The Sailor in the Wardrobe (29 page)

‘Would you mind puking somewhere else,’ Packer shouts.

You can see that young people are like old men when it comes to sleep. There is anger all over the hut after and a fight breaks out, with one of the guys in his underpants trying to expel the drunken people. Eventually they leave and go up to the weighbridge where they can drink a bit more and phone their girlfriends in the middle of the night and everybody in our hut goes back to sleep.

But it’s not long before we’re awake again, because one of them has come back, this time with a shovel in his hands. We can hear him shouting outside.

‘You fucking British bastards.’

It’s almost dawn now, and there is a terrible cracking noise. Massive holes have been stabbed through the side of the barracks and now the sun is shining in, like a new torch beam through each hole. We can hear him shouting and cursing the British, running at the Nissen hut as if he’s some kind of croppy boy coming back to
get
revenge with a pike in his hands.

‘Aaaargh,’ he shouts each time like he’s still in the comic books, and then he collapses with laughter.

He’s made about eight or nine holes already before anyone can get out there and take the shovel off him. Two lads in underpants, one purple, one white, take the shovel into the hut and hide it under one of the beds. But the damage is done. Packer says the place looks like a fuckin’ upturned colander. When the rain comes, we’ll all be soaked. Outside the drunken guy finally falls down asleep in the sun until one of his mates pulls him in like a dead man.

Next day, there is a big inquiry. It’s like the time I robbed the instrument of torture at school. The manager with his trilby hat comes down to inspect the damage and then calls everybody into the canteen for a general meeting where he makes a speech in his English accent. He says he’s suspending all casual work until he finds out who sabotaged the hut. He doesn’t seem to be that angry, just disappointed. He says he cannot have this kind of destruction going on and he’s quite happy to fire everybody in the plant if he doesn’t find out who the culprit is. The people who did it must own up. Otherwise nobody will work again and everybody goes home.

The machines in the factory continue working and the foremen do all the essential jobs that we were doing before, as if they didn’t need us in the first place.

Then there is another meeting in the barracks, where the Ugandans say it’s for us to sort out. They’ll cut off all our Kabulas and stuff them into each others’ mouths if they lose their jobs. It’s an Anglo-Irish problem and they should be left out of it, everyone agrees. Everybody starts discussing what to do. But the drunken vandal who did all the damage wants to stay, along with his friends. He’s at university and he needs to work right to the end of the pea harvest so he can get enough money to keep himself
through the year, like the Ugandan medical students. So the drunken lads who caused all the trouble have a great plan. They ask if anyone would like to volunteer, to become a paid scapegoat. They intend to make a collection which would pay for the repair of the hut as well as giving the scapegoat a huge bonus as well.

Everybody is talking about it all morning, but nobody really wants to go home. And then Packer asks me if I would like to volunteer with him. He mentions the money we would be getting and how we could be on the train later on that same evening. I tell him I like the work at Ross Foods and I would rather stay. I never want to go home again, because here I can just be myself, a fork-lift truck driver. But Packer says we can feck off down to London, and there’s a rock concert coming up in Reading. We could be listening to Pink Floyd instead of working with peas. All we have to do is act the criminals for a few minutes, look guilty and contrite, say we’re sorry and it will never happen again.

We are sitting in the manager’s office. He’s sitting behind his desk with his trilby hat resting on a stack of papers in front of him and a red ring around his forehead where the hat made an impression. First of all, he says he’s glad that we owned up to the crime. He lets us know how much we will have to pay to repair the damage, but none of that worries us because we’ll get all of that back with bonuses. He tells us that we will never be invited to work at Ross Foods again as long as we live, but that doesn’t worry us either, because there’s plenty of work to be found in England and I’m already thinking I’ll get a job in a bar, or on the buses, or better still in a cinema where I can get in to see the films for free.

I tell myself this will be over soon. It’s just a formality.
Embarrassing as it is, the manager will soon have to give us our money and throw us out. But then he leans back in his chair, staring at us for a long time, fixing on Packer and then fixing on me as if he’s not quite finished with us. I can’t look him in the eyes because I feel guilty. He’s one of the nice people and I talked to him once when he came around inspecting the factory, asking me what I was going to do with my life and laughing when I said I didn’t know.

Now he’s staring into my eyes, like a magnifying glass burning a blade of grass in the sunlight.

‘I didn’t expect this from you,’ he says.

‘I’m sorry,’ is all I can say in reply.

‘But why?’ he asks. ‘Why did you do it?’

Packer tries to brazen it out, shrugging his shoulders. He’s more defiant and therefore actually looks like he damaged the hut intentionally. Maybe I’m still resisting guilt. The manager seems unwilling to let us go without getting some kind of an answer, something that will undo the offence of this vandalism, as if the money to repair the hut is not enough without some kind of an explanation.

I have to imagine that I was the person who carried out the crime. Unlike the trial in school around the instrument of torture, this time I have to pretend I’m guilty. I tell him that we were drunk in town and that we don’t know what came over us. But then he wants to know what pub we went to and what we drank. We don’t know the name of the pub and he asks so many questions in rapid succession that I am in danger of giving myself away.

It’s like an interrogation, only the other way around. It’s become tortuous, sitting there in his office pretending to be guilty, afraid that any minute he will find out that we’re innocent, afraid that I will blow it all and retract my
own confession. It’s like a trial in reverse. Except that when you’re guilty you can put your hand up and own up to it. Go on, put me in prison. Execute me, whatever. If you’re guilty, you can come clean, acknowledge your crime and take the punishment.

‘Is it something you have against the British?’ he asks.

‘No,’ Packer and I both say at the same time. ‘No, it’s nothing like that, honestly.’

The manager is after the truth. He wants justice. He’s like a judge waiting to announce the sentence and I wonder about the whole idea of taking on guilt that doesn’t belong to me. I am reminded of how my mother was shamed in front of the world after the war and now I’m being shamed myself. I realize how strange this is, when a person is put on trial, how the judge declares that he will never commit this crime himself. It’s the judge who goes on trial. When the Nazis were put on trial at Nuremberg, the world gave an undertaking never to do the same again. When they executed Eichmann in Jerusalem, they gave an undertaking not to repeat his crimes. It’s not the criminal who is on trial now but the rest of the world. It’s the Nazis who have put us all on trial for eternity.

The manager stares at me like a psychologist, trying to work out what is inside my head.

‘Why?’ he asks one final time.

Then I can see Packer trying to think of a way out of this perpetual trial. He looks up at last and says it must have something to do with the peas.

‘Too many peas,’ he says.

And then I can’t keep myself from laughing. I try to cover my face with my hand, and I’m waiting for Packer to say that peas are a vile and ordinary vegetable and we
never want to see another pea as long as we live. The manager looks up in complete astonishment. We have become truly guilty now, laughing in the face of justice, mocking our accusers like cold-blooded criminals without an ounce of remorse or shame.

‘It’s not funny,’ he says.

I realize that he’s still got our money. So I try to stop laughing long enough so we can finish all this and get out of the office with what’s left of our wages.

‘That’s really cheap,’ he says to us, almost spitting it like an insult into our faces. ‘You come in here and say you’ve smashed up the place and then laugh at it.’

At least he believes I’m guilty. And finally he opens the drawer to take out two envelopes. He’s lost his patience and begrudgingly hands over the money.

‘I can’t understand you people,’ he says, but we’re already on the way out, down the stairs and out into the free world, innocent at last.

It’s all over. We pack our bags and collect the money we’re owed from the other lads who smashed up the hut. We’re amazed at what we’ve come out with, and figure that we would have had to work for weeks to get this much. Some of the lads envy us and ask us what we’re going to do and where we are thinking of going. Packer tells them we’re off to the Reading rock festival. They call us ‘fucking Kabulas’ because they’re all jealous of our freedom. Packer tells them we’re going to hang around in London for a while and we might head off to Berlin. He’s heard of a ship that goes from Harwich to Hamburg every day. Germany is where the real money is, so it’s goodbye to the peas and goodbye to the men in trilby hats and goodbye to all the sad Kabulas left behind in Ross Foods.

We get on the bus to Norwich. From there we get the
train to London, and soon we’ll be looking at movies, drinking in bars and going to nightclubs. We’re never looking back. We’re lashing down to London, speeding through the flat countryside where all the peas are grown. Machines harvesting. Trucks waiting to be loaded. We’re free and innocent while they are all still working. We will soon be dancing with women, while back at Ross Foods Ltd, they will be going insane with the sight of green peas all around them. They will be dreaming about peas and engines shaking without stopping all night. They’ll be complaining about the smell of socks and the rain coming through the holes in the roof. They’ll be dreaming about freedom. They’ll be dreaming about women in white coats and white underwear dancing around and throwing peas at each other. They’ll be dreaming about hips and Venus hills. Of peas and nipples and arms and legs. They’ll be dreaming of lying down across banks of peas with women taking off their white coats. Women whispering things that you cannot hear with the noise of the graders shaking all night. Peas rolling over soft skin. Peas running along breasts and peas rolling into belly buttons like roulette.

I’m out of the wardrobe now. Packer and I came to Berlin, arriving on the boat in Hamburg and coming down on the train late at night. We found jobs easily and I’ve started working in the store room of a publishing house. There are lots of new things happening here and it’s like living in the middle of a revolution, everything rushing forward into the future, like the traffic.

When you’re young, you can change your identity. You can escape from your family and change your name, leave your country, go to live in a new city and not tell anyone where you come from. You can disguise yourself like an actor and choose what to remember and what to forget. But there is always something that gives you away, some tell-tale part of you that cannot be hidden. It’s not just the obvious things like your accent, your language, your appearance. It’s the way you look at the world, your point of view. You can never disguise that because it shows up like ancient ruins on the landscape.

On my way to work every day I pass by the bombed-out ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, like an archaeological site left behind in the middle of the city. You can still see the bomb damage. The windows are hollow, without glass. An empty shell, left there deliberately with all its bullet holes as a reminder of war. Close
to where I work, I pass by giant furniture stores where houses once stood. There’s one of those gaps in the street where a house disappeared and was never rebuilt, replaced instead by a children’s playground. I can hear children’s voices. Echoes of children. Even at night after dark, the ghosts of children, repairing history with sweets.

One day in a bookshop I came across some black and white pictures of the church from the time before the war when it was still intact. I realized that I was looking at the same church, but they had attached a spire that didn’t belong there. I could hardly recognize it, as if they had reconstructed the Rock of Cashel or rebuilt the deserted village in Achill. I thought I was mistaken and that the pictures belonged to some other city, until I read the caption underneath — Kurfürsten Damm, with a view of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church – taken in 1925. I was uneasy, looking back at this pre-war, pre-calamity time when nothing had happened yet and the worst was still to come. It was as if I could forecast the disaster of the Hitler years without being able to stop it. I didn’t trust myself and wanted to get back to the present. I walked out into the street, glad to see the Memorial Church once more with my own eyes, the same as it ever was, exactly as they had left it, a beautiful, bombed-out ruin, standing still in time.

I’ve got a place to live on a street called Sonnenallee, in Neukölln. There are lots of young Germans living in the apartment with me, so I begin to emphasize my Irishness, spending time with people who play Irish music in the bars at night. I’m learning to play the guitar and the tin whistle, even speaking broken German like Packer, to make sure that nobody mistakes me for a real German.

Maybe it’s a kind of homesickness, something I have
inherited from my mother and my father. I’m always waiting for letters from home. One day I met an old woman standing by the rows of post-boxes in the hallway of the house on Sonnenallee, waiting for letters from far away, like myself. Some of the metal doors had been forced open. Others were full of advertising leaflets, like stuffed mouths. Through the small window in the post-box, I could see that there was no mail for me, but I went all the way down and opened the door with the key, just to be sure. I was on my way back up the stairs when the old woman spoke to me very politely, stepping into the light.