Hand in the Fire. Hugo Hamilton
He knew I was trying to get a foothold in this country and encouraged the idea of me getting into business on my own. He started explaining the rules, telling me how to run my own future, giving me all kinds of advice on how to get started.
I felt so accepted. You see, when you’re not from around here, it often feels a bit like gate-crashing, like you’re at a party and people are wondering where you come from and who invited you. You take everything at face value and you can easily get people wrong. It’s often hard to make a call between good and bad. So it’s great to have somebody looking out for you. Somebody on your side who’s going to let you know what’s coming your way.
He even introduced me to his girlfriend, Helen. She shook my hand and recalled talking to me briefly on the phone. It was good to see her in person. You could understand why he would have fallen in love with her. The energy in her eyes. The open smile. She started asking questions as soon as she discovered where I was from.
‘Belgrade,’ she said.‘I love Balkan music. All those high-speed trumpets and drums.’
It made me feel homesick for a moment to meet somebody who was so interested in my country. She said she had a few CDs from that region and that she would love to go there sometime.
‘I’d give anything to hear the music live.’
They were quite well informed about Yugoslavia and what happened during the war. There was nothing much that I could add to their knowledge, only to confirm that Milošević and Karadžić and all these people had fucked up the place and left a terrible stain on the map. What more can you say than that?
They wanted to know about my family. So I told them how my parents had died in a car crash. Long after the war was over, we were on our way to the wedding of my sister when the accident happened, somewhere in the countryside. Both parents were killed instantly and I was very lucky to be alive, if that’s how you would put it. I was able to attend the funeral, but I suffered head injuries which had me in and out of hospital for months afterwards. I was having great trouble with my memory ever since.
The truth is that I didn’t want to remember anything. I’ve read stories about women who suffer from voluntary blindness after repeatedly witnessing terrible things in war. They cannot bear to see any more horror and lose their sight as a form of sub-conscious self-protection, so it seems. Their faculties close down in an attempt to shut out the worst. Maybe it was a bit like that for me. There were certain things from childhood that I didn’t want to know any more. You could say it was voluntary memory loss. Except that it was much simpler to tell everyone I had received head injuries in a serious car accident and suffered from amnesia.
I liked to think of myself beginning all over again here, with a clean slate. I had no life before I arrived and could hardly remember a thing.
‘Why did you pick this country, of all places?’ Kevin asked, though I don’t think he meant it like that.
‘It’s a very friendly place,’ I said, trying to say the right thing. ‘And quite neutral.’
‘Neutral?’
I hesitated and told them I had been to Germany for a while, but it didn’t suit me there. Not that I had anything against Germans, just that I was under pressure to say something good about this country. I said I found people here less judgemental, more forgiving perhaps, more open to mistakes in history.
‘Leave him alone,’ Helen said, smiling.
They fell into a brief argument among themselves, as if I was absent. Some older debate which I could not fully understand. Only in the tone of her voice could I tell that she was defending me, putting words into my mouth. Then they stopped, as if it didn’t really matter all that much. He laughed and put his arm around my shoulder.
‘Another quick one.’
It struck me that I had forgotten to mention my trip down south.
‘By the way,’ I said. ‘I took your advice and went down to Dursey Island.’
She seemed surprised by the mention of the island. I saw her staring at him, but he was turning something over in the back of his mind and didn’t want to look up.
‘Dursey Island,’ she said. ‘You sent him out to Dursey Island?’
‘Where else?’ he said, finally answering her eyes.
‘Out on the cable car with the sheep?’
‘Not exactly with the sheep,’ I replied, just to clarify that point.
‘And was it raining with the sun shining at the same time?’
But she was not really waiting for an answer from me. She was looking only at him. I remained silent, because they might as well have been sitting alone together, on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the ocean. They continued staring at each other and I felt as though I had walked right into their bedroom.
Some days later I phoned him to agree a price for the job at his mother’s house. He laughed at one of my linguistic errors. I said it would cost ‘twice as less’ as I had initially estimated. He pointed out the mistake and offered to meet me later on that same evening with the start-up money so that I could buy the materials and begin the job the following morning.
It was a Friday night and I was out drinking with some of the lads from the site after work. The building company I worked for was a medium-sized operation with about a dozen or so core workers. Home renovations. I spent my time hanging reconditioned doors, putting in new saddles and repairing architraves, replacing damaged floorboards and skirting boards. The builder kept getting my name wrong and called me Vim. I corrected him a number of times and told him it was Vid, but he insisted on changing it back to Vim. Some of the workers had other names for me, like Video. Because my first name was so short and they were unable to shorten it any further to, say, Pat or Joe, the only thing they could do was to lengthen it, giving me versions like Viduka, or Vidukalic, or Videolink, sometimes Vid the Vibrator, or Vim the most effective detergent against household germs. The builder said he was keeping me on, not because I was a good carpenter but because I finished things. He could find any amount of carpenters who were better skilled than I was, but I had a way of completing the job that made it look done. I think some of the other workers were irritated with me for being so neat, but that didn’t stop them from bringing me with them after work on the razz, as they called it.
I was sucked into the rush-hour of their celebration. It felt like the world was going to come to an end at any moment and they were compelled to make the most of it, like a big farewell party. They had a store of phrases and excuses to justify being young and not dead yet. They were determined to live it up by any means, to make up for all the bad times behind them and maybe all the bad times ahead of them as well. They kept predicting the amount of drink they would take and how much fun they would have. There was no question that they were having the time of their lives, but I always had the feeling that, instead of living in the moment, they were more interested in getting away from the real world, stepping back and talking everything up into a big story, like people watching their lives pass in front of them.
Don’t ask me what the name of the place was, I can’t remember. It was a traditional kind of bar with three men standing on a small stage with guitars, belting out songs which most of the people in the pub knew by heart, old and young.
There was a song about a woman called Nancy Spain. It had to do with a ring she had been given, but which seemed to have gone missing. Every time it came around to the chorus, the whole pub joined in to ask the big question, where was the ring that had been given to Nancy Spain? Did she lose it? Did she give it away? I asked some of them around me who she was and what happened to the ring, but they had no idea. They were on the same level of ignorance with me, though they knew instinctively the question could not be answered. Some things exist only in the form of enquiry. They could relate to the idea of the lost ring and were just very happy to mime the action, pointing