Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

When the models come up the steps onto the quay, I hear one of them saying that she’s covered in mackerel scales and feels like she’s slept with a dead fish. They look pale and thin, as if they have not eaten in days. They put on some new lipstick and more perfume to cover up the smell of fish and petrol and seaweed all around the harbour. They try to look like they belong on solid ground again and have nothing to do with the sea, but they stumble on their high heels and have to hold on to each other as if their legs have been turned to jelly by the waves. Maybe they’re not feeling very well after the journey back across the bay in the small boat. Packer tries to talk to them. He’s not afraid of women and has things to ask them. He wants to know what magazine they’re going to be in, but the models are not very friendly. They won’t answer him and maybe they think boys shouldn’t be so interested in women’s fashion magazines.

One of the harbour boys then takes a dead mackerel from the fish box and holds it out in front of his groin. He starts walking around with the tail end of a mackerel wiggling out in front of him, showing his floppy mackerel mickie off to the world. The models look at him in disgust. They say we’re a pack of little perverts. Gurriers. One of the models even gets sick over the side of the quay at the sight of the harbour boys running around with blue and silver mackerel mickies in their hands. Mackerel mickies with green stripes and black zigzag designs. Dangerous-looking mackerel mickies with rigor mortis. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Dan Turley grinning, because now we’ve all become run-alongs after him, making a big joke of Tyrone and his models. Mackerel mickie boys running around yelping and laughing, chasing each other around in circles until one of the models is forced to smile.

But then I notice that Packer has not joined in. He stands back with his arms folded, just watching. He wants nothing to do with this because it’s all just vile and ordinary.

All the news on radio and TV is about Northern Ireland and about Vietnam. There are lots of new words and phrases being invented, like sectarianism, direct rule, internment without trial. Meaningful dialogue, terrorist suspects, strip-searching, inhuman and degrading treatment. You could learn good English by listening to the news, because everybody is trying to find better ways of expressing what’s going on and how they feel about things. They have to find new alternatives for words like evil and bloodshed and shock and horror, because the words often become meaningless. They come up with versions for things like containing the situation, weeding out individuals, descending into violence. There are new terms like arms caches, safe houses, plastic rounds, dawn raids, Nationalist concerns and Unionist positions. From Vietnam we are learning words like defoliation, infiltration, heavy pounding and carpet bombing. You can also learn geography and we have the echoes of exotic names in our heads, like the Ho Chi Minh trail, the Falls Road, Da Nang, Divis Street Flats, Portadown, the Tet Offensive and the Ardoyne. In Vietnam, they’re using a substance called Agent Orange to get rid of all the forests where the enemy can hide, and in Northern Ireland they’re leaving no stone unturned to root out the perpetrators. One day my mother found orange specks on the sheets hanging out on the line and was alarmed that Agent Orange could have started drifting that far across to Ireland on the clouds. She was afraid of war coming back again. But then my father examined the sheets when he came home and said it was nothing, only our own bees occasionally relieving themselves in the air as they flew out over the garden.

There are lots of other things happening as well. New things being invented, new food in the shops, like yoghurt. People were talking about a very fashionable new fruit called avocado. There’s lots of new music on the radio by the Rolling Stones and Perry Como and Bob Dylan singing about ‘No direction home’. Everything is moving forward into the future. Everybody loves air hostesses and nurses. There are new models of cars like the Commodore and the Cortina. And this summer, it’s obvious that things are never going to be the same again in Ireland or anywhere else, because I saw a photo on the front cover of the Irish Press one day of a woman in a white miniskirt and white boots and a broad white hat, lifting her weekend case onto a train while a nun in a black habit was waiting patiently behind her.

Packer sometimes talks to me about how he’s going to get a sports car. One of these days, he says, he will be driving a white, open-topped, two-seater. He’s going to grow a moustache and speed about the place and get a twenty-foot boat so we can sail around together. He talks about what’s going on in Northern Ireland and says his mother comes from up there and that she was once hit by the lash of a drumstick on the street when she was only nine years of age. She was standing by the railings, watching the Orange Parade going by, when one of the drummers lashed her right across her neck and she still has the scar.

On TV, we watch the Loyalist Protestants march through the streets on the twelfth of July, celebrating their most important day, the day that King Billy won the battle of the Boyne. They are called the Orange Order and they march through Catholic Nationalist areas of Belfast with Lambeg drums and flutes called fifes. My father makes a joke about them and says they’re worse than Agent Orange and they could defoliate the entire rainforest with their noise. He worked up there for the British army, just after he qualified from university as an engineer, and says the sound is deafening. They use flexible drumsticks and some of them will play those things for twelve hours until their hands are bleeding with hatred. They beat those drums every year to ensure that nobody forgets about their history. It’s the only way to keep your memory alive, that is to make as much noise as possible, my father says. The bigger the drum the less likely it is that people will forget.

My mother says it’s the British Loyalists and the Irish Nationalists telling each other that they have a longer memory. She watches the marchers and cannot understand why there is so much trouble about it, with people rioting and setting buses on fire. She says it’s not such a bad thing, men marching around with drums like massive bellies in front of them. But my father says she’s making a big mistake, because the Lambeg drum is an instrument that is intended to offend Catholics and remind them that they don’t belong in their own country.

‘It’s not that simple,’ my father says. ‘You can’t always put Irish history through the German sieve. It’s Loyalists marching against the Nationalists, just to antagonize them. It’s people who refuse to be Irish making noise to drown out the people who want to be Irish.’

‘Why don’t they join in with them?’ my mother asks.

My father smiles and it’s clear that she’s using German history to try and resolve what’s happening in Ireland today. She is always making comparisons, saying that the Irish think with their hearts and the Germans think like the horses, only with their heads. She tries to stay positive and keeps asking why the Nationalists don’t just get one or two drums of their own and join in. She thinks they are all children up there in different gangs and if they could only come together they would have a great time in one big band. My father tries to explain that the Nationalists have been kept down for years and that the Loyalists want everything for themselves. The drummers are the playground bullies who want to torment everyone else and remind them that they are the favourites with the British teachers.