Hugo Hamilton - Hand in the Fire

‘Come back and see me sometime.’ She smiled through red eyes. Then she sat down and looked at her phone to see if anyone had left a message. She waved with both hands and told me to take care of myself, so I walked out the door, away across the street, not even watching for the traffic on the wrong side of the road, as though it was impossible for me to get killed.

To be honest, I never expected to meet him again. The city was full of carpenters, so it was a surprise to get the call early one evening saying he wanted to discuss a small job at his mother’s house. What was even more strange was the urgency. We had to meet right away. And then it was all quite informal, with no clear lines between work and friendship. Normally you keep those things separate, so I thought. You might go for a drink after the job is finished, if everybody is happy. But he started everything in reverse. He wanted to go for a drink even before I had time to prepare a proper estimate.

By then I was working full time for a small building company. My plan eventually was to get into business on my own, so I was happy to take on small jobs in my spare time. I had got to know a Lithuanian carpenter by the name of Darius who had his own workshop and a van. My own range of tools was very limited and he lent me some of his whenever I needed them.

Kevin picked me up and brought me over to his mother’s house. A beautiful, spacious family home on a terraced street leading down to the sea, not far from the nursing home where I had worked. It was clearly in need of some repair and as he parked the car, he called it Desolation Row, after one of his mother’s favourite songs.

He left me standing in the kitchen while he went upstairs calling his mother. But then she came in from the back garden wearing gloves and holding a pair of shears in her hand, looking at me as though I had just broken in and couldn’t find my way out again.

‘And who are you, if I may ask?’

The confusion was soon cleared up when he reappeared and introduced us. She took her gloves off to shake my hand.

‘Vid Ćosić,’ he said and she repeated the name slowly: Choz-itch .

Next thing we were standing upstairs in his mother’s bedroom, talking about fitted wardrobes. I asked her what she had in mind and she mentioned black ash.

‘Black ash,’ I said, trying to warn them off with a smile. ‘In a bedroom. Might end up looking a bit like a funeral parlour.’

There was silence in the room. I had said something wrong. His mother sighed like a slashed tyre. She wore a very serious expression and perhaps she was in mourning, I thought to myself. In fact she hardly smiled even once during the meeting.

‘Black ash is very dignified,’ Kevin said, helping me out.

‘Of course,’ I said, as soon as I realised my mistake. ‘It depends on how it’s done. Like, what kind of ash were you thinking of, veneer or solid ash, stained?’

I thought it was a travesty putting any kind of fitted wardrobes into a room like this. It was an old period house and they would never look right. But that’s something you learn after a while. You couldn’t be honest. You had to make allowances for taste and be prepared to say that black ash was an elegant choice, even when it was the most revolting material you ever had the misfortune to work with. Besides, there was no changing her mind. She had seen something in a magazine. Floor to picture rail in black ash veneer was what she wanted.

They must have known I would be very competitive, because they didn’t seem to have anyone else in mind for the job. The cost was not much of an issue, or the timescale. I made it clear to them that I could only take it on in my spare time.

‘I’ll need a bit up front for the materials,’ I said.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘How much?’

‘I’ll have to price the stuff and get back to you.’

‘Just let me know.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said, because that seemed like a good, neutral sort of phrase to me.

And that was it. He was already rushing me away to the nearest pub for a drink. While he was waiting for his girlfriend to turn up and go to dinner with him, he filled me in on his mother’s personality. You could see that he admired her and also feared her a little, like a schoolboy. She was a schoolteacher, he explained, so you had to earn your smiles. She could be a bit severe at times, but she was actually very funny underneath the exterior, so he claimed. Quite street wise, too.

He gave an example which sounded more like a warning. His mother had been attacked in the street recently by a junkie who was after her handbag. She managed to distract him by saying the next thing that came into her head. ‘They knocked down the wall,’ she said. Her attacker looked all around in confusion. Who? What wall? By then he had completely forgotten about the handbag and fled empty-handed.

‘Don’t worry,’ Kevin assured me. ‘You’ll get on great with her.’

It was not the kind of job you could easily price for, because there were other factors involved. Payment in kind. 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.