The Sailor in the Wardrobe (9 page)

My father takes off his glasses and stares across the table at me. Right or left. What’s his next move, I wonder. It’s a game that has often been played before but this time it’s serious. My mother lunges at the scissors to remove them. My father is out of breath and I feel sorry for him, because I’m younger and faster. I feel I should give myself up out of kindness, let him get me and then it will be over, but then he decides to push the table towards me, to trap me in one corner. He’s already crawling across the dissected dress, reaching out towards me with one hand, so the only thing left to do is to get out under the table, past my mother and up the stairs to lock myself into the bathroom.

After a while, my father comes up and bangs the door with his fist, but it’s no use and my mother is finally able to persuade him to go back down. She closes the door of the front room and they discuss the whole thing rationally once more. From the banisters, I can hear my sisters whispering in the kitchen, trying to keep Ciarán happy. In the front room my father’s voice was going up and down and I’m wondering what’s going to happen to John Lennon now? I can hear my father saying that John Lennon is the last nail in the coffin for the Irish language. My mother says it’s only music and that she listened to
some pretty stupid pop songs as well in Germany until they were banned. Onkel Ted tells him it’s important not to be negative, there’s no principle involved and music is not like a hurling match with winners and losers. My mother says it’s time to do something big, something generous and imaginative.

They’re talking for a long time and it even looks like they’ve forgotten about it, thinking back over their lives instead and how things have not worked out the way they had imagined it. Maybe they’re thinking about the time further back when my father was younger and refused to take advice from anyone because he was afraid it would weaken his ideas. When we were small I can remember him going to the funeral of his cousin Gerald in Skibbereen. My mother often made us pray for Onkel Gerald who was drinking too much and telling too many stories. We were not told how he died, only that it was a tragedy. Some time later we found out that he had taken his own life because his older brother had died in front of his eyes in a drowning accident and he never came to terms with that. My father wanted me to know that as a warning, so I would be afraid of alcohol, because Onkel Gerald could have been a great writer if he hadn’t squandered all his stories in pubs around West Cork.

It was one of the biggest funerals ever in Skibbereen, and afterwards all the relatives and friends gathered in the house for sandwiches and tea and whiskey. Everybody was smoking and talking and the small house was crowded, right out to the front door. People kept breaking into tears all the time because Onkel Gerald was a good man who was loved by everybody all the way up to Cork City and Mallow, as far back as Gougane Barra and Bantry. Nobody wanted to believe that he committed suicide in
his own home town, when there was so much to live for and he could have been one of the best journalists in Ireland and there was a job open for him any time with the
Southern Star
.

There was an argument at that funeral. When all the people were gathered together, Aunty Eily came over to my father and spoke to him about how he was raising his children. Even though she was heartbroken with grief for her son Gerald, she told my father that what he was doing was wrong. The news was out that my father had stopped allowing his own children to speak English. Even though she had never been to our house and never travelled out of Skibbereen, she had heard it from other relatives who came to visit us from West Cork, saying they had met my mother and tasted her cakes. They said the children were very polite, but that we were afraid. ‘Fearful’ was the word they used, because each time they asked us a question, we took in a deep breath and were afraid to answer. After the funeral, Aunty Eily told my father that he should stop what he had started before it was too late.

‘You’ll turn them against you,’ she said.

He didn’t listen to her. He smiled and said everybody in Ireland would soon be doing the same. He was leading by example and our family was a model for all Irish families in the future. He would not allow anyone to interfere with his mission or say anything about the way that he wanted to run his family.

I can hear Onkel Ted leaving the house and I know they must have come to a decision. My father has been persuaded to do things calmly and they come up the stairs to my room. I see my father holding John Lennon in his hand and handing it back to me like a toy that has been confiscated. He sits down beside me on the bed
with my mother on the other side, holding my hand.

‘If you want to listen to it,’ my father says. ‘If you want to listen to any record, just ask me and I’ll put it on for you.’

He does not mention the fact that I broke into his music cabinet like a thief. He’s going to forget about that. He smiles, trying to put the rage behind him.

‘I mean it,’ he says, and I know this is a big gesture from him. ‘Any time.’

Then he starts confessing something to me. He tells me about the wedding he went to in Skibbereen some weeks back. My father and Onkel Ted both went together in the car, to the wedding of Eleanor and John. He tells me that Aunty Eily was there, too, even though she’s very old now. He could see by her face and the way she walked slowly, how much time had gone by, as if the future suddenly comes rushing towards them. At the reception afterwards, everybody was telling stories and singing, but this time it was my father who had tears in his eyes because he sat beside Aunty Eily and told her that he should have listened to her long ago while he had the chance.

‘I’m afraid you were right,’ he said to her. ‘I have turned them against me.’

My father is telling me this himself. He’s admitting to me that he was wrong. I want to run out of the room, because I can’t bear to think of him like a small boy, with Aunty Eily putting her arms around him. He has tears in his eyes, saying that she told him it is never too late. He says he hopes there is still some time left for us to be friends. He’s worried that one of these days I will leave the house and never come back.

I want to be generous to him. I want to tell him that there is no need to feel so betrayed, that the Irish people
are still as Irish as they ever were, even if they’re all speaking English now. It only means they’ve become good at acting. They’re good at stepping in and out of new roles and new languages, because sometime along the way in the history of Ireland, they became good at being somebody else. I want to tell him that people like John Lennon and Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka are all living in the same country now. It’s the country I belong to as well, one without any flag. I want to tell him there is nothing to worry about and that music is not like war, but I don’t know how to explain that and I don’t know if it makes any sense. I don’t even know if I believe it myself.

One day, when I was out in the boat with Dan Turley, something happened that made me think nothing made sense any more. We were coming back by the island when I suddenly heard the shout again. Standing on the island was a man holding a bottle in one hand and waving his fist.

‘BASTARD’ I heard him shout.

It must have been the same man who had shouted Dan’s name from the top of the cliff. I could see there was something about him that caused Dan to go even more silent than before. The man on the island was reducing his name to a joke, an insignificant fisherman. Dan wanted him to go away, to drown and disappear. I could see him narrowing his eyes, imagining the man on the island already washed up on the rocks like a dead seal with bite marks punctured in his skin and big black holes where his eyes once were.

Sometimes voices carry really well across the water, depending on how the wind is set and how the waves are facing. When it’s calm and there’s no wind, the sound carries so far that you can think the whole bay is like a
room and you can hear people miles away, just whispering. But this time, the man’s voice was not being carried very well and we could hardly hear him. He seemed to have no voice, even though his fist was up in the air and I could see him raging across the water at us. Here and there, the wind carried a word or two across and then whipped it away again.

‘Buffaloes,’ is all I could make out. ‘Papist buffaloes.’

It was a Northern curse, one that you hear on the radio these days. I tried to imagine what would happen if these two men met face to face, what they would do to each other. This time, Dan stared back as if this was some kind of drunken madman who lived out on the island and the less notice you took of him the better. I could see the thimble shape of the Martello tower and the rough grass draped over the island like green tweed. The seagulls were waiting quietly for something to happen. There was a cormorant on a rock spreading his black, oily wings out to dry. I wondered where the island goats had gone to and where they could possibly hide in such an exposed place. I could see the black tide mark all around the edge of the island and I began to imagine that there was also a black rim on the man’s lips, from drinking and shouting.

I could see him staggering as he tried to come closer, stepping forward on the rocks as if he was going to walk across the water and kill Dan with his own hands. He began to gesture at us, holding the bottle down to his groin. And still Dan carried on without a word, steering past without seeing him and without hearing him over the sound of the engine. The boat bounced across the waves, cutting through the water and separating the white wash to each side. Dan looked back as if he could stare the man off the island, out of existence. He was
standing there, balancing on the rock with the bottle in his hand, shouting but unable to reach us with his anger. He took aim and the bottle crashed on the edge of the island, making a tiny noise like a coin or a brass button falling to the ground.

We kept going towards the harbour and steered right into a cloud. It started raining heavily and my knees were getting wet. Behind us, the island was still in sunshine and the grass was lit up luminous green against the dark blue clouds. We knew the rain would hit the island soon and then we would all be soaked. We kept going with the rain bouncing on the water and Dan looking back at the island until it disappeared from view.

The first thing we noticed about Stefan was that he didn’t eat cake. Nobody had ever refused my mother’s baking. Maybe he had better things on his mind and didn’t come over to Ireland to eat cake, but it was still hard to think of anyone in his right mind being able to take their eyes off the coffee cake that was specially made for his arrival. It was decorated into sections on top with little squiggled walls of coffee cream which my mother pressed out with her stainless steel syringe, like triangular fields with a haystack in each. She made this cake only on special occasions, when we had a guest, or when there was a birthday to celebrate, so it was like a big prize, standing on the side table with everybody glancing over now and again to make sure it hadn’t suddenly disappeared.

We watched Stefan as if we were living at the end of the world and he was the first visitor from outside for a million years. We were like a family cut off by long distance, living on an island so far away that it took him years to reach us. We watched the way he chewed. The way he smiled. Every word he uttered. He spoke German like us, but it was so unusual to see anyone apart from ourselves sitting at the table that we all felt we had been left behind in time. Stefan took the place of Franz at the table, so everybody had to move down one chair to make
room, as if he was an older brother who had been missing and had finally come back to us for good. Maria was wearing the new dress that she had made with a pattern of sparks and stars in various colours and my sisters all laughed until they had tears in their eyes whenever Stefan made the slightest joke. Ciarán was examining Stefan’s bony cheeks and my mother was asking lots of questions, saying Stefan was tall like his father, Ulrich, but that he had the eyes and the smile of his mother, Käthe. Stefan explained that he was studying medicine, but that he was taking some time off to look around Ireland before it was too late.

When it came to the big moment when my mother cut the cake and placed the first slice on the plate with the silver cake trowel, making sure it didn’t fall over on its side, Stefan shook his head and passed the plate back.

‘No thanks,’ he said with a smile. ‘Not for me.’

‘No cake,’ my mother said, and she was obviously surprised.

She didn’t ask him a second time or try to force him the way she would if she was Irish. She offered him Florentines and biscuits instead, but he shook his head at those too. She continued handing out slices of cake to each of us and we stared at the plate in front of us, as if we were doing something strange in our house, something ancient that other people had given up years ago, like being German or speaking the Irish language. I lost interest in the cake myself and my mother thought there was something terrible happening, because I was the one who would always ask for a second slice and now I couldn’t even finish the first.

After the table was cleared, my father spread out a map
and started pointing at all the important places in Ireland, giving Stefan information on Irish history, showing him pictures of Robert Emmet on Thomas Street and pictures of the GPO in flames, saying that he would bring him in the car to show him some of these sights. Stefan was listening eagerly and I could see how excited my mother and father were, talking about Ireland. She spoke about the time she first arrived and went cycling on her own up to Lough Derg. My father spoke about Connemara and other places that had to be seen to be believed. It almost looked like they were talking to each other more than to Stefan, trying to convince themselves that these beautiful places still existed, not just in their memory. They took out old photographs and postcards, urging Stefan to travel around as fast as he could before they disappeared.