The local news that night made no mention of a theft, though the disturbance on the road was noted. Police, said the newsreader, preparing to slide the page to one side (sports results next), and giving the word an end-in-itself rather than means-to-an-end quality, were ‘investigating’. The news the following morning was of a pipe bomb ‘believed to be in connection with yesterday’s disturbance in east Belfast’ thrown at a house in a nearby housing estate – it failed to explode – and, the morning following that, of a ‘crude improvised device’, which did go off overnight, on the windowsill of another house, children aged eight and eleven months asleep upstairs.
It seemed the men from the Post Office were pointing the finger of blame for the loss of the-money-that-wasn’t at one of their own pals, or ex-pals, with whom they had as often been at war, as they liked to say, as they had with, as they liked to say even more, enemy combatants.
That initial cheer felt by the people queuing in the Post Office (and by Herbie, if he was being honest) began to feel a little misplaced.
How often had joy turned like that to ashes in the mouth? How often had little spats spread and consumed large parts of the city until they slowed its traffic to the pace of the funeral processions they created? He began to fear that this one would not end until there were men in white shirts and black ties walking three abreast, carrying wreaths with the initials of one organisation or another.
All this he communicated to Beth, in his daily phone conversations, listening in her responses for any indication that some of the details were not entirely news to her.
She gave none.
She did tell him, in the course of the call on her third day back, that two young men had been stabbed to death in her part of South London in the less than seventy-two hours she had been there. Another four men and an eight-year-old girl had been shot and wounded outside a house where there was a party going on.
Too early to say yet what effect that would have long term on tourist numbers in the area.
He hung up, still not able to tell one way or the other.
There were a couple more incidents: a shotgun blast directed at a car parked outside a social club (missed), an oil tank set alight.
And then out of the blue there was a press conference.
Of slightly greater moment to the wider world than the closure of a sub-post office on a B road between Belfast and County Down, and matters consequent on it, was the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which fell on the Tuesday following.
(Would the Agreement at Twenty have recognised itself still in the new-dawn photographs from the time, or have looked at the assembly that didn’t assemble, the power-sharing executive that executed no power, and thought that its identity too had somewhere along the way been stolen?)
Rooms in the new hotels had been steadily filling up with journalists and television news crews and the advance parties of minders and spinners for politicians who had spent the past two decades growing into wax models of their former selves.
It was too good an opportunity to miss.
The day before the main event, loyalist paramilitary representatives appeared in time-honoured paramilitary representative fashion, at a long table draped in blue cloth, flanked by leaders of the various Protestant Churches, whose shirts beneath the dog collars were always more colourful than you remembered. One of the churchmen read out a statement saying that no one had an eraser for the past, before he addressed the future, by way of the present moment, calling for an end, with immediate effect, to all forms of criminal activity by members of the organisations the other men at the table (who nodded throughout) represented. He – they – the statement – went further. Anyone engaging in such activity at the expense of their own community was no more and no less than an affront to the true principles of loyalism.
A declaration of transformation they called it.
Herbie had lost count of the number of times paramilitary representatives or the clergymen who flanked them had come out with statements like that – rejection, repudiation, even remorse. Too many for him – or anyone else he spoke to in the course of that particular Monday – to set any great store by this latest… iteration. If it had the effect of calling a halt to the mayhem that the butterfly wing of Paul’s revenge had unleashed, though, that would at least be something.
Wouldn’t it?
*
He didn’t even attempt the Records Office the day of the anniversary. Too much disruption. Bill Clinton was in town: an actual presidential motorcade on top of the city’s daily rush-hour tribute act! Belfast, for all the recent expansion, the north- and eastward spread, was still not big enough to accommodate so much fame in one go.
(The November day, several years before, that MTV first descended with its cavalcade of stars, the traffic was worse than the Bomb Scare Fridays of old when five tactically abandoned cars could induce gridlock and grant everyone a not altogether unwelcome early end to the working week.)
It figured, even so, that with all this out-of-jointness he would despite his ongoing precautions and diversions finally bump into Louise, that same afternoon, as she came out of the insurance broker’s on the city side of the building that was no longer the Post Office and not yet Clean. She looked as though whatever she had been doing since last he saw her agreed with her very well.
‘What’s the matter,’ she said after a moment, ‘you boycotting us or something?’
‘Just having to watch my pennies a bit more these days.’
‘You know, we price match with all our major competitors,’ she said, blinking robotically. He replied in the same register:
‘I will be sure to bear that in mind when I am next in need of provisions.’
‘How’s…’ she floundered.
He thought for a split second it was Tanya she was reaching for, but she would have had no way of knowing anything of her illness. ‘Beth?’
‘Beth! That’s awful of me,’ she grimaced, ‘mental blank.’
‘She went back to England at the beginning of last week.’
‘And are you…?’
‘Relishing the peace and quiet? Not so much.’
‘You wouldn’t think of moving to be closer to her?’
‘I don’t know. I might.’
They walked a way together, an inch-wide force field between their upper arms. She stopped eventually, looked him straight in the face. ‘I meant what I said before, I really enjoyed the time we had together, you know.’
‘I do.’
‘Good.’
‘Excuse me.’ A man with a white stick wanted past. They both took a step back. ‘Thank you.’ A few yards further on he turned. ‘You were saying, “I do,”’ he said in Louise’s direction, ‘and you,’ he said in Herbie’s, ‘were saying “Good.”’ He waved above his head. ‘Just in case I interrupted anything important.’
‘Do you think it would disappoint him if we told him that was everything I had to say?’ Louise said.
He watched his feet eat up another half minute’s worth of footpath, in step with hers, then out, then in again.
‘This is you here, isn’t it?’
They had arrived almost without his realising at the corner of his street. Bin day. Dark-grey wheelie bins left every which way on the footpaths by council workers under ever greater pressure to empty more and faster. She stroked his cheek in parting, open palm, then back of the hand. It was all he could do to stop from holding it there. ‘Call in and say hello some time. Brian misses you too. Apparently you are his best audience.’ He wondered if people had actually died. He wondered too, as he carried on down the street alone, if he might move across the water right enough. ‘Give it five years,’ he said under his breath, ‘and if doesn’t work out…’
Yeah, right.
He had, what, four, five lots of five left – hands – six at an absolute stretch, after which dependency beckoned, or (you would like to think some residual sense of self-respect would kick in) the exi
t door.
‘Excuse me… Herbie.’
He had nearly reached his front gate. The woman across the road – her, Audrey Bannon – was standing at her gate, next to her bin. He tried to think if he had ever heard her voice before. He had expected it to sound thinner somehow, from being so long constrained. There was a trace of somewhere else in it. Donegal maybe.
‘You wouldn’t have such a thing as a hammer, would you, or a brick?’ A faint smile at the absurdity of it. ‘I’ve gone and locked myself out.’
He walked out into the road towards her. ‘Is there nothing else you can do? No one you could phone?’ he said and straight away knew there wasn’t. ‘Wait here, I’ll see what I can find. Unless, do you want to come over?’ Again, he knew, she didn’t. ‘Wait here.’
The toolbox was in the second place he tried, underneath the stairs, underneath a pile of other crap. He imagined as he opened it the tools blinking. The claw hammer lay aslant in the bottom tray, the thing around which all else had always had to fit. He lifted it and its accumulated history, pictures hung, climbing frames built and in the fullness of time dismantled, and brought it outside.
‘Do you need a hand doing this?’
She took the hammer from him. ‘Not unless you want to hold the bin for me.’
She dragged the bin up the alley, Herbie following behind, and parked it a couple of feet to the side of the back gate, where, as she pointed out with the hammer’s handle, there was a gap in the broken bottles that someone resident there in less enlightened or litigious times had cemented on to the uppermost bricks in the wall for the deterrence of burglars and ne’er-do-wells.
‘Don’t ask me why, but I stood one day on a stepladder after I moved in and tried to chisel out as much of that as I could.’
She put a hand on his shoulder for leverage as she hoisted herself up on to the bin, hammer in her other hand, and – a quick look down the other side – leg up (he glanced away) and over the wall.
The scene switched then from television to radio drama. A grunt as she hit the ground. Foley artist footsteps (cabbage was it they used?) receding, a rustle of clothing (that was the backswing), a cra—whoops (her word) – the glass resisted… He was about to shout, ‘Maybe aim further in from the frame,’ when she caught it an almighty wallop and the glass shattered, carried on tinkling for a few seconds longer as she cleared a space large enough for her to – climb through? No, he heard, in between the sounds of her straining, a key being extracted – ‘Got it!’ she said – from a lock. She opened the door from the outside then – Foley artist footsteps approaching (order another cabbage!) – came down the yard and – picture restored! – opened the gate for him.
A stand of sunflowers painted on the nearside yard wall against a background of sky blue, a washing line with a single Marigold hanging from it by a pale green peg, glass all around the back step and what could be seen of the kitchen floor, twice as much you would have thought as was needed to fill the frame it had just come out of.
‘That,’ she said, ‘is why they always tell you not to leave the key in your back door.’ She gave him back the hammer, warm handle first. ‘I feel I ought at least to offer you coffee.’
‘I think maybe you have other things you need to be getting on with.’
A glance behind her, a nod, rueful. ‘Some other time,’ she said and managed to make it sound like it belonged in the world of plausible future events.
He took a couple of steps down the alley, checked back. ‘You can borrow the hammer if it ever happens again, or you can leave a spare key with –’ he swerved away from ‘me’ without noticeable hesitation – ‘any one of us on the street if you want. We all do it.’
‘I’ll think about that,’ she said and stepped back into the yard. He heard the bolt slide home. The crunch of her feet through the glass.
Peadar and Norrie were coming down the street at speed as he emerged from the alley. ‘Was that glass I heard smashing there now?’ Peadar asked. ‘It sounded like glass.’ Norrie barked, four sharp barks: it did in-deed.
‘It was, but it’s nothing to worry about.’
Nothing to worry about? Smashing glass? Peadar drew his head back sceptically. ‘If you say so…’ He stood for a moment, a man robbed of a mission, but only for a moment. ‘Come on, Norrie.’
The dog, which had been fixing to sit, got up – more scrabble than spring (more often the former than the latter of late?) – and loped after him.
Herbie double-checked that his own bin had been emptied then dragged it back closer to the gate. Emmet would be by shortly in his van of many gadgets (a tank of water and a hose, he had started with; now he was driving the Batmobile), cleaning those bins on his list, setting those that weren’t, as a matter of common courtesy and wheelie bin aesthetics, straight.
He stopped just inside the front door and was surprised to see a man not old looking out of the hall mirror at him, hair more grey than fair, sure, but hair, cheeks ruddied by the wind and the recent flurry of activity, and suddenly the game stretched out again before him, and six or five or even four hands seemed to hold out the possibility – probability – of at least one more change of fortune.
He still did not know how to make sense of any of it, he wasn’t sure that he would ever know.
But, so what?
Fill my glass, deal me in, I’m not thinking of folding yet.
He shut the door.
About the author
GLENN PATTERSON was born, and lives, in Belfast. He has written a number of acclaimed novels including Fat Land, The International, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young and Gull, and he co-wrote the screenplay of the film Good Vibrations, based on the Belfast music scene of the 1970s. He is the Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast.
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