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.

I hear her telling her mother in Canada that we are settled down now. She says I have a good job in the music business. I am responsible for signing up new talent. She says she has a part time position teaching drama at her former boarding school. She has begun to teach yoga classes, we keep the front room clear of furniture. She says my brother is a good carpenter, my sister Gabriela gave us a porcelain teapot. I have a little brother who works in a bicycle shop nearby. My sisters sometimes come to look after the children.

We are living on the main street. On the bus route, same side as the veterinary surgery and a grocery shop, further down a pub on the corner. The house next door has been turned into a guest house. A white, double-fronted building with a terracotta path running up the middle and patches of lawn on either side, each with a cluster of palm trees at the centre. The palm trees give the street a holiday atmosphere. They are not real palms. A non-native variety pretending to be palm trees. They manage to grow well in the mild climate, up to the height of the first-floor windows. There must be something in the soil they like. They have straight leaves that get a bit ragged, with split ends. At night you hear them rattling in the wind.

The people upstairs are laughing again. They make me conscious of my life downstairs. I pull the curtains. I put the books back. I check to make sure the girls are asleep. I lay out their clothes for school in the morning. It all seems to give the people upstairs more to laugh at. They laugh until it comes to the point where I can’t help laughing myself. And as soon as I laugh, they go silent. I find myself laughing alone. I hear them putting on music. They always play the same track, which becomes a problem after a while only because I like the song myself. Whenever I want to play it, they get there ahead of me. The song I love becomes my enemy.

I hear Helen’s footsteps on the tiled kitchen floor. I can see the shape of her body in the sound of her shoes. Her straight back, her arms have no weight in them, she has long hair, apple breasts. I hear the silence as she moves to the carpet for a moment and returns to the tiles.

At night, the dreamy passengers on the upper deck of the bus can see right into the house as they pass by. They catch sight of us for a fraction of a second, we sleep on the floor in the empty front room, the mattress pulled in from the bed, with the fire on and the curtains left open. The passengers see nothing, only two people with yellow bodies staring at the ceiling, remembering things.

She talks about growing up in Birmingham. The garden around her house with the monkey-puzzle tree, her family packing up and leaving for Canada. The farewell party was held in Dublin, the landing of her grandmother’s flat was filled with suitcases. Her aunts and uncles came back from England and France to say goodbye. Everybody laughing and talking about Donegal and Limerick and Carrick-on-Shannon, then everybody in tears when one of the uncles sang her mother’s favourite song, how the days grow short, no time for wasting time, who knows when they would be in the same room again.

Normally it is the child who leaves the mother behind, but Helen got switched around. She found herself watching life in reverse, seeing her family off at the airport in Dublin, standing with her grandmother at the bottom of the escalator waving and her mother unable to turn around to look back. The streets were wet with recent rain, the lights reflected on the surface. Men with collars up going across the bridge, the river not moving much, only the neon glass of whiskey filling up and going dry again. Two buses back to the empty flat, staring out the window all the way. Her grandmother lit a fire and drank some brandy. They sat face to face in the bath, their eyes red, their legs dovetailed, two girls, twice removed. The pipes were creaking, a finger drawn through the steam on the tiles, flakes peeling off the ceiling. The soap was oval shaped, it smelled like smoked mackerel and cough mixture.

The term for emigration in the native language is the same as tears. An emigrant is a person who walks across the world in tears. Going in tears. Tearful traveller.

Some weeks later Helen was called out of boarding school when her grandmother was taken to hospital. Her uncles came back once more, they brought three bottles of brandy, one to be confiscated by the nurses, one to be drunk on the spot, the other to be hidden for later. When everyone was gone again, her grandmother tapped on the bed and told Helen to get in. That’s how they fell asleep. Her grandmother died during the night beside her, the hospital was quiet, only a thin extract of light left on in the corridor and the nurses whispering.

Long after the buses stop running, she sits up and talks with her back turned to the fire, her spine melting like a wax plait. Her eyes are full of departure. All that travelling in tears. All the packing. All that leaving and arriving and leaving and re-arriving and leaving all over again.

She tells me how strange it was to visit her family in Canada for the first time. In the summer, when school was finished, she found herself going home to a place she had never been to before. Her father picked her up from the airport in Toronto. In the crowd of faces waiting behind the glass, he looked so international. The distance made her shy in his company, like being in a doctor’s surgery, he spoke in a series of directions, driving out of the car park on to the main highway. His freckled hands on the steering wheel as they passed beneath a huge billboard of a woman in a swimsuit holding a cocktail with a pink umbrella, the seams where sections of the poster were joined together crossed her legs, it took a full minute to go by. At a service station he bought some root beer, a medicinal taste that never occurred to her before.

People speak in big voices, she says, it’s all straight roads, endless skies, no fences, her eyes were too big, too open for the brightness of the sun. The shadow cast by a tree was a deep pool on the lawn.

The strangest thing of all was seeing her family waiting on the porch, as if they were practising being at home. Everything was the same as before in Birmingham, the furniture replicated in the same order, only the view outside the windows had changed. Her mother’s welcome was exaggerated, warmer, more pressing, a hurried photograph taken of them all together in the living room, the family complete again. She sat duplicated beside her mother on the chaise longue, their hands clasped, their knees aligned, her brothers and sisters standing along the back in a series of family variations.

Her mother is full of shrug. She shrugs off what she left behind by turning her head aside in a mock-expression of disdain, closing her eyes and placing her chin on her shoulder. She laughs and repeats a family phrase brought to Canada all the way from Limerick – when I think of who I am.

They never say the word emigration.

The town is situated on a bluff, overlooking Lake Huron. Designed in the shape of a large wheel. It’s like a clock, Helen says, with streets radiating out from the courthouse at the centre. She laughs and tells me her family live inside a clock, facing the sky. It is reputed to be the prettiest town in Canada. You can see the sun going down twice. Once at shore level and then again if you run fast enough up the wooden steps to the lighthouse, you see the same red sunset repeated, she says, the clock waits, you get a second chance.

She speaks like a postcard. Her voice is full of streets I don’t know. The town is her invention, even the name sounds made up – Goderich.

I’ll bring you there, she says.

It has the biggest salt mine in the world. Sifto Salt – the true salt. Our salt on every table, she says. Our salt going all over Canada in winter to clear the ice off the roads. Carried on big salt ships across the Great Lakes to Michigan. The mining company has erected a shrine at the edge of the town, a glass pyramid with a faceless salt figure inside. It’s the height of a young woman, she says.

The Salt Madonna, they call it.

Her family home looks right over the mine. You see the lights at night, she says, like a carnival down there. You hear the salt loading arm swinging across in your sleep, voices shouting, trucks reversing, trains like owls coming to take the salt boulders away. And sometimes, she says, the blasting underground will send tremors up through the floor into your bed like an electric current. It’s a city underground, a thousand feet down, going out for miles underneath the lake. Giant trucks, two-way traffic running through halls with white cathedral ceilings, bright with arc lights shining. The air is so dry you can’t even sneeze. Your lungs crack as you breathe. The giant equipment used for extraction is left buried down there in empty salt chambers when it stops functioning, no rust, nothing ages. Her father gave her a stick of salt from the mine, she keeps it in a small case along with her letters.

The sky was beginning to clear up. I got the children ready to go out. I buttoned up their chequered lumber jackets, sent over from Canada, one blue, one orange. They both had colds, red cheeks, Essie coughed like the bark of a seal. We slipped out past the front room with the yoga session in progress, ten women in a circle with their eyes closed, breathing and humming. Helen is an actor, good at playing the part of an instructor.

We turned left, past the guest house with the palm trees, past the veterinary surgery, the grocery shop, we crossed the road by the eucalyptus trees. Along the seafront, we met the veterinary surgeon coming back with his children. His name is Mark, I know him from school, a bit older, he married a French woman, his children call him Papa. My children call me by my first name. I don’t encourage them to say – Dad. Other children at school think I am their older brother.

The sea was calm. Some cargo ships in the bay waiting to be loaded. Close to the horizon, there was a bright section of water where the sun shone through the clouds. For me, there is an abnormal emphasis on those fragments of light, on the mood of the coastline, on the rocks moving underwater. The seafront is full of sand and sex and shivering and wet bathing costumes pooled on the ground. Everything is familiar, the granite pier, the lighthouse.

You can be bullied by things you love.

I am a quiet father. Given to brief outbursts of emotion, followed by long spells of expanding silence. My anger is mostly self-directed. I remain in my own thoughts, detached as a book. I have my hands in my pockets, paying no attention while Rosie and Essie are climbing on a wall with a ten-foot drop on the far side. I get them down and look at the rocks below, the full terror of being a father. The fear of my own childhood?

There are things I should be telling them. Warnings, bits of stories to make them safe. Everything my mother described to me in her language, I now find myself converting into the language of the street for my own children. They are my audience. I speak with that same breathless enthusiasm in which my mother described the sea and the salt air, the tide like the hand of a thief slipping through the rocks. I pass on the tragedy in her voice when she spoke about the men who died in a lifeboat going out to rescue people from a sinking ship one night, drowning in sight of their own families on shore. I tell them about the cruel sea captain who once visited the harbour and whose ship was later taken over by mutiny. The black canvas fisherman’s hut. The white house that looks like a ship run aground on the most dangerous rocks in the world.

My words come to an abrupt stop. Everything has now been said. Those few bits of information I placed into their minds have left me drained, I feel the cold around the shoulders, I want to sleep.

The bandstand at the park was designed in a time when the country was still part of Britain. I watch Rosie and Essie running around the circular bench around the bandstand. It causes me to remember my own father, the unavoidable memory of his silence, the day he gave me and my brother plastic cameras that squirted water when you took a picture. We ran along the same bench and my father didn’t say a word. He was not the type to speak to people in the park. He spoke the ghost language, he spoke my mother’s language, he never spoke his own mother’s language. He turned his back on his people, the place where he grew up in West Cork. His soft Cork accent went missing in German, it left him open to misunderstanding.

A woman sitting on the bench close by wanted to know if I was the father of the two girls.

Are they your kids?

I smiled.

She was concerned about the way I was staring at them. People might get the wrong idea.

I know your family, she said. Your mother is German.

That’s the thing about returning home, it’s the furthest you have ever been away. The hotels along the seafront, the blue benches, the baths where I used to go swimming, the things you love turn against you, they feel snubbed and they will snub you back. You have become a spectator. The granite is not credible. The grass is implausibly green. The sea is raised up to eye level in a broad blue line, you feel cheated by what you know, you remain a stranger.

My mother was waiting for us with an apple cake. The smell of baking came rushing through the hall, like entering another country. The house was unchanged, my father was dead, but his voice was still present on the stairs, his anger, his love, his music reaching up to the roof. A man had come to take away his beekeeping equipment, his mask, his gloves, the smoker with the green bellows. The buzzing of bees remained in the rooms. The picture of my grandfather, the sailor in the British Navy, was hanging in the hallway, rescued from the wardrobe where my father had banished him.

My mother spoke to Rosie and Essie in German, they smiled and didn’t understand. They responded in English. They played outside language, they dressed her up like a child in scarves and jewellery. She held their faces in her hands – who washed your eyes?

The youngest in my family are still living at home – Greta, Lotte, Emil. Greta is working as a nurse. She takes Rosie and Essie into the kitchen to bake biscuits, I sit in the living room with my mother. I want to know more about the town where she grew up. We go over everything – her father’s business in ruins, her father dying when she was a child, her mother dying not long after, the house on the market square left empty.

My mother and her sisters went to live with their uncle. He was the Lord Mayor, hounded out of office for refusing to vote for the Nazis. Standing in the polling station holding up a rigged ballot paper, demanding true democracy. His friend, the journalist, was taken away to Dachau, back a year later no more than a shadow of himself. There was trouble on the square when somebody daubed slogans on the walls against Hitler. People suspected of putting up the anti-Hitler words were dragged out of their houses and forced to clean them up. Her uncle told her not to acquiesce, not to join up, not to be torn along, not to give the Nazis anything but her best silence.

My mother got work in the town registry office. A decrepit place, she said. Her supervisor was a man with gastric problems that required the windows to be left open, he was constantly eating boiled eggs brought into the office by his wife, the same boiled egg every morning at the same time. Her job was in registration, keeping the records on births, deaths, marriages. Where people came from, who they belonged to, surnames and dates going back centuries, many of them descendants of refugees from another time, like her own family who had fled pogroms in the low lands. She found herself constantly running up and down the stairs with the human ledger. People coming in a panic to check their ancestry.

There is a man in the town who falls in love with two sisters, she told me. The sisters live in a house on the market square, he is studying to become a lawyer, he calls to the door to collect them both and they go cycling in the country. The three of them cycling through the flat landscape. The wind in the fields is like a comb through green hair. They come to a lake and go swimming, their bodies turn gold, they spend time lying on the grass together. He watches them getting dressed, he admires them both equally, their feet, he wants to understand the mechanism in their ankles, how does all that work?

He cannot make up his mind which of them he should marry and says – if only I could marry you both.

The sisters smile their best. They all cycle back to the town and go to the cinema together. On the market square, there is more trouble, a crowd has gathered to say the cinema cannot be used by people who are Jewish. They leave. He walks them back to their house, he carries on alone through the church grounds, past the house with the fountain in the basement where Thomas à Kempis lived. On his way home, one of the sisters he is in love with comes running after him, she kisses him wildly on the street, she pulls him into a run, out along the streets through the town gates to the windmill, they disappear inside, their faces in the dark.

They hear glass breaking.

The town is full of unrest. The fire brigade is on the way to make sure the fire does not spread. There is smoke all over the market square when they get back. The following day, the student lawyer meets both sisters together and takes them to a café in Krefeld. Goods have been thrown out of the shops into the street. In the café, people make grunting noises, tapping on their cups with their spoons until a Jewish family with three children at one of the tables is forced to leave. He takes the two sisters out, leaving the cakes half finished behind them, he holds them by the hand, one on either side. They go to the opera and afterwards they sit over a drink in the foyer. He tells them that he has made up his mind, it’s only right for him to marry the older sister, the younger sister who brought him to the windmill bursts into tears and runs away into the street.

The windmill in my mother’s town has been disused for many years. It is situated right outside the medieval stronghold and the fortress wall. When my mother was born, the town was occupied by French and Belgian troops stationed in the fortress. Then it was taken over by the Nazis. Then it was taken over by the American forces stationed there after the war.

The student lawyer continues meeting the younger of the sisters at the windmill every night. He loves her, but the protocol of families forces him to marry the older sister first, the younger sister cannot jump the queue. The preparations go ahead, permissions in place, his happiness is in the windmill but his future calls, he cannot delay, the war is coming. The younger sister is left behind in grief at the windmill, watching him walk away, back to the town through the entrance gate with the dawn arriving onto the cobbled streets and the roof of the church a bright pink. Glass crunching underfoot.

In the morning, the younger sister goes to the registry office, calling up documents which have nothing to do with her but with the student lawyer she loves and cannot have. She sits in the office, reading the dates, his entry into life, his mother, his father, his family going back in time. From the documents, the people of the town appear to be scattering, the arrow of time in reverse, uncoupling, unmarrying, dead people coming back to life, children disappearing, families thinning out to the point of arrival, when they first merged into the town.

Tears enter the records. A jealous smudge of vandalism. The letter J is found attached to the family name. The wedding never goes ahead, the names are never joined. The law student disappears. Two sisters left broken hearted, the windmill never moved.

The garden at home had become terribly overgrown since my father died. My mother asked me to do something about it, make a start, at least. She loved the sound of the soil being turned. I brought out a chair, she sat sheltered from the breeze, by the greenhouse.

What I liked about digging was that it had no meaning. I was happy doing something with no great purpose. It was like reverting to childhood, taking over what my father used to do. It was good to have Rosie and Essie there with me. They had their own patch of ground each to work on. They gave me the feeling that I could pass everything on to them, no need for me to achieve anything more.

My life is limited to the vision of a father. My ideas are all designed around them. I love placing things into their minds and watching them bounce back in their crooked words. My success comes through them, I am at their disposal, I love hearing them laugh, my despair returns every time they fight. When Rosie is angry she shouts the word – anything. When Essie is angry she shouts the word – blood.

It was not long before the spade clacked against a solid object. The sound of metal travelled up through the wood into my hands like a tuning fork. It took a while to dig up. It turned out to be an old pair of shears. They were rusted solid. The blades were fused together and could not be prised apart. The wooden handles had completely rotted off, leaving only two core metal prongs. The prongs had been moulded with a twist in the metal, presumably to prevent the handles from slipping. A flat metal cap had been welded on to the top of each prong.

The girls came over to see what I found. With the wooden handles gone, it looked like a set of antlers. My mother laughed. Antlers, she agreed. She called me a poacher. What I’d recovered was a piece of gardening equipment belonging to my father. The fact that the handles had completely rotted away seemed to date them back to when he first bought the house. The garden was a wilderness when my mother arrived from Germany. My father was too embarrassed to take it on. He felt the eyes of the neighbours looking at him through the windows. She didn’t care who was watching and went out to dig the garden herself, while he looked on from the window along with the other neighbours. It was only when he saw her digging the weeds unbothered by the audience that he changed his mind. She freed him from the fear of being judged. He no longer cared about being seen and took over the work himself, growing vegetables in neat rows, a section for flowers, new fruit trees, a patch of lawn and a place to sit in the sun.

His garden fire is what I remember most, the smoke drifting over the boundary walls, sending a message across the world, the neighbours could hardly see a thing, they had to close their windows, it drifted through the house, it was in all the rooms, in our clothes, in our beds, it went out onto the street, the big cigar cloud of his gathered weeds smoking through the afternoon, into the night, still smouldering in the morning.

Helen arrived as soon as her yoga class was finished. My sisters ran to open the front door and let her in. She was like a visitor from another world. They examined every inch, the black beret, her long dark copper hair, the black corduroy jeans, her light green jumper finished off square across the front. Her freckled shoulder came leaping out as she leaned forward to put down her bag on the floor in the hallway. In the kitchen, she spoke in German, remembering words she had learned in Berlin, testing them out on my mother with a contorted twist in her voice. My mother laughed and treated her like a child, slapping her on the thigh – you are a mouse.

It’s a time of revolution. Every act contains some degree of rebellion and disobedience. There is a feeling that things are changing, civil rights, women’s rights. The art scene is full of naked bodies. Things have become less sacred, less respected. Irrelevant things are being brought centre stage, a strange truth is discovered inside objects which have previously been merely functional.

We hear about a German artist who is using butter and felt in his work. He makes a legend of his own life story, he wears a hat to cover up the head injuries he suffered when he was shot down as a pilot in the war. He puts on spontaneous happenings, in New York he sat in a room with a coyote, in Berlin he took up a brush and began to sweep the street with an audience around him – sweeping out, he called it.

New ways of protesting. New ways of challenging the past. In Berlin, I had been to a play where the actors did nothing but offend the audience. Everyone was being shaken awake. There was respect for madness.

The bar where I used to sing in Berlin was full of people with new ideas. One night, a man came in carrying a sports bag with him. He didn’t order a drink. He slapped the bag down on the ground and fell on his knees. He opened the bag and took out a large raw bone. The meat had been stripped from it, straight from a butcher shop, a dog would love it. There were some red bits of flesh attached, the knuckle of a joint, like a gleaming white door handle.

Right in the middle of one of my songs, the man held the butcher’s bone up in the air like a warning. The bar had a cobbled floor and a green wrought-iron fence around the stage, the ceiling was a backlit panel of stained glass. It was located right under the railway bridge, near the main station. Trains could be heard rumbling overhead.

Everybody stood back.

I stopped singing. The man with the bone was in his thirties, long hair down to his shoulders. He wore clothes that attracted no attention, a pair of worn jeans, the collar of his shirt had rounded ends. His boots had the laces undone.

Kneeling on the cobbled floor, he held the raw bone in his hand and let out a roar. Without saying a word, he began gnawing at it, ripping off bits of pink flesh, snarling as he ran his teeth up and down along the white bone. His jaw was unshaven, there was a rage in his eyes, staring ahead into a distant place. The bar was silent, no drinks were being served, even the trains seemed to have stopped running.

Nobody knew what to say. We were given no clear signal whether it might be reality or invention. Hard to know if the man was performing or whether he was truly hungry and couldn’t wait to eat. Was he angry, was he out of his mind, was he doing it to scare the customers, growling like an animal as he licked and tore at the remaining meat? No indication that he cared if people were watching, he seemed unaware of his audience looking on with astonishment, amusement, pity, mistrust, afraid to laugh. The space around him was clear. He might as well have been kneeling in the middle of a steppe alone, a man in war, a man holding on to his life, a man who had come across this treasured section of bone, glancing anxiously over his shoulders to make sure nobody was going to take it off him.

Each country has its own way of breaking the silence. An artist arrived in Dublin one day carrying a huge wooden crucifix. On Good Friday, he was seen walking down the main shopping street with the cross on his shoulder. People might have mistaken it for a re-enactment of Calvary, but it was more of an art installation, a happening, he was questioning the power of the church. He leaned the man-size crucifix up against the wall of Kehoe’s pub and went inside for a drink. His art had no fear. He sat at the bar staring at his pint as though he was looking at the Atlantic.

All that revolution unleashes a provocative force inside me. I don’t need much encouragement. I am still trying to escape the grip of my father’s rule. I am full of rebellion. I believe in nothing. I have no collective instinct. I find it hard to belong to any group, I follow no team, I even have trouble shaking my head at rock concerts.

I stage my own private happenings. I get into a senseless confrontation in court one day over a parking fine. The fine had been issued on a quiet road with no parking signs. It was my right to park there. I had a perfectly good argument for saying the law was unjust. But it never even came to the point where I could present my case because I refused to swear an oath on the Bible. I told the court I did not believe in God, the judge roared at me – who made Dublin Bay?

It was too much of a crusade.

What is the point in trying to make a point? The first thing I need to change is myself, my silence, my inability to articulate or even work out what I want to say. My vocabulary is inadequate. Fighting the system, going against the establishment, breaking the hold of authority, none of those terms work for me. I speak in crowded sentences. A rush of misplaced words that don’t belong to me. I express confused emotions in public that are more suitable for letters. What I say is never memorable, just clumsy and exposed.

I have no gift for concealment. I do my best to speak with guile, but it sounds contrived, like borrowing a scarf without permission.

Better to keep listening.

I am struck by a book I borrowed from the Germany library in which the main character decides to create something that will never be recognised. It describes the furious love of a man who devotes his entire life and fortune to the task of building a monument for his sister in the middle of a forest. His decision to place the structure out of sight is central to his achievement. He builds his cone-shaped construction in a silent place where it will never be seen by anyone, not even by his sister, the person for whom it has been created. It becomes a monument to what is unsaid and unseen.

What a wonderful idea, I thought. A man compelled to squander his living energy on something that makes no sense, erecting an utterly useless edifice in a remote place, for what? For the sake of nothing? For love?

Do something useless today.

Helen has been encouraging me to write. All those silences can be put together into a book, she says. Things I have been collecting since I was a child. The absurd language wars, the mismatching countries, I have a needless need to put things in writing.

I brought the rusted shears found in my mother’s garden with me when we were leaving. At home, I propped them up on the mantelpiece in the empty front room and stepped back to admire the shape. Something about the fact that they could no longer be used as garden shears appealed to me. I began writing down what they looked like. Metal antlers. The skull of an impala. The eyes are missing. The skin has been torn off. What remain are the bones of a face. The rest of the carcass has been severed, possibly dragged up into a tree by a leopard.

Why was I grasping at these comparisons? Going for the refuge of a story? What things look like instead of what they were, the suggestions they flung out rather than the material facts? Was I protecting myself from the real world? Was I describing myself? Does everything turn into a self-portrait?

I went back to the object in front of me. Rusted garden shears. Beyond use. Nothing more than a piece of unearthed metal with no significance attached. I mistrusted even that bare description. The words were full of opinion, imposing a function on the object, it was being looked at, being conquered, given value. I tore up the few sentences I had rolled together and went back to the physical artefact itself. I stopped trying to explain where they came from or who they might have belonged to. I saw them only as the senseless shape they had become. I tied a thin piece of invisible wire to the metal prongs. I drove a nail into the wall and hung them up.

The morning is spent in the basement conducting a stock inventory. Many of the album stacks in the storeroom have been untouched since the last count. I have introduced a stock control system adopted from a publishing house where I worked for a while in Berlin. Each item in the catalogue has a card attached to the stack with the number of copies left in stock. A person filling an order, often myself, will cross out the number and enter the new figure with the amount of sales deducted. If stocks run below a critical figure, the card is brought to the attention of the person in charge, myself in this case, so the item can be re-ordered in time to meet demand. The idea is to avoid the awkward situation of running short of either one of the components, the disk or the album sleeve, one without the other is worthless.

The system is more suited to firms with a greater turnover. At the native basement, some of items in the catalogue sell only a couple of copies a year, some cannot even be given away, ever more precious for being so rare. The stock can be counted with good accuracy in a couple of hours, so there is no need for an early warning system. If a record shop in Saint Paul, Minnesota, for example, orders unusually high volumes of a native singer whose family and friends have gone to live in that part of the world, there is no problem rush-ordering copies. There might be a delay while the latest Madonna album takes precedence at the pressing plant, it can all be explained in a letter, the music on our list is timeless.

The card system is soon abandoned, mostly by myself. We go back to counting by fingers. Numerals are safe provided they are written down. Spoken in Irish, they can be tricky. They seem more scientifically accurate in English, everyone on the street can understand them. The same goes for phone numbers and appointments, less room for error.

I have entered the results of the count into a report sheet. I have the sales figures in one column. A separate column for wastage, returns, warped pressings, damaged or discoloured album sleeves. There is a further column for stock given away as official gifts. Complimentary albums are frequently rushed by courier to key personalities in the community – government ministers, priests, bishops, school principals, theatre managers, men and women in positions of influence.

Once I was finished, I compiled the various figures into an annual audit and sent it upstairs to the commander. He sent me back a note to let me know that he was impressed with the figures. The organisation had been ingeniously established by him as a charity, sustained by a giant lottery held each month in the shadow language. There was no need for the figures to balance out in any commercial sense, no requirement on any of the artists in our catalogue to make a profit. Decisions were based entirely on cultural reasoning, on keeping things alive that would otherwise die without trace. Our loss-making was repaid in a surplus of heritage. One of the latest recordings was made with a solo dulcimer player, his sales remained at zero, but the number of copies given away as promotional material was higher than average.

The commander spoke to me at length about expanding the catalogue, he wanted me to recruit new bands, younger singers, more women. We signed up a singer with red hair from the west of Ireland who had a fantastic voice, she was well known for singing in English, she carried the shadow language in her pronunciation.

Gradually, with the kind of work I do, recruiting the best of Irish talent, the urge to sing begins to disappear in myself. It doesn’t feel right. I still have the rage and the sadness in my repertoire, all the songs I used to sing in bars in Berlin, but I don’t believe I can be genuine without being fully native. Being an outsider makes me inauthentic, half Irish and half German, half man half horse, some say. I don’t get away with singing back home in my own country, only in Germany where people thought I was as genuine as butter.

The Irish for singing is the same as speaking.

One of the band members I toured with in Germany came back to Ireland with a similar problem, not being able to speak. He found it hard to adjust to being among his own people again. In a Galway bar one night, he sang a song about emigration they said he had no right to sing. No matter how good his voice was, no matter how long he had been away from home or how much he missed the landscape of Mayo where he grew up, they accused him of appropriating grief that was not his own.

He might have been a bit like me, a daily migrant, going out the door to a country he was not sure he belonged to any more, he had to check to see who was listening. People treating him like a non-national. He sang from the heart that night in Galway, but he was forced to stop when somebody roared across the bar at him – go back to where you came from.

He grew up in a big house near Westport, there was a triple stained-glass window above the stairs, a view from the windows onto a lake and rolling lands, only himself and his mother and all those empty rooms. He was the last descendant of the Fitzgerald line, directly related to the famous fighting Fitzgerald, a historical figure who was given a ring by Marie Antoinette in Paris before she was beheaded, then he ended his life in a similar way, hanged in Castlebar for imprisoning his father in a cage with a circus bear. The ring was kept in a tobacco tin, the gem was on a swivel with the stamp of the French court underneath. His people were kind during the Famine. The house was later given over to the state to be turned into a museum of country life.

He plays the guitar left-handed. He has blond hair, a blue freckle on one cheek. He sits sideways at the table with his legs crossed while eating. He barks when the music is good. I saw him once kicking over a chair with excitement while he was listening to a band playing the Céili at Claremorris. I saw him yelping and slapping his hands on the dashboard for Voodoo Chile as we drove into the Brenner Pass.

There is nothing I want to do more than sing, but the catalogue of speaking songs no longer works for me. I am no match for those great singers. I try new ways of calling out my frozen mind, I pick up the guitar, I learn some contemporary songs, but my voice is easily dismantled. I settle back into my long listening.

The veterinary practice was closed. We heard the news that morning. The boy was found lifeless on the floor of the surgery. A note on the door mentioned the word bereavement.

I knocked. It took a while before Mark, the vet, came out. He didn’t take me inside. We stood on the pavement. He didn’t want me to see exactly where it happened, the empty space on the floor where he picked the boy up and ran out the door into the street late in the afternoon, racing to the hospital, hoping he was still alive. I was not brought in to meet the boy’s mother in her grief.

I’m sorry. That’s all I could manage to say.

Ah listen, he said.

We stood in silence. His eyes were flooded, nothing more he could say either. Two fathers trading encouragement, full of words we could not say, looking at the ground. The eucalyptus trees on the corner across the road smelled like a hospital. The shopkeeper in the adjoining premises was looking out the window at us. We had no conversation. For the sake of talking, it occurred to me to mention a book of short stories he had recommended the last time we met, but I kept it to myself. There was a story in it about a couple renting a house in a remote place where they love each other with great intensity until the owner suddenly wants the place back for himself, their love comes to an end.

I stared away towards pub on the corner. He stood kicking the wall with the tip of his boot.

Jesus Christ, he said.

We heard the breeze rattle the eucalyptus trees across the street. The leaves were sickle shaped, green leather knives. The smell of sap was suffocating, a toxic preparation for parvovirus in dogs. Hardly any cars went by, no buses, I would have noticed. It was hard for him to face going back inside. As though he wanted to stay out there on the street with me, that might be the best way of remembering when things were safe, I was a person who brought him back to a time before the tragedy.

I stood there without saying anything more. Like a child trying to hide something, refusing to say there was a bottle of blue liquid I thought was a drink of lemonade.

He put his hand on my shoulder.

Look after those girls, he said. Then he slapped me on the back of the head and went inside.

The white coffin went to the church, people were standing in the street, I didn’t hear what they were saying, I didn’t talk to anyone. He stood with his sister’s arm around his shoulder at the graveside, a small group of mourners, his wife held his hand for the last prayers. The loss of their son took the streets from under their feet. He gave up the veterinary practice, she went back to live in France, he worked for a while in the North, in Coleraine. I ran into him from time to time when he was back, at the fish shop, at the fruit and vegetable shop, sometimes down at the harbour, we always stood for a while and he told me the news, we never talked about the dead boy or his family breaking up. His shoulders were hunched, he moved with delay, there was a cut made in his voice. Maybe it was a form of surrender in his eyes, half turning away and coming back to face you once more, it was good to hear him laugh again. You met him in the pub on the corner full of rugby fans and pictures of James Joyce. You saw his bike outside with a basket full of books.

I have a friend who went to Australia.

He has a gift for talking. His memory has legal accuracy, he studied law. He is tall, he speaks in a stride, it was hard to keep up. He was run off his feet revealing things he had heard about people, things about ourselves that we had forgotten, you felt good because your life mattered to him. He could remember Helen and myself in Berlin, the time I sang my sad songs in the street for passing pedestrians until a woman from the offices above came down and paid me to go away. He could remember Helen on the U-Bahn, a man staring at her love belly, the three of us walking arm in arm across Hermannplatz, she was carried along, not touching the street.

He got talking to people easily, people who normally avoided each other were glad to be in the same place together when he was around. He gave me the feeling of being in motion, being alive, being lucky, it was our responsibility to celebrate. His information had no false avenues. His grasp of human emotions was generous, you could trust him with your thoughts. I allowed him to put words in my mouth. I spoke so little. He did most of the talking for me.

If I could write the way he speaks, I thought, I would be at home anywhere in the world.

We stood at the bar in Kehoe’s pub. I was happy listening to the scattered voices. The twirl of a coin on the counter, a beer mat flipping upwards and being snapped between thumb and finger. Everything was worth remembering, the worn rung on the bar stool, the spill of beer, the discontented faces of barmen on the wrong side of life. Things you overheard – No, fuck off, I owe you a pint. Snatches of nonsensical conversation that didn’t join up – the permafrost, my twist, Galileo, you’re due a refund. I loved that disjointed prose of the city, the abstract way in which something serious could be said in one part of the pub and people burst out laughing in another corner.

In a flood of enthusiasm, I told my friend I was trying to write. The manner of the announcement made it look as though I had no other choice, each one of us was trapped inside a book, the only way out was to write it down. At one point, thinking that I had the speed of his voice in mine, I pulled out a couple of pages from my bag for him to look at.

It was a section in which I described my silence. Waking up at night, wandering around the house where I grew up while everyone else was asleep. I became an intruder in my own home. Avoiding the creaks on the stairs. Not switching on the light. Looking around at the objects belonging to my family, the photographs on the mantelpiece, the town where my mother came from. In darkness, it felt as though I had walked into a strange house where I didn’t belong, the people who lived there had nothing to do with me. When the light started coming up at dawn, I caught sight of myself in a mirror. A strange figure I could not recognise, standing alone among the furniture and family possessions I knew so well. The reflection was not mine, it belonged to someone else, from nowhere.

He read it quickly. He said it was a bit raw, a bit honest. I saw no difference between his honesty and my honesty, only that everything he revealed had time to evaporate overnight. His stories were full of travel. The names of cities and rivers in faraway places.

He told me that he was leaving. We met and got drunk together. I missed him. His departure left me short. It removed the map. I no longer had any connection to the talking grid. He carried crucial information away to Australia with him in his shirt pocket. Doesn’t every emigrant do that? I thought to myself. Each person leaving takes away some essential knowledge that cannot be replaced by those left behind.

A photograph sent from Fremantle shows him wearing a bright blue shirt with floating vintage cars and palm trees. By the angle of his shoulders, he must be standing in the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine. Everything I attempt to say from that point on is directed like a shout across the world to a distant reader, waiting for the echo to come back.

Another episode with my teeth. Brought on this time by an attempt to write in German. My mother’s tongue gave me no protection. It was like pointing at myself. I became the accused. I took on the banality of somebody waiting to be caught and brought back to face trial. Normal words like bread and butter were extremely childish and at the same time loaded with pre-existing meaning. Milk was no longer milk. I could not use the word ground, nothing to do with land, territory, domain, home, belonging.

Writing is no place to hide.

It may have been the mashed potato, it scalded my front teeth. I knew what was coming and didn’t want my children to see me flinching. I got up from the table and left the house. Helen asked me where I was going but I had no idea. I walked as far as the lighthouse, it felt as though I was biting granite, my teeth scraping at the pier wall. Then I walked in a great hurry back to my mother, asking her if she had ever seen Hitler.

Once, she said.

Where?

Düsseldorf, she said.

She was in a department store looking at fabrics, feeling for quality, when everybody suddenly rushed out the door onto the street. He’s here, somebody shouted. The wind sucked them out, shop assistants included, leaving the till behind unguarded. She was the only person left inside. The crowd was lined up along the street, people on their toes, straining to see over shoulders, leaning in the direction where the cavalcade was expected to appear. The buildings were decorated with swastikas, everybody waving flags.

My mother used the expression – torn along.

It was her way of describing that moment on the street, what her uncle the Lord Mayor had warned her about, how everyone was being swept along by a euphoric feeling, by a longing inside each breast for a strong leader after so much disaster. She said the people had an appetite for lies and false facts. It helped them to hide what they didn’t want to know about themselves. They stood waving with great happiness in their hearts, they had been promised holidays in the mountains, family trips on a cruise liner, their country was winning again, they were expecting heaven on earth.

Inside the abandoned department store, my mother said she felt unsafe. She was afraid they would accuse her of stealing. She went outside and saw a small woman who had just left the shop with a broad new hat. The cavalcade passed by with Hitler in the back of an open-topped car. A small man with a modern moustache. It was known that he had a warm smile and his eyes had the ability to look inside each person.

The moment was brief, my mother said. She stood at the back of the crowd. She hardly knew it was Hitler, only that the woman in front, wearing the wide-rimmed hat, not paid for, the label was still attached, turned around with great excitement in her voice and said – did you see him?

After the cavalcade passed by, everyone went about their business. The woman with the new hat walked away down the street. Another woman crossed the street wearing a new tweed coat, the gifts of Hitler. My mother was working in Düsseldorf by then, in an employment office, she had some money, she went back into the department store to buy gifts for her sisters, the two eldest ones were already married, things they needed. She said it was a time of high fashion. A time you could not easily trust men. Most of them were in the Nazi party. Her boss was a senior Nazi member, he was married, always asking her to go for a drink.

A lot of the women in Düsseldorf looked elegant and provocative, she said. The style was to show how perfectly rounded your backside could be. They wore tight dresses that turned the bottom into a walking globe, spherical cushions in bright colours and stripes. She laughed and sang the line of a pop song from the time, about a woman walking down the street with her round bottom swinging and all the monkey men turning around to look at her.

Walking back home, the granite bite in my mouth slowly began to let go. Nothing, to my mind, can be as intoxicating as the grip of denial being released. The enormous energy that goes into refusing the past comes flooding back in a wave of peace once I face up to it. It is not possible to choose my history. I cannot favour one part over another.

They were all asleep when I got back. I made sure the children were covered. Helen woke up, there was a sleep cloud of warm air around her neck. I whispered to let her know I was going to stay up and listen to some music. I had borrowed a set of headphones from work. I put on one of the albums from the basement catalogue. The accordion player from Galway with a cigarette in his mouth gone to America, a jig called the Rambling Pitchfork. Three, four times in a row I played it.

The Rambling Pitchfork.

The country is full of black flags. We see them hanging from the windows, attached to lamp posts, on the goalposts in sporting fields. Black flags tied to the gates of a car park, on the back of a delivery truck, on bridges over the dual carriageway. Some of the flags are tattered, made of material that doesn’t last. Some of them no more than black refuse bags, stuck to the branch of a tree in the wind.

The black flags make it impossible to ignore what is going on in the north of Ireland. They are there to remind everyone of people on hunger strike. Hunger has a deep meaning in our country. In some places, the flags are accompanied by the faces and the names of the men on their fast along with the name of the camp in which they have been imprisoned. They look thin and gaunt, their hair long, their eyes sunken, one of them had been elected to parliament in London while in prison, his face bore a smile from an earlier time.

There was a letter published in the paper, sent by the mother of one of the hunger strikers to the prime minister in London. It was requesting a meeting to explain why her son was refusing food and water. It described what it was like for a mother to see her child slowly dying. The prime minster was a mother herself, she wore a blue scarf around her neck, but her response to the mother of the hunger striker was unequivocal, she saw no need for compassion, a crime was a crime. The men on hunger strike could not be regarded as political prisoners. They were asking for too much, a letter a week, one visit a week, the right not to wear prison clothing.

On Saturday morning, I drove into the city. I circled around the square to show Rosie and Essie the basement where I worked. I pointed out the park where I had my lunch every day, the corner shop that sold two slices of brown bread and cheese, the German library with the red door. The building beside the German library used to belong to the British Embassy, but it was burned down after a massacre in which civilians were shot dead by British soldiers on the streets of Derry, now it was a solicitor’s office. We parked by the National Gallery, they giggled at the painting of nude women in the countryside. Afterwards, we went to the café with stained glass, we had our own sandwiches. We bought two cherry buns, gone pink inside, but we had to leave them behind unfinished because Rosie got sick.

We should have brought the bowl, Helen said.

We had a stainless-steel bowl at home which was used whenever they were sick. It was also used for baking and washing lettuce and other things like soaking beans and chick peas. From time to time, Rosie and Essie wanted it for playing with water, a doll’s bath, teddies dripping and shrunken. It was a bowl that could be used for many things in the family, though we generally called it the sick bowl. It was dented in a couple of places and had the sound of a bell.

Get the sick bowl.

I grew up alert. Listening like a soldier in perpetual war. When I heard the voice of a child, I woke up running, a hundred doors opening, my bare feet along the green carpet, bursting into the bedroom holding the bowl in one hand, Rosie too weak to stand, waking up from a sick dream. Her forehead wet. Her face white. My other hand keeping back her hair, rubbing her tummy – you’re OK, it’s all out now, all gone. Helen coming with a warm facecloth, then everything was fine again, they eventually went to sleep again as if nothing had happened.

Next day, the sick bowl was back in the kitchen. The sound of water rinsing it clean was a swirling echo of sickness. The bowl was like a steel stomach throwing up a dizzy gush of bubbled hot water. Dried and stainless again. The warped faces of children laughing, reflected from inside the bowl, used briefly to send messages to other civilisations in a distant universe. Then the bowl was ready to be used once more to make a chocolate sponge. Everything looping in a cycle of cakes and steeping lentils and nauseous bell sounds.

Was it some illness I brought with me from the house where I grew up? The country my mother came from, the country my father invented in his head. Something in my overlapping history that I am passing on to my children?

My memory is full of sickness. My father bursting into the room with the sick bowl. Bursting in with medicine. Bursting in with a hot poultice. Bursting in to accuse me of speaking the language of the street inside my head. Bursting in to let me know that innocent people had been shot down on the streets of Derry. Bursting in to tell me the British Embassy was on fire. Bursting in the following day with his beekeeping gear over his head, climbing out the window of my bedroom onto the flat roof wearing big gloves and the smoke of burning sackcloth coming from the nozzle of his bee calmer. Bursting in that same night again with his fists in my sleep after I climbed back in late through the window past the beehives, my mother begging him to stop, the whole family awake on the landing and my brother appearing at the door like a boy adult with one single word – peace. My father finally brought to his senses, his fists turned back into hands, my mother led him away and my eyes got used to the light on.

My father bursting in to apologise with a book, with a box of oil paints, with a small fact about helium he thought I might be interested in and might get us talking. The reconciliation music coming from the front room, Tristan and Isolde, their love death rising and rising up the stairs.

And my little sister, Lotte.

My mother has asked Helen to teach Lotte how to read and write in English. They are doing Tolstoy, a page a day. Lotte fell behind as a child because of her asthma, the language of the street was forbidden in our house, she missed a lot of classes at school. Helen is a good teacher, she waits for Lotte to catch her breath after each sentence.

I remember lying awake hearing Lotte trying to breathe, unable to say a word. Her hair was soaked with sweat, my mother wiped her forehead. The doctor came late one night. We heard his deep voice in the hall, he gave Lotte a Valium injection. She fell asleep and I thought she would never breathe again. Next time the doctor was called, he said it was all in her mind, nothing more than a psychological impediment preventing her from breathing normally like every other child on the street. I heard my father coming up the stairs, bursting into Lotte’s room. He slapped her and told her to go to sleep – you’re making this up. My mother tried to calm him, but he continued shouting, commanding Lotte to start breathing properly. She was quiet after that. But worse again the next day. My father prayed and got his brother the Jesuit to make the sign of the cross over her. He ordered the latest medical journals. Cortisone was known to restrict bone growth in a child. He gave Lotte a glass of liquid yeast instead. He gave her goat’s milk. The cat disappeared. He put on Bach. He read about bronchodilator medication, he discovered an inhaler called Ventolin.

If only it was possible to understand his vision, the mixed family enterprise he created. If only it had not been so obscured by his rage, his love, the silence he cast over the family with his crusade. I thought of him reading to improve his German. The care my mother took to correct his grammar. The risk they entered into. The adventure in their eyes when they started this strange family out of place. The house was full of love and misunderstanding. She encouraged him to do things he would never have taken on in his own language, this beekeeping enterprise he got himself into.

I think of the bees arriving for the first time. Like visitors, given refuge in our home. A swarm delivered in May from West Cork. A dome-shaped straw skep with bees talking inside, buzzing with ideas. My mother welcomes them with an embroidered tablecloth, a blue bowl of star and moon shaped biscuits, her voice high with excitement. Her language is a running diary, observing my father, the strangeness of a man in his own country. He wears a protective cage over his head, stepping like an astronaut onto the flat roof while we watch from the window above. Seven faces leaning out to see him punching the humming skep with his fist. It rolls away like an empty hat. He stands back with his big gloves held up in the air. A white sheet spread out, a colony of bees dropped out before nightfall, walking up the beach to a new hive waiting.

We drove out across the mountains until we saw no more black flags. We came through a bog with yellow signs showing a black car veering over the edge. Another sign with a black hump, warning about the uneven surface. The car we had was beige, maybe mustard brown. It had a boxy shape, a biscuit tin with no seat belts in the back, the gear lever was up high by the steering wheel. A slide window, so you could leave your elbow out. The girls were screeching in the back, lifted off their seats with every bump in the road. Helen had her bare feet on the dashboard, I was distracted by her knees.

Hard to say if I was driving away from something or driving towards something. My decisions were random, based on forces in my childhood I could not explain. Behaving at the mercy of feelings that never matched the time we were in. I was creating my own mixed family enterprise, doing my best to be unlike the family I came from.

It was late in the afternoon, we got fish and chips. I had a bottle of wine, some shallow styrofoam containers from a Chinese restaurant for wine glasses.

I drove the car into a field. The weeds squeaked along the paintwork, slapping under the wheel arches. The silence when I turned off the engine was enormous, nothing but ourselves and the sound of wrapping paper and the smell of salt and vinegar. The country was depopulated. Only us, sitting with the doors open, facing the sunset. It was warm. The breeze was like a hairdryer coming through, it blew a paper napkin up against the windscreen.

We waited for the sun to leave, the children went to sleep. In the middle of Ireland, we sat watching the field going dark. The wind came up. A few drops of rain at first, then louder, bouncing on the roof of the car. Helen said it was as heavy as the rain in Canada. She told me how she was once caught in a thunderstorm and could not find her way home. The streets all looked the same, the rain bounced a foot off the ground, it created a halo around the world, her hair down on her skull, blinded by the weight of water in her eyes.

She sat in the car staring into the field of rain as though she was back in Canada, with Lake Huron in front of her. A solid black plate lit up in a flash of lightning, the salt mine, the two bright lines of the railway tracks, her family home in view for a brief unreachable instant.

Give my love to the lake, she said. Give my love to the night-heron. Give my love to the boardwalk and the big empty salt rooms underneath the lake.

I started up the engine, we had to go before the mud kept us there for the night. I was the expert at getting home, driving like a lover, like a father, picking the children up in my arms from the back seat when we got home, one after the other in sleep level six, carrying them inside. Helen opened the doors, taking their shoes off, shielding their eyes from the light. I placed them without interruption into their beds like time travellers, straight from the field of fish and chips to the next morning with the light coming through the curtains. Nothing but the crown of a thistle caught in the bumper for proof.

There was a trick I taught them on that trip. They climbed up on the stump of a tree and jumped into my arms. The leap of trust, we called it. I was the catcher, standing ready. They had to take it in turns and wait for me to shout – jump. Essie was fearless, she threw herself backwards off the bonnet of the car.

It gave us a false sense of security. As though nothing could ever happen to us. Our lives were accidental, full of love and luck and family chaos, rescued by our children.

We collected them from their art class. We did some shopping on the way home. I parked the car across the road from the house. Helen went around to get the groceries, a bag in her arms with the stalk of a pineapple growing out of her shoulder. I went to get the children out and saw Rosie standing in the middle of the road.

I didn’t have time to ask how she got there.

The sound of tyres was so loud it silenced the entire street, there was blue smoke rising, it smelled like Halloween fires burning. Rosie closed her eyes, her body shivered, her hands held up to stop the car. It came to a stop inches away from her. The driver sat motionless with his grip on the steering wheel, unable to get out, staring ahead at the child in the street. Helen looked at me, the bag with the pineapple fell out of her arms. It was that soundless space in between us that frightened me more than anything, the dry mouth words we could not say to each other, the leap of trust, where was the catcher? She ran without looking and picked Rosie up off the street. She continued running until she got inside the house. I grabbed Essie by the hand. The traffic was held up, the whole street waiting until we had the door closed behind us.

Helen stood screaming in the front room.

I took the children into the kitchen and started making pancakes.

Her scream continued for a long time. It went back to the time when she was a child only five years of age herself. In Birmingham. The house on the corner with the buses going by and passengers looking in the windows. Her father at work, her mother in the kitchen with earrings on peeling potatoes. Helen standing on the street, the side gate had been left open, her younger sister was getting into the back of a car. The driver was holding a bag of sweets. Her other sister, no more than three, was climbing in to join her. It was a Wolseley with leather seats, their legs were dangling. And the housekeeper from Ennis running out when she heard the scream, making up for everything she had lost in her own life, the baby she had to leave behind in Ireland. She was shouting Holy Jesus. Mary mother. Reaching into the back of the car to clutch the two girls by the arms at the last minute before the car took off around the corner with the rear door swinging. The howling of tyres creeping like a wounded animal along the wall.

The side gate was locked again.

Her mother’s face was at the kitchen window like a photograph gone black and white. To make them forget, the housekeeper put them all three into the bath and taught them a song about James Connolly, a working-class hero. Nobody called the police, it would have been shameful to have them come around to the house, people asking if it had to do with being Irish. Nothing happened, everyone was safe. He was caught some ten years later, an engineer, the Cannock Chase man. Only some of the bodies were found. He never admitted anything apart from the fact that he loved cars, somebody bought his Wolseley at auction to be burned in a public ceremony with a crowd of people standing by to watch.

Was that the reason?

The reason for going to Canada. The reason they could never speak of and for which they made up so many other happy reasons to go and live in a quiet place with a salt mine.

Rosie and Essie ate the pancakes with yoghurt. Essie caught me sprinkling invisible sugar with my hand. Rosie spilled yoghurt on herself, on me, it was on the carpet, a pink footprint. I brought them to bed and read the book about the boy in the bakery at night getting milk to go into the cake for the morning. We sat up in bed for a long time, all four of us. Helen was clutching them, one on each side, rocking back and forth until they were asleep.

It never occurred to me to get the groceries fallen on the ground in the street until a neighbour came to the door and handed them in to me without a word.

After midnight, Helen got up and went out to the public phone by the front door to make a call. There was no answer. She walked up and down the corridor, then she tried again.

In the house overlooking the salt mine, the phone rings around the hallway, into the kitchen, into the blue room with all the furniture brought over from Birmingham. It rings out onto the porch, as far as the white picket fence. Her mother has just left the house, on her way to the courthouse square to meet her friend. She puts on her sunglasses getting into the car. The lake has no meaning for her, the sunlight is full of scorn, the glare of things she wants to forget.

The day is hot, the cicadas are deafening. There is a child cycling along the sidewalk, in and out of brightness under the trees, making a soft tapping sound along the concrete slabs. The neighbours are gradually moving a little further along their lives each time the child comes back around – a man gardening, a woman on the porch with ice cubes ringing, blue shouts coming from a swimming pool.

The town is calm and polite. They drive slowly, they speak with caution, they call her by her first name, she gets invited to parties where people eat with their hands and it’s all paper plates and paper cups of wine and women standing around in shorts. A town where she first turned up in sweltering Donegal tweed and sang a song that brought the house down. The town by the lake where students drive themselves to school. Where the hairdresser has a swimming pool. Where the judge will be seen having coffee with the local electrician, there is no difference between people only what you have.

Helen’s mother has attached herself to this Canadian town like a story made up out of nothing. She has turned her back on Birmingham. The city in which her children almost disappeared. The city of fog. Fog loitering in the streets. The sound of coughing and cars starting at night. The headlights of a bus pointing through a dense grey curtain, the doorbell ringing and the fog slowly coming up the stairs.

The world is full of things that have not happened.

Helen gave up trying to phone her mother and came back in. We sat on the floor in the front room. The curtains were left open. Her face was gold. Her eyes were green. Her hair was copper with the light coming in off the street.

Was it wrong to feel lucky?

We ate some of the leftover pancakes. We drank two bottles of Guinness each. We made love. The dog next door was barking. The people upstairs were laughing. The buses stopped running. I got up to check on the children. I stood watching them for a while with the light from the hallway across their faces. The force of them asleep was greater than all their time awake.

My silence has become unbearable. There is a forest growing inside. Trees springing up in the kitchen, trees in the hallway, around the bed, roots running under the green carpet into the front room. The curtains have a pattern of falling leaves, the entire back wall of the house looks like open country with nothing but silence.

My mother tells me that she was in hospital once. It was in Düsseldorf, she says, during the war. She started bleeding, maybe this is difficult for her to explain. She doesn’t tell me what exactly happened, only that she could not stop bleeding and was taken to hospital.

In the room next door to her, she says, there was a man who kept screaming at night. He was a soldier, he had been stationed in the east. He was brought back injured, but the doctors could find nothing wrong with him, no medical explanation for his pain. He experienced terrible stomach cramps which made him vomit, he could not eat a thing. He crawled along the floor, he lay curled up in the corridor, the nurses had to lift him up and carry him back to his room. They said it might have been shell shock. He was more frightened than wounded, he couldn’t sleep, his arms and legs were shaking.

One night, he started talking, other patients in rooms off the same corridor could hear him speaking in a raised voice to one of the nurses, she was holding his hand. He had been commanded to a place on the outskirts of a small town. It was on the edge of a forest. Soldiers in his regiment had been given the job of clearing the town, separating women from their children. The women were rounded up into a small group of about thirty or forty. They kept looking back at the children from whom they had been separated, but the soldiers continued to push them towards a ravine. One of the children broke free and ran after the group of mothers but was held back. The child fell.

There was a soldier filming all of this with a moving camera, the man said.

The story went around the ward in a shocked whisper. The man was given an injection to calm him down. He continued speaking a while longer, then he was quiet. He was said to be delusional. Before the night was out, he was gone, his bed was vacant. The nurse said he had been discharged. There was no more talking, no more whispering, the story disappeared. My mother brought it to Ireland with her.

The dental practice is across the street from the former veterinary surgery. The waiting room is still in use as a dining room, a table and chairs for eight people, magazines like place mats. In the corner, there is a cabinet full of crockery, a porcelain teapot. Above the fireplace, a large picture of a turf boat with dark brown sails.

The surgery is in the living room, to the front, facing onto the main street. The dentist speaks to me at first in the native language, then he switches back to English. He’s from the North, from Derry. He smiles and flicks his head to one side as he speaks. He whispers to himself while he examines the X-ray, my ghost mouth.

He wants to know what is causing the trouble. I tell him I have no idea. The slightest thing can set it off, the air, the ground, the street, the sound of my own feet in my mouth. He asks me if I have been clenching my teeth, grinding in my sleep. He gives me a gum shield. I sleep like a boxer for a couple of weeks, but it makes no difference. Back in the chair again. He begins to single out one of the upper molars on the left. He undertakes the required root-canal treatment. It involves many repeat visits, lots of drilling, I take several days off work, I go back some weeks later and he puts in the crown.

The buses stop right outside the surgery. Passengers upstairs get a good look at me lying back with my mouth wide open and the light shining across my face. The sight must fill them with horror. The dentist reaching into my mouth with his fingers. My hands gripping the armrests.

I hear the dental assistant speaking to him softly in the background, handing over instruments I don’t want to see. Everything feels so enlarged. His rubber gloves make a squeaking sound against my teeth. He asks me questions he can only answer himself, all I can do is consent with a crow sound at the back of my throat.

When he’s finished, he removes the rubber gloves and says I should have no more trouble. He flicks his head to the side and apologises for not fixing the problem sooner. He refuses to take any money. I try to pay him, but he tells me to go. He smiles and says the tooth is dead, it’s beyond pain – come back to me if you feel anything.

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