Dublin Palms

The moment was brief, my mother said. She stood at the back of the crowd. She hardly knew it was Hitler, only that the woman in front, wearing the wide-rimmed hat, not paid for, the label was still attached, turned around with great excitement in her voice and said – did you see him?

After the cavalcade passed by, everyone went about their business. The woman with the new hat walked away down the street. Another woman crossed the street wearing a new tweed coat, the gifts of Hitler. My mother was working in Düsseldorf by then, in an employment office, she had some money, she went back into the department store to buy gifts for her sisters, the two eldest ones were already married, things they needed. She said it was a time of high fashion. A time you could not easily trust men. Most of them were in the Nazi party. Her boss was a senior Nazi member, he was married, always asking her to go for a drink.

A lot of the women in Düsseldorf looked elegant and provocative, she said. The style was to show how perfectly rounded your backside could be. They wore tight dresses that turned the bottom into a walking globe, spherical cushions in bright colours and stripes. She laughed and sang the line of a pop song from the time, about a woman walking down the street with her round bottom swinging and all the monkey men turning around to look at her.

Walking back home, the granite bite in my mouth slowly began to let go. Nothing, to my mind, can be as intoxicating as the grip of denial being released. The enormous energy that goes into refusing the past comes flooding back in a wave of peace once I face up to it. It is not possible to choose my history. I cannot favour one part over another.

They were all asleep when I got back. I made sure the children were covered. Helen woke up, there was a sleep cloud of warm air around her neck. I whispered to let her know I was going to stay up and listen to some music. I had borrowed a set of headphones from work. I put on one of the albums from the basement catalogue. The accordion player from Galway with a cigarette in his mouth gone to America, a jig called the Rambling Pitchfork. Three, four times in a row I played it.

The Rambling Pitchfork.

The country is full of black flags. We see them hanging from the windows, attached to lamp posts, on the goalposts in sporting fields. Black flags tied to the gates of a car park, on the back of a delivery truck, on bridges over the dual carriageway. Some of the flags are tattered, made of material that doesn’t last. Some of them no more than black refuse bags, stuck to the branch of a tree in the wind.

The black flags make it impossible to ignore what is going on in the north of Ireland. They are there to remind everyone of people on hunger strike. Hunger has a deep meaning in our country. In some places, the flags are accompanied by the faces and the names of the men on their fast along with the name of the camp in which they have been imprisoned. They look thin and gaunt, their hair long, their eyes sunken, one of them had been elected to parliament in London while in prison, his face bore a smile from an earlier time.

There was a letter published in the paper, sent by the mother of one of the hunger strikers to the prime minister in London. It was requesting a meeting to explain why her son was refusing food and water. It described what it was like for a mother to see her child slowly dying. The prime minster was a mother herself, she wore a blue scarf around her neck, but her response to the mother of the hunger striker was unequivocal, she saw no need for compassion, a crime was a crime. The men on hunger strike could not be regarded as political prisoners. They were asking for too much, a letter a week, one visit a week, the right not to wear prison clothing.

On Saturday morning, I drove into the city. I circled around the square to show Rosie and Essie the basement where I worked. I pointed out the park where I had my lunch every day, the corner shop that sold two slices of brown bread and cheese, the German library with the red door. The building beside the German library used to belong to the British Embassy, but it was burned down after a massacre in which civilians were shot dead by British soldiers on the streets of Derry, now it was a solicitor’s office. We parked by the National Gallery, they giggled at the painting of nude women in the countryside. Afterwards, we went to the café with stained glass, we had our own sandwiches. We bought two cherry buns, gone pink inside, but we had to leave them behind unfinished because Rosie got sick.

We should have brought the bowl, Helen said.

We had a stainless-steel bowl at home which was used whenever they were sick. It was also used for baking and washing lettuce and other things like soaking beans and chick peas. From time to time, Rosie and Essie wanted it for playing with water, a doll’s bath, teddies dripping and shrunken. It was a bowl that could be used for many things in the family, though we generally called it the sick bowl. It was dented in a couple of places and had the sound of a bell.

Get the sick bowl.

I grew up alert. Listening like a soldier in perpetual war. When I heard the voice of a child, I woke up running, a hundred doors opening, my bare feet along the green carpet, bursting into the bedroom holding the bowl in one hand, Rosie too weak to stand, waking up from a sick dream. Her forehead wet. Her face white. My other hand keeping back her hair, rubbing her tummy – you’re OK, it’s all out now, all gone. Helen coming with a warm facecloth, then everything was fine again, they eventually went to sleep again as if nothing had happened.

Next day, the sick bowl was back in the kitchen. The sound of water rinsing it clean was a swirling echo of sickness. The bowl was like a steel stomach throwing up a dizzy gush of bubbled hot water. Dried and stainless again. The warped faces of children laughing, reflected from inside the bowl, used briefly to send messages to other civilisations in a distant universe. Then the bowl was ready to be used once more to make a chocolate sponge. Everything looping in a cycle of cakes and steeping lentils and nauseous bell sounds.

Was it some illness I brought with me from the house where I grew up? The country my mother came from, the country my father invented in his head. Something in my overlapping history that I am passing on to my children?

My memory is full of sickness. My father bursting into the room with the sick bowl. Bursting in with medicine. Bursting in with a hot poultice. Bursting in to accuse me of speaking the language of the street inside my head. Bursting in to let me know that innocent people had been shot down on the streets of Derry. Bursting in to tell me the British Embassy was on fire. Bursting in the following day with his beekeeping gear over his head, climbing out the window of my bedroom onto the flat roof wearing big gloves and the smoke of burning sackcloth coming from the nozzle of his bee calmer. Bursting in that same night again with his fists in my sleep after I climbed back in late through the window past the beehives, my mother begging him to stop, the whole family awake on the landing and my brother appearing at the door like a boy adult with one single word – peace. My father finally brought to his senses, his fists turned back into hands, my mother led him away and my eyes got used to the light on.

My father bursting in to apologise with a book, with a box of oil paints, with a small fact about helium he thought I might be interested in and might get us talking. The reconciliation music coming from the front room, Tristan and Isolde, their love death rising and rising up the stairs.

And my little sister, Lotte.

My mother has asked Helen to teach Lotte how to read and write in English. They are doing Tolstoy, a page a day. Lotte fell behind as a child because of her asthma, the language of the street was forbidden in our house, she missed a lot of classes at school. Helen is a good teacher, she waits for Lotte to catch her breath after each sentence.

I remember lying awake hearing Lotte trying to breathe, unable to say a word. Her hair was soaked with sweat, my mother wiped her forehead. The doctor came late one night. We heard his deep voice in the hall, he gave Lotte a Valium injection. She fell asleep and I thought she would never breathe again. Next time the doctor was called, he said it was all in her mind, nothing more than a psychological impediment preventing her from breathing normally like every other child on the street. I heard my father coming up the stairs, bursting into Lotte’s room. He slapped her and told her to go to sleep – you’re making this up. My mother tried to calm him, but he continued shouting, commanding Lotte to start breathing properly. She was quiet after that. But worse again the next day. My father prayed and got his brother the Jesuit to make the sign of the cross over her. He ordered the latest medical journals. Cortisone was known to restrict bone growth in a child. He gave Lotte a glass of liquid yeast instead. He gave her goat’s milk. The cat disappeared. He put on Bach. He read about bronchodilator medication, he discovered an inhaler called Ventolin.

If only it was possible to understand his vision, the mixed family enterprise he created. If only it had not been so obscured by his rage, his love, the silence he cast over the family with his crusade. I thought of him reading to improve his German. The care my mother took to correct his grammar. The risk they entered into. The adventure in their eyes when they started this strange family out of place. The house was full of love and misunderstanding. She encouraged him to do things he would never have taken on in his own language, this beekeeping enterprise he got himself into.

I think of the bees arriving for the first time. Like visitors, given refuge in our home. A swarm delivered in May from West Cork. A dome-shaped straw skep with bees talking inside, buzzing with ideas. My mother welcomes them with an embroidered tablecloth, a blue bowl of star and moon shaped biscuits, her voice high with excitement. Her language is a running diary, observing my father, the strangeness of a man in his own country. He wears a protective cage over his head, stepping like an astronaut onto the flat roof while we watch from the window above. Seven faces leaning out to see him punching the humming skep with his fist. It rolls away like an empty hat. He stands back with his big gloves held up in the air. A white sheet spread out, a colony of bees dropped out before nightfall, walking up the beach to a new hive waiting.

We drove out across the mountains until we saw no more black flags. We came through a bog with yellow signs showing a black car veering over the edge. Another sign with a black hump, warning about the uneven surface. The car we had was beige, maybe mustard brown. It had a boxy shape, a biscuit tin with no seat belts in the back, the gear lever was up high by the steering wheel. A slide window, so you could leave your elbow out. The girls were screeching in the back, lifted off their seats with every bump in the road. Helen had her bare feet on the dashboard, I was distracted by her knees.

Hard to say if I was driving away from something or driving towards something. My decisions were random, based on forces in my childhood I could not explain. Behaving at the mercy of feelings that never matched the time we were in. I was creating my own mixed family enterprise, doing my best to be unlike the family I came from.

It was late in the afternoon, we got fish and chips. I had a bottle of wine, some shallow styrofoam containers from a Chinese restaurant for wine glasses.

I drove the car into a field. The weeds squeaked along the paintwork, slapping under the wheel arches. The silence when I turned off the engine was enormous, nothing but ourselves and the sound of wrapping paper and the smell of salt and vinegar. The country was depopulated. Only us, sitting with the doors open, facing the sunset. It was warm. The breeze was like a hairdryer coming through, it blew a paper napkin up against the windscreen.

We waited for the sun to leave, the children went to sleep. In the middle of Ireland, we sat watching the field going dark. The wind came up. A few drops of rain at first, then louder, bouncing on the roof of the car. Helen said it was as heavy as the rain in Canada. She told me how she was once caught in a thunderstorm and could not find her way home. The streets all looked the same, the rain bounced a foot off the ground, it created a halo around the world, her hair down on her skull, blinded by the weight of water in her eyes.

She sat in the car staring into the field of rain as though she was back in Canada, with Lake Huron in front of her. A solid black plate lit up in a flash of lightning, the salt mine, the two bright lines of the railway tracks, her family home in view for a brief unreachable instant.

Give my love to the lake, she said. Give my love to the night-heron. Give my love to the boardwalk and the big empty salt rooms underneath the lake.

I started up the engine, we had to go before the mud kept us there for the night. I was the expert at getting home, driving like a lover, like a father, picking the children up in my arms from the back seat when we got home, one after the other in sleep level six, carrying them inside. Helen opened the doors, taking their shoes off, shielding their eyes from the light. I placed them without interruption into their beds like time travellers, straight from the field of fish and chips to the next morning with the light coming through the curtains. Nothing but the crown of a thistle caught in the bumper for proof.

There was a trick I taught them on that trip. They climbed up on the stump of a tree and jumped into my arms. The leap of trust, we called it. I was the catcher, standing ready. They had to take it in turns and wait for me to shout – jump. Essie was fearless, she threw herself backwards off the bonnet of the car.

It gave us a false sense of security. As though nothing could ever happen to us. Our lives were accidental, full of love and luck and family chaos, rescued by our children.

We collected them from their art class. We did some shopping on the way home. I parked the car across the road from the house. Helen went around to get the groceries, a bag in her arms with the stalk of a pineapple growing out of her shoulder. I went to get the children out and saw Rosie standing in the middle of the road.

I didn’t have time to ask how she got there.

The sound of tyres was so loud it silenced the entire street, there was blue smoke rising, it smelled like Halloween fires burning. Rosie closed her eyes, her body shivered, her hands held up to stop the car. It came to a stop inches away from her. The driver sat motionless with his grip on the steering wheel, unable to get out, staring ahead at the child in the street. Helen looked at me, the bag with the pineapple fell out of her arms. It was that soundless space in between us that frightened me more than anything, the dry mouth words we could not say to each other, the leap of trust, where was the catcher? She ran without looking and picked Rosie up off the street. She continued running until she got inside the house. I grabbed Essie by the hand. The traffic was held up, the whole street waiting until we had the door closed behind us.

Helen stood screaming in the front room.

I took the children into the kitchen and started making pancakes.

Her scream continued for a long time. It went back to the time when she was a child only five years of age herself. In Birmingham. The house on the corner with the buses going by and passengers looking in the windows. Her father at work, her mother in the kitchen with earrings on peeling potatoes. Helen standing on the street, the side gate had been left open, her younger sister was getting into the back of a car. The driver was holding a bag of sweets. Her other sister, no more than three, was climbing in to join her. It was a Wolseley with leather seats, their legs were dangling. And the housekeeper from Ennis running out when she heard the scream, making up for everything she had lost in her own life, the baby she had to leave behind in Ireland. She was shouting Holy Jesus. Mary mother. Reaching into the back of the car to clutch the two girls by the arms at the last minute before the car took off around the corner with the rear door swinging. The howling of tyres creeping like a wounded animal along the wall.

The side gate was locked again.

Her mother’s face was at the kitchen window like a photograph gone black and white. To make them forget, the housekeeper put them all three into the bath and taught them a song about James Connolly, a working-class hero. Nobody called the police, it would have been shameful to have them come around to the house, people asking if it had to do with being Irish. Nothing happened, everyone was safe. He was caught some ten years later, an engineer, the Cannock Chase man. Only some of the bodies were found. He never admitted anything apart from the fact that he loved cars, somebody bought his Wolseley at auction to be burned in a public ceremony with a crowd of people standing by to watch.

Was that the reason?

The reason for going to Canada. The reason they could never speak of and for which they made up so many other happy reasons to go and live in a quiet place with a salt mine.

Rosie and Essie ate the pancakes with yoghurt. Essie caught me sprinkling invisible sugar with my hand. Rosie spilled yoghurt on herself, on me, it was on the carpet, a pink footprint. I brought them to bed and read the book about the boy in the bakery at night getting milk to go into the cake for the morning. We sat up in bed for a long time, all four of us. Helen was clutching them, one on each side, rocking back and forth until they were asleep.

It never occurred to me to get the groceries fallen on the ground in the street until a neighbour came to the door and handed them in to me without a word.

After midnight, Helen got up and went out to the public phone by the front door to make a call. There was no answer. She walked up and down the corridor, then she tried again.

In the house overlooking the salt mine, the phone rings around the hallway, into the kitchen, into the blue room with all the furniture brought over from Birmingham. It rings out onto the porch, as far as the white picket fence. Her mother has just left the house, on her way to the courthouse square to meet her friend. She puts on her sunglasses getting into the car. The lake has no meaning for her, the sunlight is full of scorn, the glare of things she wants to forget.

The day is hot, the cicadas are deafening. There is a child cycling along the sidewalk, in and out of brightness under the trees, making a soft tapping sound along the concrete slabs. The neighbours are gradually moving a little further along their lives each time the child comes back around – a man gardening, a woman on the porch with ice cubes ringing, blue shouts coming from a swimming pool.

The town is calm and polite. They drive slowly, they speak with caution, they call her by her first name, she gets invited to parties where people eat with their hands and it’s all paper plates and paper cups of wine and women standing around in shorts. A town where she first turned up in sweltering Donegal tweed and sang a song that brought the house down. The town by the lake where students drive themselves to school. Where the hairdresser has a swimming pool. Where the judge will be seen having coffee with the local electrician, there is no difference between people only what you have.

Helen’s mother has attached herself to this Canadian town like a story made up out of nothing. She has turned her back on Birmingham. The city in which her children almost disappeared. The city of fog. Fog loitering in the streets. The sound of coughing and cars starting at night. The headlights of a bus pointing through a dense grey curtain, the doorbell ringing and the fog slowly coming up the stairs.