Of course, not all of the buildings on this menu appear simultaneously in any one version of the dream; but the space they occupy accommodates more than would appear feasible, and they are liable to mutate as the dream progresses, depending on what route you take through it; and the façades of the grand piazza will be different every time you enter it.
The weather, too, can be very changeable, shifting from blustery showers to sunny calms in minutes, and rainbows occur frequently, reminding me of the interior of St Peter’s, where stained-glass shadows tremble on the marble embrasures of windows. I often enter the church for shelter, usually arriving in the middle of an elaborate ceremony whose function I only dimly know; but this does not entirely matter, since the participants, moving in a cloud of ritual and incense, are oblivious to the other goings-on which take place in the lobby area immediately between the porch and nave. Here are whispering dealers in holy pictures and indulgences, little men in long black crombie overcoats, some displaying their wares on cinema ice-cream-girl trays, others with interior pockets sheaved with luridly printed tracts. Here you can purchase little brass glass-faced reliquaries that look like toy compasses, about the diameter of an old florin, with a florid acanthus-leaf circumference; they contain a splinter of the True Cross, or a smidgin of linen snipped from the shroud of a saint, and feel surprisingly heavy for all their small size in your hand. The more authentic of them cost about ten florins. Meanwhile, sextets of shawled women walk in rounds, intoning interweaving rosaries, and a bawling baby is being baptized at the nearby font. Four men are playing cards in the shadow of a confessional. Fourteen genuflectors follow the Stations of the Cross. Individuals are lighting candles at the many side-shrines, their faces momentarily illuminated by them. Others, entering this immanence, dip their finger-tips into the necessary stoups of holy water, feeling its cold kiss on their foreheads as they bless themselves. An unseen organist manipulates his stops of voix celeste and vox humana in a reverie of practice, climbing and descending scales of meditation, moving from funereal to hymenal mode in the space of a bar, allowing himself almost-deliberate mistakes so as not to make them again on the important occasions in his diary of engagements.
Leaving the church, I walk down Milford Street, take a right at Macmillan’s Place, again a right at Durham Street, to find myself in Barrack Street looking at my Alma Mater, St Mary’s Christian Brothers Grammar School. It is some time in the sixties.
BARRACK STREET I
I remember the second-term light that fell through the high sash windows of the fourth form in St Mary’s, and the chalky dust-motes sifting downwards through it, as the Mathematics master scribbled formulaic elaborations on the blackboard; he doubled as a Latin teacher, since both subjects were logically complicit in their aim of inculcating order into adolescent minds. Mr X had a penchant for entwining his wrists in the looped cord which operated the pawl-and-ratchet mechanism that cranked open the top light of the window, as he dangled his weight at an angle to the perpendicular, contemplating an aspect of non-Euclidean geometry, while he conjugated a Subjunctive Mood. Were this a story I am telling you, some prankster would have abraded the cord with a schoolboy’s blunt pen-knife; as it was, we feared X’s eccentricity too much to tamper with the course of nature, and his falling flat on his face one day was due to inertia and the relative load-bearing properties of braided materials. It is to his credit that he rose from prone with some aplomb, like an Olympic gymnast springing to a crucifix, end-of-routine stance from a jack-knife somersault – as if the accident had been premeditated, and formed an important flourish in his curriculum vitae. Later, he would use the memory of this routine as a retrospective device to illustrate the Ablative, ‘which expressed direction from, or time when, but was later extended to other functions’.
Another of the tall windows formed a second-storey portal for the Invisible Boy. This entertainment consisted of a simple but mysterious manoeuvre, whereby one boy in the class was delegated, or persuaded, to climb through the opened window; then, finding his feet on the boot-wide cornice that ran below the sills, he would inch his way along like a reluctant suicide, till, fingers of one hand gripping the edge of the brick embrasure, he would disappear from internal view. Understandably, the Invisible Boy was only promoted during periods of rookie teachers, or those about to be retired; trying to remember the exact point of this operation, while recognizing its clandestine thrill, I think it had something to do with knowledge being power, that we were privy to a thing our master did not know, that the class complement was minus one; also, elements of ritual sacrifice were there, since the Boy was an elected scapegoat, or a proxy, for his classmates, and his apparent freedom was an obverse prison. Nevertheless, each boy knew him as an alter ego, and through the Boy each boy could experience bi-location.
Spreadeagled, frozen for forty minutes on the second storey, I was once a Boy myself. Of necessity – it was otherwise impossible to balance – I faced the wall; yet it seemed I had eyes in the back of my head as I recalled the dizzy sudden view I got as I first gazed through the open window, till, half-way through my sentence, I fell into a reverie of West Belfast: there had been a recent shower of hail, and roofs and tops of backyard walls were frosted with it; mill chimneys, neo-Gothic spires, were silhouetted against a yellowish-blue sky; and, far-off, up on Black Mountain, a sudden ray of sunlight glanced across the whitewashed farmhouse at the corner of the Hatchet Field. I felt the verges of a flying dream.
In these lulls or slips of time, high above the muted afternoon of non-school business – the subdued clanking of a tram, the thrum of a linen mill, the distant cries of infants playing – one could see how time could be manipulated by one’s place in it.
Being sent out during class-time on an errand (or message, as we called it), the open street is wider and more empty than it had been. Recently fallen rain chuckles along the gutter in a minor Styx, before falling into the cast-iron deep of a storm-grating. The granite setts of the street are all wet sunshiny bumps and glittering mica specks; the pavement is an ongoing oblong universe of parallels, faults, joins, cracks and adjuncts, where, between the slate-blue flags, intervening avenues of moss bear microscopic flowers. Scooping a green strip of it out from its habitat with a hooked index, I realize, now, that its stripped underlay of soil must be a residue of soot, dog and horse shit, dirt, tobacco-dust and flax-dust, whereby the waste products of the city are recycled into every crevice, into bronchial passages and alleyways, and violets bloom among the tumbled ruins of abandoned brickfields.
It would take me a geological age, or no apparent time at all, to reach Greenan’s shop on the corner of Waterville Street and Clonard Gardens, where, when you plunked your thumb on the worn brass thumb-scoop of the latch, an interior bell dangled and tinkled on its connective string. You walked into the empty space, feeling invisible, hovering on one side of the high wooden counter, till Mrs Greenan, in her dressing-gown, materialized among the aromatic fugue of soap, sweets, cheese and cigarettes, and reminded you of your routine order. I used to believe that my father’s rhyme appertained to this establishment:
Oul’ Granny Grey, she kep’ a wee shap
Jist a cupla dures from ar scule
An’ the shap wiz a kitchen windy
An’ the counter jist a wee stule …
and so on for a few more verses of nostalgia, till Granny Grey ends up keeping her wee shop in Heaven, or Havin, as the Belfast accent has it.1
Doubling back to school from Granny Greenan’s, I began to appreciate the urgency of my mission, as I clutched the oblong tin of Erinmore tobacco in one hand, small change in the other; already, I could see the master enjoyably prising open its vacuum-sealed lid with a special device on his smoker’s pen-knife, as the premonition of tobacco hit his nostrils; and he would allow us to doodle, or do nothing, while he extracted a cartouche of its moist plug and cut it into bits on his left palm with a blunt blade of the knife, before rubbing it into crumbs and thumbing it into his briar bowl,
whereupon he lit it with a Bo-Peep safety-match, which burned down to a spidery, expired stalk before the tobacco ignited properly. Then his tamping implement would be deployed, a second match applied, till the whole pipe began to glow and gurgle, emitting vowels of contented smoke.
Responding to this coded message from the future, I would zig-zag like a secret agent, Early Christian Boy assigned to smuggle the Communion Host through Roman lines to a sacrament-deprived catacomb, because I knew the subterranean routes of storm-drains, sewers, and culverts. Yet, the militia also were alert to their existence, and patrolled the manholes vigorously; decades of torch-bearers and their leashed cohorts of bloodhounds wandered sluggishly among the shadowy arcades and tunnels, ankle-deep in water. Standing upright in a dark niche, immobile as a holy statue, I trembled on the verge of martyrdom; the police, eventually, would stumble on me, and interrogate my whereabouts; and I would die, rather than sin.
During these imagined epics, the ornaments and flowers in empty parlour windows were arranged like icons in a running sub-text, and the lions’ heads on doors grinned silently, as they held the bits between their teeth. By now the street was a time-bound amphitheatre, with Clonard Monastery as one ruined wall of a Colosseum, which cast its ancient gnomon shadow on the whole proceedings. Whole empires crumbled, as the moss between the flagstones seethed with microscopic life. The sky was blitzed by photographically developed clouds, blown in a hurricane into the present from its own inexorable detritus, as time collapsed about it, and only the eye of the storm could determine what would be; afterwards, the survivors in potato cellars would emerge to rub their eyes and poke about the abandoned bits and pieces of their sky-borne farms. Somewhere up there, a whole house still sailed in the vortex, all its crockery and Tilley lamps intact, pictures and mirrors tilting gently from the perpendicular. I am reminded of the elaborate traveller’s-tale bungalow, eaten inside-out by a termite army, who digest its every wooden item, but leave behind a shell of what had been, until the unsuspecting aftercomer touches it, and the simulacrum crumbles into dust.2
For all these reveries, I was not unpunctual in my return. The time I’ve taken to describe these mental byways is much longer than their actual span, for each can be perceived holistically, in kaleidoscopic, frozen moments; and time is telescoped within them. Think of those minutely detailed, mundane dreams in which you wake, rise, brush your teeth, put on your clothes, etcetera, and go to school or work, enjoying all the routine panacea of a day, etcetera, until you wake again, perhaps for real, and must endure the process once again: these dreams only occupy some fleeting moments, according to some observers; but they seem a form of déjà vu, or a basis for prognostication. An ornithologist informs me that starlings flock at dusk in standard, routine patterns, so that each day is the same to them; and what we see as wheeling, baroque outbursts occupy a predetermined flight-path; the birds are both conductor and the score, their movements only deviated by the ambient humidity or temperature. As we discussed this phenomenon – birds chattering, dotted and quavered on telegraph lines – another amateur suggested the analogy of a fireworks display, whose nebulae exploding in the night above you have been engineered to manage such effects, yet each is slightly different in its calculated spontaneity.
Over and over, though we flit incessantly into the moment, our pasts catch up with us, and apprehend us at the endless intersections, where fingerposts are unreliable, and mileages are tilted. I realize, now, that I’ve travelled back from secondary to primary school by the arbitrary short-cut of a synapse, down one worm-hole of the riddled memory, which stores everything we’ve ever known, and more, if we could only find the portals to its vast, inconsequential realms, where the laws of time and space work in reverse. In this non-Euclidean geometry, the interior of a surface is infinitely greater than its exterior. There are boxes within boxes, elaborately carved versions of each other: not copies, since one chromosomal detail, according to current evolutionary theory, must differ slightly from its predecessor, till, by a Chinese-whisper process, the microscopic generations appear garbled to their ancestors; we are assuming, here, that they evolve from the outside in, whereas the converse is just as likely to be true, since space is a function of time, and vice versa.
Time spent inside is not equal to that spent outside. The mouthful of ‘St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ Grammar School’ was reduced to ‘Barrack Street’ in common parlance, a nomenclature which corresponded both to space and history. There was speculation that the ghosts of sentrymen or screws patrolled the doors of classrooms, and this vision of a prison was encouraged by the military carriage of the black-robed, black-buttoned, black-booted Christian Brothers. Sometimes, the routine periods of time would be disrupted by sporadic bursts of poltergeist activity emanating in the chemistry laboratory. Will-o’-the-wisps had discovered its whiff of phosphorus and Bunsen-burner gas to be conducive to their being; occasionally, pipettes and retorts exploded mysteriously over the benches etched with names and acid. Dissident, spilled globules of mercury rolled and hissed on the floor; the shelves trembled with powerful chemical substances, as if an underground train of association ran below the whole establishment, shaking its foundations.
Inserting myself into the remembered cell of a classroom, I realize again that the Invisible Boy was a kind of paradox or oxymoron, simultaneously free and unfree, there and not there; his reality depended on the observer. Now I recall that in another ground-floor room, a deviant of the Boy was perpetrated. Here, a wainscot-high row of coat-hooks ran along one side of the room; in winter, they were festooned with damp, visually impenetrable gaberdines, behind which the newly incumbent Boy would be required to hunker uncomfortably. A particular kink of this version was the elevation of its scapegoat aspect to a point of sadism. Curled foetally, the Boy, as present absentee, would be cajoled by furtive kicks and fisticuffs to give himself away; yet this stratagem was liable to backfire, since, were the Boy’s cover blown, the whole class would be implicated. On one occasion, someone stuck a compass-point into Him, whereupon the Boy’s responding utterance was muffled by a collective outbreak of whooping-cough; it was agreed, thereafter, that such weapons should be decommissioned. Complicit in invisibility, we suffered Mafia or IRA extremes of honour, for our Catholic education had imbued us with the desirability of martyrdom: perfect training for a man on the run, who, if arrested, would die rather than inform or sin; and I have dreams of being such a figure to this day, finding myself apparently trapped in a cul-de-sac between the Falls and Shankill Roads, desperately searching for a manhole.
Given our underground status, we constantly employed ourselves in hide-and-seek techniques, rehearsing the dimensions of concealed space. We knew the cramped, gas-tainted meter cupboards under stairs, larders stifled in potato-earth and spice aromas, and the camphor alcoves between chinking gowns in wardrobes. Incessantly, we scanned the urban plan for shortcuts, entries, deviations from the known routes; we monitored the traffic-flow and, hopping on to the backs of flatbed lorries, practised being desperadoes on a train. We preferred the roles of Indians to those of Cowboys. We would keep our eyes peeled, and our ears to the ground, absorbing the moves of far-off regiments. We uttered gargled locomotive noises, and the telegraph wires trembled and buzzed with advance information; long before the dots and dashes were decoded at the next Morse halt, our alter-ego outlaws would have tumbled out of the box-car, down a steep embankment, thus allowing stuntmen to display their body-double skills. We could accurately gauge the chronology and provenance of horse-shit, as we crumbled it and sifted it between our thumbs and fingers. Thinking of uniformed riders, we were put in mind of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who perambulated the environment on high, bottle-green bicycles, operating their swaying dynamos and thumb-switch Sturmey-Archer gears, as they ticked like fat bombs along urban byways, apprehending miching youngsters in their out-of-school routines. Then they would conjure a pencil-stub from a special pocket and lick the graphite apex before inscribing the nom de plum
e of the truant in a black, flipped-open notebook. It suddenly shut with a snap of garter elastic, as the false name and address were registered.
Thus another chapter was closed.
1 I note here the inadequacy of orthography, which cannot represent the cadences of actual speech; and there is no one Belfast accent, but, as in any city, many. My own granny’s accent is no longer heard; it died with her generation; but accents evolve and change, and her granny’s accent would probably sound foreign to our ears.
2 Sometimes the termites ‘will do things so fantastic that they might almost be practical jokes. Forbes, an English traveller, relates in his Oriental Memoirs that, returning home after spending a few days with a friend, he found every engraving that hung in his rooms completely eaten away, frames and all, not a vestige remaining; but the glass that covered them had been left in its place, and carefully cemented to the wall, so that there should be no fear of its dropping and perhaps making too much noise.’
The Star Factory Page 18
