Summer on The Green

Occasionally a lean and unshaven man with bushy hair crossed The Green. He never stopped. His was an urgent walk. His name was Gay Lawrence. It wasn’t the name he was born with, but that was the name he got as he walked.

After football one summer day the Americans came for the first time, and The Green filled with glamour and tallness and tans and white shirts and neat trousers and ties, their backpacks full of pamphlets and books and treats all the way from America, or maybe from Bell’s shop or from Sally Picken’s rich pickings. They told us their names were Starsky and Hutch, and we played football with them, listened to them, asked them about America, asked them why were they here in rainy Northern Ireland when the weather was always so much nicer back in America, wasn’t it? We loved the Americans. They were exotic. They were omnipotent. They were here, in Carrick, not going to the cinemas in New York or Chicago, or somewhere in Utah, somewhere over there where the other Starsky and Hutch lived, the older ones. Back home they drove black cars the length of our streets, they said, and they lived in cities the like of which no-one in Ireland could imagine, they said. They drove red cars with white stripes, and the police chased them in their cars with the exotic-sounding sirens blaring: only a child can feel that the siren they hear every day is just not as cool as the sirens on American TV shows. We should come with them some day, they said, and see America for ourselves, they said. Utah is a fine state, they said. Here, they said, here’s something for Mommy and Daddy to read, they said. We loved how they drawled that word, Mommy.

The Americans were kind and softly spoken men, with short hair, sharp features, and sharp skin many shades darker than even our own summer-baked skins. They played football with us - in their suits, minus their ties - and someone would always bring them home to have dinner or orange juice with their family. They walked off with them, to home, to Chicago and Utah and New York maybe, and to cars that were wide and black and long, for use on the wide and black and long streets. But Dad told us that we were never to bring them back with us for there were enough mouths to feed in this bloody house and we couldn’t go feeding the street when we had barely enough in the bloody larder to feed our own mouths, now could we? Yes, Dad.

When there was no play on The Green we avoided the cracks on the pavement, jumped the rainbow puddles before those alleys locked in darkness, we hid behind fences, hid in the shadow cast across half your own entry, climbed onto and jumped off roofs to prove ourselves, and waited for Dad to cycle home from work so that we could run at him as he cycled toward us, our arms high to the sky with the simple joy of his return. Sometimes he would bring us home treats he had bought at Todd’s shop, and usually that was Beta Bars. Sometimes he would change out of his working man’s clothes and summon us all to him, in a voice used only when someone had done something bad. His eyes would be dark, and he would move fast and furiously, and that always meant that something was wrong and he would be the one doing the righting of it, you can be sure of that, you lot.