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.
