The Sailor in the Wardrobe

‘Help.’

It’s my sister Maria, trapped under the stairs. When you open the in-between door in our house while somebody is in the pantry under the stairs, they won’t be able to get out. We used to take prisoners and lock each other in. Now and again it happens to my mother and she laughs because it’s like spending time in jail with only tins of peas and jars of jam all around you. This time it’s Maria accidentally locked in, but my father drops all the wood and comes storming out because he thinks it’s my fault.

‘What have you done?’ he shouts.

‘Nothing.’

The instant denial. My mother says it’s always the perpetrators who claim they were just minding their own business. You don’t deny something you didn’t do. But why should I feel guilty? I’m secretly thrilled to be accused in the wrong and stand there smiling until my father rushes forward to hit me on the side of my face. It comes so fast that I lose my balance. My hand goes up to my ear and I see the look of anger in his eyes. Sadness, too, as if he can’t help lashing out, as if it’s not really him at all, but the countless lashes he got himself that have suddenly compelled him into this summary punishment in the hallway. All the punishment in history passed on, lash by lash.

‘Go to your room,’ he shouts.

My mother tries to stop him, but it’s too late and I’m already walking up the stairs with heavy feet, turning around to give him a last look of poisoned glory. It’s a miscarriage of justice. You have punished the innocent. And then to confirm it, Maria comes running up the hallway.

‘He didn’t do it.’

‘It’s a mistake,’ Franz echoes behind her.

‘Innocent as usual,’ my father mutters. He goes back to try and figure out which direction each piece of wood should be facing and now it’s my turn to slam the door of my room and stand at the window with my ear boiling. I know what it’s like to be guilty – it makes you helpless and sick. It’s like eating something really bad, like dying slowly with your stomach turning inside out from poison. Rat powder. Blue pellets for snails and slugs. I see them out there in the garden, dragging themselves away, leaving a thick yellow trail of slime and curling up in agony.

When my father comes up to apologize, I refuse to speak to him. I don’t want reconciliation. I want to hold on to my anger. My moral victory. But my mother is there pushing him into the room, forcing us to make up and shake hands. He holds my face and asks me to look him in the eyes. Then he embraces me and admits that he’s made a terrible mistake. I feel like a child, with my head rammed against his chest. I can smell the sawdust in his jacket. I can hear his heart beating and I can’t withhold my forgiveness any longer because he is close to tears with remorse. Then he stands back and smiles. He says he is proud of me and admires me for taking the punishment like a man, like Kevin Barry going to his execution. My mother says I’m such a brave person, like Hans and Sophie Scholl going under the guillotine for distributing leaflets against the Nazis.

And then they’re gone downstairs again. I’m left alone in my room, listening to them discussing the measurements once more. Suddenly all the wooden sections fit and I can hear him hammering away with a clear conscience while I remain upstairs, staring out at the slow death in the garden. I can’t stop thinking of Kevin Barry in the moment before his execution, before they bound a cloth around his eyes. I wonder what his last memory was before being shot and if he was thinking about the time when he was growing up as a boy and never even dreamed of this end to his life. And I can’t help thinking about the blade slicing through Sophie Scholl’s neck and how her head must have fallen forward with a heavy thump. Even if she was hooded, there must have been some reaction on her face. Was it one of defiance or did she look shocked? Did she blink, or gasp, or sneeze maybe? Was her mouth open and did she try to say something? Could she still hear her executioners talking for a moment, saying that it was all done now, filling in the documents and marking down the exact time of death? Could she hear their footsteps before the darkness closed in around her? And what were her last thoughts, of her mother and father maybe, of happy moments in Germany, of the time they went hiking together in the mountains?

And then one day the music system is finished.

There’s a smell of varnish and French polish in the house for days. When the amplifier finally arrives, we stand by watching my father as he carefully takes it out of the box and fits it into its compartment perfectly. He starts connecting up the cables and there is a factory smell every time he switches it on for a test run. He keeps working till late at night and then there is a sudden blast through the speaker, like an explosion waking up the whole house, maybe even the whole street. We jump out of bed and come running out on the landing, but he’s downstairs smiling and blinking like a great inventor because it’s all functioning perfectly like the magazine said.

On the evening of the unveiling, my mother makes sure everything looks right. She puts an embroidered cloth on the coffee table in the front room, with drinks and small cakes. She pours glasses of cognac and you can see how proud they both are when my father unlocks the cabinet. It’s such an achievement, my mother keeps saying, as we watch him putting on a record of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. He tells us to listen out for his favourite notes on ‘Panis Angelicus’ by John McCormack, followed by Kevin Barry and some songs in Irish like ‘An Spailpín Fánach’. Then it’s back to Beethoven and Bach. And after that he has a new idea. To see how high the volume will go without any distortion in the speaker, he makes us all sit at the top of the stairs while he puts on Bruckner. We hear the crackle of the needle going down on the record. Then he comes limping up the stairs to join us, sitting in rows at the back like a concert hall, while the full orchestra begins playing in the front room with every instrument all at once.

When the concert is over, I watch him closing the cabinet and wonder where he hides the keys. He waits till everyone is out of the room before he puts them away, so it takes me weeks to find them. I keep looking everywhere, while he’s out at work. I start thinking just like him and imagine where the best place would be to hide something from your own son.

Inside the big speaker, of course. In the vent at the bottom, to the left. While I’m at home on my own one day and everybody is out of the house, I go into the front room and open everything up to put on my own record, not one of the German records or any of the Irish songs, but one that I bought myself some time ago with money saved up. It’s a Beatles single called ‘Get Back’. I prefer the flip side, though, which has John Lennon singing ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. I used to play it whenever I could on the small turntable before that broke, but now I want to hear it properly, on my father’s new system, as if the Beatles are in the front room with me.

I have to be very careful because even if I leave the tiniest thing out of place, he’ll know that somebody has been interfering with his things. I have to become a real criminal. I have to take a photograph in my mind of everything I touch so I can put it all back exactly as before. Then I place the record on the turntable and turn up the volume. ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. I play it again and again so that people can hear it all over the street and they must be thinking it’s strange that my father would be at home putting a song like that on his new music cabinet during the day.

It’s like blasphemy, even hearing the words in our house, saying ‘you done me good’.

The song gets more perfect every time I listen to it. I sit back in the armchair and see the girl across the street leaving her house and I know that for a few moments she must be listening to the same song as me, until she walks around the corner out of sight. Music makes people look weightless. I imagine my mother and father floating around the front room like astronauts every evening while they listen to Mozart. I can see them drinking glasses of cognac without having to hold them. Family photographs of Onkel Gerd and Ta Maria lifting off the mantelpiece up into the air. Franz Kaiser and Bertha Kaiser in Kempen floating like an ascension with the market square and the church with the red roof below them. The whole family including Onkel Ted with his white collar drifting up the stairs. All kinds of vases and table lamps and pencils and books about German and Irish history flying around under the ceiling. Now it’s me listening to John Lennon and it feels like the whole world has become weightless. I feel no gravity and my feet go up onto the side of the armchair. I’m drifting out the window. Floating down the street, up above the roofs of the houses and the church, looking down at the people standing at the bus stop. Up and out and down over the harbour where I can see the lads sitting on the trellis outside the shed and Dan Turley fishing. Out across the sea I go, floating away until the place I come from is only a tiny speck below me.

Afterwards I have to put everything back. I forget nothing. I lock everything up and place the keys back inside the speaker vent in exactly the same shape as I found them. Nobody would ever know, and by the time my father comes home the echo of John Lennon is long gone, remaining only in my head and keeping me afloat.

At the dinner table, my father gives me a look of deep suspicion, as if he knows I’ve done something. There is a frown on his forehead, but he can prove nothing. He would have to take fingerprints. I’m innocent and untouchable. He knows that I’m breaking away now but there is nothing he can do about it. He knows that I go down to the harbour every day since the summer began, speaking English like everyone else and no longer loyal to his crusade for the Irish language. He knows that I don’t want to be Irish like him, that I don’t want to look like him or even listen to the same music or read the same books. I look back across the table at him, speaking English in my own head, repeating the forbidden words ‘she done me good’.

And then I remember something that brings me back down to the ground again. I realize that while I was paying attention to every detail, scrupulously putting everything back in its place, I must have forgotten the most important thing of all. I left John Lennon on the turntable.

Now there’s going to be trouble. I can feel the weight of my arms on the table. I’m such a bad criminal. I go back over everything step by step. I know I turned the speed from forty-five back to thirty-three. I know I locked each and every one of the compartments. I did everything right, down to the last precise detail, but I was concentrating so much on replacing everything that I forgot the most obvious thing. When my father goes to play music after dinner, he’ll find a strange disc on the turntable that he would never in a million years allow into the house.

I stand up from the table in a panic. The chair makes a yelp behind me and I rush around past my mother to get to the door. Everybody looks up thinking I’m going to be sick. They stop eating to see me running past, trying to get away as fast as possible. I want to rescue John Lennon. I want to run to the front room, take out the keys quickly and remove him from the turntable before it’s too late. But then I stop at the door and look back at them all sitting around the table as if they have become frozen in time. My brother Franz has a piece of carrot stuck on his fork which has stopped halfway up to his mouth. My mother has a jug in her hand but the milk has stopped pouring. My sisters are all shocked with their eyes wide open and Ita’s mouth is full of mashed potato as if she’s blowing up a balloon. My father is getting ready to follow me. He puts his knife and fork down with a clack. His backside is raised up from the chair, in mid-air.

It’s a race against time. I know it’s futile because he’s bound to get there before I’m halfway through. No matter how fast I am, he will surely catch me putting away the keys or coming out with my hands behind my back and the disc under my jumper. It’s no good and I turn back. I walk all the way around the table to sit down again and now they’re all wondering why I’m suddenly not in a rush any more. I want to explain that I thought I needed to go to the bathroom and it’s no longer that urgent. But I say nothing. My face has gone red and I feel heavy in my legs. I try to think up other schemes to get out of this. I imagine it’s not happening and that John Lennon will miraculously turn into John McCormack at the last minute, but it’s all hopeless.

Four (#ulink_aae21352-00df-5692-8985-af42c4c5b00f)

At the harbour, everybody has a new identity. It’s the way my friend Packer talks about the place and about the people and about all the things that go on there, the way that he gives everybody a new role, a new life, even sometimes a new name. He has a way of persuading people to do things they never dreamed of. He can make everyone laugh and hold them up with stories. He looks into everyone’s eyes and makes them believe what he’s saying, even as he invents the world around him and turns the most boring day into a big legend, smiling and getting people to agree with his ideas, no matter how mad his latest plans are. When Packer is around, you step outside your own life as if you’re watching yourself in a film, or reading about yourself in a book. He has a gift for making everybody feel like they have been newly invented and that the harbour is a fictional place, out of this world, on a big screen in front of us.

We sit outside the shed listening to Packer talking about Dan Turley, while he’s out in the boat, pulling up the lobster pots. Packer describes all the things nobody even notices about themselves. He talks about how Dan pays us at the end of the week, calling each one of us into the shed individually while the others are not watching, how he pulls a few notes out of his pocket and hands them over secretly with his hand down-turned and shaking a little, as if you’re the only one getting paid. He tells us how Dan gives away nothing about his life, how he trusts nobody and thinks the whole world is a conspiracy against him. Even the sea and the tides are trying to trick Dan Turley. In a low voice, Packer tells us how Dan has enemies at the harbour, how his shed was burned down once and nobody ever found out who did it. Something big is going to happen at the harbour very soon, Packer assures us, and you don’t want to be absent when it does. He says Dan Turley never smiles and often stares at the sea with his eyes narrowed, as if he has a fair idea who burned down his shed, and even though he can do nothing about it yet, he’s just patiently biding his time.

Even when Dan comes back in with the lobster and stands leaning in the doorway of the shed again, Packer still talks about him as if he’s a made-up character. Right in front of him, he begins to imitate the way Dan talks out the side of his mouth all the time, cursing through his teeth. ‘Hooken hell’ or ‘hooken clown’, he mutters, because it’s a public place and Dan can’t be offending the decent people passing by. Packer repeats the way he gives orders, the way he shouts when he’s pissed off with you for making mistakes and bringing the boat around on the wrong side. ‘Tha’ other side,’ Packer says, because that’s how Dan pronounces it in his Northern accent, leaving long spaces between the words as if he is exhausted and this is the last time he wants to say these words.

‘Tha’ – other – side.’

The harbour lads all start repeating the words until Dan goes inside and comes back out with a big hatchet he keeps for self-defence ever since the shed was burned down. Everybody suddenly runs away even though Dan is only joking and wouldn’t really use the hatchet on us, because we’re on his side. Packer is the only person who can put his arm around Dan and get him to put away the hatchet. ‘Tha’ hooken other side…’ everyone keeps saying to each other all the time, because it’s become a big joke by now and Dan has to listen to himself echoing all over the bay. But you don’t make fun of Dan for long. You know when he’s serious, because he doesn’t need a hatchet to prove it, and Packer tells us about the time he chased these young people all the way up the hill to the Shangri La Hotel one day and dragged them back down to the harbour to pay for their boat trip, even though he’s over seventy. Nobody messes with Dan Turley.

When all the lads on motorbikes arrive down on the pier with girls on the back, it looks like they have been invented by Packer. They arrive with lots of noise and smoke and park in a line until Dan starts muttering about them blocking up the whole pier. We stare at the bikes and at the girls, one of them looking at herself in the wing mirror and kissing her own lips. Somebody asks Dan to turn up the radio, but he ignores it and disappears inside the shed, waiting for the weather forecast. Somebody starts fidgeting with one of the motorbikes, turning the throttle or testing the brakes, until the owner tells him to get his filthy, fucking, mackerel-stinking hands off.

Then the harbour lads are laughing again, saying: ‘Hookin’ hell, can you not leave the thing alone? Go on, smash it, why don’t yee?’ The owner of the motorbike then has to pull his jumper down over his hand and clean the mackerel scales off the chrome handlebars. Packer tells the story about how one of the motorbike lads called ‘Whiskey’ ran out of juice one day and just robbed a bottle of Jameson off his father, enough to get him as far as the garage to fill up again. They laugh and argue. ‘Hooken dreaming,’ they say. They could easily disprove the story and say that whiskey would ruin the engine, but it’s like everything else at the harbour, they want to enter into the legend that Packer invents around us. They believe his story and even pass it on themselves later. And all the time, Packer has his own words and phrases for describing people, like ‘vulgar’ and ‘venomous’ and ‘vile and ordinary’. He has the harbour lads going around calling each other ‘shrunken paps’ and ‘mackerel mickies’, using an invented vocabulary that nobody else understands but us.

‘Hark, you shrunken mackerel mickies.’

Packer has given me a new identity as well. He describes me as the silent observer and makes it sound like a great talent to speak only when you need to. I don’t have a story for myself, so Packer makes one up for me and even gives me a new name, ‘Vlad the Inhaler’, because of my lungs. Everybody knows that I’ve got trouble breathing and that I still have the dogs howling in my chest sometimes. Packer has noticed that when somebody asks me a question, I take in a deep breath before answering. He says I breathe as if I’m still discovering how to do it, like figuring out the gears on a motorbike. He says I’m still counting in and out as if I’m never going to get enough air and that the air doesn’t really belong to me. I’m only borrowing the air around me instead of really owning it like everyone else. So now he’s given me a new name and a new identity and I go home covered in mackerel scales every day. There’s always a smell of petrol on my hands from handling the engines and also these dried-out mackerel scales all over everything I touch. Tiny silver coins on my fingernails, on my shoes, even on the books I read at home. I feel I’ve turned into a mackerel myself, breathing underwater and shedding flaky scales everywhere I go, travelling at thirty miles an hour as if I’m on the run and cannot stand still.

Then one day, when Packer went off on the back of a motorbike, I went back to myself again. Out of nowhere I saw my mother walking down along the road by the castle and the nursing home with my little brother Ciarán on his bike. At first, I thought there was something wrong and she needed to tell me something that happened. But then I realized that she only wanted to see where I worked, because I was always coming home with mackerel and stories about being out in boats, trying to describe my life the way Packer does, speaking like him about all the funny things going on at the harbour. But that didn’t mean I wanted anyone from my house to follow me down there. It was my place. It was where I got away from my family. And now my mother was coming. I saw them turning on to the pier, with my little brother just ahead on his bike, stopping every few minutes to let her catch up.

I could not allow this to happen. They would blow my cover. Any minute now, everybody at the harbour would find out that I was German, so I slipped away, up around the rocks at the back of the shed. Nobody noticed me leaving. I hid in a place where I could still see what was going on at the pier, hoping my mother would just go away again.

Dan must have thought she had come to buy some fish, but then I saw her talking to him and even shaking hands with him, looking into the shed to see if it really was the way I had described it to her, with all the engines in a row and the yellow life jackets hanging up like invisible people standing around the walls. I saw Dan bending down and asking Ciaran to show him the home-made gun he was carrying with him. It was a gun he made without any help from anyone, out of wood and all kinds of metal parts that he collected together. We were never allowed to buy guns in our house, so Ciaran made his own with a bathroom lock as a bolt and gun-sights made from Meccano parts. My father once told him that nobody was allowed to bring guns to the table in times of peace, but my mother said it was a special home-made gun that came from his own imagination. It was called a peacemaker, so he was always allowed to hang it around the back of the chair.

Dan only knows my first name, so maybe he didn’t make any connection between me and my mother. It was possible that he thought she was a tourist. He was pointing at the boats and pointing inside the shed. I was still hoping that she would just disappear again, but then I saw Dan pointing up towards the rocks. I hid down as low as I could, without falling off into the water. Then I heard my mother at the foot of the rocks calling me. My little brother Ciaran as well, both of them echoing each other from different places.

‘Hanni,’ they were calling, her nickname for me, ‘Hanni.’

I could not move. I was like a dead fish, covered in mackerel scales, unable to breathe. I didn’t want to do this thing of not answering her, but I had to. I felt sorry for my mother because she had no friends in Ireland except her own children. I didn’t want to deny her like this, but I could not let anyone know that I had a German mother, so I made her disappear out of my mind, out of my life completely. The language she was using was not my language. I un-remembered my whole family and all my brothers and sisters. I un-remembered all the stories she told me and all the cakes she baked, even the way she folded clothes. I denied that I had ever seen the photographs of where she grew up. I denied that I had ever been to Kempen on holidays. I un-remembered all the people I had met, all my aunts and uncles, all the parcels that came over at Christmas with sweets and chocolates, all the story books and all the clothes. I denied everything I grew up with and made the country that my mother came from disappear off the map.

‘Hanni,’ I heard Ciaran calling.

He was shooting the seagulls. I could hear myself breathing hard and there was nobody I wanted to talk to more than my mother.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ I heard her say.

I watched them leaving again with Ciaran cycling ahead, both of them stopping now and again to look back. I waited until they went out of sight at the nursing home, before I came out again.

Later on that same day, a schoolteacher from the convent school up the road came down to the harbour. I had seen her many times before, going up on the rocks to sunbathe. This time she drove right up the pier and got out of the car, dressed up with a pearl necklace and light green scarf across her shoulders. She came over to the shed to ask if we had any lobster. It was left to me to get the weighing scales. She followed me over to the side of the pier and I could hear her shoes clicking after me. She stood right behind me as I pulled up the lobster storage box, scraping against the harbour wall as it came up, water gushing out through the sides.

When the box was on the pier, I undid the rope that kept the lid down and started taking out the lobster one by one, so she could take a look at them. I could smell her perfume in the air all around me. Her dress was flapping with the breeze coming in from the sea and she had to hold it down. I thought she would recognize who I was, so I spoke without looking at her very much. There were about a dozen lobster in the box, all with their claws tied with black rubber bands to stop them fighting each other and to make it easy to pick them out. When she kneeled down to look into the box for herself, I could see right down into her dress and had to look away again.

After I weighed various lobster, she decided on two of them which I set aside for her. I closed the box, calculated the price and she got out her purse from a velvet green bag. But as she was handing me the money, she looked right into my face and smiled.

‘You’re the German boy, aren’t you?’ she said.