Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  So we didn’t go to Mass, which was a cardinal—if not mortal—sin in my teacher’s eyes. My classmates would rarely share the secret of what the gospel had been, though I’d offer them bribes to reveal the truth; even my friends enjoyed watching me sweat, enjoyed having some fleeting power, cackling along with the relief of the absolved. Once exposed, the transgressor would be humiliated by the teacher, who would punish the miniature person for their heathen family, in front of the baying class. Some would be reduced to tears. I never was, but I felt profoundly anxious on a weekly basis. I would beg my parents to take me to the church anytime in the day, in the hope that a leaflet was left in the pews that I could take into school as evidence. None of it seemed anything to do with Jesus, not the Jesus I had read about, at least. He seemed like a decent, kind man, one who perhaps belonged amid my father’s plethora of heroes, and who had warned that whoever harmed a child should be cast into the sea with a millstone around his neck. I did not recognize this other Jesus, in whose name the priests and teachers spoke.

  Nothing in the teachings fit what I had read in the Bible. The clear was made opaque, and the opaque was never made clear. Derry had only the first stirrings of a class system—virtually every Catholic was one generation away from peasantry, if not still there—but because of this, it was transparent, even to me, who was social-climbing and trying to set myself up above others. In a way, it made it more pronounced, given that people were so desperate to be above one another. It was still a friendly, down-to-earth place where people said hello (or rather “Alright?” in the street), and there was still a degree of solidarity in being in the shit together, but tiny differentiations were starting to be used as symbolism and leverage. Where you lived, how you spoke, how you dressed. I could see it emerging. The teacher was a case in point. There wasn’t much of a genuine middle class in Derry—perhaps a handful of doctors, solicitors, an architect or two—but there was a desire for it. And so many people, who were two paychecks away from destitution, began to perform the role; and to perform it meant not only displaying one’s feathers but also subtly pecking at others’ throats.

  My teacher was one such soul. The ritual was not about the gospel, which was just a means to an end and often contradicted the meaning of Christ’s words entirely, but about the humiliation. Her harangues were symptomatic of the authority figures that we would face. Once, she read us the lesson where Jesus states that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Then she went on to state that the eye of a needle was a metaphor for a gate in Jerusalem, and therefore it was actually very easy for the rich to pass into heaven; indeed, they were at the front of the queue. I didn’t know much then, or now, but I knew bullshit when I heard it. She would claim that “Jesus died the worst death it is possible to die,” and so anyone who had cancer or any terminal illness should embrace their pain to be one with our Lord. It was a sadist’s gospel, or at least vicarious masochism.

  I kept reading the Bible, enchanted by it, but never really found its connection to the Church. Except for a fleeting moment in the iconography of the saints, but then it was lost, like light through stained glass. When a priest arrived who was genuinely Christian, who would talk to me about crises or intricacies of faith, I knew he would not long be in the job, the priesthood, or, indeed, in some sad cases, this life. When I asked other priests about matters that had stayed with me—the Tower of Babel, the Book of Revelation, the flaming sword that kept Adam and Eve from returning to Eden, the immortal soldier who’d pierced Christ’s side—I was stonewalled. It seemed as if they had read another book, or no book at all, and instead made up stories to suit their unfolding neuroses. At the same time, I mistrusted the puritanism of Protestantism, which seemed pinched and judgmental and austere. Life-negating. I came to regard Catholicism—the ecstasies of Bernini, the animal-human evangelist hybrids of the Book of Kells, the strange mystic idiosyncrasies of the saints—as some vast, glorious outsider art project that I was party to, but which was very different from the Church that housed it. Perhaps even its antithesis.

  There were things I could not believe, though I wanted to. One was the Resurrection. Even when I was a child, I could see the apostles for the scared, hunted group they were. They were right to be scared, given their fates. Shell-shocked that the person they believed in had been flayed and then nailed to a tree and died, doubting God himself. I saw the need for the Resurrection, the desire for it, the metaphor, but also the danger of believing in it. Doubting Thomas appeared not as the flawed character I was taught but as a real one (as, too, did Judas). No one was coming back to save any of them. There was no king sleeping in the mountain. If there was any saving to be done, we must do it ourselves.

  My parents, out of habit and expectation, took me to the cathedral to be baptized as a newborn baby. Upon hearing that my name was to be Oisín (a close second after Rory), after the mythological poet-warrior of Celtic Ireland, the priest refused to baptize me. It was a heathen name and the priest would not let it pass his lips. Young and flustered, my parents plucked my name out of the ether and, suitably chastened, they bumbled through the ceremony. There was no room for poetry in the world of the Church or in histories that departed from the one true path. There was probably not even room for the mysteries of God.

  Christ was incidental to such followers. It seemed arbitrary that this story of a Bronze Age Galilean fisherman was the one that took hold. It could have been so different, and they would still have been adamant believers in whatever the new religion was, because it served a purpose for them. It allowed judgment of others, chastisement, even banishment. I started to read beyond, into biblical ephemera, and found out there was another figure at the time of Jesus, a rival messiah called Simon Magus, who undertook magic tricks, which seemed synonymous with miracles. Other failed messiahs followed down the centuries. There was Cyrus Teed, who preached that the earth and sky exist inside a hollow planet under a mechanical sun; Arnold Potter, who, believing he would ascend into heaven, leapt from a cliff to his death; the sleepwalking divine Jacobina Mentz Maurer; Mad John Thom, the bulletproof Cornishman; Tanchelm of Antwerp; and Moses of Crete. It seemed merely historical chance that I grew up in a society dedicated to one messiah and not any number of other candidates. Their teachers were incidental. In those parallel worlds, men would still kill one another, using the split hairs of doctrine as excuses. And crones would still torment children over scripture, simply because they could.

  Disaster, however, always loomed welcomingly on the horizon for the teacher. Something in the emerging news of impending climate change—at that stage the stuff of fairly obscure scientific studies and environmentalist polemics—chimed with her millenarianism. The ozone layer is disintegrating. The tide is rising. Acid rain eats the statues of our holy ones. She talked about it with a kind of satisfaction. She was one of the chosen, she’d clearly decided, and so the Rapture was something to look forward to, even accelerate.

  I tried to imagine what the sea rise might mean. The docks would be inundated with water. The Bay Road would become submarine. The Bogside would return to its former life as a riverbed. The city center an island once more. Returning to the state that the rifts in the landscape have always perhaps been nostalgic for. We were lucky in terms of the number of hills in the city, but that meant there were also valleys, and these might become waterways. The future was an archipelago. I would wander around the Glen and think, with a sort of future nostalgia, that I was looking at a landscape of heather, gorse, and wire that would one day be coral.

  I wondered if war was the same. Incremental. How it came to a place. If it was sudden or creeping. You always imagine there is an announcement over a loudspeaker, a chilling siren, a sudden explosion, a declaration, but perhaps it’s more chaotic and plural. It happens everywhere and nowhere. People leave and arrive. Sightings are reported. A tank enters one suburb, while in others people are drinking coffee. People sit in rooms reading already out-
of-date papers while other rooms are shelled. Perhaps sometimes it comes as mistaken protection, full of promises and garlands, soon to be discarded.

  The teacher snapped me out of my daydream, with the edge of a ruler across my knuckles, and I turned back to my sums. I already knew what the teacher wanted—it wasn’t an eternity singing celestial praise, but to be elevated to heaven in order to have a view of the damned below.

  Inventory

  The news gave the names of victims, their religion, their profession, where the killings took place. Little else was required, but every single one was a story, from multiple perspectives.

  A petrol bomb hits an army Land Rover. Those inside spray fire extinguishers on a colleague they believe to be on fire, and he suffocates. A soldier is telling another about his newborn child, whom he is due to see for the first time, when the other’s gun fires by accident. A man seen swinging a nail bomb is shot, and the bomb, in what will become a common occurrence, is nowhere to be found. Three Scottish lads from the Royal Highland Fusiliers, two of them brothers, are found dead on a hillside. They’d been off duty, out drinking, and, enticed by local women, headed off, pints still in hand. They were taking a piss in a row in a desolate spot when they were shot from behind. Their bodies were found by boys, playing in the morning. A suitcase with a smoking fuse is dropped in the reception of a police station, and a paratrooper is in the doorway, shepherding people out, when it goes off. A young man is shot trying to grab a helmet that was knocked off, and another is shot trying to come to his aid, bleeding out in a car on the way to a Donegal hospital. A schoolboy is beaten to death and dumped in a sinkhole. A terribly injured musician, his bandmates shot to death or blown apart around him, crawls across a field and notices a crescent moon in the sky. A middle-aged man has a heart attack as his windows are shattered. A workman’s van backfires and a soldier shoots him through the throat; his workmate, dragged into the barracks, emerges later, injured. In Ballymurphy a gunfight ensues, and a private and an IRA volunteer are shot. Then a thirteen-year-old boy, throwing stones at the army, is shot through the face. Then a fifty-year-old mother of nine children. Then a priest helping a wounded man, waving a white onesie from the ground. Then a man who went to help them and had taken off his shirt to stem the blood. Paratroopers run a sweepstakes on who gets the most kills, a veteran later claims. A young man lies dying by a stream. A father of ten is riddled with more than a dozen bullets. A security guard is perforated by a nail bomb in his factory. A seventeen-year-old is shot in Ladybrook. A fourteen-year-old is shot dragging an injured priest to safety. A man with a prosthetic arm, which looked “unusual,” working with a priest repairing a church, is shot in the head. A young secretary survives a bomb in her work and dies from another in a pub. A seven-year-old girl tries to lift her dead eighteen-month-old sister, killed by an IRA sniper’s bullet. A fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, collecting rubber bullets as souvenirs, is shot by a soldier in Abbey Street. The army releases a statement: “In neither case was there anyone else in the line of fire. In the first case the gunman who had fired at the soldiers was seen to be hit.” Swabs are taken from the hands of the dead and dying, for traces of lead. If none is found, the soldiers are commended for firing before the victims had a chance to fire from their imaginary weapons. A man panics, having stolen fishing waders, and runs and is shot dead. A driver mistakenly thinks a hand gesture to halt is one to drive on. Inquests and coroners. Regrettable outcomes and tragic incidences and promotions.

  A Royal Horse Artillery soldier is shot dead at Bligh’s Lane army post. A soldier firing tear gas at a crowd from a sentry post is shot dead; he is found by his brother, a fellow serviceman. Later that day a random civilian walking by is shot from the same post. A worker gets sloppy and takes the same route two days in a row. A furnishing store is bombed, killing two babies when a wall falls on their pram. Soldiers kill a man at a disco as a priest pleads with them not to. Three Pentecostal worshippers are killed as they sing “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” A boy with a toy gun is shot while playing “jailbreak.” The Star Pub is bombed. A girl is shot standing at a bus stop. A cop car is ambushed from multiple streets, trying to speed to the relative sanctuary of Rosemount station. A soldier is shot at a burning timber yard. A pub hosting a Bloody Sunday commemoration is bombed, the customers falling through the floor into the cellar. A chaplain, a gardener, and cleaners at the Parachute Regiment’s base are killed in an explosion. Members of the Parachute Regiment, it is claimed by one of their own, use part of the skull of a slain Catholic civilian as an ashtray. Fantasists, seeking adventure and claiming “involvement,” disappear. An eleven-year-old girl sees her father shot three times in the head in the hallway. A man with an incriminating mess card is found dead in the snow. A woman burns in a petrol-bombed bus. A seventeen-year-old is called over for directions. An eighty-six-year-old man is shot while standing at his window. An eleven-year-old boy is shot with a rubber bullet. An eight-year-old girl is shot in the heart.

  Bombs blow up on their handlers, paying heavily for using rudimentary triggers of clothespins and rubber bands. A sailor is stabbed to death for wearing a crucifix around his neck by one of the loyalist Tartan gangs, dressed like the Bay City Rollers. A traveling salesman shares his samples with his murderers. A young man walking home with a fish supper for his family is shot by an army sentry from the Derry Walls. Five workers for the BBC are blown up by a booby trap intended for the army in their Land Rover, driving up to Brougher Mountain transmitting station in the winter. A bomb-disposal officer’s last words are “What a wonderful find” before the mine explodes. A civilian is shot dead from a Saracen in retaliation. The IRA commit Bloody Friday with twenty-two bombs, in less than two hours, across Belfast. They kill nine in the village of Claudy, outside Derry, when they can’t find a functioning phone to call in the warning. A civilian working for the army winds down his window and says hello to his killer. Two men with the same name are shot in Derry: one dumped in a coffin in a car at the border for informing, another shot by the army. A constable is shot in the back with a submachine gun while tending to a road accident. A mannequin placed in an army observation post overlooks two postmen being riddled to death in a drive-by. A nine-year-old, playing cowboys and Indians in his back garden, trips a wire next to a landmine set for the army by the IRA. A postman finds him badly maimed. “Help me, mister. I’m hurt.” A twelve-year-old is shot dead by a corporal, who says, “Next, please.” The judge laments “a momentary lapse in [his] normally high standard of discipline and restraint.” The boy’s father drowns himself in a canal the following year.

  At a Derry army post, a package is handed in and explodes on opening, killing a second lieutenant and blowing the hand off his captain. Whistles are sounded to clear areas, three in succession, but civilian deaths still occur. A fourteen-year-old is shot in the cross fire of an IRA sniper. Two soldiers are shot on the ninth floor of Rossville Flats. Fire is returned on a hijacked taxi carrying a teenage boy and two teenage girls. A Catholic who works at Ebrington Barracks takes a colleague out for a driving lesson, with a bomb under their car. Informers are found dead in liminal places: garages, quarries, coastal paths, woods. Police and soldiers on guard duty are sitting ducks. So, too, are those called out to random reports of break-ins or fires or suspicious activities around derelict buildings. Some areas are too dangerous to investigate. A parcel left on a bridge, a helmet left on a motorcycle. Cars drive with no headlights on. Men die because ID cards are left idly on tables or a tattoo is thoughtlessly on show, however briefly. Things are seen. Words are said. Calls are made. Accents are deciphered. A man is asked directions from a passing car. Four soldiers are invited to a housewarming party by a group of girls, at a house where no one lives. Two brothers walk home with takeaway for their bedridden mother and never arrive.

  Death lists are made. Both sides deny their bullet went through the four-year-old’s head in the cross fire. Men die on the way to place obituaries in papers, and to
place bets. A Protestant woman is shot for living with a Catholic. Someone sees a man staggering after gunshots and does nothing and he bleeds out after five hours. A politician and a ballroom dancer, who’d appeared on Come Dancing, are carved up by a future politician. There is a trend, a fashion that comes and eventually goes, of hanging victims. A woman burns to death on the upper deck of a bus. A man is shot by loyalists alongside his pregnant wife, who tries to shield him, but they finish him off; his father has a heart attack at the news and they have a joint funeral. A man, engaged to be married shortly, walking to buy a paper, is blown through a shop window. A soldier handing chocolate bars to colleagues is shot in the head. A last phone call is made with garbled shouting in the background. A man sits opposite a man in a pub who’s been following him; others see but decide not to tell him. Bus drivers are shot in front of their passengers. A teenage soldier bursts into tears after getting separated from his patrol and having his gun snatched; a group of women take pity on him and try to shepherd him away, but he doesn’t trust them and freezes, and he is pushed into a garage and shot twice when the IRA arrive on the scene. A son goes missing in 1969, his father spends the next four years looking for him in Belfast, day in, day out; the son is never found, while the father is found hooded and bound, shot in the head, for delving too deep and asking too many questions.