Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

‘Packer,’ I called out.

I thought of how they would be sending divers down to take up his body, how I would have to show them the exact spot. I thought of how they would say Packer was duplicating the tragedy of Tyrone, their faces both scarred and partially eaten by crabs. I listened to the low sound of the foghorn from the main harbour and thought this was the end. If Packer didn’t come up, I would have to go down and drown with him. And when I heard him coming up to the surface behind me, I thought I could not trust life and death any more. I could see his head out of the water and hear him gasping. I saw him lashing out with his arms, trying to swim towards the lights on the shore as if I had abandoned him and he was left to struggle all the way back on his own.

‘Here, I’m coming,’ I called to him in a whispered shout.

I nearly stopped breathing myself as I rowed back over to where he was. He clung on to the stern. I rested the oars across each other down under the seat and helped to pull him in. Then he collapsed on the floor of the boat, coughing up water. He was trying to say ‘Jesus’ and he didn’t care if the lobster was biting his leg because all he wanted was to be alive and to get air back into his lungs.

I took the oars up again and rowed back as fast as I could, gliding across the black water with Packer slumped over the side of the boat all the way, just coughing and retching like the sound of a seal barking. It was only when we got back to the pier that he finally picked himself up and climbed the steel ladder on the harbour wall. He staggered on his legs and bent down with his hands on his knees. I tied the rope to the ladder and followed him up quickly, feeling the cold bars in my hands. We stood on the pier as though we had both been saved.

‘Jesus,’ Packer said, as if it was his only word left.

He came over and put his arm around me, suddenly kissing the side of my face as if to thank me for bringing him back to life. I could feel his wet clothes. I could feel his hands shaking. I could hear him rasping heavily as if he had to relearn how to breathe in the air and make it his own. I had imagined him back to life. It was the new invention, the special talent that my mother had been talking about. I had brought Packer back from the dead and it felt like I could bring others back as well, even Tyrone, even those who were dying in Northern Ireland, even those who had died in the Irish famine, or those who had been murdered in the Ukraine.

‘Let out the little divileen,’ Packer shouted on his first full lungful of free air.

He was laughing coughing now and I was laughing crying, both of us more alive than we had ever been before. I got the lobster out of the boat. He took a drink of beer to get the taste of salt water out of his throat. With his arm around my shoulder, we walked away from the harbour like two ghosts just back from the dead, him holding a beer and leaning on me, squelching all the way with the water in his shoes. Me half carrying him on my shoulder with the lobster in one hand and the bag of beer in the other.

We got to the party and Packer frightened everyone with the lobster and his story of near-drowning. He cooked up the lobster and told everyone that when they went into the boiling water alive, they were not screaming, only singing an Irish lament. He talked as if he was never going to get a chance to speak again, telling everyone what it was like to drown and what it was like to be brought back to life. He was making up for all the years of silence that he would have endured as a dead person if he hadn’t freed himself from the lobster pot in time. I knew that drowning was like having no friends. I had kept him alive, because that was the whole idea of friendship, that he was carrying the glory and I was carrying the secret.

They made him get out of his wet clothes and offered him a girl’s dressing gown with his hairy legs sticking out underneath and his tanned chest open. We drank and ate tiny offerings of lobster. Packer had his arm around one of the nurses and she was feeling his pulse to make sure he was not still shaking. Somebody put on a record of a woman who sang in a high, wailing voice, like a slow, exhausting musical scream that went on for a long time until she eventually calmed down again at the end. I admired the life in her lungs. Later on they told me the band was Pink Floyd and I made myself remember that name. I got talking to one of the girls at the party myself and when it was time to leave, she asked me to come back for breakfast in the morning on my own so we could listen to the song again together. She looked into my eyes and told me that she was born on the same day that Stalin died. And then it was myself and Packer again, out on the empty streets with only the birds beginning to sing around us. The two of us lying on our backs with our arms and legs stretched out, right in the middle of the main road. The two of us walking back down towards the harbour as if he had to see the place one last time so that he could turn his back on it for good. He wanted to look out over the sea to watch the sun coming up. So we sat on the rocks waiting for the first glow in the sky to the east, yellow, then pink, then orange, then blue. The tide was gone out now and the shoreline looked exhausted, draped in black seaweed. We could see the curvature of the world. We could see the grass turning green on the island. The seagulls were flying overhead, hundreds of them coming up from the south and silently flying across the bay. We saw the lighthouses fading away to nothing as the sun came up like a hot coal over the horizon, and I knew that one of these days, very soon, I would earn my own innocence.

Everybody is going over to England now to work in factories. Packer and I decided to write off to some of the addresses in Norfolk, to companies like Smedleys and Ross Foods Ltd. Packer says you can work as much overtime as you like and make a packet. England is where the money is. We both get letters back from Ross Foods inviting us to work in their factory near Norwich for three months. So it’s goodbye to the harbour, because we’re going over to Norfolk and then we’ll head down to London to do what we like with our own money. In London, we’ll be free because nobody will give a damn who we are and what we do with ourselves.

When we arrive at Ross Foods we get a bed with a straw mattress which you have to beat into shape before you can lie on it. We all sleep in Nissen huts, hundreds of beds lined up on both sides under the arched roof where you can’t even stand up straight at the side, only in the middle. It’s very hot inside the huts, and when the sun comes up in the morning, they say, you’ll boil to death in your sleep. Packer is already making jokes and entertaining everyone, saying some of the Irish lads are liquefying in the heat, like decomposing bodies.

Somebody says the Nissen huts were left over from the war, when they flew bombing missions over to Germany from air bases close by. Somebody else said it was where German prisoners of war were kept. Sometimes we can hear air force jets flying overhead, like the sound of thunder claps echoing around the flat landscape. I’ve never heard them before because they don’t have those jet fighters in Ireland. Packer said we have De Valera and Irish neutrality to thank for that, because otherwise we would have joined NATO after the war and the West of Ireland would be full of airfields. The bogs would be buzzing with jet fighters and the seas would be full of destroyers.

Everybody is complaining and joking about the lack of sleep. Snoring neighbours. Farting friends. Smelly socks. It’s become a national pastime for the Irish to complain about the raw deal they are getting from the British. They complain about the hard work, even though they love being here, making money. Some of them refer to the foremen as Brits, because they can never forget history. But we’re making money and there’s nothing to spend our money on, apart from Mister Kipling apple tarts in the canteen. The personnel department of Ross Foods keeps our wages safe until the day we leave.