Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

Maybe this is how I know I’m only at the start of my life, because I see these old people at the harbour so often. They have the time to look back and re-examine everything they went through and try to correct all the wrong turns they made. I’m just trying to move forward and not think back about anything at all. I’m escaping from the past and want to have no memory, while they want to keep their memory as long as they can, wishing they could start again with a clean slate, like me, doing all the things they missed because they couldn’t recognize their own luck at the time. They say old people experience a second childhood, and maybe that’s when you become innocent at last, when you see all your own mistakes.

I watch Packer and Dan Turley coming back from fishing. Packer ties the rope against the ladder, then climbs up with the lobster box while Dan scoops out the water from the bottom of the boat. Tyrone is there as well, getting ready to go out fishing. Dan and Tyrone ignoring one another as if they didn’t even exist, pretending to be so busy that they are actually blind and cannot see.

There has been a development in the past few days that has turned the harbour into a courtroom again. The missing boat was recovered by the harbour boys, out on the far side of the island. It was undamaged, left to bob up and down with no heavy wind or big swells that might have lashed it against the rocks. Dan Turley is grateful for getting it back, but there were clues left behind that have strengthened all his suspicions. An empty bottle of whiskey was found in the boat, which, they said, pointed the finger straight at Tyrone. Also, who else would have known how to find a way off the island once the stolen boat was abandoned out there?

Tyrone has been found guilty in silence. Everyone is staring at him, executing him with their eyes, though there’s no proof at all that he’s done anything and nobody can come out and say it to him directly. It seems almost better that way, because we can judge him privately, among ourselves, without the confrontation. It gives Dan the upper hand, morally. He can point the finger as much as he likes and Tyrone cannot defend himself. Tyrone is forever bad, while Dan is forever good. A fair trial would ruin all that. And then I do something to bring everything out into the open. Because Tyrone is the enemy of Dan Turley, I pick up a dead crab from one of the boxes on the pier and throw it down into the harbour. I have no intention of hitting anyone with it and only generally throw it in the direction of Tyrone. But that has always been my problem. It’s just like the trouble with the fireman at Halloween. My aim is so good that the crab bends on the breeze and flies like a big accusation through the silent air and drops right down into Tyrone’s boat, landing at his feet. The dead crab stands for all the unspoken words flying around the harbour. I move away, back towards the shed to make sure nobody suspects me. I can hear Tyrone muttering, looking all around to see what bastard threw it. He wants to defend his good name. Then he looks across at Dan Turley who has noticed nothing and remains totally unaware of the flying crab.

Tyrone pushes himself off the moorings and sculls his way past some of the other boats without starting the engine yet. He lifts his oar up to push off the harbour wall, giving the boat enough momentum to cruise silently out towards the harbour mouth. As he comes to where Dan is bailing out the dirty fishy water, he brings the oar around through the air as if he wants to decapitate him. He’s taking the law into his own hands and I see the oar swinging, but Dan crouches down to pick something up from the bottom of the boat and it misses him. Tyrone places the oar back into his boat and starts the engine. Nothing has happened and the world carries on as before. Tyrone bends down to throw out the rotten crab, while Dan climbs the ladder up onto the quay. They ignore each other and the whole thing is beginning to look like an optical illusion. I know I threw the crab and I saw Tyrone swinging the killer oar, but maybe my eyes were deceiving me, otherwise the old people and the nurses sitting around would have noticed it too. I could have just dreamed it all. I could have miscalculated the distances in the glare of the sun. From where I stand on the pier, it may have looked like Tyrone was trying to kill Dan, whereas in fact he might have been miles away, well out of reach. Suddenly I don’t trust my eyes any more and wonder if I have started making my own nightmares now.

But then Packer comes up to the shed and places the lobster box on the ground in front of me, looking at me with big open eyes.

‘Did you see that?’ he asks.

‘What?’

‘Did you not see Tyrone with the oar? Tried to kill Dan, I swear. He was only that much away, only inches away from killing him.’

Of course I had seen it, but I thought I had imagined it. I knew what was happening at the harbour and how things would come to a head one day soon, but maybe I could not believe it until I was told by Packer.

‘You should have seen him swinging the oar. Jesus.’

I told him the sun was so bright that I could see nothing.

‘There’s something happening here,’ Packer said. ‘This is not over yet.’

At last, I could begin to believe what I had seen myself, what I had caused myself, only because Packer was now saying it. It was invented through his words. When Dan came up the ladder and walked back towards the shed, he seemed not to be too concerned about it.

‘We saw that,’ Packer said to him.

Dan didn’t reply. He just turned around and watched Tyrone making his way out to sea, bouncing on the waves, standing up straight in the back of the boat with his hand on the engine. It was Tyrone’s trademark and you could recognize his silhouette anywhere by the way he stood up in the boat unlike anyone else. Dan had a rule that you should never stand up in the boat, because that is the most common way of asking to be drowned. The slightest gust or wave from the ferry could jolt the boat and you’re gone over. There was no point in being a hero at sea. And now he was watching Tyrone standing up in the boat like he was on skis with a cigarette in his mouth and a bottle of whiskey in his pocket.

‘He could have killed you,’ Packer said, but it was not clear at all whether Dan had really noticed how close he had come to being hit. Was he living in an optical illusion, trying not to see reality? Voluntary blindness. Maybe it was nothing more than the usual animosity and Packer was only exaggerating like he sometimes does, making it part of the big story that he is inventing around the harbour.

‘Bastard,’ I heard Dan say through his teeth. ‘He’ll hooken drown one of these days.’

At that moment, I realized how I had become part of the war myself. I was the person who had pushed things closet to the edge. All the sound came back to the harbour and the moment of illusion was gone. A half-dozen motorbikes arrived on the pier at once and everything turned back to normal. The nurses blew the exhaust fumes away from their patients. The girls hopped off the back of the bikes and straightened their clothes, their hair. Packer stored away the lobster in the box and Dan went inside into the shed to lie down and listen to the news. It seemed to be forgotten again, as if nobody had any memory of anything happening.

Every evening after dinner, we started saying the rosary in our house for the safe return of Stefan. It was some time now since his mother had come to visit and there was still no sign of him. One evening after the rosary, I sat alone in my bedroom when my mother came in and stood at the window. She was starting to practise freedom and opened the window to smoke a cigarette, half outside the window and half inside. If my father came into the room, she could throw the cigarette away towards the beehives and pretend nothing was going on and that the smoke was some garden fire that was still smouldering somewhere at the back of the houses. To put us off cigarettes, my father once lit one and then blew the smoke through a white handkerchief so we could see the brown nicotine stain left behind.