Hand in the Fire. Hugo Hamilton
‘Yes. But what about you?’
‘Look. This is important,’ he said, pulling in to the side of the road for a moment. ‘You cannot mention my name. I can’t be dragged into this.’
He had done me a favour and now it was my turn to return the favour, to put my hand in the fire for him.
‘You’re doing a job at my mother’s house, that’s all you have to say. If they come looking for information, you call me. Say nothing. They cannot force you to answer any questions until you have your solicitor present. You understand that?’
He drove on with the windows open and his elbow out, coaching me, assuring me that everything would be fine.
‘You remember nothing, right?’
He smiled at me, placing his hand on my neck.
‘OK, my friend.’
We were tied to each other now, though I couldn’t work out whether he needed me or whether I had become a dead weight around his shoulders.
He stopped to buy a newspaper, flicked swiftly through the pages, then showed me a small report on the incident which described the victim as a man in his early sixties who was the subject of a serious assault. He was recovering in hospital and the Garda were appealing for witnesses. They were looking for two attackers, believed to be non-national, of Polish extraction.
‘They have it all arse-ways,’ he laughed, throwing the paper into the back seat.
As he moved on again, I noticed that he had time to examine every woman we passed on the street. He spoke quite openly about what he liked and disliked, what turned him on and what he would never touch in a million years. He started telling me about his life, about Helen, about his family. Disposing of his biography, so to speak, in a single breath, like something he needed to leave behind rather than something he had grown into over the years.
I heard somebody once say that your childhood runs after you like a little dog. He started telling me things about his family that he wanted to get away from, confiding in me as an outsider who could be trusted, knowing that I would keep it all to myself.
His parents had met in London. They were probably hippies who couldn’t find enough drugs and rock music in Ireland and left the country. They were the last generation to leave on the boat, he explained, before cheap flights took over. People who felt stifled and compelled as much by the habit of leaving as by the excitement of arriving anywhere else. It was in the blood. They just did what so many did before them. He began his life growing up in England and only returned when he was around nine years old. With the troubles going on in the North, he explained, and the mistrust of Irish accents on the streets of London, his mother decided to make a go of it back in Dublin. Over the years, he had lost any trace of his English accent. And maybe this was why he understood my position so well. At school, he learned what it was like to be excluded and tried to mix in and camouflage himself. He did his best to be Irish. He was aware of the inadequacies that come with being a stranger and denied the early part of his own childhood, ignoring the dog running after him.
‘Never look back, my friend.’
He would repeat this phrase many times more. It was inscribed on every thought, on every decision he made.
‘You’ve got to be able to walk on out of it,’ he said. ‘Believe me. You can’t let yourself be dragged down.’
He was speaking out of my mouth, as they say. I agreed with everything he said for my own personal reasons, which had all to do with leaving and never going back again. He must have seen something in my situation that could perfectly explain his own, the story of his life described in mine. Like me, his aim was to escape. Only, he made it look like fun. All the bad things erased. Everything full of optimism and enterprise. Everything converted into a laugh. You could tell what made him so attractive to women, for instance, not only his striking good looks but also his ability to magnify the world around him into a great story.
His mother’s name was Rita, and right from the beginning I could see that he adored her. She was a born schoolteacher and you could hear the chalk grinding when she spoke. Her word was always final, with no remission. End of story. She had seen everything in life, including drugs and sex and anything young people could invent. It was all being repeated over and over down through the generations, just a new treatment, new lingo, new energy and new boredom. She took in the news and current affairs as though she could see it all coming. She reacted in the same way to her own misfortunes with stoic detachment, as though they were happening on the far side of the world.
He told me that she had a long memory. If you did something to her, she would never forget. For example. His little sister was initially called Eilish, after his aunt Eilish. But there had been a falling out, something unforgivable was done, and his mother changed the baby’s name to Ellis.
He said his father was a ‘waster’ from Connemara who had ‘fucked off’, leaving Rita to bring up three children on her own back in Dublin. She’d had the good fortune to inherit a house and was helped out by her brother, a priest, but it had not been easy to keep the family going. His father was the classic emigrant, the person who walked away but kept on singing about going home.
‘Homesickness,’ he said. ‘It’s like a disease. A psychiatric condition that people used to pass on to their children at birth.’
He could remember his father coming back from time to time on a visit. The family had tried to make a go of it once when Kevin and his sisters were small, but he left again, back to London. Kevin could recall him singing with his eyes closed. Speaking the old language, talking in Irish to his friends. But then he finally disappeared for good. The only contact after that was talking to him on the phone once or twice, before the money ran out in whatever coin box his father stood in. The line would go dead and all he would hear was the crackle of the rain on the other side.
‘Thing of the past, really,’ he said. ‘Homesickness. All that seeping nostalgia. It’s like polio. Or tuberculosis. Very rare these days.’
His father had written himself out of the family history. I was being written in. And maybe that’s what I longed for most, to be pasted into the family scrapbook, whatever the consequences. He was claiming me as his friend, offering me this precious information, but also conscripting me as a foot soldier, sworn in by an unspoken oath of loyalty.
When we arrived at the house, he introduced me to both his younger sisters, Jane and Ellis. His mother made a pot of tea and put some fresh scones on the table for us. I felt more like a guest than a worker. Kevin gave them my biography so as to avoid too much interrogation from his mother. Belgrade, parents died in a car crash, memory loss after the accident, came to Ireland to get a new start. No further questions.
‘Tragic, what happened there,’ his mother said, being polite.
Then he disappeared again and I began working upstairs in the bedroom. First of all I smashed up an ancient free-standing wardrobe which was listing to one side. I stacked the broken pieces in the back garden to be used for firewood. After that, I ran around to the local building supplier’s to collect some batons so I could start framing up for the new wardrobe, which was simple enough. It was not such a big job. The black ash panels were to be delivered during the week. I reckoned the whole thing would not take much more than a week or two in my spare time.
Later, while I was fixing the batons to the wall, his mother brought me a mug of tea and some biscuits. She was curious to see how I was getting on. And when I was finished, I made certain to clean up after myself, so that she would not end up walking on splinters in her bare feet at night. I brought the plate and the mug back down and placed them in the sink.
‘You’re a bit of a perfectionist,’ she said to me. ‘I can see that.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Not often you get that around here.’
‘Ah well. I do my best, I suppose.’
She owned a collection of tin, wind-up toys. A little boy on a bicycle.