by Alan Judd
One rubber bullet was fired and, although the stoning continued, the crowd was kept at too great a distance to be a serious menace. They turned then to building a barricade of cars across the road out, rocking them from side to side and then turning them over. Most were old wrecks anyway but one or two were probably stolen. By this time a number of the press had arrived and hovered uncertainly between the Army and the mob, before making hurriedly for the Army as the stone barrage worsened. Charles was always surprised at the speed with which a relatively minor disturbance could become a dangerous confrontation. It needed no more than a drop of bitterness, mixed with the odd injury or two, to turn the whole thing. Charles resumed one or two acquaintances of the previous night and learned from them that trouble was breaking out throughout Belfast. There were Republican demonstrations against the shootings and Loyalist demonstrations in support of them. Londonderry was quiet and somebody pointed out that the two cities were never aflame together. The arrival of the TV men seemed once again to constitute an important part of the ritual without which no riot seemed real. The press symbolised both crowd and referee at a football match but it was a match in which the referee’s decisions were long delayed, and in which one side was able to conduct itself with regard to them alone while the other was hampered also by a set of rules known to all but applied to itself. Once the cameras were in place the game could begin in earnest.
However, it was not to be. The search teams in the school finished, with nothing found, and the CO decided to pull out. ‘You can tell your press friends we’re going home now,’ he said to Charles. ‘We’re going to walk right through their barricades, and first thing tomorrow morning when there are no press around and all these buggers are in bed I’m going to get Scoopy-do down here and dump all these old cars slap bang across their front doors. If they want to build barricades in my patch they’d better understand they’re going to get their own back. So you can tell the press it’s all over bar the shouting for tonight, once we’ve pushed that lot to one side. These people aren’t going to cause more trouble in case we search the whole area. I’m certain the bloody stuff’s here somewhere though, absolutely certain. Still, it’ll wait.’
The barricades, which were still being built, were to be taken simply by driving the Pigs through them. This pleased the press because it would be dramatic, pictorial and, above all, quick – there were other, potentially more interesting incidents in other parts of the city. The search teams were still clearing up and the Pigs were revving their engines in hungry anticipation when Van Horne told Charles that he was wanted.
‘By whom?’
‘Dunno, sir, but they’ve been calling for you for about five minutes now.’
‘Where?’
‘Out there.’ Van Horne pointed down the street at the mob.
‘They want me?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, I’m not going. How do they know me anyway?’
Van Horne smiled patiently. ‘No sir, not them. The soldiers, sir. Our side. Down by the telephone box – look.’
Some thirty yards away between the Army and the mob there stood a telephone box. Some soldiers were crouched behind cars and low walls nearby. They were a snatch squad deployed to keep the mob back out of stone-throwing range. One of them was beckoning to Charles and pointing at the telephone box. ‘What does he want?’
‘Maybe someone’s telephoning you, sir.’
There was no trace of a smile on Van Horne’s face. ‘You can come with me,’ said Charles. There was no great danger in reaching the telephone box, as the occasional brick could be easily avoided, but it was against Charles’s principle of minimum involvement. Running, with so little obvious need and in front of so many people, would have appeared unofficer-like, and so he was obliged to walk in the normal officer fashion, his hands behind his back. Van Horne mysteriously got there ahead of him and crouched on the pavement behind the box because something had provoked the mob suddenly to bombard it with stones. Charles joined him, having run the last few yards despite his feelings about appearance. One of the soldiers lying in a garden nearby said that there was a journalist in the telephone box who wanted to speak to him. Charles did not need to ask who it was. Propped up against the back of the box, he carefully poked his head round the side and then withdrew it sharply as a lump of iron whistled past. ‘Beazely!’ he shouted. There was a pause and then he heard Beazely’s voice shouting something indecipherable. ‘What are you doing in there?’ Charles shouted again.
‘I can’t get out. Every time I open the door they stone me.’ Beazely sounded frightened and distressed.
Charles leant back against the box, safe from the stones. The nearby soldiers laughed. ‘Ring for the police!’ Charles shouted.
‘Bloody funny, ha ha. Now what about getting me out?’
‘Make a dash for it and come round here.’
‘I can’t. There’s some kids behind the houses just waiting. They’ll get me.’
‘Try it.’ Charles poked his head carefully round the other side. Like all telephone boxes in the area, and like most throughout Belfast, this one lacked glass and a telephone. He could just see Beazely’s baggy trousers and dirty sheepskin jacket. ‘Come on, try it!’
Beazely began to edge open the door with his foot and immediately a shower of stones and debris came crashing down. Some very small children, less than twelve years old, were throwing them and laughing before running back behind a house. Beazely let the door close. Charles again withdrew his head as a stone made sparks on the road a few inches from his eyebrow.
‘Want us to move up and take ’em out, sir?’ called the soldier from the garden.
‘No. The CO’s going to move up on the barricades in a couple of minutes.’ Beazely was shouting something again. ‘Speak up!’ shouted Charles.
‘I said, is anyone coming to rescue me?’
‘In a couple of minutes. We’re just organising it. Hold your ground.’
‘For Christ’s sake.’ Beazely sounded desperate.
There was a pause while nothing seemed to be happening anywhere. It was impossible not to relish Beazely’s predicament. Charles raised his voice again. ‘How old do you think I am?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ The reply was muffled, as though Beazely had pulled his jacket over his head.
‘You said I was forty-one in your paper.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You did.’
‘Slip of the pen. Sub-editor. Jesus Christ, Charles, get me out of here, can’t you? They’re going to kill me soon.’
Charles could see that the Pigs were about to move. ‘I’m just about to get it rolling.’
‘Speed it up. Please. Before they get me. Look, we can do a deal. I’ve been thinking about it.’
‘What kind of deal?’
Beazely’s reply was drowned by the roar of the oncoming Pigs. Two abreast, they rumbled down the street and ploughed into the flimsy barricade with a great rending of metal. The mob fled like minnows before a perch. With their engines revving high so as to give an impression of much greater speed than they had attained, the Pigs nosed and shrugged the cars aside. The CO and his party walked down the road behind them, chatting amicably. A few more stones came from behind the houses but they were no more than a parting gesture. The trouble was over.
Charles walked round to the front of the telephone box and opened the door for Beazely. Seeing Charles he straightened himself, touched his glasses nervously and stepped out. ‘I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d had it in there. It would only take one of those lumps of metal on the head and that’d be it. Look at it all. Don’t know where they find it all from.’
Charles looked at the debris around the telephone box. It wouldn’t have been difficult for Beazely to have been killed or seriously injured. ‘Just as well we came when we did,’ he said. He felt slightly guilty at having made fun of Beazely now. ‘You sure you’re all right?’ he ask
ed.
Beazely smiled a grateful smile. ‘Shaken and stirred but still in me glass,’ he said. He blew his nose and then looked at the bent cars askew across the pavements. ‘I’d better take some piccies of this lot.’
‘I’ll do it for you if you lend me your camera,’ offered Van Horne. ‘That all right, sir?’
Charles nodded. Beazely was only too pleased. ‘That was a great picture of Charles they used in this morning’s. Blood and thunder. Fear and danger. You could see it all.’ He gave his camera to Van Horne, who went off and happily clicked away. He pulled a crumpled packet of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘I thought I’d had my lot then, I really did. Very impressive rescue operation you laid on there, Charles, very impressive.’ Beazely was obviously beginning to feel he could cope again with the world. Charles decided he preferred him when he was frightened. He was more likeable and natural. ‘Little bastards,’ Beazely continued. ‘They had me in there for about twenty minutes, you know. Every time I poked my nose out they chucked half a house at me. Killing themselves laughing too. I’d kill ’em, I tell you, kids or not, if I had your job. ’Course, it would’ve been different if I’d had a gun.’ He pulled on his cigarette, his confidence returning with each puff. ‘Listen, about this deal. What do you say to fifty-fifty?’
‘Fifty what?’
‘Don’t be thick, it doesn’t suit you. Fifty-fifty. We’ll go halves. Half my salary while I’m out here for you and your oppo with the camera. I can live on expenses, see, no trouble. In return for which you and him do my reports. Nothing I wouldn’t be reporting anyway, nothing confidential, just what everyone else is writing about except that you’re there and they’re there and I’m not. I can sit in my hotel snug as a bug. You know what all this aggro does to me. I just can’t do it, I can’t function. But you’ve got to be there anyway, haven’t you? You’ve got no choice, so you might as well do my job at the same time and get paid for it. And you hear about things that happen in other areas so you can tell me about those. See, you’re in the thick of it in a place like this. This is what you like, isn’t it? What you join for. I don’t, see. It’s not what I joined for. And if you don’t know something you can ring the PROs in other areas and get the story from them. See what I mean, Charlie?’ He tapped on Charles’s flak jacket with the two fingers that held his cigarette, his confidential saloon-bar manner now fully in order. ‘You could do it, you know. That stuff you and Van what’s-it told me last night, it was bloody good. Crisp, to the point, an eye for detail, I didn’t have to add much to it. Superb. You could both be great journalists, you know. In fact, this could be good practice. And it don’t matter if it’s not always like that. So long as I can get the bones of it I can hack the meat about, see. I just stay in the hotel and you ring in when you’ve got something. Fifty-fifty. What d’you reckon? Couldn’t be fairer.’
Charles strove to see a flaw in the idea. He needed the money to leave the Army and it sounded so simple. It was not, after all, giving Beazely any more than he would have got anyway, nor more than any other journalist would have got. Also, where something like this was concerned, he felt he could trust Beazely. He sounded as though he knew what he was talking about. Certainly, there was no other way of getting out of the Army soon. But for the present the very novelty and simplicity of the idea baffled him.
‘Come on, you idle bugger, it’s easy. Just give me two or three stories a week, that’s all. For Christ’s sakes, your own PR desk at HQ could give you that. Then you just phone ’em through to me. No one will know. I did it with a Yank when they sent me to Vietnam and it worked like a bomb till he got zapped. And with one of the delegates at the Labour Party Conference till the drink got him. You can’t lose, Charlie. Hundred a week minimum, no tax, guaranteed, plus bonuses of course. How you split it with your oppo is your business but I’d suggest fifty-fifty. Keeps people happy. Anything else and they either think they’re hard done by or they think you must be getting a rake-off that they don’t know about. How about it?’
Speedily, furtively, the deal was done. Van Horne was brought in, listened to the explanation and simply nodded at the end of it. Involving a soldier was the only aspect about which Charles felt uneasy, but Van Horne was no ordinary soldier and his immediate acceptance of the deal suggested that he would have thought any other course mere foolishness. Perhaps he, too, wanted to buy himself out of the Army.
‘Great stuff.’ Beazely pulled out another mangled cigarette. ‘I’ll do this afternoon’s story as I happened to be here. I wouldn’t have hung around of course if I hadn’t wanted to talk to you. You can start tomorrow.’
All the other journalists had gone off to the Ardoyne where there was more trouble, according to Van Horne. Most of the Land-Rovers and Pigs were pulling out.
Beazely put his cigarette back into his pocket. ‘I’m not staying here without the Army. No disrespect to you two, but I have faith only in numbers in these situations. I’ll go back to the hotel. Can you fill me in on the Ardoyne business? Before ten if you can. Basic facts plus a few details. Children and injured soldiers, that sort of thing. Make them up if you like.’ He buttoned up his coat as he left, as though to keep out the danger.
It turned out that the CO had got Brigade to send Scoopy-do that night rather than the following morning. There were no journalists around, no rioters and just a few soldiers. Scoopy-do lumbered down the road like a hungry beast let out for feeding and paused in front of the CO, who stood with his hands on his hips looking very pleased with himself. It was a different Scoopy from the night before and a different Sapper. The CO explained that he wanted the cars dumped in people’s gardens as close as possible to the front doors. ‘If these people are prepared to steal them, make barricades out of them and then no doubt burn them, they can bloody well have them in their living rooms.’
Everyone, including the startled residents, watched Scoopy-do go about its business. It would move itself alongside its victim, so that it was in a killing position, and then raise one huge paw and with ponderous but unerring accuracy smash it on the head. It would then back off a few yards, as though to survey its crushed victim for signs of life, before raising its gaping bucket-jaws, lowering them gently on to the victim and fastening with an appetising crunch. Next it would pick up the car by the neck, like a dog with a rat, exposing the wheels like legs, and would trundle off to someone’s front garden and lower it carefully on to its side across the front door. The occupants were confined, for once, to hurling abuse from the upstairs window.
‘The only drawback,’ said the CO, ‘is that we don’t know for certain that it was people from these houses that actually caused the trouble. It could have been people from the next street. But they all hate us anyway and this might persuade them to try to restrain their friends next time. Though I doubt it.’
‘We will not tell Beazely about this,’ said Charles to Van Horne.
‘There’ll be complaints. He’ll get to hear of it.’
‘But not from us. Not this.’
They pulled out when the cars were positioned to the CO’s liking, leaving the onlookers scratching their heads and swearing. The rain was falling more steadily now and dusk was approaching. It was one of those afternoons that are never really light and that slip with relief into night. They had reached the outer ring of the estate when there was a loud explosion from somewhere back within it and a small plume of dark smoke rose rapidly behind them. The CO was as aware as everyone else that this could be a come-on, a bait to lure them back into an ambush, but he was never a man to wait and see. ‘Turn about!’ he shouted. His Land-Rover and its two escorts lurched round and headed back down different roads towards the Bull Ring. They had not gone far when they saw that the smoke, which was all but finished, seemed to have come from a scrubby bit of no-man’s land at the side of a house. Several women and a couple of men were looking at something on the ground, and more were joining them every moment. As usual after an explosion, other sounds seemed cowed into silence. When they g
ot out of the Land-Rovers the engines on tick-over were the only noticeable noise. Several of the escort party ran doubled up across the road and took up fire positions facing the surrounding houses. The CO’s party, with the CO inevitably to the fore, ran over to the sullen little group. As they reached them the group turned and tried to stop them seeing what it was they were surrounding. For a moment the resistance was real enough but the RSM and Nigel Beale put their heads down as though in a rugby maul and the people were pushed aside. Even then, though, they did not go away but still kept shoving and pulling resentfully. A fat woman grabbed hold of Charles’s sleeve above the elbow with both hands and for a few moments he struggled with her in silence before elbowing her in the belly and winding her. Throughout all the tussling no one spoke and no one shouted. It was conducted in an eerie, bitter silence and seemed all the worse for it. When they finally broke through they saw that the object of the crowd’s attention was a small, dark-haired boy of about eight or nine. He was lying on the ground in a curiously twisted attitude. His head was resting on his right shoulder, his eyes were closed and his face was calm as though in peaceful sleep. His right arm was stretched out beside him with the palm upturned. His left arm appeared to go straight down the side of his body but it was difficult to see where it ended because from the elbow all the way down to his knee was blood and mangled red flesh. No hand or fingers were visible. The right side of his body looked complete and normal.
