Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  Everywhere we went on the Catholic side of Belfast, we heard bombs going off as Protestant royalists protested Bobby Sands’ election to parliament. On the Protestant side, pictures of the royal family stared out of every shop. Lady Diana and Prince Charles engagement mugs hung in the windows and their souvenir tea towels flapped in the breeze in eerie outdoor displays. The brick walls were spray-painted with Union Jack graffiti.

  We were making our way back to the Catholic side of town when I looked behind me and saw a battalion of soldiers and police in riot gear. They held shields in front of their faces. I tapped Annie’s shoulder, but she was staring straight ahead at an angry mob marching toward us wielding stones and bottles. I went speechless and tugged on Annie’s sleeve.

  “Get out of the fucking way!” Annie grabbed my arm and yanked me off the street. We dove into a doorway as rocks exploded against the brick wall behind us and bottles rocketed past our heads and shattered. We were trapped between the demonstrators and the law. It was pissing down bricks like rain. People scurried off the street like cockroaches surprised by light. We ran out of the doorway to help a young woman push her baby’s pram out of the line of fire.

  “Pick a side,” Annie said.

  “No contest.” I looked over my shoulder at the advancing army. “If I’m going to die, they’re gonna find my body on the Catholic side of town.”

  We got on our hands and knees and crawled beneath the flying debris toward the protesters. A few of them saw us trying to reach them and waved us on.

  When we were safely behind the front lines, a bloke in the crowd took us into a leftist café and bought us cups of tea. Posters on the walls said “Troops Out” and “Free the H-Block Prisoners.” I figured the “H” stood for “hunger,” as the slogan referred to the IRA hunger strikers who wanted to be treated as political prisoners in an occupied country and not as criminals. We’d all heard Maggie Thatcher in her flat, bloodless voice talking about Bobby Sands on the telly, “There can be no flexibility. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political. It is crime.” I wondered if she read Gertrude Stein.

  When it got dark, we decided it was time to get out of Ulster, or “Ulcer,” as Annie had begun to call it. Annie said she was bored dodging rubber bullets and tear gas, but I knew that meant she was nervous. There had been another bomb scare in the shopping precinct we’d just left with chips that were still too hot to eat. The pubs with their pro-IRA graffiti had elaborate fencing around the entrances that you had to weave through so no one could toss in a bomb and run away. The soldiers snapped our photos one more time. “Smile, you’re a terrorist,” I said. Annie wrapped her red-and-black Manchester United scarf more tightly around her neck and blew on her fingertips sticking out of black, fingerless gloves. I put my chips inside my green army-surplus jacket to warm myself up.

  At the station, we discovered that we’d missed the last train to Dublin. Suddenly our tiny bed-and-breakfast room where we slept crammed into a single bed seemed like Eden. All we wanted to do was get back to it. There was only one more train leaving Belfast that night. It was a local one that would only take us as far as Portadown, about twenty-three miles to the southwest. We jumped on it anyway to put some distance between our bodies and the explosions. In Portadown, we asked a mother and daughter sitting on a bench how to get to the bus station. They smiled at each other. “It’s in the city center,” the mum said.

  “How do we find it?” I asked.

  “You can’t miss it.” The adolescent girl looked like she was trying not to laugh. “It has a bomb in the middle of it.”

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “There’s a bomb in the city center,” her mum explained. “The whole area’s cordoned off. You won’t get near the bus station tonight, love.”

  “Brilliant,” Annie said.

  We walked to the motorway and tried to catch a ride south. The yellow motorway lights barely illuminated the trees behind us. No one would stop. We were freezing, and it was spooky. “Maybe it’s ’cos there’s two of us,” Annie said.

  “Maybe it’s because it’s dead stupid,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s ’cos there’s two of us,” Annie repeated. She hid in the thicket, and I stood on the road alone.

  Oh good, I thought. Here I am, rape bait. Almost immediately, a car stopped. I ran to the driver’s side window. “Cheers, mate. Can you take my friend, too? She’s over there.” When I pointed, Annie came out onto the road and waved. “I swear on my life we’re harmless,” I said, my breath blowing out in white gasps. “No one would stop for the both of us, and we’re really cold and desperate.”

  Annie approached the car. “Sorry, mate. We hadn’t wanted to fool you, but no one would stop.”

  “We’re really, really sorry,” I said.

  The bloke hunched inside his green anorak. “Just the two of you? No blokes? Right, get in. Hurry up, it’s freezing. I want to close the window.” Annie climbed in back, and I sat on the passenger side, fastening my seatbelt and thanking the driver profusely. The heater was on, and as the car sped down the motorway, I felt my feet thawing inside my black-and-white Converse high-tops.

  “I can take you as far as Newry,” the man said.

  “Ta very much,” I said. “We really appreciate it.”

  “You’re lucky I’m a decent bloke,” he said. “It’s dangerous hitchhiking out here. Don’t you young ladies know that?”

  “We got stuck in Belfast,” I explained. “The train would only go as far as Portadown. There was a bomb in the city center, and we couldn’t get to the bus station. We just want to get back to Dublin.”

  We were still caught in County Armagh, an IRA stronghold. On the motorway outside Newry, Annie said, “That geezer scared the shite out of me. As soon as he said that, about being a decent bloke, I was sure he was a serial rapist.”

  I said, “I couldn’t decide if he was worried about us or if he wanted to give us a false sense of security before he murdered us.”

  From Newry we got a ride to Dundalk, right on the border. It also had a bomb in it. Then we got lucky and caught a ride with an older man who took us over the border and all the way to Dublin. He said we reminded him of his daughter, and I prayed to God it wasn’t the daughter he’d raped regularly until she was sixteen. But he turned out to be a decent chap and dropped us off in front of our bed and breakfast, warning us not to accept rides from any lorry drivers.

  The sky was cold slate. Nobody else was on the street.

  “Crikey.” Annie rocked back and forth in her black monkey boots, hands in her pockets. “What a relief.”

  “Yeah. We handled that really well. I’m proud of us,” I said. “I mean, the whole time the bombs were going off and that, we had nerves of steel.”

  Someone’s car backfired on another street, and both of us hit the pavement and rolled behind the nearest vehicle.

  “Well,” Annie said, standing up and dusting gravel off her trousers, “better safe than sorry.”

  We had a cheap bottle of red wine in our room and sat on the bed to drink it. I was pretty sloshed by the time we finished it and lay down. “Aren’t you gonna even take off your baseball boots?” Annie asked.

  “I’m too pissed.” I pulled the yellow duvet over my clothes.

  “They’re wet, you lazy sod.” Annie pulled off my sneakers and socks and threw them by the radiator. She rummaged around in my bag for a pair of dry socks and put them on my feet. She put her own shoes, socks, scarf, and gloves by the radiator and squeezed into the small bed.

  I shivered and snuggled against her jumper for warmth.

  “Why haven’t we ever had sex?” Annie said.

  “Because we’re not each other’s type.”

  “I know, but why aren’t we? If you think about it logically, we’re perfect for each other.”

  “It never occurs to me to have sex with you. You’re my best
mate.”

  “Aye, I can’t get me own head round it. But isn’t it kind of mental? We don’t have a girlfriend between us. We should be having sex.”

  “Why?” I squinted at her. “Why should we be having sex?”

  “Isn’t it what we’re supposed to want? Are we freaks?” Annie smacked me on the arse. “Kiss me.”

  “My head hurts.”

  Annie leaned back and said dramatically, “Take me.”

  I started laughing too hard to do any such thing.

  “Take me, Amanda. When a woman says ‘take me,’ you must take her. C’mon, give us a snog.”

  I laughed myself into tears. Annie and I sang the Stiff Little Fingers’ song “Alternative Ulster” straight through five times. Then I played two Gang of Four songs in my head about the situation in Northern Ireland, “Ether” and “Armalite Rifle,” until I fell asleep to the raindrops slapping against the window.

  Our last day in Dublin was sunny, and we rented bicycles. It was the first time I’d driven any kind of a vehicle since leaving the States, and while it was relatively easy for me to remember that cars drove on the opposite side of the road as a pedestrian, it was much harder on a moving bike. I thought I was going to die at a particularly frenetic intersection near Trinity College, but Annie urged me on and we pedaled out past the Guinness factory.

  It was raining and the water was choppy when we took the ferry back to England.

  When I got back to Exeter, I bunged my gear into my room and made it to the refectory just in time for tea. I took my shepherd’s pie, chips, and peas to a table where a group of my mates was sitting.

  “Where the bloody hell have you been?” someone asked.

  I told them what Annie and I had done, expecting them to be impressed. I didn’t bring up our nerves of steel, allowing that to be obvious.

  My friends lectured me on how stupid I’d been. I drank fourteen cups of tea while I listened to them.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? You never hitchhike in Northern Ireland. You could have been picked up by any fucking terrorist. Terrorists do sometimes pick up people and use them for cover to get back and forth across the border, you know.”

  I left the refectory subdued but with a massive tea buzz. Daffodils bent their yellow heads in the wind against the lush grass. The moon and stars were crisp and bright above the tall trees, and the sky was clear. I felt like I was at the hub of the universe. Bluebells lined the path. I went into the common room to watch Top of the Pops. Someone brought in my favorite chocolate biscuits, Digestives, and passed them to me. I was safe, and I had chocolate. Nirvana.

  TRACK 8 Stay Free

  I couldn’t believe it when spring term ended. I had to leave my room at uni, and I had no money. I hung around with Neil in London and Annie in Manchester, but they were broke, too. We knew I’d have to leave. Neil and Annie were going back to university in the fall, and my student visa had run out. I wanted to finish school at Exeter but wasn’t allowed to work and didn’t have the funding to continue there, even if Annie hid me in her room.

  I couldn’t quite picture myself without a place to live and working sporadically in pubs for a pittance under the table while my mates, who got government grants to go to school, went on with their lives. If only I had found the women inside my head, I thought. I was sure I could have stayed with them, and my life would have made sense. But now I had no plan and felt like I would be left behind by my friends. Not on purpose, but they were busy. Already I could tell how different our lives would become as they returned to their families and got ready to continue their studies and get jobs.

  My goals were vague and centered around meeting the women in my head. It seemed safest if I returned to the States and finished school. I could feel the symptoms of my OCD coming back as I suddenly had no place to be and nothing to do. I didn’t think I would survive as a hanger-on in my friends’ lives without a life of my own. I felt myself growing weaker as a cloud of depression hung over me and my insomnia reappeared. I hated myself for choosing the safer way out, but I could tell my reprieve from mental illness was ending.

  For a while, I continued to bounce between Annie and Neil. The three of us met in London in June. Annie and I went to the first-ever Lesbian Strength march. It was 1981. The march was women only, and the men stood along the route and hung out of windows cheering us on. I remember the line of women resplendent with multicolored punk hair. Blue, orange, pink, green, red, purple—we must have looked like exotic birds to anyone flying over. Afterward we went to a women-only disco in Chelsea and a punk club in Brixton with a front window full of broken TV sets.

  When the club closed at two in the morning, Annie asked a policeman for directions to the motorway. When he bent down to talk to her, I got out of the car we’d borrowed from her parents, took the conical blue-and-silver constable hat off his head, put it on, stepped out into the street and directed traffic until he snatched it back. Sinking back into my seat in the car, I turned to Annie and said with satisfaction, “I was a big tit.”

  “That look suited you, mate,” Annie said. Then we stared at each other while I wondered how I was ever going to survive in my native, alien land without her physical presence.

  Before I left the country, Annie and I went on one last mission. To commemorate the impending royal wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, one night we actually drove out to Althorp, the Spencer family’s ancestral estate, and spray-painted “The Gays Were Here” on some pillars to protest the unfair age of consent laws for gay men. Then we ran through a dark, Northamptonshire field of tall, rain-soaked grass to dispose of the spray cans. Years later, I cried my heart out when Princess Diana was murdered.

  We drove through Northampton and noticed billboards advertising a new salad dressing with the slogan “Are You Daring Enough To Try It?” We had an extra can of spray-paint in the back of the car and decided to “gay” the town. We went to every billboard we could find and wrote “Go Gay” in big, red letters under the picture of a large bottle of salad dressing pouring onto a salad. Most of the billboards sat in areas that were easy to reach and fairly deserted in the middle of the night, except for one. It was bathed in bright, scrutinizing lights in the city center. We had to climb over a railing and scramble through some bushes to reach it. It was pointless to wait for the constant traffic to die down, so we just graffitied it in front of everybody.

  Annie and I arranged to meet Neil in London the night before she took me to the airport. I ate a last doner kebab. Annie said, “I can see you if you ever have a baby. It’d be sat there in its pram with you shoving greasy, repulsive pieces of kebab meat down its throat.” I started crying. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, mate. I still love ya.”

  “It isn’t that, you silly git.”

  Under the arches on Villiers Street, Charing Cross, we went to Heaven, the huge gay nightclub with beautiful neon inside and different kinds of music on each floor. Annie and I had heard that sometimes Joan Armatrading, a musician we were quite keen on, hung out there. We hit a few more pubs then walked aimlessly around London all night. At dawn, I said a tearful goodbye to Neil. I couldn’t believe I was leaving him. As Annie and I pulled out in her mum and dad’s car, the sky was streaked with orange, and the small milk lorries were making their deliveries. “Goodbye, milk floats.” I waved sadly out my window.

  We got to Heathrow, and I grabbed my gear from the back seat. I picked up Annie’s bag, which was suspiciously heavy. “Give it me,” Annie said. “It’s just some things you might need.” She unzipped my book bag and crammed in a bottle of Ribena, jelly babies, Marmite, a Mars chocolate bar because I’d said the English ones were different, a can of Newcastle Brown Ale, two packages of Chocolate Digestives, and a box of Typhoo tea bags.

  “I’m really made up,” I said. Annie hugged me and kissed my cheek. I smelled the rain in her hair one more time. As I made my w
ay to International Departures, I already knew that getting on the plane would be the worst mistake I’d ever make in my life.

  TRACK 9 The Prisoner

  For a year, I’d been a different, better version of myself, comfortable in my own brain, and content for once to be where I belonged. Though I hadn’t met up with the women in my head, I’d been to the places that still held their shadows. But now that I returned to the United States, my OCD and depression slammed back into my life hard.

  I missed the craziest things about England, like the indigenous orange-blue-and-yellow Wall’s Ice Cream signs, drinking orange juice at the cinema, Cadbury’s Ninety-Nines, and the way all English Kentucky Fried Chickens sold chips. I swore when I got back to Devon I was going to hug a hedgerow. But after a few years, I wasn’t even communicating with Annie and Neil anymore because my incapacitating breakdowns and the shame that accompanied them made it too difficult to maintain personal relationships, especially long-distance ones.

  Even though I longed to be in England, I didn’t believe my symptoms would evaporate again the way they had when I’d lived in Exeter. I thought about the women in my head all the time, but they weren’t present in the same way they had been. After spending a year in England without finding them, I couldn’t pretend that they would suddenly appear and rescue me from myself and from being in the wrong life.

  With my insomnia and noisy head, I didn’t function well enough to hold down a regular job successfully. Even on a good day, I felt like anything could topple me over the edge into another serious mental breakdown, and I didn’t know where to put myself for safe keeping. I couldn’t maintain my sanity, but I’d learned how to maintain my grade-point average. The best option for me seemed to be staying in school, as it would give me a flexible schedule and allow me to maintain my health insurance. All my instincts had boiled down to simple survival. I got into a PhD program in literature, which offered me a teaching stipend, so halfway through my twenties, I found myself driving across the country to begin a new life just outside of Washington, DC. And that’s where I stayed to save myself.