Hugo Hamilton - Hand in the Fire

Most of the patients drank tea all day and couldn’t sleep at night. One old woman came down to see me regularly and Nurse Bridie told me to ‘go along’ with her. Which turned out to be good advice in general. The woman was dressed elegantly in a green cape and drooping earrings, ready to go out to the theatre, so she claimed. The only thing out of place was that it was well after two in the morning and she was wearing slippers. She asked me to call a taxi and I pretended to do that, lifting up the phone and dialling an imaginary number, speaking to an imaginary person on the other end of the line.

I suppose you could say that everyone is an actor, to a certain degree, but I sometimes found it hard to enter into the character I had been given to play here. I was still learning the lines, while everybody around me seemed so sure of their roles. They were born for the part.

I couldn’t help being myself most of the time.

While the woman in slippers waited for the taxi, she produced a silver cigarette box from her handbag, telling me that it belonged to her father who had fought in the War of Independence. She asked me to place my index finger into an indent left by a bullet. But for that cigarette case, she said, her father would have been killed as a young man and she would never have been born. Holding the silver case in my hand, I thought of the man whose life it saved. I could even imagine the night of the ambush as if it happened only recently in my own country, when the war was going on. The faces hidden in the grass. The empty landscape. The well-chosen bend in the road. The hours of boredom and the clothes of men stinking like soup after rain. All the imaginary noises in the distance until the sound of the real truck driven by enemy soldiers came along at last with headlights stabbing across the bog. The fear vibrating in the turf and, eventually, the crack of shots and the shouts of men and unforgettable silence after it was over. Men lying dead on the road and the echo of gunfire still singing in the brown bog pools for weeks and months, even now.

As she placed the cigarette box back into her bag, she revealed that her father was not the kind of person who owned a cigarette case, let alone a full packet of cigarettes. He had taken it from a dead British officer after an ambush. He had inherited the charm of the silver cigarette case and passed it on, like so many other monuments left behind in this country from that time, so she told me, like the railway tracks and the granite harbours and the obelisk in the shape of a ‘witch’s hat’ on the hill which was built for no reason during the famine times.

My first history lesson. I was grateful to her for it. It gave me the feeling of belonging here, a feeling of friends and enemies going back a long time. It made me think I had lived here all my life, with uncles and aunts talking about me and waiting to hear from me. You can read as many history books as you like about this country, but it all sounds like fiction unless you have something tangible to link it up to.

The taxi never came. As she got up to leave, she told me it was nice to have got the chance to meet me. The next time she came down, she had no idea that we had met before, which allowed me to pretend I never heard her story and I could be welcomed all over again.

More often it was Nurse Bridie who came down to get away from the ‘insatiable maniacs upstairs’, as she put it. I recognised the squeak of her white shoes on the floor. She sat down and tried hard to get me to talk. She asked me why I had come to Ireland and what dark secrets did I have hidden behind my eyes. She wanted to know if there was anything I missed about home, apart from the weather and the cakes. She wanted to know if I had a girlfriend, and when I shook my head, she didn’t believe me.

‘You’re so innocent,’ she said to me a number of times, which made me think I was completely transparent.

She told me lots of things about the nuns in Ireland. She said they were savages, most of them. She had gone to school with the sisters of ‘no mercy’. She said the nuns had always employed the most vulnerable. There was a young boy working in the kitchens who got a pot of boiling chip oil spilled over him. ‘You should have heard him screaming,’ she said. ‘Blisters the size of cups on his neck. When they tried to remove his shirt, the skin came off like red silk lining. Mass. That’s what they offered him as compensation.’ Then she warned me to leave before it was too late.

‘Get out before they pour boiling oil on you.’

She blew me a kiss each time, just as a joke. Then I heard her shoes squeaking away again. I knew there was a sadness being suppressed by her laughter, like a cut under the skin that would not heal. But it was hard for me to ask her what it was.

When I stopped working there she said she was not surprised that I would break her heart and walk away, it was the story of her life. She invited me for a farewell drink. We met in a pub close by and she seemed older out of uniform, or younger, it was hard to say. More motherly, perhaps, and also more fragile, more like a girl. Sitting with her coat on and her handbag beside her, she stirred her vodka and tonic with a plastic stick and did all the talking, because I had nothing to say and didn’t know what questions to ask. She placed her mobile phone on the table beside her drink and watched it for a while to see if it would ring. She started crying and I could not work out what to do in a situation like that where she was not my mother or my sister. She ended up putting her hand on my arm to comfort me instead. She opened her handbag, searching for a tissue to wipe her tears, but then produced a letter which she asked me to read.

Dear Bridie, it said, it is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter.

It was written by her fiancé around thirty years earlier. I read it slowly all the way through, moving my lips across every word. He was breaking it off with her, so I gathered. They were intended to get married. The date had been set for the wedding and the families notified. At the last minute, he changed his mind and explained that he was not ready for it, because he was still drinking too much. He was not fit to be married to her. He didn’t deserve her love and the only thing left for him to do was to leave the country and emigrate to America.

I suppose each country has its own rules for love and dishonesty. Different ways of disappearing and walking away from the past. Different measurements for loneliness and happiness. I wanted to track down the man who wrote the letter and tell him that he had made the biggest mistake of his life. But it was no longer possible to intervene because time had turned us all into distant observers.

She told me that she had a baby shortly after he left, but that she had been persuaded to give it up for adoption. She had tried to make contact with her son in recent years, but he had not wished to meet her. She asked me if I thought he would be good looking and intelligent, so I said yes, of course. She wanted to know if he might have red hair like her and then she answered all her own questions, assuring herself that her boy was happy in his new family and better off not looking back. Even though he was grown up by now, living his own life, she still spoke of him as a baby. Staring straight into my eyes, she said she hoped he turned out a bit like me, in fact, which made me think of myself as her son, promising to do my best.

She’d been holding on to the farewell letter ever since, refusing to get off the bus at the terminus, dreaming back and forth along the same route for ever.

‘Go for it,’ she said to me, putting the letter back into her handbag. I wondered if these were the exact same words she had spoken to her fiancé, just to be big-hearted and to make sure they parted as friends with no hard feelings. She pushed me with her elbow, unable to sit beside me any longer. Then she stood up to embrace me.