Hugo Hamilton - Hand in the Fire

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 at the ring finger and repeating the gesture of giving it away each time the chorus returned.

I ran into an electrician who had been working on the same site with me for a while, rewiring. He was a cool character, in his late fifties, with a goatee beard. He spoke to me in a casual way, indirectly, looking away towards the band. He started telling me about a guy called Dev, saying that he had ‘totally fucked up the place’ and I thought it was somebody working with him on one of the sites. Was he another electrician or what? They all laughed when I asked the question. And that’s how it often is, you say something without even knowing that it’s funny. Until it was explained to me that Dev was the short for De Valera, a tall figure from history that some of the older people talked about as though he was still alive and likely to walk into the pub any minute and order himself a drink.

The electrician was glad to step in and give a summary of Irish history. I listened eagerly, accepting the facts about internment camps and hunger strikes. He mentioned place names and dates which meant nothing to me but which made some of the women flinch. I suspected that there was still a strong level of sexual attraction revolving around national sorrow, not just where I came from but here as well. They talked about how bad things were ‘up there’ in Northern Ireland. One of the women said it was great to have no more checkpoints and no more dawn raids, not to mention car bombs and kneecapping. But she felt there was something great about those times as well. Lots of passion. Lots of men on the run. She said there was a smell of disinfectant in the air since the Peace Process began, and within seconds they were all laughing again.

I tried not to ask any more stupid questions and they claimed me as their friend, temporarily at least.

‘Anyone gives you any trouble, we’ll burst them.’

The word ‘burst’ confused me at first. I could only associate it with the phrase ‘bursting out laughing’. They were making me laugh all the time. Everybody was bursting out and cracking up, and I had no idea that I was walking myself into trouble. It came as a complete surprise to me that the electrician would end up trying to burst me a little while later.

All through the evening, they called each other ‘knackers’, which I first thought was some kind of joke. It was a reference to travellers, people on the move, like the Roma back home. Unlike the settled people who lived in houses, the travellers lived in caravans by the side of the road mostly, or used to, before it became illegal to do so. I had seen them on my journey around the country and was told that they had been displaced by a man named Cromwell, another hated figure in Irish history. ‘Knacker-drinking’ was a term which they used to describe those who consumed their alcohol outdoors in public places.