The Sailor in the Wardrobe. Hugo Hamilton
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tried to make him stay but he didn’t want trouble. He doesn’t want to witness anything like my mother witnessed in Germany. I told him not to be so scared of things, but he was suddenly gone from my side. And maybe it’s easier when I’m on my own, to feel that I belong to them now.
As soon as the fire brigade pulled up outside the railings, the jeers began from inside. Cursing and booing. Somebody said it was a riot, but the firemen ignored it all and smiled. It wasn’t so long ago that they were doing this kind of thing themselves, but now it was their duty to put it out. They un-spooled the hose and directed the water at the flames. As the fire began to hiss, the boys started throwing things, empty beer cans and loose branches. Then it was sods of grass which they picked up all around them in the park, harmlessly hitting the black uniforms of the firemen as if they didn’t even notice.
I belonged to the Irish fire now. I was carried away by the anger of the crowd and had no option but to pick up a sod of my own, not so much to hit anyone but to prove that the fire mattered as much to me as it did to them. The firemen were reducing the great flames to nothing. You could feel the heat fading and the shouts becoming more hostile. Bastards. Fuckers. I heard myself joining in. Words I had only heard them use against me, now became my words too.
More sods were thrown. Bigger ones. This time I picked up the heaviest sod I could find. I pulled at the long grass until a large clump of earth came loose and it felt like I was holding a severed head by the hair. I could hardly swing it around me. The trouble was that when I let go, I discovered my aim was a lot better than I imagined. I could already see that it was going to hit one of the firemen directly in the head. It flew through the yellow air like a black skull with grassy golden hair flying back. I could see the shock in his eyes as the sod crashed into the side of his face, just as he turned his head around.
‘You little bastard,’ he shouted.
He wiped his eyes and brushed bits of soil out of his collar, then straightened his helmet.
‘Sorry, mister,’ I said.
I wanted to tell him I didn’t actually mean to hit him. But it was already too late for that because the boys around me were cheering.
‘Great shot.’
‘Look, he knocked the fuckin’ head off a fireman.’
For the first time ever, I had done something which made me into a hero. I would be accepted now. They were saying the Germans were amazing marksmen to be able to hit somebody from that distance with a sod. Every time I would walk down the street from now on, they would think of me as the guy who clobbered the fireman. I would no longer be an outsider and they would be clapping me on the back, asking me to do it again, to see if I could break a street light with a stone. But as they kept cheering and laughing, I knew they were making things worse for me, because now I had the fireman to deal with.
‘Sorry,’ I said once more. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
I saw the rage in the fireman’s face and ran away, hoping that he wouldn’t follow me. I heard the sound of him cursing and his heavy boots thudding in the grass behind me. There was no escape. I was going to arrive at the railings and be trapped, away from the fire and away from the crowd, with nobody coming to stand by me.
At the corner, I turned around to beg for mercy with my hands up. There was a gap in the railings, but I didn’t really believe I could get away. I knew there were bars missing in other places, where boys crossed the park rather than walking all the way around. I was too numb to think of escaping, so got ready to surrender.
‘Please mister, don’t hit me,’ I said. ‘It was an accident.’
The fireman slowed down to a walk because he knew he had me cornered. Even in the darkness I could see from his eyes that he was not going to show me any mercy. At that last minute, I decided to try and climb through the bars. I felt his hand on my neck and heard his voice saying ‘little fucker’ in my ear. He was too big to get through the gap himself, but his arm was stretched out through the bars holding on firmly to my clothes.
‘Stop him,’ he shouted at some men walking by on their way to Eagle House for a drink. He tried to drag me back in through the gap and I was pulling away with my foot up against the railings.
‘Hold the little bastard for me.’
Some of the boys came up to see what was happening. They had lost interest in the fire which was almost gone out by now.
‘Look, it’s Eichmann,’ one of them said.
They had turned against me. They no longer saw me as a hero who had done something to defend the big fire. It was a mistake to have even tried getting in with them, because they were on the side of the fireman now, staring at me through the bars, waiting to see what would happen. All I could think of doing was to chop at the fireman’s hand and release myself from his grip.
‘Get him,’ the fireman shouted, and some of the men outside the railings began to converge on me. One of them with a red face threw down his cigarette and stepped into my way. I dodged him, but he came after me until he started coughing and stood still. I felt their hands on me, but I managed to twist and pull away from them each time, even when they put a foot out to trip me. Another man came after me, but the change in his pockets started falling out and rolling towards the gutter, with him cursing and calling me a whore and bending down to pick up his money.
I was afraid to run further into the terraces. I tried to turn back, but some of the boys had begun to come through the gap in the fence.
‘It’s Eichmann,’ they were shouting. ‘After him.’
I was running down their streets. Rockets were going off all around me. Children staring at me through their masks. Women standing outside their houses smoking and talking, watching me running past with my shirt and my jumper torn. Some of the doors were wide open and you could see right into the front rooms where the television was on. I thought the women were going to get out the dustbin lids and start banging. One of the women was laughing or coughing, I didn’t know which, and a terrier dog ran out barking and chasing after me because he knew I didn’t belong to that street.
Then I remembered how this happened to my mother, a long time ago, when she was small. She told me how the Kaiser girls played on the Buttermarkt Square in Kempen, right in front of their house, and sometimes they clogged up the fountain with paper from their father’s stationery shop and the water swept all across the square and the town warden complained to their father. The town warden even chased them into the house one day. But instead of protecting them, their grandmother let him right into the house to teach them a lesson that would put an end to the complaints. My mother was the only one who ran out the back door and into the streets again, while the other girls were all caught in the hallway by the warden and their grandmother, facing punishment. My mother ran through the streets of the town all afternoon, around by the Burg, by the windmill, running and running, thinking that the warden was after her all the time. Even when it got dark she was still afraid to go home. But then she was even more afraid of being left out all night, so she decided to give herself up. When she got home at last, sneaking up silently to her own house, the warden was gone, but she had to explain to her father why she had come home so late after everyone had eaten their dinner and the table was already cleared. So then she told him about the town warden chasing them into the house and how she was the only one who wasn’t caught. She expected her father to be angry, but he smiled. He put her on his knee and stroked her head until she was not so afraid any more.
Now it’s me running away, just like my mother. Now it’s the fireman and all the other bonfire boys coming after me through the streets. The fireman must have got out through the park gate because I saw him following me all the way with the boys ahead of him, running hard and catching up fast. Further back, some of the men were following, too, and I was afraid the whole city was after me. I was afraid the women would try to bar my way and that nobody would tell the fireman to have mercy on me.
At the end of the street I didn’t know which way to turn, so I climbed up onto the roof of a parked car and from there onto a wall that had some glass shards sticking out of the top. I could see nothing