Inventory

by Darran Anderson

“Mull of Kintyre … bodies rolling in from the sea.”

  My memory of the text was always in black and white. Life was in newsprint. The only colors I remember were those of flags. Or of accidents, like the spilled rainbows of oil along the gutters slick with rain.

  The most famous graffiti in the city was “You Are Now Entering Free Derry,” painted on the gable wall of a demolished terrace of houses. It marked the autonomous territory that the citizens had claimed against the empire—a word I’d always associated with the villains of Star Wars. Really it was a couple of housing estates that were unruly enough to keep the army and the cops at bay. They did so from 1969 until 1972. War photographers had come there when Derry was part of the nexus of rebellion from Paris to Vietnam to the civil rights movement in the United States. The graffiti itself had been adapted from a student protest message at the University of California, Berkeley. Eventually the existence of a people’s republic of Derry within the United Kingdom could no longer stand, and the army was sent in to seize back the Bogside and Creggan in Operation Motorman, a massive invasion involving over twenty thousand military personnel and tanks transported by HMS Fearless, launched from the river. A young witness to the operation was shot dead alongside his friend. A single teenage terrorist was shot in a tree and was left alone to bleed out in the back of a meat wagon. My father, only a kid then, had stood on the shore at Moville, a fishing village over the border, and watched the vessels moving up the river, knowing what was coming before the defenders in Derry did. The “Free Derry” sign remained. The idea still existed in people’s heads. After the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters took place, British soldiers painted their own graffiti: “Paratroopers 13, Bogside 0.” The “Free Derry” sign was attacked and vandalized many times. Once, the army even drove an armored vehicle into it, but it stood firm. Time and again the locals would paint it afresh.

  Floppy Disk

  In The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy’s house crash-lands on the witch, she opens the door from her sepia world into one of vivid Technicolor. I watched the scene on the mounted television in the video store, with the clerk perpetually irritated in the background. “Are you going to rent anything?”

  “I’m waiting for my friends.”

  On our street we had our own secret arcade. It consisted of a single machine. It was clandestine, in the back of the video shop. We usually went in, nodded at the store clerk, who was usually busy watching some hideous B-movie, arguing with one of those guys you thought worked there but who just hung around, unpaid, all day. We would pester the irritated clerk for posters from the window, hoping to get RoboCop or Predator for our bedroom walls, to hang next to the Mr. T poster, though you never knew what you had been given until you got outside and unrolled it, and then we would mock each other incessantly if it was a rom-com. We walked past the rows of VHS tapes, getting more obscure the farther we went in—sci-fi, then horror, taking a right at European art house. The soft porn, the stuff of hell and damnation in the eyes of the Church, was kept under the counter and had to be asked for in hushed tones, and sniggering boys would shout things as the blushing couples grabbed the tapes and exited swiftly. The arcade game was technically outside, in a chilly half-finished concrete annex. It was kept there, it was said, because the proprietor didn’t have a license, which made it seem underground and illicit.

  The game was Street Fighter II. Blessed were the rare days when I would walk into the back of the store, with a pocketful of change, and find the room empty. Sometimes, most times, I’d go in there totally skint and just watch the demo play. What intrigued me wasn’t really the characters or the monkish learning of elaborate special moves. Rather it was the backdrops. Other worlds were suggested in pixels. I found myself staring at the Hong Kong streets, the prone Buddhas, and Indian shrines, wanting to leave the fights and explore the scenes in the background, knowing these places existed somewhere out there. Sometimes I walked into the lion’s den: all the older kids hogging the machine, but all short of funds and resentful, trying in vain to break into it. Naive as I was, I could already spot who the neighborhood psychopaths were: they usually got your character into the corner and repeated the same move over and over until your energy depleted. Or tested out the assaults of the game in real life if you promised to beat them. Mostly I hung back, sitting on crates, hoping not to be noticed, and watched the bloodbaths, both in pixels and in reality. Nevertheless, the time came when you had to step up, be tested. It was an initiation ceremony. A crucible. The way you won mattered, but maybe what mattered most was the way you lost.

  My cousin DD was the first person I knew who had a computer at home. There was a myth that he’d constructed it himself. I was always enamored with my cousins. Older, wiser, cooler, they had posters of bands that kids my age weren’t allowed to listen to—the bands we were thus obsessed with—on their walls. They had satellite television with surreal Japanese game shows. In their sheds they kept terrapins and their BMX bikes. DD heard that I liked computer games and invited me up to his room: “Come and see.” He took out the disk, blowing any dust off, and slid it into the slot, and it took a while to load, with patterns of different colors sequencing on the screen. Then suddenly we were in an infinite blue landscape, with vector tanks moving around with impossible deftness. It was another world. I stood there, openmouthed.

  “How … how did you do this?”

  He showed me the reams of code he’d written. It seemed like some arcane magic, the kind of riddles and diagrams on gnostic medieval manuscripts. How typing certain numbers and letters in a certain order could create a different universe. It was like knowing the secret name of God and creating golems with it.

  “This is the future,” DD claimed, and he was right, though he would not live to see much of it.

  I admired DD a great deal from a distance, but the age gap was slightly too much. I knew that time spent with him took the form of kindness on his part, rather than friendship. In childhood, a span of just a few years appears a chasm, before it narrows to insignificance in adult life, but we never made it that far. An older, future friend of mine eventually worked with DD at a technology firm out in an industrial estate at the edge of town. They used to get lifts to work together, and my mate said that DD was one smart cookie and that he’d mentioned me, and I thought that I must get in touch with him soon. I had this image in my head, given that several years had passed, that he must have been working on mind-blowing things on his computers. What worlds could he have conjured up since, now that the technology is so much more advanced? Where had that blue landscape of vectors led?

  Early one morning, not long thereafter, DD came back from a night out and bumped into his brother, who was on the way out for a morning jog. In hindsight, DD seemed fine, with no visible signs of distress, in fact no warning signs at all, no need even for anyone to look particularly hard. And so there was much conjecture later on, given what happened and the unexpectedness, especially given that he was quiet and “getting on with things.” DD said nothing to anybody. That was the last anyone saw of him, in the land of the living. He walked up to the farms beyond his housing estate and entered one of the barns. There he found some discarded baler twine and tied it to a rafter and then around his neck, and he climbed up and then dropped. The coroner was able to determine that his first attempt had failed. The rope had snapped. DD had not taken this as a message or a second chance. He tried again and made sure this time.

  They say drowning in real life is different from how it looks in the movies. There are rarely any screams. People drown silently, grasping and panicking for sure, but soundlessly, because they are too busy trying to breathe to speak. It takes a trained eye even to notice it, especially when someone is drowning on dry land.

  Periscope

  Derry means “oak grove,” but the trees were largely quarantined in the parks. Where did all the other oaks go? Perhaps into smoke, burning through ten thousand winter nights. Perhaps into the sea. It took over two thousand oak trees to
build a single battleship, before the iron ships came. Whole forests sailed on the oceans, were splintered in battle, and ended up in their depths or floating in their vast gyroscopic currents.

  At Christmas I had received a gift. It was a periscope, which, through some alchemy of mirrors, could enable me to see around corners through a spyglass. I had wished for a long time for a telescope, but it was pointless, given the yellow glare of the streetlights and the smog, which extinguished the stars overhead and even gave the moon a blurry nicotine glow. But the periscope had its uses: to see and not be seen. At the beginning, I made myself a nuisance to my parents, watching them talking, eating, or simply minding their own business without their knowledge, until they felt my prying eyes and voiced their displeasure. So I took the periscope away upstairs. From my bedroom, I could see rooftops to the horizon, mostly slate, chimneys, and aerials. The bay window let in an arctic breeze in winter but trapped the heat like a microclimate in summer. I remember gazing at the river from this vantage point, which seems impossible now, and perhaps a false memory implanted somewhere along the way; or perhaps I was remembering a dream or a photograph of somewhere else. A memory of someone else’s memory. Memory has its complications, contradictions, collages, and it has times when it aspires to fiction. I would turn the light off in my parents’ room when they were downstairs, and pulling the curtain closed but just wide enough to allow in a sliver of light, I’d survey the activity at night: staggering drunks, nestling couples, scuffles, and barbarisms. When the streets were empty, I’d watch rubbish blowing along, thrown from cars, and would move upward and along the windows, gazing at bedroom ceilings, and the impossible mystery of a candle in a window, and someone coming and going in rooms I’d never visit, and the car lights in the street that would momentarily startle me back to my senses.

  In the distance, lit up from below, was St. Patrick’s Church, Pennyburn. I would notice how its mock-Russian onion dome turned a darker hue during storms and glistened like dragon scales in the sunshine. It was a glorious, exotic note on the skyline, and in my mind it merged with Edmund Dulac’s illustrations for One Thousand and One Nights, which I would pore over, as if the book were leaking into reality. It reinforced—this innocuous spire in a landscape of rooftops—that the border between the worlds of fact and fiction might be navigable and there might be roles for smugglers.

  “You’ve been stuck indoors too much. You’ll get cabin fever. Go on—go out and play with the traffic,” my mother commanded, shooing me onto the street. As I left with my periscope under my arm, she saw the glint in my eye and thought twice, one eyebrow raised. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Just along the street.”

  At first, my reply had not been a lie. I’d used the periscope to see over walls and through the knotted holes in wooden fences. I’d peer into letter boxes, my eye huge and magnified like an octopus at a porthole. Gradually, though, as always, I drifted toward the Glen, the wildwood.

  It was not long before I lost track of where I was and found myself surrounded by thickets. As I leaned down by the bough of a fallen tree, there was a skirmish of wings high overhead. It was then that I heard the radio chatter, ten or twenty seconds before I saw the trees become figures, secreting past in formation, a patrol of British soldiers in camouflage, shades that were as slow as ships with broken masts. I watched them through the periscope. They had not seen me and were too close for me to casually reveal myself without startling them. I felt the fear rising, knowing I was trapped. They could not see me, and they must not. I lowered myself farther onto the earth, sodden with leaves, and delicately weighed each breath. My heart was beating in my throat. They grew so close, I could hear their treads. The light splintered through the trees and onto the ground, but I could not even look up. Slowly they passed, like a herd in some distant future long after humankind has disappeared, and eventually my heartbeat subsided. As I watched them, their backs turned, head into the trees again, I thought to myself, giddy with relief, “One nil.” It would be years before I realized how close I’d come to being shot.

  Torch

  In the living room, under the stairs, was an impossibly dark space that my parents called the “spider cupboard.” It contained a perpetual fragment of night when the door was closed. It enveloped anyone who entered, and even when your eyes accustomed to it, there was minimal vision. You could feel the darkness. You could not see your hand in front of your face. The air tasted faintly of coal. Everything became still in there. It was as if the walls of the house had fallen away and you were standing in an infinite, starless cosmic black and it would take all your nerve to remain there for long. One day, someone locked me in there. Everyone has their breaking point, and as I finally snapped and pounded on the door to be let out, I could hear laughter through the door, and the panic rose in my chest. I was frantic before they relented and I spilled out onto the carpet, reaching for my inhaler. Even when the door was open and the light was shining in, it did not penetrate far. And yet the darkness still lured me in.

  Always a hoarder (“Steptoe,” my mother joked), Da kept a lot of his junk in there, hanging on little hooks and piled up in boxes. Rarely would he throw anything away. The hoarding seemed to be the echo of a deep, lingering habit, a kind of need that went beyond need.

  I would take my father’s torch into the spider cupboard and search through the items: concert posters, sheet music, strange photographs of groups of young men with their arms around one another standing in front of rows of lights and wire fences, and photos of family members now deceased, which seemed taboo to even look at but utterly compelling. Turning the torch around, close enough to create a halo of light, I could see writing of indeterminate age faintly scrawled in different colors on the stone wall. It was always cold to the touch, like a castle wall. I shone my flickering light along the wooden panels descending: the inverse side of the staircase above. I always dreaded shining the light down into the farthest reaches for fear I’d see something. The darkness there swallowed even the battery’s power. I could never see where it ended or if it ended at all, convincing myself that perhaps it went down into the darkness of a hollow earth, to hell or limbo, and if you did terrible things, or even just questionable things (and who was to know what they were?), you’d go there and never be let out. I kept one foot in the doorway at all times, never entirely crossing the threshold.

  Football

  I lost all track of time, trying to curl the ball into the corner of the two-dimensional chalk-drawn net. My concentration was interrupted by a familiar voice. My older cousin Robert. An edgy guy with the gift of the gab. Handsome and cocky, but boyish with it, so you couldn’t be angry with him. He was a magnet. He’d say things like, “I can’t wait until tomorrow…’cause I get better-looking by the day,” knowing how ridiculous he sounded but kind of believing it, and people would laugh rather than cringe. One of the untouchable few. Charismatic. Indestructible. Always joking around with my mother and any other woman in sight: “You know me—I’m a lover not a fighter.” One of those relatives who gave you kudos with the other kids. I liked Robert a lot, but I always felt myself getting shy with extroverts, and awkward with people I wanted to like me back.

  “What’s the craic, kid? Keeping her lit, I hope.”

  I nodded silently, without the remotest idea what he was talking about.

  “Good stuff. Is your auld boy in?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, tell him I’ve left in that thing he was after.” Robert winked and nipped into the house.

  I nodded to no one and went back to pounding the ball against the wall. Every time it hit, it left a damp circular print. I carried on for a while, until many circles were overlapping, and then sat down on the curb. Chimney smoke was drifting down the street. It had a blue tinge to it. The smell of turf. Slowly drifting along, gradually disappearing—the moment it vanished imperceptible in the drizzle. I sat and watched it, so hypnotized that I didn’t realize I was soaked right t
hrough.

  The ball was suddenly kicked out from between my legs with a spray of water. “You snooze, you lose, kiddo.” Robert started dribbling the ball along the pavement, then flicked it up onto his knee. “Still got the magic.” He started keeping it up then, attempting some ridiculously ambitious bicycle kick–style move, and walloped the ball onto a nearby roof. “Could’ve played for Liverpool.”

  He was laughing to himself as he walked away and out of my memory. I stood there in the rain, staring up at the ball.

  Aerial

  Time was of the essence. My mother had just nipped down to the corner shop. The devil makes work for idle hands, and I treated the house, secretly, as a laboratory. I realized I had only a few moments for the experiment. The electricity, the very substance of lightning, lived inside the walls. Wires like snakes. I’d seen it strike the church tower once, and somehow scientists had bottled it and contained it, and I could let the genie out of the bottle, just a peep. Out of curiosity, I lifted the aerial from the top of the television and very delicately slotted it into the socket.

  I woke up sometime later, lying on the floor. My head was ringing as if it were inside a colossal bell. The dimensions of the room were all wrong. I thought I remembered a flash and a whoomph sound, but it felt like it had happened in a dream a week earlier. My mother was standing over me, screaming, but I couldn’t hear her. Everything sounded like it did at the swimming baths. There was a sickening smell of burning, and as she wrenched me up onto my dangling feet, her hands trembling, I noticed the wallpaper was very lightly on fire: a scorch mark rising to the ceiling, following the path of the electric wire. I felt ill, dizzy, but as my voice and hearing returned, I realized I was not injured enough to tell the truth. “It just … fell into the socket.”