by Dermot Healy
“Can we call it even?” she asked him.
She got up and played “Madame George” by Van Morrison. It was a long triumphant Belfast lament. Jack tried to concentrate his mind on Catherine. Where had she come from? What had she come home to? What was he doing there? He wanted to say: Look, we have both been unfaithful to each other, but didn’t. He didn’t do anything. Her disloyalty and guilt drove him to unparalleled lust. They made love in a sweltering panic to someone else’s passion. He poured her a glass of wine, then himself another glass.
“Have you another bottle?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said sadly.
25
What Did Shamey Coyle Do When He Left Prison?
Left alone in their house in working-class Belfast he often found a sound he could not place running through his head. It was like the static across the trawler’s radio at sea. To drown it out he tried talking to himself. But this “talking to himself” implied a mild exchange, an off-hand chat. In fact, what he was at amounted to verbal self-abuse.
In the company of others the rant would stop.
Yet as he stood in the urinal of a pub or sat on a seat in Ormeau Park it would begin again. Till eventually he realized one day in the Hatfield Bar that the sound he was hearing was his own crazy thoughts raging in his ears. A verbal tinnitus followed him across the tiled floor, through the door, over the thin carpet till he took his seat and settled. And still soundlessly it might persist, so loud that Jack felt that whoever was closest to him would hear the echoes from inside his head. He began to dread being alone. After a night of drunkenness he would wake with such overwhelming pangs of guilt that he felt mentally unstable.
His mornings began with unfortunate musings and bullying hallucinations. His romantic self had always rebelled against surreal imaginings but now he found himself stalked by abstractions, ringings, morbid fantasies. He raged to get beyond, to get out. To give up the drink, today! To start today! Now! That evening he’d find himself – with all these promises to himself broken and forgotten – drink in hand, waiting on Catherine to come home. The abuse continued right up to the moment he saw her alight from the bus.
As the front door closed behind her, the silence mysteriously returned. The furies departed.
“There’s a community group I know looking for a writer to work with.”
“I’d be no good at that.”
“Yes, you would.”
Through her he established contact with them in West Belfast. They were researching a play about a fictional Republican prisoner who was to be released into the outside world after fifteen years in jail for murdering a policeman. Would Jack be interested? It seemed a way out of the quandary of his everyday life on Belfast Lough. Yes, he said, he’d be interested.
Near St Theresa’s private school at Aitnamona Crescent, they rented a room where the Turf Lodge and Andersonstown meet. The first day he walked in there he found himself among a group of people much like himself – outsiders of English or Southern Irish stock; do-gooders who wanted to write meaningful social drama; young writers with a morbid interest in imagining death by violence; women with an axe to grind; people who felt themselves above religious fighting; social workers who had failed to meet the demands of the streets; strident moralists who pretended to liberalism; people with an insane curiosity into why humans kill; and a few Northern Irish who came and went like spirits searching for the bodies they had once inhabited.
Catherine bought a second-hand Lada for £250 with money she earned from two radio plays with the BBC. Each weekend Jack gave her lessons out at Helen’s Bay. In first gear they went in circles round the Folk Museum. He taught her how to do a hand-brake start and a three-point turn below Cave Hill. Her concentration and single-mindedness was total. They took with them a half-bottle of whiskey to drink from between lessons.
Each morning she drove to the Arts Centre, with him calling out directions as she went – Hollywood Bypass! Marine Parade! Go handy! One way! Now the Sewage Works. Lights! Lights! Now Belfast Airport. Don’t do that! Belfast Harbour. Easy, Catherine! Albert Bridge Road, good woman! Albert Bridge, turn right, turn left, East Bridge Street. Easy! Straight Across! Fuck him! Across Cromac Square. Where are we? Slow now, slower! Shaftesbury Square. Jesus!
He moved into the driving seat. They’d kiss, assuredly and lovingly. And he’d drive from there to Aitnamona. He would scarcely have arrived at his desk when Catherine would phone to see if he was safe.
“I made it,” he’d reply.
“The best of luck,” she’d say.
The group sat round uneasily in a circle trying to invent someone who would meet their criterion. Their first job was to find a suitable name for the prisoner. At last, after a bewildering argument, Shamey Coyle entered the world of community drama. A street and a suitable family life was found. He had been born in Hatfield Street off the Ormeau Road in 1949. In 1970 he had moved to Gransha Gardens in the Turf Lodge area with his new wife, who was from Thompson Street, off the Mountpolinger Road in the North Strand.
“Would he have married a Protestant?” asked Jack.
“Don’t be daft,” he was told, “this is a play based on reality.”
What does that make me? wondered Jack. The rant began in his head. Oi! Hip! Ya fucker ya! Up the road ya bollacks! Grieving is it? Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Through my grievous. Sacramentum. Conas mara tá? The fox, the stoat and the bonnie shoals. There is a narrowing constriction at the end of the space. Float through it. It’s only whadyacall it . . .
“Do you think so, Jack?”
The question directed at him separated itself from the myriad of other voices.
“Oh definitely,” he agreed.
Now the group set off to do their research. Late in the afternoon of his second day Jack drove to the Falls Road. He was directed to wait in Islandbawn Street. He sat in the Lada smoking and planning the order of the interview. Very close to him a British Army convoy passed by. Soldiers on the footpath moved one behind the other. The last soldier ducked down by the wing of the Lada. Various shouts rang up and down the street. The soldier crouched by the window. Playing loudly over his personal stereo came a snatch from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
He grunted and ran on down to the next street corner. After the soldiers were gone a knock came to the window. “You the lad that wants to see someone about a play?”
“So, he shoots a policeman,” the man said.
“Yes,” said Jack, “but I’m beginning to worry about this whole project.”
“Why?”
They were sitting in a small, bare living room off Springmartin Road.
“Because I don’t know whether it’s possible to write about these things.”
“I mean why did he shoot the policeman?”
“Because he claims he is part of the occupying forces, I suppose.”
“Do you think so?” He lit a cigar.
“It’s what I presume.”
“I would expect he shot him because he was ordered to do so.”
“Well, yes, in the final analysis, yes.”
“He’s a soldier, isn’t he? That’s what Shamey Coyle is.”
“Yes.”
“And if he shot him in Castle Street, what I’d like to know is – did he walk up the street and shoot him at the check-point?”
“That wasn’t mentioned.”
“For that to happen, the policeman would have to be alone. Do you think a policeman would be standing alone in Castle Street?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Neither would I.”
“But what I wanted to find out about was his life after prison.”
“And what I want to know is whether Shamey Coyle shot this peeler? That will tell us what you want to know. And if he did, how he did it. You don’t intend having him in jail for a crime he didn’t commit?”
“Well, the charges were brought long after he was arrested. He would have been arrested on suspicion.”
“Ye
s, but he’s in the RA, isn’t he? He’s a soldier. If he’s a soldier he has already shot someone, or he is about to do so.”
“Yes.”
“Well then, before you have Shamey Coyle arrested you want to know he killed the man they say he did, and then you want to find out who he killed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Who was this policeman he killed?”
“He was just a policeman, that’s all,” Jack said lamely.
“Well, he has a name, hasn’t he?”
“It would be fictitious.”
“So is Shamey Coyle, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Make up a name for him, then. Make him flesh and blood.” “I suppose he could be called Christopher . . . Little.”
“OK. I suppose that will do.”
“Now what?”
“Who is Christopher Little?”
“He’s nineteen. He’s Protestant. He’s a policeman.”
“And he’s been shot.”
“Yes,” said Jack. He thought a minute. “But how?”
“Right. That’s the question you should be asking yourself. Yet that’s not what you asked me when you came through that door there. You didn’t say – look, I’m having trouble finding out how Christopher Little was shot by Shamey Coyle, did you?”
“No.”
“It was me put that into your head.”
“That’s true.”
“And you accept its important?”
“I suppose I do.”
“And now I hope you realize the value of propaganda.”
Jack was startled. He sat there silently looking at the fresh-faced man who stood with his back to the living-room door, a foot raised with the sole flat against one of the panels. For the first time Jack began to see how far he had been led in a certain direction to consider a concept he had not even entertained.
“If you want to write a play about us, you’ll have to start from the point of view of propaganda. For instance, do we need your play?”
“You might when it’s finished.”
“If we liked it, it would be because it suits our point of view.”
“So, whatever we do, as far as you’re concerned, will only be authentic if it follows your line?”
“Authentic for some people means blood and guts on a side street.” He walked over to the window and looked out. “Authentic to me means being true to the Republican cause. If you were writing a play about another class of human being things would take a different course. But here is where we are. People here are either true to their Republican or Loyalist traditions or they are not. This is something Shamey Coyle would have known.”
“So what do I do?”
“Well, if I wanted to tell you a story that would suit me as a Republican, I’d have your Shamey Coyle start out as anti-Provo. The Brits shoot his brother and he joins the RA.”
“That seems like he joined out of revenge.”
“Sometimes it’s as simple as that. You’re not born with nationalist convictions. People join the RA for simple reasons.”
“And what does that make Shamey Coyle?”
“It makes him a true blue. Your problem is you’re trying to make him a hero. But that’s not the scenario. I’m giving you the true one. You want a Shamey Coyle who has dramatic possibilities. I’d prefer to see a man I could believe in.” He put out the cigar and dusted his trousers. “You don’t look convinced.”
“I’m trying to work it all out.”
“He’s a complicated man, is Shamey Coyle, right enough. It takes a wee while to invent him. You’d need a few hundred years of history to get him right.” He shook Jack’s hand. “I wouldn’t like your job.”
The group met a few days later. They carried on building up a composite figure of Shamey Coyle, a figure who had to represent an IRA man in every particular, and who became, as a consequence, a typical piece of propaganda for them. For him to be otherwise he could not have done what he did, or lasted as long as he would have had to in prison. Soon Shamey Coyle became a source of endless bickering. Each person had their own vision of how a Republican comes into being. They wanted to make him brainless or else highly intelligent; he would be baby-faced, he would be ugly; then came the possibility of him turning from a patriot into an informer.
“Fuck, just leave him in the RA,” said one of the Northern Ireland lads. “Leave informing out of it.”
“We must be accurate.”
“Fuck you. Let him take a bad trip on acid.”
“Yes, maybe he turns informer,” continued the social-worker. “But what sort of man turns informer?”
“A fucking dick-head, if you ask me.”
“Someone who ultimately does not believe in violence?”
“No,” corrected Jack, “someone who does not believe in the IRA.”
“Are we talking here of a man with high motives?”
“Shit. You have it all wrong,” said one ginger-haired lad. “From the beginning Shamey Coyle dreams of getting away from Belfast. If he joins the RA he sees himself as a free man one day walking down the streets of New York.”
“It’s no wonder,” said Jack, “that where we are is called ‘the place of the bog’.”
“What do you mean?”
“Aitnamona – it means ‘the place of the bog’.”
“Do you speak the Irish?”
“Yes.”
“Well, wee lad, you could be making a few bob just up the road there. I hear they’re looking for an Irish teacher in the Mills.”
And that’s how Jack Ferris, after a few weeks building up a profile of Shamey Coyle, left the group that was trying to put the play together and began teaching Irish in Conway’s Mills on the Falls Road. He never actually discovered what Shamey Coyle did when he left prison, but somehow or other he learned to mourn the death of Christopher Little, whose existence he would not have thought of had he not come into being through a conversation with a man who would have killed him.
The teaching of Irish did not bring in much money. His group consisted of two ex-prisoners, a few sons of Comhaltas people, two Republican poets, a young short-story writer anxious for fame, and two girls who were actually learning Irish as a foreign language at school.
In the dark winter nights he’d park the Lada in a side street off the Falls outside the door of a friendly couple. He’d walk the rest of the way. Always he would remember those little streets, the few figures waiting smoking in the dark outside the hall, the lighting of the Superser, the coffee break, the strange sensation of hearing the Irish of O’Ríordán the poet spoken by a group of Belfast adults, while outside a British convoy moved down the street, or a helicopter sent a probing light across the Guinness barrels in the yard.
He had never taught before, and did not want to take it on, but it was Catherine that encouraged him.
“You’d make a beautiful DJ,” she told him. “If you were on the radio I’d listen to you all the time. And you’d make an even better teacher.”
“I’ll be too nervous.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
Twice a week he made the trip and then went off with some members of his class to a nearby pub. They told stories of their lives with a harsh fluency in plain English. The young writer wanted to know how he might write a book that’d make a million. See that boy Jeffrey Archer! And what about Barbara Cartland? Ah couldn’t be bothered wi’ Belfast, who wants ta write about Belfast, said the short story writer, I’ve had it up ta here.
It was an extraordinary thing for Jack to find that he was a useful member of society again. In the afternoons he drank with disreputable Protestants, then crossed town to engage in the Irish language with puritanical nationalists and would-be commercial novelists. Then, arriving home at twelve, he’d find Catherine seated by the window of the house waiting for him, a half-bottle of wine standing on top of the fridge and her scripts spread across the living room floor.
“Will you read out that part for me?”
she said over dinner.
“Who am I supposed to be tonight?”
“You’re a woman who agrees to go undercover for the RUC.”
“Oh yeah?” said Jack. “It’s getting that I don’t know who I am any more.”
She had such a generous sense of giving that he felt blessed. In bed he returned to an old habit of his, one she had eased him away from. He started to cry out like a wounded animal as he came. “Sh,” she’d say. But still this fearful sound would issue from him. Such helplessness distressed her. And her mind would leap at the thought that she might lose him. “You’re unique,” she’d say. She held him, saying over and over, “I love you.” And, she saw, he was very generous towards her. He seemed to have forgotten her betrayal of him.
Tentatively, she’d kiss him.
She thought how crazy she would have been had the same thing happened to her.
“I love you,” she said. “Please let’s be happy. I can only think of being happy with you.”
But it was also a dangerous time for Catherine. For though she wanted his forgiveness still, privately, her betrayal of him gave her a great deal of satisfaction. Telling him that night of how she had made love to another man had helped put some erotic distance between herself and Jack. It reminded him that she existed in a world other than the one he knew her in. She could go outside of his perspective. She could command his lust at any hour. But now as they seemed to grow closer, she could find no fantasy to sustain her. Always, to retain her identity in a relationship she kept one part of herself free from her lover. This allowed her the possibility of betraying him. But Jack’s discovery of her had released her from all duplicity. Never before had she been driven to face up to a lover.
She told him this and held him, and yet wondered privately where it would end.
She began talking of ridiculous plans. When summer came they would leave Belfast. They must leave Belfast, she said. They would go to Europe. They could go anywhere they wanted. “You see,” she said, “I can’t bear it anymore. I don’t want to become a cynic. When we argue I often feel like killing myself. My work suffers when we fight. I suffer, you suffer. But the nightmares are getting worse. Every day I’m full of new grievances. We could go South.”
