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.
