Dublin Palms

by Hugo Hamilton

  New Year’s Eve. Some bells ringing. The snow is deep, a brightness across the world, everything is like a fairy tale with a bad ending. As the train pulls out slowly from the station, she can see the human shapes hanging, three bodies floating above the snow, their limp feet pointing down like puppets. Their heads have dropped to the side, their arms loose, their hands empty. Around their necks, they have signs she cannot read. The street light casts a golden circle around the snow beneath them, as if they are onstage, the wheels of the train make screeching sounds like the orchestra tuning up.

  The boy in the carriage sees it, they look at each other and cannot speak.

  In Prague, the boy is taken off, then put back on the train a while later, chained again by the feet. Other soldiers board the train, some of them tied to each other. She is made to wait on the platform, the train pulls away, she sees the boy again briefly, staring out, she wants to wave, but there is no way she can let herself do that.

  It’s become so cold, it matters which way your back is turned, east or west. The air is dry and glass sharp, it hurts in the ears. She is taken under guard to a truck outside, they help her up onto the step, into the back. With all that is happening, all that determination to get people back to the front to continue fighting, there is still time for politeness. The truck labours up the hill. The driver at one point has trouble finding the gear and there is a grinding sound of metal teeth, they slip backwards before starting up the slope again. The voice of the driver is like encouragement to a horse. It’s hard to believe you can keep driving upwards, it must be close to the sky. They stop. In front of the castle overlooking the city. She gets a brief view of the wide river below, the bridges, the snow laid out like napkins on the rooftops. She is taken inside the castle and brought down the stairs, a long corridor with doors on either side, she is locked into a cell with a bed and a blanket.

  Helen was the last to leave. She locked up the café, looked at the scorched olive tree outside and made a note in her head to get that removed. She walked around to the car park and got into the car, started the engine, turned on the lights, reversed. As she began moving out, she found a man standing in front of her, blocking the way. It was Bardon, she recognised his white hair, his face, the smile. She stopped and got out. She was friendly to him, but he wouldn’t give in, he said he wanted to be paid, he was not waiting any longer.

  She asked him to clear the way. She said she needed to get back to the children. She gave her word that I would deal with it right away, but he still refused to let her go. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, then he had them in his pockets, there was a plastic bag flapping in the barbed wire fencing along the back wall, she thought it was a bird.

  She threatened to call the guards.

  I’ll come again, he said.

  When she got home, I could see how distressed she was by the way she was trying to calm me down. She looked a bit pale. I asked her if she had been sick. She waved her hand and said she was well able to deal with him.

  This has got to stop, I said.

  Rosie and Essie jumped down from the bannister rail as though I was talking to them.

  I’ll find a way to pay him, I said.

  Are you joking? she said. Pay him with what? For what? For that damp place. The mushrooms growing out of the carpet, do you not remember?

  I know, I said.

  He was ripping us off.

  He won’t give up.

  His conscience is a concrete block, she said.

  From her eyes, I could see she didn’t want to talk about it any longer. Discussing it only made Bardon more present in our lives. What was the point? We had no money. The girls started climbing the bannisters again, Rosie had almost reached the top, she was stuck there. Helen had to help her down, tapping at the spaces in the bannister rail to show her where to place her feet. Our backs were turned to the hall door. We didn’t see the face appearing in the frosted glass panel.

  The man, Essie said.

  I turned around, it was Bardon.

  A blurred shape, moving across from right to left, searching for the bell. His face was illuminated by the overhead light in the porch, the warped pattern in the glass panels made him look short-sighted. He was unable to see us even though we were no more than a few feet away, standing still inside the hall, hardly breathing. His eyes were black, one of them larger than the other. His forehead was sloping away in layers of dense liquid, a pulsing creature with white hair, floating by like the crown of a jellyfish. He had no mouth, only the luminous design of a smile across his shoulders.

  The doorbell rang.

  Helen jumped – Jesus, she said.

  Jesus, Essie repeated.

  Helen got the girls down from the bannisters and brought them into the breakfast room. At the last minute, Rosie ran back up the hall to pick up a piece of pottery she had made in school, a green dish. Helen closed the door.

  I waited to see if he would go away, pretending there was nobody in, even though the lights were on. Our car was parked outside. His vague shape was swaying. Opening the door would let in a flood of seawater, I thought, Bardon with giant tentacles and suckers clasping.

  He rang again and waited. He swung around when I finally opened the door, staring at me with his facial question mark. His eyes were full of rage. He was chewing something, a vague spearmint flavour hanging in the doorway.

  OK, I said, I want to settle with you.

  It was the only way of getting him to leave us alone.

  I was inventing some fantastic, last minute, scheme to get out of this. I explained to him that I had no money at the house. There was no point in offering him a bad cheque. He asked about the day’s takings at the café, did Helen not bring home cash? I told him it was nothing, no more than the price of a few cups of coffee.

  I don’t believe you, he said.

  What about this, I said?

  It was as though I had just started learning to speak. There was a beginner’s conviction in my voice. I asked him would he mind coming with me down to my mother’s house. I would get her to write a cheque for the full amount. That would settle it once and for all. He smiled. He was happy to hear that. He agreed to get into the car, I reversed out of the driveway and drove down the steep hill.

  Along the way, he began a polite conversation, asking what part of Germany my mother was from. He had been to Stuttgart, twice, he said. He still had a couple of words in German, the terms for health insurance, pharmacy, doors closing, the Germans are wonderful people.

  I said nothing one way or another.

  Outside my mother’s house, I parked the car and asked him to wait while I went inside.

  It might take a couple of minutes, I said.

  Good man, he said.

  I stood in the hallway. Greta was reading aloud to my mother in the front room. The door was open. Greta was on the sofa with her bare feet up, my mother on the far side in a chair with a rug around her shoulders. It was the story about a man running a recording studio being asked to cut the word God out of a recorded text, replacing it in multiple places with a new expression – a higher being in heaven. Then later he is asked to cut all those words out again and replace them with little bits of silence.

  I heard my mother laugh, she had read this story many times before. It was written by an author who came from the same part of Germany as she did. He had been in the war, he had become addicted to drugs that were given to the soldiers to keep them going, a version of speed that made them aggressive and detached from reality. His books sometimes appeared like drug visions, he had the mind of an expressionist painter. He had come to Ireland around the same time as my mother. He wrote a small travel book that always reminded me of her way of seeing things, the excitement of arriving, the welcome, the time moving slowly.

  I continued listening to Greta reading. I waited for the moment in the story where the man
in the recording studio gathers the cut snippets of tape with the rejected Gods and puts them into a matchbox. There is a change of heart. He is finally asked to splice the Gods back into the text again and he ends up with a collection of silence.

  How could I ask my mother to pay my debts?

  The story must have made me change my mind. I left the house quietly without disturbing them. I walked to the car and got in.

  I’ll drop you home, I said.

  Did you get the cheque?

  In a minute, I said.

  As I drove down towards the seafront, he began to apologise for approaching Helen directly, she’s a fine woman, he said, very honest, very feisty.

  Feisty?

  He said she had great determination. We were good people underneath. It was not easy for him talking to her about money. But he had his own obligations. The four other properties he had were not yielding all that much. Getting rent out of people was like extracting teeth, he said. Not to mention all the outgoings, he had two sons going to college, they burn up money, he said, it’s a bugger trying to keep them fed.

  With no money to pay him, I returned to the fantasy of arguing my way out. I found myself speaking in a righteous, adversarial tone, turning the finger back on him. In semi-legal language, I accused him of threatening behaviour towards Helen, a mother of two children. He had unlawfully prevented her from getting home to her family, a pregnant woman. He had physically restrained her in the car park, it amounted to kidnapping, false imprisonment.

  He laughed.

  You blocked her way, I said.

  I was having a word with her, he said.

  You have no right to stop her going about her business, holding her hostage against her will.

  He laughed again.

  Come on, he said, getting angry. I was having a word, it’s not my fault she got so upset.

  Upset?

  She drove the car at me, he said.

  What?

  She tried to run me down.

  You’re making this up, I said.

  She could have killed me, he said. Only that she stopped to open the car door and get sick.

  You made her sick?

  The hormones, he said. She was out of control.

  Without explanation, I found myself racing down towards the harbour. My mind was white. My teeth were buzzing. All self-questioning was suspended.

  Bardon became anxious and asked me what I was doing – where are you going?

  I hit the brakes and brought the car to a sudden stop on the pier. As though I remembered at the last minute how easy it was to go over the edge, there was no barrier to madness. I pulled up the handbrake and switched off the engine. The stillness of the harbour was hard to believe, the boats swaying, the screech of a heron lifting. A red sheen thrown back by the windows of the yacht club, duplicated in the water below.

  It was the small inner harbour, where they used to bring in the coal from England, where the whelk boats are tied up. Where lovers sit for hours at night with the radio playing softly and it seems they can never get the car started again. A place of privacy. A place of fantasy. A timeless place on the edge of the world where everything could be reimagined, where the false truth could be switched off and you could go back to the truth beneath the truth and talk about stars and planets and places in the universe that became so inaccessible during the day. Where lovers were close to danger and became immortal and woke up still alive with the sun coming up, the air held too much oxygen, there was a strong smell of diesel and fish, a hollow sound of water slurping in a cavity along the pier wall.

  Why had I brought him here? To this sacred place, known for love and forgetting? Like we were going to sit there and have a long chat, man to man. I was going to speak my mind, let him have it, warn him, tell him, beg him, never again to go near Helen – you made her sick, you made her cry. Here it was, the great protest. Standing up to him. Standing up to everything that was wrong with the world.

  My silence let me down. I got out of the car and stood at the edge of the pier with my arms folded. I heard him trying to open the car door, asking in a muffled voice if there was a child lock. He tried again and again with his shoulder. The car rocked with each attempt. He started knocking on the windscreen, his face alarmed.

  Open the door, he called, like a good man?

  I turned and walked over to let him out. I was full of politeness. I could not help being helpful.

  Sorry, I said. It’s a faulty lock.

  Why this rush to be sorry? The inability to be bad. All my bad had been done before me. There was no bad left for me to do. I had no right to repeat history. The perpetrator in me had been removed. My role models were negative. Bad was my great inspiration. I had to be better than bad. Bad at bad. Better than better. Sorrier than sorry. Never again. I had the urge to be weak, to be soft, to sit back across the coiled-up ropes and fishing nets with my arms out in submission. The losing part of me was getting the upper hand. The winning part of me was capitulating to the part of me that was full of regret. The fighting part of me was out of place. The business part of me was guided by sad songs about people leaving. The failure part of me was making up for people never arriving.

  Soft things had begun to undermine my anger. Like candles and chocolate, the smell of a match lighting up in a room, wooden toys, parcels being unwrapped with the same care that went into packing them, my mother’s language, things I could only laugh at like the words to describe a bad mood – your mackerel mouth.

  He stood on the pier as though he had come in from a long sea voyage, happy to feel the solid force of home underneath his feet. His fury returned with renewed conviction once he was safe. His mouth was a fist. He inhaled through his nostrils and put out his hand.

  Where is the cheque?

  She owes you nothing, I said.

  We stared at each other like underwater men.

  We’ll see about that, he said.

  It was the brown leather shoes I heard. Kicking some of the whelk shells. I saw him stop to urinate against a bollard. I saw him dance to shake himself. I saw him step back to zip up. I continued watching his head going along the granite wall until he got to the road, he didn’t have far to go.

  I felt sorry for what I had not done.

  Why had we allowed ourselves to be shaped by history? By human divisions? Territory? Money? We remained contestants. He could not afford to give in. I could imagine no way out. It was the same dead-end confrontation I had with my father. He was my father. Every man was my father. We were trapped in this male rage. Men doing what men do. Not letting go. Grabbing power. Pissing. Protecting property. Striking fear into others to stop the fear in ourselves.

  I stayed with the calmness of the harbour. I got interested in debris floating on the surface, thick pools of oil, trawlers double moored, the squeeze of tyre fenders as they pushed up to each other, belly to belly. A tower of fish boxes, shackles and chains, wooden pallets. A few marks along the granite wall where they cleaned off paintbrushes.

  I drove away with excessive caution, like a first-time driver. The streets were empty. I got home and parked down the slope outside the house. I sat for a while going over all the things in the world that were refusing to change, all the things in myself that remained unaltered. Was this another failed-artist moment? I was trapped by the things I loved. Trapped by the things I feared. Conscripted into being a man, a father, a lover, a boy, a son, a friend, a fighter, a follower, a consumer with quantifiable needs, the man I was expected to be.

  Helen was already in bed, she looked up and waited for me to speak. I sat down with my back to her.

  Tell me what happened.

  Nothing, I said.

  She told me to get in. I took off my shoes and got out of my clothes. I felt the warmth inside the sheets and gave in to the wave of comfort. A sleepy submission drew all the strength fr
om my arms, it made me defenceless, I found it impossible to hold on to my anger. She picked up a book and began reading to me out loud. I listened to her like a child. Maybe it was the warmth around me or maybe it was the sheer irony of the prose that made me feel so safe, back in the fold of the imagination. It was the story of the troubadour going out on his horse to fight for the honour of women. The blatant connection between the book and what was happening in my life became an absurd parable. The finger was pointing – look at yourself, the heroic knight, dressed in ludicrous bits of armour. It made me laugh at myself. I could see how futile and comical my actions were. It occurred to me that Bardon was sitting up in bed with his wife Marjorie, that she was reading to him from the same book and that he was also unable to stop himself laughing. The two of us with the covers up to the chin, we might as well have been in the same bed together, all of us helplessly laughing at the description of the most beautiful woman on earth.

  It was time to deal with my silence. There was no point in going back to the dentist. What more could he do only remind me that emigrants were full of tears, tap on my teeth and ask if I was still speaking the shadow language. Point at the ghost of my smile and tell me that the inventor of X-rays was a German man who took great delight in photographing his wife’s bones, she thought he was forecasting her death.

  Our family doctor had his practice in a large house on the corner. His surgery was the smallest room. Barely enough space for a leather examination table, some bookshelves, a wash-hand basin. He sat in his chair while I sat on the leather table with my legs hanging down like a boy in short trousers. He listened to my chest, took my blood pressure, examined my fingernails, eyes, ears, tongue – ah. He checked my testicles and asked me if I was happy, was eating properly, did I drink much?