Hugo Hamilton - Disguise

In a Dublin bar that evening, he understood for the first time in his life what it meant to be homesick. He drank his beer, aware of his own presence in time and space. He had no story to live inside, no place in the imaginary world. He craved that belonging, something beyond the limitations of his own physical state.

‘You’re not from around here,’ somebody said, and then he was drawn into conversation with a group of office workers.

They asked him questions. It seemed absurd to them that somebody was sitting alone without talking. They had a peculiar gift for creating an ersatz feeling of home.

He decided to stay in Ireland. Rented a cottage from an old woman some distance outside the city. It had a great rose garden which had become neglected but which he cultivated and brought back to life for the time that he lived there. He found a job working part-time in a recording studio in the city, creating tunes for radio adverts, mortgage companies, insurance brokers. Happy tunes to which people drove to work every morning, jingles that entered into their subconscious traffic-logged stares and adhered like sticky tape to their minds. He made them up and forgot them right away, hardly even remembered composing them when he heard them on the radio himself.

He found a few clubs where they played jazz and managed to get some stand-in gigs. Ultimately, he found a regular spot, too, but there was no money in it and maybe the will to make it was gone. He was only doing it for his own pleasure now, and that lifted a great weight of expectation off his shoulders, allowing him to play more freely.

He was away for the most important years when Daniel was growing up. He had missed key events in his development, only hearing about them in letters from Mara. He was absent when Daniel had his teenage crisis with drugs and only heard about it weeks later when it was all over.

One day, Mara received a phone call at work to say that Daniel had been rushed to hospital after suffering a seizure. Martin was in the emergency ward with him.

‘He’s all right,’ Martin assured her. ‘The doctors are examining him right now, doing all the tests. He just keeled over in geography class. His classmates said he was shaking and his eyes were rolling around.’

‘My God,’ Mara said. ‘What are they saying?’

‘They suspect it’s epilepsy,’ Martin said. ‘But let’s wait and see.’

She was forced to drop one of her own patients in mid-treatment. Raced over to the hospital and found Daniel sitting up in bed with Martin beside him, already joking about things. He was out of danger, but had to remain under observation until they had done a CAT scan and various other tests.

When Mara finally got to speak to the registrar herself, she asked lots of anxious questions. She was told that Daniel was a suspected epileptic, and if this proved to be the case, he would probably have to go on lifelong medication to prevent further attacks. They had ruled out blood pressure issues. She was told that seizures like this could mean only one of two things, epilepsy or drugs. People sometimes got seizures from taking cocaine, but they had already ruled that out because Daniel denied taking anything.

She had recently found hash in his bedroom and had told him to be careful.

‘You’re only fifteen,’ she said to him.

She explained that she and Gregor had done all of those things as well, but that you could not allow it to take a hold of your life. She spoke wisely, like a recovered addict, knowing all the trapdoors of addiction, but still unable to get away from her own obsessions which had also made her very detached from reality, still trying to substantiate the life story of a man who had disappeared out of her life.

Around the hospital bed she eventually got Daniel to admit that he had taken cocaine along with a substantial quantity of alcohol.

‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ she said after speaking to the doctors once more.

Was this a cry for help too? While Martin and Mara brought chocolates and childish gifts, delivering all his needs, his music, his books, his games, trying desperately to turn him back into a child, what became clear to them all was that Gregor was absent from this crisis in his life. It was Martin who was present for that remarkable incident and Martin who collected Daniel from the hospital and brought him home. Gregor only heard about all this much later in a letter, as though it was some passing event in life which had already been sorted out by the time the news came.

The people in the town must have wondered why it was all taking so long. It was only a matter of hours before the town fell into the hands of the Americans. They were already on the far side of the lake, probably only waiting for the dawn to come. Already there had been quite a number of air attacks. Bombers on their return from city infernos had casually dropped an excess load on the post office one morning. The bakery had also been hit and fifteen people killed while they queued up for bread. All week the sound of heavy weaponry could be heard in the distance, echoing across the lake, absorbed by the forests. Now and again, the urgency of battle came closer with the abrupt presence of fighter planes overhead and the immediate response of anti-aircraft guns. Trucks racing by. Soldiers running. Orders bawled out in the streets. A tired assortment of old men and boys dragging themselves towards the enemy lines while others watched them carefully for signs of weakness and surrender. It made little sense defending this cluster of streets with nothing more than a church and a graveyard and a public house. A few villas by the lake and a railway station full of refugees. And still the business of holding the lines dragged on endlessly, hour by hour, through the night.

At the same time, they must have been wondering how all this could be over so soon. It was only a few years ago that all the dreamy optimism swept through the streets like an immortal carnival and everyone hung out their swastikas. Some of the children who were just starting in kindergarten at that time were not even out of school yet. The boys who were in school then hardly had enough time to grow a stubble on their chins before being sent to the front line. It was coming to an end before it even began, and still there was unfinished business in the town. In that last moment before peacetime and justice, they held on to the logic of invincibility with even greater tenacity, defending their own transgressions with suicidal obsession.

In the police station, Gregor’s mother had been allowed to go to the toilet. The corridor was heavy with smoke and kept dark. Only the rectangular outline of light around the door at the back where they were holding Max. An officer directed her with a torch and she was able to clean the boy up in the dark and wash out the soiled cloth. She heard the interrogation, men speaking with great patience one minute, then raising their voices suddenly to a frightening bark that made her jump. They laughed as though they were at a party.

‘Don’t worry,’ she heard one of them bawl. ‘We’ll have him before the night is out.’

As she came back through the corridor again she heard the voice of Max, pleading with them.

‘I don’t know,’ he begged.

‘Who gave you the fuel?’

There was no answer to that, only the sound of a fist, hard and soft, no more than a light click coming from a sports field or a playground, but with incredible violence concealed inside. How breakable the world was. How unfair the game rules. How much the force of the blow was felt by herself, imagined beyond all proportion in the dark.

‘Muncher,’ they shouted. ‘Useless muncher.’

Their failure to find answers was being converted into rage. And their rage needed more justification, more abuse, more derision. They railed in grand terms against all schemers and deserters, defrauders of the Reich in its greatest hour of need. They knew what Emil had been up to all along, singing the right songs on Hitler’s birthday like a great patriot. They vowed to comb every street until they found out where he was hiding. They knew about his trail of lovers. Some of them had already confessed their pathetic treason of bedroom acts.