Inspired, I began to make maps myself. I copied the features without really knowing what they meant. Wind rose. Compass. Scale. Cherubs and bearded gods blowing prevailing winds. I drew maps of the tumbledown terraced streets of our neighborhood, like it was the center of the world, which for us it was. Everywhere is, for someone. I sketched the main routes first, then I added the tiny lanes that my friends and I hung around in, exclusively and jealously guarded. Largely unseen, behind the lives of the adults. The alleyways with their garbage sentinels, marked “No Hot Ashes,” which we’d pretend were shrieking Daleks or Darth Vader with his Stormtroopers. The backyard walls crowned with broken bottles lodged in concrete. Rusting tin cans of Scottish lager with crumpled models on them, like cubist paintings. The acrid smell as we poured the rainwater out of them. Clues left of nights before by now-vanished apparitions. I mapped the gates that we were able to bypass, being small and agile enough to squeeze through the gaps and shimmy up the drainpipes. You couldn’t take bicycles or even skateboards down such routes, as they were strewn with debris, so we’d venture in on foot, dragging sticks along the moss-dripping walls. I marked those areas on my charts: “Here be dragons.”
All discovered space becomes territorial. And we boys, without thought or instruction, colonized our immediate surroundings and its promontories. We’d give one another “heevies” up walls, joining our hands in downward prayer to hold each other’s heel and hoist upward. And we’d scramble, hands gripping tiny footholds, knees scratched against ragged red brick, to sit triumphant eventually, perched on high, graffitied walls, shimmying over to give each other room, the soles of our feet stinging when we finally tired of surveying our small council-house kingdom and leapt down onto the pavement slabs.
There were dodgy places that boys and girls did well not to hang around, especially alone, and especially after sunset. Areas that drinkers would frequent. Certain houses where the front doors were hanging off and the occupants seemed to regularly shape-shift. The darkened concrete staircases of the flats at the end of our street. I drew quicksand, tiger traps, pitfalls, trolls at these points on my map. I would find—in incidents I dared not think about, let alone speak of—that it paid to keep your wits about you in such places. I grew to have a healthy suspicion of intriguing characters, and not just old creeps: those wearing camouflage gear, for instance, especially young men who were too old to be hanging around with kids. My friends did too, responding with excuses and insults when the atmosphere changed. Sometimes the strangers would become distinctly unpleasant, inexplicably enraged, as if arguing with someone who wasn’t there, but we found safety in numbers. There were no other adult intrusions into our map world, bar once a week when the garbagemen would barge in, whistling, and we would run after them, alongside their trucks, jumping up onto the running boards as they cursed us. No one else bothered us really. Except, of course, for the army.
I sketched in pencil the front gardens, opposite the pub and the bakery, where we would do our “donkey derby” dash. The more hazardous challenge of the backyard run, bursting through clothes dangling on washing lines and clambering onto coal bunkers. I drew the maze of housing that led down into the valley. I drew cubes within cubes, until it resembled the brutalist tower block a stone’s throw from our street; and I drew us as stick figures climbing to the top, above the perilous drop, where we would sit on the glowing concrete and watch the cinema of the skies, half-believing it was a performance by God every night. And we would watch the sun go down behind the bread factory, behind the mountains of Donegal, out there beyond the border. Perched as we were on the very edge of Europe, an outland, we would watch the sun boil into the wild Atlantic. And we would make sure we got home before the moon, covered with barnacles and shaking off kelp in my sketches, started to rise out of the sea.
The real wilderness was the Glen. I had written “X marks the spot” on that expanse on my map, and rubbed it out and moved it so many times that it gave the space an impression as opaque and chaotic as the place actually was.
There was something about the wastelands of the Glen, and the deep, dark woods on its periphery, that I needed in order to feel the snug safety of my room in contrast. I found myself drawn there, both with my friends and alone. All sorts of stories clung to the place. Tales of murder, long enough ago to be in ballads or close enough to be word-of-mouth. Famine roads cut through the wasteland, where the British establishment and the landowners had made the starving Catholic Irish build roads to nowhere, to justify the charity of a bowl of soup. They made the people, all of them close to starving to death, construct architectural follies too—huge structures it was willfully impossible to live in, built by many who effectively had no homes. Some of the roads they laid down ended in the middle of fields, in the middle of nowhere, because all those working on them simply died where they stood.
If there were any treasures in the city, surely they would be found in the Glen, the most foreboding of places. That’s where I would hide something if I had to. A place where it was always raining or lashed with sleet, or choking in a thick fog. So I ventured there, trudging among the heather, wrenching my boots out of rabbit holes, climbing over ivy-covered, half-collapsed walls. I had a pair of shoes with compasses in their soles. Once I found a catacomb amid the greenery. It formed a perfect room around me when I crawled into it, insulated from the world outside, but I was unable, on subsequent expeditions, to find it again and wondered if I’d dreamt it. Throughout the wasteland were cracked warning signs, missing letters and falling to pieces. Each one documenting a tragedy perhaps, as warnings do, but also acting as an invitation, like the curses of pharaohs to stay away, do not venture in, there is nothing but death here—all to keep the grave robbers from the precious grave goods of kings.
Most of the time I would set off with our gang, at least partly reluctantly, on some harebrained scheme of their devising. I was neither the quietest nor the most vocal, and I lagged behind, surveying the scene, always primed to take to my heels at the first sign of trouble. Our leader, a charismatic boy named Jamesy, could handle himself and had a natural flair, and it was not unusual for him to lead us while somehow smoking a cigar, its origin never adequately explained. There was Carl, who was crafty; and Danny, who was jolly; and Gareth, who was timid; and there was me, who had no idea what I was or how I appeared. I could write the characters of others in my head, in a silent commentary, but I struggled with seeing myself, even in mirrors. Face-blind to my own face.
The Glen was forbidden, but only to the degree that trespassing there gave us delight. To venture out of our neighborhood, which we patrolled as sentries, really was forbidden. We’d end up in the territory, and at the tender mercies, of other gangs of street urchins. Behind enemy lines. Streets and alleyways and crossover points were defended with sticks and stones, and kids would return home wailing, with throbbing eggs on heads and fat lips, if they intruded too deeply. I had not yet realized, having not worked out the meaning of the painted curbstones of my town, that humans did not grow out of this impulse. It only darkened as they aged.
Cardboard Box (Marked “This Way Up”)
“I’ll see you when I see you,” my father would tell my mother when they first met as teenagers, and he would disappear accordingly, off gallivanting and hitchhiking across the thirty-two counties; the elusiveness irritated and attracted her. “I’d be damned if I let him get the better of me,” she thought. I had seen photos of my father out at Inch Island, where he’d gone to “live off the land.” He and his brother and their friend look like a stranded prog rock band. My mother thought he looked like Bob Marley from behind, with his long hair and denim jacket; and thought, with some delight, and accurately, that he’d outrage her parents. It was a time when having long hair was an invitation to get your head kicked in, and so they learned to scrap early on. The lads would drink Mundies fortified wine, listen to British blues-boom records like Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, wear pirate earrings, and smoke Woodbines and Park Driv
e. They’d put metal tips on the heels of their brogues to make an authoritative click when they walked through the dance and punk clubs. Girls would go to the riots in gangs, linking arms, to “check out the talent.” The guys would wear their Sunday best while throwing bricks and petrol bombs. Hair done. Boots polished. Aftershave dabbed. Preparing for battle. The key was to get noticed, but not too noticed.
Briefly my parents-to-be had escaped together from the Troubles-strewn North, hitchhiking the entire length of the country to Cork—a kind of twin town that suggested what Derry might have been without the conflict. My father had worked there for a while on the docks, unloading cargo, recalling later a huge African spider scuttling off into the rainy streets from a crate of bananas. While they were there, my mother, only eighteen and unmarried, learned she was pregnant with me, and so they decided to return north, to the imaginary comfort of their families. I was almost a Cork man, they’d say, but they returned north, over the border and into the conflict, as if disaster had a strange kind of magnetism or gravity.
They had gone to Cork for no other reason than to escape, but their path had been pointed out by my father’s record collection. Growing up, Da had become a fan of the blues singer Rory Gallagher, from listening to his older brother’s LPs. He’d grown his hair, bought lumberjack shirts in imitation, learned guitar and harmonica. Da and his friends would roadie for bands that came to town. Gallagher never stopped coming, even in the darkest days of the Troubles, when musicians like the Miami Showband were being butchered. Punks appeared in NME posing next to barricades in Belfast, but bottled out of actually playing, while Gallagher just turned up quietly and played loudly. He was born in Donegal but moved to Cork, and so, seeing a path, my parents followed suit. They also resolved, if their firstborn was a boy, to name him Rory as a tribute. In the end they were three weeks too late, and my cousin received the name instead.
We chimed as toddlers. Rory was boisterous, while I was cautious, but we were both curious little fellows. We lived three streets apart and were inseparable. We would climb on bunk beds, and peel the colors off Rubik’s Cubes and stick them on each other, and make forts with cushions and blankets that would transform into the Wild West or carry on forever like the sea.
One day, a stranger was driving down the street past the corner shop, with its boxes of fruit and veg spilling out onto the pavement. The cars would take shortcuts through the terraces to bypass a series of traffic lights on the main road—a safety decision made by a well-meaning civil servant. The driver was making up time and was idly about to drive over a cardboard box near the faded white line when something stopped him. It moved—perhaps there was a dog inside?—and so he stepped out of his car and went to kick it out of the way, when a child suddenly crawled out from inside it. It was an uncomfortably close call for everyone, and the kids were told emphatically not to hang around on the road, but bar a sliver of pavement outside their front doors, there was nowhere else to play.
One day, Rory was kidding around, trying to pinch turnips from the shop a few doors away from his house, and he bolted, not pausing for a second to look, and was struck by a passing car. The driver was distraught. Perhaps never the same again. There was nothing that could be done, and so Rory stayed a little boy forever.
The first night that it rained after he was buried, Rory’s mother became terribly upset, wanting to bring a blanket to the cemetery so that her child could be warm. They stopped her from leaving the house. They stopped her from going to him because he wasn’t really there anymore.
As a small boy myself, I was shielded from the grief, but something entered the world right then, just as my little cousin exited it. Something fathomless. Rory wasn’t coming back, I was told in gentle terms by my mother, her mascara streaked from tears. “Back from where?” I wondered but did not ask. It was the first sense—one that would never go away—that there was a shadow world, a world largely ignored but ever present, within this one.
Chalk
Opposite the house was a blank gable wall that rarely remained blank for long. Messages would appear on it continually, and yet, for all the time I spent looking through my window, I’d never seen anyone write any of the words on it. I had seen people painting blocks of white over the slogans, but never once had I seen the messages being delivered. It was as if they just appeared, like the scene we’d been told about in Bible studies at school, the words of doom appearing at Belshazzar’s feast, written by an invisible hand.
The owners of the house took great displeasure in noise, and would come out frothing at the gob, but when their pristinely polished Lada car was not parked up on the pavement, I was free to cross the street and draw goalposts on the wall. There were other games we’d play—Curby, where we’d throw the ball to bounce back off the curb from the white line; and the hide-the-ball game Alla Balla, which we didn’t realize was centuries old—but those games required at least two people. When I was solitary, which was often, I would thud the ball against a two-dimensional goal, commentating in my head as if I were Maradona, George Best, Paul McGrath, or Totò Schillaci.
Sometimes I’d have to draw the lines of my chalk goalposts across the graffiti, and I’d thud the ball against the letters. What they meant seemed cryptic to me. “IRA.” “INLA.” “IRSP.” “SS RUC.” “Fuck the UDR.” I thought of the painting of the crucifixion in my classroom and of the letters above Jesus’s head. “INRI”: “Jesus the Nazarene, king of the Jews.” Perhaps these were the kings of these streets. I found out only later that they were the acronyms of the combatants—rebels versus the state, state versus citizen, people versus people—in our little war. Depending on where they were from, often an accident of birth, they were terrorists or freedom fighters. Forces of law and order or brutal tyrants hiding behind the law. Rebels fighting injustice or each other or themselves. Them against them. You against you. I against I.
Sentences would appear. “Up the Provos.” “Brits out.” “Tiocfaidh ár lá.” “Mickey D is a tout.” “Death to hoods.” Sometimes there’d be something I’d recognize. “Fuck the Queen.” “Celtic FC.” Mostly they were puzzles, and I’d go inside and summon up the courage to ask my mother, “What is a sex pest?” or “Who are snitches?” After reading “Free all POWs now,” I asked her, “What is a pow?” thinking it was the noise Batman made when he fought the Joker or the Riddler in my comic books.
“It’s just people writing nonsense. You don’t need to worry. I remember all sorts of messages being written when I was a girl. There used to be one that went around called ‘Kilroy was here.’ And another called ‘Big Aggie’s Man.’”
“Who were they?”
“No one really. Just make-believe people. You know, like Jack Frost. And San—oh, you know, made-up people.”
“Like imaginary friends?” I asked.
“Sort of.”
“But who writes them?”
“They’re just messages. Sometimes you get funny ones. Like the one in Belfast that said, ‘Is there life before death?’”
“I don’t get it.”
“Someday you will. You think too much, Professor Anderson.” She ruffled my hair.
I sat on the floor, legs crossed, for an hour, wondering about life before death.
I knew nothing of how the messages worked. The graffiti. That they were threats and warnings, made specifically with an audience in mind. The court of public opinion. I didn’t know that they were ordering people to go into exile voluntarily or go into the afterlife permanently. At best, those singled out might have a beating with spiked bats, or have their kneecaps blown out. Sex offenders, drug dealers, informants, pariahs. The messages were to them but also to the community, like Martin Luther posting his theses on the doors of the Schlosskirche. Back then, I knew nothing of the schisms between the groups, personal or ideological—men in Ford Escorts punched full of holes while dropping their kids off at school, or blasted standing in phone boxes in the midst of calls to their wives—that gave birth to new acronym
s. I did not know the meaning of the other acronyms, of the terrorists from the other side, UVF, UDA, UFF; but I knew enough, even at a tiny age, to fear them and avoid any area where those letters appeared. Death was brought to you today by the letter “U.”
There were deeper clues to some other reality everywhere, it seemed to me. Shoes hung mysteriously over telephone wires. Cracks in the pavement would have diabolical consequences if stepped upon. Coal holes were hatches to other dimensions. Messages sprayed by council workers and electricians on the pavements were runes. If you came from my background, you dared not set foot anywhere with red-white-and-blue-painted curbstones, or Union Jack flags (the “butcher’s apron,” republicans called them), or bunting or murals with William of Orange on horseback, or celebrations of being massacred at the Somme, or our province’s self-mutilated symbol, the blood-soaked severed red hand, thrown onto the land when two princes raced each other to be the first to touch and claim its soil. The adults would stir up the fear in you, like joking about the bogeyman. “You go there, they’ll put you in the sack. Or you’ll end up in the bonfire.” And the other side—they—told their children likewise.
It was the same on maps. I’d read the tantalizing poetry of the names of villages and towns all across the province in which we lived—Blackskull, Desertmartin, Mazetown, Moneyglass, the Birches—and I knew, deep down, that these were places surely I could never go.
The graffiti appeared all through those years, warnings or gloatings over atrocities and deaths, which read like supernatural curses from dark storybooks.
“Fenians, remember Hyster.”
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