Dublin Palms. Hugo Hamilton

Birmingham. It rings out onto the porch, as far as the white picket fence. Her mother has just left the house, on her way to the courthouse square to meet her friend. She puts on her sunglasses getting into the car. The lake has no meaning for her, the sunlight is full of scorn, the glare of things she wants to forget.

      The day is hot, the cicadas are deafening. There is a child cycling along the sidewalk, in and out of brightness under the trees, making a soft tapping sound along the concrete slabs. The neighbours are gradually moving a little further along their lives each time the child comes back around – a man gardening, a woman on the porch with ice cubes ringing, blue shouts coming from a swimming pool.

The town is calm and polite. They drive slowly, they speak with caution, they call her by her first name, she gets invited to parties where people eat with their hands and it’s all paper plates and paper cups of wine and women standing around in shorts. A town where she first turned up in sweltering Donegal tweed and sang a song that brought the house down. The town by the lake where students drive themselves to school. Where the hairdresser has a swimming pool. Where the judge will be seen having coffee with the local electrician, there is no difference between people only what you have.

      Helen’s mother has attached herself to this Canadian town like a story made up out of nothing. She has turned her back on Birmingham. The city in which her children almost disappeared. The city of fog. Fog loitering in the streets. The sound of coughing and cars starting at night. The headlights of a bus pointing through a dense grey curtain, the doorbell ringing and the fog slowly coming up the stairs.

      The world is full of things that have not happened.

      Helen gave up trying to phone her mother and came back in. We sat on the floor in the front room. The curtains were left open. Her face was gold. Her eyes were green. Her hair was copper with the light coming in off the street.

      Was it wrong to feel lucky?

      We ate some of the leftover pancakes. We drank two bottles of Guinness each. We made love. The dog next door was barking. The people upstairs were laughing. The buses stopped running. I got up to check on the children. I stood watching them for a while with the light from the hallway across their faces. The force of them asleep was greater than all their time awake.

My silence has become unbearable. There is a forest growing inside. Trees springing up in the kitchen, trees in the hallway, around the bed, roots running under the green carpet into the front room. The curtains have a pattern of falling leaves, the entire back wall of the house looks like open country with nothing but silence.

      My mother tells me that she was in hospital once. It was in Düsseldorf, she says, during the war. She started bleeding, maybe this is difficult for her to explain. She doesn’t tell me what exactly happened, only that she could not stop bleeding and was taken to hospital.

      In the room next door to her, she says, there was a man who kept screaming at night. He was a soldier, he had been stationed in the east. He was brought back injured, but the doctors could find nothing wrong with him, no medical explanation for his pain. He experienced terrible stomach cramps which made him vomit, he could not eat a thing. He crawled along the floor, he lay curled up in the corridor, the nurses had to lift him up and carry him back to his room. They said it might have been shell shock. He was more frightened than wounded, he couldn’t sleep, his arms and legs were shaking.

One night, he started talking, other patients in rooms off the same corridor could hear him speaking in a raised voice to one of the nurses, she was holding his hand. He had been commanded to a place on the outskirts of a small town. It was on the edge of a forest. Soldiers in his regiment had been given the job of clearing the town, separating women from their children. The women were rounded up into a small group of about thirty or forty. They kept looking back at the children from whom they had been separated, but the soldiers continued to push them towards a ravine. One of the children broke free and ran after the group of mothers but was held back. The child fell.

      There was a soldier filming all of this with a moving camera, the man said.

      The story went around the ward in a shocked whisper. The man was given an injection to calm him down. He continued speaking a while longer, then he was quiet. He was said to be delusional. Before the night was out, he was gone, his bed was vacant. The nurse said he had been discharged. There was no more talking, no more whispering, the story disappeared. My mother brought it to Ireland with her.

      The dental practice is across the street from the former veterinary surgery. The waiting room is still in use as a dining room, a table and chairs for eight people, magazines like place mats. In the corner, there is a cabinet full of crockery, a porcelain teapot. Above the fireplace, a large picture of a turf boat with dark brown sails.

      The surgery is in the living room, to the front, facing onto the main street. The dentist speaks to me at first in the native language, then he switches back to English. He’s from the North, from Derry. He smiles and flicks his head to one side as he speaks. He whispers to himself while he examines the X-ray, my ghost mouth.

He wants to know what is causing the trouble. I tell him I have no idea. The slightest thing can set it off, the air, the ground, the street, the sound of my own feet in my mouth. He asks me if I have been clenching my teeth, grinding in my sleep. He gives me a gum shield. I sleep like a boxer for a couple of weeks, but it makes no difference. Back in the chair again. He begins to single out one of the upper molars on the left. He undertakes the required root-canal treatment. It involves many repeat visits, lots of drilling, I take several days off work, I go back some weeks later and he puts in the crown.

      The buses stop right outside the surgery. Passengers upstairs get a good look at me lying back with my mouth wide open and the light shining across my face. The sight must fill them with horror. The dentist reaching into my mouth with his fingers. My hands gripping the armrests.

      I hear the dental assistant speaking to him softly in the background, handing over instruments I don’t want to see. Everything feels so enlarged. His rubber gloves make a squeaking sound against my teeth. He asks me questions he can only answer himself, all I can do is consent with a crow sound at the back of my throat.

      When he’s finished, he removes the rubber gloves and says I should have no more trouble. He flicks his head to the side and apologises for not fixing the problem sooner. He refuses to take any money. I try to pay him, but he tells me to go. He smiles and says the tooth is dead, it’s beyond pain – come back to me if you feel anything.