by Colm Herron
“Why, are you going to be marching again?” I asked.
“Did you not know? Sure it’s in the papers.” She picked up a newspaper from the floor, folded it and tossed it to me. “It’s on the front there.”
I scanned the front page. STUDENT MARCHERS PLAN TO CUT A SWATHE THROUGH ULSTER – PAISLEY. People’s Democracy activists are intending holding a four-day march across Northern Ireland starting from Belfast on the first of January and ending in Derry on the fourth.
“Taking John Bull by the horns?” I said. She’d be wanting me to go on it. I’d go. I handed the paper back to her.
Aisling smiled, tears shining. “You could say that. I think we’ve had enough of the half loaves our beloved prime minister’s been handing out and the way the media’s treating him like some kind of hero. This thing’s going to die the death if we don’t do something.”
“We can’t be naive about this,” added Frances. “Paisley’s right in a way for once. We know we’re going to provoke. We’re going to be marching through Protestant areas that Catholics never marched before. Which we’ve a perfect right to do by the way, seeing they’ve been coat-trailing through our streets all their lives. The time for us to stay in our ghettos is gone. The rednecks will react, they’ll be violent and the RUC will side with them. There’ll be Fenian blood spilled but it’s the only way the world’s going to see what sort of a place this is.”
“But what if that brings out violence on our side?” I asked and was right away sorry I’d spoken because I’d given her another opening to ridicule me.
“Well then you’ve got the revolution getting moving haven’t you? That’s how politics works you see.”
These words were said slowly, so slowly, as if I was an idiot or something. I wasn’t about to take that sort of ridicule from anybody, least of all this bloody fly in the ointment.
“So it’s orange versus green is it? You’re hoping to dig the IRA up out of their graves? How does this fit with all the socialist stuff you’re on about? All these intersections?” Good that, I thought.
I saw the anger building across from me and heard Aisling start to say something and then stopping.
“There are two things you have to understand,” hissed the dyke, nostrils widening. “Number one, I am talking about a socialist revolution here. And number two, to get the thing started you have to bring matters to the boil and then you lance the boil you see, bring out the badness.”
“She’s right Jeremiah,” Aisling said reasonably. “If this doesn’t come to a head soon it’ll go on generation after generation. It has to be dealt with. The other things can come later. All-Ireland socialist republic, integrated comprehensive education, nationalization of the banks, cancellation of the Third World’s debts.”
Jesus. I stared at her. “Do you really think, Aisling …”
She waited. Patient, raising her hand to quiet Frances who looked ready to let fly again. “What? Do I really think what?”
I lowered my eyes. “I don’t know,” I said. “It all seems so, I don’t know, inconsistent.”
“In case you didn’t realize,” said Frances, “no worthwhile political change has ever been brought about without violence. Do you think the people of Poland are going to get their rights by sitting on their backsides?”
“For Poles read Fenians?” I asked. Her face flashed with hate. I smiled bitterly at her sitting there themed in black like one of these freaks you’d see in the front of the National Enquirer or something. Was Aisling out of her mind or what going to bed with that?
“The word you should be using is imaginative, not inconsistent,” said that. “But if you prefer to live in some kind of armchair dreamland, well … all I can say is, your political ignorance is staggering.” And she turned her head away from me and shook it at the wall.
Aisling spoke, her voice a little shaky. “The march on the first is based on the Selma marches in Alabama. Sixty-five wasn’t it Frances?”
“March sixty-five. Selma to Montgomery. There were some broken heads there all right. Bloody Sunday the first one was on. The police laid into six hundred of them with their billy clubs. Sunday the seventh of March it was.”
“There’s one thing I’m not looking forward to,” Aisling said, “and that’s John Hume and these ones trying to hog the limelight when we get back to Derry on the fourth.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, unless there’s a blue moon those four days we’re going to get a rough ride all the way from Belfast. And the minute we land here you’ll have these middle of the roaders that haven’t an original political idea between them standing up spouting from the backs of lorries with the TV cameras on them and most of us will probably be in casualty.”
“Sure it’s the same all over the place, sure what do you expect?” said Frances. She seemed to weary then, the effort of going on talking not worth it anymore. She gripped the arms of her chair and raised her ugly bulk slowly to a standing position, then straightaway plodded to the toilet without another word. We heard the bolt noisily secured and looked at each other.
“Stay, won’t you,” she said softly pleading.
“How?”
She looked around her helplessly. “I wish you and Frances had got on.”
“How? How can I stay?”
“Do you want to?” I wished we were alone so I could have her right then. Maybe right there standing up when Frances went to bed. Or. I looked at the sofa next to me.
“I love you,” I said. “I wanted to see you, I tried to find you I don’t know how many times. I wanted to tell you I was all right about Audrey. I’m sorry for what I said that night you came to the wake.”
She covered her face with her hands and sobbed into them. I sat there trying to get the right thing ready to say for when she was able to listen again. She took away her hands then and her eyes and nose were running. The toilet flushed noisily and Frances emerged heading straight for the bedroom looking at nobody. “Night,” she said.
“Goodnight Frances,” Aisling said. “I won’t be long.” She produced a tissue out of somewhere. The bedroom door clicked closed .
“Audrey showed me things.” Shoes clattered dropped deliberately. “I tried to tell you. She brought me out of myself ways I never thought could happen.” She wrestled at her nose with the tissue, then folded it carefully in four and slipped it up her sleeve. “But I would nearly have left her that time for you even though it would have broken my heart.”
“What time?” I stood up. Now can I hold her? We’re alone now.
“The last night I saw you. Not counting Armagh. The night of the wake. Maybe if I’d met you before I met her I’d never have taken up with her. But then …”
“Then?”
“Then I couldn’t have loved you the way I did. It would just have been like it was with the others before you, the same old thing over again. I never loved in my life before I met her, do you know that, Jeremiah? I’m talking about everything, everything, I’m talking about trying to accept people being different, Protestants, blacks, Indians, Muslims, Jews, anybody coming to live here.”
“Was that it? Tolerance? Was that what she taught you?”
“And that God’s in everything. Also that God’s in everything.”
“But I thought you didn’t believe. You said it yourself. That thing you just said there was one of the first things we learned in the catechism.”
“You’re not listening, you’re not letting me finish. It’s churches I don’t believe in. She was twenty-two and it was as if she was here before, honest to God. Did you ever hear of Spinoza? Or Karl Krause?”
“I don’t think so.” This was doing my head in. Why couldn’t we just get down to it? And talk later.
“It’s so simple when somebody explains it to you. God’s in everything, He’s in nature, He’s got nothing to do with priests and churches, right? Who wrote the Bible? Men, the whole sixty-six books of it. You wanted to hear her, Jeremiah. Eve was made u
p and the apple was made up and the whole world swallowed it. For thousands of years women have been living inside the boundaries made for them by men. Like, who says women can’t love each other? Men. And men say it’s a heresy to think God could be in nature. You know why they say that? Because it would only lose them their power. If God’s in nature then they’ve no control over Him because nature’s a law unto itself so that means men can’t be go-betweens anymore, they can’t interpret and twist. Where would they be then, the ones in Rome and Canterbury and Jerusalem and all? If people can find God outside in the fields or with their lovers where does that leave these people in their marble halls?”
“They lose their dominion I suppose.”
Her eyes filled with brightness. “That’s exactly the word Audrey used. Dominion. The second time I was ever speaking to her she said to me, I won’t allow any church or state to have dominion over my body. How dare they! That’s what she said. How dare they!”
“Could we turn off the superser?”
“What?”
“The superser. Could we turn it off? My head’s spinning with it.”
She got up quickly from her chair and switched it off. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” She was closer to me now, standing not four feet away. She blinked. Can I hold her now I wonder, I thought. “I’ll have to get an electric heater,” she said absently. “I’m always intending.”
“It’s just the fumes,” I told her. “Probably I’m spoiled. We’ve got a coal fire you see.”
She nodded. “You know why it struck a chord for me? What Audrey said? My father. My father did what he wanted with me for two years nearly and then with my little sister and these people think … these people are just as repulsive as he was. Who do they think they are anyway?”
“God’s gift?”
She gave a little yelp of approval and quickly crossed the space between us. Then standing very close to me she put her arms around my neck. I could only think of one thing. I gripped her and held her hard against me, so hard she gasped. When I found I was hurting her I loosened my grip a little and our mouths kissed. I’m not sure how long we stood that way, bodies together, lips soft and warm. Near the end of it I slid my hands from her waist and fingered the leather skirt. She didn’t resist at first but soon drew back from me.
“Take it easy, that’s sore,” she said but her eyes were smiling. “Why don’t you come in with us?”
“What?”
“Come in with us. Frances will be fine with it.”
“You don’t mean …”
Aggressively she tongued my mouth, then slid her hand behind the buckle of my belt and turning away pulled me after her like a trolley. “Come on. Honestly, it’ll be all right.”
It was more than all right: reader, it was wonderful. Frances grumbled at the start and threatened to go and sleep on the sofa but after some coaxing and cuddling from Aisling which I manfully tried to turn a blind eye to she accepted the arrangement on the understanding that Aisling lay between us.
It didn’t take me long to appreciate the advantages in this unique situation, being turned on greatly extra by making love right next to Frances kept wide awake and knocked nearly out of the bed three times at the very least on account of our exertions. I’m not going to try and tell you that I got permanently even after all the outrageous slings and arrows I’d taken from her but for those heavenly minutes at least it was as if they’d never happened and she looked like a beaten docket by the time Aisling and I settled.
But then possibly the best part of the night, next to unbelievable in fact. As I lay pretty much out for the count on my stomach bathed in a molten afterglow I felt this rush of icy air and seemed to dream that the bedclothes had been whipped off me. Before I could grasp the what the why and the wherefore I felt a fierce stinging pain on my backside repeated over and over and half turned to see the bold Frances standing on the bed swinging Kitty Birch for all she was worth and roaring out of her like a madwoman. She was stark naked now and a very different animal from the academic I’d briefly got to know and hate.
My sideways glimpse angled upwards revealed a woman with rictus leer and invisible eyes like some grotesque Greek statue come to life. Then for no reason I could understand at that particular time the pain eased giving way to titillating tingles, what amounted to a second wind in fact, the urge to start again in other words, and I heard Aisling whimpering beside me. I must confess that with all the turmoil happening I’d temporarily forgotten her. My mind to be honest was on Kitty who I realized had been withdrawn from my person though I knew from the vicious swish of her that she was still about and I ached to be flayed by her again. But quickly I began to understand that Aisling was the one presently getting it so I lay still, mind racing, waiting, hoping the beating would turn her on before I faded.
The strangest things happened then, outside and inside of my head in slow succession: fumblings, fondlings, footerings and the thought that maybe you didn’t have to like someone to enjoy their company in bed, the growing understanding that as long as you worked with your eyes closed you could loathe them yet not be loath to doing the business. Anyway, what with one thing and another I ended up between the two of them, Frances and Aisling, and between the two of them it ended up I could hardly lift my head. But somewhere in the middle of everything I had this notion that the bedroom wall was coming in and it took a while to grasp that it was only our next door neighbor above Mickey MacTamm’s barbers trying to make contact.
“Trollop! Bastard! Christ I don’t know which of the two of yous is worse. I’m phoning the police if yous don’t stop it right now, you hear?”
I actually thought he said priest and this put me in a bit of a temporary state brought on I have to admit by the Catholic rule of thumb which teaches that if ever you come across heaven on earth then as surely as night follows day hell will soon be coming up on the inside behind it and consequently during that minute or whatever it was I was picturing the parochial house across the road flooded with light at three in the morning give or take, and Bishop Farren and Doctor Hourigan and a whole collection of them summoned from neighboring parishes shuffling over to Aisling’s flat in solemn procession with bell book and candle to pronounce excommunication.
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Frances’s father is a crooked property owner and she says she’s going to shop him come the revolution. But for now she’s biding her time living rent free in one of the plush houses he has up the Malone Road that’s only a short taxi ride from her studies in Queen’s University. Plush isn’t the word when I come to think of it, the place is obscene.
Obscene is probably just about right actually because a lot of the time during every weekend which I now spend up there I should tell you, there are happenings in the pink active sexfriendly ultra king-sized airbed (twelve by ten) that I can hardly bring myself to write freely about even in these decaying months of this most decadent of decades. If the truth be told it’s like Sodom and Gomorrah there sometimes. And what was the other place? Edom, if I remember right from the Teachers’ Guide to the On Our Way catechism. Edom where they did things arseways. A la mode. When in Edom as they say.
I’m telling you this not as a voyeur — even though I have to admit I’ve done a bit of that too — but as a full-blown participant. Body and soul have no bounds there, reader, need is what drives us up the enchanted slopes, ecstasy is what we get at the top and the good vibrations only stop when we’re asleep and not always then either.
You may wonder how I can bring myself to go on lying with Frances given she’s got baps like hot water bottles and an ass on her that would put a fully loaded beer lorry to shame and given also she still contraries me every time I open my mouth to speak. But the mind is a funny thing and up the Malone Road it’s all smoke and mirrors from the first joint of the day to watching ourselves in action when evening begins to fall. As the poet Robbie Burns put it after he saw a louse crawling into the lady’s bonnet in church: O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us t
o see oursels as others see us. A true philosopher if ever I read one.
And then there’s also the fact that her bed is a non-aggression zone, an erstwhile no-man’s land that I’ve been given access to. And we tolerate each other there because Aisling is the prize. Plus Frances has this big soft thick rope with all these strands hanging down that she calls her cat of many tales that inflicts maximum pleasure without leaving welts. Also when I’m taking time out I can get quite delirious watching illegal lesbian acts being performed right in front of me like I was King Herod or somebody. For make no mistake about it, even with all the things I feel about Frances and the awfulness of her Adam’s apple, there’s something about one girl surrendering to another that always does the trick.
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Sometimes I asked myself if it was worth it. And then I remembered Aisling and knew that it was. I’m thinking here about the People’s Democracy march. Hungover from what are you having in Frances’s lust nest on New Year’s Eve night I lined up at nine the next morning outside Belfast City Hall next to Aisling and Frances and I don’t know how many others. We got a bit of a noisy send-off from a pantomime-looking character called Major Ronald Bunting who’s supposed to be a friend of Paisley’s. He had a Union Jack and a bunch of men with him and they were singing The Sash my Father Wore in I counted about twenty different keys. This wasn’t good for my head or my bowels for that matter which weren’t in great shape either from the drinking and being bound up the night before and I’d this terrible certainty they were never going to work again.
The first day is still a bit of a haze to tell you the truth. I remember the fresh air and the walking easing the headache once we got out past Glengormley but these things are relative. I was still feeling mostly like shit warmed up and the way the police cozied up to the Unionists blocking our way every few miles didn’t help. Each time a handful of them appeared somewhere the cops diverted us down back roads miles out of our way and then it took ages to get back to near enough the place we’d been stopped. And we were supposed to be a legal march, it was the other crowd who were breaking the law, blocking the queen’s highway. To tell you the truth the only thing that kept me going was Aisling beside me. She’s got a way of holding my hand sometimes that’s like a promise and this covers a multitude.
