Read Online The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton - Free Book Online Page B

could not trust us to count right. He came back inside with a pink piece of paper covered with black fingerprints and asked my mother to sign her name. That was to make sure she agreed that there was no mistake in the counting and that nobody ran away with one of the empty sacks. But there could be no mistake because we counted out loud in German and the man counted the empty sacks in English, and it was the same number no matter what language.

Eight
    My mother has to go home to Kempen and we can’t go with her. She’s on the phone in the front room crying and speaking in a loud voice to Germany and we’re outside the door listening until she comes out with shadows around her eyes. She says she has to go away for a while. So then we have to stay in the house with the yellow door where they speak no Irish and no German, only English. My mother lays everything out on the bed for us and packs it into a bag. We get up very early in the morning when it’s still dark outside and the light in the bedroom is so bright that you can’t look at it. It’s cold, too, and Franz is standing on the bed in his underpants, shivering and singing a long note with his teeth clacking. I’m able to put my shirt on by myself but I can’t do the buttons because my fingers are soft. My mother is in a hurry and she pinched my neck when she was doing up the top button, but she said sorry and then it’s time to go. It’s still dark outside on the street and you can blow your breath out like smoke. It’s still dark when we get on the bus and still dark when we come up to the yellow door and then I can’t walk because my legs are soft. I have a limp in both legs and I hold on to my mother’s coat because I don’t want to emigrate and live in a different country from her.
    I don’t know where Germany is. I know it’s far awayfrom Ireland because you can’t go there on the bus, you can only look at it on the map. I know there was the First World War and the Second World War and the second would not have happened without the first. I know the Germans wanted to have an empire and that wasn’t allowed. The goat wanted to have a long tail but only got a short one, my mother says, whenever we want something that we can’t have.
    I don’t like the house with the yellow door. I don’t like the room with the toilet and ten potties hanging on the wall. I don’t like the smell of the brown rubber sheet on the bed and I don’t like the smell of custard. The house with the yellow door and the yellow custard is a place where you wait for your mother to come back and sometimes you hear other children crying on the stairs because they’re waiting too. Franz would not eat the custard or go to the toilet. He closed his mouth and said he would never open it again for the rest of his life. The nurse tried to pretend that the spoon was a train going into his mouth, but he shook his head and turned away. He could only eat and go to the toilet in German. So my father had to come and bring him to the toilet. I closed my mouth and refused to speak because the nurse would not say goodbye to the moon. I said she was from a different country and then my father had to come another time and give the nurse the word for moon in Irish.
    I know that my mother’s father, Franz Kaiser, owned a stationery shop in the town of Kempen and nobody had any money to buy anything, so he had to close it down. But that didn’t stop him making jokes and playing tricks on people just to see the look on their faces. My mother says he was famous for all the funny things he did because he always made up for it afterwards. One day in the KranzCafe he stuck his finger into a doughnut and held it up in the air to ask how much it cost, just to see the look on their faces when he said it was too expensive. But then he bought all of them, one each for my mother and her four sisters and one each for all the other children he could find on the market square.
    One day he played a trick on