Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

Night after night, he sits in the front room now, surrounded by sheets of paper and manuals all around him on the sofa and on the floor, speaking to himself in English and speaking in German when my mother goes in to try and help him, even though she has no idea what all these technical terms mean. She asks the most simple questions and makes him think about the problem like a child looking up at a plane crossing the sky. He walks around the house with the drawings in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. When he’s outside on the roof of the breakfast room tending to the bees, he suddenly drops everything and runs inside to look at the manuals once more, with his bee-keeping gear still on. He’s going around like an astronaut in another orbit. He doesn’t see what’s going on and he’s stopped being on sentry duty, watching us all the time to see if we’re breaking the laws.

He doesn’t even notice that my mother has begun to start smoking. She has been giving German lessons to some of the students around the neighbourhood and one day, while she was teaching and smoking a cigarette at the same time, he came home and walked straight into the front room. My mother didn’t know what to do with the cigarette in her hand and decided to give it to the student, who was only thirteen years of age, but my father noticed nothing, as long as my mother was not smoking. He was in his own world, just wondering why the ghost in the British machine still refused to talk to the ghost in the German machine.

And then one night he’s cracked it. Long after everyone has already gone to bed, he wakes up the whole house, walking up and down the hallway in his pyjamas, slapping his hands together, with us on the stairs thinking he’s gone out of his mind.

‘It’s fifteen past midnight,’ he says, and he’s smiling.

‘It’s much later than that,’ my mother says.

‘No, I mean clockwise and anti-clockwise,’ he says. He’s so happy that he wants to run out onto the street in his bare feet, but my mother closes the door and pulls him back into the front room, with all the lights in the house on as if electricity doesn’t cost anything and Ireland is going to have too much of it. My mother says you can’t run out naked like the man who invented the displacement of water in the bath. My father is buzzing with excitement because he’s cracked the mystery that will bring peace between the machines. He can’t stop walking up and down the room and back into the hallway, smacking his fist into his hand and then throwing the drawings up in the air as if they no longer matter. He’s laughing at them all now. He tells my mother to get out the cognac and the special German biscuits, because he wants to celebrate and put on music.

‘I was blind,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how I didn’t see it.’

He says the solution was so simple that everybody in Ireland missed it. It was so straightforward it was staring us all in the eye. He explains how both machines had a dial. Both the German model and the British model needed to run together at the setting of fifteen from midnight, but they could not see that the Germans had the convention of going clockwise and the British had the convention of going anti-clockwise, after midnight and before midnight. It’s like driving on the left- or the right- hand side of the road, and you just can’t have both. He talks about volts and amps and megawatts and windings and fork connections and legs until he has us bewildered with science.

‘Will the machines be friends now?’ Bríd wants to know.

He smiles and gives her a big kiss on the top of her head with his hands on the side of her face. He embraces everyone in the front room and it’s time to celebrate because he’s invented peace and harmony between nations. Right in the middle of the night when the whole street is asleep, he puts on music, blasting off Beethoven because he is the person who brought England and Germany back together again at Ard na Crusha, in West Clare.

So it’s goodbye to the hurt mind and goodbye to the silence. Goodbye to the fear and the rules and the punishment, goodbye to guilt and shame. Goodbye to the breathing war.

Packer and I are celebrating as well. ‘Goodbye to the hurt mind,’ he keeps repeating out loud, on the buses, in the shops, everywhere we go, even opening the door of a pub in the daytime and shouting at the lonely drinkers inside. He even shouted it into the GPO one day at the people buying stamps and postal orders. Packer making them all look into their own hearts — bus conductors, builders, shopkeepers, men with briefcases, women with children, all staring after us with blank expressions while he laughs and leaves the words hanging in the air behind him like a long shout.

One night we met at the harbour again. He had heard about a party that was being given by one of the nurses and we were planning to gatecrash. But in order to be let in, Packer said it was not enough to arrive with beer and cigarettes. We had to come with something special. Lobster. Love and live lobster, he called it. We sat drinking one of the bottles looking out at the water which was orange and black. There was a slight fog rising over the water and the lighthouses shone a blurred, dirty light across the surface. It was calm and warm. We could hear the mullet jumping around the edge of the pier. We sat for a while, staring at the necklace of lights going all the way around the bay and at the anchored cargo ships lit up like villas in the darkness. We wondered what the sailors were doing, playing cards and waiting to unload on the docks in the city next morning. There was a foghorn, maybe the Bailey or the Kish, humming in the background. It was like the note of a church organ, a low note with no edges, coming and going again and again.

We could have gone straight to the party, but Packer was determined to do something big, something unusual. Nothing could ever be vile and ordinary any more. We were going to arrive with something that would open everybody’s eyes. The lobster storage box was padlocked, so we decided to take a boat out and get them straight from the pots. The golden handshake, Packer called it. We hid the beer beside the shed. We slipped the boat off the moorings and rowed silently out of the harbour without the noise of an engine. The tide was in and when we got to the lobster train, I held on to the oars while Packer started pulling up the ropes, examining each pot, one by one. He couldn’t put his hand inside for fear of getting caught by the lobster claws, so he lifted each pot up towards the lights of the city so he could see the shape of the lobster and take it out carefully from the back.

This worked very well for the first time and we had one lobster in the boat, but when he was lifting up the next pot, Packer fell back under the weight of it. It was as if a large hand had come up from the sea and lifted him out of the boat. He disappeared without much of a splash even, down into the purple darkness with the lobster pot strapped across his chest.

I didn’t know what to do. At first I thought it was funny and I imagined how Packer would be telling the heroic story later on at the party, how he nearly got himself drowned while trying to get the live lobster. I waited for him to come back up, but the water didn’t move. I stood up in the boat with the oars still in my hands, but the water had become a heavy liquid, swollen like black oil. Even the ripples had disappeared and there was no chuckling under the boat. I knew Packer was being dragged all the way down to the bottom with the weight of the lobster pot across his chest and the rope fouled around his arms. I knew he was trying to free himself before it was too late, so I waited and kept the boat steady to make sure I didn’t drift away.

I was the champion at staying underwater and not breathing, so I knew it was gone beyond the time that your lungs would be bursting and you would involuntarily take in water. I was watching my friend Packer drowning silently, right underneath me in the darkness. I wanted to shout, but I felt my breathing going short. I thought of jumping in after him but I would see nothing in the dark. I remembered how I once felt I was drowning, how Packer stopped talking to me and I didn’t want the same thing to be happening to him. I thought of Tyrone and how he drowned all alone with the ropes wound around his legs and arms. I imagined how Packer and Tyrone would meet each other underwater, with Packer still trying to get away from the ropes and Tyrone drifting towards him with a green face and sandy hair waving, dark eyes and mouth open. Tyrone lunging at him through the water with a bottle in his hand, as if he could not bear to die alone and wanted to hold on to Packer, as if each person who drowns has the need to drag somebody else down with them to the same place, like a chain of lobster pots, one after the other, lying among the seaweed at the bottom of the sea.