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.” 

H-Block, D-Block

It was a sign of some respectability to have a son attending St. Malachy’s College, and my parents let me know that they thought it wonderful for me to be going to such a prestigious college, a college where the priests and brothers and teachers could break down any good man and have the joiners and repairmen fashion a fine priest out of the shattered pieces. It mattered not a jot to them that I had barely scraped a pass in my exam to get into this prestigious college. I passed, and that is all that mattered, they said, and I was to be thankful to God above I was going to the place where they fashioned the good priests that would supply the whole of Ireland and the suffering Catholic countries filled with Black Babies. That was cause enough for a great deal of pride, they said. My sister had passed her 11-Plus exam also, and had made it into Dominican College, also in north Belfast, where nuns taught the good and the pure Catholic girls, photographs of whom would never appear on page three of any mass media publication, with the exception perhaps of The Universe, on bended knee kissing a Pontifical ring or accepting the Cleaner of The Year Award for doing good women’s work in the House of The Lord, and just you be happy with that, woman.

Catholics living in Carrickfergus really had only four choices when it came to going to a school that continued the teaching of the other supposed one true faith: you could go to Saint Malachy’s in Belfast, if you were a boy; Dominican College, if you were a girl; Saint Comgall’s in Larne or Saint Nicholas’s in Carrickfergus itself. There remained the possibility of going to Garron Tower, but of all the descriptions I ever heard of that place, I pictured it as remote and filled with the toughest priests and brothers in the land. And you had to board there, so you would be attending school without your brother and you knew you would miss the madness and the fun that filled your time together. No-one I knew had ever gone there, at least not a soul that had come back alive to tell the tales. Father McGarry had taught there once also, and he felt a great affinity with the place, and if a priest said it was good then it was good and that was that. No matter, I barely scraped a pass and my primary school friends Paul McKay, Robbie McKeown and Mark Reel persuaded me to go join them at the prestigious college at 36 Antrim Road, Belfast.

Mum spent the summer of 1981 trying to pull together the money to buy the Saint Malachy’s uniform: shirt; black trousers; grey or white socks; a white, green and black school tie; black, tie-up shoes. The whole ensemble was to be topped off with a black blazer, and on the blazer pocket on the upper left there was to be sewn the patch with the college coat of arms and its motto, Gloria Ab Intus. 

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Gloria Ab Intus, glory from within, glory from within,” said the grey-haired old master conducting the introductory pre-term lecture in the school’s main lecture theatre. He dallied on his first “glory,” waiting to exhale as his pointed finger came from the back of his head to end pointing straight into the audience. “Glory, ladies and gentlemen, young men.” It was mid-August, and the time between school years, but he took the parents and pupils gathered that day on a tour of the grounds and gave his lecture dressed in his black schoolmaster’s cloak. The cloak left me in no doubt that the business of learning never ended for the teachers of Saint Malachy’s College. Summers in Saint Malachy’s were for learning too, not for boyish fun and games and rites of passage.

“Glory from within the self, you young men, and glory from within the walls that surround this school, this place of learning,” he declared haughtily, his wizened face puckering under the weight of glasses thick in frame and heavy on correction. His lower lip disappeared under his nose, as if he had no teeth, and his pointed chin projected unnaturally beyond the furthest extent of the rest of his face. He stood in what I would come to know as the Learned Man’s Stance, his hands behind his back, swinging heel-to-toe, toe-to-heel, chest out, his hands swung occasionally to aid balance, and the ubiquitous scholar’s stare into nothingness to aid in the search for truth, knowledge, meaning, and wisdom. Mum sat beside me, a respectable distance from the front and from the back, just as we sat in church, a distance safe enough to ask questions in her quiet manner, or to blend into the air if necessary, if anyone dared seek answers. 

That day, in that lecture theatre, the old master told us about the history of the school; its rules and its punishments; the proud sporting history and academic record that were the very cornerstones of the glory that came from within the walls; how to dress, how not to dress, and the punishments meted out for contravening the dress code; the importance of religion in the school’s life; the buildings within the school grounds. 

“Saint Malachy’s is divided into blocks, and we, ladies and gentlemen…” The old master paused for effect and to allow a thin, almost imperceptible grin to develop over his face, “we are currently in D Block.” At that, a polite laugh went up, laughter of the type we heard in the old Church of The Holy Plaster Shower when the priests made jokes as the drums of Protestant pride beat loudly outside, and The Sash filled the holy air. 

“I know, I know,” said the old master, laughing now, and, in doing so, convincing me that he did in fact have teeth, upper ones, at least. “But we go only as far as E Block in here, you’ll be glad to know.” Another polite laugh.

Within the college walls over one thousand spotty boys dressed in black and sporting bad haircuts scurrying between Blocks A through E produced the Gloria Ab Intus. Outside the walls, on the streets of Northern Ireland, the only blocks that really mattered were the H Blocks, the impenetrable H-shaped accommodation used to house prisoners in Northern Ireland’s largest prisons. Since 1971 prisoners convicted of, or suspected of committing or planning, terrorist-related offences, languished behind the walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Maze, just outside of the town of Lisburn, ten miles south of Belfast. The government built the prison hurriedly in the early seventies to detain the suspicious men they removed from the streets of Northern Ireland, mostly Catholics as they were the enemies of Ulster, innocent or not, guilty or not, and guilt by association was often deemed guilt enough. They held suspects without trial, a tactic known as Internment, or so Radio Ulster and Downtown Radio told us anyway. The prisoners did their languishing in blocks of cells built in the shape of a giant H, when seen from above, with four wings in each block and an administration area connecting them all, the bar of the H. Since its construction HMP Maze had become a place of fervent Republican and Loyalist politics and thinking and thuggery and deals, and the men could reach out from behind its high walls to affect everyone in the country. In 1981 the prison was in the news again. Republican prisoners had gone on hunger strike as a campaign to win back special category status, a status that allowed them additional freedoms because, under that status, they were considered political prisoners, or prisoners of war. On the first day of March 1976 the British government abolished the special category status, and on the first day of March 1981 – exactly five years later - the leader of the IRA in the jail, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, refused food for the first time. Sixty-six days later, on 05 May, he died, making a martyr of himself and bringing the world’s attention to his Republican ideals. His funeral two days later attracted almost one hundred thousand mourners, a sign of the support his Republican ideals attracted in the fervently British colony. The streets of the country blew up in the face of the security forces and the rioting continued for many days after the funeral.

As we sat in the lecture theatre that day, learning of the mighty glory all around us, the hunger strike and the H-Blocks were alive and real in the minds of everyone sitting there, and in all Britain and Ireland. Ten days before I started school proper, on the first Tuesday in September 1981, the tenth hunger striker - twenty-seven year old Michael Devine - died. Other hunger strikers were ready to lay down their lives for God, Catholicism, the Pope and a reunified thirty-two county Ireland, but none did so before the strike ended on 03 October that year, broken as it was by Margaret Thatcher’s tough stance on everything from prisoners, to free school milk, to striking miners, to just how sharp her pencil must be. From the day the strike started to the day it ended, sixty-two men, women and children would die horrific deaths on the streets of Northern Ireland, not counting the ten who died in the hospital wing in Her Majesty’s Prison Maze. Of those deaths on the streets twenty-eight were Protestant, eight were British soldiers – as good a kill as any Protestant, even if Jew or Catholic - and twenty-six were Catholic. During my first three months in school, before the IRA called its annual Christmas ceasefire, there would be thirty-seven deaths in Northern Ireland, many near the rusty blue gates enclosing Saint Malachy’s College. The hallowed main gates of the college were on the Antrim Road, a road that formed one edge of the area that we would all eventually know as the Murder Mile.

Fire

The ebb and flow of students through the nearby Queen’s University meant that few got to know us and we got to know few, even if that few lived a floor’s distance from us in the same block of flats. We looked for second or third floor flats to avoid the rabble of students stumbling home drunk from the Empire Bar on Botanic Avenue, or Renshaws Hotel on University Street, or The M Club and Lavery’s on University Road. But even on the upper floors we could hear puke splat and bottles smash, the inept amorous advances, the fights and arguments. Living on upper floors meant also that we had time to do something to protect ourselves if someone, some proud soldier, ever did wish to take out two innocent Proud Catholics. They had two locked doors to get through, and every night we blocked the flimsy inside door to our flat with gym weights and an old ironing board wedged between the door and the hallway wall. We knew the measures we took were never going to stop a determined Proud Protestant terrorist for too long, but it would give us enough time to call the police, to let them know where they could find our cooling bodies.

I had little furniture of my own to move with, and so was glad that our flat rental agency furnished the flats, albeit basically. The furniture in the flat made the furniture in The Vatican look modern and luxurious, but I was most glad of the wardrobe they supplied. It was old, made from a hard wood, and it was heavy. I moved it to the wall of my bedroom adjoining the hallway, positioning it in line with the front door on the other side of the wall. It became my bulletproofing, strategically placed where it might afford some protection if someone decided to shoot indiscriminately through the front door. There is a door, a divider wall, my clothes and two thick pieces of wood for a bullet to pass through before it gets to me, I thought. It offered little comfort, and I had a recurring dream of bullets sparking off metal coat hangers or an ancient lock, exploding from the darkness of the wardrobe then plugging my head softly and silently to my pillow. The end. A good ending, quick and painless; no fight, no martyrdom, no songs dedicated to my bravery. He died a coward in his sleep, they would sing, a scared little shit hiding behind an ironing board and a wardrobe. I would know nothing about it because it would happen so fast, leaving my brother to call the police and watch over my corpse. I hoped I would never be murdered on a Thursday because that would mean that my funeral would be at noon on a Saturday, and Arsenal might be playing. I would want my brother at my funeral, and holding it at the same time as an Arsenal match would cause him a crisis of conscience.

The Proud Protestant soldiers would wait across the street. Eventually the flat would darken. They would laugh nervously. Things needed to settle a while.

“Let’s give it ten minutes or so. Then we’ll go. Get yourselves ready.”

“How many, Jonty?”

“Two, maybe. One anyway.”

“It’s fucking freezing. Put the bloody heater on, will ye?”

“Relax fellas, will youse?”

“I heard Steeky say earlier that he followed one of them Fenian fuckers home today. Says he didn’t leave. Could be two in there. Shit! It’s fuckin’ freezin’ in here.”

“Now gents, now gents. You’ll all be warm soon enough, so youse will. Tell you what, let’s stick the radio on, see what’s happening tonight.”

 “Well I’m ready.”

“Houl yer horses, lads. All in good time.”

They would wear leather jackets and rubber gloves. Their hair they would have slicked back with a heavy common gel, and before getting out of the car they would smear Vaseline over their eyebrows, in their ears and in their noses. They would get in somehow, run up the two flights of stairs, pull their weapons from under their coats, flick the safety off, fire. Our front door is powder. Powder rains, and the ironing board and weights spark and disintegrate. By then I would be lying in my usual first position, foetal, on my right side, my hands under my head palm-to-palm, as though in prayer. I might hear the door in the hallway creak open, and maybe the start of a bang or a ricochet off a lock. In a second the left side of my head would explode, the bullet pass through my head, through my hands, my pillow would turn scarlet and skull fragments would lodge in the left side of my brain and in the pillow behind my right ear, where the exit wound would blow my skull apart. 

Dead in a second. That is just how it would happen; this is how I would die if I was ever to die young and off-guard and asleep. The undertaker would be under strict instruction to place my hands by my sides, not over my chest, exposing the wounds in my palms. And the priests and the bishop concelebrating my funeral would take great mileage from my dying with the marks of Jesus on my hands, letting the gathered few know that I had been sacrificed for a reason that might never be understood by anyone other than God Himself, but that my stigmata guaranteed my place at His right hand, me and Him having suffered in the same way, see? Some might place their fingers in the holes. Most would just accept it.

There was one way into our flat and one way out, and that was how we liked it. A week after we moved in we considered contacting the landlord to have a fire escape installed at the back, but we knew that not having a fire escape was safer than having one: it was one less way for someone to get to us. This was how we lived, balancing risk. Fire could take us; Proud Protestants would have to fight to get at us. Life in The Hollies had prepared us well for living anywhere - we needed to be vigilant at all times, but, by then, that was second nature.

Meeting someone new was a game, the winner getting to know the loser before the loser got to know the winner. Friends of friends came under examination, particularly those Proud Protestant friends and Proud Catholic friends crashing at our place after drunken nights. 

“Who are your friends?”

“Them? Oh, just some friends of mine. Why?”

“Do you know them well?”

“Yeah, course I do. I wouldn’t…

“Where do they live?”

“Jeez. What is this? Twenty Questions? They’re just friends I know from the east of the city?

“What part? What are their names?” Names and locations were perfectly foolproof indicators of religious affiliation. Almost perfectly foolproof.

“Will you relax, for god’s sake? They’re alright, lads. I know not to bring anyone back here, so just youse calm yourselves.”

“Yeah, well, if you’re gonna fuck her make sure she’s not connected to anyone who is connected to anyone else. The last thing we need is… Well, anyway. You know.”

“Of course. Beer?”

“Sure.”

The rules were simple, and anyone bringing anyone back to the flat to sleep with them or party with them had to follow those rules. 

First Rule: If you’re gonna bring anyone back make sure you know them, and that they never get to know us, unless you know that person well and know they’re not connected. 

Second Rule: You can drink. You can fuck. You can party. Then you get them out. 

Third Rule: The sooner the better: if you can get them here, fuck them and get them away again while they’re still drunk, then do it. There’s less chance of them remembering anything of who we are or where they were. 

Fourth and Final Rule: Enjoy every fucking moment.

Colour and Liver Spots

The old Roman Catholic chapel in Carrickfergus was in its last days by the end of the 1970's, and boastful plans were already in place to build a new church, one that resembled an apple pie with a generous slice missing. The blueprint hung in the bemarbled church porch for us all to fawn over. The priests wanted this new design for the church, a design they said would take us into the twenty-first century, and, just like the Pope, they were infallible, so it was to be. Priests, we were told, always knew what was best for us, no matter what. Priests, we were told, knew us better than we knew ourselves.

The old walls of the church were failing: the failures lay hidden under thick, blistered and bubbled cream paint at least a century thick. The paint was so hard and dry that breaking a bubble with a young thumb produced a ragged circle of jagged paint thorns and a low cracking noise, and the breaking of a bubble took curious eyes back in time over a century, to the time between the laying of the stone behind the bubble and the first beautification of the church. But now, over a century later, each time a priest closed the tabernacle door a shower of plaster and dust fell from a circular enclosure high above the altar, above which, of a sunny afternoon, bloomed a beautiful and intricate stained-glass window. The heating system failed often, and the wooden floor rotted through in too many places for walking to be safe. A young, sharp fingernail could cut easily into the viscous, waxy polish on the pews, and a bit of wax sliced off and rolled continuously between a thumb and a forefinger could distract a child until the end of mass. The jagged slivers of wax turned smooth and round and malleable with heat and force before the priest invited us to declare ourselves unworthy to receive the body and blood of Christ, “ …but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Those sitting there before us had etched their names into the wax. They were almost invariably male names, or a boy name and a girl name enclosed in a rough-hewn heart, and we could see the darkness where a caretaker had applied a thicker coat of wax to rid Our Lord’s house of the aberration of graffiti.

Towering stained-glass windows adorned the failing walls, and as the sun rose above Belfast Lough on summer mornings, we could see sun-beaming images of saints, and people who should be saints sure enough, cut into the dusty inner. The deep blues, yellows, brown-reds and muffled opaque whites filled the warming air. If the roof of the chapel had ever been lifted, I fantasised, the lazy, brilliant, warm, swirling colour would surely have spilled over the tops of the walls, drenching the church and school grounds, and it would have come to rest serenely and beautifully over the town itself, a very grey town, a perfect canvas. The sun cast languidly on the far wall, and the thick melted-crayon light mingled with elaborately chiseled models of six of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, illuminating the truly devout at the foot of those Stations, the pious and all too often self-righteous women of the parish, usually. After every mass, a huddle of old women would “do the Stations,” making gallant efforts to genuflect at every captured moment of the journey from court to Calvary despite the years of rheumatism and gout they undoubtedly suffered gladly as a penance for a sin long since forgotten or never committed. Bony, liver-spotted fingers held the tops of pews - for balance, or to bring ease to a long suffering joint - and they let go only when it was time to move on or when it came time to bless themselves. A Rosary netted the other hand. Their long thick coats, their simple brown shoes and their colourful headscarves were the uniforms of holiness, and a simple sign of their continuing adherence to communion at least once every day and to confession at least once every week. The cherished Rosary beads with the vial of long-evaporated Lourdes water, and a family Bible a generation or two past sturdiness, they were the only tools necessary for holiness.

These same women kept the marble polished in the aisle and in the porch, and it may have been them that kept the pews deeply waxed and almost heart-free. They gave gladly of their time and good health to work hard for the Lord, to decorate and clean Our Lord’s home, and to buy their way into Heaven and the company of the Lord and all his angels and saints on the back of a mop and bucket, or a Hoover, or Mr. Sheen and a duster, or the brown paper and the heated iron they used to remove the candle-wax from the carpeted floors. 

Many were gentle - motherly, even - and they talked with hushed voices, through thin and hairy lips, for some a set of dentures filling their scarved heads. Others were pious, arrogant, older women, and they treated the church like it was their favourite room at home, the room to where visitors were escorted to be entertained before being rushed out for fear they might get too comfortable, the room with the nice china on show, the deepest, cleanest carpet and the furniture carved from soft, rust-coloured fallen clouds. How dare anyone change, move or otherwise spoil the good work the Lord gave the women of the parish the very breath in their bodies to do, but not the health to do it, and sure that was the very reason, wasn’t it, why they did it anyway, to suffer, to give? They gladly suffered on for His good. They smiled smiles all too brief and perfunctory, their hands too full with the tools and their heads too full with the excitement for the next cleaning job to let them stop for one polite moment. But for these women this was the highest station attainable in the church, the duty of cleaning, the duty to look after men – both earthly and heavenly - and they took it seriously. There was little room for joviality. 

180

The white-with-a-little-brown, right-angled streets that we knew so well in the days when we played hide-and-seek - when we believed one street was exactly like the other, and that it mirrored others - had become fearful places by the time of my eleventh birthday. We boys received regular and very stern warnings from our parents about us venturing out late at night, warned we should avoid dark alleys, warned not go into areas we did not know, and warned about being in the company of those we did not know.

“Boys, you’ll soon find out that there’s things that people don’t like about you. Especially you two, you boys. People don’t like Catholics around here.” Dad was serious, but he had no strange crease between his eyes or anger in them. He was sober and careful, insistent and wise. This was man talk. This was man-to-nearly-man talk. This was serious. 

“This could save you boys from getting a beating, or killed, so listen to what I’m telling youse,” pressed our father. Mum agreed, and urged us to stay close to the house, to venture not too far from the door of Number 43.

“Okay. Why?” we asked. Mum pleaded again for us to remain close by, not to wander too far, to be careful whom we chose as friends.

“Yeah, okay. But why?”

“Just listen to your mother, boys. If you don’t want to hear what we’re telling you then fine, on your own heads be it. But don’t come crying back here, to me and your mother, saying that we never told youse.”

With her forearm Mum swept an arc and in an instant the boundary of our nighttime play became the street directly outside the house and along the entry between the front and the back, if the eldest son and his boyos were elsewhere. During the day we could play in the fields and the garages, but no further than another couple of streets away unless we knew where we were going, or we were meeting someone we knew, and that we got there and back before it got dark. Being Catholic became even less fun than usual.

At night our parents would gather us round and lead us in prayer, our backs turned to Jesus and to Mary with Child. We prayed for the souls of the dead and the safety of the living, always ending our prayers with the chorus, “...and if I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Before we knelt in prayer Mum or Dad would close the new living room curtains. Mum had bought heavy curtains for the upstairs and downstairs front of the house, and Dad forbade us to drag the sofa toward the hearth: it had to remain pushed tight against the wall, holding fast the curtains that we folded tightly one over the other. We closed the blinds ever earlier, regardless of the season. We were under strict instruction to put no lights on without first closing the blinds and curtains, and only our parents could answer the door after sunset. We stopped asking why and simply obeyed. As we prayed we could hear the eldest son and his friends in the alley, and we thanked our God that we were safe for now, in the house. Evel was returned to the safety of The Vatican. 

We began to feel fearful living in the house and walking on the streets, and the friends we dared visit were the ones we knew we could trust, even though we knew of no reason why we should not trust all and sundry in our Hollies world and beyond. We made no new friends in the street. We learned that the friends we could trust were those with whom we went to school, the ones with whom we made our First Confessions and Communions and Confirmations. They often were the friends who lived near the church we attended, Saint Nicholas’s Roman Catholic Church, or those who went to its school, Saint Nicholas’s Roman Catholic School, the same place our father attended after the dilapidated school in The Commons closed its sepia doors and ejected the dilapidated children, around the time the white and brittle spider webs finally cracked and splintered, loosing their hold, becoming only decorative and benign.