The Sailor in the Wardrobe (27 page)

At home, my father doesn’t enforce the curfew any more. He doesn’t ask what I do and what time I come home, because he is preoccupied with other things, with his bees, with translating books and writing more articles for the papers. He’s been planning a business trip to Germany for the ESB, to buy a new shipment of high-voltage cables. He’s been translating technical manuals for them and right now he’s been given a big problem to solve for Ireland that does not involve any fighting or
dying. It’s a problem that none of the leading experts in the ESB have been able to crack, because it’s about Britain and Germany.

The ESB generating station at Ard na Crusha was built by the Germans just after Irish independence, by a company called Siemens. It was well known that the Germans were the best at engineering, so they were brought in by the new Irish Free State government so they would build a generating station at the Shannon that would light up the whole country. As they were building a power station on the Shannon estuary at Ard na Crusha, the Germans began to have trouble getting the Irish workers on the scheme to work, and the German foreman once got a gun and went down to the barracks where the men slept and woke them up early with the gun pointing at their heads, saying that if they didn’t come to work on time in future he would shoot every one of them with his pistol. He was so furious and had such a serious look in his eyes that they believed him and didn’t think it was just a German playing a joke. So the generating station was finally built, even though everyone was saying it was a white elephant and the farmers all over the country didn’t want ESB poles on their land. But now there was a new problem. The station had been in operation for years, and to complete the rural electrification scheme, it had to expand. In addition to the German transformer, the ESB bought a British-built transformer which was a little easier to bring into Ireland. There was no reason why a new British-built machine would not work with the German one. But when it was finally delivered and installed, the engineers at Ard na Crusha could not get them to work together. The two big machines were designed to work in series, next to one another, my father
says, so that there would be a huge saving in power which would double the capacity provided for the national grid. It had taken months for the new machine to be imported and built up, but when the machines were asked to work together, they refused.

Senior engineers were sent down from head office in Dublin to carry out tests. They studied the manuals and went back to the beginning each time, to see if they had missed any vital steps. They could not understand how a machine could be so stubborn and they began to think it was something psychological, something to do with the war that made even the machines reluctant to make it up and put the past behind them, some basic incompatibility between the German and the British models. The Irish understood that very well, my father says, how a machine would resent the newcomer. Of course the engineers didn’t put that down in the reports, but they did finally pass the problem back to head office saying they were baffled and could only conclude that it was a non-technical malfunction.

Experts were sent to Britain and to Germany to consult the manufacturers, but they came back no wiser. The British machine which had been bought at great expense was lying idle and only the German model was being used for the moment. It remained a mystery. All the leading engineers scratched their heads and passed the problem on, blaming the person who had made the decision to try and match two different makes like this in the first place. It was at this point that somebody remembered that my father spoke German and that there might be no harm in him having a go at it.

So he’s been sitting at home every night, going over all the different reports, studying the tests that were
carried out in Ard na Crusha as well as all the reports from abroad. Night after night, poring over the same documents and manuals, measuring and calculating everything mathematically. He doesn’t believe that a problem can’t be solved and doesn’t believe that machines have a mind of their own or that nationality plays a part in electrical science.

‘It’s the ghost in the machine,’ my mother says at the dinner table, and they both start laughing. My father says it’s only Irish people who still believe in the supernatural and they will never solve anything if they remain in this pre-technical state. He says they still look at every problem from an emotional point of view, as if everything is personal. They have deluded themselves into believing that machines are possessed with nationalist features which make them unreasonable and uncooperative.

‘The machine is a servant,’ he says. He speaks as if he has discovered something about himself and us at the same time, as if it’s suddenly become clear to him that he turned us, his own children, into machines when we were small.

‘Under the right conditions, with no obstacles in the way, a machine will do as it is told in any language. This idea that a machine is like a donkey or a human with temperament is nonsense.’

Then for the first time in our lives around the table, we realize that he is speaking to us in English. The most basic rule to keep everything British outside the front door has been broken by himself.

‘The Irish must step into the technical age or they will not survive,’ he says, and we are shocked to hear these words coming from him in English. It should be a moment of freedom, but we feel rigid, almost wishing
that he would keep to the rules no matter how absurd they have become. Franz is worried that my father might ask him a technical question and he won’t know what language to answer in. We’re still afraid to speak, so we would rather be silent and listen.

We are astonished at how natural he is in this forbidden language. He’s a different man, more relaxed, more like other men in Ireland. Even though we are still afraid to join in, we admire the way he speaks with a soft Cork accent. For the first time in my life, I hear him speaking to us in his own language, putting everything in his own words, breathing in English. Up to now he’s always been speaking to us in a foreign language, either in German or in Irish, languages that were never his own. Now he’s speaking to us in his native tongue, the language of his childhood, the language of his memory, the language of his own mother. It’s the language he went to sleep in when he was a boy, the language of stories and songs that he heard when he was growing up. Now I can understand what he really means to say, as if he’s got his voice back after years of exile.

Night after night, he sits in the front room now, surrounded by sheets of paper and manuals all around him on the sofa and on the floor, speaking to himself in English and speaking in German when my mother goes in to try and help him, even though she has no idea what all these technical terms mean. She asks the most simple questions and makes him think about the problem like a child looking up at a plane crossing the sky. He walks around the house with the drawings in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. When he’s outside on the roof of the breakfast room tending to the bees, he suddenly drops everything and runs inside to look at the manuals once
more, with his bee-keeping gear still on. He’s going around like an astronaut in another orbit. He doesn’t see what’s going on and he’s stopped being on sentry duty, watching us all the time to see if we’re breaking the laws.

He doesn’t even notice that my mother has begun to start smoking. She has been giving German lessons to some of the students around the neighbourhood and one day, while she was teaching and smoking a cigarette at the same time, he came home and walked straight into the front room. My mother didn’t know what to do with the cigarette in her hand and decided to give it to the student, who was only thirteen years of age, but my father noticed nothing, as long as my mother was not smoking. He was in his own world, just wondering why the ghost in the British machine still refused to talk to the ghost in the German machine.

And then one night he’s cracked it. Long after everyone has already gone to bed, he wakes up the whole house, walking up and down the hallway in his pyjamas, slapping his hands together, with us on the stairs thinking he’s gone out of his mind.

‘It’s fifteen past midnight,’ he says, and he’s smiling.

‘It’s much later than that,’ my mother says.

‘No, I mean clockwise and anti-clockwise,’ he says. He’s so happy that he wants to run out onto the street in his bare feet, but my mother closes the door and pulls him back into the front room, with all the lights in the house on as if electricity doesn’t cost anything and Ireland is going to have too much of it. My mother says you can’t run out naked like the man who invented the displacement of water in the bath. My father is buzzing with excitement because he’s cracked the mystery that will bring peace between the machines. He can’t stop walking
up and down the room and back into the hallway, smacking his fist into his hand and then throwing the drawings up in the air as if they no longer matter. He’s laughing at them all now. He tells my mother to get out the cognac and the special German biscuits, because he wants to celebrate and put on music.

‘I was blind,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how I didn’t see it.’

He says the solution was so simple that everybody in Ireland missed it. It was so straightforward it was staring us all in the eye. He explains how both machines had a dial. Both the German model and the British model needed to run together at the setting of fifteen from midnight, but they could not see that the Germans had the convention of going clockwise and the British had the convention of going anti-clockwise, after midnight and before midnight. It’s like driving on the left- or the right- hand side of the road, and you just can’t have both. He talks about volts and amps and megawatts and windings and fork connections and legs until he has us bewildered with science.

‘Will the machines be friends now?’ Bríd wants to know.

He smiles and gives her a big kiss on the top of her head with his hands on the side of her face. He embraces everyone in the front room and it’s time to celebrate because he’s invented peace and harmony between nations. Right in the middle of the night when the whole street is asleep, he puts on music, blasting off Beethoven because he is the person who brought England and Germany back together again at Ard na Crusha, in West Clare.

So it’s goodbye to the hurt mind and goodbye to the silence. Goodbye to the fear and the rules and the
punishment, goodbye to guilt and shame. Goodbye to the breathing war.

Packer and I are celebrating as well. ‘Goodbye to the hurt mind,’ he keeps repeating out loud, on the buses, in the shops, everywhere we go, even opening the door of a pub in the daytime and shouting at the lonely drinkers inside. He even shouted it into the GPO one day at the people buying stamps and postal orders. Packer making them all look into their own hearts – bus conductors, builders, shopkeepers, men with briefcases, women with children, all staring after us with blank expressions while he laughs and leaves the words hanging in the air behind him like a long shout.

One night we met at the harbour again. He had heard about a party that was being given by one of the nurses and we were planning to gatecrash. But in order to be let in, Packer said it was not enough to arrive with beer and cigarettes. We had to come with something special. Lobster. Love and live lobster, he called it. We sat drinking one of the bottles looking out at the water which was orange and black. There was a slight fog rising over the water and the lighthouses shone a blurred, dirty light across the surface. It was calm and warm. We could hear the mullet jumping around the edge of the pier. We sat for a while, staring at the necklace of lights going all the way around the bay and at the anchored cargo ships lit up like villas in the darkness. We wondered what the sailors were doing, playing cards and waiting to unload on the docks in the city next morning. There was a foghorn, maybe the Bailey or the Kish, humming in the background. It was like the note of a church organ, a low note with no edges, coming and going again and again.

We could have gone straight to the party, but Packer
was determined to do something big, something unusual. Nothing could ever be vile and ordinary any more. We were going to arrive with something that would open everybody’s eyes. The lobster storage box was padlocked, so we decided to take a boat out and get them straight from the pots. The golden handshake, Packer called it. We hid the beer beside the shed. We slipped the boat off the moorings and rowed silently out of the harbour without the noise of an engine. The tide was in and when we got to the lobster train, I held on to the oars while Packer started pulling up the ropes, examining each pot, one by one. He couldn’t put his hand inside for fear of getting caught by the lobster claws, so he lifted each pot up towards the lights of the city so he could see the shape of the lobster and take it out carefully from the back.

This worked very well for the first time and we had one lobster in the boat, but when he was lifting up the next pot, Packer fell back under the weight of it. It was as if a large hand had come up from the sea and lifted him out of the boat. He disappeared without much of a splash even, down into the purple darkness with the lobster pot strapped across his chest.

I didn’t know what to do. At first I thought it was funny and I imagined how Packer would be telling the heroic story later on at the party, how he nearly got himself drowned while trying to get the live lobster. I waited for him to come back up, but the water didn’t move. I stood up in the boat with the oars still in my hands, but the water had become a heavy liquid, swollen like black oil. Even the ripples had disappeared and there was no chuckling under the boat. I knew Packer was being dragged all the way down to the bottom with the weight of the lobster pot across his chest and the rope
fouled around his arms. I knew he was trying to free himself before it was too late, so I waited and kept the boat steady to make sure I didn’t drift away.

I was the champion at staying underwater and not breathing, so I knew it was gone beyond the time that your lungs would be bursting and you would involuntarily take in water. I was watching my friend Packer drowning silently, right underneath me in the darkness. I wanted to shout, but I felt my breathing going short. I thought of jumping in after him but I would see nothing in the dark. I remembered how I once felt I was drowning, how Packer stopped talking to me and I didn’t want the same thing to be happening to him. I thought of Tyrone and how he drowned all alone with the ropes wound around his legs and arms. I imagined how Packer and Tyrone would meet each other underwater, with Packer still trying to get away from the ropes and Tyrone drifting towards him with a green face and sandy hair waving, dark eyes and mouth open. Tyrone lunging at him through the water with a bottle in his hand, as if he could not bear to die alone and wanted to hold on to Packer, as if each person who drowns has the need to drag somebody else down with them to the same place, like a chain of lobster pots, one after the other, lying among the seaweed at the bottom of the sea.