Hand in the Fire - Hugo Hamilton

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      When I stopped working there she said she was not surprised that I would break her heart and walk away, it was the story of her life. She invited me for a farewell drink. We met in a pub close by and she seemed older out of uniform, or younger, it was hard to say. More motherly, perhaps, and also more fragile, more like a girl. Sitting with her coat on and her handbag beside her, she stirred her vodka and tonic with a plastic stick and did all the talking, because I had nothing to say and didn’t know what questions to ask. She placed her mobile phone on the table beside her drink and watched it for a while to see if it would ring. She started crying and I could not work out what to do in a situation like that where she was not my mother or my sister. She ended up putting her hand on my arm to comfort me instead. She opened her handbag, searching for a tissue to wipe her tears, but then produced a letter which she asked me to read.

      Dear Bridie, it said, it is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter.

      It was written by her fiancé around thirty years earlier. I read it slowly all the way through, moving my lips across every word. He was breaking it off with her, so I gathered. They were intended to get married. The date had been set for the wedding and the families notified. At the last minute, he changed his mind and explained that he was not ready for it, because he was still drinking too much. He was not fit to be married to her. He didn’t deserve her love and the only thing left for him to do was to leave the country and emigrate to America.

      I suppose each country has its own rules for love and dishonesty. Different ways of disappearing and walking away from the past. Different measurements for loneliness and happiness. I wanted to track down the man who wrote the letter and tell him that he had made the biggest mistake of his life. But it was no longer possible to intervene because time had turned us all into distant observers.

      She told me that she had a baby shortly after he left, but that she had been persuaded to give it up for adoption. She had tried to make contact with her son in recent years, but he had not wished to meet her. She asked me if I thought he would be good looking and intelligent, so I said yes, of course. She wanted to know if he might have red hair like her and then she answered all her own questions, assuring herself that her boy was happy in his new family and better off not looking back. Even though he was grown up by now, living his own life, she still spoke of him as a baby. Staring straight into my eyes, she said she hoped he turned out a bit like me, in fact, which made me think of myself as her son, promising to do my best.

      She’d been holding on to the farewell letter ever since, refusing to get off the bus at the terminus, dreaming back and forth along the same route for ever.

      ‘Go for it,’ she said to me, putting the letter back into her handbag. I wondered if these were the exact same words she had spoken to her fiancé, just to be big-hearted and to make sure they parted as friends with no hard feelings. She pushed me with her elbow, unable to sit beside me any longer. Then she stood up to embrace me.

      ‘Come back and see me sometime.’ She smiled through red eyes. Then she sat down and looked at her phone to see if anyone had left a message. She waved with both hands and told me to take care of myself, so I walked out the door, away across the street, not even watching for the traffic on the wrong side of the road, as though it was impossible for me to get killed.

       3

      To be honest, I never expected to meet him again. The city was full of carpenters, so it was a surprise to get the call early one evening saying he wanted to discuss a small job at his mother’s house. What was even more strange was the urgency. We had to meet right away. And then it was all quite informal, with no clear lines between work and friendship. Normally you keep those things separate, so I thought. You might go for a drink after the job is finished, if everybody is happy. But he started everything in reverse. He wanted to go for a drink even before I had time to prepare a proper estimate.

      By then I was working full time for a small building company. My plan eventually was to get into business on my own, so I was happy to take on small jobs in my spare time. I had got to know a Lithuanian carpenter by the name of Darius who had his own workshop and a van. My own range of tools was very limited and he lent me some of his whenever I needed them.

      Kevin picked me up and brought me over to his mother’s house. A beautiful, spacious family home on a terraced street leading down to the sea, not far from the nursing home where I had worked. It was clearly in need of some repair and as he parked the car, he called it Desolation Row, after one of his mother’s favourite songs.

      He left me standing in the kitchen while he went upstairs calling his mother. But then she came in from the back garden wearing gloves and holding a pair of shears in her hand, looking at me as though I had just broken in and couldn’t find my way out again.

      ‘And who are you, if I may ask?’

      The confusion was soon cleared up when he reappeared and introduced us. She took her gloves off to shake my hand.

      ‘Vid Ćosić,’ he said and she repeated the name slowly: Choz-itch.

      Next thing we were standing upstairs in his mother’s bedroom, talking about fitted wardrobes. I asked her what she had in mind and she mentioned black ash.

      ‘Black ash,’ I said, trying to warn them off with a smile. ‘In a bedroom. Might end up looking a bit like a funeral parlour.’

      There was silence in the room. I had said something wrong. His mother sighed like a slashed tyre. She wore a very serious expression and perhaps she was in mourning, I thought to myself. In fact she hardly smiled even once during the meeting.

      ‘Black ash is very dignified,’ Kevin said, helping me out.

      ‘Of course,’ I said, as soon as I realised my mistake. ‘It depends on how it’s done. Like, what kind of ash were you thinking of, veneer or solid ash, stained?’

      I thought it was a travesty putting any kind of fitted wardrobes into a room like this. It was an old period house and they would never look right. But that’s something you learn after a while. You couldn’t be honest. You had to make allowances for taste and be prepared to say that black ash was an elegant choice, even when it was the most revolting material you ever had the misfortune to work with. Besides, there was no changing her mind. She had seen something in a magazine. Floor to picture rail in black ash veneer was what she wanted.

      They must have known I would be very competitive, because they didn’t seem to have anyone else in mind for the job. The cost was not much of an issue, or the timescale. I made it clear to them that I could only take it on in my spare time.

      ‘I’ll need a bit up front for the materials,’ I said.

      ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘How much?’

      ‘I’ll have to price the stuff and get back to you.’

      ‘Just let me know.’

      ‘Fair enough,’ I said, because that seemed like a good, neutral sort of phrase to me.

      And that was it. He was already rushing me away to the nearest pub for a drink. While he was waiting for his girlfriend to turn up and go to dinner with him, he filled me in on his mother’s personality. You could see that he admired her and also feared her a little, like a schoolboy. She was a schoolteacher, he explained, so you had to earn your smiles. She could be a bit severe at times, but she was actually very funny underneath the exterior, so he claimed. Quite street wise, too.

      He gave an example which sounded more like a warning. His mother had been attacked in the street recently by a junkie who was after her handbag. She managed to distract him by saying the next thing that came into her head. ‘They knocked down the wall,’ she said. Her attacker looked all around in confusion. Who? What wall? By then he had completely forgotten about the handbag and fled empty-handed.

      ‘Don’t worry,’ Kevin assured me. ‘You’ll get on great with her.’

      It

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