It was clear that I was never really cut out for security work. I was a bit of a walkover. I didn’t have the confidence of an enforcer. What I really wanted was to get into carpentry, even boat building, if possible, but there is no such work available. It was just a dream really. The best I could hope for was some kind of restoration work on old boats. In the meantime, I was glad to make any contacts that might get me into the building trade.
The nursing home was administered by nuns in brown habits, though they didn’t take part in day-to-day caring any more. Those duties were carried out by lay nursing staff. The few nuns that were left over came out from their residence early in the morning to walk the grounds with their headgear blowing vertically in the wind. I got to know one of the nurses on night duty. Her name was Bridie and she had red hair. She was much older than me, in her fifties, but she kept winking and calling me the love of her life. She would laugh out loud and repeat a few of the things I said, not just the accent but the vocabulary. She said I sometimes sounded like a letter from the bank, using words like ‘complete’ and ‘commence’ and ‘with regard to’, words I picked up from the newspapers and which were not suited to everyday use.
‘I’m going to commence laughing,’ she would say.
It took me a while to get the hang of the ordinary words. At first I couldn’t see any difference between start and commence. My sentences must have sounded more like translations, asking people if there was any rumour of work going for a carpenter.
The problem at the nursing home was not so much people breaking in as people breaking out. The ‘inmates’, as Bridie called them, had no valuables to speak of, only books and pictures of their families, packets of shortcake, tins of exotic mints and butterscotch. The rooms all smelled of apple cores and rubber sheets, sometimes banana and leather. There was no alcohol allowed on the premises and some of the patients were going mad with abstinence. One night the dog caught an old retired doctor by the name of Geraghty trying to sneak away across the lawn. He had no socks on and his shoelaces were undone. He stood with his hands up, pleading with me, saying that he had permission to go to the pub. What could I do? I tied his shoelaces for him and let him go. Some time later, Nurse Bridie came down to raise the alarm and he was eventually found sitting on a seafront bench, singing to the waves.
The ground-floor windows were fitted with special bolts after that. Then Geraghty asked me to buy him a half-bottle of whisky and Nurse Bridie knew I was responsible. She came down to the office and sat on my lap, putting her hands around my throat, pretending to strangle me. Doctor Geraghty had run amok through the corridors upstairs with his clothes off, declaring love to every woman in the place. He had forced his way into one of the rooms and refused to leave, hanging on to the metal bed end where a terrified woman sat up with the blankets under her chin, asking for a mirror so that she could fix her hair. When I went upstairs to help escort him back to his room, he turned on me. He could not remember that it was me who had given him the whisky. I took hold of his arm and he went from being drunk and spongy to being rigid and defensive. I was surprised by his strength as he ripped his arm away and stared at me with stony eyes, full of anger or only joking, I wasn’t quite sure at first.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘Where are you from? You have no right to interfere in my business.’
‘Now, now, Doctor,’ Bridie said in a firm voice.
Then she led him away quickly, no nonsense, just by sheer willpower and authority. Within minutes she had him back in bed, kissed the top of his bald head and told him to be a good boy. I could never imagine having that command over people here. I had no way of telling an old man what to do in his own country. I was like a child ordering the adults to go to sleep.
Most of the patients drank tea all day and couldn’t sleep at night. One old woman came down to see me regularly and Nurse Bridie told me to ‘go along’ with her. Which turned out to be good advice in general. The woman was dressed elegantly in a green cape and drooping earrings, ready to go out to the theatre, so she claimed. The only thing out of place was that it was well after two in the morning and she was wearing slippers. She asked me to call a taxi and I pretended to do that, lifting up the phone and dialling an imaginary number, speaking to an imaginary person on the other end of the line.
I suppose you could say that everyone is an actor, to a certain degree, but I sometimes found it hard to enter into the character I had been given to play here. I was still learning the lines, while everybody around me seemed so sure of their roles. They were born for the part.
I couldn’t help being myself most of the time.
While the woman in slippers waited for the taxi, she produced a silver cigarette box from her handbag, telling me that it belonged to her father who had fought in the War of Independence. She asked me to place my index finger into an indent left by a bullet. But for that cigarette case, she said, her father would have been killed as a young man and she would never have been born. Holding the silver case in my hand, I thought of the man whose life it saved. I could even imagine the night of the ambush as if it happened only recently in my own country, when the war was going on. The faces hidden in the grass. The empty landscape. The well-chosen bend in the road. The hours of boredom and the clothes of men stinking like soup after rain. All the imaginary noises in the distance until the sound of the real truck driven by enemy soldiers came along at last with headlights stabbing across the bog. The fear vibrating in the turf and, eventually, the crack of shots and the shouts of men and unforgettable silence after it was over. Men lying dead on the road and the echo of gunfire still singing in the brown bog pools for weeks and months, even now.
As she placed the cigarette box back into her bag, she revealed that her father was not the kind of person who owned a cigarette case, let alone a full packet of cigarettes. He had taken it from a dead British officer after an ambush. He had inherited the charm of the silver cigarette case and passed it on, like so many other monuments left behind in this country from that time, so she told me, like the railway tracks and the granite harbours and the obelisk in the shape of a ‘witch’s hat’ on the hill which was built for no reason during the famine times.
My first history lesson. I was grateful to her for it. It gave me the feeling of belonging here, a feeling of friends and enemies going back a long time. It made me think I had lived here all my life, with uncles and aunts talking about me and waiting to hear from me. You can read as many history books as you like about this country, but it all sounds like fiction unless you have something tangible to link it up to.
The taxi never came. As she got up to leave, she told me it was nice to have got the chance to meet me. The next time she came down, she had no idea that we had met before, which allowed me to pretend I never heard her story and I could be welcomed all over again.
More often it was Nurse Bridie who came down to get away from the ‘insatiable maniacs upstairs’, as she put it. I recognised the squeak of her white shoes on the floor. She sat down and tried hard to get me to talk. She asked me why I had come to Ireland and what dark secrets did I have hidden behind my eyes. She wanted to know if there was anything I missed about home, apart from the weather and the cakes. She wanted to know if I had a girlfriend, and when I shook my head, she didn’t believe me.
‘You’re so innocent,’ she said to me a number of times, which made me think I was completely transparent.
She told me lots of things about the nuns in Ireland. She said they were savages, most of them. She had gone to school with the sisters of ‘no mercy’. She said the nuns had always employed the most vulnerable. There was a young boy working in the kitchens who got a pot of boiling chip oil spilled over him. ‘You should have heard him screaming,’ she said. ‘Blisters the size of cups on his neck. When they tried to remove his shirt, the skin came off like red silk lining. Mass. That’s what they offered him as compensation.’ Then she warned me to leave before it was too late.
‘Get out before they pour boiling oil on you.’
She blew me a kiss each time, just as a joke. Then I heard her shoes squeaking away again. I knew there was a sadness being suppressed by