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

Sometimes it’s a mistake to be born the son of people who love each other too much. Mary Frances went to see him at the hospital in Cork as often as she could. Once, after Ted was born, they all went up to visit him together, but he didn’t recognise any of them any more and just turned away in the bed. Then a priest had to come and he died alone. Onkel Ted says it was a very cold day in winter when his body was brought on the train to Skibbereen and from there in a carriage to the graveyard on the hillside in Glandore. After that there was only the picture of the sailor over the mantelpiece and the box with the last card he sent home. After that Mary Frances had nothing in her mind only to pray and fight for a pension from the British navy, no matter how long it took, so that she could educate them and make sure they didn’t have to go into the navy or emigrate to America. It was the biggest day of her life when her two sons came back to visit her in Leap, one an engineer, the other a Jesuit.

‘It’s no good looking back,’ my father says. He is sitting across the table from me at breakfast time again and smiles. ‘You should be looking forward. You’re like a blank piece of paper and you should only look forward.’

Maybe that’s why he had to put the picture of the sailor with the soft eyes in the wardrobe, along with all the medals and the box with the homesick postcard. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want anyone to know that he has a limp, because we’re living in a new country now and we can never go back again to the past. And maybe that’s why he changed his name to Irish, so we’ll never be homesick.

‘Ten more days and then we’ll be in the future,’ Maria says.

The storm was gone. There was no wind at all any more and the sun was shining, but when my father went out to work he saw the broken slates on the ground and said there was a hole in the roof. There were fallen branches all over the road, too, and he told us never to touch any wires. Down at the seafront, the waves had thrown lots of sand and seaweed on to the road as if it were part of the sea, as if Dublin were going to be living underwater soon.

The man came to fix the roof. His name was Mr McNally and when I came home from school I saw the ladder in the house going up to the skylight. My mother said he had been up there on the roof for a long time and if he was any longer it would be infinity. I knew that infinity was even further away than the future, but I didn’t know that infinity was in the past as well. She said she could not wait for him to come down, so she stood at the foot of the ladder and called up to him.

‘Mr McNelly,’ she called, because she says everything with a German accent. ‘Mr McNelly, I have a cup of tea ready for you.’

In Ireland, you can’t ask people anything, she says. It’s not like Germany where a question is just a question. In Ireland people get offended by questions, because it’s a way of saying what you’re thinking. The only way to ask Mr McNally something politely was to offer him a cup of tea. My mother was not able to go up the ladder herself, so she kept calling up through the skylight. She said that the longer Mr McNally stayed up there, the bigger the hole in the roof would get and the more money we would have to pay.

Now and again, the phone would ring and it was my father calling from the office to ask where Mr McNally was now and how big the hole was. He could not come home early and go up the ladder himself, so my mother had to go back up the stairs and call up into infinity, saying the tea was already made and was now going cold. As well as that, there were homemade German biscuits, too, just out of the oven, covered with icing and hundreds and thousands. And when Mr McNally still didn’t come down, she called him from the back garden, and after that from the gate in the front garden as well. Everybody on the whole street knew the tea was ready and my mother was getting worried because nobody had ever failed to come down for her biscuits before. When the phone rang again she told my father that maybe Mr McNally had a problem hearing things. And all the time the hole was getting bigger and bigger, the longer he was up there, so my mother said the next time there was a problem with the roof she would have to get two people to fix it, one man to do the work and the other to go up and call him down for tea and biscuits.

In the end she took off her apron and told us all to hold the ladder while she tried to climb up herself. The sun was shining down through the skylight and she didn’t go very far because the ladder started shaking, so she came back down again. She said I had nothing to be afraid of, because she was holding the ladder herself and nothing would happen. So I climbed slowly up into infinity and put my head out over the roof, but it was so bright out there that I was blind, and I could see nothing. All I heard was the sound of snoring.

My mother could not understand why Mr McNally would not prefer to lie down and sleep on the sofa instead of sleeping on the roof. She likes things to be done properly, in the right place, and the roof is no place to fall asleep.

Mr McNally was very friendly. He smiled and said the hole in the roof was not half as big as he thought it was. It could have been much bigger. Some of the damage he had seen on other roofs was shocking, he said. He sat down at the table with the newspaper and looked at a list of horses’ names. Then he rolled the paper up and put it away in his jacket pocket and drank the tea. He ate some biscuits and then lit a cigarette. He was talking to my mother all the time and he asked her if she knew what the feeling was like not to be able to remember something, like the name of a horse or a football player. My mother nodded her head as if there was something she could not remember either. Sometimes, Mr McNally said, he thought he was losing his memory. He said it was the worst thing of all, not knowing what you couldn’t remember. Then it was time for him to go and he said he hadn’t eaten biscuits as nice as hers before. He said he was hoping there would be another storm soon, so he would have to come back and fix the roof again. My mother smiled. He hit me on the head with the newspaper and said I was a lucky devil, and after he was gone we counted the biscuits that were left over.

My mother smelled the blue smoke and looked out the window for a long time to see if she could remember what it was she had forgotten. But it was only something that she could not put out of her head. Something from the time in Germany that she had almost put away by writing it down in a diary for her children. Still, it came back again and again. Sometimes it was there at the back of her mind and she didn’t even know what was upsetting her, until she sat down and remembered. She smelled the smoke and thought about when she was trapped in the past, as if she were still unable to move on and she would never see the future. She would live her whole life in the same moment, when Stiegler was coming up the stairs, and it felt like helpless infinity. At first she tried to resist. She said she would go to the police, but Stiegler said that it wasn’t a good idea for her to contact them because he had too many friends in the Gestapo. They would never believe her.

‘I’ll tell your wife,’ she said, but he wasn’t even scared of that.

‘I wouldn’t advise that,’ he said.

He had power in his words and she had none. Every night he came up the stairs and she would hear the sound of his breathing outside. She would see the door handle turning. Then he stood inside her room and she could not stop it or help herself. Sometimes she tried to believe that it was right and that this was the sacrifice she had to make in her life. There was somebody she knew who had joined the Nazi party just so that the rest of the family didn’t have to. So maybe she was going through this so that nobody else in her family had to endure it. It was all her own fault and she had brought it on herself. This is what she had wanted, she thought, what she had dreamed of so often. Maybe it wasn’t quite what she had imagined, but if you’re weak and stupid and have been misled, it’s still your own fault and you can only blame yourself for what happens next. If you can’t stop something at the beginning, then you may not be able to stop it later on either and you deserve everything that follows. So she was in a trap, with Stiegler coming to her room every night. He took off his clothes and placed them neatly on the chair. He even folded his tie. He even put each sock neatly into each shoe. He took off his watch and looked at it briefly before he hung it on the back of the chair. It was never too late to resist. She still felt that she could threaten to go to the police again. But he put that out of her head and closed off the last escape route that she had.