by David Hough
“Did youse do it, Martin? Did youse post yer application?” She sounded worried as she slipped a hand into his. It felt warm, comforting, unlike her hesitant voice.
He nodded. “Posted it a few minutes ago. Too late to back out now.”
She bit at her lower lip before replying. “Can we have a wee while together?” Something in her voice spoke of a deep concern.
“You want to go to Ivan’s flat?” He pictured her naked body writhing on top of him and was unable to suppress a sudden grin. Was this the moment for an unexpected stroke of good fortune to come his way? It was a good job she was a lapsed Catholic, he reflected, because they had worked their way through one whole lot of condoms in the past month. And it was a good job Aunt Judy had no idea he was sleeping with a Catholic. Aunt Judy was a regular worshipper at Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, where Catholicism was an ugly word. It wasn’t the nearest Presbyterian Church, but it was the most appealing to Aunt Judy.
“You should come and listen to the Reverend Ian,” his aunt often told him. “He’s a true believer in the teachings of Jesus. And it saddens me that you no longer attend any church.”
“Religion no longer means anything to me, Aunt,” he would tell her.
In truth he had turned away from the Presbyterian church because of its overriding message of gloom and doom. Even a friendly game of football on Sunday was a moral sin. The descendants of Scottish settlers had, it seemed, brought their dour religious lifestyle to Ireland with them and then ramped it up until it was beyond Martin’s liking. At least the Catholics made some effort to enjoy their lives.
“But the Reverend Ian’s voice is the word of God, Martin,” his aunt told him.
“In that case I wish God wouldn’t shout at us, Aunt.”
She had a well-practiced way of shaking her head sadly. “You’re a wicked sinner, Martin. What have I done wrong for you to end up like this?”
Thank God she knew nothing of Sorcha Mulveny. He couldn’t even mention her name in the house. It was a dead giveaway. There were no Protestants in Northern Ireland called Sorcha.
As he walked beside her, Martin’s thoughts intensified. Out of bed, she was an attractive young girl: an island of beauty caught up in in a sea of ugliness. She was not a complete innocent, that was obvious, but neither was he. There had been other girls, Protestant girls, but none of them had appealed to him so much as Sorcha. Likely, she had secrets hidden in her past, but he didn’t care. No one was wholly pure in this damned city. In bed, she was a powerhouse of sexual emotion. She had an uncanny way of leaning her head back and crying out, “Yes, yes!” just at the moment he ejaculated inside her. It was her Eureka moment, she told him, the recurring discovery of the ultimate orgasm, the one that had so long eluded her with other bedmates. It also heralded his certainty that he would never want to have sex with anyone else. Protestant or Catholic, what did religion matter when they were so good in bed together? It would matter even less if she would go with him to England. He could marry a Catholic in England and who would care? Their lives would not be at risk.
He gave her a brief inquisitive glance, a look designed to display his sexual need. To his disappointment she seemed unwilling to respond to it, even before she spoke.
“’Tis not sex I need right now, Martin. I just want to spend a while wi’ youse. The thing is… we need to talk. Can we go somewhere for a coffee? Somewhere safe, where we can just be together and talk.”
He looked away to hide his initial frustration. “There’s a café just along the road here. It opens early.”
“A Prod café? I said somewhere safe.”
At that moment he saw an expression of fear invade her eyes. Why? Did she really think she’d be shot for going into a café on this part of the Crumlin Road? Or was he the one who was being thoughtless? He replied with an air of resignation. “You’ve come with me to Ivan’s flat many times over the past month, and Ivan’s a Protestant like me.”
“After dark,” she said. “We went there after dark. Not in broad daylight. I wouldn’t walk into a Protestant house in daylight. Someone would see me, fer sure.”
He snorted loudly. “You’re in a Protestant area now, Sorcha. Everything round here is Protestant, until we get a mile further down the road. You know what it’s like down by the Oldpark Road. Down there, they might as well put up a notice: No Prods allowed here on pain of death.”
She hissed back through gritted teeth. “I told you! I’m not going into a Protestant house or a Protestant café in broad daylight.” The look of fear never left her eyes. “I’d feel safer if we go that mile farther down the road. Are youse too scared to come wi’ me?”
Martin stared hard at her, wondering if she was serious. It was the first time he had seen her so frightened.
“We don’t all go around killing Catholics before breakfast,” he snapped before he could stop himself.
Her gaze fell away in the light of his hard stare, but her voice remained firm. “Youse are scared of comin’ with me, aren’t youse? D’youse think they’ll roast youse alive in retribution for Bloody Sunday. Do youse?”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“And I wouldn’t be here if youse had.”
She had delivered a deliberate taunt, but he was not going to show cowardice in the face of a girl who gave him such a good time in bed. He was made of better stuff than that. He jutted his chin defiantly. “All right we’ll walk on and you can choose where we get the coffee.”
“Glad you can see sense at last.” Her voice lightened and he detected an easing in her stride. “Get rid of that English newspaper first, will youse. They don’t like English newspapers in the Oldpark Road.”
“They don’t like anything English down there,” he replied, and dropped the paper into a hedge. Whoever found it could have a free read this morning.
They walked on down the Crumlin Road, past the outskirts of the Ardoyne area, until they came to a junction. Had they carried on another hundred yards they would have come to the Crumlin Road Gaol and the Mater Hospital. Over the years, the gaol had held numerous IRA men, including de Valera. The Belfast courthouse, where many a terrorist had been sentenced, stood directly opposite it. In 1942 a nineteen-year old IRA man called Tom Williams was hanged in the goal for killing an RUC officer. Martin glanced down the road towards the edifice and reflected that the staunchly Republican Oldpark residents would still remember Tom Williams with favour, but they would have little thought for the policeman he killed. Was he wise to follow Sorcha here?
As he and Sorcha turned into Oldpark Road, a sudden burst of gunfire drew them both to a halt. It seemed to come from several streets away, deeper into the ghetto. They looked at one another and waited for a return of fire. There was none so they shrugged and walked on.
“Is this more comfortable for you, Sorcha? Do you think you’ll be safe from attack now?” Martin asked, unable to hide the irony in his voice. His doubts about his own safety now began to hit home. Too many innocent Protestants had died because they strayed into the wrong areas, and the Ardoyne was very much a ‘wrong area’ for a Protestant. And that gunfire had been only a few streets away.
“Are youse laughing at me?” she snapped angrily.
He turned and grinned as a way of covering his own unease. “Of course I am. Now, where are we going?”
“We’re in the Bone, so we keep walkin’.” She pointed ahead. “There’s a small hotel along here where they know me. I do some wee jobs for them sometimes, so I do. Washin’ dishes and the like. We can get a cup of coffee there. And we can talk.”
“Why d’you Catholics call it the Bone?” he asked, wondering if her reply would be fact or legend.
She replied easily, as if everyone should know the answer. “The Bone… the Marrowbone… Marylebone.”
“You think the ‘bone’ comes from Marylebone?”
“’Tis true. ’Tis because of Marie Le Bone. Mary the Good, in French. That’s where it comes from.” She spread
her hands to show her certainty. “Funny how the English called a London railway station Marylebone after Mary the Good, and we call this part of the Ardoyne after her.”
“Really?” He held back from expressing his thoughts. His original question had been rhetorical because he had read that the London Marylebone came from the church of St Mary at the Bourne. Bourne was the old English word for a stream. But Sorcha came from a world of myth and legend that was often at odds with reality, a world in which St Patrick cast out all the snakes from Ireland. If they stayed together in Belfast it was inevitable that disagreements like this would come between them. They would find themselves arguing about so many deeply entrenched opinions, especially religious opinions. Prudence and the joy of her naked body told him to keep that day at bay for as long as possible… until he could persuade her to join him in England. It would be their only real hope of staying together.
Sorcha seemed unaware of his reservations. “They say there used to be a shrine to Marie Le Bone somewhere round here, so there was.” She paused before asking, “What’s it to youse anyway?”
“Nothing.” He should have known better than to ask. He had no wish for an argument right now.
His regrets at venturing into the Nationalist area began to mount. The evidence of rioting was here for all to see: the bullet marks on the walls and the distorted tarmac where cars had been incinerated. His attention was drawn to a burned-out car abandoned on a patch of waste ground. Beyond it, Provisional IRA graffiti adorned a gable wall. In Loyalist areas the most common wall art was ‘Bugger the pope’. Here it was ‘Fuk the qeen’. The only thing Martin deduced from it was the marginally higher standard of literacy on the Loyalist side of the divide. The standard of ignorance and bigotry was about equal.
A shop directly opposite had been torched. The windows and doors of the next two houses were boarded up. Bricks from a recent riot littered the pavement nearby where a group of unruly children played noisily. They stopped their game to stare at Martin, a face that would be unknown here. Distrust of strangers was the norm to these children. He turned his head away and another gable mural met his gaze. A giant painting of Provo killers proudly parading their Armalite AR-18 rifles, the ‘widowmakers’. The hooded heads and the lethal weapons looked down threateningly onto the dirty streets. We rule here and don’t you forget it, they seemed to say. Martin suppressed a gulp and gritted his teeth.
Surely England could never be anything like this.
If the Green Hills Hotel in Oldpark Road had a star rating it would have been on the minus side of zero. It was nothing more than cheap lodgings on the first floor above a terrace of run-down red-brick shops. A faded sign at street level was falling loose from its mountings. Sultry youths loitered nearby and watched Martin and Sorcha with expressions of wariness. A trail of smoke drifted from what looked like cigarettes, but were not cigarettes. The lingering smell was not nicotine.
“Ignore them,” Sorcha said, and she led the way up a narrow flight of stairs to a dim reception area. An elderly, white-haired woman in a drab grey dress sat behind a desk, busily knitting. She had a pair of scissors in one hand, snipping away at the woollen ends in a newly-darned man’s sock. She eyed Martin suspiciously. He knew the look. It said ‘who the hell are you’ without a single word being spoken. He glanced around as a way of avoiding her gaze. A crucifix hung on one wall. A print of Jesus with his heart exposed hung on another. He looked for an image of Mary the Good, but saw none. The whole place stank of animal urine, but there was no sign of a cat or a dog. He looked back at the old lady, wondering if the smell came from her. The knitting continued.
“Youse’re abroad early, Sorcha,” the woman muttered, never taking her gaze from Martin. The way she peered at him with her small, beady eyes made him feel he was still being interrogated. He flinched, knowing that suspicion of strangers was an everyday part of life in any Belfast ghetto. They learned it from birth.
He wondered what she would say or do if she knew who he was. Hatred of Protestants and the English wasn’t solely because of Bloody Sunday, although that fiasco played a major part in it. It went all the way back to the famine, the plantation, the various Irish risings and beyond. He understood that, and he understood how the stories evolved with their telling, like Chinese whispers, until they became a version of Irish history that was considerably at odds with Irish history.
He resolved to keep his mouth shut as long as possible.
“Can we have a couple of coffees, Maggie?” Sorcha put on a casual air. “Me and me cousin are parched.”
“Yer cousin?” The old lady’s voice held an air of doubt. The scissors hung in the air as if she was about to turn them onto Martin.
Sorcha relied firmly. “Aye. He’s visitin’ from Derry. Is that okay?”
“Ach, well…” The old woman put aside her knitting and stood up slowly, rubbing at her bent back. She moaned as she shuffled away.
“We’ll sit in here.” Sorcha pointed to a tiny sitting room. She leaned closer to him and whispered. “If anyone asks, ye’re called Patrick. D’ye hear me? Martin sounds too Proddy for this area.”
“Martin McGuinness isn’t a Protestant.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“It just is.”
Martin shrugged and followed her into the room. A small window was open, letting in the street sounds and a welcome breath of air.
“Aunt Judy would kill me if she knew where I am now,” he said.
“Better she kills youse than the Provos.” Sorcha indicated him to sit on an old, well-worn two-seater settee. She nestled beside him, grasped his hand and asked in a low voice, “Are youse really gonna go to England?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never been there. Have youse?”
“No, but I’m sure it’s the right thing to do. And ’tis my own choice.”
“You’re quite sure? They say ’tis a terrible place for us Irish.”
“Who says that?”
“Everyone.”
“Republican nonsense. Anyway, I made up my mind a long time ago.” He spoke quietly, wary of the old lady in the reception area overhearing him. “I just never got round to actually doing something about it. Thought I could put it off and live here for a few more years, but it isn’t working out. I’ve no job and it’s not like a proper home here, is it? Not with IRA bombs going off day after day.”
“But, England…?”
He paused. “My dad was English, did you know that?”
“No.” She gave him a surprised look, released his hand and shrank back.
“It’s true,” he said. “He came from somewhere down in the south of England. Moved to Belfast after he married my mum and got a job in the shipyard. She was Belfast Irish through and through, was my mum. So I’m told.”
“’Tis not just England that worries me, Martin. Maybe I could cope with that if I tried. ’Tis more the thought of youse joinin’ the British army an’ maybe gettin’ sent back here to kill innocent Irish people.” A sharp element of hostility crept into her voice.
“The people the army go after are not innocent, Sorcha,” he said, struggling to keep calm.
“They were on Bloody Sunday.”
“Maybe, maybe not. It was all a tragic mistake,” he snorted loudly.
“Innocent people died,” she pointed out.
“Innocent people on both sides have died in the Troubles, Sorcha. Don’t forget that.” Then he remembered where he was and dropped his voice back to a whisper. “’Tis bloody unfair. The IRA go out onto the streets with the deliberate aim of bombing and killing innocents and your people say nothing about it. The army makes a stupid mistake and you’re all up in arms.”
“That’s not true. It was such a terrible thing to happen, everyone should be up in arms about it. But let’s not argue.” She looked around in case anyone was close enough to hear. “Please, Martin, let’s not argue. Not here.”
“You started it.” He wished now s
he hadn’t brought him here.
“What about yer aunt?” she asked. “Will she mind youse goin’ to England?”
“I doubt it.” He thought for a few seconds, his anger slow to dissipate. How much should he tell her? How much should he explain? The icy looks that had followed him through his adolescent years? The beatings when he was a child? In the event, he said, “I know Aunt Judy deserves credit for taking me in after my parents died, but she’s never been like a real mum. It always felt like she had to do it from duty rather than family love. Maybe she just wasn’t cut out for motherhood. Or maybe it’s because she never got over losing my uncle. I’ll thank her before I go, but I suspect she’ll be glad to see the back of me.”
“And youse think England will be better than Belfast?” Sorcha said.
He laughed lightly. “Come off it, Sorcha. Right now any place is going to be better than Belfast.” He put an arm about her shoulders. “The question is; would you be willing to come with me?”
“Live in England?”
“Yes. With me.”
A telephone rang in the background, but he ignored it.
“Why?” she asked. “Why do you want me of all people to go with you? Why me?”
“Because I don’t want to lose you.” He wanted to say how much he loved her, but he sensed it was too soon. He would be asking too much commitment from her before they were both sure. They had known one another little more than a month, and her reservations were obvious.
She went into a short period of silent thought before she spoke again. “If youse don’t want to lose me, don’t join the army.”
“I must.” He cast a hand towards the window. “There’s nothing for me out there. I must get a job and quickly. The army is one obvious choice. With luck I’ll get sent to Germany.”
“You wouldn’t have said that in 1940.”
“I wasn’t alive in 1940 and I don’t live in the past… unlike some.” He gave her a hard look and wondered if she would pick up his meaning. Belfast was full of people who lived in the past. The 1916 rising was only yesterday. The famine was the day before.
