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

I like giving the wrong answer. My father sits on the far side of the table in the breakfast room and says he’s going to wait until I give the right answer, even if it takes all day.

‘Five plus six makes …?’

My father was a schoolteacher once so he knows what he’s doing. He says that he and his brother Ted both got a scholarship and now he wants to make me the best boy in Ireland at tables. I can see myself twice over in his glasses, sitting with my arms folded. He waits and waits, while I search around in my head and say to myself that I will — NOT — give the right answer. I know the answer but I frown and roll my eyes up towards the ceiling and even put my hand on my chin, because that’s meant to help you with thinking.

‘Nine,’ I answer.

‘Wrong,’ he says. ‘Think again.’

We have all the time in the world. It’s Saturday afternoon, he says, and we have better things to be doing. He could be sitting in the front room reading any one of six books about the history of Germany or the Spanish Civil War or the lives of saints or the Blasket Islands or cabinet-making or beekeeping. I could be outside running around in the garden. Franz is waiting for me to go and play football. But we’re going to stay sitting there in the breakfast room all day and all night if we have to. So then I try again, squinting and frowning and humming to myself, now let me see, five and six makes …? I have given every wrong answer there is so there’s none left except the right one.

I look at my father’s bad ear which is flattened out of shape and purple. When I asked him once what happened, he told me that a teacher in boarding school hit him with a steel ruler. Maria said she would pray for it to get better, but then he frowned and blinked and said he didn’t want us looking at his ear any more or talking about it. My mother told us afterwards that he had no father and at boarding school his ear started bleeding and lost all its feeling because he was homesick and wanted his mother. It’s hard not to look at his ear and think about the steel ruler coming down like a sword. I keep thinking of things like that not happening. I try to imagine stopping it with my arm. I imagine fighting off the teacher with long brush. I imagine bending my father’s ear back into shape again, like plasticine.

‘Concentrate.’

He slams his hand down suddenly on the table and I jump. Then my mother comes in because she doesn’t want this to go on for ever either. She says it’s time to give in and then I’ll be free to go. Outside, I can hear the sound of Mr Richardson hammering at something and the echo coming back across the gardens. I can hear Miss Tarleton’s lawnmower and I know there’s hardly any grass on her lawn but she does it anyway. Then I hear the two bangs from the lifeboat, one after the other with a long gap in between, and my mother saying ‘trouble on the sea’. I can hear the Corbetts’ back door closing like a sneeze. Then silence again. Everyone is waiting for the right answer. My mother is nodding. My father is staring. And Franz is standing at the door with the football.

‘Nil.’

It’s the only answer I could think of that I hadn’t given already apart from the right one. But then there was real trouble and real silence. People passing by our house would have heard nothing at all only breathing. Now I could see my father’s eyes inside his glasses, and his ear was red hot, like a piece of coal out of the boiler. He pushed the chair back with a loud howl on the floor and told me to wait while he searched in the greenhouse for a good stick that wouldn’t break this time.

My mother shook her head because it was out of her hands. The person who can’t hear it, must feel it, she said a few times, because that’s what they say in Germany. I could see that she was sorry this was happening but she could do nothing to stop it. She took Franz and Maria away and closed the door. I could hear the ‘in between door’ closing, too, that separates the back of the house from the front. I could hear her going up the stairs, further and further away, closing another door behind her until she could hear nothing at all any more and didn’t have to think about what was going to happen. Everybody was gone, even the sound of the hammering outside, and I could only hear the stick whipping through the air. My father was breathing hard and thinking about lots of angry things in his head like the lives of saints and beekeeping and the time he was at school in Dunmanway and couldn’t go home to his mother. He was thinking about all the things that he couldn’t do with his own life, that he was going to make me do instead. He said he would keep hitting me all day and all night until I gave the right answer.

‘Eleven,’ I cried. ‘Eleven, eleven, eleven.’

Then he stopped and asked me if I was good again.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Say it.’

‘I’m good again.’

I could still feel the hot red lines on the back of my legs when it was time for tea. Franz and Maria wanted to look at them but I didn’t want anyone talking about me, not even my mother. My father shook my hand and said it was time to put it all behind us. It was time to smile because we all have to be friends again. But I couldn’t smile. So then he held my chin and pushed my lips apart with his fingers and I had to show my teeth.

‘Nobody can force you to smile,’ my mother said.

She had a better idea. She offered me an extra biscuit, one more than anyone else. And then she started telling a story about the time they got married and went up two mountains, one in each country. On the train going along the Rhine together, they sat in a carriage with a young boy who looked out the window and ate biscuits from a brown paper bag. All the way to Koblenz, the boy sat eating one biscuit after the other without a word, as if he would never see a biscuit in his life again, as if he was afraid the time of no biscuits would come back. Sometimes he closed the bag and put it aside, as though he told himself he was not going to have any more, but then he could not resist starting again and again until the whole lot was gone.

After that I was sick for a long time. It started after we helped to clean the windows one day, first with soap, then with crumpled newspapers that make a squeaking sound like wild dogs barking far away in the hills, my mother says. The windows were so clean that we thought we were outside and there was no glass at all. After that it was hard to breathe, because the sound of the wild dogs got into my chest. I had to stay in bed listening to them howling all day and all night. My mother came with plasticine and cars. She bought a new colouring book and new pencils, but my fingers were soft and I couldn’t draw. She came in with a tray, but I could not even eat the biscuits, so she made me sit up and drink the lemon tea, at least one sip for your mother, she said.

At night she left the door wide open and the light coming up the stairs, but I was still afraid. The window rattled and there was a large piece of wallpaper hanging down on the far side of the room which looked like a man with a hat coming in sideways through the wall from next door. At first I laughed and said he was only a piece of wallpaper. But he just looked at me with one eye and kept coming with his shoulder held forward. A light from the street shone into the room and sometimes the man stepped right into the light, then moved back into the darkness again. I was very hot and shivering at the same time. I put my back against the wall and started shouting at him to stop, until my mother came running up and sat on my bed. She said I was soaked with sweat and brought in a warm towel to wipe my chest. She said I was afraid of my own imagination. My father came up and stuck a piece of folded paper in the window to stop the rattling. He put on the light for a minute to prove that there was no man coming through the wall, then he smiled and kissed the top of my head. He listened to the howling in my chest and said it didn’t sound as bad as before. Then he went downstairs again and my mother stayed sitting on my bed to tell stories.