Dublin Palms

Copyright

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Contents

5  1

6 2

7 3

8  Acknowledgements

9  Also by Hugo Hamilton

10  About the Author

11  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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1

The city is full of lovers. In the park, on the grass, two of them have a small radio playing. They are singing along to the radio. Loud and exaggerated. Miming the images in the song like synchronised swimmers. They make the vaulting shape of a bridge. Their hands flutter over troubled waters. They lay their heads down to rest on folded elbows. She gives a dirty laugh and kisses the side of his face. He raises his fist in the air with a hoarse growl.

It’s summer. I have my lunch in the park with the lovers – two slices of brown bread, a piece of Cheddar, a pat of butter from the corner shop. I lie back on the grass and listen to the soft voices around me. The sound of traffic has an interior quality, a large room with lawns and trees, enclosed by a square of terraced buildings.

I work in one of those buildings, in the basement. My day is spent underground. From my desk, I see the feet of pedestrians passing by through a small window above my head. The neon lights are left on all day, even when the sun is shining outside in the street. I am a young man with a full beard and curls in my hair, open expression, quick to smile. I am content in the basement, only that I have contracted some strange, unidentified condition. A virus, a fungus, some parasite must have entered my veins. My face is drawn. My skin is translucent. My teeth feel like glass. I am overwhelmed by fatigue and sleep at my desk. I wake up with underground eyes.

The organisation I work for has been set up to preserve a minority language. Normally referred to as the native language. Some people call it the dead language. It is not spoken on the street, only written in the shadow script above the street names. My work is carried out entirely in this ghost language – Gaelic, Irish.

I run the vinyl record department.

We have a unique collection of native singers. It is my job to collect them from the train station. I bring them for something to eat in a hotel where people from the country gather and recognise each other, a drink before going to the recording studios. They are self-conscious when the red light comes on, the shallow acoustics, the mute face of the recording engineer behind glass staring as if they come from another continent. They get startled by the sound of their own voices played back around the sound-panelled walls. One of them tried out the headphones and said it turned him into a different man, his voice was never the same again.

Some of them go missing. I had to search the entire city for a man who disappeared with a nurse not even half his age, when I found him she was putting on her blue trainee uniform and he stood naked in front of me only for his tweed cap and his fists up. Some of them need to be held by the hand while they sing. Some are equally good at American country music, they will start with a nasal hum at the back of the throat and deviate into the Wichita Lineman. Some of them refuse to travel, we go to record them in their own kitchens. I once had to deliver payment to a singer who would not accept a cheque and insisted on being paid in person. In a village in Connemara where the ghost language is still widely spoken, I met him in a bar with cash. He wouldn’t touch the money, his hands were enormous, a pint of Guinness was no more than a thimble in his fingers, it took three days until he was fully paid.

Our most popular album was recorded live in a Dublin theatre where the audience can be heard yelping with excitement in the background. There is a sense that our moment has come, our music is raw, straight from the earth. It gives me the feeling of being carried back in time. We belong to a country with less roads, less lawnmowers, a place with more wild bees nesting in the grass banks.

One day I arrived at work to find everyone standing in the hallway crying. The commander of the organisation lay at the foot of the stairs, his face gone cold. His naked head was resting on the first step. His right arm was laid out as though he had been giving a speech when he fell. His shoes were off, his socks were yellow, a diagonal design along the side, as though he played golf. Which he never did, nothing further from his mind. The socks merely brought home how normal and integrated we could be while being so devoted to the restoration of a great treasure from the past.

We spoke in low voices, praising his wisdom, his vision, his words had the power to infuse us with emotion. When the ambulance arrived, he opened his eyes. He waved the paramedics away and tried to stand up, resuming his speech where he left off. Entirely in character with the language we worked so hard at reviving, the commander was brought back to life by the sound of a teacup and carried up the stairs to his office. The floor was strewn with newspaper cuttings, some empty bottles, the desk lamp was still on, covered with a garment that was beginning to burn. His secretary appeared and helped to lay him out, she rolled her cardigan up into a cushion. We arranged his tie over his eyes to shield him from daylight.

It’s a happy place to work. Being part of this marginal community in the heart of the city gives me a sense of place. Something glorious about a culture under threat. Hearing the endangered language around me brings back a recurring memory of going out to the islands. Leaning against the rusted white frame of the ferry boat with the engine throbbing in my shoulder. Quiet places with sunlight coming through stone walls, patches of green and blue, gannets diving, waves bashing into the cliffs. Everything in my work is devoted to a silence in the landscape, to what is receding, what is being kept alive.

When it’s time to go home, I tidy my desk and switch off the lights. The remaining daylight seeps in through the high window across the ghost faces along the walls. The basement returns to its forgotten peace. On the way out, the receptionist smiles. She is the niece of an author who wrote a novel in the native language about dead people arguing in a graveyard. I can no longer hide the fact that I am partly dead myself. Half alive. Perhaps undead. As dead as a dead language refusing to die.

I make my way across to the German library. It is situated on the other side of the square in a building that is identical in every way to the one where I work in the basement, same façade, same ratio of windows overlooking the park of lovers, same door, only painted red.

As soon as I step inside I have the illusion of being at home, seeing German newspapers and magazines displayed on tables in the front room. Going up the stairs to the library on the first floor is like going to my bedroom as a child, finding the latest acquisitions propped up in a row on the marble mantelpiece as though it’s my birthday. They have the heating full on. I spend an hour there with my jacket off, a stack of books beside me, until the librarian politely tells me it’s time to go.

The books I borrow give me a fictional character. I see myself being invented in everything I read. I am a boy unable to grow up. I spend weeks in a sanatorium. I take on the anxieties of a goalkeeper. I read about a journalist going undercover, doing dirty and dangerous jobs, washing out metal tanks with acid to demonstrate what it was like to be a migrant worker in Germany. I read the story of a writer who buys himself a new suit for a prize-winning ceremony – after accepting the literary award he brings the suit back to the tailor because it no longer fits him. And the story of the adult child who escapes from a cellar and stumbles onto the streets of Nuremberg without language, gradually claiming back the power of speech.

I grew up in a language nightmare. Between German, Irish and English. I could never be sure what country I was in. My mother was German, my father was Irish. She came to Ireland to learn English but ended up teaching my father German. He refused to speak English, she never learned Irish. At home, we spoke her language, we went to school in the ghost language, my father was a revolutionary who prohibited us from speaking English. It had the effect of turning all language into a fight, a fortress, a place of hiding. It felt like emigrating every time I went out the front door. On the street, I had to look over my shoulder to see what words I could be at home in.

The native language is referred to as – the tongue, our mouth, tongue and country, our famine mouth, the place we come from and the people gone away and the story that cannot be told in any other language.

German is the language of looking back and digging deep and starting again, the language of people who love Ireland more than their own country and sit for hours staring at the full moon over the Atlantic.

English is the language of the street, the language of rule, victory, valour, the language of rock and roll and Shakespeare and James Joyce, the language of freedom and fucking off and never looking back.

This war of languages has left me with a deep silence. I doubt the ground I walk on. I make my way around the city as though I have only recently arrived. Still arriving. Never arriving. My viewpoint is unstable, seen from multiple places at once. Everything is in contradiction, the words are full of blasphemy, I hear the grinding of translation in my head.

Does it have to do with the maritime pressure? The humidity, the cold breeze under my shirt, the empty streets with the veil of rain under the lights? Does it have something to do with shifting from the cold basement of one building to the overheated first floor of another and straight into a noisy ground-floor bar around the corner? The creaking floorboards underneath the carpet. The sound of bottles and fizz, people laughing. Something about switching between these different levels that makes it impossible for me to belong fully to either of them? The basement part of me has nothing to do with the library part of me. The bar part of me laughs at the basement part. The library part is slow to rub shoulders with the others.

Each part of me has its own silence, like maps overlapping. A different history, a different now, a different here. Different ways of being at home. Each country has its own denial and guilt and not being accepted. I remain loyal to each part of myself and true to none.

On the way home, I have the feeling that I am not fully consenting to the place where I live. The streets are refusing to dry. There is a sticky glaze on the pavement, like walking on a strip of adhesive paper. I am in a place that does not correspond to where I stand. My body has become detached from my thoughts, my feet in Ireland, my head in Germany, my voice left behind in a landscape of shadows in the west.

Back home, Helen smiles with her head tilted to one side as though everything is up close and simultaneously far away. I bring the children to bed. I make up a story for them about a wedding in the lighthouse. The bride wore a necklace of strawberries. I gather up their toys and put the books back in the bookcase, they love nothing better than piling them up in towers to sit on.

The light is left on in the hall. Helen is getting into bed. Her freckled shoulders. Her vertebrae. In the bathroom, the toothbrush falls out of my hand into the sink. I turn away and hold my face. Leaning slowly forward, I go down onto my knees and place my forehead on the floor.

Silence is not emptiness. It’s not the absence of matter. It is a solid state, full of love and language and things collected from childhood. A frozen river of emotion. My condition, though it remains undiagnosed until later, must have something to do with this silence.

It breaks out in my teeth. It begins in the front teeth and gradually spreads across the back teeth, the severity of it leaves me unable to say a word. There is no medical explanation. I have been to the dentist a couple of times, but he can find nothing wrong. He took X-rays, tapped each tooth, froze them one by one, he went as far as refilling some of the old cavities, what more can he do?

It goes away. It comes back. There is no pattern. It flares up at random when I am happy and untroubled, in the park with the lovers, at my desk in the basement, back home with everything calm, the children asleep. I curl up on the bathroom floor like a poisoned snail. My eyes fog over. My mouth is full of glass. I lie with my ear against the wood and the shining white toilet bowl rising like the bow of a ship above me. A hissing dribble of toothpaste emerging from the corner of my mouth.

Helen’s voice comes in around the tiled walls, her hand is pulling at my arm. I shake my head like a horse and get up on my feet.

You have got to stop working in the basement, she says. It makes you sick. She says she will start up a business, a drama school, a theatre, she will open a café, I need to get out of that basement.

We were in Berlin together. The city where I went to escape from my silence. Where I sang in bars at night, songs in the shadow language that nobody understood. I can reconstruct the configuration of streets, the faces in the bakery, the order of train stations. The announcements in my mother’s language, as though everyone in Berlin was related to me, a city of cousins. I can hear the train doors closing, crawling through dimly lit stations with border guards and dogs on the platforms, emerging from underground over abandoned city land, the ruins, the sand, a tree growing up through the tracks.

I stood on the platform waiting for her. I was wearing a white shirt that was too big for me. It was passed on to me, along with a second-hand great coat, by the caretaker in the apartment block where I lived. He was a big man. The shirt was so wide and loose fitting, it billowed in the breeze coming along the tracks and gave me the feeling I had stepped into the life of a much larger being. The excitement I experienced at that moment was not my size. My body mass could not hold that amount of joy. The words I had were too small to contain the magnitude of what was happening to me. I was entering an oversized future, with desires and feelings of luck that were far beyond my capacity to understand. My arms, my chest, my open neck, I was in danger of floating away inside a flapping white tent.

Helen arrived with a big belly. She carried a portable radio. Her shoes were painted over with oval handwriting. We made slow progress through the streets, reduced to the speed of an oncoming baby. We sat in the park while she ate a tub of quark, her belly was full of quark.

I brought her to a bar, she looked underage, just out of school. The barman had a knitting needle through his nose. A man with a female voice came in with a Great Dane and bent over for a joke to let the dog sniff his backside. A woman in a sleeveless leather jacket and gashes along her bare arms spoke in a slow voice to Helen, asking her what it was like to be pregnant, how can you sleep?

The city was warm. We spent the summer in a long pause, not doing very much, going to galleries, sitting in cafés, as if we were living inside a photograph waiting to move forward. Every night I stood up in bars wearing my white shirt, singing songs in a lost language. Every morning I got out the almond oil to rub across Helen’s belly with the windows open and the tree at the centre of the courtyard swaying. Her navel was a pre-historic spiral at the top of a shining dome. We were constantly hungry. She needed tons of cheese and apples and smoked mackerel. The future was expanding inside her, it seemed she could hold it back and stop the world and never have to give birth. Our lives remained in that place of refuge before coming into being. We were in a time before knowledge. The moment before memory. All we could think of was now.

We walked through the streets at night when it was cooler. We passed by posters showing the faces of wanted German terrorists. A woman leaning out the window watched us from above in silence. The street lighting was dim. The buildings were decayed, gaps where houses went missing, the war was not far behind.

We found the viewing platform and I helped Helen up the wooden stairs. We looked across the wall at the open death zone. A stretch of empty ground lit up, guards in a watchtower, houses on the far side like canyons left in darkness. The platform had been erected in a time of handkerchiefs, for people waving to their relatives on the far side, holding up their children, calling out their names. When the people on the other side were prohibited from waving back, the platform no longer had any function other than for visitors coming to have a look over the edge of the world.

Leaning on the rail, looking at the frontier before us, I understood the shock in my mother’s eyes when she read about the Berlin Wall being built. The newspapers sent over from Germany by her sisters only confirmed how far away Ireland was, how much apart she was from her family. I grew up with that distance. The wall became part of me. Describing it was like describing myself. A human division which had spread into every corner of the world, into every family, every heart. The wall had yet to come down. The barriers had yet to be opened, people streaming across, their jubilant faces, smiling and crying, crowds on top of the wall hacking. None of this had happened yet, all that freedom was still impossible to imagine, like the sound of a new born baby.

We stared across the Berlin Wall, a kiss, a smile, the dirt of border lighting in Helen’s face as she turned to me and said – let’s go back.

Everybody in Dublin is back from somewhere. The pubs are full of returning. They talk about their encounters, drug voyages, bus journeys on death roads. They laugh at mortality. They laugh at life. They laugh at the strangeness of things, the invention of difference, the great mind-altering misunderstanding of the world.

They stand at the bar in Kehoe’s pub full of books to be written. Stories of heroic distance, cities and characters I could never dream of. One of them was robbed on a train while sleeping in the luggage rack. One of them took a piece of tubing into his nostril, his life came and went, he woke up a week later in the same place, same voices quietly talking around him, same dog lying on the ground in a curl. One of them was left between two countries, rejected at the border to Iraq, refused re-entry to Afghanistan. One of them refused to pay the price of a bottle of whiskey for a bottle of Coke and nearly died drinking the water in a river. Another one was nearly killed in a German car plant, a millisecond away from being pressed into the shape of a car door, his elbow brushed the safety button.

They have come back amazed at what women can do, what men can do, what food can do to you. An actor Helen knew from the theatre in Dublin got shot in New York by his lover, he came back in a wheelchair. A neighbour of mine got lost in Goa and never made it back to his family. A woman Helen knew at school returned from Brazil, her husband ran away with another man, the same in reverse for a man I knew from Galway, his wife went off with his sister.

One of them brought back a story from Morocco. He was in a town called Fez, a narrow street no wider than a hallway. There were three young women wearing headscarves in front of him when a donkey came rushing by with panniers full of olives and boy rider whacking a stick. The donkey was farting on the way through. The girls, the young women in their hijabs, turned around, unable to help themselves. Their hands were up to their mouths, they were in tears holding on to each other, choking, doubled over in the street.

We are back from Berlin with our story.

What have I got to tell? A Nativity scene, with the Berlin Wall in the background. I became an overnight father, we returned to Dublin, Helen breastfed Rosie in the snug, a glass of Guinness for the baby. We got a place to stay, I took up a job in the native basement, we now have a second girl, Essie, our immaculate family.

Back where?

It makes no sense.

Back to where we first met? Back to the first words she spoke to me. Back to where Helen worked in a small theatre, back to the places I brought her on the Aran Islands, she didn’t speak the ghost language, she was a visitor, I had to translate my songs for her.

Back home? Back to my country? Back to where I am from – where I am only half from, where I have tried to be from, where I have never been from?

Back to where she is not from either?

Helen grew up in England. Her family lived in Birmingham before they double emigrated to Canada and left her behind. She was sent to boarding school in Dublin, still a child. They went to live in a town with a salt mine, by one of the Great Lakes in Ontario. Helen found herself emigrating in reverse, going back to Ireland, a country she didn’t know.

She is a piece of Irish soil in her mother’s shoes.

On Sunday night, she’s on the phone to Canada. She sits by the payphone in the hallway with her back to the wall and her knees up, playing with the cable. I stand in the bedroom listening to her, the children asleep, I have their shoes in my hands, pinched up off the floor. I hear her paraphrasing her life. She describes the ground-floor flat where we live, sectioned off in the hall with two separate entrances. She says it’s fully furnished, fitted with a pastel-green carpet, nice neighbours upstairs, not far from the sea.

I can hear the questions her mother is asking in Canada by answers Helen gives in Ireland. Everything is enhanced in her voice. Our lives are magnified out of proportion by distance. She converts everything around me into a fabrication. She puts the world into my mouth.

The school, the streets, the people upstairs are very funny, the Alsatian next door is enormous, the shopkeeper is always giving her the wrong change. The furniture auctions next door, the swivel-mirror she bought, the auctioneer took her name, a sticker attached – Helen Boyce.

Our surroundings are enlarged to fit the wider spaces of Ontario. Things that remain locally reduced in my head are brought to life with big-sky clarity by Helen’s enthusiasm over the phone. For over an hour, everything is released from the prejudice of reality, all previously undiscovered. Nothing is valid, nothing is true until it is spoken.

It makes me feel at home, listening to Helen describe nearby things in such a faraway tone. That same excitement with which my mother spoke to her sisters on the phone in Germany. I grew up in this removed story, never quite matching the place where we lived. I once asked my mother where she felt at home and she said it was where the postman delivered her letters. It was the letters coming from Germany that brought her home. Helen is the same, sending back the news, rerouting our lives to a place on the far side of the world.