The Speckled People (4 page)

They went to a mountain in each country. And no two mountains could be any more different. First they went to the famous Drachenfelz, right beside the River Rhine. They stayed in the hotel at the top and had breakfast looking out across the river below them, at the barges going up and down without a sound, like toy boats. She collected the train tickets and hotel receipts, even the thin decorated doilies under the coffee cups. Everything was important and would never be forgotten. She would not forget the smell of the sea either, or the smell of diesel fuel, or the faces of Irish people on the boat coming across to Ireland. They went up to a famous mountain in Ireland called Croagh Patrick to pray. It was a much harder mountain to climb and some people were even going up in their bare feet, with sharp rocks all along the path. At one point the wind came up so quickly they had to hold on to the rocks with their hands. There was no cable car. There was no hotel at the top either, where you could have coffee and cake. But when
they reached the small church at the top and heard the voices of people praying the rosary together, there was a great view. They looked back down at the land all around them, with tiny houses and tiny fields and islands going out into the Atlantic.

Inside our house is a warm country with a cake in the oven.

My mother makes everything better with cakes and stories and hugs that crack your bones. When everybody is good, my father buys pencil cases with six coloured pencils inside, all sharpened to a point. I draw a picture of the fox with blood around his nose. And Franz draws a picture of the house, with everybody in separate rooms – Vati, Mutti, Franz, Hanni and Maria, all standing at different windows and waving. Áine is gone away to London. The O’Neills are gone away, too, so there’s no chopping wood and no English and everybody in our house is in the same country, saying the same words again.

It’s Sunday and there’s a smell of polish on the floor. There is a smell of baking and ironing and polish all over the house, because Onkel Ted is coming for tea. Onkel Ted is my father’s brother, a Jesuit priest, and he comes to visit us after his swim at the Forty Foot. His hair is still wet and combed in lines. He once saved my father’s life, long before he was a priest, when they were still at school and used to go swimming down in Glandore, not far from where they lived. My father started drowning one day so his younger brother had to jump in in his shirt to rescue him. Afterwards my father couldn’t speak because he
was shivering for a long time. But we don’t talk about that now. Onkel Ted can speak German, too, but he doesn’t say very much and my mother says he’s not afraid of silence. So he listens instead and nods his head. I tell him that Franz has shadows around his eyes because he fell off the wall and broke his nose, but my mother says we won’t talk about that now. My mother is trying to prove how decent and polite the Germans are and Onkel Ted is trying to prove how decent and polite the Irish are. And then it’s time to reach into his jacket pocket for the bag of sweets and we can have two each and no more.

Outside our house is a different place.

One day my mother let us go down to the shop on our own, but she gave us a piece of rope and told us all to hold on to it so we would not get separated. An old woman stopped and said that was a great way of making sure we didn’t get lost. My mother says we’re surrounded by old women. Miss Tarleton, Miss Tomlinson, Miss Leonard, Miss Browne, Miss Russell, Miss Hosford, two Miss Ryans, two Miss Doyles, two Miss Lanes, Mrs Robinson, Mrs McSweeney and us in between them all. Some of them are friendly and others hate us. Some of them are Protestant and others are Catholic. The difference is that the Protestant bells make a song and the Catholic bells only make the same gong all the time.

You have to be careful where you kick the ball, because if it goes into Miss Tarleton’s garden next door you’ll never get it back. She told us not to dare put a foot inside her garden. Mrs McSweeney is nice and calls you in for a Yorkshire Toffee. The two Miss Lanes across the road have a gardener who wanted to give you back the ball one day but he couldn’t. He came to the gate, ready to hand it back, but then one of the Miss Lanes appeared at the
window and shook her head. The gardener stood there, not knowing what to do. We begged him please to give it back quickly before she came out, but he couldn’t because he was working for Miss Lane, not for us, and she was already at the door saying, ‘Give that ball here.’ She said she was going to ‘confiscate’ it. We stood at the railings until Miss Lane said: ‘Clear off. Away from the railings. Go on about your business, now.’

My mother laughs and says ‘confiscate’ doesn’t mean kill or stab with a knife. It just means taking control of something that belongs to somebody else. One day I confiscated my brother’s cars and threw them over the back wall into Miss Leonard’s garden, but we got them back. One day Miss Tarleton declared a football amnesty and we got nine balls back, some of which never even belonged to us in the first place and most of which were confiscated all over again very shortly after that. Miss Tarleton might as well have handed them straight over to the Miss Lanes. My mother wants to know if the Miss Lanes play football in the kitchen at night. And she wants to know what the Miss Lanes have against her, because they just slammed the door in her face.

My mother says maybe they still hate Germany, but my father says they hate their own country even more. He says they still think they’re living in Britain and they can’t bear the sound of children speaking German on the street and, even worse, Irish. My mother says that means we have to be extra-nice to them, so they don’t feel left out. You have to try not to throw the rockets up so high because the bang frightens old women and makes them think the Easter Rising is coming back again. You have to make sure the ball doesn’t go into their garden. My father says it’s your own fault if you lose the ball, because their
garden is their country and you can’t go in there. He says our country is divided into two parts, north and south, like two gardens. He says six counties in the north have been confiscated and are still controlled by Britain. The difference between one country and another is the song they sing at the end of the night in the cinema and the flag they have on the post office and the stamps you lick. When my father was working in the north of Ireland once, in a town called Coleraine, he refused to stand up in the cinema because they were playing the wrong song. Some people wanted to put him against the wall and shoot him. And then he left his job and came back to his own country where he could speak Irish any time he liked.

So, you have to be careful what country you kick your ball into and what song you stand up for in the cinema. You can’t wave the wrong flag or wear the wrong badges, like the red poppies with the black dot in the middle. You have to be careful who to be sad for and not commemorate people who died on the wrong side.

My father also likes to slam the front door from time to time. And he’s the best at slamming doors because he makes the whole house shake. Lots of things rattle. Clocks and glasses and cups shiver all the way down to the end of the street when my father answers the door. He sends a message out all over the world, depending on who knocked. If it’s the old woman with the blanket who says ‘God bless you, Mister’, and promises to pray for him and all his family, if it’s the man who sharpens the garden shears on the big wheel or if it’s somebody collecting for the missions, then he gives them money and closes the door gently. If it’s people selling carpets he shakes his head and closes the door firmly. If it’s the two men in suits with Bibles then he slams it shut to make sure not even one
of their words enters into the hall. And if it’s one of the people selling poppies, then he slams it shut so fast that the whole street shakes. Sometimes the door slams shut in great anger of its own accord, but that’s only because the back door has been left open and there’s a draught going through the house.

One day Mr Cullen across the street asked us to help him wash his car. Afterwards he gave us a whole chocolate bar each, because he works for Cadbury’s and has boxes and boxes of chocolate bars and Trigger bars in the boot of his car all the time. A woman came along the street selling the red badges with the black dot in the middle, so, as well as the chocolate, he bought us each a badge and pinned them to our jumpers. Lots of people on the street were wearing them – Miss Tarleton, Mrs Robinson, Miss Hosford, and the two Miss Lanes.

We didn’t know they were wrong. We didn’t know that wearing the wrong badge was like singing the wrong song in the cinema. So when my father saw us coming into the house wearing poppies, he slammed the door and all the clocks and cups and saucers shivered. Franz shivered too. My father ripped the poppies off so fast that he stabbed his own finger with the pin and I thought the badge was bleeding. He ran into the kitchen and opened the door of the boiler and threw the badges into the fire. Then he ran his finger under the tap and looked for a plaster while the badges burned to nothing and I thought it was a big waste because Mr Cullen had paid money for them.

‘Who gave you those damn things?’ my father wanted to know.

‘Not like that,’ my mother said. ‘They don’t understand.’

‘Who gave you those poppies?’ I could see that my father
hated even saying the word. ‘They’re British army poppies. Who gave them to you?’

‘Mr Cullen.’

‘Mr Cullen has no right. I’m going over to have a word with him.’

But my mother pulled on his elbow again. She told him that Mr Cullen’s father died in the First World War and we didn’t want to offend him. My father said Mr Cullen was trying hard to offend us. Lots of good people died on the German side, too, as well as all the Irish people who died fighting against the British army instead of joining in with them. And what about all the people who died in the famine and there are no badges you can get for them. Mr Cullen was mocking us, he said, giving us the poppies on purpose because the Germans lost the war and the Irish lost the six counties. My mother says she’s not offended and Mr Cullen is too nice a man to even think of something like that. Its time to be big-hearted, she says. It’s not important to win. And one day they’ll commemorate all the people who died in those wars, not just their own.

‘They have no children,’ she said.

I was afraid that my father would find out we got chocolate and that would go in the fire, too. One day when we were coming home from the shop with Smarties, Franz dropped one of them on the street and my mother told him to leave it there because it was dirty. Then he threw the rest of the Smarties on the ground as well. If one was dirty then they must all be dirty. So I thought this was the same, that we had brought home something from outside on the street that was dirty.

‘Never let me see those things again,’ my father warned.

‘Explain it to them, for God’s sake,’ my mother said. She doesn’t like things being taken away from us without
something else put in its place. She wants everything to be explained in a calm way, sitting down.

So my father sits at the table and we sit opposite him and he tells us why we can’t accept poppies from anyone. First of all, he says, there was the British empire. He takes out a map of the world and points to all the pink bits that were owned by the British. Then he says the Germans wanted to have an empire, too, but the British didn’t like the idea, so that was the First World War. He says millions of men died when two empires fought against each other and not even one person was killed on their own soil. It was big countries squabbling over little countries. Then right in the middle of it all the Irish decided to declare their own free state. We serve neither king nor kaiser, is what the Irish were saying to themselves and to all the other small countries around the world. But after that it’s hard to understand what my father is saying any more because my mother’s name was Kaiser and I don’t know what the difference is between the First World War and the Second World War, and who the Nazis are and what they have to do with us. My mother says the Germans hardly behaved any better than the British, that instead of just having an empire and keeping slaves, the Nazis made slaves of their own people. The Germans turned themselves into slaves and started killing all the other people who were not German enough and my father says it’s all the same thing.

‘That’s the end of the road,’ he says, and I think there are people being killed at the end of the road and I don’t want to go down there any more. My father says all we need to know is that poppies are not allowed in the house and that’s the end of the story. We’ll get our own badges and flags and songs. On St Patrick’s day, we get shamrock and green badges and tricoloured jelly and ice cream.

At night in bed I’m afraid of silence. I can see the light coming under the door and I think my father still wants to go over to Mr Cullen, only that my mother is holding him back telling him to leave it. It’s all in the past. We’re in the future and we have to behave like the future. Then I hear the music coming up from the front room. Big German music spreading all over the house again, all the way up the stairs and in under the door with the light.

On Sunday, Onkel Ted comes to tea again with his wet hair combed in lines. I tell him about all the balls that Miss Tarleton gave back but the Miss Lanes took away again. I tell him that we were allowed to wash Mr Cullen’s car and that we got chocolate. I tell him about the poppies and all the people being killed at the end of the road, but my mother says we won’t talk about that now. I tell him that a man on the bus said Nazi to my mother under his breath, but we won’t talk about that either. Then it’s time to reach into Onkel Ted’s pocket for the sweets and I don’t know what to tell or not to talk about any more.

After that it’s hard to know what’s right and wrong. My mother says we’ve started doing a lot of things that make no sense. One day Franz put stones in his ears and he couldn’t hear anything any more. Maria put a marrow-fat pea in her nose and it swelled up so much that the doctor had to come and take it out. Franz hit his thumb with a hammer and his finger went blue. Then I started burying all the silver spoons in the garden with my grandfather’s initials FK written on them and my mother had to find the treasure. She laughs and says she hopes we won’t do any more stupid things for a while. But then one day I started throwing the toy cars in the fire. I carried the box with all my cars into the kitchen and opened the door of the boiler by myself. I could see them lying on top of the
orange coals. I watched them lighting up blue and green for a moment, until the flames disappeared and they went black and silver. One by one, I threw my cars on top of the coals until my mother came and asked me if I was out of my mind. She pulled me away and slammed the door of the boiler shut. She kneeled down and looked straight into my eyes. She makes everything better with hugs that break your bones. She tells me a story and says it’s all forgotten now and we won’t talk about it any more.