Hand in the Fire

She’d been holding on to the farewell letter ever since, refusing to get off the bus at the terminus, dreaming back and forth along the same route for ever.

‘Go for it,’ she said to me, putting the letter back into her handbag. I wondered if these were the exact same words she had spoken to her fiancé, just to be big-hearted and to make sure they parted as friends with no hard feelings. She pushed me with her elbow, unable to sit beside me any longer. Then she stood up to embrace me.

‘Come back and see me sometime.’ She smiled through red eyes. Then she sat down and looked at her phone to see if anyone had left a message. She waved with both hands and told me to take care of myself, so I walked out the door, away across the street, not even watching for the traffic on the wrong side of the road, as though it was impossible for me to get killed.

3

To be honest, I never expected to meet him again. The city was full of carpenters, so it was a surprise to get the call early one evening saying he wanted to discuss a small job at his mother’s house. What was even more strange was the urgency. We had to meet right away. And then it was all quite informal, with no clear lines between work and friendship. Normally you keep those things separate, so I thought. You might go for a drink after the job is finished, if everybody is happy. But he started everything in reverse. He wanted to go for a drink even before I had time to prepare a proper estimate.

By then I was working full time for a small building company. My plan eventually was to get into business on my own, so I was happy to take on small jobs in my spare time. I had got to know a Lithuanian carpenter by the name of Darius who had his own workshop and a van. My own range of tools was very limited and he lent me some of his whenever I needed them.

Kevin picked me up and brought me over to his mother’s house. A beautiful, spacious family home on a terraced street leading down to the sea, not far from the nursing home where I had worked. It was clearly in need of some repair and as he parked the car, he called it Desolation Row, after one of his mother’s favourite songs.

He left me standing in the kitchen while he went upstairs calling his mother. But then she came in from the back garden wearing gloves and holding a pair of shears in her hand, looking at me as though I had just broken in and couldn’t find my way out again.

‘And who are you, if I may ask?’

The confusion was soon cleared up when he reappeared and introduced us. She took her gloves off to shake my hand.

‘Vid Ćosić,’ he said and she repeated the name slowly: Choz-itch.

Next thing we were standing upstairs in his mother’s bedroom, talking about fitted wardrobes. I asked her what she had in mind and she mentioned black ash.

‘Black ash,’ I said, trying to warn them off with a smile. ‘In a bedroom. Might end up looking a bit like a funeral parlour.’

There was silence in the room. I had said something wrong. His mother sighed like a slashed tyre. She wore a very serious expression and perhaps she was in mourning, I thought to myself. In fact she hardly smiled even once during the meeting.

‘Black ash is very dignified,’ Kevin said, helping me out.

‘Of course,’ I said, as soon as I realised my mistake. ‘It depends on how it’s done. Like, what kind of ash were you thinking of, veneer or solid ash, stained?’

I thought it was a travesty putting any kind of fitted wardrobes into a room like this. It was an old period house and they would never look right. But that’s something you learn after a while. You couldn’t be honest. You had to make allowances for taste and be prepared to say that black ash was an elegant choice, even when it was the most revolting material you ever had the misfortune to work with. Besides, there was no changing her mind. She had seen something in a magazine. Floor to picture rail in black ash veneer was what she wanted.

They must have known I would be very competitive, because they didn’t seem to have anyone else in mind for the job. The cost was not much of an issue, or the timescale. I made it clear to them that I could only take it on in my spare time.

‘I’ll need a bit up front for the materials,’ I said.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘How much?’

‘I’ll have to price the stuff and get back to you.’

‘Just let me know.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said, because that seemed like a good, neutral sort of phrase to me.

And that was it. He was already rushing me away to the nearest pub for a drink. While he was waiting for his girlfriend to turn up and go to dinner with him, he filled me in on his mother’s personality. You could see that he admired her and also feared her a little, like a schoolboy. She was a schoolteacher, he explained, so you had to earn your smiles. She could be a bit severe at times, but she was actually very funny underneath the exterior, so he claimed. Quite street wise, too.

He gave an example which sounded more like a warning. His mother had been attacked in the street recently by a junkie who was after her handbag. She managed to distract him by saying the next thing that came into her head. ‘They knocked down the wall,’ she said. Her attacker looked all around in confusion. Who? What wall? By then he had completely forgotten about the handbag and fled empty-handed.

‘Don’t worry,’ Kevin assured me. ‘You’ll get on great with her.’

It was not the kind of job you could easily price for, because there were other factors involved. Payment in kind. He knew I was trying to get a foothold in this country and encouraged the idea of me getting into business on my own. He started explaining the rules, telling me how to run my own future, giving me all kinds of advice on how to get started.

I felt so accepted. You see, when you’re not from around here, it often feels a bit like gate-crashing, like you’re at a party and people are wondering where you come from and who invited you. You take everything at face value and you can easily get people wrong. It’s often hard to make a call between good and bad. So it’s great to have somebody looking out for you. Somebody on your side who’s going to let you know what’s coming your way.

He even introduced me to his girlfriend, Helen. She shook my hand and recalled talking to me briefly on the phone. It was good to see her in person. You could understand why he would have fallen in love with her. The energy in her eyes. The open smile. She started asking questions as soon as she discovered where I was from.

‘Belgrade,’ she said.‘I love Balkan music. All those high-speed trumpets and drums.’

It made me feel homesick for a moment to meet somebody who was so interested in my country. She said she had a few CDs from that region and that she would love to go there sometime.

‘I’d give anything to hear the music live.’

They were quite well informed about Yugoslavia and what happened during the war. There was nothing much that I could add to their knowledge, only to confirm that Milošević and Karadžić and all these people had fucked up the place and left a terrible stain on the map. What more can you say than that?

They wanted to know about my family. So I told them how my parents had died in a car crash. Long after the war was over, we were on our way to the wedding of my sister when the accident happened, somewhere in the countryside. Both parents were killed instantly and I was very lucky to be alive, if that’s how you would put it. I was able to attend the funeral, but I suffered head injuries which had me in and out of hospital for months afterwards. I was having great trouble with my memory ever since.

The truth is that I didn’t want to remember anything. I’ve read stories about women who suffer from voluntary blindness after repeatedly witnessing terrible things in war. They cannot bear to see any more horror and lose their sight as a form of sub-conscious self-protection, so it seems. Their faculties close down in an attempt to shut out the worst. Maybe it was a bit like that for me. There were certain things from childhood that I didn’t want to know any more. You could say it was voluntary memory loss. Except that it was much simpler to tell everyone I had received head injuries in a serious car accident and suffered from amnesia.

I liked to think of myself beginning all over again here, with a clean slate. I had no life before I arrived and could hardly remember a thing.

‘Why did you pick this country, of all places?’ Kevin asked, though I don’t think he meant it like that.

‘It’s a very friendly place,’ I said, trying to say the right thing. ‘And quite neutral.’

‘Neutral?’

I hesitated and told them I had been to Germany for a while, but it didn’t suit me there. Not that I had anything against Germans, just that I was under pressure to say something good about this country. I said I found people here less judgemental, more forgiving perhaps, more open to mistakes in history.

‘Leave him alone,’ Helen said, smiling.

They fell into a brief argument among themselves, as if I was absent. Some older debate which I could not fully understand. Only in the tone of her voice could I tell that she was defending me, putting words into my mouth. Then they stopped, as if it didn’t really matter all that much. He laughed and put his arm around my shoulder.

‘Another quick one.’

It struck me that I had forgotten to mention my trip down south.

‘By the way,’ I said. ‘I took your advice and went down to Dursey Island.’

She seemed surprised by the mention of the island. I saw her staring at him, but he was turning something over in the back of his mind and didn’t want to look up.

‘Dursey Island,’ she said. ‘You sent him out to Dursey Island?’

‘Where else?’ he said, finally answering her eyes.

‘Out on the cable car with the sheep?’

‘Not exactly with the sheep,’ I replied, just to clarify that point.

‘And was it raining with the sun shining at the same time?’

But she was not really waiting for an answer from me. She was looking only at him. I remained silent, because they might as well have been sitting alone together, on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the ocean. They continued staring at each other and I felt as though I had walked right into their bedroom.

4

Some days later I phoned him to agree a price for the job at his mother’s house. He laughed at one of my linguistic errors. I said it would cost ‘twice as less’ as I had initially estimated. He pointed out the mistake and offered to meet me later on that same evening with the start-up money so that I could buy the materials and begin the job the following morning.

It was a Friday night and I was out drinking with some of the lads from the site after work. The building company I worked for was a medium-sized operation with about a dozen or so core workers. Home renovations. I spent my time hanging reconditioned doors, putting in new saddles and repairing architraves, replacing damaged floorboards and skirting boards. The builder kept getting my name wrong and called me Vim. I corrected him a number of times and told him it was Vid, but he insisted on changing it back to Vim. Some of the workers had other names for me, like Video. Because my first name was so short and they were unable to shorten it any further to, say, Pat or Joe, the only thing they could do was to lengthen it, giving me versions like Viduka, or Vidukalic, or Videolink, sometimes Vid the Vibrator, or Vim the most effective detergent against household germs. The builder said he was keeping me on, not because I was a good carpenter but because I finished things. He could find any amount of carpenters who were better skilled than I was, but I had a way of completing the job that made it look done. I think some of the other workers were irritated with me for being so neat, but that didn’t stop them from bringing me with them after work on the razz, as they called it.

I was sucked into the rush-hour of their celebration. It felt like the world was going to come to an end at any moment and they were compelled to make the most of it, like a big farewell party. They had a store of phrases and excuses to justify being young and not dead yet. They were determined to live it up by any means, to make up for all the bad times behind them and maybe all the bad times ahead of them as well. They kept predicting the amount of drink they would take and how much fun they would have. There was no question that they were having the time of their lives, but I always had the feeling that, instead of living in the moment, they were more interested in getting away from the real world, stepping back and talking everything up into a big story, like people watching their lives pass in front of them.

Don’t ask me what the name of the place was, I can’t remember. It was a traditional kind of bar with three men standing on a small stage with guitars, belting out songs which most of the people in the pub knew by heart, old and young.

There was a song about a woman called Nancy Spain. It had to do with a ring she had been given, but which seemed to have gone missing. Every time it came around to the chorus, the whole pub joined in to ask the big question, where was the ring that had been given to Nancy Spain? Did she lose it? Did she give it away? I asked some of them around me who she was and what happened to the ring, but they had no idea. They were on the same level of ignorance with me, though they knew instinctively the question could not be answered. Some things exist only in the form of enquiry. They could relate to the idea of the lost ring and were just very happy to mime the action, pointing at the ring finger and repeating the gesture of giving it away each time the chorus returned.

I ran into an electrician who had been working on the same site with me for a while, rewiring. He was a cool character, in his late fifties, with a goatee beard. He spoke to me in a casual way, indirectly, looking away towards the band. He started telling me about a guy called Dev, saying that he had ‘totally fucked up the place’ and I thought it was somebody working with him on one of the sites. Was he another electrician or what? They all laughed when I asked the question. And that’s how it often is, you say something without even knowing that it’s funny. Until it was explained to me that Dev was the short for De Valera, a tall figure from history that some of the older people talked about as though he was still alive and likely to walk into the pub any minute and order himself a drink.

The electrician was glad to step in and give a summary of Irish history. I listened eagerly, accepting the facts about internment camps and hunger strikes. He mentioned place names and dates which meant nothing to me but which made some of the women flinch. I suspected that there was still a strong level of sexual attraction revolving around national sorrow, not just where I came from but here as well. They talked about how bad things were ‘up there’ in Northern Ireland. One of the women said it was great to have no more checkpoints and no more dawn raids, not to mention car bombs and kneecapping. But she felt there was something great about those times as well. Lots of passion. Lots of men on the run. She said there was a smell of disinfectant in the air since the Peace Process began, and within seconds they were all laughing again.

I tried not to ask any more stupid questions and they claimed me as their friend, temporarily at least.

‘Anyone gives you any trouble, we’ll burst them.’

The word ‘burst’ confused me at first. I could only associate it with the phrase ‘bursting out laughing’. They were making me laugh all the time. Everybody was bursting out and cracking up, and I had no idea that I was walking myself into trouble. It came as a complete surprise to me that the electrician would end up trying to burst me a little while later.

All through the evening, they called each other ‘knackers’, which I first thought was some kind of joke. It was a reference to travellers, people on the move, like the Roma back home. Unlike the settled people who lived in houses, the travellers lived in caravans by the side of the road mostly, or used to, before it became illegal to do so. I had seen them on my journey around the country and was told that they had been displaced by a man named Cromwell, another hated figure in Irish history. ‘Knacker-drinking’ was a term which they used to describe those who consumed their alcohol outdoors in public places.

From what I could work out, the top most despised people in this country were Dev, Cromwell and Margaret Thatcher. After that it was knackers and scumbags. After that it was people like junkies and drug lords and clampers. Further down the list were the environmentalists and the artists. The person they hated most of all, it seemed, was an old woman in a shawl who was long dead, a woman by the name of Peig Sayers who lived in very poor circumstances on the Blasket Islands and forced everyone to speak the old language, Irish. The most dangerous people of all according to them were the bi-polars, because they could not be easily identified. It was not as though they conveniently lit up green at night like Zombies with their hair falling out. You never even knew when you were in the company of a bi-polar. But none of them were despised half as much as spongers. They could not be trusted for one minute.

I had no idea which of these categories I would fit into. My problem was not knowing how to judge people here. I tended to trust everybody equally. I didn’t know who to avoid or what streets to stay away from.

At some point in the evening I started getting on very well with a girl called Sharon. Her hair was streaked with highlights. The trunk of her belly was showing with a diamond stud in the navel. She had quite a few tattoos, on her arms and around the small of her back as well, all pointing downwards. She wanted to know if I had any tattoos or piercings, but I was embarrassed to say I didn’t. There were plenty of guys around with tattoos running up along the side of their necks, but they didn’t seem to interest her.

Whenever she laughed it was like the sound of gunfire going off and I mistook her initially for an old woman. She kept making me laugh until I had to tell her at one point not to burst me any more. She said my English was very good and started dragging me outside for a cigarette, even though I didn’t smoke.

That’s when the misunderstanding arose. She turned out to be the daughter of the electrician I had been talking to and he was not really in favour of what was going on between us.

‘Don’t get any ideas,’ he whispered to me in passing.

I think I had more to drink than I could cope with. I completely misread the signals and saw no sign at all of danger.

The band was playing the Bee Gees number about a man on death row, and maybe I should have taken that as a warning. There was a TV on in one part of the bar with an old movie playing silently without anyone watching because they all knew the story. The Godfather, I think it was. Al Pacino lying to his sister about having her husband killed.

There I was, being pulled out the back door of the pub to a small grotto which had been erected for smokers. Sharon called it a pagoda. We sat down and instead of smoking she took out a small sachet of pills, wrapped in silver foil. She took one herself and offered me one as well, but I didn’t need it.

She got up and started dancing to an imaginary techno beat which was far more energetic than the pop ballads coming from inside. She seemed not to be aware of me. Then she came over to kiss me, grabbing the back of my neck and rushing her tongue right into my mouth like a jeep. The other hand reached for my balls.

‘Show us your prick,’ she demanded.

I delayed long enough until she got impatient and searched for my zip. I was totally out of my depth and couldn’t tell if it was more of a rescue than an interference when her father suddenly appeared with two of his friends standing next to him.

‘Sharon,’ he roared. ‘Get in here.’

‘Ah fuck off, Da.’

He came over towards us while the other two remained at the door in case they were needed. Sharon had a screaming argument with her father at that point, with me as the main focus. She claimed she was old enough and entitled to screw anyone she liked and that this was not ‘Holy, Catholic Ireland’ any more with people placing an armed guard on their own daughters.

‘You’ve got a six-month-old baby, Sharon,’ he said.

‘Look, it’s OK,’ I interrupted, beginning to edge away towards the pub door. What I wanted most was for everyone to go back inside and enjoy the music again and be friends. But it wasn’t up to me to make a move.

‘You fucking stay where you are, you Polish cunt.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Sharon said.

‘He’s only a knacker and a sponger.’

The electrician threw a punch which sent me right out of the grotto, into a line of bins. Before the full panic set in, I had time to get offended. I wanted to tell him that I have never been to Poland in my life, but my nationality was hardly the issue here. The mistake suited me in many ways because I didn’t really want people to know I was from Serbia. I picked myself up and looked around to see where I should run to.

But by then it was already over. Sharon was walking away with her father and the two other men, like a team of escorts leading a pop star in through the back door of an arena. She must have been thrilled to be rescued like that. From inside, I heard the sound of applause and whistling and people cheering and the band starting up a number by the Gypsy Kings.

That’s when I got the phone call from Kevin. It couldn’t have come at a better time and we agreed to meet in a bar across the street, well away from the electrician and his daughter. It felt a bit sneaky, doing a bunk on my work mates, but I didn’t want to drag Kevin into any of this trouble.

He arrived with Helen and they immediately looked at me with some concern.

‘Are you all right?’

There was a bit of blood on my shirt and they kept asking me what happened. I played it down and told them I had simply miscalculated the situation in the bar. I had no idea that Sharon had a six-month-old baby or that her father was her chaperon for the night, not to mention the other two bodyguards.

‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like that,’ Kevin said.

‘The lads at work brought me there,’ I said.

‘Trust me,’ he said.

They were no friends, he assured me. A true friend was somebody who would put his hand in the fire for you. He explained what was more likely to happen and what it meant when somebody got burst. Briefly, it meant losing teeth. It meant footprints on your face.

He handed me the money for the materials and bought a round of drinks. He got quite drunk and told great stories which made Helen laugh out loud. Me as well. I liked him. I liked them both together, because they gave me this great feeling of being at home.

5

There we were, later that same night, Kevin and Helen and myself. The three of us walking together. Him in the middle with one arm around her and the other around me. Our feet shooting forward in unison. A strange animal with six feet and three laughing faces, two parts male and one part female. Once we reached the car and broke up, each of us stumbled away in a different direction. We lost the balance we had as a unit and had to regain our stability as individuals. He leaned into her, pushing her back against the side of the car to kiss her, but she shrugged him off, saying she was going to concentrate on getting home first. He fell away with his hands against the bonnet in a worshipping gesture. She laughed as she searched for the keys in her bag. She got into the car and turned on the engine while he sank down on to his knees, speaking to one of the headlights. His face lit up white. His eyes shut. Grinning. She shouted at him to get in, and then he cast an enormous shadow into the street as he stood up again.