One day I ran away from home with another boy from school called Evil. We stayed out all night until it started raining and the only place we could find to shelter in the whole city was in the cab of a truck. It was so cold in the truck that we were shivering. In the morning we went into a church to get warm, and I knew that I never wanted to be homeless again. Homeless people are always hunched up with the cold and warm people stand up straight. I knew there was a boy living rough under the Top Hat. There’s a dance hall called the Top Hat Ballroom that we pass on our way to school. It had a huge black top hat on the roof until it was blown off in a storm one night and the hat fell down into the laneway beside the dance hall. Now there’s a homeless boy living under it and I don’t want to be like him, hunched up with no language to go home to.
Instead, I went home and told my father that I would kill him. I said I would not speak any dying language any more, only killer languages, and then I asked him how would he like to be killed by his own son. He took off his glasses and told me to go ahead. But then I did nothing. I just said what they say in school when they’re afraid. I said it wasn’t worth wasting my energy. In any case, my mother said I would have nowhere to go home to if I did something like that. Once you kill somebody, you can never go back. So now she tries to keep us away from each other in different parts of the house with at least one or two doors slammed between us. She helps me to run away. Sometimes she lets me stay out of school and go to the cinema where it’s dark and nobody knows who I am. Then I talk to myself in English. I pretend that I’m not German or Irish at all. But one night my father found out and he came up to my room when I was already asleep. He started punching me in my sleep and I woke up with him foaming at the mouth and my mother pulling him back by the elbow and Franz standing at the door calling peace. My father had lost the language war and everybody knew it. My mother says the people who lose become ugly and helpless with anger. Nobody wants to be a loser. Nobody wants to be left in the train station with a suitcase full of helpless anger.
Sometimes I argue with my mother as well. I start twisting around all the things she said and making no sense out of them. I ask her why she was trying to bring me up to live under the Nazis. We have to behave as if the British are still in Ireland and the Nazis are still in Germany. I tell her the silent negative is useless. She can’t argue with me any more. She has other children to look after as well, she says, and so I tell her that she had too many children. Then she looked at me for a long time and waited for a moment to search for what she wanted to say next.
‘Maybe I should have skipped you,’ she said.
Then I threw an egg at her. I picked it up and threatened her with it, but she pretended that she didn’t care. Go ahead, she said. I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t know how to hate very well yet, so I threw it softly so that she could catch it without breaking it. And then she threw it back to me and I caught it as well. So from that day on we started throwing eggs to each other every day and catching them, until we laughed and nobody ever had so much fun with eggs before without eating them.
I stand alone at the seafront a lot. Sometimes I throw stones at the waves. Sometimes I just sit on one of the rocks and think I’m in the luckiest place in the world, with the blue sea out in front of me and the sun stinging me in the back. Sometimes I think of escaping away to another country where nobody knows where I came from. And sometimes I am trapped, full of helpless anger. Sometimes I still hate everything, even the dog that had no name and no owner. He just followed the fist people when he felt like it. He was a betrayer. One day I found him near the harbour so I pushed him in and told him to drown.
There was nobody around and nobody to see what I was doing. I threw stones at him because I was Eichmann. I was the most cruel person in the world. I smiled as I watched him trying to rescue himself. I laughed like the Nazis in the films and would not let him up the steps again. I knew I was punishing the innocent instead of the guilty. He swam away to try and rescue himself somewhere else. I watched him scraping against the side of the boats, but it was no good. He swam helplessly around in circles looking for anywhere to survive and not die out. He was getting tired and then I started feeling really sorry for him, because he was an old seadog now. I wasn’t angry any more, just ashamed. I said this was the worst thing I ever did in my life and I tried to save him. I ran over to the next steps and called him, but he wouldn’t trust me any more and I could never trust myself again either. I was one of the fist people now. I didn’t know any better. The dog had his mouth open, trying to get air and not drink any more of the seawater. He was starting to go down under and I couldn’t look any more. I had to run away. I was sick of what I had done and I knew that I would never have any friends. My knees were shaking and I wanted to disappear and drown myself as well. I was so sick of what I had done that I ran home and scraped my hand on the wall so the skin came off and there were little black stones mixed in with the blood.
My father knows he’s lost the language war because he’s behaving more like other fathers now. He bought a television set and started watching programmes in English like the detective who pretends he knows nothing. He got a car, too, and buys petrol in English and even eats biscuits that are not made by my mother. Sometimes he looks like he’s tired of fighting and tired of making sacrifices all his life, and he’s sad because he might as well not have bothered. There’s no point in keeping the waves back any more. He says he made mistakes. It’s not easy to say that you lost, but he came to me one day and shook hands and said he wished he could start all over again because he would make different mistakes this time. Sometimes if you lose, everything is wrong. If you win, everything is right.
Then one day British soldiers shot people dead on the street in Derry. They had lost the language war, too, and shot straight into a crowd of people marching for civil rights. On television we saw a priest crouched down waving a white handkerchief and maybe the British people are afraid of dying out. My father watched it all on television and couldn’t speak. He sat for a long time staring at all the things that happened in Ireland for hundreds of years and were happening all over again. Later he came upstairs and said he didn’t want me to make the same mistakes again. He said he had never held a gun in his hand and there was no point in me doing it either. He said it was better to use the typewriter, because if you make mistakes, you can still correct them without killing anyone. I knew he wanted to make up for all the mistakes he made.
Onkel Ted came out and gave me a book called Black Like Me, about a man who changed his skin from white to black, just to see what it was like for other people. He said you have to be on the side of the losers, the people with bad lungs. You have to be with those who are homesick and can’t breathe very well in Ireland. He said it makes no sense to hold a stone in your hand. A lot more people would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too. My father has one soft foot and one hard foot, one good ear and one bad ear, and we have one Irish foot and one German foot and a right arm in English. We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don’t just have one briefcase. We don’t just have one language and one history. We sleep in German and we dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.
Twenty-nine
After that my father was killed by his own bees.
Every year in May the bees swarmed because they wanted a new place to live in, not just the same gardens and the same flowers and apple trees every time. Whenever there was a swarm, you could see it like a cloud in the air all around the house, with bees zigzagging like needles against the sky when you looked up. It was always a fine day, too, with the sun out and no rain. And they would never sting when they were swarming. My father said they were happiest when they were going off to find a new home because for them it was like
going on their holidays to Connemara or Germany. You could stand underneath without any protection and not be afraid. You could watch the cloud until it started moving away from the house like a whirlwind. They would not go far at first, only up to a nearby tree where they would settle down and wait while the scouts went out to find a new address for them to live in. Then you still had a chance to catch them and bring them back before they emigrated and disappeared for ever. My father taught me how to do it. You could see the swarm like a black beard hanging in the tree and you could climb up with a straw skep and not be afraid to put it on top. You didn’t need to have gloves on or anything. The bees would think it was a new home and move in. Either that or you could hold the skep underneath and shake the branch until the beard fell straight in. Then you put it on the ground and all the bees would settle down again. You had to be quick and calm at the same time. You had to do all this before the scouts came back with the new address and sometimes, when you thought you had caught them, the cloud would start swirling up in the air again and fly away over the roofs of the houses.
I was very good at catching the swarms when my father was out at work and he was good at making them move back into their old hives again as if it was a brand new home. But after a while the bees started getting very angry and they always wanted to go back to the country. My father said that maybe they were getting aggressive because of inbreeding. And one day, when he was out on the roof of the breakfast room checking the hives, they attacked him. I wasn’t there to stop it. I wasn’t there to do the sting-stopping trick with the tea towel and cracking the bees before they could do any harm. I was away, walking on my own all day, hanging around by the sea and thinking of going for a swim.
Nobody could stop what happened. My father was dressed for going on the moon with the cage around his head and the big gloves going up past his elbows. He was taking out the frames and trying to make sure they weren’t thinking of running away again, so then the bees all went mad. They zigzagged all around him like an unhappy cloud. My mother knew there was something wrong so she closed all the windows and told everyone to stay inside. Maybe my father was not meant to be a beekeeper. Maybe he wasn’t calm enough to be a father. Maybe the bees knew he was still fighting and thinking about the time when he was a boy and nobody liked him except for his mother. Maybe they could feel anger in the air from the time when Ireland was still under the British, or when Ireland was free and could remember nothing but being under the British. Maybe they could smell things like helpless anger, because they kept trying to kill him. And then one of them finally got in under the cage around his head and stung his ear.
My father thought he would never hear music again as long as he lived, so he began to panic and dropped the frame in his hands. The bees jumped up in the air like a black cat. They were humming like a furious engine now. He tried to get the bee out of his ear but they were already stinging the leather gloves. Every time he tried to stop them from getting under his cage, he was only letting more of them in. He nearly fell off the roof trying to beat them off He shouted for help and climbed back in through the window to get away from them. My mother heard him calling and ran up the stairs with a towel, but there were bees all over the house by now. Everyone ran away to hide. Ita got into bed and covered herself up with the blankets and didn’t come out again. Bríd took Ciarán into the bathroom to play with water and locked the door for ever. The whole house was full of bees. They were in every room, buzzing at the window, trying to sting anything they could find, soft things like curtains and pillows and coats that smelled like us.
My father was running through the hall with bees on his back and his arms. My mother was behind him trying to beat them off with the towel and getting stung herself as well. He was shouting and trying to get the cage off his head. They were both shouting, which is the worst thing of all because the bees know when you’re not calm. That makes them even more aggressive. They stung him around his neck and close to his eyes and on his lip. They stung him inside his shirt, even under his arm, even in the other ear so that he couldn’t hear anything any more. Then my mother just flung open the front door and ran out of the house, out on to the street, with the bees still following. They escaped from the house and left the front door wide open. She pulled my father across the road and waved at the cars passing by. Neighbours ran back into their houses because they were scared of bees and scared of the Irish language. In the end, a woman stopped her car to take them down to the hospital. But even then the bees got in with them and kept stinging my father. Even when he got into the hospital they came after him and kept stinging until he stopped fighting and couldn’t say anything more. They were buzzing at the frosted glass of the hospital windows and around the neon lights. They were still trying to sting anything they could find, things like rubber tubes and plastic gloves. When the doctors and nurses started taking his clothes off they found bees underneath who were trying to sting him even though he was not moving any more. They found a bee right inside his ear. They counted 38 stings in all and that was more than anyone could live through with a bad heart.
When I came back I saw the front door open for anyone in the world to walk into our house. I knew there was something wrong because there was a hum in the hallway. Bees were at all the windows. They were dying on the floor and walking around in circles, making themselves dizzy. I knew there was something wrong because Ita was still under the bedclothes afraid to come out. Everybody was crying and you don’t want your father to die. You still want to be friends with him, otherwise you won’t like yourself very much either. I didn’t want to have a father who was killed by his own bees before I could talk to him.
My father worked all his life with the ESB. He helped to bring electricity to lots of places in Ireland like Connemara and Mayo and the Aran Islands. It was called rural electrification. My father was responsible for all the wires hanging between the lamp-posts all around the country. He was respected with his long Irish name, the name that nobody could pronounce but that everybody remembered. And then he had one last job to do before he died, he had to buy some high tension cables in Germany. He was the only one who could speak German in the ESB, so he was sent over to get the best value. He visited factories and admired all the German inventions. He travelled all around the country and said the Germans were great people. And that’s where he died. The bees followed him all the way and on the last day at Frankfurt Airport, when he was on his way back home again, they killed him. He was sitting down, ready to say goodbye to one of the men he was buying the cables from. Then he just fell over into the man’s lap, stung to death.
The phone call came in the afternoon. My mother came out of the front room with shadows around her eyes. She walked around the house as if she was lost and didn’t know where to go. His coffin came back to Ireland some days later. His suitcase, too, full of things that he had bought for us, presents from Germany to make up for all the mistakes.
I had seen other funerals before but I never thought it would be our funeral. At the church my mother looked so different. She’s my mother, but when I saw her crying, she was a child again. She was thinking of all the things that happened in her life after she was nine years old and her own father died. Now she’s an orphan again and everyone has to look after her. She was weak coming out of the church, so Eileen and Tante Roseleen had to help her and hold her arms. There were lots of people outside the church that we didn’t know. People shook hands with me that I never saw in my life before and I never knew my father had so many friends. Everybody was looking at us and whispering with the foggy dew in their eyes. People said there was nobody like my father left in Ireland now. They said he was the last person to be killed by his own bees and Irish people were only interested in things like cars and televisions from now on. Onkel Ted was there to help my mother into the black car for all the family because she had nowhere to go home to any more. It looked as if she had just arrived in Ireland and didn’t know where she was.
After that it
’s sometimes hard to talk to my mother. She says she should have fought back earlier. She says she was trapped by my father and could not escape. If she had the choice she would still be born in Germany and she would still come to Ireland, but she would have changed things and made different mistakes this time. People sometimes come to visit her and ask her if there’s anything they can do. Gearóid comes in his Volkswagen and his tweed suit, but she doesn’t want to see him. Some of the neighbours invite her over but they don’t always understand what she says in her German accent. Sometimes people come from Germany to visit and then the house fills up with the smell of cake again. But most of the time my mother prefers to sit in the front room and read books and write her diary, because that’s your only friend for life. To my children, she starts off again. When you grow up I don’t want you to say that you knew nothing.
The Speckled People Page 25