Hand in the Fire

‘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 (#ulink_85f00b24-2f1f-5370-a3ab-0e93fe31b655)

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.