When we used our false IDs to get into pubs, I always took care to sit at the back, always facing the front door and next to the toilets, in case brutal reality, in the form of a loyalist gunman, came to visit. They had done so on Halloween night, a year or two earlier, at a pub called the Rising Sun in the little village of Greysteel, just outside Derry, walking in wearing balaclavas, holding an AK-47 and shouting, “Trick or treat,” before opening fire, first on a teenage girl who had replied, “That’s not funny.” Another massacre was carried out while punters watched the Ireland-Italy World Cup match. Yet another had been interrupted when one of the patrons, in the process of being slaughtered, switched off the lights.
Effigy
In the days leading up to the marches each July 12, teetering Babel-esque structures would be built, one in every loyalist housing estate. Towers of pallets and tires. From a distance, they appeared like sea stacks or Indian temples. On closer inspection, they were festooned with cultural ephemera “from the other side.” Mainly tricolors, but more esoteric fare occasionally. I once saw a Vatican flag, which it must have taken real searching to find, and stolen Virgin Mary statues. There was even a wheelchair once, right at the top.
The bonfires would resemble outsider art until they were doused in petrol and ignited when the sun had set. The night sky of July 11 glows in multiple directions. Flying in at night, the city seems to have been recently blitzed. On the ground, crowds circle the fires, cheering, drinking, singing, staring into the incandescent soul of the blaze, volcanoes of momentarily cathartic rage. People look unrecognizable by the fire’s glow. Some look beautiful and some grotesque. I was able to slip in for a number of years, taking advantage of this distortion of light. I had seen the bonfires burn so intensely that the rain turned to steam before it had even landed.
The Catholics responded by inventing their own bonfire night to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption, when the Virgin Mary ascended, body and soul, into heaven. They assisted her with a ladder of acrid soot. What was left afterward were burned offerings, melted mannequins and wreckage, and rain clouds infused with sulfur. Once I had stood as a lunatic threw a gas canister into the conflagration, and a short while later, huge arcs of seemingly liquid flame whipped around and it exploded in a burning mushroom cloud, before blowing the fire into glaring embers in all directions and sending the metal canister rocketing skyward, landing God knows where; and the people cheered, not out of delight but sheer relief to be still alive. The cops immediately showed up and everyone scattered. I scrambled over a fence and, behind relative safety, stopped to catch my breath. The smoke, black as tar, was pumping into the sky, dissolving into the red night as I turned and ran to join my friends, whooping and laughing into streets lit up like an inferno. We must have looked like something out of a Bosch painting.
Occasionally we would go on missions to set other neighborhood’s bonfires alight prematurely. We were taking our lives into our hands by doing so, especially if we did it to a loyalist bonfire. I always scouted, without saying so, for escape routes as we entered, in case we were ambushed, and hung back generally from the arson. My cautiousness was partly down to a latent recollection of being burned at a bonfire once, in the time before conscious memory, when my mother had gotten too close to sparks that showered down from the crackling wood and set my mop of blond hair on fire. I didn’t fully realize how dangerous it was. Tensions were always heightened at this time of year. Once, a couple of young loyalists had passed out on a sofa in a field while sniffing glue and guarding a bonfire, and both had been brutally beaten by raiders. One never woke up again.
In our own territory we regularly lit fires. We were pyromaniacal guttersnipes, Prometheans of the glass-strewn alleys, and given an empty field, as there used to be at Magee, we would construct a fire, dispatching aerosol cans like offerings into it and then diving theatrically into ditches as the fire ticked and we awaited the miraculous explosive shattering of the quiet Sunday. In the seasons when our playing fields grew wild, we would ignite the gorse and the fire would catch almost quicker than anyone could run, a tiny match setting acres alight, gorse bushes accelerating in flame like herds of wild blind horses being driven into the sea.
Lundy’s Day was a big celebration in Derry. Still is. The loyalists would be bused in by the thousands from all over Northern Ireland and Scotland. They’d be steaming drunk before noon, pissing in doorways, chanting, waving Union Jacks, and giving Nazi salutes. Burger stands and cassette tapes of skinhead bands. In such an atmosphere there was a distinct possibility I would have been beaten to a pulp or worse if they’d known who I was or my background, but I was curious. It built into a frenzy when they wheeled out a papier-mâché effigy of Robert Lundy, the loyalists’ arch-traitor, who abandoned his people enduring the Siege, climbing down the walls onto a pear tree and escaping with the keys to the gates. I had read enough to know that Lundy had been unfairly misrepresented, as the self-appointed hero, Governor Walker, had insisted that he go; and Lundy had lived on to fight elsewhere, but every faith needs a Judas.
The effigy burst into flames and cheers erupted. Faces looked crazy in the glow. It was the kind of light in which everyone lost their identities and you couldn’t tell who was who. The Presbyterian symbol was a burning bush. Their motto was “Burning yet flourishing.” They had won the Siege, but each year they resurrected Lundy to execute him all over again, because in certain minds the Siege had never ended. And certain minds never wanted it to end.
Car Key
I used to walk from the town to our home at the border. The road ran parallel with the river, and before they lined it with streetlights, I would follow the white line, shit-scared, from experience, of dogs (or worse) bounding out from the depths. There were sleeping houses, their facades like skulls. I would pass a small car scrapyard, vehicles stacked on top of one another. A heavy magnet swinging in the breeze, and guard dogs that would test the length and strength of their chains, straining to attack, all teeth and neck veins. In the daytime a constant flow of traffic passed. I remembered bouncing on my father’s shoulders when none of the estates were there, when it was all fields. He carried me the whole way. Miles. I never heard my father complain once.
Walking home after a night of drink and debaucheries was always an admission of failure, scouring pockets for shrapnel for a taxi and bemoaning not sharing a bed with another stranger. Some internal radar would take over and guide me home, as my senses were simultaneously dulled and reeled with the drink. I followed the white line, muttering and singing to myself, staggering like a silent-movie drunk. I’d walk through the city first until I ran out of city. In the daytime, reeking wagons filled with pigs for the slaughterhouse would pass in plumes of dust. You could follow their path by the stink. At night, it was different. Occasionally a huge truck would thunder past, lighting up the road like Las Vegas, and then it would be gone and the night would close in again, darker than before, as the red lights disappeared into the distance.
The hardest part of my walk home, the most sobering, was the shrouded bend at the Bishop’s Corner, the first place my friends and I had ever gotten drunk, but now almost empty and distinctly sinister. The darkness somehow pooled and deepened there. It seemed like a place where someone, or something, might strike. Destined for ambush. On moonless nights I would curse the dark, quickening my step. However drunk I was, anxiety always cut through the cozy glow, and on moonlit nights I would curse the light, which turned every moving shadow of every branch into overarching limbs. Nature itself seemed to seethe and conspire and close in. Even cities were dark once, before electricity, before gas, before whale oil. Once they were shackled by the dark, and all manner of things, in the mind, owned the night.
Before you came to the convent and the now boarded-up school of Thornhill, there was a field, sometimes filled with horses. They were blue under the stars, momentarily lifting the fear with wonder, the shudder of their warm, swirling breaths. I’d reach over the wire to stroke the blaze on the
ir brows, tentative creatures from some other world.
One night the horses were gone. So, too, was the moon. Instead there was an unnatural light in the distance. I walked toward it, knowing it was unnatural and did not bode well. In childhood I had read about marsh lights, corpse candles, will-o’-the-wisp, gunderslislik, wanting to chance upon them even though they had evil connotations. For a moment I thought the light might be something supernatural, and I was drawn in like a moth to the moon. I passed what I thought were piles of leaves and branches scattered on the road, but their placing seemed odd. As I walked on, I noticed they were mechanical objects, inexplicably scattered. I prodded one or two with my boot. They were heavy, smeared in oil. I had no idea how they had gotten there. As I turned the corner, the light became dazzling, and as my eyes adjusted, I could start to make out the barriers closing off the road to traffic. I realized the objects had all been wreckage. The pieces became more explicable as I walked on: parts of an engine, an obliterated wing mirror, a scalped hubcap, so far from the scene ahead that I could barely imagine the forces that could cast them there. It was the aftermath of giants.
The fire brigade had erected floodlights, arc lights that shone like a Nativity scene, a medieval passion play, Candlemas, an alien landing, or a messianic birth. The glass glistened almost innocently. I walked through the still-stunned air, an intruder unnoticed on a busy film set, and they didn’t seem to see me—not the firefighters with their cutting gear still glowing, or the ambulance crew logging the time, or the police drawing rings around the shrapnel, a scene at once sacred and profane and mesmeric as a morning dream.
Usually the joyriders, always older than I expected, ditched their cars long before this point, after the requisitely satisfying hand-break turns and wheel spins around estates and the mad bolts down expressways. Usually they drove them into the ground in circles, in thrall to Archimedes, or just rammed them into school gates and ignited the evidence. I worked with a caretaker in a local school, and we’d have to clean up such aftermaths nearly every Monday morning. This joyrider was unlucky: unlucky to find the police on his tail, unlucky to take that route in a bolt for the border. Yet it was the same physics as a game of pool. He got the angle and speed wrong on that deceptive bend. I had seen three crashes unfold at that same corner, each almost warranting the “Accident Black Spot” sign that was then used to memorialize deaths at such places. This was by far the worst crash. The car was no longer a car anymore, wrapped around the tree. The dimensions were all wrong. It was a painting by an insane cubist: a shape, all angles, previously unseen by nature. Imagine the laws of motion, the stampeding gale of horsepower, the massive deceleration, the forces that engulf those inside the vehicle like tons of water through a breached hull, and the space to constrict, to embrace and conjoin muscle, metal, and bone. He was in the afterlife or oblivion, quicker than he could possibly realize.
Every day afterward I walked past the scene and the marks were still there on the road. The petrified squeal of the tire tracks in chalk. You could read the patterns of crash lines, the gaudy amber arrows sprayed toward the pavement, then parallel lines churned in the grass directly into the tree, still standing, almost imperceptibly shifted off its axis, like it was rooted in the iron core of the earth. Every day the marks on the road were there, unnoticed by everyone at the nearby bus stop. The path by which a young man exited this world. Then one day they were gone, and this was another nowhere again.
Videotape
The wasteland, a former hockey pitch, would turn from a taiga of frost to a concrete pasture of wildflowers in the summer and then back to frost. We’d drink there in all weathers. We’d get pissed and have dummy fights, as the batteries and the songs on the beatbox slowed down and warped. When our presence had been noted, indicated by a coating of burglar-resistant paint on the walls we hopped over, we began drinking round the back of a Chinese takeaway. A few of my mates then were loco. They were funny, charming, but they always pushed the limits. It started innocently enough, daring one another to shoplift the stupidest thing we could from the minimarket, but a sense of harm continued to enter.
Once, they found a manhole in a field and spent hours prying it open, and then covered it with leaves and got a friend’s older brother to come, under the ruse of showing him a bird’s nest full of bright-blue eggs (the lie-telling always had an art to it), and he walked over, pontificating on his avian knowledge, and fell in mid-sentence, groaning from the bottom of the shaft as the uproarious laughter turned distinctly nervous in character. Another time, a kid broke his collarbone on one of our “death swings,” and we tried chasing him to silence him as he ran home squealing. We’d set fire to gorse, as we always did, and that would soon spread out of control, but it was no longer funny and instead was stressful as the fire engines arrived. It was like handling dangerous chemicals. They were the kind of guys who see Begbie and Tony Montana as characters to aspire to. Squaddies in a parallel universe.
Paul always had this lumbering recklessness. He’d do anything for a dare, always proving himself, always shadowboxing. He’d punch hornets’ nests if dared. He would invent films that no one else had seen. Claim he’d been to places he couldn’t possibly have been near. Always talking about zombies and ninja films. Always articulating affection through rough-and-tumble that would very quickly escalate. He had brute strength too—a big kid who hoarded food under his bed, overweight but built like an ox; one punch and your arm was dead for a whole day. He was a mixed-up kid but didn’t seem to dwell much on anything either. It was a dangerous mix. He was a few years younger than the rest of us, and gradually, as the age gap became more significant, he began to hang around with the younger lads of the area. There seemed to be even more of a streak of malice to their activities. We all did similar things: we lacked their malevolent intent, but what did intent mean when the end results were the same? What difference did it make that you thought you were good inside your head?
Soon Paul was getting into fights with random passersby. A mutual friend, a lunatic himself who used to try to derail trains for the craic, told me that Paul was an accident waiting to happen. I started to hear stories and I began to give Paul a wide berth. It was obvious it would all end badly. He couldn’t be told and was bolstered by his new role, going from the youngest to the oldest in his groups. He no longer had limits. When I said to watch himself, as he had been told a hundred times previously, Paul acted threatened and threatening.
The local kids were soon conjuring up schemes like poaching, robbing taximen, or deliberately getting locked overnight in a supermarket, but they started becoming more reckless. The last time I saw Paul, they had a stuntman scam. They’d run out in front of a car, leap up onto the hood, and then skid dramatically onto the ground; then, as the person exited their car with their hand over their mouth, they’d flail around and ask the person for hush money. They called it “the perfect crime.”
One night they were hanging outside around the takeaways, and Paul, egged on, randomly picked a fight with two guys who were leaving, and words were exchanged and he clocked one of them. The guy was knocked out and cracked his head on the pavement. They switched off his life support later that night in hospital. He was a former “blanket man”—a particularly venerated part of the republican movement for what they’d gone through in prison. Before the hunger strikes, these prisoners had grown their hair long and refused to wear prison clothes, and smeared their excrement on the cell walls as a protest, to be recognized as political prisoners in a war and not as criminals. The man was also a father of four. Old enough to be Paul’s dad. He’d survived the Troubles, and Paul killed him. After he’d served time in a juvenile lockup, Paul had to leave Derry under threat of death. The last I heard, he was living with a relative who was a priest in Belfast. Maybe he had a new name, a new identity. We never saw him again.
Mix Tape
My teenage years really began with the opening notes of Pulp’s “Babies.” Or so it seems now. Absurdly intense, I
was uncomfortable in my own skin as a young man. I felt too tall, too skinny, too pale, too angular. In a western, I would not have been the hero, the outlaw, or the sheriff, but instead an apprentice coffin maker. The temptation, with being an introvert in a world run by extroverts, is to construct a mask. I began to see it, as Britpop eventually reached us through NME and VHS tapes. The middle-class boys adopting the Manchester swagger, the middle-class girls punching the air to “Common People” on the dance floor. I thought of creating masks, identities to hide behind—until, that is, I met her.
She was a friend of a friend—a book obsessive, music obsessive, film obsessive. She looked like Amélie and had plans for greatness, which she declared without embarrassment or arrogance, but as if stating a fact. She had a boundless love for discovering culture, which unguarded me.
“Everything’s been fucking said and done already,” I’d say, prematurely cynical.
“But not by us. Silly man.”
She smiled and kissed me, and she tasted ecstatically of cigarettes and vanilla. I was smitten.
She was, for me, the discovery of worlds. She was kind, which I was not accustomed to in strangers, making me compilation tapes with Chopin’s nocturnes, Satie’s Gymnopédies, Holst’s “Neptune, the Mystic,” and Mozart’s Requiem—music that I’d never imagined existed. She played the piano and the violin and spoke French, and lived in an attic room plastered in pages from The Face, and adored books, most of all Le grand meaulnes. She seemed nostalgic not just for all the lost ages but for the time we were currently living, as if aware it would not last.
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