The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton

Author:Hugo Hamilton [Hamilton, Hugo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007380237
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

My father took over the Kinderzimmer. That’s the room we play in and keep our toys in, the room most people call the dining room. It’s the room with the mashed potato still on the ceiling. Now my father says he’s going to start a new factory and he needs a place where he can make things. First of all he built a workbench in one corner that’s so heavy it can never be moved again. It has a vice at one end and lots of space underneath for spare pieces of wood that might be needed later. Then he made a press on the wall where he could hang up lots of tools like chisels and a saw and a wooden mallet. And before you start buying anything like wood or glue or screws, before you even start measuring and sawing, you have to have an idea. You have to draw a plan.

My father has great ideas for things that are badly needed in Ireland, like Wägelchen. They have lots of them in Germany, my mother says, but none in Ireland. So he drew a picture of one that looked just like a box with lots of measurements. He can see it in his head. He can see exactly what it will look like when it’s finished, a German boxcar with stickers of forests and mountains and fairy tales stuck on to the sides. He calls it the prototype and we’re allowed to watch while he works every evening after he comes home.

‘Is it for us?’ Maria asks.

‘Yes and no.’

‘Is it for Ireland?’

‘Yes and no.’

He keeps frowning as he works. He has to concentrate hard and you can see the tip of his tongue coming out the side of his mouth. He says you have to measure everything twice because you can only cut once. Then you see the sawdust falling on the floor like snow. You see wooden curls falling like blond hair. There are some thin, cut-off pieces of wood, too, that look like swords for us to fight with. Sometimes you can hear him whistling a tune as he works every night until it’s very late. Even long after we go to bed you can still hear the sound of the hand-drill squeaking and sometimes the mallet banging, until my mother goes into the Kinderzimmer to put her arm around him and tell him the world wasn’t made in one day either and there’s plenty of time tomorrow. But he still wants to finish one more little thing and after that it’s quiet again with everyone asleep.

One night he was working so late it was after midnight. You could hear him sanding all the time and it sounded like he was telling everyone to be quiet.

‘Shish … Shish … Shish …’ he kept saying.

Then there was a smell of paint in the whole house that was nicer than any other smell in the world. And in the morning when we got up, the first Wägelchen was

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