The Speckled People (15 page)

Inside, my mother is boiling the cow’s tongue and there is a strong smell all around the house. That evening we watch as she wraps the tongue up in a white cloth and puts it into the vice. She winds the lever around and presses the tongue as hard as she can. Then she leaves it there for a whole night.

The next day we sit down to dinner and my mother brings out the tongue on a plate, all pink and pressed into a square shape by the vice and some glue around it as well. My father takes the knife and begins to cut. Everybody gets a slice along with cabbage. Franz wants to know if you eat a cow’s tongue, will you start saying moo. My mother laughs, but now it’s time to stop the
jokes and eat. I don’t like the taste of tongue. It’s like eating rubber. I look around at Franz and Maria and they have stopped chewing as well. Maria is allowed to spit hers out on the plate because she’s going to get sick, but we have to keep eating until it’s finished and learn not to be afraid of new tastes.

‘It’s just exactly like ham,’ my mother says.

She eats it and my father eats it and they nod to each other.

‘Excellent,’ my father says.

But I don’t think they like it either. I think they’re just pretending because they don’t want it to go to waste and people to know they’re wrong. We have to keep chewing, even though I nearly want to get sick, too, and I can’t stop thinking of biting my own tongue and all the glue coming out from inside it. Everything comes to a standstill. There’s a big lump in my mouth and I’m like Ita on the potty, not swallowing the last spoon and not saying a word, until my mother says it’s all right, we don’t have to eat any more as long as we finish all the cabbage.

‘I suppose you don’t want to eat something that somebody else had in their mouth already,’ she says.

And then I can see her shoulders shaking. She starts laughing so much that she can’t even eat any more either. My father is laughing, too, and he has to take off his glasses. He has tears in his eyes this time and they keep laughing for a long time, until my mother tells us to clear the table and promises that we will never have to eat tongue again as long as we live.

The reason my father has a limp is that when he was a boy he got a very bad disease called polio. And that’s the end of it, he says. Except that it’s not true. It’s not a lie but it’s not the truth either, because he never told us about going to the doctor or staying in hospital and getting sweets. He never had polio, because Onkel Ted told me once that my father had a limp when he was born. So maybe his mother only made up that story about polio, because people were afraid of anyone who was deformed at birth and it was better to say you had a disease like everyone else. Or maybe my father made it up himself because they were always laughing and limping after him on his way to school and saying that he had a father in the British navy.

Sometimes on Sundays we go to visit our relations. Tante Roseleen smiles at me all the time with her eyes. Onkel PJ has a wristwatch with a silver cover on it to protect the glass from breaking if you go to war. Tante Lilly has two sons called Jimmy and Pat who toss coins up in the air and show us how to play cards. And sometimes they all come to our house and bring red lemonade, then Tante Kathleen comes up from Middleton and Tante Eileen comes up from Skibbereen with Geraldine and Carmel. Then the house is full of smoke and English. I’m still afraid to bring bad words into the house, but then my father starts telling
stories in English, too, and everything is all right as long as the visitors are still there. They say that nobody in Ireland can bake a cake like my mother. They say nobody can build a wooden toy trolley like my father and there are no children as lucky as we are with three languages, because we’ll never be homeless. They sit around the table and talk until it’s very late, but nobody ever says anything about my father’s limp. We don’t know what questions to ask, until one day when I told Onkel Ted that the worst disease in the world was polio because it makes your legs shorter and you get a limp.

‘Polio,’ he said. ‘Is that so?’

My mother says some things are hard to talk about, some things are private.

‘You remember the stick in the water,’ she says. ‘You remember the day we were down at the sea where the dog was barking and there was a stick in the water that was crooked. You know it’s not crooked or broken. It’s an illusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s a lie.’

There is nothing in the whole world that my mother hates more than lies. She wants us to be honest and to tell the truth when you’re asked, because lies are worse than murder and nobody will trust you. You won’t even trust yourself any more. She wants no more lies, not even a small one, not even an Irish one. Irish lies or German lies, it makes no difference to her, it’s always wrong. And anyway it’s impossible to tell a lie in our house because my mother has a good nose and she can smell something burning. My father has a very good ear for music, too, and he can hear the creaks in the floorboards from miles away, even in the office in Dublin where he works with the ESB. One day I started looking in his wardrobe again. I was on my own this time and I found the picture of the sailor that he
didn’t want me to see. I found the photographs of HMS
Nemesis
and all the medals from the British navy. When my father came home from work that evening and we all sat down at the dinner table, he knew it and had a frown on his forehead.

‘What did you do today?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘That’s the oldest answer in Ireland.’

He knew every answer in Ireland because he was a schoolteacher once. I could see myself twice in his glasses, but I couldn’t see if his eyes were soft or hard. He was waiting for me to talk, so I told him that when I grow up I want to be a sailor. I told him I want to have a uniform and go all over the world on ships.

‘Have you been looking in my wardrobe?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

I knew that nobody would ever trust me again because I said a lie. My father asked me the same question once more. He said I was the champion of wrong answers and he told me to think hard because he wanted the right one this time.

‘Never be afraid of the truth,’ my mother said.

I thought she was able to smell burning. And my father was watching the way I was buttering a slice of bread with hard butter, tearing big holes and making a mess of it.

‘No, I didn’t,’ I said again.

‘We have to believe him,’ my mother then said, but after dinner when everything was cleared away from the table, I had to stay behind with my father looking at me. He can hear what’s inside your head. He waited for a while and then asked me if there were any questions I wanted to ask him.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Then why were you looking in my wardrobe?’

I wasn’t sure which questions would make him angry and which questions would make him smile. He sat facing me for a long time until he had to get up and go outside into the garden because it was starting to get windy. He told me to sit there and think. I could hear him in the greenhouse rattling with sticks and I thought it was for me again and that we would be going up to pray for Ireland. I heard the back door banging in anger. But then I heard him outside in the garden with the sticks, tying down the new trees. I could hear the wind blowing. I could hear my mother talking to him and it was dark by the time he sat down at the table again. Then he looked at me and just smiled. He wasn’t angry any more. He said it was wrong to tell lies and it was wrong to be more interested in the past than in the future. It was no use looking back all the time and he would show me something else instead.

‘I’m going to show you the future,’ he said.

I waited for him to say what it was but he just smiled.

‘It won’t be long, wait till you see. We’ll be going there soon.’

That night there was a big storm. The window was rattling and the rain was tapping on the glass. Sometimes the wind pushed so hard that even all the rattling stopped and I thought the glass would break. I could see the shadow of the trees on the wall, shaking so much that they sometimes disappeared altogether. It was so wild and angry outside that I thought the roof would lift off the house. I thought the front door would blow in and everybody would be able to walk inside and see us. I heard my father coming up the stairs with one hard foot and one soft. My mother came to say goodnight and told me to pray
for all the people out on the sea, and then I thought the house was moving like a ship.

I know that when my father was small he was called Jack after his own father John. He didn’t know anything about his father until his mother told him he was a sailor with soft eyes. The sailor had a soft voice, too, she said, and he always called her ‘baby’ because she was the youngest in her family. He was away at sea all the time, even at Christmas, and the only thing that my father could remember seeing was the sailor’s uniform, laid out all ready one night on the kitchen table. The next morning he was gone again and there was nothing left only the picture over the mantelpiece and all the letters he wrote home that were kept in a tin with roses on the lid.

Every time there was a storm she stayed up all night praying for all the people out at sea. And then she knew everything was all right when she got a postcard from Gibraltar with a short message.

Dear Mary Frances,

Rough crossing. More homesick than seasick,

all my love, John.

It was the last card he sent. He must have put it in the mailbox before he went out to work on deck. A wave must have come from the side and caused the ship to lurch, they said, because he fell over the railing down on to the lower deck. He would have fallen overboard and drowned if not for his friends pulling him to safety and bringing him inside to lie down on his bunk to sleep for a while. But when he woke up, he could not remember anything. He didn’t look ill or have any broken bones and there was nothing wrong at all until he walked off the ship in
Gibraltar and got lost. He was like the Munster poets and kept going around and around the town in circles with no idea where to go, until the captain realised that he was missing and sent a search party out to arrest him for being a deserter.

The first thing that Mary Frances heard was some weeks later when she got a letter from Manchester saying that her husband was in hospital there. He had fallen and lost his memory on HMS
Vivid
, they said. She wasn’t able to go and see him so she asked a cousin who was a nun in Liverpool to go to see him instead. And after a long time he was allowed to come home to Leap. He never wore the sailor’s uniform again and he would never be seasick again because he was invalided out of the navy. There was no money coming from the British navy either to anyone who was invalided and he couldn’t work at anything else in Leap. So Mary Frances looked after him and went up to Mass with him every morning to try to bring his memory back. He remembered her face and her name, but then after a while he started forgetting even that much, so that he could do nothing at times, only hold his head in his hands and say that he wanted to go home. He was a stranger in his own home. And then he lost his mind altogether one day, because he took a knife in his hand. My father was still a small child and he was crying so much that the noise went into the sailor’s head like a nail into the wall, so he stood up and said he would kill him if he didn’t stay quiet. Everybody in west Cork knew it wasn’t like John Hamilton to do a thing like that, but his head wasn’t right after falling on a British ship. He stood in front of his own picture in uniform, holding a kitchen knife in his hand and shouting, until Mary Frances had to stand in front of him, in front of the man she loved
more than anyone else in the world and tell him to kill her first.

Sometimes it’s a mistake to be born the son of people who love each other too much. Mary Frances went to see him at the hospital in Cork as often as she could. Once, after Ted was born, they all went up to visit him together, but he didn’t recognise any of them any more and just turned away in the bed. Then a priest had to come and he died alone. Onkel Ted says it was a very cold day in winter when his body was brought on the train to Skibbereen and from there in a carriage to the graveyard on the hillside in Glandore. After that there was only the picture of the sailor over the mantelpiece and the box with the last card he sent home. After that Mary Frances had nothing in her mind only to pray and fight for a pension from the British navy, no matter how long it took, so that she could educate them and make sure they didn’t have to go into the navy or emigrate to America. It was the biggest day of her life when her two sons came back to visit her in Leap, one an engineer, the other a Jesuit.

‘It’s no good looking back,’ my father says. He is sitting across the table from me at breakfast time again and smiles. ‘You should be looking forward. You’re like a blank piece of paper and you should only look forward.’

Maybe that’s why he had to put the picture of the sailor with the soft eyes in the wardrobe, along with all the medals and the box with the homesick postcard. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want anyone to know that he has a limp, because we’re living in a new country now and we can never go back again to the past. And maybe that’s why he changed his name to Irish, so we’ll never be homesick.

‘Ten more days and then we’ll be in the future,’ Maria says.

The storm was gone. There was no wind at all any more and the sun was shining, but when my father went out to work he saw the broken slates on the ground and said there was a hole in the roof. There were fallen branches all over the road, too, and he told us never to touch any wires. Down at the seafront, the waves had thrown lots of sand and seaweed on to the road as if it were part of the sea, as if Dublin were going to be living underwater soon.

The man came to fix the roof. His name was Mr McNally and when I came home from school I saw the ladder in the house going up to the skylight. My mother said he had been up there on the roof for a long time and if he was any longer it would be infinity. I knew that infinity was even further away than the future, but I didn’t know that infinity was in the past as well. She said she could not wait for him to come down, so she stood at the foot of the ladder and called up to him.

‘Mr McNelly,’ she called, because she says everything with a German accent. ‘Mr McNelly, I have a cup of tea ready for you.’

In Ireland, you can’t ask people anything, she says. It’s not like Germany where a question is just a question. In Ireland people get offended by questions, because it’s a way of saying what you’re thinking. The only way to ask Mr McNally something politely was to offer him a cup of tea. My mother was not able to go up the ladder herself, so she kept calling up through the skylight. She said that the longer Mr McNally stayed up there, the bigger the hole in the roof would get and the more money we would have to pay.

Now and again, the phone would ring and it was my father calling from the office to ask where Mr McNally was now and how big the hole was. He could not come home
early and go up the ladder himself, so my mother had to go back up the stairs and call up into infinity, saying the tea was already made and was now going cold. As well as that, there were homemade German biscuits, too, just out of the oven, covered with icing and hundreds and thousands. And when Mr McNally still didn’t come down, she called him from the back garden, and after that from the gate in the front garden as well. Everybody on the whole street knew the tea was ready and my mother was getting worried because nobody had ever failed to come down for her biscuits before. When the phone rang again she told my father that maybe Mr McNally had a problem hearing things. And all the time the hole was getting bigger and bigger, the longer he was up there, so my mother said the next time there was a problem with the roof she would have to get two people to fix it, one man to do the work and the other to go up and call him down for tea and biscuits.

In the end she took off her apron and told us all to hold the ladder while she tried to climb up herself. The sun was shining down through the skylight and she didn’t go very far because the ladder started shaking, so she came back down again. She said I had nothing to be afraid of, because she was holding the ladder herself and nothing would happen. So I climbed slowly up into infinity and put my head out over the roof, but it was so bright out there that I was blind, and I could see nothing. All I heard was the sound of snoring.