Hand in the Fire. Hugo Hamilton
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play with people’s names. I tried to limit the amount of times I used words without meaning, such as ‘like’ or ‘you know’. I was cautious with terms like ‘mega’ and ‘sketchy’ and ‘leggin’ it’ and ‘literally glued to the television’. I didn’t trust myself saying things like ‘will you go away’ or ‘would you ever fuck off’ because I’m always afraid people might take it to heart. Besides, I can never pronounce the word ‘fuck’ properly. I make it sound too genuine. You have so many different ways of saying it in this country, I’ve given up trying.
We got talking about where I had been so far and what places around the country I had visited. I told him I was planning to travel out to the west, but then he sent me on a detour down south instead.
‘Have you been to Dursey Island?’
‘No,’ I said.
He had a commanding way of speaking. His eyes were intense, looking right at me. He stepped into my life quite easily, offering advice and making decisions for me.
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he said, ‘until you’ve been to Dursey Island.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s no place in the world like it,’ he said. ‘Hardly anyone living out there now. Just yourself and the ocean, that’s all.’
Was there a reason for sending me there? Did he have some connection to the place? They talk of six degrees of separation, but here in this country you only have one or two at the most. He looked away towards the door of the pub as though he could see right across the landscape and all the people in it. He told me how to get there, right at the tail end of the country, off the coast of Cork.
‘You go over by cable car,’ he said. ‘The only place I know with a cable car crossing the Atlantic.’
‘You’re not serious,’ I said.
‘I am serious,’ he said. ‘You can look it up, Vid. It’s a fact.’
‘Dursey Island.’
‘Dursey Island,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t tell anyone that you haven’t been there.’
He clapped me on the back and got up to leave, thanked me once more, then disappeared.
Two days later I found myself taking up his advice, knowing that unless I went down there to see it with my own eyes, I would never believe it.
I followed the map and got lost. I dropped into a pub along the way for directions and the man behind the bar started pointing with a knife. He was cutting a lemon into slices and stopped what he was doing in order to show me the way. I could not really understand his accent and kept staring at the filleting knife in his hand. The words came spilling across the counter and I was so distracted by the way he was stabbing the air that I hardly picked up anything he was saying to me. I smelled the tang of lemon and waited for him to finish. He must have noticed my confusion because he began to repeat the whole thing from the beginning. But again, my concentration failed, watching only the silver blade flashing in his hand. He pointed the knife directly towards me, giving an almighty stab, forward and upwards. Straight all the way, he said. If I had been standing any closer I would have got it in the neck. He waited for me to repeat these directions back to him like a schoolboy, so I nodded, more out of politeness. Rather than forcing him to go through the whole frenzied attack all over again, I thanked him and told him it was all perfectly clear to me now. But as I turned to leave, I could not help thinking he was going to throw the knife at my back. A dark stain seeping through my clothes as I sank down to the floor.
And then I went on a shaky journey by cable car out to Dursey Island, high over the water with my heart in my mouth, as they say, and my stomach falling into the ocean below. Once I got there, I wondered what was so special about the island. It was a beautiful place and full of history, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I walked around for a while and took a few photographs. Some of the seabirds were new to me. Some of the clouds, too, faster, lower down, more eager to reach land on their way in off the Atlantic. I heard the waves crashing on the rocks, like the door of a giant freezer being slammed shut repeatedly. I kept thinking there were better places to visit, more startling, more empty places such as Skellig Rock, rising up out of the sea in the shape of a solid black fin. There were patches of sunlight shifting across the water. It looked like it was going to rain, but didn’t. A strong breeze flapped at the back of my jacket making me think there was somebody behind me. But there was no one around and I felt like the last man on earth.
After an hour or two I wanted to get back to the mainland. As the cable car swung across towards me, I could see a young boy inside. The door opened and a dozen sheep came bursting out as though set loose from a trap, their hooves banging and scraping at the steel, jumping over one another in the rush to get at the grass.
One of the sheep got its front leg caught in between the cable car and the pier, so the boy tried to dislodge it. The animal was in great fear, eyes wide, struggling to get away. I gave him a hand to release the sheep and he told me the island was used mostly for grazing now. Some people owned holiday homes there, but they were absent most of the year. The sheep were already ripping lumps of grass as though the perilous trip over was not worth another thought. On the return passage, I was overpowered by the smell of sheep shit and sheep fear and possibly my own fear included, until I stepped on solid ground again. I watched the boy’s sister whistling and herding more sheep on to the cable car with the help of their dog. Then they all travelled across to the island together in the same compartment. At one point, I imagined the door opening and the sheep falling down into the sea, one by one, with their legs pedalling frantically as they accelerated towards their death. But that never happened and there was little or nothing else to remember except the fact that I had been there.
So there you have it. Dursey Island. It does exist. As much as I exist. It has become part of me now, like a stored photograph. I can boast about being there and tell everybody that it’s not just a place on the map where people once lived and God knows where they all are now. But what about all the places I never managed to visit? How could I go around verifying every headland and town in the country? Most of it has to be taken on trust. I take your word for it.
There were plenty of other things I had to find out for myself. And maybe I needed a different sort of map altogether. Some kind of rough guide on how to fit in as much as possible. The rough guide to friendship. The rough guide to betrayal also. The rough guide to rage and hatred and murder.
I had to verify all those things as well.
Don’t get me wrong. It was good to be here. I loved the place right from the moment I arrived – the landscape, the wind, the change of heart in the weather. I didn’t want to live anywhere else in the world. I loved the easy way you have of making people feel at home. All the talking. The exaggeration. The guesswork in the words. I wanted to belong here. I wanted to take part in this spectacular friendship.
At the time I was still employed in security. My first job here was working as a night watchman in a nursing home. Not bad for the time being, I thought. Not a bad introduction to a country either, because it gave me some idea of the back story. All the hopes and disappointments collected under one roof.
The nursing home was situated around an ancient castle by the sea, on the outskirts of Dublin, with extensive grounds overlooking a small harbour, used mainly for pleasure boats and fishing. What a great place for the old people to spend their final days, watching ships coming and going in the bay. Those that could still see, in any case. At night, the lighthouse shone across the water and there was a string of yellow city lights going all the way around the edge of the coast. My job was to take the guard dog out to patrol the grounds once every hour and to deal with any emergencies, which amounted to a few drunken shouts, no more. The dog was an old Alsatian who had a peculiar sense of obedience. He had been trained to obey your command as long as you stayed on the inside, between him and the buildings. If you strayed on to the far side, he would see you as an intruder