Dublin Palms. Hugo Hamilton
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it some illness I brought with me from the house where I grew up? The country my mother came from, the country my father invented in his head. Something in my overlapping history that I am passing on to my children?
My memory is full of sickness. My father bursting into the room with the sick bowl. Bursting in with medicine. Bursting in with a hot poultice. Bursting in to accuse me of speaking the language of the street inside my head. Bursting in to let me know that innocent people had been shot down on the streets of Derry. Bursting in to tell me the British Embassy was on fire. Bursting in the following day with his beekeeping gear over his head, climbing out the window of my bedroom onto the flat roof wearing big gloves and the smoke of burning sackcloth coming from the nozzle of his bee calmer. Bursting in that same night again with his fists in my sleep after I climbed back in late through the window past the beehives, my mother begging him to stop, the whole family awake on the landing and my brother appearing at the door like a boy adult with one single word – peace. My father finally brought to his senses, his fists turned back into hands, my mother led him away and my eyes got used to the light on.
My father bursting in to apologise with a book, with a box of oil paints, with a small fact about helium he thought I might be interested in and might get us talking. The reconciliation music coming from the front room, Tristan and Isolde, their love death rising and rising up the stairs.
And my little sister, Lotte.
My mother has asked Helen to teach Lotte how to read and write in English. They are doing Tolstoy, a page a day. Lotte fell behind as a child because of her asthma, the language of the street was forbidden in our house, she missed a lot of classes at school. Helen is a good teacher, she waits for Lotte to catch her breath after each sentence.
I remember lying awake hearing Lotte trying to breathe, unable to say a word. Her hair was soaked with sweat, my mother wiped her forehead. The doctor came late one night. We heard his deep voice in the hall, he gave Lotte a Valium injection. She fell asleep and I thought she would never breathe again. Next time the doctor was called, he said it was all in her mind, nothing more than a psychological impediment preventing her from breathing normally like every other child on the street. I heard my father coming up the stairs, bursting into Lotte’s room. He slapped her and told her to go to sleep – you’re making this up. My mother tried to calm him, but he continued shouting, commanding Lotte to start breathing properly. She was quiet after that. But worse again the next day. My father prayed and got his brother the Jesuit to make the sign of the cross over her. He ordered the latest medical journals. Cortisone was known to restrict bone growth in a child. He gave Lotte a glass of liquid yeast instead. He gave her goat’s milk. The cat disappeared. He put on Bach. He read about bronchodilator medication, he discovered an inhaler called Ventolin.
If only it was possible to understand his vision, the mixed family enterprise he created. If only it had not been so obscured by his rage, his love, the silence he cast over the family with his crusade. I thought of him reading to improve his German. The care my mother took to correct his grammar. The risk they entered into. The adventure in their eyes when they started this strange family out of place. The house was full of love and misunderstanding. She encouraged him to do things he would never have taken on in his own language, this beekeeping enterprise he got himself into.
I think of the bees arriving for the first time. Like visitors, given refuge in our home. A swarm delivered in May from West Cork. A dome-shaped straw skep with bees talking inside, buzzing with ideas. My mother welcomes them with an embroidered tablecloth, a blue bowl of star and moon shaped biscuits, her voice high with excitement. Her language is a running diary, observing my father, the strangeness of a man in his own country. He wears a protective cage over his head, stepping like an astronaut onto the flat roof while we watch from the window above. Seven faces leaning out to see him punching the humming skep with his fist. It rolls away like an empty hat. He stands back with his big gloves held up in the air. A white sheet spread out, a colony of bees dropped out before nightfall, walking up the beach to a new hive waiting.
We drove out across the mountains until we saw no more black flags. We came through a bog with yellow signs showing a black car veering over the edge. Another sign with a black hump, warning about the uneven surface. The car we had was beige, maybe mustard brown. It had a boxy shape, a biscuit tin with no seat belts in the back, the gear lever was up high by the steering wheel. A slide window, so you could leave your elbow out. The girls were screeching in the back, lifted off their seats with every bump in the road. Helen had her bare feet on the dashboard, I was distracted by her knees.
Hard to say if I was driving away from something or driving towards something. My decisions were random, based on forces in my childhood I could not explain. Behaving at the mercy of feelings that never matched the time we were in. I was creating my own mixed family enterprise, doing my best to be unlike the family I came from.
It was late in the afternoon, we got fish and chips. I had a bottle of wine, some shallow styrofoam containers from a Chinese restaurant for wine glasses.
I drove the car into a field. The weeds squeaked along the paintwork, slapping under the wheel arches. The silence when I turned off the engine was enormous, nothing but ourselves and the sound of wrapping paper and the smell of salt and vinegar. The country was depopulated. Only us, sitting with the doors open, facing the sunset. It was warm. The breeze was like a hairdryer coming through, it blew a paper napkin up against the windscreen.
We waited for the sun to leave, the children went to sleep. In the middle of Ireland, we sat watching the field going dark. The wind came up. A few drops of rain at first, then louder, bouncing on the roof of the car. Helen said it was as heavy as the rain in Canada. She told me how she was once caught in a thunderstorm and could not find her way home. The streets all looked the same, the rain bounced a foot off the ground, it created a halo around the world, her hair down on her skull, blinded by the weight of water in her eyes.
She sat in the car staring into the field of rain as though she was back in Canada, with Lake Huron in front of her. A solid black plate lit up in a flash of lightning, the salt mine, the two bright lines of the railway tracks, her family home in view for a brief unreachable instant.
Give my love to the lake, she said. Give my love to the night-heron. Give my love to the boardwalk and the big empty salt rooms underneath the lake.
I started up the engine, we had to go before the mud kept us there for the night. I was the expert at getting home, driving like a lover, like a father, picking the children up in my arms from the back seat when we got home, one after the other in sleep level six, carrying them inside. Helen opened the doors, taking their shoes off, shielding their eyes from the light. I placed them without interruption into their beds like time travellers, straight from the field of fish and chips to the next morning with the light coming through the curtains. Nothing but the crown of a thistle caught in the bumper for proof.
There was a trick I taught them on that trip. They climbed up on the stump of a tree and jumped into my arms. The leap of trust, we called it. I was the catcher, standing ready. They had to take it in turns and wait for me to shout – jump. Essie was fearless, she threw herself backwards off the bonnet of the car.
It gave us a false sense of security. As though nothing could ever happen to us. Our lives were accidental, full of love and luck and family chaos, rescued by our children.
We collected them from their art class. We did some shopping on the way home. I parked the car across the road from the house. Helen went around to get the groceries, a bag in her arms with the stalk of a pineapple growing out of her shoulder. I went to get the children out and saw Rosie standing in the middle of the road.
I didn’t have time to ask how she got there.
The sound of tyres was so loud it silenced the entire street, there was blue smoke rising, it smelled like Halloween fires burning. Rosie closed her eyes, her body shivered, her hands held up to stop the car. It came to a stop inches away from her. The driver sat motionless with his grip on the steering wheel, unable to get out, staring ahead at the child in the street. Helen looked at me, the bag with the pineapple fell out of her arms. It was that soundless space in between us that frightened