The Speckled People. Hugo Hamilton
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it was no fox we had in the kitchen but a rat the size of a fox. And the rat was very glic, he said, because he hid behind the boiler and would not come out until he was chased out with fire and smoke.
There are other people living at the top of our house, all the way up the stairs, further than you can count. They’re called the O’Neills and they never take their hats off, because they think the hallway is like the street, my mother says. They are very noisy and my father makes a face. He goes up to speak to them and when he comes down again he says he wants the O’Neills out of the house. There will be no more chopping wood under this roof.
Áine came to look after us when my mother had to go away to the hospital. She’s from Connemara and has different words, not the same as the workers, or the O’Neills, or the Garda, or my mother. She teaches us to count the stairs again in Irish: a haon, a dó, a trí … She doesn’t lay out the clothes at night or tell stories. She doesn’t call me Hanni or Johannes, she calls me Seán instead, or sometimes Jack, but my father says that’s wrong. I should never let anyone call me Jack or John, because that’s not who I am. My father changed his name to Irish. So when I grow up I’ll change my name, too.
Áine can’t speak my mother’s words, but she can speak the words of the Garda. She brings us for a walk along the seafront and shows us the crabs running sideways and the dog barking for nothing all day. She says she wants to go to London, but it’s very far away. And Connemara is far away, too. I said London was far away one, and Connemara was far away two, and she said: ‘Yes.’ She sits for a long time looking out across the sea to London. Then she takes us up to the shops to buy sweets and I get more than Franz because I’m very glic. She teaches us how to walk on the wall, all the way back along the seafront, and Franz makes up a song about it: ‘Walk on the wall, walk on the wall …’
My mother came back with a baby called Maria, so that’s Franz, Johannes and Maria: Eins, Zwei, Drei. We speak German again and my mother shows us how to feed the baby with her breast. Maria opens her mouth and shakes her head and then my mother has to change her nappy because the baby did ‘A A’. After that, my mother puts Maria out in the garden with a net across the pram to stop the birds from stealing her dreams.
Áine took us down to the sea again because Franz had a fishing net and he was going to catch one of the crabs, but they were too fast. I said they were all ‘two fast and three fast’, and Áine said: ‘Yes.’ She took out a box with a small mirror and put lipstick on her lips. She took off her shoes to put her feet into one of the pools with the crabs. I started throwing stones into the pools. Franz got all wet and Áine said ‘A A’ in Irish. Then I threw a stone in Áine’s pool. She chased after me and on the way home she would not let me walk on the wall, so I tried to walk sideways, like the crabs.
My mother knows everything. She knows that I was throwing stones, but Áine said it wasn’t ‘half as bad as that’, which is the same as what my mother says only in different words: Halb so schlimm. My mother wagged her finger and said: Junge, Junge, which is the same as what Áine says in English: ‘Boy, oh boy’, and in Irish ‘a mhac ó’.
That evening, my mother brought us up to the station to collect my father from the train. She picked us up to look over the wall at the tracks. We waved and shouted at the train rushing through under the bridge and then we started running towards my father coming out of the station. My father is different to other men. He has no moustache, but he has glasses and he has a limp, too. He swings his briefcase and his leg goes down on one side as if the ground is soft under one foot. It’s the same as when you walk with one foot on and one foot off the pavement. My mother kisses him and puts her arm around him. He looks into the pram at Maria to see if she has her eyes open. Franz tries to carry the briefcase and I try to walk like my father, but that’s not allowed. He hits me on the back of my head and my mother kneels down to say it’s not right to imitate people. You always have to walk like yourself, not like your father or the crabs, just like yourself. At home, my father was still angry. He wanted to know why I was throwing stones at the pools so I told him that Áine said ‘A A’ in Irish. I mixed up the words like sand and cement and water. I used Áine’s words and told my father that she said ‘A A’, what the baby did, in my mother’s words.
‘What did you throw?’ my father asked.
‘Stones.’
I saw myself twice in his glasses and he made a face, just like when the O’Neills were chopping wood upstairs.
‘Stones,’ he said again, very loud. Then he stood up.
My mother was laughing and laughing until the tears came into her eyes. She said it was so funny to hear so many words and so many countries being mixed up.
‘Stones,’ my father said again. ’I won’t have this.’
‘It’s not half as bad as that,’ my mother said, still wiping her eyes.
‘She’s here to speak Irish to them,’ my father shouted, and then my mother tried to stop him going up to speak to Áine. She was holding on to his arm and saying: ’Leave it till the morning. Let me talk to her.’
My father says there will be no more chopping wood and no more speaking English under his roof. I stay awake and look at the light under the door. At night, I hear my mother and father talking for a long time. I hear the O’Neills coming up the stairs and I hear my father coming out on the landing to see if they will start chopping wood. Then the light goes out. I hear water whispering. I hear a fox laughing. I hear stones dropping into the pools and I hear sand and cement being mixed with a shovel. Then it’s silent and nobody is listening, only me.
My mother spoke to Áine the next day. She’s not able to speak Áine’s words. So in the words of the Garda and the workers, my mother tells her never to speak the words of the Garda and the workers to us again.
‘You must try to speak to them in Irish,’ my mother said.
‘What good is that to them?’ Áine said.
‘Please. It’s my husband’s wish.’
So we have to be careful in our house and think before we speak. We can’t speak the words of the Garda or the workers, that’s English. We speak Áine’s words from Connemara, that’s Irish, or my mother’s words, that’s German. I can’t talk to Áine in German and I can’t talk to my mother in Irish, because she’ll only laugh and tickle me. I can talk to my father in German or Irish and he can speak to the Garda and the workers for us. Outside, you have to be careful, too, because you can’t buy an ice pop in German or in Irish, and lots of people only know the words of the Garda and the workers. My father says they better hurry up and learn Irish fast because we won’t buy anything more in English.
Sometimes Áine speaks to herself in the mirror. Sometimes when the O’Neills go through the hall on their way out the front door, my mother says good morning to them, but they say nothing at all and just walk out as if they don’t understand their own language. Sometimes the man in the fish shop says guten Morgen as if he’s forgotten his own language. Sometimes people whisper. Sometimes they spell out the letters of a word. And sometimes people try to forget their own language altogether and Áine continues to say ‘stones’ as if there’s no word in her own language for it.
‘Stone mór’ and ‘stone beag,’ she says. Big stone and little stone.
On Saturday, Áine goes into the city on the bus to speak English. The O’Neills were gone away, too, and my father was in the garden digging. He said he was going to get rid of the mountain the workers left behind and grow flowers and radishes, so I watched him as he jabbed the spade into the soil and then pushed it down with his foot. The worms living in the mountain had to go away in the wheelbarrow. My father emptied it and spread out the soil in another part of the garden. Then he let me hold the wheelbarrow while it was filling up again.
Franz made a wall with a line of bricks and he was walking on it singing: ‘Walk on the wall, walk on the wall …’ My father stopped digging and told him to stop. He made the O’Neill face again. But Franz kept on saying