Hand in the Fire - Hugo Hamilton

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me and allowed a few of them to spin around the kitchen table. I had to stop the duck on a bike from falling over the edge. We got talking, because these toys were not sold in the shops here on safety grounds, because of the sharp metal parts, bits of blades bent over to hold them together. But they were still found in markets and shops all across Europe where I come from. For adults only. Parental guidance, that kind of thing. I promised her that if I was ever back home in the near future, I would buy her one to add to her collection.

      During the following week, I worked away at the shelving and began to discover a little more about the family. I’m not the kind of person who pries into other people’s business. I’m quite discreet. I do my work sort of blindfolded, you might say. But when you’re in somebody else’s house, you can’t help noticing things.

      In the bedroom, her stuff was all temporarily stored on the floor. It wasn’t just a wardrobe she was after but a place to keep her documents. They were stacked up on top of each other against the bay window in boxes and large envelopes and folders tied with ribbon. Bits of newspapers from another time. Photographs. Wedding albums. All the evidence of her life, which she possibly didn’t want to look at very often but slept with every night, alone in the same room. It was now exposed on the floor, waiting to be put away again as soon as I had the new wardrobe finished.

      I didn’t look at any of her personal things. I swear, it’s not like me to do that. But one evening, a bundle of letters fell down. The ribbon around them must have come undone and they were scattered all over the floor. It looked as if I was nosing through her stuff, and I had no option but to pick them up and put them back so they were in exactly the same order, as far as possible. Letters with her name on them. Rita Concannon. His mother came from the time of letters, before all the new technology took over. Even though she still looked quite young, the letters seemed to put her way back into an ancient era of handwriting and lots of time between things being sent off and delivered.

      The letters, I could not help noticing, were sent from England, all sealed, all unopened, all unread.

      What is it about letters in this country? I asked myself. An email or a phone message could be easily ignored. But letters seemed to have such substance. They were real. You could hold them in your hand, as I did, briefly. I wanted to know more about the person who sent them. I wondered if they had come from the absent father, the man who had excluded himself from the family. What terrible words did they contain and why were they never even opened? All those far-away things inside your head that can only be written down in a letter.

      What a cruel archivist she was to keep them unread. She was the perfectionist, I thought, storing these precious handwritten letters, gagged and sealed, with no right of reply.

      Anyone who lives in a foreign place must ask themselves that question all the time: Have they been forgotten? It made me wonder about myself. I was hoping that my presence here was not like this one-way correspondence, that I was not just a worker and that they would miss me, if I had to leave for some reason and not return again.

       7

      The Garda officers came looking for me on site around lunchtime. With all the other workers eating their take-away food and staring at me, they asked me to confirm my name and address. Was my real name Vid or Vim? Was I a Polish national? They suspected I was trying to conceal my identity and wanted to see my passport, evidence of my work permit, which I did not have with me at the time and which I agreed to provide as soon as possible. But they needed to see it immediately. They were polite and took me to my apartment and then on to the station for further questioning.

      At the station, they asked me to cast my mind back to a particular night and tell them whether I had been involved in an assault in which a man had been seriously injured. They gave me the date and the location and an approximate band of time in which the assault had taken place. They wanted to know about my movements on the night in question and asked me if I had made an anonymous phone call to a particular Garda station alerting them to the crime. They informed me that a man with a foreign accent like mine had reported seeing the victim lying in the street but then refused to identify himself. I told them I had not made any such call and that the incident had nothing to do with me.

      ‘That’s very strange,’ one of the officers said. They explained that the victim had claimed I was known to him, that we had met in a nearby bar on the night in question and that I had been seen in his company by several witnesses. It was reported that I had accosted his daughter and then subsequently, on the same night, assaulted him on his way home. He was recovering from multiple injuries, including a broken hip and a broken jaw. He was pressing charges against me, as well as another unknown Polish national who had yet to be identified.

      ‘Was it your friend who made the phone call?’ they wanted to know.

      They asked their questions too quickly for me to think. It was a shock to discover that I had become the main suspect. I had no idea what to say to them. I denied that I had assaulted anyone. They asked me if I needed legal aid, but I let them know that I was already fixed up with a lawyer, so they allowed me to make a call.

      Kevin arrived as soon as possible, dressed in a dark suit and carrying a brown case. He knew some of the officers and spoke to them in an informal way as though they were friends. He winked at me and we were given a chance to have a few words alone.

      ‘I know this is a bit of a shock, Vid,’ he said. ‘But listen, don’t worry. They’ll never get anywhere with this line of enquiry. They’re only groping around in the dark. You simply deny everything. You didn’t assault anyone. You have no recollection whatsoever of what they are alleging, am I right?’

      ‘I will have to tell the truth,’ I said. ‘I can’t lie.’

      ‘Nobody’s asking you to lie, Vid.’

      He smiled at me and placed his hand on my shoulder. It was good to see him. His presence brought a great surge of confidence back to me.

      I didn’t want to let him down either. He had stood by me. At last I had a friend and was beginning to feel at home here, so I couldn’t afford to lose that. But I felt so inadequate in front of the law. I was too honest. I didn’t have the knack of out-staring the questions and sneaking up on the facts. You had to be born with that kind of gift, like a good card player. I was a newcomer to the table, all nervous and unsure of myself, ready to bet everything on one hand and blurt out the unabridged truth.

      ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ he reminded me. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’

      ‘I’m afraid they will turn everything around with their questions.’

      ‘You don’t even have to say yes or no.’

      He seemed so relaxed, slipping his phone in and out of his inner pocket to check messages. His sandy hair fell naturally across the corner of his forehead. His nose leaned a tiny degree to the right and his smile moved across with it, very openhearted, I thought.

      ‘They’re asking me who I was with that night,’ I said.

      ‘I know what you’re talking about, Vid.’ He nodded calmly. ‘But the fact is, you don’t remember anything, am I right in saying that? You have a very poor memory, isn’t that so? You were involved in a bad car accident back home in Serbia. You sustained head injuries which caused severe brain trauma. With the result that you are now left with bouts of prolonged amnesia.’

      ‘That’s right,’ I said.

      ‘Show them the scar on your head,’ he said. ‘You suffer from memory loss, short term as well as long term. You have big gaps where you cannot remember much about growing up. Nothing about school, not even much about your own family.’

      ‘Well, yes.’

      ‘You can hardly remember where you come from, isn’t that so?’

      ‘Just about.’

      ‘Explain that to them,’ he said. ‘Make it

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