The Sailor in the Wardrobe (8 page)

‘You can’t go in there,’ I said.

‘Did you hear that? He can talk.’

But I was a dead-mouth and they walked right in past me. They were taking over the place, touching everything. One of them lay down on Dan’s bunk. Others were trying on life jackets, modelling them and dancing around behind me to a song on the radio. They laughed at a calendar with a picture of the Alps that was three years out of date. They saw the spare oars tied up to the ceiling and asked what the white markers were for, playing football or what? They rang the brass bell on the wall. They put a lead weight onto the weighing scales and said it was very heavy. One of them started brushing her hair into a new ponytail and with the sunlight coming in through the window I saw a blond hair floating through the air on its way down to the floor.

They went around saying everything was so dirty. Did I ever think of cleaning the window, for fuck sake. They wanted to know if anyone slept there at night and the others said how could you sleep with the smell of petrol and fish all over you and where was the fuckin’ toilet? They kept finding things like oarlocks and asking what the fuck was this for and what the fuck was that for. The others answered and said what the fuck do you think it’s for and they all fell around laughing again. They could do what they wanted. They could have taken the petrol out
and set the place on fire. I thought of what Packer would have done, how he would have started making up some kind of situation out of it that he could later tell the lads about, offering them some of Dan’s pink Mikado biscuits maybe, as long as they didn’t mind a few mackerel scales on them as well. Maybe he would have sat down on the bunk with them and shown them Dan’s blue mug with years of brown tea-stain inside or cut up a mackerel in front of them until they said, Jesus, let me fuckin’ out of here. But I had no way of inventing a life around myself. I had the weakness and I could do nothing until they got bored at last and left of their own accord, laughing and smoking as they walked away up the pier.

And then I could see Dan’s boat coming back into the harbour. There was a buzz of motorbikes and the harbour lads were all returning as well and within minutes they were sitting outside the shed again with Packer talking.

‘Wait till you hear this,’ he said.

He said he was about to tell us the most amazing story. He had just come back in from being out on the water with Dan. They had been pulling up the pots, when they suddenly came across a lobster that had rubber bands already tied around his claws. I’m not joking you, Packer kept saying. There was Dan, complaining about the lobster being less plentiful, and then they came across a lobster that had put his own rubber bands on as if he had given himself up.

I felt the kick in the small of my back. I was waiting for them to turn around and accuse me of being responsible for the empty storage box. I was ready to put my hands up, but nobody mentioned the missing lobster and I began to feel that I was getting away with things at last. I wondered if this was the way life always turned out, that
you got caught for the things you didn’t do and you got away with the things you should be guilty for, that guilt and innocence eventually balanced themselves out.

Packer said Dan Turley guffawed like a seagull when he saw the lobster with the rubber band coming out of the pot. ‘Hooken bloody hell,’ he kept saying as he held the lobster in the air. He must have thought somebody had dived down and put the rubber bands on the lobster just to play a trick on him. He was mystified and dumbfounded, looking all around the bay, even away out over the sea across to England to find the culprit, cursing and muttering as if it was all part of the conspiracy against him and even the creatures under the sea were in on it. Dan lifting his white hat to scratch his head and staring at the lobster in his hand as if he had been given a toy without instructions. And then the lads were off again, laughing and holding on to the side of the shed, saying ‘hooken this’ and ‘hooken that’, while Dan was standing at the door with his blue mug in his hand, frowning.

At home, my father calls for another meeting in the front room. It’s a summit conference this time, with Onkel Ted present to make sure nobody gets up and starts hitting each other. There’s a big silence in the room and lots of tension, everybody afraid to speak first and the gap getting wider all the time until my father gets up to put on a record. I watch him taking the keys out of his pocket and opening the music cabinet. He picks out a record which then suddenly turns out to be the missing John Lennon single.

‘This is your record,’ he asks. ‘Isn’t that so?’

I nod my head. I checked the bin a few times and wondered if he had disposed of it some other way, maybe burning it. Instead he kept it with his own collection, along with Bruckner and Verdi and Mendelssohn.

‘Zurück,’
he says, translating the words on the record.

‘Yes,’ I answer, and I can’t help thinking how stupid he makes it sound, as if he wants to kill the words.

‘Na Ciaróga,’
he calls the Beatles in Irish. ‘OK, let’s listen.’

He does everything with the same care as always. No matter how much he might hate this music, he treats the record with great respect, dusting it off with a special cloth first, even putting on the dust glider before finally
touching down the needle. Then he sits down and we listen to the Beatles together.

‘Get back to where you once belong, get back, Jojo.’

I see my father looking around as if he can’t wait to get the record off his turntable in case it might ruin the needle. It’s clear that my mother has been trying to persuade him to do things her way, not with violence but through discussion and compromise. He even gets up to put on the reverse side with John Lennon singing ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, but the whole thing is more and more unbearable to listen to. The only person who seems to enjoy it is my mother, until my father gives her a sharp look and she has to stop tapping her foot. She remembers why the meeting was set up and that there is a serious side to all this. My father takes the record off because it’s just too much for him and he thinks the whole system is overheating.

I’m glad when it’s over. I’m waiting for him to give his speech about how bad music is like bad food, like chewing gum rotting your teeth, like alcoholism, like taking drugs. I know he feels betrayed, because there’s no defence against music. Music is free to travel anywhere across the sea and you can’t stop it coming into Ireland and going out again of its own free will. He says I am allowing myself to be corrupted and he wants to remind me of all the good things which we have been concentrating on in our family. He says you have to be careful with music and who I allow myself to be influenced by. My mother says the music is quite nice, but she’s heard about how the Beatles have created mass hysteria in young people. We’ve all seen it on TV, girls screaming and fainting when the Beatles arrived in Dublin. My mother says it reminds her of the way girls were screaming and fainting
for Hitler, and she doesn’t want me to become brainwashed like that.

‘We don’t want you to become a
Mitläufer
, a run-along,’ she says.

She says it’s the worst thing that can happen to you, because it makes you powerless in your legs and you can only run in the same direction as everyone else. It’s what happened to the Germans and she remembers how they all became
Mitläufer
under Hitler, with the same thoughts in their heads and the same look in their eyes. My father says it’s what happened to the Irish as well, when they started speaking English and were forced to run along after the British. Now we’ve all just become run-alongs after America, with the same dreams and the same music, and my mother says if you become a run-along, then you don’t have much choice. My father and mother both know how hard it is to go in the opposite direction and there are many things in this world they will never run along with. That’s why they got married and had an Irish-German family with lederhosen and Aran sweaters, so that we would not be afraid of being different.

When John F. Kennedy arrived on a visit in Ireland, I didn’t want to be brainwashed or become a run-along, so I was the only person who didn’t go up to the corner house to watch him on TV. I didn’t want to be like everyone else, blindly following the leader like they did in Germany under the Nazis. Even though John F. Kennedy was Irish and Catholic and my mother and father liked him for standing up to the Communists who had no religion, I didn’t want to be one of John F. Kennedy’s followers with American flags and green flags waving at him. When he was assassinated in Dallas one day, I was shocked like everyone else to see the pictures on the front
of all the newspapers. I watched my mother pasting those pictures of the motorcade into her diary, but I knew I was not one of his followers because she had already taught me how to be different to everyone else. According to my mother and father, it’s alright to be a run-along after John F. Kennedy, or the Pope, or God, or any of the saints, but not somebody like John Lennon.

I don’t want to be a follower of John Lennon either, I like his music, that’s all. My mother says I have to be careful that I don’t get the weakness and lose control of my emotions. Onkel Ted says it’s hard to imagine music doing any harm or killing anyone and John Lennon is not mobilizing any armies. My father says John Lennon is an invader and it’s more like a cultural war. I wonder what he has planned for the record in the end, whether he’s going to break it in his hands in front of me or take it out one day and place it on the garden fire where it will melt down over the top of the weeds a bit like one of the early Beatles haircuts. But this time he’s obviously agreed to deal with this matter calmly. My mother has begun to change him and wants him to do things in the German way. She keeps saying that Stefan is coming to visit us soon and we’re all going to behave in a very different way from now on.

My father replaces John Lennon in the sleeve and takes out Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. He does all the usual things to keep the dust from interfering with the singing and then her voice comes through the room as if she was standing in the corner and you can actually see her chest lifting up every time she takes in a breath. I can see my mother becoming weightless, floating up above the chair with the music. Onkel Ted as well, all of them floating around the room with the ornaments and vases rising up from the
mantelpiece. My father keeps looking at me with a big smile on his face now, because he knows I like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and I can never deny that. When the record is finished, he stores it away again and turns towards me.

‘Now tell me,’ he says. ‘Which one do you think is better?’

‘You can’t expect him to give a free answer,’ my mother says.

Onkel Ted is there and nobody would dream of losing their temper or disagreeing with each other. My mother wants to put an end to the door-slamming war between me and my father and maybe we should take all the doors off the hinges for a while so we’ll
get
used to the idea that they are not there to make noise with. She starts talking about Stefan again because she can see trouble around the corner.

‘Stefan is coming,’ she said, but my father holds his hand up to stop her talking.

‘Honestly,’ he asks me once more. ‘With your hand on your heart, which do you think is the better music?’

Onkel Ted says it’s hard to make a choice between apples and pears if you like them both. My mother tries to make a joke and says it’s a pity we can’t hear them both singing together at the same time, doing harmonies.

‘What is your choice?’ my father demands.

I don’t want to barricade myself behind any song. I don’t want to think of music as war, but I still feel I have to defend John Lennon, because it’s my generation and I want to belong to new music that my father doesn’t listen to.

‘He’s half Irish,’ I say. ‘His mother is Irish.’

My father doesn’t know what to say to that. He knows I’m trying to give the wrong answer again and searches for
some hidden meaning to see if I’m deliberately insulting him.

‘Stefan is coming,’ my mother said. ‘Let’s be happy.’

‘John Lennon,’ I continue. ‘He’s an Irish singer actually. I know the songs are in English, but he’s really singing in the Irish language underneath.’

I know it’s a bit far-fetched and my father is blinking as if I’m pulling a trick on him. But I carry on telling him that even though John Lennon’s middle name is Winston, after Winston Churchill, he is still Irish underneath. He has the Irish language in his heart, even if he can’t speak it himself. But I’m no good at persuading my father. I can see him getting angry and he tells me to leave the room. So then I don’t care what he does with John Lennon any more because I’m angry myself and all I want to do now is get my own back on him. I get up to leave, but then I want to have the last word before I bang the door behind me.

‘He’s more Irish than Elisabeth Schwarzkopf,’ I say.

I can hear my mother pleading with him to leave it alone. But his footsteps are already thumping along the floor. He rips the door of the front room open again and comes limping out with my mother after him, saying Stefan would be arriving very soon and we didn’t want to have a bad atmosphere in the house. Onkel Ted is left standing in the front room, making the sign of the cross, but it’s having no effect.

I take flight into the breakfast room where my sisters are making a dress, hunched around a big pattern spread across the table. Ita and Bríd kneeling on the chairs helping Maria to connect up all the pieces of material. Their heads stuck together as if they all had the same sandy brown hair. They look up to see me running around the
table with my father right behind me, trying to swing his fist out, scattering the pieces of the dress in all directions. The table is too wide, so he picks up a ruler.

‘Come here,’ he shouts.

My sisters drop everything and escape out to the kitchen, so it’s only my father chasing me around the table now and my mother hanging on to him until he shakes her off.

‘Stefan, Stefan,’ she keeps repeating.