Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

Then one day Packer stopped talking to me. I waited for him as usual in the morning on the way to school, but he just walked past me and got on the train. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t even look at me. He closed the door and I had to get on another carriage when the train was already moving. Suddenly, he stopped being my friend. I saw him every day at school with everybody listening to his stories, everything was still the biggest and the best, but I was no longer included. He pretended I didn’t exist any more. If I approached his group or tried to listen to what he was saying, he just walked away as if he couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me.

I even went to the Waverly Billiard Hall to see if he was there one day after school, but he never looked at me once, just concentrated on his game.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him. ‘What did I do?’

Then he dropped his cue and walked out as if he was never going to play snooker in his life again.

I couldn’t prove it, but I knew that my father must have secretly sent a letter to Packer’s mother to say that her son was turning me into a run-along. Packer was afraid of his mother in the same way that I was afraid of my father, so maybe she told him not to have anything to do with me. Everybody in the world is afraid of Packer’s mother. Once she cut through the television cable with a pair of scissors to make him do his homework. So maybe my father and her got together to cut through our friendship cable, because she got Packer to turn his back on me and walk away without ever looking back. She must have sent a letter back to my father saying that I was turning her son into a monster and a mountebank, because sometimes it’s the run-along that gives a leader the courage to do all kinds of terrible things that he would never even dream of getting away with by himself.

After that I had no crowd to belong to. I heard the boys at school repeating some of the amazing things that happened to Packer and what a great life he was having. But I was no longer part of it. I was walking home sideways again, with my back to the wall. I was a nobody and everybody was looking at me as if I was a dead cat. I knew what it was like to be mentally disturbed and have nothing to say. I had no life and no inner dream and no story for myself.

Every time I think about this, I want to kill my father. I tell my mother that I’m not going to be kept in the wardrobe any more, like his own father, the sailor with the soft eyes. I’m going to break out and escape down to the harbour. If he tries to stop me, I will kill him and make him disappear, like his own father. My mother tells me not to repeat the mistakes of history. If you kill your father, you will kill yourself as well. If you hate your father you will hate yourself for ever. Instead of fighting with him openly, my mother encourages me to find my freedom elsewhere, by going to films, reading books, and not through anger.

So now I’ve become sneaky, doing things behind my father’s back. I go up to his bedroom while he’s out at work. I open his wardrobe and look at the big picture of the sailor with the soft eyes inside. He must feel the same way that I felt when Packer was not talking to me, frozen out. I wonder what he did that was so terrible. Nobody deserves to be locked away from the world like this, and I know what it’s like to be in that wardrobe, because I was trapped in there once as a child. I look at the face of the sailor and wonder why he joined the British navy, and how he is now being punished. It’s hard to get that out of my head. He was a fisherman before he joined up. Now I’m a fisherman, and maybe we’re friends and I’ve taken his place.

I want to rescue him. I cannot take his picture out, so I do something that will make it less lonely for him in there in the dark. I take the John Lennon disc that my father gave back to me. I can’t ever play it anyway, so I hide it in the wardrobe behind the picture of the sailor. Nobody is going to know it’s there, but it’s a great feeling to have a secret, to know that my grandfather has a friend to keep him company. It’s John Hamilton and John Lennon talking to each other and whispering in the dark. It’s John Hamilton joining the Beatles and singing harmonies along with John Lennon in the wardrobe at night, while my father is trying to get to sleep.

They’re singing, Back in the US, Back in the US, Back in the USSR …

One day at school, I got my chance to show that I was not invisible. I made up my mind to do the thing that everybody was most afraid of. The instrument of torture. I decided to steal it.

Without Packer on my side, they kept laughing at my brother and me for being half Irish and half German. It was weird, they said, like a big contradiction, because the Irish got the shit kicked out of them by the British and the Germans kicked the shit out of the Jews. We were innocent because we were Irish and we were guilty because we were German. Victim and perpetrator at the same time. They couldn’t deal with this and said they wanted to kick the shit out of us. I was careful, trying to stay out of sight, walking home sideways with nobody behind me, but then they got Franz. It was as if my brother was part of my weakness. They rammed his head up against the railings of the Garden of Remembrance and he came home with blood down the back of his shirt. My father sent a letter to the school the following day to say nobody had the right to do that. We were living in a free country now and people should be allowed to go about their business without being called Nazis and being punished for nothing.

Brother K had always applied the rule of pre-emptive punishment. He punished the innocent and the guilty together, to prevent revenge attacks and faction fighting going on into infinity. But it seemed not to be working, because everybody was copying his methods. So he smiled and reminded us all of the concept of referred pain. One boy gets a lash and everyone else feels it. Sometimes it was the innocent people getting all the punishment and the guilty ones getting off, but referred pain was still a great deterrent, the lesser of two evils.

Brother K rounded up all the boys who had been involved in the incident and said he would make an example of them. In a big speech, he explained that what happened outside the school could not go on and he was going to punish them so hard that everybody in the whole school would feel the pain. He said he never wanted to read a letter like that from my father again. My brother never wanted revenge. He didn’t like to see anyone punished. He just wanted to put it behind him and move on. But Brother K made us watch each lash. It went on for ever. And when the perpetrators had received their punishment, Brother K called Franz forward and explained that it was his duty to punish him as well. To prevent any bitterness and any further victimizing, he was obliged to give him the same amount of lashes as his tormentors got.

Franz cried, maybe not as much with the pain but with the sheer humiliation. Everybody knew this was unfair. The story went around the whole school and I could see everyone laughing as if it was the funniest thing that ever happened. Franz put it behind him, but I could not move on. Even though I was lucky enough not to be punished just for being his brother, I could not forget the injustice of it. It gave me the rage and I wanted to kill Brother K, to stick an axe into the back of his head. At night I stayed awake and imagined how I would kill anyone who laughed at us, bash all their heads against the railings. I was like my father and I could not stop planning ways of winning. I had to balance the scales. The punishment of my brother had to be put right.

I decided to steal the instrument of injustice. Every day I kept an eye on where Brother K kept it, sometimes in his pocket, sometimes in his briefcase. Then the opportunity came quite unexpectedly when I was going down the stairs to the lavatory one afternoon and spotted Brother K’s briefcase outside the principal’s office with the door ajar. There was nobody around. I knew he would be coming out the door any minute. I knew it was a big crime, bigger than anything that happened before in the school. I was finished if I was caught. But then I went ahead without thinking. I didn’t even have to open the briefcase because the instrument of punishment was sticking out. I put it under my jumper and ran away with the heat rising into my head. I made it down to the bicycle shed where I hid it temporarily. When I got back to my class, everybody said I looked pale and sick. Later on, after school, I went back to the bicycle shed and put it into my schoolbag. I didn’t talk to anyone, just brought it with me to find a safer hiding place. The school we go to in the city is situated right beside the Municipal Art Gallery, so I walked right in and started looking at the different paintings. In the end, I decided to place the instrument of torture on top of the gilded frame of a Dutch woman.