Ballycarson Blues

by Roderick Paisley

  In addition to being somewhat secretive Donald was a sophisticate. Unlike the inhabitants of the shelter at the Spion Kop bus stop who still believed politicians were local heroes to be admired and courted because they could achieve something, Donald had a low regard for local politicians. They thought he could do nothing for them, so they did nothing for him. The contrast between him and them was stark. Whilst Donald’s wreck of a vehicle staggered from one overnight destination to another, they loved to be seen being driven about at speed in a large limousine regardless of their destination. In fact, Donald suspected that for most politicians the destination didn’t really matter at all. For them, what mattered was just the fact that they gave the impression of going somewhere at speed. The flag on the Council chairman’s official car had changed after the recent elections. The car had even been re-sprayed a different colour and the leather upholstery refitted to match, but the limousine itself was still the same and so were the expenses claims.

  “No slush funds” had been the promise in all the political manifestos at the last election.

  Yet Donald knew all about the Zapper, the doggy diamonds and resultant income known as the “ash cash stash”.

  So much for “all’s changed, changed utterly”, reflected Donald as he watched yet another Council limousine sweep past.

  Whilst the politicians were addicted to switching from one pressing issue to the next, as the potential for re-election demanded, Donald’s life remained full of continuity as regards the things that mattered to him. Donald had been into recycling long before it ever became politically fashionable. Over the years he had driven a succession of vehicles that had been abandoned around the town and then removed by the Council for destruction. Given his obvious success as Lost Property Officer with the refurbishment of a couple of abandoned bikes, the Council had superimposed greater responsibility on him by adding the care of discarded motorised vehicles to Donald’s empire. This cloud of additional responsibility had a rusty lining. By privately appropriating the vehicular debris of the town, Donald had eventually traded up from a motorbike and sidecar, through various half-wrecked, oil-burning hulks to an ice cream van recently decommissioned from Wee Joe Forsale’s home delivery service at the Iceberg Café. Donald parked his transport at various accustomed night spots round the town. These night spots were not places of entertainment – they were simply the places where Donald slept for the night.

  “It’s Friday night, so it’s the Black Lough lay-by,” he said to his travelling companion Gretel, “and stop licking my face.”

  Gretel was a German beauty, a quarter of Donald’s age, with black and brown hair. A real dog, indeed an aristocrat amongst hounds, a true German shepherd. A decade previously she had been abandoned as a young pup, picked up by the abandoned dog patrol, unclaimed and destined for the Council’s Zapper. Donald had fallen in love and rescued her from Death Row by hiding her in his shed in the Council yard.

  But Gretel’s close encounters with the final call to the great kennel in the canine hereafter had not ended there. To keep her alive for long Donald had to get her out of the Council yard, unnoticed. He hit on the idea of disguising the dog as his granny by dressing her in a fur coat, a long blonde wig and goggles, and wrapping a headscarf over her head and muzzle. Donald was just going to drive her out of the Council yard in style. It was in the days of Donald’s motorbike and sidecar and, to stop her jumping out of the sidecar and giving the game away to the security guard, Donald had attached Gretel’s leash to the sidecar seat belt. Unfortunately, he could not find a proper helmet to fit. Gretel’s ears were just too big.

  Donald would have to wait until Half Inch O’Neill was on duty as security guard on the main gate. That man had been given his nickname not because of his propensity to theft but from the thickness of his lenses and the distance he was reputed to be able to see if he was not wearing them. Even with the benefit of his special prescription glasses, Half Inch O’Neill demonstrated his visual skills when he spent fifteen minutes at a local football match haranguing the linesman for giving a corner. Why had the linesman stood unwaveringly and taken such abuse without retaliation? Was he a model of tolerance or just deaf? No, the subject of the verbal assault turned out to be the corner flag and not the linesman.

  So when Half Inch O’Neill came on duty, Donald started his motorbike and headed for the main gate with his dog in disguise. The ruse worked, although there was a difficult moment when Half Inch O’Neill gave the slouched and crumpled-looking passenger a somewhat unfocussed second glance and observed, “She doesn’t look too well.”

  “She’s just dog-tired,” replied Donald nonchalantly.

  The security guard continued his advice like an agony uncle. “Travelling in that wagon without a helmet? I think she’s mad,” he opined, pointing to the occupant of the sidecar.

  “You are right. She’s barking,” replied Donald and sped out of the Council yard as the barrier lifted.

  They accelerated out of the main gate at much more than a safe speed. The tyres squealed as they turned right at the junction into Constitution Street. Gretel, however, was as yet unused to motorised transport and stood up, only to become unbalanced. The force of the turn shot her out sideways over the side panel of the sidecar and into mid-air. With one end of her leash attached to her neck and the other to the seat belt she was dragged along in the air two feet above the ground, a leash’s length to the left of the vehicle. It was only when the still attached and airborne dog nearly hit two drunks walking along the pavement that Donald realised that he had come close to unleashing a hell hound on the local population. Fortunately, noone believed the drunks’ story about a flying dog, but reports of their experience were analysed and chewed over for days by the senior sociologists in the shelter at the Spion Kop bus stop.

  A few days after the great escape Donald’s lay-by was visited by the Council’s environmental health officers dressed in white suits and facemasks. Donald thought the bottom had fallen out of his world. Gretel would be collared. But joined-up government had not as yet reached Ballycarson and the officials in question were not there to repossess the dog. They were there to deal with consequences and not cause. There had been complaints about dog mess in the lay-by and a pile of empty “Happy Mutt” dog food cans in the sidecar. After an inspection, a written recommendation was taped to the motorbike that Donald should change his vehicle, get rid of that smelly carpet and install easy-to-wash-out flooring in the sidecar. Better still, he should upgrade to a car. Didn’t he know he was probably in violation of the Council’s policy regarding vehicles in multiple occupancy? Why did he not get a stable address? “I’ve got a dog, not a horse,” Donald muttered under his breath but quietly decided it had been a shave rather too close.

  So Donald acquired an old Volkswagen Golf. To comply with the Council notice previously received, he ripped out the existing carpets. However, he was not prepared to sink to the level of asking Councillor Finvola O’Duffy for a dog end of a reject washable lino for his mobile kennel. Instead, he rummaged in the lost property shed until he found an unopened bag of Portland cement. Donald then proceeded to enhance the floor of his new car with a one-inch thick layer of easy to hose down concrete.

  The inspiration for this firm foundation had come from the stories Donald had heard about his great-grandfather. Prior to the Great War the vast bulk of the population of rural Ulster had lived in houses with mud floors. Exceptions were rare but one such was Donald’s great-grandfather who had furnished his house with a granite stone floor. This entirely level substantial construct was not a product of that man’s skill as stonemason. The truth was that he lived near a graveyard and had simply appropriated many of the headstones of his close relatives for his own use. The stones were placed face down so the floor of the house presented an entirely smooth surface free of dirt, grime and general squalour. At the turn of the century this stone floor was a real and enduring feature. Noone else had such easy to assemble, easy to clean, prefabricated fl
ooring. In addition, if anyone broke in and stole the stones they would be easy to identify and retrieve as the family name was already chiselled into every one of them.

  The inspiration from the gravestones did not stop there. Donald recalled how he had been told that most of the neighbourhood used to go to Donald’s great-grandfather’s house for a Friday night ceilidh. On one such night an argument arose about the age of one of the former worthies of Ballycarson who had been Donald’s great-great-uncle. The argument was quickly settled with a pickaxe. It was not that the participants had come to blows. It was merely the case that Donald’s great-grandfather had nipped out the back and had returned with the implement. He then proceeded to use it to lift part of the floor and read off the precise figures to supply the answer from the lifted gravestone.

  So, inspired by past events, Donald smoothed and finished off his concrete car floor as Gretel looked on.

  “Let us put our marks on this floor too. So if someone steals it we will know it is ours,” said Donald to Gretel.

  He proceeded to scrape the date and his name in the wet cement floor and encouraged Gretel to put her paw print immediately beside it.

  “A bucket of water should see to the dirt every week,” he said to Gretel as he smoothed out the screed round the seats and took care to trowel out small indents around the pedals. “That’s a weight off my mind.” Donald smiled as they stood back to admire his work. “That will last for years.”

  But a weight off Donald’s mind was a weight on the springs of the car. Unfortunately, the new floor outlived the car. But it was only when Donald was cruising over the speed ramps laid on the road outside the police station that the weakness in his solid foundation became apparent. The back of the car floor collapsed onto the road. The police laughed so much they forgot to book Donald. It was time for another vehicular upgrade.

  Donald’s most recent mode of transport and place of residence, the ice cream van, had come onto the market as a result of a musical mistake – a cock-up rather than a cacophony. Big David’s recording studio provided material for businesses on both sides of town, although political realities necessitated that those on the Nationalist west were supplied surreptitiously and via an intermediary. What occurred was that the package was tied on the back of a trained messenger dog that was sent off with its message to the addressee. Originally the breed of dog used had been a Saint Bernard and the package had been tied round its neck like the traditional barrel of brandy. However, a few years later, at a time of increased tension between the two communities in Ballycarson, Big David feared that a breed of dog linked, however tenuously, to a religious personality could be identified with one side of the sectarian conflict. He did not want his dogs kicked in the streets as happened to the Dachshunds in London during the Great War. The Saint Bernards were retired to security duty at the Council yard and Rottweilers and Doberman pinschers were substituted on the mail deliveries. So the black and tan warriors became the standard means of covert cross-community commerce.

  For added security with really sensitive cargo, each dog had a handler disguised as a blind woman with a white stick. A woman it had to be because each handler carried a handbag with further important contents and no self-respecting Ballycarson male would take on as risky a job as to be seen with a handbag in public. No expense was spared on high-tech equipment. The handbag was armour plated. To be more accurate, each handbag was actually an old-fashioned metal kettle with the lid padlocked shut.

  For Big David one would have thought when it came to recording mistakes it would have been a case of once bitten twice shy. However, in a virtual re-run of the barking disaster at the salami factory, the CDs provided to the various firms had been mixed up. Instead of a cheerful musical jingle for an ice cream van, the messenger Rottweiler delivered Wee Joe Forsale a CD of the British National anthem, which was intended to be played at the end of the performances in the Loyalist cinema in the east end of town. When this melody of loyal affirmation was played over the ice cream van tannoy in one of the large Nationalist housing estates in the west side of town it occasioned considerably more than a pointed letter of complaint to the Council. A riot ensued releasing all the community energy that had been pent up and suppressed during a long series of Senga Rae’s concerts. The ice cream van had been saved from being completely torched only because the petrol bomb thrown into the vehicle had extinguished itself in the cargo of litres of melted vanilla ice cream.

  With the prospect of such a heated reception no more drivers could be found to volunteer for the housing estate ice cream run. So the ice cream van was abandoned. Eventually it made its way into the hands of Donald Oskar Gormley.

  Clearly the purpose of the ice cream van changed when Donald acquired it. On the side of the van the original phrase “Ballycarson’s Big Cones” had been partly obliterated with the two last letters obscured by rust, leaving the words “Ballycarson’s Big Con”. Whether accident or design had erased the final two letters, noone knew, but, again, this new message added to Donald’s street credibility and afforded an element of mystique to the products he sold from the van. Here was a fraud in plain sight. The man in question was not only up to something, but he was advertising the fact to all and sundry. The authorities were doing nothing. Were they afraid of him?

  Location is everything in the retail trade. To Donald Oskar Gormley this truth was known only too well because his particular trade required a very particular location. The trade was smuggling and the location was the border – exactly on the border.

  Yet again Donald had learned his lesson from family history. During the 1940s his grandfather had run a public house in a village straddling the Irish border. So as the North went to war and enjoyed the delights of double summer time, the South remained neutral and slipped an hour behind if only for part of the year. The difference between these local time zones was particularly convenient as the front rooms of the Gormley public house were in the south and the back rooms in the same building were in the north. The international frontier was marked by a thin but distinct white line painted on the wooden floor of the hallway. When the Gardai in the south arrived to ensure that time had been called, the drinkers moved through to the back of the building and toasted their health in the next room. Of course, the reverse was the case when the Royal Ulster Constabulary arrived. Things being as they were (and still are) in Ireland, it was quite impossible for both police forces to arrive at the same time. The passing of war had done away with the general economic need for double summer time. But a pressing political need emerged to demand a local retention of the phenomenon in Ballycarson, if only for one day a year. In the dying days of the last Unionist administration the cultural office of the local authority recognised that there could be substantial cultural advantages if the clock went forwards every year at 11 o’clock in the evening on 11th July. The Glorious Twelfth would arrive an hour early. And if the clock then went back an hour at 12 o’clock in the evening on the 12th itself, the already remarkable day could be extended by an hour and become even more remarkable. The cultural advantages of an extra hour’s flute-playing activity were obvious. Unfortunately, the proposal for a longer day for musicians itself became a victim of time. The Unionist administration fell after defeat by Nationalists at the elections. The proposal was never mentioned again in the new political climate.

  But time stood still in other respects. In accordance with family precedent, on Saturdays Donald parked his ice cream van exactly on the border with the back door projecting into the south and the side window just within the north. At the back door the customers came to collect deliveries of cameras, CDs, computers, video- and smartphones, and other electrical goods, whilst from the side window were sold delicacies such as cigarettes, bottles of schnapps and cans of lager. Works of literature were obtainable from the cab. This was the Saturday cross-border market, an irregular, regular department store – and an international one at that. Noone had noticed that this form of trade had become wholly irrelevant
in the new EU single market. The border had ceased to have any real commercial meaning. But that was part of the problem in Ballycarson. A tradition had sprung up over the years. It, above all else, gave meaning to an international border that both political traditions exploited whether they could say so in public or not. Just because the world had moved on and made the commercial activity largely meaningless was no reason to abandon the time-sanctioned business. Indeed, respect for previous years of political and commercial effort demanded that the tradition be kept up. The more obscure and meaningless it was the better for all concerned and the further removed from present reality the more difficult it was to criticise.

  Home deliveries could of course be arranged, but these were more expensive and meant carting material across the border using Donald’s extensive workforce of drivers. Transport for such home deliveries had to be specially arranged. Small items were smuggled inside beehives carted on the back of lorries as the army and border police were known to be afraid of bee stings and never looked inside. Larger items were wrapped in plastic and smuggled inside the refuse of farms or building sites in slurry tankers or skips.

  It was by the last of these means that Wee Joe Forsale had received his regular deliveries of literature from Donald. These were the “dirty” books he was keen to hide from his wife. It was not that they were porn magazines. It was just that because of the means of transportation in slurry tankers they acquired a certain smell, which lasted for a few weeks after unwrapping and would have caused a matrimonial stir if opened in the kitchen.

  Wee Joe Forsale’s literary aspirations had started in a small way. Originally he was a mere technician – a collector of the technical manuals of boats, buses, cars, strimmers, water pumps and lawnmowers. His prized possessions were the instructions and warranty for the first diesel Mercedes Benz purchased in Ballycarson. However, in the last few years he had moved on to what had obviously become his real life mission. He was dedicated to collecting large sets of dictionaries and encyclopaedias.