Where Are We Now?

by Glenn Patterson

  How apt, she and Kofi said, a heartbeat apart, that the latest and perhaps greatest attraction of this new era of tourism – Titanic Belfast – should in its glass-walled way nod to its 1850s predecessor. In cities as in life, we might conclude (Pauline did, so Kofi did too), what goes around comes around, and what goes down can triumphantly rise again. It was as rousing a phrase to see as to hear and completely for the moment made Herbie forget that he had previously heard Pauline refer to the Titanic building as an eyesore.

  If her going first had been a fix, he had to admit, it had been an inspired one.

  The week after – no press now, no Deputy Mayoral entourage – there were still close to eighty in attendance for a talk on amateur boxing and the archive. (You could, in fairness, never go wrong in Belfast with boxing.) The week after that – Pete’s week, the Difficult Third – the audience was still in single figures ten minutes before the lecture (‘Speaking to the Nation? Broadcasting in a Fractured State’) was due to begin, though it climbed eventually to nineteen, one of whom got up when it came to the Q&A and delivered a ten-minute lecture of his own while a friend distributed leaflets. The fourth Tuesday was Lydia, the Women’s Solemn League and Covenant, which was always bound to be good, if perhaps a little one-sided, box office. ‘We, whose names are underwritten, women of Ulster, and loyal subjects of our gracious King, being firmly persuaded that Home Rule would be disastrous to our Country, desire to associate ourselves with the men of Ulster in their uncompromising opposition to the Home Rule Bill now before Parliament, whereby it is proposed to drive Ulster out of her cherished place in the Constitution of the United Kingdom, and to place her under the domination and control of a Parliament in Ireland. Praying that from this calamity God will save Ireland, we here to subscribe our names.’

  Seventy-seven, they got for that, and late Twitter apologies from a group of women from Londonderry – they were very particular about the first two syllables – whose minibus had got a flat tyre at a roundabout outside Magherafelt, from where they tweeted a photo of themselves with a banner reading ‘Leave Means Leave’. (And perhaps Leave enough time for unforeseen sharp objects on the road if you ever mean to Arrive.)

  Then it was week five and Herbie.

  He had thought, several times in the previous month, about changing tack and taking as the subject of his talk Sean’s notebooks, but he and Louise were just starting then to see more of each other. Between that and Beth coming home in the evenings, full of tales of Screen, his time was no longer entirely his own. Who knew, once he opened those boxes and started to read, what he would unearth and how long it would take him to sift and organise it? Besides, the fliers had already gone out with that ‘Illustrated Guide to’ title on them and he had a hunch that Pete was not wrong about the numbers it would attract. Would he really have been doing justice to Sean’s memory by unveiling the work of nearly forty years to half a dozen people?

  The weather, that Tuesday, was Belfast Bland – available any given season of the year, more an absence of extremes than the presence of anything you could put a name to – which ought to have been a good thing: who wanted to have to brave the wind and the rain for the pleasure of giving up their lunch hour? (It had practically been blowing a gale – Met Office amber warning – in week three, as Pete had reminded Herbie several times since.) On the other hand, people might step out from their houses or workplaces into the milder-than-recent air and think, wait a minute, this is too pleasant a day this time of year to spend cooped up in a lecture room. And there was of course always the possibility that no matter what the weather, no matter the number and quality of illustrations, they just could not give a flying fuck for tithe applotments.

  He went down to the lecture room, just to the right of the lobby, three quarters of an hour before he was due to start, to check it was all in order. The caterers arrived, while he was there, with sandwiches, three platefuls of them, bent out of shape by the cling film, the tea and coffee flasks, setting one of each on the table, either side of the sandwiches, and tucking their twins away underneath as back-up. You couldn’t fault them for optimism.

  They had just left the room when he heard a series of shrill cries from outside. He crossed to the window and saw through the fence across the road, behind which lay a patch of purest brownfield, the seagull chick rising above a melee of crows with a fat chip already halfway down its gullet. It had grown now to two-thirds the size of the parents, all hint of cuteness buried beneath a mess of brown and grey feathers. The crows flapped and cawed, but the chick flapped harder and gulped faster: one – two – three – gone. It lifted off and landed again a few yards away to preen, chip grease mingling with its own body’s oils. A picture of self-satisfaction.

  He went and stood at the lectern to run through the PowerPoint, matching images to text recited silently in his head. Sandy from tech support came in just as he was finishing. She had had a tattoo done since last he had seen her, a small pink rose about to blossom, high up on her right cheek bone. The stem, running from the hinge of her jaw, was formed from the words just live in thorny cursive.

  ‘You look like you’ve got it all in hand,’ she said. ‘Just one other thing… See this?’ A multicoloured rope of cables as thick as his forearm leading up from the floor into the lectern’s hardware. ‘Don’t, whatever you do, touch that with your foot.’

  ‘Are you afraid I’m going to wipe out the entire country’s memory?’

  Sandy smiled the smile of the terminally unamused. The rose twitched. ‘Just be sure and don’t touch it.’

  He got eighteen – he counted them as they came through the door, him and Pete both, clearly. He dug Herbie in the ribs before taking his seat. ‘Looks like I’m not going to finish bottom of the league after all, even though the weather was on your side.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was a competition.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you did,’ said Pete. ‘Where’s the fun in it otherwise?’

  ‘There’s still next week, don’t forget.’

  ‘“A Canter Through Couture”? With a college of further education sitting on our doorstep offering fashion courses? I wouldn’t be pinning my hopes on that one coming up short.’

  Herbie was still on his introductory remarks – was that old boy in the third row already asleep? – when the door opened and a nineteenth person, Beth, slipped in and took the first seat that presented itself, at the back of the room, although all eighteen other heads turned anyway – well, seventeen did (he was asleep, no question).

  She clapped at the end loudly enough for another ten.

  As they stood afterwards eating sandwiches and drinking coffee (second flask not required, nor all of the first one) Herbie introduced her to those of his colleagues who had made it along.

  ‘So you’re Joint-Last Pete,’ she said and shook his hand. Evidently she had been counting too.

  ‘Like father like daughter, I see,’ said Pete, taking his hand back and clapping Herbie, a fraction too hard, between the shoulder blades.

  ‘So, explain to me again why you like working here so much,’ Beth said when he had gone.

  That night Herbie dreamed he was back in the lecture room, back behind the lectern, naked of course from the waist down, apart from his shoes (his old school shoes), though he kept hoping that the audience, which – of course, of course – was twice the size at least of the first week, twice as many councillors and cameras, wouldn’t notice… if he could just turn the lectern a little more to the left, no, wait, to the right… any damn direction at all. He pressed down with the heels of his hands, gripping the corners nearest to him, but the lectern wouldn’t budge, and the audience meanwhile seemed somehow to have moved closer, to have begun to filter in around the sides, any second now one of them was bound to say something, especially as he was – oh, God, he really was – stiffening. He gripped the lectern tighter – felt the strain right up in his shoulders – and wrenched it… wrenched again. There was a sound – phht – like a gas jet cutting
out, which even as he dreamed it struck him as a curious anachronism, for he knew exactly the technological consequences of what he had done. He looked down between his feet at the rope of coloured cables… Sliced clean through, writhing, two snakes where before there was one. He didn’t care now who knew he had nothing on underneath – was sticking right out in front of him – he dropped to his hands and knees, toppling the lectern as he did… he had to get the two ends of this thing back together before any permanent damage was done. Already though he was aware of chairs being knocked over as the audience stampeded for the door out to the corridor, from where he could hear more panicked footsteps, shouts… The lights flickered, once, twice, three times, then failed. The fire alarms went off all through the building, followed a rapid heartbeat later by the car alarms out in the car park, scores of them, hundreds maybe, right the way down to the SSE Arena, sirens cutting in and out of them, converging from all four corners of the city. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He had the laces out of his shoes and was knotting them together or not knotting them – the aglets had come off and the fraying cords kept slipping from his grasp, no matter how much he licked his fingertips – and then he felt it, a tremor beneath him, faint at first but growing in magnitude. Such chairs as remained standing fell. Carpet tiles were dislodged, a crack appeared in the exposed floor to the right of where the lectern had landed. He watched, helpless, as it zigzagged the length of the floor and up the end wall, watched as the room and all the rooms above it split in two. His impression was that the entire city had started to crumble, its foundations eaten away, so that he was kneeling looking up into the heavens – it was definitely heavens, not sky – where he saw, of all the things in this world or the next that he might have seen, the face in one particular cloud of the man who owned the chemist’s his parents had always favoured when he was growing up, frowning, the way he did when anyone handed him a prescription, as though whatever was ailing them had to be their own fault: what have you gone and done now…? And that was the end of it.

  In the next version of the dream he had, only a few nights later, he went into the lecture theatre on purpose with a long-handled axe up the sleeve of his coat and whacked the cables – and whacked them and whacked them – until the security guards, friends of his all, came running into the room, whereupon he turned the axe – it was a light sabre now – on them.

  The thought occurred to him again, reconstructing the dream in the cold, cold still-not-light of 7 a.m. (he hadn’t yet got round to resetting the timer on the radiators after the clocks went back): it might be time he found something else to do with his days.

  *

  Roza and Micky had found the ideal hill for the German-Polish producers to have their Annaberg battle on, rising up from a wind-blasted bog just north of Killeter, a couple of miles from the border with County Donegal. ‘There’s an old bit of a ruin on it that can easily be built up to look like a monastery,’ Roza said. ‘They can shoot it in reverse: start with the aftermath, then have all the fighting and the killing, then finish up by making it all better again.’

  ‘Then go on from there and do the rest of the twentieth century,’ said Micky. ‘The rest of recorded history, why not, right back to the Garden of Eden.’

  ‘In Tyrone naturally,’ Roza said.

  The producers weren’t hanging about. The call had gone out in the papers and across all the social media platforms for extras. Hundreds had come forward to enlist. ‘There’s only one problem,’ Micky told Beth, who told Herbie, at the end of the first day, ‘they all want to be insurgents.’

  ‘Me play a member of the Freikorps?’ one man said when he turned up at the location and was shown his uniform. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. What if somebody recognised me dressed up as a Nazi?’

  Roza pointed out that there was little likelihood of the film ever getting a UK and Ireland release and besides these were the very early days of National Socialism in Germany, it was unlikely that many of the Freikorps battalions were yet affiliated.

  ‘Yeah, but people could still find it on YouTube.’ Leaning closer then, ‘And, like, even if they weren’t Nazis they were still Huns.’

  Huns, she took that to be, both in its German-soldier sense and in its more local, ‘for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory’ usage.

  Another group of would-be extras arrived in two identical vans and after half an hour’s negotiation about which side they would be on, disembarked and formed up in three very well-drilled columns. After a further half hour scouting the terrain, their spokesperson took the director aside and advised her on how the insurgents could hold the hill, on condition that she let him take command.

  ‘I’m afraid you have this the wrong way round: you have to lose,’ the director said. The spokesperson suggested she have a chat with the writer. ‘It’s not about his script,’ the director told him, ‘it’s about what actually happened: the Freikorps chase you and the rest of the insurgents down the other side of the hill.’ At which point the spokesperson clicked his heels, said thanks but no thanks, and he and his well-drilled friends got back in their vans and drove away.

  In the end the only way they could make the numbers work was to cast local people as Poles while recruiting the Freikorps almost entirely from actual Poles living in the larger towns roundabout. Beth visited the set one of the days they were shooting there, although by the time she had got across the bog in one direction and factored in the time needed to get back across it heading home, it was more like ‘one of the hours’. She got chatting to two brothers from Chelm who had been living this past few years in Dungannon, working on a mushroom farm, and who told her this could well be the last thing they did before they were obliged to move to the Donegal side of the border in order to work, or else headed back home for good. They liked the fucked-up irony that they were going to be the ones doing the driving out.

  ‘Though you know,’ the older brother said and adjusted the peak of his Freikorps cap, ‘that we Poles regrouped after Annaberg. We got them in the end.’

  The battle raged, was reset, raged, was reset, and raged again for four full days. (The sound effects were added later, but the guide track – played over speakers hidden in boxes round the set – was actually a manipulated version of Halloween fireworks displays, which those who remembered said bore a striking resemblance to the Belfast gun battles of the early Seventies.) For three nights everyone bar the director and her DP got gloriously pissed on the campsite that the production company had erected on a neighbouring hill in order to save on accommodation and transport costs: Freikorps and insurgent, walking wounded and bloodily deceased, long established and recently arrived, swapping stories and songs, showing photos pulled up from smartphone wallets. And all the time the winds blew in raw off the Atlantic and almost unobstructed across Donegal. (It was supposed to be May. Luckily there wasn’t a tree within a half-mile radius to give the lie to that.) When the director finally called a wrap her assistant passed among them with medals made out of flattened beer-bottle caps and the foil from the necks of cider bottles.

  Then both sides united in electing a representative in case the political institutions at Stormont were ever revived. After all that savagery and bloodletting they reckoned they must surely have merited speaking rights in the chamber. At the very least a mural or two.

  Or leave it another thirty years and there was bound to be a novel.

  8

  Herbie hadn’t really bothered much with Christmas for the past few years. A tree, of course, there had to be a tree, which he would usually get around to putting up the day before Christmas Eve, but cards and all the rest of it…? Nah. Not for him.

  Beth, though, was insistent. First of December equalled the first mince pie (as the second equalled the second, the third the third) and a wreath on the front door. He told her that he had seen interesting-looking wreaths when he was passing the Christmas Market (or Post-Halloween: it had been up for a fortnight already), birch twig possibly, with sloe berries, but Beth would
n’t hear of getting anything from there. A giant outdoor pub ringed by sub-M&S tat. (‘Nothing wrong with M&S,’ Herbie said.) And no birch twigs either: holly from the fruit and veg shop, or forget about it.

  He stood inside chatting to the fruit and veg man while she looked at every wreath hanging from the awning – three times – before making up her mind, changing it, then changing back again: that one, definitely. And it was admittedly beautiful, a distillation almost of the form. With a bunch of mistletoe and a metre of red ribbon thrown in, gratis. ‘You’re my first of the year,’ the fruit and veg man said.

  She asked Herbie as they were tying the wreath to the door knocker whether he still did Black Santa. Not for a long while, was the honest answer.

  The Dean of St Anne’s Cathedral had started – way before Beth was born – keeping a vigil in the week leading up to Christmas, out on the footpath of Donegall Street at the bottom of the cathedral steps, a box beside him for donations to charity, and dressed in his dean’s dark cape, the hood as often as not up against the weather (it was a wind tunnel, Donegall Street), hence the nickname.

  It had become one of their Christmas Eve traditions, his and Beth’s, pick up the turkey crown and then swing by Donegall Street, while Tanya caught up with old school friends, home for the holidays, in the bar in the Queen’s Arcade. Beth – that’s right – with the little satin drawstring bag containing the pocket money she had been putting aside since Halloween… in the zebra money box, he supposed. The solemnity with which she undid the string and shook out the coins, or as she got older the folded five-pound notes.