Free The Sailor in the Wardrobe by Hugo Hamilton Page A

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, thatyou 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.

Seven
    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 finallytouching 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