Hugo Hamilton - The Speckled People - A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

One day the boiler burst. It started hissing and clicking because of all the bad things that had been thrown into it. It got so hot that you could hear it cracking inside. Then there was a bang and it burst open with hot brown water gushing out all over the kitchen floor like tea with milk. My mother told my father to call the fire brigade. He frowned and sucked in air through his teeth. But then he put out the fire by himself. He carried the red coal out on a shovel and rolled up his sleeves to sweep the tea out the back door.

Then it’s winter and our house starts filling up with mice. The pipes are cold and there are mice in every room because they get in under the back door. More and more of them are coming in every day until all the mice from the whole city are living in our house, my mother says. They’re in the hall and on the stairs, everywhere you go. Any time you open the door and go into a room you see them running away. But mostly they’re under the stairs where things are kept, like jam jars and pots and old shoes. There are so many of them that you have to watch where you walk, because one day when Franz was running down the three steps from the hallway into the kitchen, a baby mouse ran out from under the stairs and got squashed. We all crouched down to examine the flattened corpse until my mother told us not to be so interested in blood and took it away on the shovel.

It’s so cold, we stay in one room by the fire where it’s nice and warm, but if you go from that room up to the bedroom, it’s like going out on the street and you need your coat on. My mother shows me her hands and says they will never get warm again. They’ve gone blue and green with the cold, like mackerel. She wants me to take pity on her hands and please let them in under my jumper to get warm. Be a good boy and give shelter to my poor fish-blue hands, she says. Just let them in for a little second or two to get warm. Then I scream and laugh and my mother screams and laughs, because the mackerel are fast swimmers and they go up under my jumper and down around my neck into my shirt and my mother says: ‘ Wie schön, wie schön warm ’, oh lovely and cosy and warm.

Áine came back from London, but she’s so sad that she only talks to herself in the mirror now. She can’t even say ‘walk on the wall’ in Irish or English or go down to the seafront because her legs won’t carry her. She’s never going back to London, but she doesn’t want to go back to Connemara either, so she lives with us. Sometimes you hear her upstairs crying and my mother says something happened to her, something that can’t be explained or forgotten about either, so we just had to wait for her to get her words back. Onkel Ted has to come and make the sign of the cross over her, but still she won’t come out and nobody knows what to do. My mother says it’s the worst thing of all to be sad for yourself. You can help other people but often you can’t help yourself.

At night you can hear the mice scratching and chasing each other around. For a while we counted the number of mice we saw every day, but then we didn’t know if we were counting the same mouse twice in different rooms. My father bought two traps to catch them but that wasn’t enough, so he bought another one that would catch three of them at the same time. It made no difference. Even if you caught three mice each day, my mother said it would still take a hundred years to catch them all because they could have families faster than we could kill them. The only thing was to stop talking about them and then they would go away. One day, there was a dead mouse in the trap that was half eaten by his own friends, and my mother said it was time to stop talking about it. Mice have no feelings, she said, and some people have no feelings either.

Áine spent all her day sitting up in bed smoking cigarettes. My mother said the best thing was for her to find a new job, then she could buy new clothes and go out and meet new people. Áine’s legs wouldn’t even carry her to the front door, so my mother went around to all the neighbours to ask if anyone knew of any jobs. She spoke to people who owned a man’s shop and people in two grocery shops. After a long time she found a job in a gift shop, but Áine burst into tears on the first day and the owner told my mother that a gift shop is meant to be a happy place and nobody was going to buy anything from a person with tears in their eyes. He said he would prefer it if my mother came to work for him instead. My mother said she would love to work in the gift shop, but her hands were like mackerel and nobody was going to buy anything from fish-cold hands.

My mother said she knew what the problem was. If Áine had nice shoes then she would feel better and her legs would carry her down the street with no shame. My father said it was a waste and that everyone else in our house needed shoes, too, but my mother said it would all be paid back in other ways. So Áine got new shoes, but it made no difference. At night she left the light on in her room and my father said that was a waste, too, because she was not even reading a book, only sitting there smoking cigarettes. He said he gave up smoking when he wanted to buy German records and the only way of paying for them was to take the money from the cigarettes instead. If he had a mouse for every cigarette that Áine smoked and a penny for every mouse that he caught, he would be able to buy every opera and every symphony that ever existed on Deutsche Grammophon. He said it was the cigarettes that were making Áine sad. And one morning, my mother found a black hole in one of the pillow cases and she was afraid the house would burn down.

Every day my mother sits down with Áine and tries to make her smile. She says nobody can make you smile if you don’t want to. Every day my father goes to work on the train. Every day we catch three mice and every day new ones come. Every day I scream and laugh when my mother’s mackerel hands go under my jumper. Every Sunday Onkel Ted comes to tea after his swim at the Forty Foot because he doesn’t feel the cold. We tell him things that happened, but not about mice and not about Áine or the black holes burned in her dresses. My sister Maria pulls up her dress to show Onkel Ted her tummy and then we reach into the pocket of his jacket for the sweets. He goes upstairs to make the sign of the cross over Áine and when he comes down again, he says my mother should take her out dancing.

‘Irish dancing,’ my father said. ‘It would have to be Irish dancing.’

Then everybody is silent for a while looking at each other. Until my mother suddenly bursts out laughing and says she’s forgotten how to dance. Two silent brothers looking at my mother laughing and laughing at the idea of coming all the way over from Germany to bring an Irish woman out to Irish dancing. Onkel Ted smiles and waits for my mother to finish. He’s very serious and says there are things you never forget like cycling and swimming and helping other people. So one evening, my mother and Áine got dressed up and went dancing in the city. She put on her blue dress with the white spots and Áine put on her new shoes and a dress without holes in it. My father stayed at home reading his book and we sat on the carpet playing cars and listening to mice.

My mother said Irish dancing was not like waltzing or any kind of dancing that she had ever seen before. She said in Ireland your feet never even touch the ground. Everyone was floating, except for a man who sometimes slapped his heel down with a bang to the music as if he were trying to make holes in the floor. The dance hall smelled of smoke and perfume and sweat and it was filled with people of all ages. There was a priest and some nuns as well, sitting down in the seats. An old woman with long hair was dancing as if she were only sixteen. All the men were on one side of the hall and all the women on the other. The women danced as if the men didn’t exist, and at the refreshments counter there were people talking over tea and sandwiches as if the dancing didn’t exist. My mother watched three boys sharing a bottle of fizzy lemonade. Each time one of them drank through the straw, the other two kept watch to make sure he didn’t go past a certain mark before he passed it on to the next boy. They had tears in their eyes from drinking so fast.