the other. I think I was trained well by Kevin to remain silent at all costs. But saying that I had a bad memory because of a car crash at home was not going to wash with them.

  ‘Just give us his name, that’s all, then we’ll let you go.’

  ‘We know it wasn’t you,’ one of them added.

  ‘Was it the other guy you work with? Darius, is that his name?’

  ‘No,’ I said immediately. ‘It wasn’t him.’

  ‘Well who was it then?’

  There was no chance of me revealing the name. I was surprised that they hadn’t worked it out already for themselves, but it seemed that Kevin may have appeared too much like my employer to be regarded as an accomplice or a friend of mine.

  It struck me just how my own father must have conducted his business, extracting information from people in Belgrade when there was none to be had. Perhaps it helped me to deal with this situation, some inherited genius in reverse, pretending that I had nothing to give.

  An impatience came over them. A fist came from nowhere and connected with my mouth. I was confused because their hands were in their pockets. Apart from the hand that held the swinging coke bottle, I could not work out which fist was responsible. I even tried to count the amount of fists they had as though there might have been an extra one somewhere that I was not aware of.

  ‘You better give us the name or else you’re the end of the line. You get his share of the pain.’

  They had done their homework. They said they had heard all about me and my country. They knew where I lived as well.

  I put my hand in my pocket to try and speed dial on my phone, but they spotted that trick instantly. They made a joke about phoning a friend and kicked the phone out of my hand. One of them picked it up from the ground and threw it right into the harbour.

  Another thing I tried was what I had learned from Rita Concannon and how she dealt with assailants who were after her handbag.

  ‘Johnny!’ I shouted. ‘Get the guards.’

  They looked all around them, but they saw through that one as well and laughed. I knew their fists were getting ready inside their pockets, so there was no option left but to act in my own defence. I selected from a minimal range of tools in my bag and brought out a hammer, which I felt was a better choice than a screwdriver or a chisel. A hammer seemed to suggest less intention to kill. One of them responded instantly by producing a lock-knife, and when I saw this, I instinctively used the hammer to dislodge it. I felt the soft crack of knuckles coming all the way back through the handle of the hammer into my own grip. The knife fell to the ground. The boy who owned the injured hand held it out as though it no longer belonged to him and he would rather not have it any more. It was floating away from him with the extreme lightness of pain. He gave a squeal from his mouth that seemed to describe it quite accurately.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said at the same time, because it was not my intention to hurt anyone, only to save myself.

  While they were all looking at the broken hand, I managed to make a run for it. They took their time picking up the knife before they came after me.

  It was a mistake to defend myself. Because the fear began ringing inside my head. Easier to run away from attackers than it is to run away from your own nightmares. There was also the fear of my own actions. Already, I was re-imagining this moment with violent inspiration, wishing the hammer had connected with a skull or an eye or a set of bright red teeth.

  I ran down towards the yacht club where Johnny worked. I should have given myself up and allowed them to take me out of my misery once and for all. But I held on to some instinct of survival. Like a mindless sand-hopper, I ran all the way down past the front of the building, ignoring the main door and deciding not to knock or shout for help at that point. Some supreme intelligence told me not to bring Johnny into this.

  What surprised me was the lack of night walkers present that evening. Nobody around to alert the authorities. I turned at one point and threw the hammer at my pursuers, but that only stalled them for an instant and provided them with a further weapon.

  Because I had been inside the building with Johnny many times, I also knew where the weak points were in the perimeter fence to the boatyard. With this knowledge, I ran straight to the best place and began to climb. I managed to pull myself up to the top before they reached me. They were left jumping up to try and drag me down. Unable to grab my foot, one of them leaped up with the hammer in his hand. Though it only glanced against the knob of my ankle, it drew a note of extraordinary payback that I could only describe as one hundred per cent, distilled pain. It took a moment before I could draw my foot up over the barbed wire, doing all kinds of further damage to my leg, concentrating on my ankle as though it was some kind of tuning fork that held the note for ever.

  I jumped down on the far side and limped away like a xylophone on foot, making things far worse. The only consolation was that I was on the inside and that my improvised plan had a chance of working. I was able to pass in front of the cameras and alert Johnny to the problem. As soon as I appeared on the security screens, he would call for help. I even thought of telling my pursuers this so that they would waste no more time on me. Look, you’re going to be recorded on security cameras and be famous all over the country on Crime Time.

  Coming up to where I understood one of the cameras to be, I shouted and waved my hands. I called for Johnny to get help right away.

  There was no reaction from inside. But that didn’t matter because it was recorded anyway. I stayed in sight of the cameras as long as I could until they came in across the fence after me. They had found my bag. They also had any amount of implements at their disposal, oars, anchors, chains, lead pulleys, a whole range of imaginative tools which could be converted into perfect objects for extracting pain and death.

  I hid behind some of the boats so they had to come looking for me. It also gave Johnny time to act. I thought of bargaining with them so we could all get back to more important things like football and computer games and sex and whatever, but there was no point.

  There was no movement in the windows of the yacht club and I began to realise that Johnny was possibly not watching the screens himself. He had his small teapot full of whisky, as always, sitting back and relying on the screens to remember everything by themselves. That was the trouble with security cameras, they were meant to act as a deterrent, but only provided encouragement because it told people that the place was abandoned. It was a breach of trust in the community, asking people to commit their crimes in full view of the law.

  They were getting closer and I thought they were
equipped with heat sensors to track me down. I picked up a shackle and threw it at the window where Johnny sat. It was one of the skills that might have made me into a marksman in war. The window cracked and I saw Johnny appearing. This gave me the chance to run from my hiding place along a row of boats covered with canvas hoods, right out into open view of the cameras and the first-hand eye-witness of Johnny Concannon. I ran right on to the jetty. Even though I was running into a dead end, there was a comfort in the fact that it was being recorded for later use in evidence.

  One of them threw a gaff at my feet, causing me to fall. In fact, I may have voluntarily thrown myself into the water at that point because there was nothing else I could think of. I managed to swim in underneath the jetty. When they arrived at that spot, they tried to fish me out by hooking the gaff at my clothes. I slid further away under the jetty, keeping my mouth above water for air. They continuously jabbed in through the gaps with various tools. It was impossible for them to see me in the dark, but they had a feeling for where I might have moved to, because I was gasping and coughing.

  For the first time, I was able to verify something that you could normally only take on trust, which is that drowning is the worst way to go. Swallowing oily sea-water in large gulps must be the most desperate feeling imaginable. Apparently there is a moment when the closing mechanism at the back of your throat opens up involuntarily. In the panic, you mistake water for air, inhaling the fluid right into your lungs. It was hard to understand why people chose drowning as a way of death. And I thought of how unlikely it would be for a woman to do this while she was pregnant, unless she was helped by others.

  I made more and more noise. I was gulping in air, or what I thought was air, scraping underneath the dock above me as though it was a cage, keeping me down. Their tools struck me and sent me down further underwater. I knew there would be no ultimate proof of my injuries being sustained before or after drowning, above or below the surface.