I would never have believed then that people, politicians, the great and the good, would one day claim there had never been a border. That none of this existed, including me. They should have kept some of the checkpoints. Let them fall into ruin but exist as warnings from history. Moving on was a refined way of covering up.
The motto of County Derry is Auxilium a domino, “Help comes from the Lord.” By then it had taken on a jaded, bitterly ironic tone. The locals had largely forgotten that the army came initially as heroes to save them, was welcomed as a stabilizing force at a time when civil disobedience was being crushed, a bulwark between Catholics and the sectarian police. There had been a honeymoon period. The tea-and-biscuit period. Mobs backed up by the police and auxiliaries had been making violent incursions into Catholic areas. The army arrived in Derry via the river, to the Naval Base. They were officially instructed to adhere to a “MIDAS” touch: minimum force, impartiality, discipline, alertness, and security. They forgot what happened to King Midas. The problem was that the terrorists weren’t seen as terrorists by the population. They were the population, in places. And therefore the population could be conceived of as terrorists. It was a gray zone and an excuse for murder.
They were welcomed as protectors. The welcome did not last. The locals forgot they came as heroes because the soldiers forgot.
I hadn’t thought of the checkpoint as a target, though it thought of itself as one. That stuff happened nearby but elsewhere, like in the hinterlands of South Armagh, where the IRA had road signs put up that read “Sniper at Work.” I never thought I lived in a hinterland, because home doesn’t feel that way. It’s a center. One day I came back from school to find windows cracked and blown in around the estate. The IRA had hijacked a white van, cut the roof off it, driven it within striking distance of the checkpoint, and fired a mortar from inside. They’d use gas canisters at times, nicknamed “barrack busters” (which then became a term for the large stumpy bottles of cider that alcos drank, as the cheapest way to get drunk). The van launched into the air, veered off into an adjacent field, and exploded, creating a blast wave and no doubt sending the soldiers within into fight-or-flight mode. By the time I arrived back, the drama was over, and they were performing forensics on the scorched vehicle. I had a tendency to narrowly miss such events, later sleeping through an earthquake on a Greek island, not yet aware that I should be very careful of wanting to be part of history. I’d always left early or arrived late. The police standing around behind fluorescent tape. A woman using bowls of water to wash blood off the street and into the gutter. A parent, framed in a window, sweeping glass from their child’s cot.
The soldiers at Culmore were lucky. Their colleagues at Coshquin were not. Perhaps they were the same soldiers, rotated. Early one morning a van rolled in. Inside was a building contractor, a Catholic, who’d repeatedly been warned against working for the army but had carried on doing his job, refusing to be frightened. The IRA paid him a visit one night, held his family at gunpoint, strapped him into the driver’s seat, and watched him all the way as he drove in and pulled up next to the soldiers. There were shouts and the sound of gunfire and then the entire checkpoint was gone. Commanders were trying to radio to a checkpoint that no longer existed. People were stunned afterward. Eventually a distancing came about, when I began to hear jokes and playground insults. The more callous it was, the more neutralized it seemed. Support for the IRA plummeted in the aftermath, though. It was seen locally as cold-blooded murder. That feeling lasted until the next time loyalists went in and shot up a bar, or the army shot an unarmed person. Peace was continually squandered, but even the brutal, clarity-inducing shock of the violence was squandered and passed over too.
Diary
School was another territory. I kept my head down. The key was to find blind spots. The football pitches. The handball alley. The back gates. Places out of sight, to hang out and smoke dope and talk about Akira or Judge Dredd or Nine Inch Nails or whatever. The school prided itself on having several Nobel laureates, being a factory of the new Catholic middle class. I never felt comfortable there. Each year they focused on getting a select few, the anointed head boys, to Oxbridge. The outlook for the rest was superfluous, regardless of how smart you were. If you were interested in something like architecture and art history, as I was, you were out of your lane and out of your depth, it was strongly implied. So much depended, even there in a beleaguered backwater town, on who your parents were and how much they earned.
Other boys clambered to be prefects, basically snitches. The priests were often ball-busters. Even the secular teachers had a fairly closed outlook. “There will never be peace in this country,” a history teacher announced to us one day, not long before the peace process began. Teachers with predatory sexual proclivities were well known and joked about, even by other teachers (“Don’t get caught in the showers with Mr. You-Know-Who”), but were allowed to simply drop off into quiet early retirement. We were taught to keep our traps shut. We were also taught to elucidate and enunciate in speech class, which was designed to rid us of our regional accents and any trace of working-class traits, so that we’d be fit to masquerade as civilized people when we invariably moved to London to find work.
I grew more and more inclined to other forms of education, sifting through books on the futurists, the surrealists, Dada, New Objectivity. Art became my education and my faith. I became fascinated by the ephemera of the movements, their pamphlets, handbills, invitations to happenings, photographs of strange characters. It, like the surreal marginalia doodled by medieval monks in the outlines of illuminated texts, was much more interesting and lifelike than the official historical stories.
Some of the masters—a pompous phrase they insisted on, in aspirational mimicry of the English—were plum-mouthed alcoholics with elbow patches, comb-overs, and half bottles of whiskey in their briefcases, who’d grown up in the shires and gradually been washed out to the peripheries. One even came in drunk, stood at the front of a class of fourteen-year-olds, and asked which one of them was man enough to get up and fight him. He was last seen sitting outside the headmaster’s office, with a coat draped over him like a defeated boxer, bleary-eyed and staring beyond the floor into outer space, waiting for his wife and the final drive home.
My attempts not to draw attention to myself drew attention. My attempts at invisibility irritated certain priests and teachers. A dark horse was something to be suspicious of. Hidden depths were impermissible. My hair was always too long or too short, my appearance too scruffy, my subjects too arty. They allowed for certain kinds of freedom, or rather they left cracks and corners beneath the teachers’ attention that creativity could flourish in. All my art projects were collages, as I couldn’t afford paint, and the textiles I wanted to use for fashion design were even more expensive. I’d cut up free catalogs and stick the pieces together, and the teachers would comment on the influence of Hannah Höch or Joseph Cornell, and I’d silently nod my head.
It was a sanctuary, though. You could bring albums to the art rooms, guitars into the gym when no one was around. Playing real songs that would never be recorded or even named, we formed imaginary bands with imaginary names and drew imaginary logos on our folders. Other kids exchanged rave tapes. We drew elaborate, obscene tableaux on our friends’ plaster of paris. Kids went from spraying “IRA” to “NIN” or “NWA.” Until Britpop, the jocks seemed to have little interest in music, which suited the rest perfectly. I always carried around an assortment of cassettes inside a secret pocket in the lining of my blazer, which also allowed for some minor shoplifting. There was such a scarcity of access to music that learning of a band or genre was like being party to alchemical secrets. People claimed ownership of favorite bands. I was insatiable, recording scraps of footage on flickering video. Exciting things were happening, but far away, over the seas. Most of the time I hammered through my work in class so that I could spend the day staring out the window, daydreaming. I always sat next to the window. The occas
ional kind teacher would notice and give me books after class that we weren’t studying—Camus (whom I adored) or Salinger (whom I didn’t); I hadn’t realized they did this for the weirdos every successive year. One of the few young priests would talk to me about the religious collages I was making in art class and my burgeoning fascination with Nietzsche, but he was the exception and quietly vanished shortly thereafter, perhaps caring more than was healthy for his mission.
Being left to your own devices was a brief utopian state, which was not often permitted. To be quiet by choice or temperament was to be a threat, to be judged as plotting, which I was, always searching out escape routes through gaps in the railings or disused parts of the school. The school itself used to be an aristocratic building, intended once as a casino. The old IRA had held out in the building against hostile forces once, while tommy guns blasted all the windows in on them. Middle-class teachers and even priests loved to tell stories like that about the old IRA, while condemning the new one. History was a way of forgetting. There was an old windmill ruin, the site of pitched battles during the Siege, and a library filled with ancient religious texts. If you got past the guards of these areas, they were perfect places to hide, but risky too, given that all it took was being spotted on the way in by a prefect and they’d bring one of the masters directly to you, with a face like thunder.
My shyness and efforts at discretion were undermined continually by the fact that I surrounded myself with lunatics. My friends seemed constantly, perilously keen to get noticed, and I was dragged, often bodily, into their schemes. They flooded the science labs. They would suck the gas taps and blow on Bunsen burners to set fire to each other’s aprons. They started a craze for passing out by hyperventilating, which was traced back to them when a kid had a seizure. When I say “they,” I mean “we.” I was lined up in a hallway and roared at by an apoplectic year-head, still feeling out of body following my own unconsciousness. In art class, when the time came to make sculptures, we would place lumps of clay filled with air holes next to one another’s projects so that they’d explode in the kiln. Once, we stole chemicals from a science lesson because we wanted to light invisible fires and get people to sit on them. Fun was always pushed to dangerous levels. Driven in buses to celebrate a cross-community bonding game of rugby, one of my friends opened his blazer to reveal a box full of ball bearings. After the resulting mini riot between the schools, the teachers from the other school came marching down the aisle, picking out the ringleaders one by one. Some were wearing their coats inside out and had ruffled their hair in disguise. I’d have ditched my friends, but for the fact they were hilarious and the only interesting people in sight, deranged as they were.
Once, though, they turned on me. At the bottom of my bag and in my locker I would keep a black book, full of notes, fragments of songs, poems, ideas for stories and films. It was like the inner workings of my head, and I was intensely protective of its privacy. One day my friends were fooling around, turning my school bag inside out as a trick, and they found the book, and before I even discovered it was missing, it had been passed around and ridiculed. They began mocking me as I came walking down to where the smokers stood. I snatched it back, my face flushed, and feeling ill, then took it out later that day to the lane at the back of the school and burned it. The fragments in the book were gone forever. It was only later that I felt angry for betraying myself. No outside enemy could ever win if you had no enemy inside your own head.
Something happened to me after that time. Something changed. It was as if a space that I had secretly formed had been invaded. I still kept to myself, always sketching, dreaming obsessively of imaginary art movements to belong to or of long-lost artists in distant cities, but I developed a quick temper. All it took was an unwanted ruffling of my hair, for instance, and I’d fly off the handle. I don’t know where that rage came from. It didn’t matter that I could barely beat snow off a rope. The red mist insisted on action. At the beginning of a new year I got into a punch-up walking home, over a misunderstood aside, with the hardest kid in the school, a glassy-eyed thug who by all accounts ended up in the youth wing of the IRA not long afterward. In the course of the scuffle I was knocked out cold, so my mate jumped in. It was broken up only when a taximan pulled in and intervened. I had a shaved head then, and given that Alien 3 was in the cinemas, older kids took to calling me “Ripley,” which I didn’t mind so much, but the attention, their gazes and nudges and laughter in the corridors, felt inescapable. I stuck it out and was left alone from then on. I wore the wounds, came to school, and they moved on to easier targets, but although I appeared impassive, the rage simply grew.
The army intensified this feeling. Every day my friends and I would walk down through the town to get our buses home. To do so, we’d have to walk through the Derry walls at Bishop Street, right next to the courthouse. It was an intersection area, given to attacks, and the army kept turnstiles in the ancient archway that you had to pass through. The medieval walls were retrofitted with the security apparatus of wire and tin and high protective fences. All the windows in the areas were boarded up or had iron grilles over them. The first CCTV cameras watched people pass in hazy spectral form. The noisy, undulating swarm of schoolboys would shrink briefly into a single file as we passed through, and the Brits would occasionally shout abuse from the slit of their lookout post. Two or three times I was spat on and, no longer caring much, began to return the favor. The group would expand again within the walls into a noisy swarm, and the Brits would go back to training their sights on a passing city.
Empty Bottle
Without money to spend, there was nowhere for us to go. We slowly realized how exclusive buildings were. My friends and I were regularly moved on from loitering anywhere, under the threat of arrest. In the prime of youth—the greatest years of our lives, as we were frequently told—we were banished from sight. We gravitated to the edges. Caught out one night, a friend and I tried to sleep in a building site, but there was a huge drop between the planks we were lying across, and all it would have taken for serious injury was to roll over in our sleep. We trudged on into woods overlooking the river, but the rain came down so heavily it felt like hail and we were forced to take refuge by crawling into concrete tubes. I crawled in first and passed out, exhausted, and woke only because of my friend’s screams. Flicking a lighter, I found we were covered in insects—in our hair and clothes—and we clattered out, kicking and twitching back into the rain. I thought the morning would never come, sitting drenched on the doorstep of a bricked-up gatehouse. I had a home. I was a tourist in ruin. After that experience, I found myself looking at streets in the city, thinking of where someone homeless might find refuge, and I could find very few places that hadn’t been, in some way, sabotaged.
It is the living who haunt places, not the dead. Hanging out around town with my friends, I would cross paths occasionally with my uncle Budgie. He was my cousin but had been brought up alongside my father and his siblings as their brother because Budgie’s mother had been young and unmarried when she’d fallen pregnant. She’d been sent off to England to hide the pregnancy, and my grandmother Needles raised the baby on her return. The prying eyes were always looking for scandal. Of all the children and grandchildren, Budgie was the one who looked most like our grandfather, or at least like the army photograph. He had a hint of Elvis, had Elvis chosen boxing rather than rock ’n’ roll. Budgie had a mix, not uncommon in the North, of caustic wit and tenderness. He also had a catastrophic drink problem, exhibited publicly. The whole town eventually knew him, after the elder generation of locally famous street drinkers died off. He was a strange anti-celebrity. Reports of his whereabouts would inevitably be one of two possibilities: “Budgie’s off the drink” or “Budgie’s in a bad way.” I remembered him very sweetly coming up to our house with his newborn child and girlfriend, proclaiming a new chance at life, and even as young as I was, I knew it would not last. Budgie ended up in a squalid flat a few streets from our home. It was lar
gely empty, even of furniture, and the drinkers would all lie on the floor at angles that seemed to have followed falls. It scared me visiting him, but I tried not to show it, standing behind my father’s legs. Eventually even that shell of the flat went and he ended up on the streets, unprotected.
Two elderly alcoholics, called Sammy and Sheila, were famous in the town; Sheila grew up in Springtown Camp originally. More people knew them than knew who the mayor was. They’d hang around Littlewoods at the bottom of William Street and the pedestrian area of Guildhall Square with their little dog. There used to be subterranean public toilets there, which were then replaced by a fountain before it, too, disappeared. They’d sit there or shuffle around. They were old before their time, and when they died, Budgie and his friends had already replaced them. It was a hard existence that had persisted for a long time (my father remembered men extracting pure alcohol from boot polish to drink), but homeless people had been older before, seasoned itinerant travelers or eccentric old men dressed like ornamental Victorian hermits. Now something had changed, and the homeless street drinkers were suddenly young. Tapping money for drink, lying out in the elements, committing petty crimes, giving—but far more often receiving—violence. Budgie ended up bloated, with a repeatedly broken nose changing his profile. I never thought he’d live that long, but he survived into his thirties, and I began to think, foolishly, that he was perhaps indestructible and would make it, or at least slow down as he aged. I was wrong again. They closed the homeless refuge he’d been sleeping in, cost cutting a few years before full-blown austerity. He was forced to make his home in a disused public toilet next to a car park that had once been called Victoria Market and still bore the archway, without the market. It had no door and an ill wind came in off the river.
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