The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  I have no doubt that one of the reasons for my father giving me the book in which this story appears is because its first section is devoted to ‘Saint Ciaran – the First of Them All’. This is Ciaran of Clear Island, one of the many Ciarans (diminutive of Old Irish, ciar, dark-haired) which abound in Irish hagiography; perhaps he wanted me to follow in his footsteps, though the path of the Clear Ciaran is straighter than the one I’m taking through this book:

  Patrick took a bell from under his cloak and put it into Ciaran’s hands.

  ‘This bell will guide you. It will not make a sound before you come to the well at Fuaran. Then it will ring with a clear note. Be silent as the bell. Do not speak to anyone until the bell rings. Remember – it may be a long time, but I will come!’

  Here, our hero gets a ship from Rome to Ireland. Then:

  The Bell Rings

  Ciaran found a road and followed it. Before evening he came to a well. The water was cold and clear, with a sparkle in it. He drank and washed himself, but there was never sound from the bell.

  The road kept near the coast. Sometimes it was a fine highway where two chariots could pass. Then it would grow rough and narrow so that only those who walked could use it.

  Ciaran met other roads but did not look at them.

  ‘Time enough to go exploring when the bell rings,’ he thought.

  When he had been among foreigners, unless they knew Latin, he could not speak with them. Now he was among those who spoke his own language and it was hard to keep silent. People on their way to fairs walked beside him, talking of the price of grain and mead and of the long distances on bad roads. Drivers, liking the look of him, slowed up to offer a lift. Women tending fires, or washing clothes in a stream, called out, wishing Ciaran a safe journey, and he could only smile at them.

  Ballad-singers and story-tellers were the best companions. They didn’t want him to talk, only to listen, and Ciaran was a good listener.

  When the road went round a bay he was glad to cross in a boat. If it went inland along the bank of a river to a bridge, he watched out for a ford.

  ‘Isn’t the straight way the best when a man is in a hurry?’ he asked himself.

  The road went through a thick wood and night was coming on. Ciaran walked in darkness yet he could see sunlight beyond the trees. He went slowly, wondering where he could find shelter.

  Eventually, the bell rings. Ciaran finds the well, and builds an oratory. He befriends boars, foxes and badgers, and preaches to them; people coming to the well for water stay to listen. Then, one day, after a sleepless night,

  Ciaran stood up and went out of the hut. Dawn was coming over the wood. The tops of the trees were touched with gold. He could hear the crackling of dried leaves and twigs. Strangers were coming.

  He climbed the hill which rose above his oratory…

  At the horizon, clouds piled against the sky.

  ‘Are they clouds?’ wondered Ciaran. Turrets, golden and rose coloured, stood beyond the waves. Towers, white or palest blue, rose from glowing roofs. Dawn came, through windows shaped like flowers and stars.

  Ciaran had heard stories of Falias, Gorias, Finias, Murias – ancient magic cities of the Danaans who lived in Ireland before the days of history. They were built in a single night, each with its special treasure.

  ‘Can this be one of those cities?’

  Then seven hills rose beyond the glittering roofs and Ciaran gazed once more upon the glories of Rome, while the bell of St. Patrick rang from the oratory …

  I can remember, or imagine my father telling me a story like this, as I hear his voice by way of the disembodied medium of radio; and I visualize him ensconced in an armchair in my sister’s kitchen in Cushendun, where he lives now, looking like a hatless Toby jug with his hands clasped on his pot belly. As he talks, he reveals some aspects of himself that I hadn’t picked up on before: for instance, he used to compose poetry in the toilet of the General Post Office where he worked, ‘losing himself in the language’, escaping clocked time, and I momentarily think of jail journals being written on that semi-opaque thin parsimonious post-War bog-roll (but it would be difficult to write on today’s absorbent luxury) and wonder why such documents are never called diaries; ‘journal’, perhaps, has more implications for posterity and reflection, as the prisoner ponders the world beyond his cell, and justifies the crooked path that led him inside, escaping into language, as he renegotiates his memory to make a story of his life, finding a pattern within it he wouldn’t have thought possible, until the words took over, and made hitherto disparate trains of thought connect, as if building an instant underground tunnel between two railway lines; and prisoners often do escape by way of trains, especially when shackled in pairs to each other in forties American films, clambering aboard through the conveniently open door of an empty cattle-car, after they had disengaged themselves by lying parallel on the track so as the wheels of the train would cut their fetters into clichés. And tunnels, were, of course, especially popular, in which the biggest logistical problem was the disposal of dirt, as men walked stiff-legged in the compound with bags of it inside their regulation thick khaki trousers; recently, a Republican tunnel was discovered emanating from an H-block in the Maze Prison, whose name I am sure has nothing to do with the English for labyrinth – more likely, it is a corruption of the Irish for buttock, más. I can’t remember the waste-disposal details of this plot, but bits of bedstead heads had been used to shore up the walls; the guys had installed an electrical lighting system; later, it was alleged that the authorities knew about the attempt all along, but had maintained a fictional ignorance of it, in order to let the prisoners usefully divert their energies.

  Which brings me back to my father, who had spent some days inside, having been mistakenly interned, during the Second World War, in lieu of my Uncle Pat, his brother, who was rumoured to have been in the IRA. This was a minor confraternity of dedicated men who wore slouch hats and trench coats, and conducted manoeuvres on the back-roads of the Antrim hills above Belfast, like distant Irish deputies of Legs Diamond, transported by their one motor-car, which had two rusted pistols and a ceremonial sword concealed beneath its gaping floor-boards; I now remember a corroborating photograph of my Uncle Pat with one foot on the running-board of such a vehicle, grinning like an innocent gangster from under his brim, surrounded by four comrades; and I feel again the tremble of loyalty I felt for his cause when I first set eyes on this snap in my teens. Outside of such photo-calls, IRA men were practically invisible at the time, seeming to exist by rumour or osmosis in a narrative dimension largely inaccessible to the overwhelmingly non-combatant Catholic population. I used to think of them secretly meeting in minuscule cells built into cavity walls, or lying parallel in threes beneath the floorboards of a ‘safe house’, munching the triangular slices of buttered soda farl provided for them by a spinster sympathizer; I was sure they knew the sewer system of the city inside-out, where they were wont to flit like wills-o’-the-wisp from manholes, into culverts, into niches where they’d stand like statues as the dark police passed underneath unwittingly.

  Their underground status was a kind of voluntary imprisonment; indeed, many of them wanted to get caught so as to achieve temporary martyrdom. I used to have fantasies myself of being committed for some idealistic crime or other, and would dream of spending my undistracted time inside quite pleasurably, writing The Great Book, like a monk in his cell, describing Celtic loops and spirals. Coincidentally, in the course of writing this book you are reading, I was sent some entries for a children’s Hallowe’en story competition, the ‘Spooker Prize’, based in Derry. This story by Chris McCauley seems appropriate in the context. It is called:

  Star Factory

  Star Factory,

  Foyle Road,

  Derry. Friday 13th October

  There is a huge half-crumbling derelict building on Foyle Road. It is called the Star Factory. It has five storeys but I have a far more interesting story to tell you, one you have
never heard and one you will never forget.

  It was a dark, chilly and completely boring October night. I sneaked out of the house and called round for some friends. We decided to sneak into the school grounds to have a game of football. Climbing over the gate in Bishop Street, we stealthily slipped over to the building beside the PE hall. I looked to see if anyone had seen us. Nobody was there, so we crept cautiously down to the pitch.

  The game was going well and nobody had seen us. It was almost impossible to score against Kevin ‘Schmeichel’ Ryan or tackle Andrew ‘Striker’ McIvor and Seamus ‘good pass’ O’Reilly. But then ghosting through the middle I hit a shot fiercely. It ricocheted off Seamus’s head and into the Star Factory. I wasn’t going to let my new ball sit there for long so I was after it like Michael Schumaker on a Sunday evening.

  Over the wires I went, I rummaged through the rubbish. I searched everywhere but there was no sign of my ball. Then I noticed a door I had never seen before. It was a solid wooden door with metal studs and rusting hinges. The paint was cracked and peeling. Surprisingly, the door showed no signs of being burnt, although the walls were scorched a dark ash-black from the fire which had destroyed the building. There was an old rusty handle which strange to say turned quite easily. I should have known then that something weird was going to happen, but I could never have guessed.

  The door swung open to reveal a chamber … (here, the photocopied typescript must have got a dog-eared bottom edge, and some words are missing) … to get that ball if it was the last thing I did (it was a foolish mistake).

  I marched straight into the room. Just at that moment, all along one wall there was a haze which simmered for a moment, then turned into people. They were women all working at sewing machines making shirts. They seemed to hover above the ground and the shirts floated into piles on their own. I began to walk forward. I couldn’t stop myself. It was as if my body had been taken over by some strange power. The apparitions didn’t seem to see me, but then an old woman beckoned me to her. Something told me there was nothing to be afraid of, so I slowly walked towards her.

  ‘You should get out of here,’ she whispered. ‘Because if you stay here for over half an hour you will become a ghost like them, and you will only be allowed to be human for half an hour a year. You don’t want to end up like them.’ She pointed to some ghostly boys who had come looking for their footballs when they went in the Star Factory and beside them a cabinet which just … (a word or two is missing in the original) … above the bottom of the cabinet with an eerie glow. These were the lost footballs. At that moment the college clock began to strike twelve. I ran towards the door as fast as I could. Just as I was about to reach for the handle the bell struck twelve and the door slammed shut. I went to grab the handle but my hand went straight through it. Too late!

  I am now a ghost, trapped in the Star Factory, for the exception of half an hour, when I am able to leave the ghost world and enter the human world. I have taken this year’s time to write this story to you in the hope that people will know the real danger of the Star Factory but I am already running out of energy. I must go.

  Yours phantomly,

  Chris McCauley

  This beautifully constructed story, this missive from the Underworld, still gives me a serendipitous1 frisson, and I am grateful to Chris McCauley for allowing me to reproduce it here.

  The two Star Factories suggest that there might have been a minor chain or constellation of them, but in a way I prefer just the two: I would say that the Derry Star would have been the first, Derry having been famous for shirt-making, and the Belfast Star an offspring, which gives an interesting twist to the Derry versus Belfast rivalry, whereby the Derry people imagine themselves to be superior beings, more talented with anecdote and wit than we taciturn Belfastians; and while they inhabit a Northwest Athens, we endure an industrial slum. Also, they are great singers in Derry, as evidenced by local girl Dana’s having won the Eurovision song contest in 1970.

  I think now of the Belfast to Derry railway, which once occupied the track of the Great Northern line south of the Bog Meadows, and the strung-out corresponding static march of electricity pylons some hundreds of yards to its north. At that time, pylons were wont to be blown up by the IRA, as if they were not already dangerous enough, with their skull-and-crossbones signs and barbed wire looped around the perimeter of their first stages. When it drizzled, they sounded like badly tuned field radios, and sent shivers down your spine as you crossed their force-field. One such armatured Eiffel Tower occupied a salient position just behind Mooreland; on rainy nights, drifting off to sleep, I imagined its sigmatic noises to be interference from the stars.

  1 I confess I never knew the derivation of this word, until I looked it up, just now serendipitously, in Chambers’ Dictionary. Serendipity, the faculty of making happy chance finds (Serendip, a former name for Sri Lanka. Horace Walpole coined the word (1754) from the title of the fairy tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, whose heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.)

  BALACLAVA STREET

  I still dream about the half-acre behind Mooreland, and its various stages of field, leftover landscape, vacant ground, plot, building-site, half-built houses, and completed semi-detacheds. Here, there is a network of small paths between the privet and convolvulus demarcations of back gardens, where it sometimes rains cherry-blossom, or the overpowering odour of sweet-pea stains the air with tinctures of pale lilac, purple, yellow-pepper-yellow, ruby, celadon, and dazzling apple-white. Starch-white sheets billow on clothes lines, washed in Surf or Tide. Little picket gates and hedgy archways provide interesting access points to the gardens and their crazy paving winding among small lawns, rose arrays and vegetable patches. One such creaking gate leads to the stepping-stones of the stream. There is a small beach of gravel here, where I can hunker for unknown hours and watch the current burl and bump across the pebbles.

  Stepping across to the other side, I plunge into the era of the building-site: an aura of raftered pine and brick, wood-shavings and cement-dust.

  It was a world of half-finished structures, whose exo-skeletons of scaffolding were connected, Babel-wise, in gangways, hoists, ladders, platforms, ropes and planks. It had the presence of a great interminable siege, as we stalked its storeyed parapets and battlements and gazed down across its blasted landscape of earthworks and ziggurats of brick, and churned mud where cement-mixers were embedded like mortars. Discarded hods and buckets lay scattered everywhere, like details in a documentary of Breughel building techniques.

  Before the building-site proper existed, deep trenches were dug in the back field. Roofed with corrugated iron and floored with bits of cast-off carpet, they made admirable suburban HQs, where our wish to be invisible could be realized, as it was in wardrobes, hedges, under stairs or attic roofs, in peek-a-boo routines of out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

  Games of pursuit were thus inevitable – Cowboys and Indians, hide-and-seek, of course, but also the many variants of tag, or tig,1 as we called it. In Rally-o, the person tigged had to remain rooted to the spot, but could be freed if a peer spat over his head and shouted ‘Rally-o!’ at the same time. In ground-tig, the players who were not ‘it’ could be out-of-bounds by being above street-level, however infinitisimally: one would perch on garden walls and swing on gates, or clutch at hedges and lamp-posts with all fours, discovering new latitudes of elevation. This was a game for taunts and bluff, where a player could cock a snook by advancing to an almost-tiggable position from the refuge of a dustbin, like a runner trying to steal a base in baseball, which can be thought of as an elaborate game of tag.

  Kick-the-tin, a hybrid of tig and hide-and-seek, employed an empty tin can as a release-mechanism, which, if kicked away from its central location, allowed players time to find new hiding-places while ‘it’ retrieved the can and replaced it on its spot. Thus the can was a kind of clock with differential radii, depending on the angle and length
of the kick: it recalls the vatic tin-can ghost of the Lower Falls, which was heard tripping down the gutter, but never seen, any time there might be trouble in the offing. It was first heard in the twenties, when a policeman was shot dead outside the National Bank on the corner of Balaclava Street; since its habitat has been demolished, it has not been heard, but its memory lives on, even within the minds of those who’d never heard it, since it had acquired the status of a story.

  Now, when I lie awake on a windy night and hear the vacillating roulette trickle of a tin can, I feel a shiver of impending doom, as Glandore blurs into Balaclava, thecan resounding off the street in fits and starts – melismatic, rallentando phrases, broken by lulls and false denouements – till at last it ticks to a stop, or I fall asleep. Then I am prompted to step out of my body, to glide at second-storey level through the dark streets in a Wee Willie Winkie nightgown, making sure that everyone is safe in bed –

  Rapping at the windows, crying through the lock,

  Are the children in their beds? Now it’s eight o’clock –

  which reminds me, that in my father’s and mother’s time, men were hired to walk the streets with long poles in the dawn to knock on bedroom windows, like antonyms of lamplighters, waking people up for work, before the advent of alarm-clocks. A broken Westclox alarm-clock with luminous numerals and hands was a fixture in one of the tin-roofed catacombs of Mooreland, providing the hastily conscripted crew with an important focus of radium power; on other occasions, it could be a compass, or a depth-gauge, as our dug-out-turned-submarine escaped the enemy above by sinking to hitherto unfathomable depths. The needle descends the dial; the riveted steel panels start to creak and give at the seams as the sea spits and boils through them; and the whole craft threatens to break up under the unprecedented pressure, till it settles, with a slow, musical bass clank, on an angle of the sea-bed. At this stage in the story, the sweating crew heaves a collective sigh of relief, except the captain, who has seen it all before and knows there’s more to come.