Here’s the funny thing, though: after I left, I never cared so deeply about any city again. It was Belfast, with its broad streets and narrow furies, that held all the poetry for me. It enraged me and clasped me close like a family member. Even after everything that had happened it was still home, the only place in the world where I didn’t talk with an accent. I approached every other city with the politeness reserved only for friends.
Sometimes I think that maybe now I’ll only go back for good in an urn, and whoever cares enough can spoon me out like instant coffee and sprinkle me over the Lagan. Or if Eve should die first, and I’m old and alone, perhaps I’ll leave London behind and let Belfast drive me crazy one more time.
The city does that: it sits and waits patiently for its émigrés to return, and sometimes they do. When the world-famous snooker player Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins was ruined with cancer, he came back to Belfast, to the same streets where he first started out as a wee lad playing truant in a local snooker hall called the Jampot.
He fell into a small council flat in Sandy Row. There was nowhere else for him to be. His crackling wire of electricity, that made sparks fly off the green baize every time he walked towards it, had worked loose and reduced everything in England to ash: his stacks of prize money, his cheeky street-urchin’s face, his marriage, his health. When he played in the world championship final in 1982, Big Jacky and I had sat jammed together on the sofa, eyes glued to the screen, and cheered at the television when he won the title for the second time. Away from the lights of the tournament halls, though, the little sizzle beneath his skin wouldn’t let up.
Higgins couldn’t get the hang of time, the way most people learn to. He couldn’t handle the way it slowed down without asking. When he was playing snooker, he could bend time to his will, letting it hang suspended in the air, or blasting balls round the table faster than an intake of breath. Out there in the world, though, the minutes moved too sluggishly for his internal beat, so he drank and brawled and head-butted to kick-start them somewhere in the chaos.
Back in Belfast in his final days, he haunted the pubs and streets, a six-stone shocker of a body hauled around by a tiny, gaunt head with burning eyes and a rasping voice, still smoking and drinking beneath a raffish fedora hat. Marty saw him a few times in the bar opposite his flat, reading the paper and sinking Guinness. By then a pint of the rich, black stout was often the closest he came to food. His loyal friends in the snooker fraternity, many of whom he had insulted in his cups, raised cash in an effort to buy him new teeth. He had none of his own left, but a skein of cockiness persisted in him like a live nerve.
The city still loved him and was soft on him. It prized even the husk of his charisma, and tolerated his explosive, sentimental qualities as similar to its own. It craned its ear in bars to hear his hoarse stories and stood him drinks, waiting for the day when it would wrap him up in legend and carry his coffin through the streets on a horse-drawn carriage. There’s a painted mural of him now in Sandy Row, wielding a cue in his flashy heyday. He died alone in his flat.
Higgins came home to Belfast when he was wrung out, looking for a last bit of comfort, but not everyone finds it there. Now that things are quieter, we tiptoe back to the old places where pain is tangled up with the past and unpick the threads and try to comb them into some kind of order. And there are certain people who can’t seem to get anything in order, because their threads are lost or too densely matted, because they still don’t know what happened to the people they loved, or who was to blame.
27
A month ago, in July, I was back in the shop, going over some of the stock orders with Marty. The pair of us were down in the cellar, surrounded by cardboard boxes of Tayto crisps, instant coffee and basmati rice. We had branched out into a small selection of groceries. Marty had a notion to bring in a line of Thai and Indian curry paste. He was grumbling that they weren’t anywhere near as good as doing the real thing yourself entirely from scratch, but that most people were too lazy. This was rich, I thought, coming from someone who once subsisted almost solely on nicotine, chips and diesel fumes. Still, he’s good that way, keeping an eye out for new stock.
As he was lugging the boxes, he suddenly paused and said:
‘Och, did I not tell you—’
‘Tell me what?’ I said.
He looked at me hesitantly for a second, as though not sure whether to proceed, wondering perhaps if he was breaking some unspoken pact about territory that wasn’t to be ventured into again.
‘They arrested McMullen.’
For a moment I thought ‘who?’ and then I remembered: the sleekit looking heavy that used to hang about with McGee’s dad. I’d always avoided him, with his half-smile and the creased T-shirt clinging to his belly like the rumpled skin on boiled milk. There was a look in his eyes that intimated that any form of closeness would end badly.
‘McMullen? Why’d they do that?’ I said.
He looked at me again.
‘Och get on with it, Marty,’ I said, exasperated.
‘They found a woman’s body in a disused quarry down near Kilkeel and it was McGee’s ma.’
I couldn’t take it all in at first.
‘His ma? How did they know it was her? How did they know where to look?’
‘They were told. A wee fella who was brought along that night to help McMullen bury the body has terminal cancer. Said it was wrong what happened and he needed to get it off his chest. He gave a statement to the police. No one can do anything to him now, he said, he’s going to kick the bucket and he doesn’t give a shite who threatens him—’
‘But why did they do it?’ I interrupted.
‘He didn’t really know. Said McMullen had told him she was out of control and posing a problem for the organisation. But he seemed to think it was personal. Maybe she’d had an affair and the da found her out.
‘There’s a relative in Glasgow, an old woman now, who says that before McGee’s ma went missing she called her up from Belfast and said she was coming to Scotland with the two boys. Then she never did. The oul doll said she told the police about it years ago but nothing came of it, the ma was just noted as missing. Sure everything was going crazy back then.’
‘Did McMullen admit it?’
‘Nope, denies it all. But the forensics confirmed that it’s definitely the ma all right. After all those years in there. The stuff they can find out these days is incredible—’ Marty broke off for a second to contemplate the sheer science of it – ‘And the other guy gave a full statement so they’ve got that.’
‘What does the da say?’
‘Can’t say anything, he’s in the nursing home, totally banjaxed, doesn’t even know what day it is now. The older son goes up to visit him every other Saturday.’
‘They told everyone she’d run off to Scotland,’ I said.
In those days full of smoke and rage no one really questioned rumours of a solo flight.
‘Aye,’ said Marty, going back to unpacking the boxes. He took a pair of scissors and sliced decisively through a strip of parcel tape. ‘Some Scotland.’
I went upstairs to get a breath of air. This news, after all these years, had stunned me. I thought of McGee tied up down there on that chair, a grown man still imagining the ma had walked out on him when all the time she was stiff in the grey cold quarry, entombed in that industrial grave. The sun was shining very brightly and it strained my eyes and made a seam of pain dance jerkily behind them.
I shouted down: ‘Marty I’m just going for a dander’ and then I started walking.
I kept on the move, out of the streets where I was born and then on, up past the boxy behemoth of the City Hospital, across towards the university area and into the Botanic Gardens. When I got there I briefly sat down on a wooden bench, just like old times, but after a minute or so I could feel a kind of nameless panic rising in me so I walked twice round the gardens fast with none of the old pleasure and then out past Botanic train station and towards the city centre
.
I walked past the Crown Bar and Robinsons and thought about stopping in for a pint but I knew the restlessness would be too powerful again if I sat down in an enclosed space, so I carried on up through the wide streets past the City Hall until I made it to the waterfront at the edge of Belfast Lough, where the wind wheeled around the monumental new buildings that had risen near the water after the ceasefires. Eventually something about the churning movement of the grey sea allowed me just to keep myself still there and stare into it.
It’s not even that I felt guilty about McGee, especially when I remembered what he did to me. By the time I knew him he had already hardened into what he was. Still, it knocked me sideways, the pity of it. Time had yanked back a tarpaulin and exposed a filthy secret curled in there, a knotted weed that throttled the hope in him when he was small and had possibilities.
Ten minutes or so passed, and gradually I started to breathe more slowly. I saw a stone lying next to me, part of a little decorative border, but large enough to be significant. I picked it up and threw it down into the shifting water and waited with my eyes closed for the faint report as it clipped the surface and disappeared.
You dig down into the past and finally your spade comes up against rock. There’s no way through. Sometimes you need just to set the spade to one side. The thing is, I started remembering again recently. When I heard about what they found in that quarry near Kilkeel it churned everything else up too.
I’m watchful – that much has become a habit – but without always knowing what I’m looking out for. Something that doesn’t sit right, I suppose, that sets the alarm bells ringing. When I walk into a room the first thing I take note of, still, is the exit.
I can feel it in the air. It’s coming at us again, this time in England and beyond, another time when the rules are shredded, when unreason starts to swagger. Voices are aggrieved and growing shrill, slicing through the old wrappings of courtesy. Everyone yells that no one else can understand them. Everyone talks more than they listen, staking out their place on Twitter and Facebook with swear words in capitals and bellowing self-righteousness. I don’t think they’ll stop it now. It’s all too exciting, until it isn’t any more, and by then it’s too late. Back home we found that out the hard way.
There may be bombs again at some point and maybe shooting. I hope not. I don’t know what form it will take but it’s hard to stop my mind from making strategies for it. Even in the immediate absence of flies, a spider still spins its web.
The secret is to be able to remember just enough about what happened all those years ago, but not to let it rush over me. I swallowed a little piece of darkness back then, and it lodged deep. I have to keep the remembering under control, tightly hedged about with the here and now, or I might suddenly become so aware of the fragility of things that I couldn’t even step outside the door. How smashable we all are.
And then, safe at home, sure I could accidentally slip off a stool while changing a light bulb, bang my head and fade away like that instead while destiny sniggers in the corner like a rotten imp.
So I go out again and again into the city, pushing myself through London’s thickened arteries to work and sip my drinks and sit on park benches in the sun. I keep watch only from the corner of my eye. We all disappear in the end, somewhere in the human dance of exits and entrances. That thought used to torment me, but now it helps. All you can do is try to be kind along the way, try not to disgrace yourself. There’s no point fretting. You have to lie back and let the river shift you downstream as far as it goes. I can say that for me, of course, but not for Eve and Elsie and Ray. My worries still track them silently, barefoot on the riverbank in the dark.
Whatever happens, unless you seek it out, it won’t be your choice. We can fight the drift of our times, but we can’t always escape it, even now that we think we know so much. When I consider the sum of my life so far – the little family, the busy coffee shop, the modest stack of achievements – I know that I am not eminent in any way, and never will be. That’s okay. Even eminence withers. Even tall sunflowers will droop and rot. In any case, I never even thought to get as far as eminence. Survival and love have been windfalls enough.
The day after I heard about McGee’s ma I went up to the care home on Arnold Street where old McGee was incarcerated. On the way I walked past the waste land. It was bigger now, the nothingness spreading out like a stain after they bulldozed half a street for regeneration and then neglected to build anything new. Nonetheless it was occupied: the young lads were building a bonfire there for the Twelfth of July celebrations, to commemorate when the Protestant forces of King William of Orange routed the Catholic ones of King James in 1690. In our streets, news from the seventeenth century was still hot stuff.
In recent years these pyres had grown steadily taller until now they were twice the height of houses, preposterous turrets of wooden pallets, subject to sabotage from rival gangs. Confronted with these hazardous miracles of engineering, the city authorities wrung their hands and backed away. This one was studded with Irish tricolours, and an effigy of Liam Blake dangled precariously from the middle, awaiting the coming flames on the Eleventh Night. A trio of trainee hardmen were hanging around guarding it, shooting me watchful looks. When I was small I would sometimes come out with Big Jacky to witness the ceremonial lighting of the bonfire, but I stayed away from it now. The atmosphere around it had grown edgier. There was a wildness among some of the teenage lads that I could do without. When lit, the fire was so intense that you ran up against the wall of heat the moment you stepped out of your house. Last year a nearby bonfire had set a couple of houses alight.
The care home was two streets away, a low-roofed, red-brick, purpose-built structure whose architects clearly valued utility far above charm. From a distance, it looked as though it had been assembled from giant blocks of rust-coloured Lego. I knew McGee’s surviving son was unlikely to be there because it was a weekday morning, but I had borrowed one of Marty’s baseball caps anyway and tilted it low over my eyes. The older son wasn’t even connected to the paramilitaries, from what I had heard, but I thought the home would have a camera outside it and I had never fancied guest-starring on closed-circuit television.
There was a heavy door and a buzzer you had to press to be let in. The young blonde woman at the desk smiled at me and I smiled too broadly back. It was the least menacing of settings, but when the door thumped shut behind me I felt the tolling of an irrevocable decision.
‘Is Billy McGee here?’ I said. ‘I was told he was. I’m on a visit.’
‘Are you a relative?’ she asked – then, as if wanting to soften the bluntness of her question – ‘He doesn’t get too many visitors.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just an old family friend. I mainly live abroad but I’m back in Belfast and I just wanted to pop in and say a quick hello.’
‘He might not know you,’ she confided, ‘but I’m sure he’ll appreciate the visit. Just up the stairs and turn right at Room 12.’
I walked up the green-carpeted stairs to the first floor. The whole place was hotter than a hospital ward, and the windowsills were studded with shiny vases of fake flowers fanning out air freshener. The scent of disinfectant hovered just on top of the smell it was meant to purge, the one that issued from small leakages of dignity, the body’s faltering obedience to the will. In the background was the constant muted drone of a vacuum cleaner.
I found Room 11, and the door next to it was open. Inside, near the window, a middle-aged care worker in a white coat was patiently spooning the pale pink gloop of what looked like strawberry yoghurt into an elderly man’s mouth. The man in the chair was old McGee. He still had his solid thatch of greying hair and vigorous brows. I paused for a moment in the doorway to look at him there, vacant and pliable in a navy-blue sweatshirt and a pair of sagging elasticated sweatpants. Before, he had favoured polo shirts and jeans. He had always stayed in decent enough shape, for an older guy. I remembered when, to a boy at least, his physique h
ad carried the possibility of threat.
His carer looked up and saw me. She smiled through her thick pink lipstick and her gold earrings caught the light. Little splashes of decoration in all this carefully managed despair.
‘Hello,’ I said, by way of explanation. ‘Just here on a wee visit.’
She turned back to old McGee and said with exaggerated cheerfulness, the sing-song way you would talk when buoying up a tired child: ‘You have a visitor.’
He didn’t turn his head, but opened his mouth reflexively for the yoghurt that had stopped coming. His jaw hung open, while she dabbed around his mouth with a napkin.
She looked apologetically at me: ‘Is it a while since you’ve seen him?’
‘A wee while, yes.’
‘He’s gone downhill in the last few weeks,’ she mouthed in a stage whisper, preserving decorum. ‘He might not know you straight away, but I’m sure he’ll appreciate the company.’
I pulled up a leatherette chair next to her and sat down. A sudden wail of indeterminate anguish came from another room. The carer looked quickly from McGee to me and back again. The wail came again, with an added note of urgency.
‘I wouldn’t normally ask but we’re so short-staffed today. Would you mind feeding him the rest of the yoghurt while I see to another resident? He needs a little while to swallow so don’t take it too fast.’
What could I say?
‘Of course, not a problem.’
I took over the spoon and the yoghurt from her as she bustled out. Something about the sweetish, acrid smell of the substance repelled me. Now I was sitting in her chair McGee’s eyes were fixed on me, without any gleam of recognition. His face was pale and cross-hatched with wrinkles, but there was still a trace of stubbornness in the set of his chin.
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