LP
When we were small, my father would perform tricks for my sister and me, suddenly accelerating into flips on the beach or walking on his hands through the house, humming circus music. He was built like a Victorian strongman. He would do push-ups with us sitting on his back, laughing as we pounded on him with tiny fists. Once, he did pull-ups from a bridge in the woods, dangling over a waterfall, as we yelped and bounced in ecstatic terror on the planks above. As we got older and grew out of childhood, he became more withdrawn. My friends would always be impressed in his presence, but when they left, he and I would just drift to other rooms. It was no big thing. My friends did that with their fathers too. And besides, heavy things seemed to be worn lightly with my father, if at all. He never raised his voice or needed to. His disdain was shown with a laugh and rolled eyes. The silences were rarely uncomfortable, but they nevertheless grew the older I got. I never knew precisely why.
His sanctuary, and mine in turn, was music. Da was obsessed with the blues, from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago. He played a mean guitar and harmonica (the blues harp, he called it) and had a fine voice. I would ask him if he’d been in any bands as a teenager, but he’d always change the subject. In a strange way, I felt like I got to know my father more from playing his records than from talking. What he listened to was one method of trying to understand him, just as I learned something about my mother from her Leonard Cohen and Sandy Denny records. Da had a treasure trove of LPs in the attic that gradually made it down the stairs as the years went on, mainly through my impish climbing and dangling from the attic hatch. Dusty, scratched, warped at times, but with mesmerizing interstellar covers of other planets or ancient-sounding folk singers standing on misty headlands. Discovering artists was like discovering entire planets to explore. It began early. As soon as I learned to toddle around, I would sidle over to the record player, knowing exactly where to drop the stylus to play particular songs. It really kicked in, though, as it does with everyone, in the second age of discovery that is the teenage years.
Other houses had photos of the pope, JFK, maybe a china plate of the Queen Mother. My father had shrines to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and an almost life-size portrait of Robert Johnson looking impossibly dapper in a pinstripe suit, trilby on, guitar in hand. For years I thought they were saints. Perhaps they were. The self-harming martyrs and ascetic neurotics offered up by the Church paled next to Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, and Reverend Gary Davis. The tricks of holy men seemed far too austere and too absurd compared with the crackling clairvoyance of vinyl.
My father always sang. He sang more than he talked. It took me an awful long time before I realized it wasn’t just a form of communication, but could also be a way of avoiding it.
Clock
The future was elsewhere. We were all stuck in the present. You could feel it coming—the need for it, the tug of a vacuum for air. It was close, we were on its scent, but really it was on ours.
My pals and I would walk around our neighborhood theatrically, as if on a tightrope, on the small walls that ran parallel to the roads. We’d heave ourselves up lampposts like sailors toward crow’s nests, searching for land. When someone got a possession—a BMX, say—there was a clamber of grabbing hands until someone prevailed, and then they were off, not only with little respect for the bike or the owner or their own safety, but actively trying to deliver it back to them in a diminished, disintegrating state. We broke into derelict housing, jabbing holes in stained-glass windows older than our grandparents and leaping onto furniture that hadn’t been touched since the 1950s. We lay on warm, porous tarmac and frosted concrete to kick footballs free from underneath parked cars, dislodging the occasional exhaust pipe. We played football between the battered gates of two facing lanes, stopping regularly for passing traffic, and on marshland with a sodden ball, painful to head; it went on for hours, until the tally reached way into double figures. We cultivated wounds on our way, little scars ranging from scraped knees to stitched scalps as medals, the amount of stitches defining each rank. That was before we got real injuries, the ones that stayed with you, the ones you didn’t want, inside and out. Those were still to come.
Occasionally we’d overstep the mark. One monumentally stupid way was getting “hangies.” We’d stand around roadsides, using discarded hubcaps as Frisbees, waiting for the opportunity, then we’d run up behind trucks and cling to the back as long as we could. Usually the driver would notice at the next traffic light or even straight away, given the extra weight on the suspension, and we’d leap off and scatter. We were as dedicated as trainspotters for rare vehicles to attach ourselves to: horseboxes, car haulers, boats on trailers.
Our favorite was an ice-cream van that had a huge Uncle Sam Perspex face on the back. We’d dangle from the Stars and Stripes hat, trying to get a foothold on the slippery beard as it drove down the road, playing a shrieking robot version of “Dixie’s Land.” From time to time we’d get a driver who was in a daze and didn’t notice the change in the vehicle’s weight or failed to spot us in the rearview mirror. Or, worse still, a psychopath with road rage, who’d deliberately speed up or try to physically shake us off. They’d drive for miles until some of us, clinging on, white-knuckled, were weeping and threatening to jump in front of other horrified drivers. We’d be left miles into unknown territory and we’d return exhausted, to the laughter of the younger kids of the neighborhood, saying, “Ha-ha, you’re dead. Your folks have been shouting for you for hours. You’re dead.” They’d follow me like I was the Pied Piper, right to my front door.
We were nine years old, Gareth and I. The other boys were ten, and thus a lifetime our senior. We all filed into line as they led the expedition. The bravado was almost believable. When there was any risk, the elders were not stupid and sent the younger ones in first, to take point, like they were expendable grunts. Gareth and I held our breath, treading lightly through the alcos’ house with no front door, stepping over the barely breathing mannequins scattered in swastika shapes over the floor. We dangled and dropped into a torched, abandoned squat whose occupants had signed off their tenancy by setting fire to a gas bottle, blowing holes full of sky in the roof. In a third house it was always the 1950s, since its owner had died or simply left. Everything had lain in place, undisturbed, since. A sudden departure, frozen for forty years—it was like time travel. Everything remained still in situ, impeccably ordered but covered in a shroud of moths and dust. A sliding glass cabinet, a light switch and shaving sockets in the bathroom, a clothesline spanning the kitchen: we were afraid to touch anything for fear it would all crumble or stir into life; afraid of the ladder that led to the attic, afraid of the dial phone that might suddenly break its long silence.
Once the area was secure, we were dispatched outside as lookouts. We were almost glad to be posted outside while the others plundered. We huddled together in the yard, out of reach of the rain and out of sight of the neighbors, under a wall crowned with broken bottles, not caring if the others got caught; and we’d talk about what we wanted to be when we grew up, where we wanted to go, occasionally interrupted by the sound of shattering glass or a muffled whoop of delight or an insult thrown from one of our gang mates at some high window (“Are you two homos snogging?”). When the conversations were interrupted, we forgot to return to them.
Fate was not kind to our group of street urchins. One of the boys began to suffer from liver failure at an early age, before we’d even begun drinking. Though he survived, it appeared touch and go as he bloated and turned yellow. Another was exiled from the city for drug dealing. Gareth died in the Swiss Alps, of all places, falling into a ravine. He wasn’t found for some time.
He was always called in from the street earlier than the rest. I was always second, having time to watch him walk away under the yellow glare of the streetlights. Sometimes he would whistle.
Fence
Legal territories were mapped out by aristocrats in drawing rooms, but everyone drew their own borde
rs in some way, from the earliest age: the division of a shared bedroom into zones, like occupied Berlin. Chalk on a playground. Beyond the singular house, the terraces were defined according to risk. There were safe areas, where we knew every passageway and escape route and could mount defenses against roving gangs of ne’er-do-wells from elsewhere. Then there were absolute no-go areas, where trespass risked life and limb. There weren’t many transitional places. The demarcation lines were well established. One exception was the fairs that drew in gangs from all over town, so that the excitement of the swirling rides and pounding dance music and flashing lights always had a distinct and delicious element of peril.
Later, we’d escape over the border to camp in Donegal, a beloved place full of mysteries and wonders (from the Poisoned Glen to the Bloody Foreland), but where we found territories guarded by the local young men of the villages. Though the inhabitants of Derry and Donegal were essentially the same people, there was acrimony due to the narcissism of small differences. Some of the villages were deceptively crazy, for all their picturesque qualities. In one, a mass brawl between drug gangs had been broken up, not by the Irish police, the Guards, who sat it out on the sidelines, but by a spooked horse. We learned to keep to ourselves, to camp in hollows and woods or inside Napoleonic forts, burning bonfires by the sea as comets blazed in the skies. We drank and sang to the stars through those nights. But we were always called back over the border.
In the city, on the periphery of my neighborhood, I could venture up to Rosemount far enough to visit relatives and pick up a subscription to the comic 2000 AD, which led me to assume that the adjacent Brooke Park was a safe zone, or a DMZ at worst. It faced dead-end terraces that I never dared intrude upon, but the park itself was a pastoral sanctuary I’d loved when much younger, being taken up there regularly by my mother. It didn’t even matter that I’d contracted blood poisoning after falling off the roundabout and busting my knee on the glass-flecked gravel. I had, after all, earned a scar and, melodramatically, “nearly died” in stories to follow, including this one. And so it was still a sanctuary and a place of boundless imagination: climbing on a metal frame designed to look like a Soviet satellite with a wooden seat facing skyward, dreaming that I was Gagarin.
A statue was at the bottom of the park, of a banker, baron, and MP known to locals as the Black Man, due to the darkened bronze, which had once stood between traffic in the central square (“the Diamond”) of town. At night, my classmates would whisper, the statue would descend and hunt trespassers to their doom. Aside from spectral effigies, the park seemed safe. It had a feeling of serenity, with its fountain and oaks and weeping willow trees. I did not know that the violence had reached even there. Once, for example, at the bowling green pavilion, two soldiers were blown up when someone nonchalantly handed them a package wrapped up like a present. A relative, then a passing schoolgirl, had looked into the aftermath and seen bodies through the smoke and the barrel of a rifle zigzagged by the force of the blast. She recalled a female soldier, one of the Wrens, screaming. “Blood pumping out of a head wound.” There was no counseling for anyone in those days. You were told not to talk about it. This is how quickly the abnormal becomes normal. Time carried on without mercy. Weeks later, another soldier was killed by a sniper, leading to gun battles throughout the city. Unforgettable things were “forgotten.”
Trespassing there was a folly that was rewarded with a busted head when I was set upon by a gang of older kids, who caught me and a friend kicking a football around, without sufficient papers. Gazelles away from the pack. I’d almost gotten away, until felled by a slide tackle, and had tried to roll into a ball as boots flew and stomps came down. It was only halted by a passing jogger, by which stage I was bashed around, trying to catch my breath through sobs. The worst part was then being driven by a friend’s father, who was above the etiquette of the street, to confront those who’d done it—“Look at him, you ghastly wee brutes. Look at his face”—and having them beam in at me in the back seat, like I was being held up as a trophy from a safari hunt.
I had broken not only the silent code of territory but also that of omertà. You took your beatings, I told myself, and you retaliated, biding your time, for years even, until the gang had forgotten who you were; and then you saw one of them strutting along, absentminded, and the odds were in your favor. You didn’t snitch. It was the worst of crimes where we lived. The absolute worst. Worse than murder. From then on, when we ventured into other areas, we went in numbers and we answered attacks by responding in kind. I had thought of it as something we could shake off as we got older, like the shell of a chrysalis, but it only intensified.
And yet I cherished where we lived with a sense, even then, that it was impermanent. I knew I would leave one day, unwillingly, and so, curling back the carpet in my bedroom, I would hide objects beneath the floorboards and scratch messages on the stone walls underneath the wallpaper. Transmissions to the future.
Most of the time we evaded the gaze of adults and explored the boundaries. We unweaved holes in wire fences. On waste ground we set up Evel Knievel jumps for bicycles with dodgy brakes, putting a flattened drinks carton under the mudguard to make an approximation of a motorbike vroom. We climbed the precarious heights of trees to attach ropes to make death-swings, achieving increased g-force and then blackout by winding them up and spinning on them, or breaking bones when the swinging rope snapped, sending the swinger careering through the air at an unnatural angle, still optimistically holding a portion of rope flapping in the breeze as they headed toward plumes of nettles.
The names of the streets puzzled me as I wrote them carefully onto my maps. I had been told that the courts and terraces had Scottish names (Glasgow, Argyle, and so on) because the houses had been built for shipbuilders a hundred years before. They were long gone now or assimilated. The docks were still there, decaying behind locked gates, but the ships were no longer being constructed. Nor were there any on the river. What puzzled me were the other names—the names of trees. We lived at the corner of Cedar Street and Hawthorn Terrace, but there were no trees in sight. My forest was one of lampposts, chimneys, and drainpipes. One morning my father took me cycling up to the Grianán of Aileach fort, a stone refuge for ancient sun-worshipping Celts high on a Donegal ridge—my father’s old boyhood haunt, where he would flee for temporary respite from the madness of those years. Delicately wheeling our bikes out onto the street at five in the morning, I was struck instantly by how the mundane, familiar streets seemed to have transformed. Everything was unearthly silent, I could feel the silence on my skin, and the air was filled with the unmistakable smell of pine trees, as if we were in the middle of an invisible wood, separated from it only by time.
Salt
Across from our house was the chip shop. It had a mosaic of tiny colored windows on one side, which drunks kept falling through. On the other side were portholes and pipes emanating steam, as if the building were a machine. Above, there was a flat where the electric neon-blue of a sunbed glowed radioactively at night. My mother worked in the chip shop in the evenings, while she studied to be a nursery nurse in the daytime. My pals always wanted to go in and hang out, cadge free chips, but I knew even then to keep them away, that trouble followed in their wake and they’d push things. Ma would work late, serving those staggering back from the local pubs. I would always lie awake until she returned, recognizing the sound of her step on the stair, and she would always check in on me and I’d let on to be asleep.
My parents were smart but had no qualifications, so it didn’t count to the kids at school or in society at large; my father had an endless pile of books, while my mother was always crafting things. Once, looking through photos, I found a picture of someone kneeling with a welding mask on and a flare so incandescent it dazzled, even from a photograph. “Who’s that?” “That’s me,” Ma said, laughing, “when I was a teenager.” I took my parents to be, as everyone does, vaguely biblical, when in hindsight they were just kids. My mother was only
eighteen when she got pregnant. She had a tentativeness that bordered on the fearful, a fear that, when you knew her, seemed not to belong to her but be imposed from outside or from experience rather than personality. The quiet kind of introversion she wore was always mistaken or misrepresented as snobbery. She reacted with bolshiness, by saying loudly that she didn’t care, as those who do care often do. In the photograph, she is welding with a cigarette in one hand. She is wearing some kind of poncho. To this day, I have never seen a superhero more impressive or nonchalant. She’d watch endless soaps, but was happiest sitting in front of paranormal programs or films where huge robots bludgeoned each other through disintegrating cities. I wondered if my fascination with seeing the mechanics inside things came from her.
Poverty is continual low-level anxiety. It is ambient. The step of children without poverty is perceptibly lighter. Most families didn’t have much in Derry, and still don’t, but there was nevertheless a pronounced sense of shame at living in a small house, or in getting free meals at school, or not wearing certain brands of clothing. The teachers encouraged it, by getting the children to stand up and tell the class where they’d been on holiday, or bring their Christmas toys into school, or count how many rooms were in their houses and describe them. They could even tell from the wallpaper that covered their notebooks. I used to hate no-uniform days. Once, my mother had bought me a counterfeit football top, because we could not afford a real one. The lads at school were scathing, and I went home and took it off, and my mother found it hidden and was hurt, and I felt guilty for my petulance and spent the rest of the day trying to make her laugh, like a shamed jester. The Traveller kids got it especially hard. Even the poorest among us gave them a desperate time, seeking perhaps someone to stand between us and the bottom.
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