The Sailor in the Wardrobe Read Free Page A

her lungs instead of bad red air. Nightmares about my mother not being in the same country as us. At one time, my drawings were all full of pigs and chickens and farmers facing in one direction. All the smoke and all the flags were flying to the left until one night, when my mother discovered that she was the only person looking the other way, to the right. She told me to turn her around and then everything was fine, with all of us facing in the same direction, all in the same country again.
    There were so many nightmares in our house that my mother must have been up all night sometimes. As soon as one bad thing was down on paper, something new would get into our heads. The more we drew our nightmares, the more we made up new ones. There are night drawings of skeletons, snakes, spiders, lions, walls with eyes, doors with teeth, stairs with massive earthquake cracks opening up on our way to bed. We used up every monster there was, my mother says, and there could hardly be any more nightmares left for us, but still we invented more. And downstairs at night, I know myfather and mother were busy with their own nightmares. My father in the front room trying to write articles for the papers and thinking of new inventions that would make Ireland a better place. My mother in the kitchen at the back, putting her German secrets into her diary along with ours.
    It was the nightmare factory. Other families were obsessed with sport, or music, or practising Irish dancing. We grew up dreaming about things that happened and things that had not happened yet and things we wished had never happened. By drawing everything down on paper, we developed a special talent for inventing fears and nightmares. We became the nightmare artists.
    At some point we all started dreaming fire. A timber yard went up in flames in Dublin one night and you could see the firemen on ladders directing the water across the walls. An oil tanker on fire and the whole sea covered in flames. Trees on fire in Vietnam. Blazing cars in Northern Ireland. A man named Jan Palach set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square in Prague. My mother remembered seeing lots of things on fire with her own eyes in Germany during the war. She remembered the synagogue in Kempen on fire and no firemen helping to put it out. So then it was drawings of buildings on fire, prams on fire, a doll’s house on fire. Now it’s buses burning in Belfast and you think there’s almost no point in fixing anything down on paper any more, because it keeps coming back again and again on the TV every night, right in front of your eyes.
    All over the world, there is trouble on the streets now and trouble inside the houses. Civil rights demonstrations. People marching with placards and throwing stones at the police. At dinner, my father slaps his hand on thetable and says things are changing in Northern Ireland at last, things that were left unfinished for years. He points at the TV and says he can’t wait for the future when things will be just like they were in the old days before the British.
    You can see them throwing stones and petrol bombs at the police. Everybody talking about a place called the Bogside in Derry where the police were firing tear gas at the people in the street and you saw the crowd of protesters, some of them like cowboys with handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses, picking up the gas canisters and throwing them back. My father says it must be against the Geneva convention to use CS gas on people in the street, where there could be children and old people nearby with bad chests and lung conditions. At the battle of the Bogside, you saw them throwing petrol bombs down from the roof of the flats. The people of Derry were winning because the women start factories of petrol bombs and there was an endless supply that kept raining down onto the police. You saw a policeman on fire, screaming and kicking the flames away off his legs. Other policemen coming to help him, beating the fire off with