Jaques Le Shack

By the end of 1992 my brother and I had left The Vatican: we knew that Carrick was becoming too dangerous for men of our ages. We moved first to an ancient and dingy cottage on the Shore Road, where Carrick meets Greenisland. We christened it Jacques Le Shack. It was heated by a single fire in the front room, which, in order to dry laundry, burned year round, come snow or sun. It was too small and too hot in winter, and too small and way too hot in summer, but it was close to Paddy and JD, and we wished for little more in life at that time. And it was a step away from Carrick.

“Aye, you’re right there lads, you know,” said my Dad, when hearing we were leaving. “This place's just too small now for all of us.”

“And it’s time for us to leave, Dad,” said my brother, injecting his usual healthy dose of reality, “And you know it.”

“We know it,” I added. 

“I love you, I alwayth have and I alwayth will,” whispered Ma softly. She said it clearly: she wanted us to know she meant it. “Be thafe, won’t youths?

Ma begged us to keep our heads down and ourselves to ourselves. She begged us to stay, told us we had always been safe, trying to reassure us by telling us that we were all still alive and that there was nothing we could possibly endure that we had not already.

“We’ve outstayed our welcome, Ma,” I told her, “No sense in tempting fate, now is there?” She continued to ask that we stay in our known hometown, where every street mirrored another and sure wouldn’t that bring its own comforts if you were ever chased by the hungry Loyalist dogs? Remember, she said, that goodness and kindness would follow us all the days of our lives, because He is there with His rod and His staff, and we had to believe.

“Only fucking idiots believe that, Ma, I retorted. Life is not about expecting kindness and love just because you live a life giving and hoping for kindness and love. Expecting that in return is crap here, in this place. We’re targets, and the older we get the worse it is for us. These fuckers wouldn’t give a second thought about killing any one of us.” The Child of The Hollies had, by then, graduated into the ranks of the ex-WAF thugs, with all its gold-covered pure green; wispy attempts at moustaches, all pimple-addled; and the ubiquitous tracksuit garb.

In one of our most searing conversations, I told my Ma that all life came down to was that you should expect violence, no matter how Christian or how loving you were, no matter how many times you turned the other cheek, no matter what religion. I told her that violence was inevitable, that it was a part of life, something that needed no acceptance because accepting the inevitable is going one step too far. 

“The inevitable is the inevitable, Ma” I argued, “There’s no accepting about it. If you’re born, expect it, expect violence. Don’t bother thinking you have a choice here, Ma, not here, not in this fucking province. You’ve no choice but to. Don’t accept. Expect.” 

The night before we left Ma begged again, holding out some hope that her insistence and clumsy religion-littered guilt trips would persuade us to change our minds. But we went to our beds that last time insisting that nothing in Carrick brought us comfort, insisting the clock was ticking down.

In Jacques Le Shack I had an asthma attack one night, my first in a decade and half, after drinking whiskey with Allison Gray and Lisa. Looking back, I don’t know which was the more unusual, having my first asthma event in years, or me drinking whiskey, a drink I found, and continue to find, repulsive. I remember that smoky sharpness on my father’s breath, and the discrete half- and quarter-bottles strewn around the home. Freud would have little trouble diagnosing my distaste for the water of life. And I remember Ma, the bastion of sobriety, telling me one night of the sleep aid she used, showing me a small bottle of whiskey secreted in the bottom of a large metal bucket we kept in the kitchen utility cupboard, her stash hidden beneath the head of a mop. She reassured me she used it only when she really needed to do so. I went immediately to that night when my father was kneeling beside her, telling her everything would be alright, sure didn’t he have the gun for which he was reaching and all the bravado in the world to protect us, didn’t he?

“Just you come on down the stairs, love. Sure don’t I have this to keep us all safe?” is what he said, brandishing clumsily the loaded weapon. Looking back, and peeking again through the banisters from the ninth step, seeking my mother’s face, maybe, just maybe, she had her own way of numbing the extremes of my father’s provokes of the Proud and rabid Protestants on our doorstep. And I look back at this self-medication revelation in shock, in disbelief at her need for this substance, this powerful distancer, and – I will admit with some pride – in admiration of her ingenuity, for Arthur was never going to lift a broom come hell or high water. Her bottled courage was as hidden as the cobwebs hiding between the bulb and the shade in the hallway. In fact, she could have hidden it beneath a dirty pot; or a scrubbing brush; under a dirty fork; or in an envelope containing the TV license renewal demand.

It was when living in Jacques Le Shack that I nearly collapsed after opening a pot of stew, only to discover it had gone off in the fridge, so unreliable as it was. I still remember that reel, the choking. Smell memories last the longest in our recall, but I still have yet to smell or resmell anything quite like that malodorous malodour.

But it was here also that Plum and Gil and JD and Frank and Pat and Dr. Bob The Love Physician, Tester of Armaments and Other Projectiles; and Frauke; and Lisa; and Karen; and Alison would congregate to drink ourselves stupid and wallow in the great craic, pointing fingers at the masses out there who knew not how to party with the other side. It was here that we first fucked with abandon. It was here we learned to survive on our own, which entailed getting some grasp on cooking, cleaning, paying bills, doing something akin to laundry. It was here also that Brendan first developed a tendency to dry his underwear a tad too long by the fire, burning many lightly. Here he earned the nickname Crispy Knickers. And the name stuck, for no matter where we lived, he always burned his underwear when drying them. Freud, I dare say, would have puzzled over this one. Or maybe not.

Jacques was our first taste of true freedom, and we relished it. When we were evicted a year later to make way for a garage and store development, we only moved further south, continuing our slow exodus out of Carrick, to a dingy flat on Belfast’s University Street. We relished the increased freedom that move brought us, but our Ma worried every day for the rest of her life. She worried that she would never again see us, alive or dead. She worried something would happen to us in the city, the same city where Proud Protestants sought any innocent Taig, guilty or innocent, the same place where Proud Fenians paramilitary armies beat our Proud Fenian Dad into shredded nerves as he worked the Markets area for National Car Parks. We weren’t a stone’s throw from that very carpark he worked, the same one where, after watching a production of Young Frankenstein at Saint Malachy's College, he abandoned his boys in a cold car, in the dark, him in search of a pint in that darkness, leaving us at the mercy of young men armed with guns and British accents and a dearth of years on the journey to maturity.