The Sailor in the Wardrobe (14 page)

During lunch break, I heard the other boys saying to each other that they would absolutely crucify the guy who did it. If he didn’t own up and save the innocent from being punished, he was going to need a wheelchair. I was caught both ways. I was certain that Brother K was bluffing and that he had no idea who did it. He was lashing out indiscriminately. But the alternative might be even worse, if the boys suspected that I was responsible.

When Brother K finally paraded the five suspects in front of the school, I realized I could get away with it. I had the moral problem of seeing others being punished for my crime, but before Brother K even got a chance to start the punishment, some of the boys in our class got up the courage to protest and say it was a massive injustice. They began to accuse Brother K of acting outside natural law. It was Packer, above all people, who stood up and spoke out.

‘It’s not fair,’ he said. ‘You have no right to punish people without proof. It’s morally wrong.’

Packer became the hero of the day, as if he had taken the instrument of torture himself. He had taken my place and was now going to be famous all over the school, like the leader of some great rebellion, full of courage and selfless inner strength. Others in the class began to back him up, as if he had given them the strength to speak out at last. He had liberated them. It was happening all over the world at the time. There were black civil rights marches in America. People protesting against the war in
Vietnam. Civil rights marches in Belfast and Derry too. We could see the trouble coming on TV, police punishing innocent people on the streets who were trying to run away. The British army bursting into people’s houses. Things could not go on like that for ever.

Everybody was arguing openly now. Some of the boys were talking about the Geneva Convention. Others were talking about the final court of justice, quoting bits from
The Merchant of Venice
and
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. In the middle of all this, people jumped up and began shouting, saying it was a return to barbarism and lynch law. Summary judgment.

‘It could have been anyone,’ somebody said.

The whole class was on its feet. I jumped up as well and Brother K was suddenly overwhelmed by dissent.

‘Maybe it was me,’ I shouted, and they all thought it was the best joke ever, because I was the last person they imagined as the culprit.

‘Yeah,’ they started saying after me. ‘I did it. It was me, brother.’

Brother K was finally forced to back down. He didn’t give in easily and turned on Packer instead.

‘Behold, the true culprit,’ he said. ‘Masquerading as a liberator.’

It was Brother K’s only way out. He wanted to turn the rest of the class on Packer like wolves, hoping they would tear him apart. He suspended the punishment of the five suspects, hoping the class would take out its pre-emptive revenge on Packer instead. He resumed the classes and everything went back to normal. He was waiting patiently for the perpetrator to seek recognition for his crime. He was certain it would not be long before the real culprit would step forward into the light.

Nobody ever owned up and nobody ever guessed the truth. In the end, they all believed it was Packer who had done it, only that he still wouldn’t admit to it openly. The more he denied it, the more they believed it was him, because they needed to solve this mystery and decided he was their revolutionary folk hero. He remained silent whenever they asked him, as if he was above praise. He had the integrity of a real leader, they said, the person who refused to take the glory for himself. Only the great people in this world have such an assured vision. He became untouchable and I think even Brother K began to respect Packer’s inner strength and leadership.

I had the power of the real knowledge on my side. I carried the secret with me that could have shattered Packer’s character in front of the whole school. I could have spoken up and declared him a fake. I could have said he was an impostor, a mountebank, a false hero living on the courage of his people. I could have reduced him to a tumbled statue from a forgotten empire, like Nelson. I could have told Brother K and all the schoolboys to follow me out onto the street, all the way into the Municipal Art Gallery next door, and pointed to the painting of the Dutch woman. There is your instrument of torture. But I didn’t want that glory for myself. Instead, it became part of my secret life, part of the underground life that I lived in hiding. It was Packer who remained the hero, and even though he still refused to talk to me, it was a consolation to know that he needed me to keep this secret, even though he didn’t know it. He was carrying the glory and I was invisible.

There was a lecture given by a great art historian in the gallery one day and we got the afternoon off to attend. He explained the origins of the Dutch movement of
portrait painting. He called it the golden age of Dutch genre painting. He explained how they had an obsession with painting women writing letters or reading books. Everybody thought it was very boring altogether and there was only a snigger at one point when the art historian mentioned a famous painting called
Woman at Her Toilet
. He didn’t have much to say about the Dutch woman with the gilded frame, except that it was interesting that there was so little furniture in the background. I was staring at the painting and everybody must have been wondering why I was so interested, as if I saw some hidden meaning in this Dutch portrait that no art expert had yet noticed.

I kept going back into the gallery on my own. I stood in front of the painting and thought about the instrument of torture hidden on top of the frame. I wished I could have told people and created a story of liberation around myself. I kept reminding myself of things that my mother told me and could never tell the world either, secrets that she kept in her diary, because that was her only real friend in life.

There was another painting I came across in the gallery, even more interesting than the Dutch woman. It was the beheading of John the Baptist. I knew it had something in common with my own story and the way I was unable to move on in time. John the Baptist was kneeling down at the centre of the painting with his eyes closed, his neck exposed, hands behind his back. To the right behind him, a soldier, dressed in flowing clothes, swinging the sword. It made me understand the power of an artist, the secrets they carry in their heads and the way they can slow a moment in life to a standstill. I could not stop thinking about the agonizing, endlessly revolving movement in
this painting. The soldier’s arms were full of strength and tension. You could see his muscles tight with action and the sword only two seconds away from slicing through the neck of John the Baptist. You could foresee the next moment clearly when his head would fall to the ground and roll away, while his decapitated body surged with a fountain of blood through the severed neck. You could stand there in front of the painting, waiting, hoping it would not happen, thinking somebody could say something and it could still be stopped at the last minute. You could stand there knowing exactly what was coming next, but the sword would never reach that point.

I looked at this picture like a big film on screen. I stood in front of it and thought of Sophie Scholl when she was sent under the guillotine in Munich. I thought of the trains going to Auschwitz. I thought of bombs stopped in mid-air over cities. I thought of guns pointing at heads. People waiting with hoods over their heads in police stations up North. That quiet moment in the street before a car bomb goes off, before the timing device changes everything beyond recognition. I thought of the Enola Gay in mid-air, like a stationary Air-Fix model in the sky over Japan. I was stuck in that revolving moment of history, paralysed and unable to move forward in time, unable to live in the aftermath and still wishing I could hold everything up like an artist. I was forever stuck in this pre-calamity, this pre-beheading, this pre-gas chamber moment when everything was fine, but already too late.

Then one day I heard that Packer was injured in a motorbike accident. He had broken his leg and was in hospital. Some of my class went to visit him and said he was having a great time with all the nurses laughing at his
jokes. I started thinking of going to visit him myself, but I was afraid that he would not talk to me. It was my mother who encouraged me to go and see him. She knew that I had become invisible and told me to walk into the hospital and not care.

So that’s how I walked into the ward and Packer seemed shocked at first when he saw me. He didn’t know what to say. We shook hands and he smiled at me. Instead of talking about what happened between us, he started telling stories. He sat up in bed with his leg in plaster, with lots of signatures and little drawings on it, most of them made by girls. There was chocolate and fizzy drinks and flowers everywhere. He said he had been given morphine and it felt like he was rolling around in his bed like a marble, down onto the floor, into the steel bedside locker beside him with the door closing behind him. He never said a word about the fact that he had cut me off. We never spoke about that and just became friends again as before.

All that is over now and I have begun to pretend that nothing ever happened. Since then Packer has been trying to make up for the silence, including me in everything he does, getting me the job at the harbour. But something has changed, as if I can never fully trust friendship again after that. I can never tell him anything about myself and I have decided to remain in hiding. And maybe that’s what friendship is, this uneasy pact between two different people, between the person who carries the glory and the person who carries the secret. It’s as if he needs me now as much as I need him. It’s the pact of heroes and followers, of pop stars and fans, of idols and admirers. It’s the pact between the artist and the person he paints, the pact between the storyteller and the person who lives inside the story.

So now that’s all in the past. It’s Packer and me working together at the harbour, sitting in a boat, drifting away and looking up at the clouds, listening to the sound of hammering somewhere in the distance. We see Tyrone coming out of the harbour, bringing a group of models out to the island along with a photographer. We follow them at a distance and see them setting up on the island with Tyrone sitting in the background drinking a small bottle of whiskey. We watch them for a long time being photographed in their swimwear, changing behind a canvas screen and coming out in new costumes. One of them has to hold a basket full of mackerel. One of them wears a bathrobe, leaning back on the rocks, almost falling off the edge into the water and showing her legs. Another one in a leopard-skin swimsuit and a straw hat, chasing after the goats. Another picture of two girls together in miniskirts and high boots feeding seagulls.

When Tyrone arrives back in the harbour with the models, I can hear Dan Turley muttering and cursing because he’s jealous that Tyrone got the job of bringing the models out to the island. Tyrone is younger and more handsome, and looks like the kind of man who hangs around models all the time, laughing and offering them cigarettes. Tyrone helping the models with their bags. Tyrone holding a model’s hand and assisting her out of the boat, as if she’s stepping out of her dress. Tyrone getting his picture taken with a big smile on his face and his arms around all the girls.

When the models come up the steps onto the quay, I hear one of them saying that she’s covered in mackerel scales and feels like she’s slept with a dead fish. They look pale and thin, as if they have not eaten in days. They put on some new lipstick and more perfume to cover up
the smell of fish and petrol and seaweed all around the harbour. They try to look like they belong on solid ground again and have nothing to do with the sea, but they stumble on their high heels and have to hold on to each other as if their legs have been turned to jelly by the waves. Maybe they’re not feeling very well after the journey back across the bay in the small boat. Packer tries to talk to them. He’s not afraid of women and has things to ask them. He wants to know what magazine they’re going to be in, but the models are not very friendly. They won’t answer him and maybe they think boys shouldn’t be so interested in women’s fashion magazines.

One of the harbour boys then takes a dead mackerel from the fish box and holds it out in front of his groin. He starts walking around with the tail end of a mackerel wiggling out in front of him, showing his floppy mackerel mickie off to the world. The models look at him in disgust. They say we’re a pack of little perverts. Gurriers. One of the models even gets sick over the side of the quay at the sight of the harbour boys running around with blue and silver mackerel mickies in their hands. Mackerel mickies with green stripes and black zigzag designs. Dangerous-looking mackerel mickies with rigor mortis. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Dan Turley grinning, because now we’ve all become run-alongs after him, making a big joke of Tyrone and his models. Mackerel mickie boys running around yelping and laughing, chasing each other around in circles until one of the models is forced to smile.

But then I notice that Packer has not joined in. He stands back with his arms folded, just watching. He wants nothing to do with this because it’s all just vile and ordinary.

All the news on radio and TV is about Northern Ireland and about Vietnam. There are lots of new words and phrases being invented, like sectarianism, direct rule, internment without trial. Meaningful dialogue, terrorist suspects, strip-searching, inhuman and degrading treatment. You could learn good English by listening to the news, because everybody is trying to find better ways of expressing what’s going on and how they feel about things. They have to find new alternatives for words like evil and bloodshed and shock and horror, because the words often become meaningless. They come up with versions for things like containing the situation, weeding out individuals, descending into violence. There are new terms like arms caches, safe houses, plastic rounds, dawn raids, Nationalist concerns and Unionist positions. From Vietnam we are learning words like defoliation, infiltration, heavy pounding and carpet bombing. You can also learn geography and we have the echoes of exotic names in our heads, like the Ho Chi Minh trail, the Falls Road, Da Nang, Divis Street Flats, Portadown, the Tet Offensive and the Ardoyne. In Vietnam, they’re using a substance called Agent Orange to get rid of all the forests where the enemy can hide, and in Northern Ireland they’re leaving no stone unturned to root out the perpetrators. One day
my mother found orange specks on the sheets hanging out on the line and was alarmed that Agent Orange could have started drifting that far across to Ireland on the clouds. She was afraid of war coming back again. But then my father examined the sheets when he came home and said it was nothing, only our own bees occasionally relieving themselves in the air as they flew out over the garden.