The Speckled People. Hugo Hamilton
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are people being killed at the end of the road and I don’t want to go down there any more. My father says all we need to know is that poppies are not allowed in the house and that’s the end of the story. We’ll get our own badges and flags and songs. On St Patrick’s day, we get shamrock and green badges and tricoloured jelly and ice cream.
At night in bed I’m afraid of silence. I can see the light coming under the door and I think my father still wants to go over to Mr Cullen, only that my mother is holding him back telling him to leave it. It’s all in the past. We’re in the future and we have to behave like the future. Then I hear the music coming up from the front room. Big German music spreading all over the house again, all the way up the stairs and in under the door with the light.
On Sunday, Onkel Ted comes to tea again with his wet hair combed in lines. I tell him about all the balls that Miss Tarleton gave back but the Miss Lanes took away again. I tell him that we were allowed to wash Mr Cullen’s car and that we got chocolate. I tell him about the poppies and all the people being killed at the end of the road, but my mother says we won’t talk about that now. I tell him that a man on the bus said Nazi to my mother under his breath, but we won’t talk about that either. Then it’s time to reach into Onkel Ted’s pocket for the sweets and I don’t know what to tell or not to talk about any more.
After that it’s hard to know what’s right and wrong. My mother says we’ve started doing a lot of things that make no sense. One day Franz put stones in his ears and he couldn’t hear anything any more. Maria put a marrow-fat pea in her nose and it swelled up so much that the doctor had to come and take it out. Franz hit his thumb with a hammer and his finger went blue. Then I started burying all the silver spoons in the garden with my grandfather’s initials FK written on them and my mother had to find the treasure. She laughs and says she hopes we won’t do any more stupid things for a while. But then one day I started throwing the toy cars in the fire. I carried the box with all my cars into the kitchen and opened the door of the boiler by myself. I could see them lying on top of the orange coals. I watched them lighting up blue and green for a moment, until the flames disappeared and they went black and silver. One by one, I threw my cars on top of the coals until my mother came and asked me if I was out of my mind. She pulled me away and slammed the door of the boiler shut. She kneeled down and looked straight into my eyes. She makes everything better with hugs that break your bones. She tells me a story and says it’s all forgotten now and we won’t talk about it any more.
One day the boiler burst. It started hissing and clicking because of all the bad things that had been thrown into it. It got so hot that you could hear it cracking inside. Then there was a bang and it burst open with hot brown water gushing out all over the kitchen floor like tea with milk. My mother told my father to call the fire brigade. He frowned and sucked in air through his teeth. But then he put out the fire by himself. He carried the red coal out on a shovel and rolled up his sleeves to sweep the tea out the back door.
Then it’s winter and our house starts filling up with mice. The pipes are cold and there are mice in every room because they get in under the back door. More and more of them are coming in every day until all the mice from the whole city are living in our house, my mother says. They’re in the hall and on the stairs, everywhere you go. Any time you open the door and go into a room you see them running away. But mostly they’re under the stairs where things are kept, like jam jars and pots and old shoes. There are so many of them that you have to watch where you walk, because one day when Franz was running down the three steps from the hallway into the kitchen, a baby mouse ran out from under the stairs and got squashed. We all crouched down to examine the flattened corpse until my mother told us not to be so interested in blood and took it away on the shovel.
It’s so cold, we stay in one room by the fire where it’s nice and warm, but if you go from that room up to the bedroom, it’s like going out on the street and you need your coat on. My mother shows me her hands and says they will never get warm again. They’ve gone blue and green with the cold, like mackerel. She wants me to take pity on her hands and please let them in under my jumper to get warm. Be a good boy and give shelter to my poor fish-blue hands, she says. Just let them in for a little second or two to get warm. Then I scream and laugh and my mother screams and laughs, because the mackerel are fast swimmers and they go up under my jumper and down around my neck into my shirt and my mother says: ‘Wie schön, wie schön warm’, oh lovely and cosy and warm.
Áine came back from London, but she’s so sad that she only talks to herself in the mirror now. She can’t even say ‘walk on the wall’ in Irish or English or go down to the seafront because her legs won’t carry her. She’s never going back to London, but she doesn’t want to go back to Connemara either, so she lives with us. Sometimes you hear her upstairs crying and my mother says something happened to her, something that can’t be explained or forgotten about either, so we just had to wait for her to get her words back. Onkel Ted has to come and make the sign of the cross over her, but still she won’t come out and nobody knows what to do. My mother says it’s the worst thing of all to be sad for yourself. You can help other people but often you can’t help yourself.
At night you can hear the mice scratching and chasing each other around. For a while we counted the number of mice we saw every day, but then we didn’t know if we were counting the same mouse twice in different rooms. My father bought two traps to catch them but that wasn’t enough, so he bought another one that would catch three of them at the same time. It made no difference. Even if you caught three mice each day, my mother said it would still take a hundred years to catch them all because they could have families faster than we could kill them. The only thing was to stop talking about them and then they would go away. One day, there was a dead mouse in the trap that was half eaten by his own friends, and my mother said it was time to stop talking about it. Mice have no feelings, she said, and some people have no feelings either.
Áine spent all her day sitting up in bed smoking cigarettes. My mother said the best thing was for her to find a new job, then she could buy new clothes and go out and meet new people. Áine’s legs wouldn’t even carry her to the front door, so my mother went around to all the neighbours to ask if anyone knew of any jobs. She spoke to people who owned a man’s shop and people in two grocery shops. After a long time she found a job in a gift shop, but Áine burst into tears on the first day and the owner told my mother that a gift shop is meant to be a happy place and nobody was going to buy anything from a person with tears in their eyes. He said he would prefer it if my mother came to work for him instead. My mother said she would love to work in the gift shop, but her hands were like mackerel and nobody was going to buy anything from fish-cold hands.
My mother said she knew what the problem was. If Áine had nice shoes then she would feel better and her legs would carry her down the street with no shame. My father said it was a waste and that everyone else in our house needed shoes, too, but my mother said it would all be paid back in other ways. So Áine got new shoes, but it made no difference. At night she left the light on in her room and my father said that was a waste, too, because she was not even reading a book, only sitting there smoking cigarettes. He said he gave up smoking when he wanted to buy German records and the only way of paying for them was to take the money from the cigarettes instead. If he had a mouse for every cigarette that Áine smoked and a penny for every mouse that he caught, he would be able to buy every opera and every symphony that ever existed on Deutsche Grammophon. He said it was the cigarettes that were making Áine sad. And one morning, my mother found a black hole in one of the pillow cases and she was afraid the house would burn down.
Every day my mother sits down with Áine and tries to make her smile. She says nobody can make you smile if you don’t want to. Every day my father goes to work on the train. Every day we catch three mice and every day new ones come. Every day I scream and laugh when my mother’s mackerel hands go under my jumper. Every Sunday Onkel Ted comes to tea after his swim at the Forty Foot because he doesn’t feel the cold. We tell him things that happened, but not about mice and not about Áine or the black holes burned in her dresses. My sister Maria pulls up her dress to show Onkel Ted her tummy