It looked as if everything had stopped moving. You could feel the boat drifting and hear the water making all kinds of swallowing noises underneath. Everything was rocking, but it looked like we were stuck in the same spot all the time, because the sun was shining again, like a thousand liquid mirrors flashing across the water. Everything was white and blank and you could not even see the land any more, as if the country we came from had disappeared and we now had no country to go back to. You knew where it was, right in front of you. You could imagine the shape of it in your head – the hill, the harbour and the church spires. You could hear lots of familiar sounds coming from the shore – a motorbike, a train going into the city. There were men drilling on roadworks somewhere, except that it didn’t sound like drilling at all to us, more like somebody ringing a small bell. Everything was far away and it was just me and Dan, drifting and jigging the fishing lines up and down, not saying very much to each other, as if there was some sort of fisherman’s law of silence in the boat. Sooner or later we could see that we were not standing still at all and that the tide had already taken us close to the island. Dan muttered something and we pulled in the lines. The boat bounced across the waves and the spray came over the bow, wetting my bare arms, until we came level with the harbour again and he cut the engine. We threw out the lines and drifted once more, listening to the water giggling underneath, until we hit a shoal of mackerel and the boat was suddenly full of flapping.
Then I heard a shout coming from the shore.
‘Turley.’
His name, nothing more. I looked to see if he had heard it too. Along the top of the rocks there was somebody standing with the advantage of the sun behind him, but we could see nothing and the shout could have come from any of the caves along the coast that looked like open mouths. It could have come from the small stone ruin or from any of the dark windows of a derelict house on the cliff. It was just the one shout, no more. Somebody who knew him. A hostile call that hung in the air over the water and would not go away, as if somebody wanted him to know that he was being watched and that they had not forgotten, that’s all.
I know there is no place to hide from your memory and no place to hide from your own name. It will come after you, following you down the street, on the bus, even out in the boat. Your own name following you like a curse. Packer told me that Dan Turley comes from Derry and that he’s got enemies, but we don’t know much more than that because he never talks about himself. He’s the man who never looks back, the man who wants to forget his own name and where he came from, like me.
My father and mother taught us how to forget and how to remember. My father still makes speeches at the breakfast table and my mother still cuts out pictures and articles from the newspapers to put into her diary when she has time. She wants to make sure that we remember how we grew up and don’t repeat what happened to her in Germany. She wants everything to be fixed and glued into her book. Our history and the history of the world all mixed together. There is a lock of blond hair on one page and a picture of Martin Luther King on the next. School reports and pictures of tanks on the streets of Prague facing each other.
Whenever we had nightmares in our family, she would get up in the middle of the night to take out a piece of paper and coloured pencils. Here, draw the nightmare, she would say. Once you put it down on paper, you will never have to dream about it again. So we would sit up in bed with the light on, rubbing our eyes and drawing whatever it was that frightened us. Sometimes I couldn’t remember what the nightmare was. My fingers were so weak with sleep that I couldn’t even hold the pencil or push it down onto the paper. But she would wait patiently with her arm around me, until the bad thing was drawn and coloured in. Look, she would then say, it’s there in your drawing and we can put it away. Now we have un-remembered it and we can go back to sleep again.
Our family is a factory of remembering and forgetting. My mother’s diary is full of secrets and nightmares. There’s a drawing by my sister Maria of a wolf with green teeth preventing her from getting down to my mother at the bottom of the stairs. There’s a picture of my brother Franz in one window of the house and everybody else in separate windows of the same house, unable to speak to each other or hear each other calling, because each room has a different colour and a different language. There’s a picture of a river coming through the front door with lots of people that we don’t know on boats sailing along the hall, speaking English. There were nightmares in Irish and nightmares in German. Nightmares in English that could only be drawn without words. Family nightmares and world nightmares. I once drew the picture of a Jewish man who had his beard ripped off and his chin was all red, because my mother told me that story and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. There’s a drawing of Roger Casement being buried in Glasnevin. Another drawing of the Berlin wall and people trying to escape through the windows of their houses, throwing their suitcases and their children down first.
Sometimes we had to draw the nightmare and also the solution. Maria at the bottom of the stairs in my mother’s arms, and the wolf locked in the bathroom. My sister Bríd standing at the window getting lots of good blue air into her lungs instead of bad red air. Nightmares about my mother not being in the same country as us. At one time, my drawings were all full of pigs and chickens and farmers facing in one direction. All the smoke and all the flags were flying to the left until one night, when my mother discovered that she was the only person looking the other way, to the right. She told me to turn her around and then everything was fine, with all of us facing in the same direction, all in the same country again.
There were so many nightmares in our house that my mother must have been up all night sometimes. As soon as one bad thing was down on paper, something new would get into our heads. The more we drew our nightmares, the more we made up new ones. There are night drawings of skeletons, snakes, spiders, lions, walls with eyes, doors with teeth, stairs with massive earthquake cracks opening up on our way to bed. We used up every monster there was, my mother says, and there could hardly be any more nightmares left for us, but still we invented more. And downstairs at night, I know my father and mother were busy with their own nightmares. My father in the front room trying to write articles for the papers and thinking of new inventions that would make Ireland a better place. My mother in the kitchen at the back, putting her German secrets into her diary along with ours.
It was the nightmare factory. Other families were obsessed with sport, or music, or practising Irish dancing. We grew up dreaming about things that happened and things that had not happened yet and things we wished had never happened. By drawing everything down on paper, we developed a special talent for inventing fears and nightmares. We became the nightmare artists.
At some point we all started dreaming fire. A timber yard went up in flames in Dublin one night and you could see the firemen on ladders directing the water across the walls. An oil tanker on fire and the whole sea covered in flames. Trees on fire in Vietnam. Blazing cars in Northern Ireland. A man named Jan Palach set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square in Prague. My mother remembered seeing lots of things on fire with her own eyes in Germany during the war. She remembered the synagogue in Kempen on fire and no firemen helping to put it out. So then it was drawings of buildings on fire, prams on fire, a doll’s house on fire. Now it’s buses burning in Belfast and you think there’s almost no point in fixing anything down on paper any more, because it keeps coming back again and again on the TV every night, right in front of your eyes.
All over the world, there is trouble on the streets now and trouble inside the houses. Civil rights demonstrations. People marching with placards and throwing stones at the police. At dinner, my father slaps his hand on the table and says things are changing in Northern Ireland at last, things that were left unfinished for years. He points at the TV and says he can’t wait for the future when things will be just like they were in the old days before the British.
You can see them throwing stones and petrol bombs at the police. Everybody talking about a place called the Bogside in Derry where the police were firing tear gas at the people in the street and you saw the crowd of protesters, some of them like cowboys with handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses, picking up the gas canisters and throwing them back. My father says it must be against the Geneva convention to use CS gas on people in the street, where there could be children and old people nearby with bad chests and lung conditions. At the battle of the Bogside, you saw them throwing petrol bombs down from the roof of the flats. The people of Derry were winning because the women start factories of petrol bombs and there was an endless supply that kept raining down onto the police. You saw a policeman on fire, screaming and kicking the flames away off his legs. Other policemen coming to help him, beating the fire off with their shields. Eventually the police lost the battle and the British army was called in. My father said the picture was complete now with the four allies from the Second World War still doing the same thing, as if they could not get out of the habit. It was French troops in Algeria, Russian troops in Prague, American troops in Vietnam, and now the British troops in Northern Ireland. We heard Jack Lynch saying that we could no longer stand idly by and watch Irish people getting hurt again. I even made a petrol bomb myself one day, because I was working in a garage at the time. But then I had nothing much to throw it at, so I just lit it and watched the earth on fire in the lane at the back.
When the British soldiers first arrived in Belfast, the Catholic people thought it was a great liberation because at least they were no longer going to be ruled by their Protestant neighbours. We saw pictures of women on the streets, handing out cups of tea to the soldiers and saying they were welcome. But that didn’t last long and very soon, the British soldiers were despised even more than their neighbours. The same women who had given them tea were seen kneeling down in the streets, banging dustbin lids as the soldiers went by in Saracen jeeps. The army of occupation, they were called now, and you could hear the sound of dustbin lids echoing all over the city like a long shout, like the curse of history following them wherever they went through the streets. One day I came home and saw my mother banging the dustbin lid on the granite step in front of the house. I could hear it echo along the street and it looked like she was carrying out a solitary protest of her own. When I asked her if she was doing it against the British, she laughed out loud and kept repeating it all evening, because no such thing had ever even entered into her head and she was only banging the lid to try and knock the snails off.
And now the long shout was coming after Dan Turley. I heard it very clearly, as if it was right beside us, or above us. Just one shout, like an accusation that would not go away. Dan’s surname left hanging in the air all around us. I knew how threatening it was to hear your own name being shouted out like this by some invisible voice. Your own name like the worst insult in the world, following you down the street like a million banging dustbin lids.
We had struck a shoal and were pulling in the mackerel. Dozens of them, leaping into the boat as if they were surrendering. The boat was full of slapping as the fish jumped around inside the metal box. I once asked Dan what it was like for mackerel. Was it the same as drowning for us or was it more like getting drunk, suffocating with too much oxygen, like when you breathe in fast and get dizzy? But he said nothing. He never says much. He doesn’t even call me by name. He just mutters and sometimes you have to guess what he’s saying in his Northern accent. I know very little about him. I know he’s an old man, over seventy. But he doesn’t want conversations about where you’re from and what age you are and how a mackerel feels when he’s dying on the bottom of the boat, staring at people’s shoes up close. All he told me once was that mackerel never stop moving. They can’t stay still. They’re on the run all the time, travelling at thirty miles an hour underwater without stopping.
Dan ignored the shout and pretended it wasn’t his name. Maybe he had heard this kind of phantom shout many times before, but then he must have lost his concentration, because the line suddenly slipped out of his hand and ran out across the gunwale. He tried to catch it, but a hook buried itself deep, right in between thumb and forefinger.
‘Hook,’ he said through his teeth and I saw the blood in his hand.
Ever since I started working at the harbour, I have been dreaming about hooks in jaws. Hooks in eyes, hooks in every part of your body. Hook torture and hook crucifixion. Maybe I should have got up one night and drawn it down on paper so that it would go away, because now it was happening in front of my eyes.
He was helpless for a moment, staring down at his hand, gripping it with the other hand, trying to squeeze out the pain with his thumb and forefinger, as if it was the sound of his own name that hurt so much. The blood was already leaking into his palm, mixing in with the blood of mackerel and fish scales. Outside the boat, the mackerel were tugging at the line, swimming around in circles, trying to get away and digging the hook deeper. I knew what to do. I pulled in my line and threw it across the floor of the boat with the fish still on their hooks. There was no time to do the same with his, so I got the filleting knife and cut it. The remaining mackerel were released and swirled away on their hooks, shackled to each other for ever by this piece of lost line, swimming down and sideways as if they couldn’t agree where to go at all.
He examined his hand and started swivelling the hook around, forcing more blood out and making everything worse. Then he held his hand towards me. I didn’t trust myself and felt his hand shaking as I tried moving the hook around slowly like a surgeon to see if I could reverse it out without doing any more damage.
‘Pull the fucken’ thing,’ he growled.
I had to extract it quickly. Pretend it was another mackerel. I pulled as fast as I could, but it tore a hole and left a bit of loose flesh dangling. He took in a deep breath and narrowed his eyes. I let go of his hand and saw blood on my fingers. Then I dropped the hook on the floor of the boat with the soggy, brown cigarette butts, because we were already very close to the island, almost on top of the rocks, and there was no time to lose. I could see the ribbons of black seaweed waving and the shape of the rocks, like large, luminous green creatures swimming underneath, waiting for us. He moved aside so that I could start the engine as fast as possible. He sat holding his clenched hands, as if he was praying, with the blood running into the sleeve of his jacket. I turned the boat around and the engine scraped across the back of one of the rocks beneath us. It made an underwater groan, but I managed to steer away from danger and head towards the harbour.
On our way back, the sun disappeared behind a cloud, so I could see everything very clearly without holding my hand up over my eyes. The land came back into view, but there was nobody to be seen on top of the rocks. I looked at the fish on the bottom of the boat. Most of them were rigid by now, but one or two of them were brought back to life again as the boat bounced across the water, wriggling fiercely one last time before going quiet again. Dan reached his hand out over the side of the boat and washed it. He stared across the water behind us, dreaming with his eyes open. He didn’t want to talk about it and I knew he didn’t want me to tell anyone. When we got back to the harbour, he left me to tie up the boat and carry everything in, while he got out and walked away with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He was not in a rush. He walked back across the pier and disappeared inside the shed as if nothing had happened.
The harbour is a place of nightmares, but it’s where I want to be. I love the sight of the wide open bay and the clouds, like big handwriting in the sky. I love the moon shining on the water at night, like a soft, powdery white light drifting across the world. I belong to the sea, like my grandfather, John Hamilton, the sailor with the soft eyes who got locked into the wardrobe by my father. I know he lost his life when he fell on board a British navy ship during the First World War. And after the Irish liberated their country from British rule, he disappeared, because my father wants Ireland to be fully Irish and thinks his own father betrayed his country. When we were small, we got trapped in the wardrobe along with the sailor once and had to be rescued. I am the same age now as my grandfather was when he joined the navy, so I’m stepping into his shoes. I work on the boats and go out fishing like his people did in Glandore, on the coast of West Cork. Sometimes I sneak upstairs to the wardrobe while my father is at work and look at the photograph of John Hamilton in his sailor’s tunic. I wonder if I look like him. I want to be a sailor and travel all over the world like he did before he died. I’m going to become my own grandfather. I’m going to take his name and help him to escape out of the wardrobe.