Hand in the Fire
Hugo Hamilton

For Maria

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

Afterword

Also by Hugo Hamilton

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

You have a funny way of doing things here.

Like friendship, for example.

Nobody does friendship like you do in this country. It comes out of nowhere. Full on. All or nothing. I’ve been to places where friendship is cultivated with great care over a longer period of time, like a balcony garden. Here it seems to grow wild.

You could say that I did him a small favour. I found his mobile phone lying in the street and contacted his girlfriend. Her name was Helen and there was a picture of her on the phone, laughing into the camera. I could have read through all her messages, but I didn’t want to be intrusive. I contacted her and arranged for him to pick it up that same evening. It was nothing more than that. Anyone else would have done the same. I waited outside a late-night shop and saw him walking towards me with a big smile as though we already knew each other. He thanked me and stood there, refusing to let me go. Before I knew it, he was returning the favour, shaking hands and leading me away into a bar for a drink. He gave me his name, Kevin. I knew it already but he made it more official. Kevin Concannon. He told me that he was a lawyer and the phone was his life and he was glad it didn’t fall into the wrong hands.

He was curious about me and asked me what I was up to. When I told him that I was a carpenter looking for work, he said he would keep his ear to the ground. There was a chance he could set me up with a job, if I was interested. He stored my name and number on his phone. Vid Ćosić. He repeated the surname a number of times phonetically to make sure he got the pronunciation right. Ćosić. Like Choz-itch.

‘Where are you from, Vid?’

‘Belgrade,’ I said, just to keep it short.

I was trying to avoid all those long explanations about why I came here and what I left behind.

‘Serbia,’ I added. ‘Former Yugoslavia.’

What do you say when the country you grew up in can only be remembered for one thing? I told him that I left after a bad car accident and wanted to travel, see something different.

‘Fair enough,’ he said.

What does it matter where you come from? You could say it’s irrelevant. I wanted to forget about my own country and start again. I wanted to get a foothold here, get to know the place and the people. I already knew some of the most famous names, like James Joyce and George Best and Bono and Bobby Sands. I knew the most important landmarks, like the GPO, where the Easter Revolution took place, and Burgh Quay, where the bus to Galway leaves from. Right next to the immigration offices. I was beginning to understand the way things are done here, the way you have of saying ‘how’s the man?’ and ‘what’s the craic?’ I was starting to pick up the jokes, trying not to take everything so seriously. I was working on the accent, learning all the clichés – at the end of the day, nine times out of ten, only time will tell. I was eager not to be misunderstood or misled, so I stuck to the expressions that would give me least trouble. I was reluctant to abbreviate. I never allowed myself to use puns or play with people’s names. I tried to limit the amount of times I used words without meaning, such as ‘like’ or ‘you know’. I was cautious with terms like ‘mega’ and ‘sketchy’ and ‘leggin’ it’ and ‘literally glued to the television’. I didn’t trust myself saying things like ‘will you go away’ or ‘would you ever fuck off’ because I’m always afraid people might take it to heart. Besides, I can never pronounce the word ‘fuck’ properly. I make it sound too genuine. You have so many different ways of saying it in this country, I’ve given up trying.

We got talking about where I had been so far and what places around the country I had visited. I told him I was planning to travel out to the west, but then he sent me on a detour down south instead.

‘Have you been to Dursey Island?’

‘No,’ I said.

He had a commanding way of speaking. His eyes were intense, looking right at me. He stepped into my life quite easily, offering advice and making decisions for me.

‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he said, ‘until you’ve been to Dursey Island.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s no place in the world like it,’ he said. ‘Hardly anyone living out there now. Just yourself and the ocean, that’s all.’

Was there a reason for sending me there? Did he have some connection to the place? They talk of six degrees of separation, but here in this country you only have one or two at the most. He looked away towards the door of the pub as though he could see right across the landscape and all the people in it. He told me how to get there, right at the tail end of the country, off the coast of Cork.

‘You go over by cable car,’ he said. ‘The only place I know with a cable car crossing the Atlantic.’

‘You’re not serious,’ I said.

‘I am serious,’ he said. ‘You can look it up, Vid. It’s a fact.’

‘Dursey Island.’

‘Dursey Island,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t tell anyone that you haven’t been there.’

He clapped me on the back and got up to leave, thanked me once more, then disappeared.

Two days later I found myself taking up his advice, knowing that unless I went down there to see it with my own eyes, I would never believe it.

I followed the map and got lost. I dropped into a pub along the way for directions and the man behind the bar started pointing with a knife. He was cutting a lemon into slices and stopped what he was doing in order to show me the way. I could not really understand his accent and kept staring at the filleting knife in his hand. The words came spilling across the counter and I was so distracted by the way he was stabbing the air that I hardly picked up anything he was saying to me. I smelled the tang of lemon and waited for him to finish. He must have noticed my confusion because he began to repeat the whole thing from the beginning. But again, my concentration failed, watching only the silver blade flashing in his hand. He pointed the knife directly towards me, giving an almighty stab, forward and upwards. Straight all the way, he said. If I had been standing any closer I would have got it in the neck. He waited for me to repeat these directions back to him like a schoolboy, so I nodded, more out of politeness. Rather than forcing him to go through the whole frenzied attack all over again, I thanked him and told him it was all perfectly clear to me now. But as I turned to leave, I could not help thinking he was going to throw the knife at my back. A dark stain seeping through my clothes as I sank down to the floor.

And then I went on a shaky journey by cable car out to Dursey Island, high over the water with my heart in my mouth, as they say, and my stomach falling into the ocean below. Once I got there, I wondered what was so special about the island. It was a beautiful place and full of history, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I walked around for a while and took a few photographs. Some of the seabirds were new to me. Some of the clouds, too, faster, lower down, more eager to reach land on their way in off the Atlantic. I heard the waves crashing on the rocks, like the door of a giant freezer being slammed shut repeatedly. I kept thinking there were better places to visit, more startling, more empty places such as Skellig Rock, rising up out of the sea in the shape of a solid black fin. There were patches of sunlight shifting across the water. It looked like it was going to rain, but didn’t. A strong breeze flapped at the back of my jacket making me think there was somebody behind me. But there was no one around and I felt like the last man on earth.

After an hour or two I wanted to get back to the mainland. As the cable car swung across towards me, I could see a young boy inside. The door opened and a dozen sheep came bursting out as though set loose from a trap, their hooves banging and scraping at the steel, jumping over one another in the rush to get at the grass.

One of the sheep got its front leg caught in between the cable car and the pier, so the boy tried to dislodge it. The animal was in great fear, eyes wide, struggling to get away. I gave him a hand to release the sheep and he told me the island was used mostly for grazing now. Some people owned holiday homes there, but they were absent most of the year. The sheep were already ripping lumps of grass as though the perilous trip over was not worth another thought. On the return passage, I was overpowered by the smell of sheep shit and sheep fear and possibly my own fear included, until I stepped on solid ground again. I watched the boy’s sister whistling and herding more sheep on to the cable car with the help of their dog. Then they all travelled across to the island together in the same compartment. At one point, I imagined the door opening and the sheep falling down into the sea, one by one, with their legs pedalling frantically as they accelerated towards their death. But that never happened and there was little or nothing else to remember except the fact that I had been there.

So there you have it. Dursey Island. It does exist. As much as I exist. It has become part of me now, like a stored photograph. I can boast about being there and tell everybody that it’s not just a place on the map where people once lived and God knows where they all are now. But what about all the places I never managed to visit? How could I go around verifying every headland and town in the country? Most of it has to be taken on trust. I take your word for it.

There were plenty of other things I had to find out for myself. And maybe I needed a different sort of map altogether. Some kind of rough guide on how to fit in as much as possible. The rough guide to friendship. The rough guide to betrayal also. The rough guide to rage and hatred and murder.

I had to verify all those things as well.

Don’t get me wrong. It was good to be here. I loved the place right from the moment I arrived – the landscape, the wind, the change of heart in the weather. I didn’t want to live anywhere else in the world. I loved the easy way you have of making people feel at home. All the talking. The exaggeration. The guesswork in the words. I wanted to belong here. I wanted to take part in this spectacular friendship.

2

At the time I was still employed in security. My first job here was working as a night watchman in a nursing home. Not bad for the time being, I thought. Not a bad introduction to a country either, because it gave me some idea of the back story. All the hopes and disappointments collected under one roof.

The nursing home was situated around an ancient castle by the sea, on the outskirts of Dublin, with extensive grounds overlooking a small harbour, used mainly for pleasure boats and fishing. What a great place for the old people to spend their final days, watching ships coming and going in the bay. Those that could still see, in any case. At night, the lighthouse shone across the water and there was a string of yellow city lights going all the way around the edge of the coast. My job was to take the guard dog out to patrol the grounds once every hour and to deal with any emergencies, which amounted to a few drunken shouts, no more. The dog was an old Alsatian who had a peculiar sense of obedience. He had been trained to obey your command as long as you stayed on the inside, between him and the buildings. If you strayed on to the far side, he would see you as an intruder with no business being anywhere near the place. I spent the first night sitting on top of the oil storage tank with the dog below me, waiting to tear me apart. After that, I learned to stay on the right side of him.

It was clear that I was never really cut out for security work. I was a bit of a walkover. I didn’t have the confidence of an enforcer. What I really wanted was to get into carpentry, even boat building, if possible, but there is no such work available. It was just a dream really. The best I could hope for was some kind of restoration work on old boats. In the meantime, I was glad to make any contacts that might get me into the building trade.

The nursing home was administered by nuns in brown habits, though they didn’t take part in day-to-day caring any more. Those duties were carried out by lay nursing staff. The few nuns that were left over came out from their residence early in the morning to walk the grounds with their headgear blowing vertically in the wind. I got to know one of the nurses on night duty. Her name was Bridie and she had red hair. She was much older than me, in her fifties, but she kept winking and calling me the love of her life. She would laugh out loud and repeat a few of the things I said, not just the accent but the vocabulary. She said I sometimes sounded like a letter from the bank, using words like ‘complete’ and ‘commence’ and ‘with regard to’, words I picked up from the newspapers and which were not suited to everyday use.

‘I’m going to commence laughing,’ she would say.

It took me a while to get the hang of the ordinary words. At first I couldn’t see any difference between start and commence. My sentences must have sounded more like translations, asking people if there was any rumour of work going for a carpenter.

The problem at the nursing home was not so much people breaking in as people breaking out. The ‘inmates’, as Bridie called them, had no valuables to speak of, only books and pictures of their families, packets of shortcake, tins of exotic mints and butterscotch. The rooms all smelled of apple cores and rubber sheets, sometimes banana and leather. There was no alcohol allowed on the premises and some of the patients were going mad with abstinence. One night the dog caught an old retired doctor by the name of Geraghty trying to sneak away across the lawn. He had no socks on and his shoelaces were undone. He stood with his hands up, pleading with me, saying that he had permission to go to the pub. What could I do? I tied his shoelaces for him and let him go. Some time later, Nurse Bridie came down to raise the alarm and he was eventually found sitting on a seafront bench, singing to the waves.

The ground-floor windows were fitted with special bolts after that. Then Geraghty asked me to buy him a half-bottle of whisky and Nurse Bridie knew I was responsible. She came down to the office and sat on my lap, putting her hands around my throat, pretending to strangle me. Doctor Geraghty had run amok through the corridors upstairs with his clothes off, declaring love to every woman in the place. He had forced his way into one of the rooms and refused to leave, hanging on to the metal bed end where a terrified woman sat up with the blankets under her chin, asking for a mirror so that she could fix her hair. When I went upstairs to help escort him back to his room, he turned on me. He could not remember that it was me who had given him the whisky. I took hold of his arm and he went from being drunk and spongy to being rigid and defensive. I was surprised by his strength as he ripped his arm away and stared at me with stony eyes, full of anger or only joking, I wasn’t quite sure at first.

‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘Where are you from? You have no right to interfere in my business.’

‘Now, now, Doctor,’ Bridie said in a firm voice.

Then she led him away quickly, no nonsense, just by sheer willpower and authority. Within minutes she had him back in bed, kissed the top of his bald head and told him to be a good boy. I could never imagine having that command over people here. I had no way of telling an old man what to do in his own country. I was like a child ordering the adults to go to sleep.

Most of the patients drank tea all day and couldn’t sleep at night. One old woman came down to see me regularly and Nurse Bridie told me to ‘go along’ with her. Which turned out to be good advice in general. The woman was dressed elegantly in a green cape and drooping earrings, ready to go out to the theatre, so she claimed. The only thing out of place was that it was well after two in the morning and she was wearing slippers. She asked me to call a taxi and I pretended to do that, lifting up the phone and dialling an imaginary number, speaking to an imaginary person on the other end of the line.

I suppose you could say that everyone is an actor, to a certain degree, but I sometimes found it hard to enter into the character I had been given to play here. I was still learning the lines, while everybody around me seemed so sure of their roles. They were born for the part.

I couldn’t help being myself most of the time.

While the woman in slippers waited for the taxi, she produced a silver cigarette box from her handbag, telling me that it belonged to her father who had fought in the War of Independence. She asked me to place my index finger into an indent left by a bullet. But for that cigarette case, she said, her father would have been killed as a young man and she would never have been born. Holding the silver case in my hand, I thought of the man whose life it saved. I could even imagine the night of the ambush as if it happened only recently in my own country, when the war was going on. The faces hidden in the grass. The empty landscape. The well-chosen bend in the road. The hours of boredom and the clothes of men stinking like soup after rain. All the imaginary noises in the distance until the sound of the real truck driven by enemy soldiers came along at last with headlights stabbing across the bog. The fear vibrating in the turf and, eventually, the crack of shots and the shouts of men and unforgettable silence after it was over. Men lying dead on the road and the echo of gunfire still singing in the brown bog pools for weeks and months, even now.

As she placed the cigarette box back into her bag, she revealed that her father was not the kind of person who owned a cigarette case, let alone a full packet of cigarettes. He had taken it from a dead British officer after an ambush. He had inherited the charm of the silver cigarette case and passed it on, like so many other monuments left behind in this country from that time, so she told me, like the railway tracks and the granite harbours and the obelisk in the shape of a ‘witch’s hat’ on the hill which was built for no reason during the famine times.

My first history lesson. I was grateful to her for it. It gave me the feeling of belonging here, a feeling of friends and enemies going back a long time. It made me think I had lived here all my life, with uncles and aunts talking about me and waiting to hear from me. You can read as many history books as you like about this country, but it all sounds like fiction unless you have something tangible to link it up to.

The taxi never came. As she got up to leave, she told me it was nice to have got the chance to meet me. The next time she came down, she had no idea that we had met before, which allowed me to pretend I never heard her story and I could be welcomed all over again.

More often it was Nurse Bridie who came down to get away from the ‘insatiable maniacs upstairs’, as she put it. I recognised the squeak of her white shoes on the floor. She sat down and tried hard to get me to talk. She asked me why I had come to Ireland and what dark secrets did I have hidden behind my eyes. She wanted to know if there was anything I missed about home, apart from the weather and the cakes. She wanted to know if I had a girlfriend, and when I shook my head, she didn’t believe me.

‘You’re so innocent,’ she said to me a number of times, which made me think I was completely transparent.

She told me lots of things about the nuns in Ireland. She said they were savages, most of them. She had gone to school with the sisters of ‘no mercy’. She said the nuns had always employed the most vulnerable. There was a young boy working in the kitchens who got a pot of boiling chip oil spilled over him. ‘You should have heard him screaming,’ she said. ‘Blisters the size of cups on his neck. When they tried to remove his shirt, the skin came off like red silk lining. Mass. That’s what they offered him as compensation.’ Then she warned me to leave before it was too late.

‘Get out before they pour boiling oil on you.’

She blew me a kiss each time, just as a joke. Then I heard her shoes squeaking away again. I knew there was a sadness being suppressed by her laughter, like a cut under the skin that would not heal. But it was hard for me to ask her what it was.

When I stopped working there she said she was not surprised that I would break her heart and walk away, it was the story of her life. She invited me for a farewell drink. We met in a pub close by and she seemed older out of uniform, or younger, it was hard to say. More motherly, perhaps, and also more fragile, more like a girl. Sitting with her coat on and her handbag beside her, she stirred her vodka and tonic with a plastic stick and did all the talking, because I had nothing to say and didn’t know what questions to ask. She placed her mobile phone on the table beside her drink and watched it for a while to see if it would ring. She started crying and I could not work out what to do in a situation like that where she was not my mother or my sister. She ended up putting her hand on my arm to comfort me instead. She opened her handbag, searching for a tissue to wipe her tears, but then produced a letter which she asked me to read.

Dear Bridie, it said, it is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter.

It was written by her fiancé around thirty years earlier. I read it slowly all the way through, moving my lips across every word. He was breaking it off with her, so I gathered. They were intended to get married. The date had been set for the wedding and the families notified. At the last minute, he changed his mind and explained that he was not ready for it, because he was still drinking too much. He was not fit to be married to her. He didn’t deserve her love and the only thing left for him to do was to leave the country and emigrate to America.

I suppose each country has its own rules for love and dishonesty. Different ways of disappearing and walking away from the past. Different measurements for loneliness and happiness. I wanted to track down the man who wrote the letter and tell him that he had made the biggest mistake of his life. But it was no longer possible to intervene because time had turned us all into distant observers.

She told me that she had a baby shortly after he left, but that she had been persuaded to give it up for adoption. She had tried to make contact with her son in recent years, but he had not wished to meet her. She asked me if I thought he would be good looking and intelligent, so I said yes, of course. She wanted to know if he might have red hair like her and then she answered all her own questions, assuring herself that her boy was happy in his new family and better off not looking back. Even though he was grown up by now, living his own life, she still spoke of him as a baby. Staring straight into my eyes, she said she hoped he turned out a bit like me, in fact, which made me think of myself as her son, promising to do my best.

She’d been holding on to the farewell letter ever since, refusing to get off the bus at the terminus, dreaming back and forth along the same route for ever.

‘Go for it,’ she said to me, putting the letter back into her handbag. I wondered if these were the exact same words she had spoken to her fiancé, just to be big-hearted and to make sure they parted as friends with no hard feelings. She pushed me with her elbow, unable to sit beside me any longer. Then she stood up to embrace me.

‘Come back and see me sometime.’ She smiled through red eyes. Then she sat down and looked at her phone to see if anyone had left a message. She waved with both hands and told me to take care of myself, so I walked out the door, away across the street, not even watching for the traffic on the wrong side of the road, as though it was impossible for me to get killed.

3

To be honest, I never expected to meet him again. The city was full of carpenters, so it was a surprise to get the call early one evening saying he wanted to discuss a small job at his mother’s house. What was even more strange was the urgency. We had to meet right away. And then it was all quite informal, with no clear lines between work and friendship. Normally you keep those things separate, so I thought. You might go for a drink after the job is finished, if everybody is happy. But he started everything in reverse. He wanted to go for a drink even before I had time to prepare a proper estimate.

By then I was working full time for a small building company. My plan eventually was to get into business on my own, so I was happy to take on small jobs in my spare time. I had got to know a Lithuanian carpenter by the name of Darius who had his own workshop and a van. My own range of tools was very limited and he lent me some of his whenever I needed them.

Kevin picked me up and brought me over to his mother’s house. A beautiful, spacious family home on a terraced street leading down to the sea, not far from the nursing home where I had worked. It was clearly in need of some repair and as he parked the car, he called it Desolation Row, after one of his mother’s favourite songs.

He left me standing in the kitchen while he went upstairs calling his mother. But then she came in from the back garden wearing gloves and holding a pair of shears in her hand, looking at me as though I had just broken in and couldn’t find my way out again.

‘And who are you, if I may ask?’

The confusion was soon cleared up when he reappeared and introduced us. She took her gloves off to shake my hand.

‘Vid Ćosić,’ he said and she repeated the name slowly: Choz-itch.

Next thing we were standing upstairs in his mother’s bedroom, talking about fitted wardrobes. I asked her what she had in mind and she mentioned black ash.

‘Black ash,’ I said, trying to warn them off with a smile. ‘In a bedroom. Might end up looking a bit like a funeral parlour.’

There was silence in the room. I had said something wrong. His mother sighed like a slashed tyre. She wore a very serious expression and perhaps she was in mourning, I thought to myself. In fact she hardly smiled even once during the meeting.

‘Black ash is very dignified,’ Kevin said, helping me out.

‘Of course,’ I said, as soon as I realised my mistake. ‘It depends on how it’s done. Like, what kind of ash were you thinking of, veneer or solid ash, stained?’

I thought it was a travesty putting any kind of fitted wardrobes into a room like this. It was an old period house and they would never look right. But that’s something you learn after a while. You couldn’t be honest. You had to make allowances for taste and be prepared to say that black ash was an elegant choice, even when it was the most revolting material you ever had the misfortune to work with. Besides, there was no changing her mind. She had seen something in a magazine. Floor to picture rail in black ash veneer was what she wanted.

They must have known I would be very competitive, because they didn’t seem to have anyone else in mind for the job. The cost was not much of an issue, or the timescale. I made it clear to them that I could only take it on in my spare time.

‘I’ll need a bit up front for the materials,’ I said.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘How much?’

‘I’ll have to price the stuff and get back to you.’

‘Just let me know.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said, because that seemed like a good, neutral sort of phrase to me.

And that was it. He was already rushing me away to the nearest pub for a drink. While he was waiting for his girlfriend to turn up and go to dinner with him, he filled me in on his mother’s personality. You could see that he admired her and also feared her a little, like a schoolboy. She was a schoolteacher, he explained, so you had to earn your smiles. She could be a bit severe at times, but she was actually very funny underneath the exterior, so he claimed. Quite street wise, too.

He gave an example which sounded more like a warning. His mother had been attacked in the street recently by a junkie who was after her handbag. She managed to distract him by saying the next thing that came into her head. ‘They knocked down the wall,’ she said. Her attacker looked all around in confusion. Who? What wall? By then he had completely forgotten about the handbag and fled empty-handed.

‘Don’t worry,’ Kevin assured me. ‘You’ll get on great with her.’

It was not the kind of job you could easily price for, because there were other factors involved. Payment in kind. He knew I was trying to get a foothold in this country and encouraged the idea of me getting into business on my own. He started explaining the rules, telling me how to run my own future, giving me all kinds of advice on how to get started.

I felt so accepted. You see, when you’re not from around here, it often feels a bit like gate-crashing, like you’re at a party and people are wondering where you come from and who invited you. You take everything at face value and you can easily get people wrong. It’s often hard to make a call between good and bad. So it’s great to have somebody looking out for you. Somebody on your side who’s going to let you know what’s coming your way.

He even introduced me to his girlfriend, Helen. She shook my hand and recalled talking to me briefly on the phone. It was good to see her in person. You could understand why he would have fallen in love with her. The energy in her eyes. The open smile. She started asking questions as soon as she discovered where I was from.

‘Belgrade,’ she said.‘I love Balkan music. All those high-speed trumpets and drums.’

It made me feel homesick for a moment to meet somebody who was so interested in my country. She said she had a few CDs from that region and that she would love to go there sometime.

‘I’d give anything to hear the music live.’

They were quite well informed about Yugoslavia and what happened during the war. There was nothing much that I could add to their knowledge, only to confirm that Milošević and Karadžić and all these people had fucked up the place and left a terrible stain on the map. What more can you say than that?

They wanted to know about my family. So I told them how my parents had died in a car crash. Long after the war was over, we were on our way to the wedding of my sister when the accident happened, somewhere in the countryside. Both parents were killed instantly and I was very lucky to be alive, if that’s how you would put it. I was able to attend the funeral, but I suffered head injuries which had me in and out of hospital for months afterwards. I was having great trouble with my memory ever since.

The truth is that I didn’t want to remember anything. I’ve read stories about women who suffer from voluntary blindness after repeatedly witnessing terrible things in war. They cannot bear to see any more horror and lose their sight as a form of sub-conscious self-protection, so it seems. Their faculties close down in an attempt to shut out the worst. Maybe it was a bit like that for me. There were certain things from childhood that I didn’t want to know any more. You could say it was voluntary memory loss. Except that it was much simpler to tell everyone I had received head injuries in a serious car accident and suffered from amnesia.

I liked to think of myself beginning all over again here, with a clean slate. I had no life before I arrived and could hardly remember a thing.

‘Why did you pick this country, of all places?’ Kevin asked, though I don’t think he meant it like that.

‘It’s a very friendly place,’ I said, trying to say the right thing. ‘And quite neutral.’

‘Neutral?’

I hesitated and told them I had been to Germany for a while, but it didn’t suit me there. Not that I had anything against Germans, just that I was under pressure to say something good about this country. I said I found people here less judgemental, more forgiving perhaps, more open to mistakes in history.

‘Leave him alone,’ Helen said, smiling.

They fell into a brief argument among themselves, as if I was absent. Some older debate which I could not fully understand. Only in the tone of her voice could I tell that she was defending me, putting words into my mouth. Then they stopped, as if it didn’t really matter all that much. He laughed and put his arm around my shoulder.

‘Another quick one.’

It struck me that I had forgotten to mention my trip down south.

‘By the way,’ I said. ‘I took your advice and went down to Dursey Island.’

She seemed surprised by the mention of the island. I saw her staring at him, but he was turning something over in the back of his mind and didn’t want to look up.

‘Dursey Island,’ she said. ‘You sent him out to Dursey Island?’

‘Where else?’ he said, finally answering her eyes.

‘Out on the cable car with the sheep?’

‘Not exactly with the sheep,’ I replied, just to clarify that point.

‘And was it raining with the sun shining at the same time?’

But she was not really waiting for an answer from me. She was looking only at him. I remained silent, because they might as well have been sitting alone together, on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the ocean. They continued staring at each other and I felt as though I had walked right into their bedroom.

4

Some days later I phoned him to agree a price for the job at his mother’s house. He laughed at one of my linguistic errors. I said it would cost ‘twice as less’ as I had initially estimated. He pointed out the mistake and offered to meet me later on that same evening with the start-up money so that I could buy the materials and begin the job the following morning.

It was a Friday night and I was out drinking with some of the lads from the site after work. The building company I worked for was a medium-sized operation with about a dozen or so core workers. Home renovations. I spent my time hanging reconditioned doors, putting in new saddles and repairing architraves, replacing damaged floorboards and skirting boards. The builder kept getting my name wrong and called me Vim. I corrected him a number of times and told him it was Vid, but he insisted on changing it back to Vim. Some of the workers had other names for me, like Video. Because my first name was so short and they were unable to shorten it any further to, say, Pat or Joe, the only thing they could do was to lengthen it, giving me versions like Viduka, or Vidukalic, or Videolink, sometimes Vid the Vibrator, or Vim the most effective detergent against household germs. The builder said he was keeping me on, not because I was a good carpenter but because I finished things. He could find any amount of carpenters who were better skilled than I was, but I had a way of completing the job that made it look done. I think some of the other workers were irritated with me for being so neat, but that didn’t stop them from bringing me with them after work on the razz, as they called it.

I was sucked into the rush-hour of their celebration. It felt like the world was going to come to an end at any moment and they were compelled to make the most of it, like a big farewell party. They had a store of phrases and excuses to justify being young and not dead yet. They were determined to live it up by any means, to make up for all the bad times behind them and maybe all the bad times ahead of them as well. They kept predicting the amount of drink they would take and how much fun they would have. There was no question that they were having the time of their lives, but I always had the feeling that, instead of living in the moment, they were more interested in getting away from the real world, stepping back and talking everything up into a big story, like people watching their lives pass in front of them.

Don’t ask me what the name of the place was, I can’t remember. It was a traditional kind of bar with three men standing on a small stage with guitars, belting out songs which most of the people in the pub knew by heart, old and young.

There was a song about a woman called Nancy Spain. It had to do with a ring she had been given, but which seemed to have gone missing. Every time it came around to the chorus, the whole pub joined in to ask the big question, where was the ring that had been given to Nancy Spain? Did she lose it? Did she give it away? I asked some of them around me who she was and what happened to the ring, but they had no idea. They were on the same level of ignorance with me, though they knew instinctively the question could not be answered. Some things exist only in the form of enquiry. They could relate to the idea of the lost ring and were just very happy to mime the action, pointing at the ring finger and repeating the gesture of giving it away each time the chorus returned.

I ran into an electrician who had been working on the same site with me for a while, rewiring. He was a cool character, in his late fifties, with a goatee beard. He spoke to me in a casual way, indirectly, looking away towards the band. He started telling me about a guy called Dev, saying that he had ‘totally fucked up the place’ and I thought it was somebody working with him on one of the sites. Was he another electrician or what? They all laughed when I asked the question. And that’s how it often is, you say something without even knowing that it’s funny. Until it was explained to me that Dev was the short for De Valera, a tall figure from history that some of the older people talked about as though he was still alive and likely to walk into the pub any minute and order himself a drink.

The electrician was glad to step in and give a summary of Irish history. I listened eagerly, accepting the facts about internment camps and hunger strikes. He mentioned place names and dates which meant nothing to me but which made some of the women flinch. I suspected that there was still a strong level of sexual attraction revolving around national sorrow, not just where I came from but here as well. They talked about how bad things were ‘up there’ in Northern Ireland. One of the women said it was great to have no more checkpoints and no more dawn raids, not to mention car bombs and kneecapping. But she felt there was something great about those times as well. Lots of passion. Lots of men on the run. She said there was a smell of disinfectant in the air since the Peace Process began, and within seconds they were all laughing again.

I tried not to ask any more stupid questions and they claimed me as their friend, temporarily at least.

‘Anyone gives you any trouble, we’ll burst them.’

The word ‘burst’ confused me at first. I could only associate it with the phrase ‘bursting out laughing’. They were making me laugh all the time. Everybody was bursting out and cracking up, and I had no idea that I was walking myself into trouble. It came as a complete surprise to me that the electrician would end up trying to burst me a little while later.

All through the evening, they called each other ‘knackers’, which I first thought was some kind of joke. It was a reference to travellers, people on the move, like the Roma back home. Unlike the settled people who lived in houses, the travellers lived in caravans by the side of the road mostly, or used to, before it became illegal to do so. I had seen them on my journey around the country and was told that they had been displaced by a man named Cromwell, another hated figure in Irish history. ‘Knacker-drinking’ was a term which they used to describe those who consumed their alcohol outdoors in public places.

From what I could work out, the top most despised people in this country were Dev, Cromwell and Margaret Thatcher. After that it was knackers and scumbags. After that it was people like junkies and drug lords and clampers. Further down the list were the environmentalists and the artists. The person they hated most of all, it seemed, was an old woman in a shawl who was long dead, a woman by the name of Peig Sayers who lived in very poor circumstances on the Blasket Islands and forced everyone to speak the old language, Irish. The most dangerous people of all according to them were the bi-polars, because they could not be easily identified. It was not as though they conveniently lit up green at night like Zombies with their hair falling out. You never even knew when you were in the company of a bi-polar. But none of them were despised half as much as spongers. They could not be trusted for one minute.

I had no idea which of these categories I would fit into. My problem was not knowing how to judge people here. I tended to trust everybody equally. I didn’t know who to avoid or what streets to stay away from.

At some point in the evening I started getting on very well with a girl called Sharon. Her hair was streaked with highlights. The trunk of her belly was showing with a diamond stud in the navel. She had quite a few tattoos, on her arms and around the small of her back as well, all pointing downwards. She wanted to know if I had any tattoos or piercings, but I was embarrassed to say I didn’t. There were plenty of guys around with tattoos running up along the side of their necks, but they didn’t seem to interest her.

Whenever she laughed it was like the sound of gunfire going off and I mistook her initially for an old woman. She kept making me laugh until I had to tell her at one point not to burst me any more. She said my English was very good and started dragging me outside for a cigarette, even though I didn’t smoke.

That’s when the misunderstanding arose. She turned out to be the daughter of the electrician I had been talking to and he was not really in favour of what was going on between us.

‘Don’t get any ideas,’ he whispered to me in passing.

I think I had more to drink than I could cope with. I completely misread the signals and saw no sign at all of danger.

The band was playing the Bee Gees number about a man on death row, and maybe I should have taken that as a warning. There was a TV on in one part of the bar with an old movie playing silently without anyone watching because they all knew the story. The Godfather, I think it was. Al Pacino lying to his sister about having her husband killed.

There I was, being pulled out the back door of the pub to a small grotto which had been erected for smokers. Sharon called it a pagoda. We sat down and instead of smoking she took out a small sachet of pills, wrapped in silver foil. She took one herself and offered me one as well, but I didn’t need it.

She got up and started dancing to an imaginary techno beat which was far more energetic than the pop ballads coming from inside. She seemed not to be aware of me. Then she came over to kiss me, grabbing the back of my neck and rushing her tongue right into my mouth like a jeep. The other hand reached for my balls.

‘Show us your prick,’ she demanded.

I delayed long enough until she got impatient and searched for my zip. I was totally out of my depth and couldn’t tell if it was more of a rescue than an interference when her father suddenly appeared with two of his friends standing next to him.

‘Sharon,’ he roared. ‘Get in here.’

‘Ah fuck off, Da.’

He came over towards us while the other two remained at the door in case they were needed. Sharon had a screaming argument with her father at that point, with me as the main focus. She claimed she was old enough and entitled to screw anyone she liked and that this was not ‘Holy, Catholic Ireland’ any more with people placing an armed guard on their own daughters.

‘You’ve got a six-month-old baby, Sharon,’ he said.

‘Look, it’s OK,’ I interrupted, beginning to edge away towards the pub door. What I wanted most was for everyone to go back inside and enjoy the music again and be friends. But it wasn’t up to me to make a move.

‘You fucking stay where you are, you Polish cunt.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Sharon said.

‘He’s only a knacker and a sponger.’

The electrician threw a punch which sent me right out of the grotto, into a line of bins. Before the full panic set in, I had time to get offended. I wanted to tell him that I have never been to Poland in my life, but my nationality was hardly the issue here. The mistake suited me in many ways because I didn’t really want people to know I was from Serbia. I picked myself up and looked around to see where I should run to.

But by then it was already over. Sharon was walking away with her father and the two other men, like a team of escorts leading a pop star in through the back door of an arena. She must have been thrilled to be rescued like that. From inside, I heard the sound of applause and whistling and people cheering and the band starting up a number by the Gypsy Kings.

That’s when I got the phone call from Kevin. It couldn’t have come at a better time and we agreed to meet in a bar across the street, well away from the electrician and his daughter. It felt a bit sneaky, doing a bunk on my work mates, but I didn’t want to drag Kevin into any of this trouble.

He arrived with Helen and they immediately looked at me with some concern.

‘Are you all right?’

There was a bit of blood on my shirt and they kept asking me what happened. I played it down and told them I had simply miscalculated the situation in the bar. I had no idea that Sharon had a six-month-old baby or that her father was her chaperon for the night, not to mention the other two bodyguards.

‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like that,’ Kevin said.

‘The lads at work brought me there,’ I said.

‘Trust me,’ he said.

They were no friends, he assured me. A true friend was somebody who would put his hand in the fire for you. He explained what was more likely to happen and what it meant when somebody got burst. Briefly, it meant losing teeth. It meant footprints on your face.

He handed me the money for the materials and bought a round of drinks. He got quite drunk and told great stories which made Helen laugh out loud. Me as well. I liked him. I liked them both together, because they gave me this great feeling of being at home.

5

There we were, later that same night, Kevin and Helen and myself. The three of us walking together. Him in the middle with one arm around her and the other around me. Our feet shooting forward in unison. A strange animal with six feet and three laughing faces, two parts male and one part female. Once we reached the car and broke up, each of us stumbled away in a different direction. We lost the balance we had as a unit and had to regain our stability as individuals. He leaned into her, pushing her back against the side of the car to kiss her, but she shrugged him off, saying she was going to concentrate on getting home first. He fell away with his hands against the bonnet in a worshipping gesture. She laughed as she searched for the keys in her bag. She got into the car and turned on the engine while he sank down on to his knees, speaking to one of the headlights. His face lit up white. His eyes shut. Grinning. She shouted at him to get in, and then he cast an enormous shadow into the street as he stood up again.

‘Look, I can get a taxi,’ I said.

There were plenty of empty taxis heading back into the city centre.

‘Hang on, I’m bursting,’ he said.

His back was turned, hunched over as though he was counting out some money. Beyond him, the shutters of some shops, sprayed with graffiti. Then he spun around laughing and began to piss against the side of her car.

‘You bastard,’ she shouted.

I stood back on the pavement trying to pretend I was not part of this. I was embarrassed for her because he started pissing right across the bonnet. She was calling him a fucking animal, but I was not sure if she was really that angry and whether it might all be nothing more than a bit of fun in front of me. She must have known that he would pay to wash the car. He would even try and convince her later that it was an expression of affection. It was his trademark way of doing things in great waves of raging love and generosity. And maybe this was what she liked so much about him, his explosiveness, his talent for surprise. One day they would settle down and get married. Then all this madness would have to come to an end.

He began pissing right across the windscreen at her. She cursed again, but that only seemed to encourage him. She put on the windscreen wipers and sprayed two jets of soapy water in a counterattack, spreading the mixture of soap and piss across the glass.

Then I wondered if she was crying because she just backed down and remained silent, looking away into the street because this was not a very good sign for the future.

Was he consecrating her car or desecrating it? Quite possible that he would not be doing this without me present to witness this balancing act between them. They seemed to be appealing to me like a referee.

But who was I to judge?

Hard for me to know where the boundary lay between a joke and an insult. It was only a bit of a laugh, I kept telling myself. They have different rules here that I had not figured out yet. Or was it something else? Was he showcasing his power over her? Over me? Including me in this insane, intimate public act, but also letting me know that I had no right to take part?

A car sped past with all the windows open and three female occupants in the back seat singing along to the radio. They left a fraction of a familiar hit song on each part of the pavement, in doorways, in alleys, like cats hiding under parked cars.

And then the electrician turned up out of nowhere and pushed me against the shutters of the shops.

‘Where is she?’ he shouted.

It’s possible that he said other things. ‘You Polish bastard.’ You tend to add things in reconstruction, when it’s all so difficult to believe. The electrician seemed to think that I was alone in the street, because he began to swing punches at my head and claimed that I had abducted his daughter.

It didn’t take long for Kevin to react. He came rushing over and pulled the electrician away by the collar.

‘Get your hands off my friend.’

There was a struggle on the pavement. Not even a fight but more of a dance. Kevin kicked the electrician right in the groin and forced him to bend over, following it up with a strong punch in the face.

‘Kevin,’ I heard Helen screaming.

Maybe she thought she knew him better than that. She was tied to previous assumptions of his character, unable to understand where this violence had come from. To her it must have looked like something happening far away, beyond her control. Kevin swung the electrician around and sent him falling back against the shutters. The sound resembled the clap of a shotgun, followed by the scattering of pigeons.

I got the impression that the electrician was being lifted up off the ground. His feet were left hanging in the air. The first part of his body to land was the hip and I could hear it crack on the concrete, like a rare piece of porcelain shattering inside a velvet bag.

His head was the final part to descend, perhaps in self-preservation. There may have been another boot added at this moment, though I would still like to believe it’s not true. It was quite possible that the addition of this final kick to the head fractionally delayed it from reaching the ground. Perhaps it provided a vital alteration in the angle of fall, bringing it down to the pavement sideways, with the corner of his forehead as the last point of contact. A phase tester came clattering along the pavement.

There were several more urgent kicks to the head, but then it was over. The electrician didn’t stir after that. The whole thing lasted only a few seconds, as far as I recall. Kevin pushed me towards the car and roared at me to get in. Then he got in himself and slammed the door as if that was still part of the momentum.

‘Drive,’ he shouted.

But instead, Helen got out. She ran over to the man lying on the ground, quite peacefully. Blood had come creeping out of his nostrils. His right hand stretched out on the pavement in a begging gesture.

‘Come on,’ Kevin shouted through his teeth, getting out of the car again.

She kneeled down with some obligation to care for the man on the ground. But Kevin pulled her away, forcing her back into the car, this time into the passenger seat, while he ran around and took the wheel.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t drive.’

As if being over the limit had become the main problem now.

‘We can’t just leave him there.’

The car accelerated away. I looked behind me, not sure if he was dead or alive any more. Then I heard her shouting at him and telling him to stop.

‘You’re a fucking lawyer, for God sake!’

Kevin continued driving at great speed. After a while he stopped and parked the car in a place where we were looking out at the sea. The lighthouse in the distance, blinking lazily. Some stationary ships out there, waiting to go into port on Monday morning. The usual orange necklace of city lights and a thin drizzle making it look like the ships were drifting away. We sat there breathing, listening, not doing anything but trying to sober up and figure out what to do.

‘What’s come over you?’ she said. ‘You just beat the shit out of that man for nothing.’

‘I only tipped him and he fell over.’

‘And now you’re doing a runner.’

‘Racist bastard,’ he said. ‘He brought it on himself.’

‘We have to go back,’ she said.

‘No way.’

‘You’ve got to call the guards.’

‘It was a split-second thing,’ he said. ‘I had to protect Vid here.’

There’s a pause, but it didn’t seem right to express gratitude.

Nobody moved. Each one of us trying to roll back what happened. But you might as well try and turn history into reverse. Soldiers taking crimes out from underneath their pillows and carrying them off to secret locations. Bullets popping out of people’s heads. Dead people jumping back to life and walking away backwards.

We were parked right on the verge of the quay. Any further forward and we would have ended up in the water. They would be lifting us out with a crane in the morning, out from among the floating condoms and beer cans.

‘You’ve got to be able to walk away,’ he said. ‘Big mistake to retrace your steps.’

‘Did your mother tell you that?’

She stared at him, extracting a forecast from his words, as though he had become a stranger to her.

We sat there, looking out at the black water of the port, the dark eyes of deep water staring back at us. We heard the sound of small waves going up and down the granite steps. We waited for the future to come, wondering if he was going to drive over the edge. We might as well have gone underwater as it was, driving away along the floor of the sea, through fields of brown seaweed, with mullet and luminous prawns swimming across the windscreen before us. Speeding through a silent landscape of rocks and barnacles and anchors and suspended lobster pots. I had the feeling that we were only waiting for the electrician to come and join us, limping or crawling up to the car, getting in beside me and putting his seat belt on. Dark worms of blood going in and out of his nostrils. Breathing clogging up in his chest. We would never get rid of him now, I thought. I imagined him speaking calmly, with moisture in his voice, getting ready for this long underwater journey that we were about to embark on together. ‘I was only having the craic,’ he would say, because he really wanted to be friends and keep the conversation going.

The engine started up again. I can remember thinking that he was going in the wrong direction, reversing instead of going forward. He drove in a rage once more, this time parking outside her place, rushing us away inside, into her basement apartment.

‘Stay there and don’t move,’ he said.

Then he disappeared again. We heard him walking away. Where to, we had no idea. We stood looking at each other. After a moment, her hospitality returned and she asked me to sit down.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

‘I’ve never seen him do anything like this before,’ she said, more to herself.

To calm things down she started making tea. Then she put on some music. Balkan wedding music, of all things. She was trying to make me feel at home, but the music was so familiar that I was overwhelmed by homesickness and horror simultaneously.

I was instantly reminded of my sister’s wedding, the wedding that never took place because of the car accident on the way. The violence in the street had brought back everything I had been trying to leave behind. Now the music was returning me to the same fatal scene in which my parents had died, repatriating me to the country I had just escaped from. But how could I explain that to her? In any case, neither of us were really listening to the music, only staring at the floor, silently going over what had just happened and wondering what was laid out before us.

She said it was probably best for me to spend the night there and prepared a place for me to sleep on the sofa.

When Kevin finally returned, he looked at the two of us with great suspicion, as though we had been talking about him all this time.

‘What’s that music?’ he asked.

‘Where the fuck were you?’ she demanded.

It took him a while to answer. He went to the fridge first and took out a beer, then began to open it with his teeth, just to annoy her, it seemed, because she flinched and said, ‘Jesus, will you get an opener, Kevin.’ Then he took a long drink before he finally spoke.

‘The less you know, the better,’ he said.

‘I want to know what’s happened to that man,’ she asked.

‘He’s outside, waiting for you,’ he said to me.

‘Christ,’ she said.

‘Only joking,’ he laughed. ‘He’s alive and well. In the best of health, as a matter of fact.’

She turned and disappeared into the bedroom. He went in after her and they continued arguing, occasionally shouting at each other, sometimes mentioning my name.

I hated being involved in all this and felt like slipping out, making a run for it. I imagined the police arriving any minute. I even thought of leaving the money that he had given me to start the work.

They were arguing for a long while. At times they went silent, but then she raised her voice once more, calling him a thug and telling him not to touch her.

‘It’s the pissing,’ I heard him say to her. ‘That’s what’s getting to you, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t fucking care, do you?’

‘Come on, Helen. Admit it. You’re only worked up because I did a wee-wee on your car, isn’t that so?’

‘Wake up, Kevin,’ she said. ‘Think of what you have done. Assault, that’s what they will call it. You have just put your entire career in jeopardy and you think it’s funny.’

He paused. He seemed to be reflecting on what she had said.

‘Look, Helen,’ he said, finally, ‘I’m sorry for doing a wee-wee on your car.’

‘Asshole,’ she shouted.

Then he came out grinning while she slammed the door behind him. I suppose you could say it was a victory for him, sort of. Even though he got kicked out of the bedroom by his girlfriend, he was still able to claim that he had won. The world was falling apart around him, but he was happy holding on to the last laugh. He didn’t say anything more to me, just sat down in an armchair and dozed off, buried in sleep with a smile spreading across his face.

6

Next morning he stood above me with the sun behind him, ready to leave. He had a glass of water in his hand, which he drank down and put on the table with a clack, the equivalent of saying, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ There was no looking back. No retracing steps. No time to reflect on what had gone by.

‘Mental, last night,’ he said.

I couldn’t make out why he was not more concerned. But this was a new day and it was time to put everything behind us. Within minutes I was sitting in his car, speeding over to his mother’s house.

‘Listen, Vid. What happened last night – don’t give it another thought.’

My reading was that these things never go away.

‘I work with them,’ I said. ‘They know me, those guys.’

‘He’s not dead,’ he said with great confidence. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘What if they go to the police?’

‘You’ve done nothing against the law, Vid.’

‘Yes. But what about you?’

‘Look. This is important,’ he said, pulling in to the side of the road for a moment. ‘You cannot mention my name. I can’t be dragged into this.’

He had done me a favour and now it was my turn to return the favour, to put my hand in the fire for him.

‘You’re doing a job at my mother’s house, that’s all you have to say. If they come looking for information, you call me. Say nothing. They cannot force you to answer any questions until you have your solicitor present. You understand that?’

He drove on with the windows open and his elbow out, coaching me, assuring me that everything would be fine.

‘You remember nothing, right?’

He smiled at me, placing his hand on my neck.

‘OK, my friend.’

We were tied to each other now, though I couldn’t work out whether he needed me or whether I had become a dead weight around his shoulders.

He stopped to buy a newspaper, flicked swiftly through the pages, then showed me a small report on the incident which described the victim as a man in his early sixties who was the subject of a serious assault. He was recovering in hospital and the Garda were appealing for witnesses. They were looking for two attackers, believed to be non-national, of Polish extraction.

‘They have it all arse-ways,’ he laughed, throwing the paper into the back seat.

As he moved on again, I noticed that he had time to examine every woman we passed on the street. He spoke quite openly about what he liked and disliked, what turned him on and what he would never touch in a million years. He started telling me about his life, about Helen, about his family. Disposing of his biography, so to speak, in a single breath, like something he needed to leave behind rather than something he had grown into over the years.

I heard somebody once say that your childhood runs after you like a little dog. He started telling me things about his family that he wanted to get away from, confiding in me as an outsider who could be trusted, knowing that I would keep it all to myself.

His parents had met in London. They were probably hippies who couldn’t find enough drugs and rock music in Ireland and left the country. They were the last generation to leave on the boat, he explained, before cheap flights took over. People who felt stifled and compelled as much by the habit of leaving as by the excitement of arriving anywhere else. It was in the blood. They just did what so many did before them. He began his life growing up in England and only returned when he was around nine years old. With the troubles going on in the North, he explained, and the mistrust of Irish accents on the streets of London, his mother decided to make a go of it back in Dublin. Over the years, he had lost any trace of his English accent. And maybe this was why he understood my position so well. At school, he learned what it was like to be excluded and tried to mix in and camouflage himself. He did his best to be Irish. He was aware of the inadequacies that come with being a stranger and denied the early part of his own childhood, ignoring the dog running after him.

‘Never look back, my friend.’

He would repeat this phrase many times more. It was inscribed on every thought, on every decision he made.

‘You’ve got to be able to walk on out of it,’ he said. ‘Believe me. You can’t let yourself be dragged down.’

He was speaking out of my mouth, as they say. I agreed with everything he said for my own personal reasons, which had all to do with leaving and never going back again. He must have seen something in my situation that could perfectly explain his own, the story of his life described in mine. Like me, his aim was to escape. Only, he made it look like fun. All the bad things erased. Everything full of optimism and enterprise. Everything converted into a laugh. You could tell what made him so attractive to women, for instance, not only his striking good looks but also his ability to magnify the world around him into a great story.

His mother’s name was Rita, and right from the beginning I could see that he adored her. She was a born schoolteacher and you could hear the chalk grinding when she spoke. Her word was always final, with no remission. End of story. She had seen everything in life, including drugs and sex and anything young people could invent. It was all being repeated over and over down through the generations, just a new treatment, new lingo, new energy and new boredom. She took in the news and current affairs as though she could see it all coming. She reacted in the same way to her own misfortunes with stoic detachment, as though they were happening on the far side of the world.

He told me that she had a long memory. If you did something to her, she would never forget. For example. His little sister was initially called Eilish, after his aunt Eilish. But there had been a falling out, something unforgivable was done, and his mother changed the baby’s name to Ellis.

He said his father was a ‘waster’ from Connemara who had ‘fucked off’, leaving Rita to bring up three children on her own back in Dublin. She’d had the good fortune to inherit a house and was helped out by her brother, a priest, but it had not been easy to keep the family going. His father was the classic emigrant, the person who walked away but kept on singing about going home.

‘Homesickness,’ he said. ‘It’s like a disease. A psychiatric condition that people used to pass on to their children at birth.’

He could remember his father coming back from time to time on a visit. The family had tried to make a go of it once when Kevin and his sisters were small, but he left again, back to London. Kevin could recall him singing with his eyes closed. Speaking the old language, talking in Irish to his friends. But then he finally disappeared for good. The only contact after that was talking to him on the phone once or twice, before the money ran out in whatever coin box his father stood in. The line would go dead and all he would hear was the crackle of the rain on the other side.

‘Thing of the past, really,’ he said. ‘Homesickness. All that seeping nostalgia. It’s like polio. Or tuberculosis. Very rare these days.’

His father had written himself out of the family history. I was being written in. And maybe that’s what I longed for most, to be pasted into the family scrapbook, whatever the consequences. He was claiming me as his friend, offering me this precious information, but also conscripting me as a foot soldier, sworn in by an unspoken oath of loyalty.

When we arrived at the house, he introduced me to both his younger sisters, Jane and Ellis. His mother made a pot of tea and put some fresh scones on the table for us. I felt more like a guest than a worker. Kevin gave them my biography so as to avoid too much interrogation from his mother. Belgrade, parents died in a car crash, memory loss after the accident, came to Ireland to get a new start. No further questions.

‘Tragic, what happened there,’ his mother said, being polite.

Then he disappeared again and I began working upstairs in the bedroom. First of all I smashed up an ancient free-standing wardrobe which was listing to one side. I stacked the broken pieces in the back garden to be used for firewood. After that, I ran around to the local building supplier’s to collect some batons so I could start framing up for the new wardrobe, which was simple enough. It was not such a big job. The black ash panels were to be delivered during the week. I reckoned the whole thing would not take much more than a week or two in my spare time.

Later, while I was fixing the batons to the wall, his mother brought me a mug of tea and some biscuits. She was curious to see how I was getting on. And when I was finished, I made certain to clean up after myself, so that she would not end up walking on splinters in her bare feet at night. I brought the plate and the mug back down and placed them in the sink.

‘You’re a bit of a perfectionist,’ she said to me. ‘I can see that.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Not often you get that around here.’

‘Ah well. I do my best, I suppose.’

She owned a collection of tin, wind-up toys. A little boy on a bicycle. A duck on wheels with a windmill on his head. Tin mice. Tin frogs leaping and a tin carousel with tin children swinging. She showed them to me and allowed a few of them to spin around the kitchen table. I had to stop the duck on a bike from falling over the edge. We got talking, because these toys were not sold in the shops here on safety grounds, because of the sharp metal parts, bits of blades bent over to hold them together. But they were still found in markets and shops all across Europe where I come from. For adults only. Parental guidance, that kind of thing. I promised her that if I was ever back home in the near future, I would buy her one to add to her collection.

During the following week, I worked away at the shelving and began to discover a little more about the family. I’m not the kind of person who pries into other people’s business. I’m quite discreet. I do my work sort of blindfolded, you might say. But when you’re in somebody else’s house, you can’t help noticing things.

In the bedroom, her stuff was all temporarily stored on the floor. It wasn’t just a wardrobe she was after but a place to keep her documents. They were stacked up on top of each other against the bay window in boxes and large envelopes and folders tied with ribbon. Bits of newspapers from another time. Photographs. Wedding albums. All the evidence of her life, which she possibly didn’t want to look at very often but slept with every night, alone in the same room. It was now exposed on the floor, waiting to be put away again as soon as I had the new wardrobe finished.

I didn’t look at any of her personal things. I swear, it’s not like me to do that. But one evening, a bundle of letters fell down. The ribbon around them must have come undone and they were scattered all over the floor. It looked as if I was nosing through her stuff, and I had no option but to pick them up and put them back so they were in exactly the same order, as far as possible. Letters with her name on them. Rita Concannon. His mother came from the time of letters, before all the new technology took over. Even though she still looked quite young, the letters seemed to put her way back into an ancient era of handwriting and lots of time between things being sent off and delivered.

The letters, I could not help noticing, were sent from England, all sealed, all unopened, all unread.

What is it about letters in this country? I asked myself. An email or a phone message could be easily ignored. But letters seemed to have such substance. They were real. You could hold them in your hand, as I did, briefly. I wanted to know more about the person who sent them. I wondered if they had come from the absent father, the man who had excluded himself from the family. What terrible words did they contain and why were they never even opened? All those far-away things inside your head that can only be written down in a letter.

What a cruel archivist she was to keep them unread. She was the perfectionist, I thought, storing these precious handwritten letters, gagged and sealed, with no right of reply.

Anyone who lives in a foreign place must ask themselves that question all the time: Have they been forgotten? It made me wonder about myself. I was hoping that my presence here was not like this one-way correspondence, that I was not just a worker and that they would miss me, if I had to leave for some reason and not return again.

7

The Garda officers came looking for me on site around lunchtime. With all the other workers eating their take-away food and staring at me, they asked me to confirm my name and address. Was my real name Vid or Vim? Was I a Polish national? They suspected I was trying to conceal my identity and wanted to see my passport, evidence of my work permit, which I did not have with me at the time and which I agreed to provide as soon as possible. But they needed to see it immediately. They were polite and took me to my apartment and then on to the station for further questioning.

At the station, they asked me to cast my mind back to a particular night and tell them whether I had been involved in an assault in which a man had been seriously injured. They gave me the date and the location and an approximate band of time in which the assault had taken place. They wanted to know about my movements on the night in question and asked me if I had made an anonymous phone call to a particular Garda station alerting them to the crime. They informed me that a man with a foreign accent like mine had reported seeing the victim lying in the street but then refused to identify himself. I told them I had not made any such call and that the incident had nothing to do with me.

‘That’s very strange,’ one of the officers said. They explained that the victim had claimed I was known to him, that we had met in a nearby bar on the night in question and that I had been seen in his company by several witnesses. It was reported that I had accosted his daughter and then subsequently, on the same night, assaulted him on his way home. He was recovering from multiple injuries, including a broken hip and a broken jaw. He was pressing charges against me, as well as another unknown Polish national who had yet to be identified.

‘Was it your friend who made the phone call?’ they wanted to know.

They asked their questions too quickly for me to think. It was a shock to discover that I had become the main suspect. I had no idea what to say to them. I denied that I had assaulted anyone. They asked me if I needed legal aid, but I let them know that I was already fixed up with a lawyer, so they allowed me to make a call.

Kevin arrived as soon as possible, dressed in a dark suit and carrying a brown case. He knew some of the officers and spoke to them in an informal way as though they were friends. He winked at me and we were given a chance to have a few words alone.

‘I know this is a bit of a shock, Vid,’ he said. ‘But listen, don’t worry. They’ll never get anywhere with this line of enquiry. They’re only groping around in the dark. You simply deny everything. You didn’t assault anyone. You have no recollection whatsoever of what they are alleging, am I right?’

‘I will have to tell the truth,’ I said. ‘I can’t lie.’

‘Nobody’s asking you to lie, Vid.’

He smiled at me and placed his hand on my shoulder. It was good to see him. His presence brought a great surge of confidence back to me.

I didn’t want to let him down either. He had stood by me. At last I had a friend and was beginning to feel at home here, so I couldn’t afford to lose that. But I felt so inadequate in front of the law. I was too honest. I didn’t have the knack of out-staring the questions and sneaking up on the facts. You had to be born with that kind of gift, like a good card player. I was a newcomer to the table, all nervous and unsure of myself, ready to bet everything on one hand and blurt out the unabridged truth.

‘You have the right to remain silent,’ he reminded me. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’

‘I’m afraid they will turn everything around with their questions.’

‘You don’t even have to say yes or no.’

He seemed so relaxed, slipping his phone in and out of his inner pocket to check messages. His sandy hair fell naturally across the corner of his forehead. His nose leaned a tiny degree to the right and his smile moved across with it, very openhearted, I thought.

‘They’re asking me who I was with that night,’ I said.

‘I know what you’re talking about, Vid.’ He nodded calmly. ‘But the fact is, you don’t remember anything, am I right in saying that? You have a very poor memory, isn’t that so? You were involved in a bad car accident back home in Serbia. You sustained head injuries which caused severe brain trauma. With the result that you are now left with bouts of prolonged amnesia.’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘Show them the scar on your head,’ he said. ‘You suffer from memory loss, short term as well as long term. You have big gaps where you cannot remember much about growing up. Nothing about school, not even much about your own family.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘You can hardly remember where you come from, isn’t that so?’

‘Just about.’

‘Explain that to them,’ he said. ‘Make it clear to them what a painful condition this is, not to be able to remember your own past. You don’t even recall much of what happened in your own country and who was brought before the European Court or anything of that sort.’

‘More or less,’ I agreed.

‘Some days are a complete blank,’ he said. ‘How does that sound?’

He went over the details of the night again, shaping it into a brief and unambiguous synopsis. I could remember being in the pub and meeting the victim. I could recall having a friendly chat with his daughter outside the back door while she was smoking, but I had no recollection of anything after that.

‘Will I tell them that he hit me?’ I asked.

‘I wouldn’t mention it. That would only give you a motive.’

He was so convincing. I admired the way he could see things with such clarity. He had the ability to think on his feet and look ahead while he was speaking. He knew where each sentence would end before he even began. In contrast, I spoke almost entirely in beginnings, or endings, with nothing sounding in the least bit finished or credible.

‘Just a bit of advice, Vid. Don’t let them put words in your mouth. And don’t be the big storyteller. Doesn’t suit you. Best to remember as little as possible.’

That was it. He spoke to the officers again and told them it was clearly a case of mistaken identity. First of all, I was not Polish, so they appeared to have the wrong man. They discussed this for a moment and then insisted on taking a statement. A woman Garda typed it up on a computer, then printed it out and produced a pen from the back of her hair for me to sign. Kevin later said to me that she was quite pretty, despite the fact that she was in uniform and that she was so small, not even the size of a milk carton.

‘That’s very convenient,’ one of the officers remarked at one point, referring to my memory loss, but Kevin objected quite vigorously to that suggestion, saying it was completely out of order. Calling somebody’s disability convenient, that was not on. They had the wrong man, he reiterated, and I liked that idea. It was so good to have him by my side. There was no progress made with the enquiries. At the end of the interview, they told me that I would need to come back in order to be formally identified by the victim, but in the meantime I was free to go.

Two weeks later I had to show up again for the line-up, which was made up of immigrants like myself mostly, with a man from Nigeria at one end and a man who turned out to be a plain clothes policeman in the middle, just to mix things up a little. The electrician was still on crutches, but he had no hesitation in pointing to me right away, without even wishing to look into my eyes.

To me it felt like I had been picked out as the only person who didn’t belong here.

On the same day, I was brought before the court and charged with the assault. I don’t even remember the words that were used because I was hardly listening to what they were saying. I think my mind shut down completely and refused to hear anything. I suppose I was clutching at the familiar things in my life, images of home which I was running away from but which might still give me some comfort. I was thinking of the streets of Belgrade, the trees in summer, the sound of the language, the Cyrillic writing we learned in school. The people in the cafés, the wasps around the cakes. None of those things had prepared me for what was happening in court. I was concentrating on the shape of the houses on Washington Street, my route to and from school on the bus. I could see myself passing by the cinema and I could even remember some of the movies I had watched there, the posters outside on the wall, the excitement of paying the money at the box office, getting the ticket stub and walking into the cool, darkened auditorium on a hot day, like the only refuge from the heat. I could see my life condensed into a number of key memories, like the sound of the bus doors clattering as they closed and the bus pulling away and leaving diesel fumes behind, mixed with the smell of coffee and leather goods and a million other things. I could remember the stalls with vendors selling bootleg merchandise. I could feel the heat of the summer lying across the lazy streets when I emerged from the cinema, hitting me in the face like a cushion, even though it always took a long time to step out of the story of the movie back into reality. I could remember the face of an old woman who begged on the corner, next to the bakery, still sitting on a small wooden box at that very moment, in her own city, while I was in court a thousand miles away, completely out of place.

I wondered if it was a mistake to leave your own country. My first impression here was of everything being so wealthy and inviting. The shop fronts were new and the goods on display were neat and ordered, with lots of choice. Belgrade seemed so dull by comparison. I could recall passing by a ladies’ fashion shop with the mannequin of a woman with one amputated arm. She had rosy cheeks, but her nose looked like it had been bitten off and the plaster inside her nostrils was showing as though everything had been affected in some way by the war.

I heard my name being called out a number of times, badly pronounced. Next thing I was standing in the street again, free to go, awaiting trial. The whole thing was over so fast that I had no time to pick up what had been said. It would have been so much more depressing if it hadn’t been for Kevin encouraging me, clapping me on the back as though I had won a prize. He was doing everything in his power to sort this out.

‘We’re in this together, Vid. I will not let you down, I swear.’

He reminded me that I was doing him an enormous turn and that he would see me right. He would engage the best legal minds in the city to work on this case. He got me a cup of coffee and told me to put it out of my head for the moment, but I could think of nothing else and even thought of leaving and going back home to my own country to escape from this, as if that would solve my problems.

‘We’ll get you out of this,’ he assured me. Once again, I felt the rush of confidence coming from his words. I felt safe and welcomed, as always, until I was on my own again, walking home.

It was lashing all afternoon after the court appearance. Nothing could be done about the weather. Even when the rain stopped, the trees were dripping and the gable ends of houses were stained with watermarks. I could feel the moisture at the back of my neck, inside my sleeves. I could see it hanging across the streets. The whole earth sagging under the weight of unhappiness, with more clouds, like heavy curtains being closed. Cars hissing along the streets as if we were all living in a fish tank. Passengers floating away on buses with steamed-up windows. The swings in the People’s Park were wet. The benches were wet. The lawns saturated like a green sponge. Nobody wanted to be out and nobody wanted to be in either. The faces of children at the windows, waiting for something better. I wondered if I could ever get used to it. The dampness seemed to affect everything here. Children got curls in their hair. Hall doors swelled up, causing trouble closing. Rusted railings. Rusted bicycle chains. You could hear people coughing. You could hear them complaining that it was impossible even to get the clothes dry.

At one point, while I sheltered in a doorway, a woman came along the street saying ‘rotten’ to everyone she passed by. I was in a trance, staring through the rain in front of my eyes, just hearing the word ‘rotten’ echoing again and again along the street. I listened to the water, like the sound of wheels spinning inside my head. Water running down the drainpipes and gurgling away into the sewers. Herringbone patterns rushing into the drains. Broken gutters where the water came spurting out in a fountain across the pavement until the whole city was turned into one great water feature.

I was angry. I even had time to feel betrayed. There were so many unanswered questions in my own head. Who made the anonymous phone call on the night? I refused to even think that Kevin would have done such a thing, calling the Garda station and putting on a Polish accent. A friend would not do that.

The following day, I quit working for the building company I was employed with. It was important to avoid running into the electrician or any of his mates. I got a job sanding floors instead, which was not ideal, and it made more sense to get out of the building trade altogether. It was best to lie low for a while, until this was all over.

I went back to security work. But it was not my style, standing around outside bars and night clubs in a black suit, looking people up and down and refusing entry. Not much better hanging around the door of a pharmacy all day. I decided to stop that and took up a job in a restaurant. I kept my hand in, doing a bit of carpentry work here and there with my friend Darius. But it was Kevin who really helped me out in the end, bringing me back to his mother’s house. She was so happy with the black ash wardrobes that she wanted me to do more work. The back door to begin with. It was falling apart and totally unsafe from a security point of view. You could almost walk in without even having to turn the handle. So they wanted me to put in a decent hardwood door with a proper three-lever mortise lock.

That kept me going for the time being and made me feel I was still part of the family at least.

8

It would take a good nine months or more for the court case to come up, so there was lots of time to sit around and agonise over the situation. Better to go out and have a good time while I was waiting, Kevin advised me. What helped to take my mind off things was that I found a girlfriend. Her name was Liuda and she was from Moldova, working here as a beautician on a temporary visa. I got talking to her at the pharmacy where she was promoting some skin-care products and we started going out.

I felt badly not telling her that I was charged with assault, but she was better off not knowing anything about that.

We got on very well together and maybe immigrants were better off sticking together, I thought, because we might have more in common. Put it this way, we both knew what it was like to live away from home and what a comfort it was to float around in each other’s arms. When it came to sex, you could say that we spoke the same language. Some of the things she did with her body gave me such a rush of blood to the head that I forgot everything. She was so full of stagecraft and imagination that I could never think of anything else but the act of making love itself. Her legs. Her mouth. Her breasts pointed slightly upwards at the tops of trees somewhere. Everything about her in bed demanded such full attention that I could not concentrate on anything other than the specific details of her body. The incredibly soft areas on the inside of her thighs. The brush of her nipple against the side of my face. All those breathy voicemail sounds in my ears. The encounter with her seemed to prohibit all memory. For instance, I could not remember any old people. I could not get myself to remember any dead people either. She distracted me from thinking about the news, about war and climate change, disasters of any sort, like famine and poverty and people dying of AIDS. She produced such a powerful urge in me, pulling me so vigorously inside herself that I became truly blank. In other words, we were fucking to forget. We created this little enclave of love and sex which inhibited us from getting a proper foothold in the real world.

Yes. You could say it was love, but there was no future in it. Under the circumstances, with my court case coming up and her being here on a temporary visa, it seemed pointless for us to accumulate too many memories together.

We did all the right things. We went for picnics in the Phoenix Park. We spent time at the Zoo. We went walking along the pier together. We took photos of each other with all the local landmarks in the background. Her eyes caught the sunlight – glossy, hazel-brown pebbles at the bottom of a stream. She came from a place where they still had bears and wolves and numberless trees, where nature might still make a big comeback some day. We heard the sound of the accordion coming and going on the breeze. We passed by the man from Romania playing a gypsy waltz and wondered why we had left home in the first place. We remembered the same kind of things, the sight of villages and church spires and headscarves and open shirts and unshaven smiles in the fields. We felt close to each other – same nostalgia, same tug of self-loathing, same shock of familiar tastes and images from which we had walked away.

In the long run, we were only preventing each other from integrating and moving ahead. It was there in our eyes, in the kind of choices we made, the places we went to, the kind of things we purchased that didn’t cost too much, like ice-cream cones.

For instance, one day I brought her to a place called Howth. It’s meant to be beautiful out there. Famous too, because this was the location where the writer James Joyce first made love to his future wife Nora, something which is commemorated publicly on the sixteenth of June every year in a national celebration of sex and literature and first love. People told me that Ireland used to be sexually repressed, but you’d never think it now, would you?

Howth was just another hill, basically, with a big golf course and some wealthy villas and gates and planes landing nearby at the airport. It didn’t really mean anything to us. When I gave Liuda the relevant tourist information, she shrugged as though I was talking about a past lover. We walked around and sat on a bench. We felt the dampness in the air, rising up into our shoulders. We gazed at the clouds moving fast overhead, which made us want to hold on to the bench with our hands. We kissed and touched, but we couldn’t really connect to the place. It was a mistake to bring her out there because it already belonged to somebody else. We were the latecomers. She looked lonely and pale, so we didn’t stay very long.

‘Come on, Vid. I’m cold,’ she said.

There was quite a breeze blowing and she started rubbing her arms. As we got up and walked back, I spotted a used condom hanging like a pink piece of stripped fruit in the gorse bushes. I deflected her attention, pointing eagerly like a child at the lighthouse, but I think she had seen the condom before me and didn’t mention it out of courtesy.

We were both dragging our feet. When you come from somewhere else, you develop all these prejudices about the people of this country being superior, more funny, more gifted with language and jokes. She said Irish women were strong and very independent. She wanted to learn that. Every time we stared into each other’s eyes, we were reminded only of our own inadequacies. We had to be realistic, I suppose. We were both on the lookout for something better. There was something missing, something preventing us from committing fully to this love in a damp climate.

We stuck it out together for about six months, but there was never any mention of us moving in together permanently. And the idea of setting up a family seemed completely out of the question. Think of it. We would remain strangers to our own children. We would be like two homesick parents, living in a fantasy. Lacking essential local knowledge. Routine stuff that everybody knows around here. Our children laughing at us and correcting our mistakes. Talking to us like we were deaf and blind and had no idea what was going on in the real world outside. We would speak to them in a foreign language and they would never get used to what we sounded like in our own mother tongue. It would remain a life of confusion and contradiction and naturally occurring blasphemies.

I tried to integrate her as much as possible into my life, but it never worked out. One night, I brought Liuda with me to meet Kevin and Helen, but that was a bit of a disaster. Nobody knew what to say except Kevin. He couldn’t take his eyes off Liuda all night. Kept talking only to her as though myself and Helen were not even present.

Liuda was very shy in his presence and hardly said a word. Helen was even more silent, almost aloof. The only thing she said all night was to mention Dursey Island.

‘I believe the cable car is down,’ she said, and Kevin looked up with great surprise, wondering where this thought had slipped out from. ‘They have a new one ordered from Germany,’ she added. ‘So I read in the paper.’

We had more fun on our own, Liuda and myself. At least we had love and sex, like living on our own island. We could also talk about our observations as outsiders, without offending anyone. We spoke about some of the funny things, the contradictions we experienced here. I loved listening to her talking about her clients and how envious they were of her complexion. She told me how Irish women often hated their own skin. They wanted the make-up lashed on thick. ‘Does my face look like a plate of chips?’ they sometimes joked. And how could you answer that? Beauty therapy was not about being honest but about making the customers feel good.

We agreed that people here didn’t want the straight answer all the time. They needed lots of praise. They loved exaggeration. They used compliments like mind-altering substances. She was on commission for skin-care products, so she got used to telling people that they looked gorgeous, cool, brilliant, absolutely amazing – out of this world.

She told me the story of how she came here. She met an Irish businessman who was in Moldova sourcing timber. She ran into him in a bar and he offered to get her a job. Paid for her flight over and put her up. She was nervous because she had heard about girls getting their passports taken off them when they arrived. But her passport didn’t matter as much as her visa, which put her at the mercy of her employer. She could not work for anyone else. So she lived with him and slept with him and cooked for him and worked in the office of his joinery firm.

Once he got tired of her, he allowed the permit to lapse. When he came back from another business trip with a new woman from São Paulo and a consignment of hardwoods that he swore were not from the rainforest, Liuda had to move out and find herself a new employer who would apply for a new visa. Asshole, she called him, and it made me laugh to hear her putting the emphasis in the wrong place. Ass-HOLE.

Inevitably, she was taken out of my hands, as the saying goes.

We were in a bar together one night and this guy came up to me in the jacks, talking about her. He was staggering around the place, pissing dangerously beside me in his urinal, chasing the green, pine-smelling dice around in circles with the force of his flush.

‘Come here,’ he said, zipping up. ‘Is that your girlfriend?’

‘What?’

Out in the corridor, he held my arm and smiled with great sincerity. He had something important to tell me.

‘I just want to let you know that your girlfriend has the most beautiful arse I’ve ever seen. I’m not joking you. I’ve never seen such a beautiful arse before in my whole life.’

What was I meant to say? Thanks?

‘No offence, like. I’m just saying, in case you haven’t noticed.’

He had me cornered.

‘Come ‘ere. Is she a model or something?’

I smiled and tried my best to walk away, but he insisted on shaking my hand to congratulate me.

‘Look, I hope you don’t think I’m coming on to her or anything like that. I’m just telling you the truth, that’s all. Her arse is only fucking amazing. You should be proud of yourself.’

He was right of course. Liuda was wearing incredibly tight jeans with zips across the back pockets like long, silver eyelashes, fast asleep. And knee-high boots. I could never really understand the boots, or the jeans for that matter, but that was the whole idea, wasn’t it, attracting lots of attention to herself.

‘Only messing,’ he said, putting his arm around me. ‘I’m just having the craic, that’s all.’

He leaned on me all the way back towards the bar. I could hardly interpret this as a form of aggression, because he was being so friendly.

‘I was just remarking to your man here,’ he continued, nodding to me but speaking directly to Liuda this time. ‘You have the most perfect arse that ever came into this country.’

He waited for her to smile.

‘There’s no woman anywhere around here to match you.’

I thought she might have been offended, for my sake. But this was really her opportunity to land on her feet at last, so I could not allow myself to stand in the way.

I became a has-been. I felt like shit. All my inadequacies like a tray of cakes on display in front of the world. I tried telling myself that she was the traditional sort of woman, expressing her femininity, enjoying the attention she got, not only from men but also from the jealous eyes of women who wanted to tear their false nails across her face. I told myself that I was the more progressive type, adjusted to the give and take of love, while she was still nostalgic for the time when men were men and women were women. I think she expected me to be more of a man than I appeared to be. Protective. Knowing what to do in case of emergency.

Look, I’m a lover, I wanted to say to her, not a fire-fighter. I didn’t know how to stand up for her in a row.

‘He’s only messing,’ I tried to warn her.

‘Look, Vid,’ she smiled, ‘we both know this is going nowhere, you and me. We’re in the wrong place.’

It didn’t help that I was working in a restaurant at the time, in the kitchens, coming back home every night with a heavy film of grease on my face and the stink of chicken breasts in my clothes. Early bird all night. No matter how much I showered, it would not remove the toxic residue of cooking. Each plate with criss-crossed potato wedges built up like sleepers in a railway yard. And the amount of salt they piled on to make it taste better. Then one night the manager, who must have been only nineteen years of age and looked more like fifteen, came up to me and said it was my duty to clean the toilets. They were covered in vomit. You could read the menu in small print all over the floor and the walls. I told him I wouldn’t do it. He said he understood my position. But then he told me that refusal was not an option and threatened dismissal. He informed me that everyone took their turn cleaning the toilets, so I told him he could have my turn and left.

I walked out along the pier at Dún Laoghaire harbour. I had a small apartment out there, not far from where Kevin’s mother lived. It was handy, because he was giving me more and more work at the house, so I could walk there from my place.

The wind was quite strong that night. The sailing boats were being tossed around and the guy ropes made a ringing melody against the masts. All kinds of things banging and squeaking and set loose. I was wondering if Liuda had already deleted the photos on her phone, taken at the bandstand by the accordion player from Sighişoara. The sea was churned up and as I walked around by the elbow of the pier, the wind was like a hand on my chest. A big bouncer preventing me from walking any further, pushing the words back into my mouth.

9

As the date of the trial began to come closer, Kevin called me over to his mother’s house to discuss a bigger job. Something quite substantial. His mother had been complaining for years that the floorboards in the front room were running in the wrong direction. She wanted them turned around so they would run lengthways, towards the front window rather than laterally across the room towards the fireplace. The original builder had made a right mess of things. It made the house feel small and claustrophobic.

I was the first to agree with them for aesthetic reasons, but I knew immediately that it was not worth correcting at this point, purely on financial grounds. I told them so, but the cost was not really seen as a barrier any more. Apparently she had inherited money lately from a relative in the USA, so they felt it was the right time to get it done.

I was thrilled to get back into serious carpentry again, especially a big job like this where I could really prove myself. But I was not sure it made sense. The thought crossed my mind that I was possibly being re-employed each time because of the imminent court proceedings. He was utterly calm about the outcome, but he needed my absolute allegiance to the family. He knew the Garda would never come after him at this point, unless I lost faith and brought the whole story out into the open in the witness stand. He needed me to be completely on his side, and maybe this was a kind of payment in advance for the favour I was doing him.

He reminded me from time to time not to say a word to anyone. And maybe he needed to isolate me a little from the threat of new friends who might start asking questions. He explained things to me about this country, how friendship often masqueraded as curiosity. He tried to teach me the art of answering a question with another question. He told me there was a secret language here, not the old, Irish language or the English language, but something in between the lines, like a code.

‘This is an island,’ he pointed out to me once. ‘You can never completely trust what you hear. You have to forecast what’s behind the words. You have to be able to read people’s inner thoughts. You have to be able to think on your feet and keep ahead of them.’

Perhaps he was speaking as much to himself as he was counselling me. I listened to his advice eagerly. But you can’t learn all that street-wise acumen like a faculty. You can’t pick it up like chess or tennis. So he felt it was his duty to protect me and look out for me.

His mother must have known nothing about the case, otherwise she would not have wanted me in the house. She had her arms folded as we stood in the front room looking around. Kevin half sitting on one of the radiators, allowing the full force of her tenacity to work on me.

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