Hugo Hamilton - Hand in the Fire

After an hour or two I wanted to get back to the mainland. As the cable car swung across towards me, I could see a young boy inside. The door opened and a dozen sheep came bursting out as though set loose from a trap, their hooves banging and scraping at the steel, jumping over one another in the rush to get at the grass.

One of the sheep got its front leg caught in between the cable car and the pier, so the boy tried to dislodge it. The animal was in great fear, eyes wide, struggling to get away. I gave him a hand to release the sheep and he told me the island was used mostly for grazing now. Some people owned holiday homes there, but they were absent most of the year. The sheep were already ripping lumps of grass as though the perilous trip over was not worth another thought. On the return passage, I was overpowered by the smell of sheep shit and sheep fear and possibly my own fear included, until I stepped on solid ground again. I watched the boy’s sister whistling and herding more sheep on to the cable car with the help of their dog. Then they all travelled across to the island together in the same compartment. At one point, I imagined the door opening and the sheep falling down into the sea, one by one, with their legs pedalling frantically as they accelerated towards their death. But that never happened and there was little or nothing else to remember except the fact that I had been there.

So there you have it. Dursey Island. It does exist. As much as I exist. It has become part of me now, like a stored photograph. I can boast about being there and tell everybody that it’s not just a place on the map where people once lived and God knows where they all are now. But what about all the places I never managed to visit? How could I go around verifying every headland and town in the country? Most of it has to be taken on trust. I take your word for it.

There were plenty of other things I had to find out for myself. And maybe I needed a different sort of map altogether. Some kind of rough guide on how to fit in as much as possible. The rough guide to friendship. The rough guide to betrayal also. The rough guide to rage and hatred and murder.

I had to verify all those things as well.

Don’t get me wrong. It was good to be here. I loved the place right from the moment I arrived – the landscape, the wind, the change of heart in the weather. I didn’t want to live anywhere else in the world. I loved the easy way you have of making people feel at home. All the talking. The exaggeration. The guesswork in the words. I wanted to belong here. I wanted to take part in this spectacular friendship.

At the time I was still employed in security. My first job here was working as a night watchman in a nursing home. Not bad for the time being, I thought. Not a bad introduction to a country either, because it gave me some idea of the back story. All the hopes and disappointments collected under one roof.

The nursing home was situated around an ancient castle by the sea, on the outskirts of Dublin, with extensive grounds overlooking a small harbour, used mainly for pleasure boats and fishing. What a great place for the old people to spend their final days, watching ships coming and going in the bay. Those that could still see, in any case. At night, the lighthouse shone across the water and there was a string of yellow city lights going all the way around the edge of the coast. My job was to take the guard dog out to patrol the grounds once every hour and to deal with any emergencies, which amounted to a few drunken shouts, no more. The dog was an old Alsatian who had a peculiar sense of obedience. He had been trained to obey your command as long as you stayed on the inside, between him and the buildings. If you strayed on to the far side, he would see you as an intruder with no business being anywhere near the place. I spent the first night sitting on top of the oil storage tank with the dog below me, waiting to tear me apart. After that, I learned to stay on the right side of him.

It was clear that I was never really cut out for security work. I was a bit of a walkover. I didn’t have the confidence of an enforcer. What I really wanted was to get into carpentry, even boat building, if possible, but there is no such work available. It was just a dream really. The best I could hope for was some kind of restoration work on old boats. In the meantime, I was glad to make any contacts that might get me into the building trade.

The nursing home was administered by nuns in brown habits, though they didn’t take part in day-to-day caring any more. Those duties were carried out by lay nursing staff. The few nuns that were left over came out from their residence early in the morning to walk the grounds with their headgear blowing vertically in the wind. I got to know one of the nurses on night duty. Her name was Bridie and she had red hair. She was much older than me, in her fifties, but she kept winking and calling me the love of her life. She would laugh out loud and repeat a few of the things I said, not just the accent but the vocabulary. She said I sometimes sounded like a letter from the bank, using words like ‘complete’ and ‘commence’ and ‘with regard to’, words I picked up from the newspapers and which were not suited to everyday use.

‘I’m going to commence laughing,’ she would say.

It took me a while to get the hang of the ordinary words. At first I couldn’t see any difference between start and commence. My sentences must have sounded more like translations, asking people if there was any rumour of work going for a carpenter.

The problem at the nursing home was not so much people breaking in as people breaking out. The ‘inmates’, as Bridie called them, had no valuables to speak of, only books and pictures of their families, packets of shortcake, tins of exotic mints and butterscotch. The rooms all smelled of apple cores and rubber sheets, sometimes banana and leather. There was no alcohol allowed on the premises and some of the patients were going mad with abstinence. One night the dog caught an old retired doctor by the name of Geraghty trying to sneak away across the lawn. He had no socks on and his shoelaces were undone. He stood with his hands up, pleading with me, saying that he had permission to go to the pub. What could I do? I tied his shoelaces for him and let him go. Some time later, Nurse Bridie came down to raise the alarm and he was eventually found sitting on a seafront bench, singing to the waves.

The ground-floor windows were fitted with special bolts after that. Then Geraghty asked me to buy him a half-bottle of whisky and Nurse Bridie knew I was responsible. She came down to the office and sat on my lap, putting her hands around my throat, pretending to strangle me. Doctor Geraghty had run amok through the corridors upstairs with his clothes off, declaring love to every woman in the place. He had forced his way into one of the rooms and refused to leave, hanging on to the metal bed end where a terrified woman sat up with the blankets under her chin, asking for a mirror so that she could fix her hair. When I went upstairs to help escort him back to his room, he turned on me. He could not remember that it was me who had given him the whisky. I took hold of his arm and he went from being drunk and spongy to being rigid and defensive. I was surprised by his strength as he ripped his arm away and stared at me with stony eyes, full of anger or only joking, I wasn’t quite sure at first.

‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘Where are you from? You have no right to interfere in my business.’

‘Now, now, Doctor,’ Bridie said in a firm voice.

Then she led him away quickly, no nonsense, just by sheer willpower and authority. Within minutes she had him back in bed, kissed the top of his bald head and told him to be a good boy. I could never imagine having that command over people here. I had no way of telling an old man what to do in his own country. I was like a child ordering the adults to go to sleep.