Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

‘Don’t mind them,’ the girl with the chewing gum said. ‘Seriously? How much is it for the four of us out to the island?’

I wanted to laugh out loud and have something funny to say back to them. I thought of picking up a mackerel and holding it up to their faces for a laugh, to see what they would say then. But I couldn’t do it. I was afraid they would discover who I was. I kept leaning against the shed with my shoulder stuck to the door frame. I felt the pain starting up like a big weight on my spine, as if I was lying face-down with a concrete block on the small of my back. I know that if you say nothing, people will put words in your mouth. They kept guessing what was in my head. They came past me into the shed and walked around examining things.

‘You can’t go in there,’ I said.

‘Did you hear that? He can talk.’

But I was a dead-mouth and they walked right in past me. They were taking over the place, touching everything. One of them lay down on Dan’s bunk. Others were trying on life jackets, modelling them and dancing around behind me to a song on the radio. They laughed at a calendar with a picture of the Alps that was three years out of date. They saw the spare oars tied up to the ceiling and asked what the white markers were for, playing football or what? They rang the brass bell on the wall. They put a lead weight onto the weighing scales and said it was very heavy. One of them started brushing her hair into a new ponytail and with the sunlight coming in through the window I saw a blond hair floating through the air on its way down to the floor.

They went around saying everything was so dirty. Did I ever think of cleaning the window, for fuck sake. They wanted to know if anyone slept there at night and the others said how could you sleep with the smell of petrol and fish all over you and where was the fuckin’ toilet? They kept finding things like oarlocks and asking what the fuck was this for and what the fuck was that for. The others answered and said what the fuck do you think it’s for and they all fell around laughing again. They could do what they wanted. They could have taken the petrol out and set the place on fire. I thought of what Packer would have done, how he would have started making up some kind of situation out of it that he could later tell the lads about, offering them some of Dan’s pink Mikado biscuits maybe, as long as they didn’t mind a few mackerel scales on them as well. Maybe he would have sat down on the bunk with them and shown them Dan’s blue mug with years of brown tea-stain inside or cut up a mackerel in front of them until they said, Jesus, let me fuckin’ out of here. But I had no way of inventing a life around myself. I had the weakness and I could do nothing until they got bored at last and left of their own accord, laughing and smoking as they walked away up the pier.

And then I could see Dan’s boat coming back into the harbour. There was a buzz of motorbikes and the harbour lads were all returning as well and within minutes they were sitting outside the shed again with Packer talking.

‘Wait till you hear this,’ he said.

He said he was about to tell us the most amazing story. He had just come back in from being out on the water with Dan. They had been pulling up the pots, when they suddenly came across a lobster that had rubber bands already tied around his claws. I’m not joking you, Packer kept saying. There was Dan, complaining about the lobster being less plentiful, and then they came across a lobster that had put his own rubber bands on as if he had given himself up.

I felt the kick in the small of my back. I was waiting for them to turn around and accuse me of being responsible for the empty storage box. I was ready to put my hands up, but nobody mentioned the missing lobster and I began to feel that I was getting away with things at last. I wondered if this was the way life always turned out, that you got caught for the things you didn’t do and you got away with the things you should be guilty for, that guilt and innocence eventually balanced themselves out.

Packer said Dan Turley guffawed like a seagull when he saw the lobster with the rubber band coming out of the pot. ‘Hooken bloody hell,’ he kept saying as he held the lobster in the air. He must have thought somebody had dived down and put the rubber bands on the lobster just to play a trick on him. He was mystified and dumbfounded, looking all around the bay, even away out over the sea across to England to find the culprit, cursing and muttering as if it was all part of the conspiracy against him and even the creatures under the sea were in on it. Dan lifting his white hat to scratch his head and staring at the lobster in his hand as if he had been given a toy without instructions. And then the lads were off again, laughing and holding on to the side of the shed, saying ‘hooken this’ and ‘hooken that’, while Dan was standing at the door with his blue mug in his hand, frowning.

At home, my father calls for another meeting in the front room. It’s a summit conference this time, with Onkel Ted present to make sure nobody gets up and starts hitting each other. There’s a big silence in the room and lots of tension, everybody afraid to speak first and the gap getting wider all the time until my father gets up to put on a record. I watch him taking the keys out of his pocket and opening the music cabinet. He picks out a record which then suddenly turns out to be the missing John Lennon single.

‘This is your record,’ he asks. ‘Isn’t that so?’

I nod my head. I checked the bin a few times and wondered if he had disposed of it some other way, maybe burning it. Instead he kept it with his own collection, along with Bruckner and Verdi and Mendelssohn.

‘Zurück,’ he says, translating the words on the record.

‘Yes,’ I answer, and I can’t help thinking how stupid he makes it sound, as if he wants to kill the words.

‘Na Ciaróga,’ he calls the Beatles in Irish. ‘OK, let’s listen.’

He does everything with the same care as always. No matter how much he might hate this music, he treats the record with great respect, dusting it off with a special cloth first, even putting on the dust glider before finally touching down the needle. Then he sits down and we listen to the Beatles together.

‘Get back to where you once belong, get back, Jojo.’

I see my father looking around as if he can’t wait to get the record off his turntable in case it might ruin the needle. It’s clear that my mother has been trying to persuade him to do things her way, not with violence but through discussion and compromise. He even gets up to put on the reverse side with John Lennon singing ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, but the whole thing is more and more unbearable to listen to. The only person who seems to enjoy it is my mother, until my father gives her a sharp look and she has to stop tapping her foot. She remembers why the meeting was set up and that there is a serious side to all this. My father takes the record off because it’s just too much for him and he thinks the whole system is overheating.

I’m glad when it’s over. I’m waiting for him to give his speech about how bad music is like bad food, like chewing gum rotting your teeth, like alcoholism, like taking drugs. I know he feels betrayed, because there’s no defence against music. Music is free to travel anywhere across the sea and you can’t stop it coming into Ireland and going out again of its own free will. He says I am allowing myself to be corrupted and he wants to remind me of all the good things which we have been concentrating on in our family. He says you have to be careful with music and who I allow myself to be influenced by. My mother says the music is quite nice, but she’s heard about how the Beatles have created mass hysteria in young people. We’ve all seen it on TV, girls screaming and fainting when the Beatles arrived in Dublin. My mother says it reminds her of the way girls were screaming and fainting for Hitler, and she doesn’t want me to become brainwashed like that.