That

She tried to speak, to defend herself, she tried to cower, but another slap would take the words from her mouth. She tried desperately to get away, but he held her arm so tight he bruised often the skin on either side of her elbow. She fought to get her free arm to her thigh, to defend the skin, and she tried to free her other arm from the grip he held. Her body doubled over, her head went near his crotch. She would twist again if that failed, pushing her head against his chest, her body turned into him, doing everything she could do to protect her skin from the blows, trying with all her strength to get her legs as far away from his hands as possible. 

“Who do you think are talking to anyone like that? Huh? You have to learn what respect is, and if this is the only way you’ll ever learn then hell slap it into ya! I’ll not be talked to like you talk to yer mammy, d’ya hear me?”

He never went for her head. He always went for the legs, for the sting and that satisfying popping sound that skin makes on skin when you hit it just right.

She twisted and turned and flayed and tried to beg him to stop, often ripping her clothes as she tried desperately to pull away. The next scream truncated the one previous as it blasted from her mouth, peppering the air with spit and sweat and snot and silence then noise. He found a way around her every time. He would pull her arm down sharply, turning her with the force created. Often he would get his body beside hers, his torso over her back, his left arm around her waist, from above, her body held in position by his left knee. That way she was defenceless – open at the back for a girl with a school skirt on – like he had her over his knee in a standing position. That way both her hands were free, but the grip he had was unbreakable and that was how he liked it, that was the position he wanted. All Martina could do then was tear at his trousers or reach out to Mum if she could see her in the room. Or she would just take it once more.

We did nothing. We could do nothing but stare. He was unstoppable when he was like that. Drunk or sober and spoiling for a fight, Martina or Pepper were going to get it, sure as the sun would rise the next morning over the roofs in Blackthorn Park. 

Every beating lasted a good five minutes, and they never eased. Martina struggled until the end, even if she did accept what was happening, and I knew in my heart that her struggling meant that she never became used to the pain, no matter how often or how hard Dad laid into her. She always fought. When Dad eventually let go she would run screaming and crying from the room, but he always got a slap or two in as she was running through the living room doorway, or at the bottom of the stairs. 

At Night, No Shadows, No Sounds

As the last of the night minutes crept slowly into the first of the day minutes the fear would leave us a little, and we would go to our rooms and play our new singles on the record player, keeping the volume wheel at a tinny 2 or less. With the lights off, the music so low we could barely make out the metallic voice emanating from the single speaker, our father slumbering downstairs, Mum getting ready for bed and the girls already retreated from fear and now dreaming, Brendan and I lay on our beds and watched the street. Four streetlamps illuminated the stretch of the street we could see from the window, but nothing lit up the garages; skewed toe-pointers had sent footballs smashing into the streetlights just once too often for the borough council to replace them. The substation was pitch-black, the longest, darkest parts of the alleys the same. The garages were quiet, the sub-station might quietly hum if the wind was right, the alley-ways were quiet, and the only sounds that late on would be couples walking home from bars, or cars driving past on Woodburn Avenue, or vulturous children picking dry the bones of some old dead car somewhere behind us in Blackthorn Park. We listened and watched until the early day minutes became the early day hours, the tinny voices of Africa Bambataa or Adam Ant our only comfort. We slept when dawn broke. 

For The Cause

The morning air filled with the remainder of last night’s laundry drying over the fireguard; the smell of the breakfasts; coal freshly retrieved from the shed; cigarette smoke; the waxy, sweet and heady smell of paraffin, and the songs of death and axes on the radio. Una got to the bathroom first, after Dad, and only because Anne-Marie’s search for a bra and socks took her on a journey around the four corners of the house. Often she might end up squeezing herself into a half-dry bra plucked reluctantly from the side of the fireguard or the pile of laundry in the dining room. And there were screams more days than enough when heated metal clasps burned her cold skin. When searching for her missing clothes she let the family know of her frustration in short, blunted outbursts.

“Can’t find friggin’ bras. Was one here last night, friggin’ gone this morning. Bra! Skirt! Blouse! All gone, disappeared overnight. Friggin’ gone now wherever they are!” Her movements mirrored her outbursts, being as they were erratic and rarely useful to their purpose. She rarely did search fully: she did nothing more than frantically move clothing, so finding a garment was always a happy accident, but an accident nonetheless. And her finds were rarely greeted as triumphs. “Right at the bottom of the pile, last frigging place I’d look, of course. Who the hell put it there?” She would continue, “Blouse! Need a blouse. From now on Mum leave my bloody bras on the fireguard where I can find them in the mornings. Lost bloody blouses. Friggin’ bras too. Can’t find frigging anything around here! Where’s my bloody blouse? Where?”

“Well, why don’t you do your own washing from now on then, my girl, then you’ll not lose anything, will you?” snapped Dad.

“Everything else is here except my stuff. Bras! Blouses! Gone! Bloody hell!”

“Well, I didn’t move them. Ask yer Mammy where she put them. Go on. She’ll tell you she put them right here with everything else, won’t she? Aye. She will.”

“Then why’re they not friggin’ here then? Huh?”

“Well no one else had them, did they? Huh? D’ya think we have elves and goblins that steal just your clothes? Well?”

When the elves and goblins stole Anne-Marie’s clothes they forever took them to the same place, the place where she found all her lost garments: the mythical land of The Last Place You’d Ever Look.

I stayed in bed until I heard her scream; when the hot clasp of a half-dried bra burned her skin with the two-eyelet brand, that’s how I knew the worst was over, the bras and blouses had been found, and that everyone was good and ready. When you hear your sister scream you know it’s six o’clock in the morning and time to get up, wash your face in the cold water, and get ready for toast and sausages and waxy heat and death and unemployment, followed by a hearty run the full length of The Hollies and the top half of the Woodburn Road pushing a heavy silver car guided one-handed by a bad-tempered heavy man hopping alongside, cursing into the morning air everything and everyone under the sun.

Dad was first to the car for only he could get it started, and he struggled with it those mornings, cursing silently under his breath, at first. We had to push the car down the street, silently, careful not to wake the neighbours, and by the time Dad got the car started we were halfway to the bus stop. Every morning he cursed and swore, but he held back the worst words because he knew Una was there, and she could tell the educated Aunt Kathleen what words Uncle Arthur used of a morning. Those who wore skirts were excused the trials of pushing the car on the side with the exhaust. As irregularly as regularly the car backfired, spewing filth, hot liquid, and black smoke into the crisp, pristine morning air. Pushing the car on the exhaust side was my duty. By the time we boarded the bus to school, both Anne-Marie and I had been scalded by something red hot. By Friday my blazer and trousers reeked of exhaust fumes, my hands turned soot-black and smoky-smelling if I rubbed them on my trousers, and my fingers stained pages in my books as I sat before the shrine to the Virgin Mother in Saint Malachy’s College quad, envisioning my glorious priesthood or my incredible plate-making career, seeing myself enjoying the salubrious lifestyle that work brought a man. 

At night, after dinner, we sat and waited on Dad coming home. If he was any later than his usual time we would start to worry because – we had ourselves convinced – someone had mugged him or killed him, or he was in the pub getting drunk, or there had been a terrible accident on the way home, and the parents of the child he had killed were on their ways to hound us out of our home, our house. “Kill the Drunken Fenian Child Murderer!” they would chant. “Kill the Drunken Fenian Child Murderer!” If he was a half hour late I would go to my room to peek out the window and beyond the Foley’s house and the green, and whisper to myself, “Come home, Dad. Please come home.” We loved him, we did. We wanted no harm to come to our Dad. Standing at that window I would be the first to see him coming round the corner, on to Woodburn Avenue, then into The Hollies. If he came that way he had been to The Brown Cow, and somewhere along the route home he had parked the Hillman Hunter and jumped behind the wheel of the Shredded Wheat truck. 

It took only a few months of working the carparks for my Dad to need a drink after work on weekday work nights. I wished I had the guts to say something to him for making the family worry every night he was late, and all because he wanted his Guinness or his whiskey. But he did what he did, and if his hand went up, palm forward, then you needed to shut your mouth, or else. That was the end of the argument. The end of the argument was absolute, and always in his favour, so there was no sense in trying.

Still, if he drove round that corner it meant that he had avoided or survived being mugged by the Proud Fenians in the Markets, and seeing him meant he was alive and not lying in the morgue or on a gurney in the Royal Victoria Hospital with blood pouring from his head, his pockets and his bosses’ pockets both empty. At night, after we had gone to bed, he closed the living room door – pushing it until the paint creaked against paint, just to be sure – and he would spill his guts to Mum about the people who had tried to mug him that day, or those who had cornered him in his tiny kiosk in the Markets. Every morning the newsreaders spoke of events overnight in the Markets area of Belfast, a place where serious sectarian trouble occurred nightly. Besides the countless murders there were the car bombs, or burned-out cars found abandoned in the area, decaying into playgrounds for vulturous children. Scenes of Crime Officers removed other charred cars – and their expired contents – to examine them minutely. The terrorists burned their getaway cars to destroy evidence, and many of those blackened shells littered the Markets. Being a Catholic area of the city, I thought it peculiar that Catholic thugs were mugging my Catholic Dad, but that was how it was when the people fighting for your freedoms and dying for your rights needed your money for their beer money and gun money, when Noraid – the Irish-American foundation supporting the Republican cause from a base 3000 miles distant, whose members had the audacity to walk home drunk and careless while their charitable donations morphed into shrapnel in British and Irish hearts – when that charity found itself frustrated in its fundraising efforts, then any Catholic victim was as good as any Protestant victim. Money had to come from somewhere. It rarely mattered who you were: if you had money on you and the IRA felt it was better in their hands to further the cause of the poor, poor Catholics, then just you be prepared to hand it over, for the cause. Either that or you’ll get a gun in your face, or your kneecaps blown off, a choice all too often not afforded the victim, and all for the cause. They might call an ambulance before shooting you but only if you could prove your status as a Fenian, a brother. “Say the Hail Mary, fella, and we’ll make sure you’re looked after, what about that? Huh? Get you seen to soon enough, eh? Heh-Heh-Heh!” As you laid down face-first on the eternally wet alleys running off any Belfast carpark, the man behind you – fighting for your rights – would cock his gun and ready himself to spend a bullet or two in the effort to free Mother Ireland, by emptying your pockets and reimbursing you by filling your knees with Noraid-funded lead.

Alphonse & Mirabelle; RIP

Catholic Carrickfergus, like the town itself, held no surprises. Every week the families of the parish took to the same pews they had taken to from time immemorial, when their parents and grandparents sat a layer of paint or two closer to the cold naked stone. It was impossible to lose friends in the healthy but dwindling crowd. Old Paddy McGuire sat at the back casually and noisily clearing his throat and then spitting the contents of his mouth behind the radiator below the eighth Station of The Cross, Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem. With his walking cane, old clothes, jar-bottom glasses and white hairs in odd places on his face he was maybe too old and maybe too stubborn or maybe too set in his ways for the tortured women of the parish - who did the work for the Lord in His house, without thanks or payment or smiles for dirty-faced children - to admonish.   

We sat near the middle, in the pews to the right, but only if Mum got the four of her children fed, watered, washed, dressed and down the road in time: the mile walk down Woodburn Avenue on to Woodburn Road and Ellis Street took us twenty minutes on a good day. If we were late we took to the back seats - always on the right - far from God and the splendour of the Tabernacle of The Holy Plaster Shower, and a long walk to the communion rail, which we came to know as The Finish Line. Once there it was all nearly over. If we were really late we had to stand in the polished porch, disgraced and even further from Him, His treacherous tabernacle and the communion rail. 

Regardless of where we stood or sat we knew where to see the Hall family on our left, or the Deignan sisters - all as tall and quiet and dignified as the stained-glass windows themselves - sitting a row or two in front of us, their youngest daughter’s swarthy skin and tight black hair an indication of their dedication to the cause of the poor: not every family could afford to adopt a Black Baby from a famished country, but they had. The Deignan parents looked perpetually proud and strong, but those are, perhaps, the only qualities a child can discern from faces that remained unsmiling and tight-jawed and provincially Catholic. They used the tight faces to maintain a certain serenity for themselves and an unspoken rein over the girls, even if I thought oftentimes that it looked just too good to be anywhere near to perfect, on either score. The Foley’s were there every day we were, and Mr. Foley would sing and sing and sing to all the hymns, until, one day, his hair turned pure white from the effort of his praise, and he was elevated, thereupon, to lead singer with the band. I only ever heard and saw him and him alone from then on. In saying that, one particular woman was a touch too operatic of an occasion, poorly so, and I was sure even the deaf noticed her.  

With mass ended we could go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Our parents would stop in the porch to buy the Catholic magazines and booklets to which they subscribed, papers that every good Irish Catholic family should have. Mrs. Armstrong smiled and laughed heartily in the repository as she doled out The Little Messenger or the Ireland’s Own or The Universe, or when she would sell your Mum a plastic water font from Lourdes or Knock, or a leather-bound bible for a special occasion. Sometimes she would sell you a First Holy Communion prayer book, decorated - seldom with variation - with a puffed-velvet pair of hands joined in prayer, with - again without much variation - a ruche of lace around the cuff if the prayer book was a gift for a girl. Two weeks later, Mrs. Armstrong would be raffling the same bibles for 10p a ticket, or five for 40p. Dad always bought raffle tickets, as did our Mum, because even the poor felt compelled to give to the church in every way they could. The red personal identification number emblazoned on the collection envelopes was enough of an inducement to make the contents always somewhere near respectable, and that meant that the envelope should never jingle with the sound of lower-denomination coins, whether they be British, Irish or just-been-to-Spain-on-holiday coins. We had to give what we had, whether we had or not, like the woman in the bible who washed the feet of Jesus with ointment because that was all she had. We had no jars of ointment at home worth more than the speedier recovery of a skinned knee, so we gave nothing but the food from our mouths.

In time, our house began to look like the church, adorned as it was with pictures and fonts and Holy Family shrines and memorabilia that Mum and Dad had bought or had won in the weekly raffles. I thought often of selling some of it back to Mrs. Armstrong because if Jesus ever returned and visited the good Irish Catholic people of Carrickfergus he would go straight to our house, mistaking it for the church and us as cousins because we had so many family snapshots of Him and His sacred friends and family, all glowing and serene and looking skywards, like any one of the Deignan sisters, with the exception of the black one because she was too young and too unruly to obey the stern faces of her parents. We had pictures of our holy mother, Mary; the earthly father of our lord Jesus, Saint Joseph, the carpenter; the lick of flame that we knew as The Holy Spirit; dedications to all the saints - and all the dead martyrs and holies that would be saints soon enough, sure enough - above us and around us. We lived in the holiest place in Carrickfergus outside of the church grounds. We lived in the Vatican, the Vatican of The Hollies.

But if Jesus did visit we could have chatted to Him over tea in the nice cups that Mum kept for special occasions, and we could eat some nice biscuits bought special that day. But Jesus, I was sure, would politely have eaten our yellow-pack Digestives, Rich Tea or Ginger Nuts, perhaps a Custard Cream, and he would not, I was sure, embarrass us by telling us that He came from a place awash with ice cream, the finest biscuits and cakes, and every other kind of goodness known to God alone. Jesus, I was sure, knew poverty, knew that a yellow-pack Digestive was as good as a Wagon Wheel on any given day.

“Some rabbit, Lord? Or maybe a nice piece of trout?”

“Don’t mind if I do there, Annie. Thanks. Ah, I see you got yourselves nice haircuts there too, lads.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Just killed one of my rabbits then, eh?”

“Yes, Lord. Sorry.”

“His name was Alphonse, did you know? And that fish last week?”

“Yes?”

“Mirabelle.”

“Sorry, Lord.”

“Oh, for fuck sake, boys! I’m kidding! Jesus… Do you think I have time to name every fucking rabbit? Holy sh… You two need to lighten up, you know that?”

“Yes, Lord.”

Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet, and Watch

By that summer of 1982 I had been through one year of Saint Malachy’s and I knew the pressure that teachers placed on your shoulders. We had to learn by heart every word in every textbook, and we had to learn it well. There was little room for contemplating getting just the basics, just scraping by. The academic record was the cornerstone on which the glory from within stood mighty, just as the old master informed us that past August. We had to analyse and parse Latin text word perfectly, and verb declensions we had to know by heart or the imposing figure of Mr. Crummey would stand above you and chill your heart hard as backroom butcher’s meat. That deathly, silent stare. Half my class, Junior 1B, attended Mr. Crummey’s all too frequently ordered detentions, so strict was he.

Before one particular Irish class even started, as irritatingly late on Friday afternoons as any class could be, we were made to say the Hail Mary perfectly in our land’s mother tongue or the teacher would walk to the nearest desk and throw it across the room with one hand. He was still a young man; he could do it easily, one hand underneath the desk, sending it crashing into a far wall, and him all in a fit. Teachers in neighbouring classrooms failed to come investigate the noise, and I found that strange for they castigated us pupils for talking an inch above a whisper should we find ourselves alone in a classroom awaiting a teacher. Those times, breathing was deemed a damned distraction from the good work.

One Friday Francis Hughes struggled to bless himself in the mother tongue, and as he concentrated on the foreign words in his head he lost control of his hands. The master twitched with rage, more so than he did on any given Friday. He pointed to Francis Hughes and his teeth sparked.

“Boy, I’m leaving here for one minute, one fucking minute. By the fucking time I get back here you’d better be able to bless yerself like any good fucking Catholic your age.” He slammed his hands on the desk, locked his elbows, and he bawled. “How the fuck old are you?” he exclaimed, spit misting the air. “And you can’t fucking bless yourself?” Francis stood bolt upright, his shoulders back, his fingers playing with each other, wetly I was sure. He dared not move his gaze until the teacher slammed his open hands on the desk once again before storming out, screaming. “Fucking learn it boy, and learn it fast! This is fucking ridiculous…” He slammed the door behind him, puffing air under maps along the nearest wall. They came to rest again as all eyes rested on Francis.

For the next minute the class desperately whispered instructions to Francis, Shugsy as he was known.

“It’s your forehead, stomach, left shoulder, right shoulder! Got that?” Francis tried, failed, then tried again, then failed again.

“Shugsy! For fuck’s sake! Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch! Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch! You better get it fucking right or we’re all here till late on, you fucking wanker!” 

“Yeah, get it right Shugsy, or we’re all fucked. I’m not staying here just because some wanker can’t fucking bless his self, ya fuckwit.”

The teacher returned just too quickly for the instructions to be of any use, and he made us stand for an entire class, until Francis could bless himself while reciting a blessing in some foreign tongue.

“Are you fucking stupid, boy? Are you? Are you fucking stupid?” The master stormed around the room, the tails of his grey suit-jacket flailing behind him, a wreck of desks and the concomitant cacophony spreading. Still, no teacher came to investigate.

“I don’t care if it is a fucking Friday because we’ll stay here until you know how to bless yourself boy, you stupid fucking idiot!” He bawled an inch from Francis’s nose, wagging a stiffened finger in his scarlet face. “I’m going fucking nowhere boy, and if I’m not, you’re not, and neither are any of these fuckers. Got that?” He quieted. “Now, again. Bless your fucking self again, you fucking idiot.”

There never was room for the basics in Saint Malachy’s College, not when it came to blessing yourself, not when speaking Irish or French or declining past imperfect verbs in too many dead languages thought still too important to be ignored by Irish Catholic educators.

Brimstone and Spittle

By the summer of 1983, Mum decided that her sons could still get back from the Catholic church some of Dad’s hard-earned money, and she asked Father McGarry if there was anything he would like done in the grounds around the beautiful new church that he had brought to the parish, all new and lovely and inspiring as it was. She had two fit young men, ready and willing and able, she said, offering up our precious free time, our Saturdays and Sundays, all for the glory of god. Father McGarry, the Parish Priest, the PP, lived in the grand Parochial House beside the new church. There was his gleaming new car in the driveway for all to see, a monument to the good life being a holy man could afford those broken down and pieced back together in the seminaries up and down Irish Catholic Ireland. He was tall, broad, smoked a moderately priced cigarette, and he slicked his grey hair back like an aged but perpetually handsome Brylcreem model. His was a look that belied a youthful gorgeousness, a precociousness, some ethereal knowledge. Looking calm and wise, said Dad, was the result of anyone being calm and wise with the money the PP was making, “And doesn’t he go off to Florida to play golf bloody well ten times a year, and sure that would make anyone calm and wise, now wouldn’t it?”

 

Taking our money and taking himself off to Florida left us with a gamble every Sunday. Would we get Father O’Hagan or would we get Father Patton treading the boards in his place those Sunday mornings? From Whitehead, ladies and gentlemen, came Father O’Hagan, to us youth a grumpy old priest with a ruddy and unforgiving full face, the merciless priest who threw Martina out of the confessional, at the ripe age of nine years, for not being syllable perfect with her Act of Contrition. Would we get another of his sermons that continued until members of the congregation glanced furtively upon their watches, shanks of roast beef in the oven at home getting a little drier with every admonishment? Father O’Hagan’s ferocity imbued us with the sense that we would never be saved, that we would burn in Hell fire for all eternity unless we changed our ways, and even then the odds were against us, we incorrigible bloody sinners. Despite His murderous and merciless record, what God was too timid to say and do in the Bible he gave Father O’Hagan the breath in his body to take forward. In his fleeting gentle demeanours he could make the parable of the lost sheep sound more fiery, more violent, more destructive than ten Sodoms and ten Gomorrahs, atop ten of the greatest earth-rending floods. We walked away those Sundays weaving our ways past pillars of salt in the foyer, the heat of Hell’s fires burning the soles of our feet as we crossed the foyer entrances.

And, ladies and gentlemen, from Greenisland came Father Patton, or Father Gerry as he let himself be called by those who liked others to think that they actually did know him. Father Patton once was the curate at the nearby university, and he was young and exciting and bushy-haired, a man who took great pleasure in a pipe full of sweet-smelling tobacco and some good craic. He looked like good craic, this busy-haired fellow. He was what the Elders referred to as “the new breed,” and he would walk in the congregation like a pop star, asking questions of the bleary-eyed Sunday morning faithful, questions they answered nervously into the microphone he carried with him, the respondents preceding their every answer with a “Well, yes Father, I think that what this means - what Our Lord means - is...," accompanied by a brief clearing of a dry throat at least a half-hour silent. The pious and the self-righteous fortune of cleaning ladies with their dusters and Mr. Sheen failed to take to him and his new-fangled microphone-flaunting ways, and they made sure to go to the good, the proper, the respectful eviscerations conducted by Father O’Hagan, his masses with sermons that would light the church in red and yellow and searing white as the mirage of Hell appeared to and embraced warmly the huddled mass parched by the eating of the dry fruit from the now stripped-bare Tree of Sin from which Eve had tempted Adam before turning to God and with a cackle asking, “Tell me, O Lord, where is this place called Carrickfergus?” The Catholic parish of Carrickfergus had eaten from the tree and relished it, charged Father O’Hagan. We had come back for seconds, he said. Then dessert. We took home a doggy bag of cold dead sin, hot lust, bubbling greed, he said. 

In the Old Church of The Holy Plaster Shower his fire would make the Crayola air bubble and spit and scald. But the fortune of cleaning ladies feared more that the beautifully gentle Father Gerry would stick a microphone in their half-hairy faces and they would see the priestly spittle and feel compelled to Mr. Sheen the microphone to a good and proper Catholic gleam right there and then. Cleaning priestly spittle must surely have been like getting the very key to Heaven itself. And they lived for that. They continued to live for that. Damn them. Damn priestly spittle.

Like a Wagon Wheel

My feet hit Brendan’s head as we jumped from our beds - we had been sleeping like foxes for only a few hours. Something hit a window downstairs and the bang had everyone in the house up and standing by their bedroom doors, struggling with some kind of clothing. Dad came running from his room in his vest and pyjama bottoms, his gun in hand, loaded, safety off. 

Mum begged him to take it easy, to be careful with that bloody gun because you’ll bloody well hurt yourself or someone else, then where would we be?

“Will you let me past, Annie?”

Please.

There was a second bang, and someone shouted, “Jesus, Mary and Saint Joseph!” Someone else just shouted “Jesus!” That might have been me. The second bang was a big one, and we knew that a window was left dying on the living room floor. A second later and we heard glass fall from the window into the window-sill, the metal blinds twist and buckle in the air before falling back against the windows, one side then the other. The dog barked and glass fell, and in the quiet noise our faces filled with fear, we started downstairs, running quickly and silently, followed by Mum’s pleas for us to be careful down those bloody stairs, you don’t know what’s waiting, sure you don’t. Dad made it downstairs first, and out he went with his shotgun in his hands, with a fowl cartridge in the breech, with the gun cocked, with the safety off. Definitely. The safety was definitely off this time. He opened the door without thought, without pause, without care, without once looking behind him.

“Right boys! You two come with me! Come on.” He motioned us to follow him by bringing his hand up behind his head, then he pointed quickly up and down the street with a discreet, almost invisible motion of his finger.

I wanted us upstairs and out of the way, but Dad was in the street driving his Shredded Wheat truck, and he had one fowl cartridge in the barrel of his gun and one hundred whiskeys and one hundred beers in his fiery fenian blood. There was no way we could stay up there; we needed to go down to stop Dad fucking this up for all of us by blowing someone’s head off or getting slain himself in the middle of the street, making a martyr of himself, elevating himself to the status of the hero in the many songs that The Dubliners and The Wolfe Tones and The Pogues would surely write about him. The Carrick Martyr they would label him, and in “The Ballad of Arthur McKay” they would rhyme his name with “died that day” and “a brighter day,” and there would be some mention of how we all will pray for some better way. No surprises.

We followed, knowing we had no choice but to. There were no souls walking the street, and the orange lights barely lit up the first few feet of the entrances to the alleys and entries. Whoever did this could have been hiding anywhere, and there were many dark alleys and only one gun. It was never a fair fight. Anne-Marie, Una and Mum stayed inside. Martina took a solitary step out the front door. I could tell she was scared: she had her hands to her mouth; her dressing gown she had only half on, tied loosely and quickly at the front, in a knot that betrayed her alarm, and one so loose as to have little utility. She had tears in her eyes. The bottom of her pink nightie with the cartoon character on flapped in the breeze, and she stood stiffly on the cold top step of the garden path of number 43. The grass between the cracks in the steps made her jump when she first felt it prickly on the soles of her feet. She looked like someone who should have been somewhere else, somewhere noisy, like a busy street, asking for directions because she was lost and had forgotten who she was, or where she was, or what she was doing there. She looked like someone somewhere frantic, someone trying to understand and keep control, but knowing all the while that she could let go at any time. She looked out of place in her pink nightie and no slippers, because all was quiet and calm out there on that street: barely a sound rose, only distant cars and the rustle of anything the wind could move. In those quiet moments we heard everything. It was peaceful out there as we walked like astronauts or swimmers under water, aware of our movements and any other. We crept. We stared something in the face, and came to accept that we had to stare at it. Whatever it was it would greet us in its own time.

Martina carried her fear from the house and presented it to the street, telling the watchers the truth. No matter how brave Dad was, or how brave he made his sons, Martina told the Proud Protestants that they had won.

I came to. Martina should be the last of my worries, I thought. The sound of distant cars on Woodburn Avenue was comforting because it meant that the world was continuing, that there was life out there, maybe someone who could come to help us if we needed them. We were not dead yet. We were just cold, frightened of what could be lurking in the alleys, in the garages, or behind the sub-station. We had one gun between us, and Dad held it at the ready, guarding the front of the house, pointing here and pointing there, a thumb used to get us into the dark alleys and entries behind him, the alleys that ran from the front to the back of our row of houses. He watched as Brendan and I went into them as far as the orange light faded into shadow. We would go no further: the blackness that hid ten skinny bodies in our youths could hide four grown men. 

We each looked for ourselves and everyone else, and we talked in hand signals and nods and shrugs, all of which helped maintain the completeness and the bizarreness of a silence broken only by cars and leaves and plastic bags. 

Maybe they were clever, thought Dad. Did they smash the windows on the front of the house and run to the back of the house, down our own alleyway, into our very own garden? We checked our alley last, guided there by a thumb and the barrel of a gun: it was too dark so we came back through the house, switching on the kitchen and dining room lights. It was still too dark, so we opened the back door. A giddiness of moths fluttered in as we edged out: they craved the light as much as we did. There was the apple tree. The gooseberry bush leaves fluttered gently. The small carpet of strawberries. There was nothing behind the shed but its own broken and boarded window, clinging as it was limply to the white-with-a-little-brown. Everything rustled an eerie rustle or whistled an eerie whistle as the wind passed through on its way to the lough. Nothing else. There was not one soul behind the house, in front of the house or down any alley nearby. The stillness and aloneness in that moment is eerie, but comforting.

Having checked everywhere we wanted Dad back in the house, and we broke our silences only to report in.

“Nah. There’s nobody. They’ve gone. We’ve looked everywhere.”

“Did youse go to the top of the street?”

“Yeah, nothing.”

“They didn’t get that much of a head start, boys.”

“Yeah, but they could be anywhere. It’s just useless. It’s pitch black.”

“Hear anything?”

“Nope. It’s quiet.”

“Waddabout back there?” He took his finger from the trigger and with the thumb of that hand indicated the back of the house.

“Not a thing. Unless they jumped the fences back there or got into a shed, or…”

“There’s nothing.” We shrugged in unison and exasperation.

“Alright, alright. Just youse get yerselves back in.” With another sweeping hand he herded us back inside, him keeping rear point guard. For a few moments we stood on the pavement, our backs to the house, looking around ourselves one last time. As we moved back we looked up at windows in houses to see if anyone was looking out. Often people were, spectators. Maybe it was the person who did this, or a witness? But nobody came forward to own up to the act or own up to witnessing the act. We knew it was impossible not to have heard the bang as our windows came in. Nobody gave a damn about what was happening to us. I felt that nerve-sweat trickle again. Strange, I was so cold.

Inside the house Mum had brought the embers back from the dead and a fire was crackling in the hearth. She had coaxed the embers back to life using the vacuum created by a newspaper held over the fireplace. The wind roared in the chimney, sucking the newspaper tight to the hearth, the fire rebirthing noisily behind yesterday’s headlines detailing the gruesome deaths of fine Proud Catholic volunteers and bloodthirsty Proud Protestant thugs. The day started early. The fire started early. The kettle went on the stove. It would soon be time for breakfast, and the great bra hunt, Anne-Marie’s quest for her underwear taking her back to The Last Place You’d Ever Look. In their laments, I presumed, The Wolfe Tones would rhyme "bra" with "Tiocfaidh ár lá," the IRA’S notorious rallying call.

The police came, the police went.

“Tea, officer?”

“No thank you, sir.”

“A biscuit?”

“Thank you, sir, but no. Now... You say you were asleep at the time of the incident?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you see anything?”

“So...? Wagon Wheel?”

We covered the raggedy hole in the window with thick corrugated cardboard cut from a box taken from Crazy Prices, a box with a simple blue whale on. Soon we would go upstairs, wash our faces and get ready for the first of the morning’s scaldings. Then there was the walk down the garden path to our heavy car - watched by that smiling blue whale, which, I recall, was upside down - all the while readying ourselves for the second of the morning’s scaldings.

The year 1982 saw the start of a campaign by the Proud Protestants of Woodburn to get the fenians living in The Vatican of The Hollies to leave their home. By then we knew that the people we once called friends now felt little but hatred for us. Soon the adult friends of Mum and Dad stopped visiting The Vatican out of fear: it was not a place anybody wanted to be seen going into or coming out of. There seemed a sense of guilt - worse, conspiracy, treachery by the bucketload in this British land - by association. Only the insurance man and the milkman dared visit. But they had to.

Young Frankenstein

Monday through Friday, and on the occasional Saturday, while Dad was an honest working man, he would try to stay off the drink in the evenings because he had to have a clear head to count his money against his tickets and do the tallying-up, using the basic maths he said every man should know. His temperance during the working week permitted him to make up for it at the weekends, and on the Friday or the Saturday night he would arrive home already half-drunk, having driven to a pub he had found close to the Markets, a couple of streets distant from where he worked. It is possible that it was the same establishment he walked to the evening he took my brother and me to the Saint Malachy’s College production of Young Frankenstein. Once the curtain fell we jumped into the Hillman Hunter, and on our way home he parked up in the Markets, in a dead carpark, in the dead of night.

“I’ll just be a wee while, boys,” he said as he opened the door. “Keep the windows and doors closed. And make sure not to speak to anybody.” With that he walked across the carpark, turned a corner and disappeared. We knew we were somewhere we should not have been.

“Where the hell are we?” asked my brother.

“The Markets, I think. Jesus. I hope he’s not long.”

“E, we shouldn’t be here.”

“I know.”

Our time in the car we spent in silence, watching as cars passed us by. We were wary of cars that slowed down, wary of passengers taking a little too much interest. It was late though, so for the most part it was quiet. Very quiet. Then, suddenly, they were on top of us, the British Army. A Saracen screeched to a halt in front of the car, and from the back jumped five or six British soldiers. Some jumped out and crouched behind the wheels of their vehicle; others fell flat to the ground or onto one knee before scanning the darkness along the barrels of their guns. All had their weapons at the ready, and many of those weapons were aimed directly at us.

“Jesus, E!”

“I know!”

“Where the fuck is he?”

“I wish I fucking knew!”

As more gun sights found the car, and soldiers continued to pour from the vehicle, I jumped out, and with my hands in the air shouted, “Stop! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I stood with my hands up for some moments before one soldier broke rank and stood up, his gun pointed right at me. Static voices crackled over wireless packs in the vehicle and on one or two of the soldiers. He approached slowly, his Armalite rifle steady, level with my chest.

“You. Stay there. Don’t move.” As he came closer to the car he peered inside - with his eyes and with his gun - seeing my brother in the back seat. A few feet away from me, gripping me fast with his eyes, he signaled to the others to ease up.

“What’s the problem then, lads? Why are you out here?” Such a terrifying accent. A British accent.

“We’re with our Dad, and he went across the carpark, over there. We think he’s in the pub.” My voice cracked with nerves, and sweat broke all over. I didn’t know what was worse, being face-to-face with a Brit carrying a gun or getting my Dad in trouble.

“We’re just waiting here on him coming back,” shouted my brother.

“Okay. Take it easy, lads. You, stay there. You, back in.”

The soldier returned to the Saracen and spoke to another soldier up front. Returning to us he walked backwards, checking roofs along the darkened streets, always following the barrel of his gun.

“How long has your Dad been gone then?”

“Maybe half an hour. I don’t know. He said he wouldn’t be long. An hour?”

“What bar did he go to?”

“We’ve no idea.”

“Live round here do you, lads?”

“No, Carrick.”

“Alright then. Stay where you are. Hold on, hold on... Is this your Dad?”

We looked over our shoulders and recognised instantly the figure in the distance, shuffling through the shadows.

“Yes, that’s him.”

Our father approached slowly, almost casually, his head down, and he was wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, the magic hanky obviously, the one that sobered you up, made your breath minty fresh. He spoke with the soldiers for a few brief moments, but that conversation is lost on the wind. Dad opened the car door, settled into his seat, paused a moment, then drove us home. We drove the twelve miles in silence.

“Do me a wee favour, will youse boys?” he asked as we came within sight of The Vatican. “Don’t tell your mammy what happened tonight. Okay, boys?”

On many a night, he would have a few in the Markets before getting back in the car and heading for The Brown Cow, his favourite Carrick bar. On Saturdays he would drink all day if he didn't have to work, and if he was going fishing he would pack a flask of whiskey and put it in his bag with his lines, bait, and the small animal cartridges destined for the faces of the stubborn Proud Protestant who dared get back up, or if there was more than one of the bastards. Brown Cow, Pheasant Inn, fishing, Pheasant Inn, Brown Cow. He rarely strayed from that order.

On Sunday mornings he went to mass reeking of alcohol, and we knew that people could tell in the church because his small talk was cursory - often, almost rude in his haste - and he would slur the responses occasionally, disguising his sloppiness with a cough and his magic handkerchief. And afterwards, outside, he might light a cigarette for distraction. When he left us home after mass he stayed in the car, telling Mum he would be back soon, when the dinner was cooked and ready. “I’m just going out for a wee while.”