Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  There was no hiding this incident, but next time would be different. Concealment was the key.

  “Results inconclusive,” I wrote in my notebook, when my double vision had finally subsided.

  Television

  There was something nightmarish about that television. Perhaps it was the wait to get one that built up the expectations and trepidation. When it arrived, I was appalled. It was amazing, and yet it was like a window into bedlam. A Punch and Judy cavalcade of grotesques. ’Roid-rage wrestlers, dart-throwing stand-up comedians, drunken snooker players, deranged adverts of leering serial-killer clowns and dancing golliwogs—all the nonsense figures that filled people’s heads the way medieval saints once did—tap-dancing light-entertainment lounge lizards, crazed hand puppets, Gary Glitter chants, and Jimmy Savile tracksuits. Plywood sets and sequined costumes. A nightmare from which the times struggled to awake. It was the 1980s, and the apocalypse was beamed in on our handful of channels. I was mesmerized.

  My mother warned me that I’d go blind, sitting so close to the television, the screen enveloping my panorama of vision almost entirely. I had to, or so I justified it, so that I could painfully move the tiny dials to change the channels. There was static in between. My father gazed up from his book. “You know what the Swedish call that? Myrornas krig. ‘The war of the ants.’” My father didn’t talk much, but when he did, it was full of things that no one else ever said. “Deep and meaningless,” my mother would joke. My father would laugh and return to his reading. He always had his head in a book.

  My friends would boast of having barely believable things like remote controls, Ceefax, even satellite dishes; and after they told you, they’d read your face for envy. I didn’t mind, or at least I didn’t flinch. I really liked only two or three shows, the ones I’d rush home from school once a week to see, which transported me somewhere else, the future perhaps, or another world, like Knightmare and Ulysses 31. I used to stare at the little girl playing tic-tac-toe on a blackboard while a deranged toy clown sat next to her. I was fascinated by the television because it seemed like a portal. Where to didn’t matter. Perhaps it was a fragment from some other world, intruding on ours. Watching it was like gazing into the fire, hypnotized, uncomprehending. My face illuminated by the light.

  The news was, however, a cursed interloper. Famine in Biafra, children with their bones breaking through their skin. The space age seeming to die, live on television, as I watched the astronauts plummet to earth in the Challenger disaster. The main television stations were in London and Dublin. No one spoke like me, or anyone around me. I watched The Angelus on RTÉ and EastEnders on the BBC, and they felt … disconnected, like I was on the wrong side of the aquarium glass.

  The local news was much worse, though. It began every day with a litany. Three people shot one day, two people the next. A bomb in a dumpster in a crowded high street. The tide of the bloodbath ebbed and flowed between Catholic and Protestant (“Other” was a novelty). The newsreader would make the announcements like they were the football scores. I watched as people in the room with me would respond, and I clocked the differences in reaction. If people on the “other side” were killed, they’d shake their heads and say, “That’s a sin. No one deserves that.” If it were one of their own, the reaction would be rage and curses. Every report was filled with the minor incidents. An Orange Order hall attacked. Shots fired at a house. A Gaelic Athletic Association club targeted. Scorch marks. Charred timbers. A spiderweb of cracks on glass. A “viable” explosive device found on the bottom of a car. Viable meant “could have.” Viable meant how close you’d come to the end. How thin the ice was, upon which, unwittingly, you walked.

  Sinn Féin representatives were not allowed to speak in their own voices. They had an actor speak over them, like a badly dubbed kung fu movie. I wondered how actors got these jobs? Out-of-work Shakespearean thespians, perhaps, phoned by their agents to attend a recording studio, to repeat a political denunciation. In the absence of their mysterious real voices, I always imagined bizarre ones, deep and operatic perhaps, or squeaky and cartoonish. I asked my mother and she laughed, saying they sounded like us.

  The news repeated every day, like a loop. Stuck in limbo. Always something nice at the end to lift the spirits, finish on a high note. A cat rescued from a tree. A fundraising initiative. Mirthless comedy. Our wee nation. God’s own acre.

  People were shot in their own homes. That was the lesson that sank in. It was a simple one. I began, every night without fail, to place the latch on the front door before bed. My mother caught me once and, embarrassed, I mumbled some excuse that only waded me further into the lie the more I talked. Yet I still sneaked back to put the latch on regardless.

  When the sun set, I discovered I had a fear of darkened windows, a fear that faces would suddenly appear at them. I would scurry past the one on the landing on my way to bed, without ever looking out of it, afraid I’d see something, even though rationally it made no sense, as it was on the first floor. The fear came into my mind—a fear both rational and irrational—from outside, and the television was the conduit for it. It let the monsters in.

  My sister and I would sit all Saturday morning watching cartoons and adverts for things that weren’t on sale here; competitions, stores, fairgrounds that existed only across the sea or south of the border. And when the news came on, the politicians, the salespeople, I would hold a magnet, pocketed from the fridge door, up to the television screen, and the figures would gently warp and a rainbow halo would encircle them. I was simultaneously dissuaded and encouraged by my parents telling me that the television would explode if I kept doing it.

  Totem

  The boys were playing cowboys and Indians. None of us had wanted to be the latter. My father overheard and arrived back home a few days later with a book on Crazy Horse, Geronimo, and Sitting Bull. He set it on the living room table and didn’t say a word. He would do that. Leave things out for me to find myself. I was soon transfixed, and I would gaze over the other maps of America, before the states, and chart the routes and lands of the different tribes. My father even made me a totem pole for my room, which reached the ceiling, painting birds and faces on it.

  Underdogs were almost sacred in Derry. I grew up thinking that Pancho Villa, Rosa Luxemburg, Biko, Allende, Mandela, Guevara were somehow saints. When a priest at school, after an hour of lecturing on Catholic martyrs, asked the class if they knew of anyone who had died for their beliefs, I even, foolishly, put up my hand.

  Bird’s Egg (Smashed)

  A peregrine falcon used to soar above the school. It nested somewhere on the cathedral spire, up by the stone crucifix. I would watch it—noisily at first, trying to get other pupils to look, and then silently, sullenly—high above the playground and the hopscotch squares. I was intrigued by the spire, and the idea fostered in my mind by the teachers that it was somehow a celestial transmitter and receiver. It was a holy space, and yet a mason had been killed in its construction, as often happened in those days. Was it cursed then? Haunted? Our teacher claimed it was all the more holy because there’d been a martyrdom. The mason’s name went unremembered, though.

  The spire seemed impossibly high, surely one of the tallest buildings in the world, given that there were days when it was above the clouds, though I could find no mention of it in my books. I watched the bird orbit. It would dive astonishingly fast, its wings pointed, sharp as blades. All the noise around me—the chants and handclaps and haggling over silver football stickers, the talk of Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch, whether sharks ever slept, and whether astronauts explode in the vacuum of space—would fade away into a bubble of silence. Occasionally small dead birds would be found, spattered across the playground. The children would circle around them, nudging each other to prod them with a stick.

  The girls were chanting and clapping some elaborate memory feat. The boys were kicking a crushed tin can around, in lieu of a football. The cool kids boasted patches on their jackets, pinched from older br
others, of bands they’d never actually heard, like Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Anthrax. I was smart or dumb enough to hang around with the kids who were “bad news.” It allowed me to be bookish but protected. You might be nearly the last to be picked for football, but they weren’t even allowed to take part. They’d be given their own ball and you’d look over at their pitch and they’d be lighting fires or hurling rocks at one another. It seemed more interesting than teams competing for silver jugs. Their activities were ludicrous. They would raid the nature table for frog spawn, firing tadpoles through straws at each other. They would bring in actual ninja stars to embed in the wood of cubicle doors to freak out those inside. One of the kids, an expert shot, had become a legend by launching an orange over the height of the school, after a seemingly impossible dare, and while he was being carried around the playground on the pupils’ shoulders in triumph, the orange kept going on its trajectory. It fell out of a clear blue sky and into the face of an elderly crossing guard, who retired and declined terminally shortly thereafter. They were innocent japes until they weren’t.

  I had proved my mettle to the gang by getting into fights on knee-scraping gravel pitches, straddling the chests of other boys before being hauled off by the scruff of the neck by teachers on their route home. The pièce de résistance, though, was kicking through a reputedly haunted window in a school basement cloakroom, in a misjudged attempt at “ghostbusting.” I ended up alone in the empty school with the stern headmistress-nun, while the rest of the children went to the circus, but I knew it would earn me kudos. The nuns were particularly merciless, however, with my ma, as they assumed that she was a single mother, given that my father—through shyness or distraction, or working every hour God sent—never came to any parents’ meetings, and thus that I’d hailed from a broken home, or my parents were “living in sin” or some lifestyle that did not fit the endlessly narrowing worldview of the puritan. The walk home was heavy and fraught with silence, and I felt hollow when I realized my mother was on the point of tears. I thought, suddenly and for the first time, how young she looked.

  Back in the playground, one of our group was holding court in the midst of a circle of pupils, carving with a key what he claimed was a Ouija board on the wooden steps to the Portakabin classroom. A girl leaned over their shoulders and told them that they were idiots and how she had recited the Hail Mary backward at midnight facing the mirror, and Satan had appeared and offered her three wishes; and having gained the other girls’ attention, she recounted her wishes in great detail. Meanwhile I silently watched the falcon orbit the spire.

  In other parts of Ulster, right then, children our age were walking unbeknownst into crime scenes, led in by the sickly-sweet smell of cadaverine. A game of hide-and-seek uncovered the brutalized corpse of a young man, gagged and hooded. Kids playing near a cricket ground found two men shot dead. Other bodies were discarded directly into playgrounds. What do the children dream of after these discoveries?

  The falcon kept orbiting the spire.

  Gargoyle

  We would dare each other further and further into danger, drunk not just on our own bravery, or the imitation of it, but on the possibility of one another having an accident. We’d climb higher and higher, onto more death-defying ledges, creaking drainpipes, scurrying across moss-covered rooftops. Fatalities were somehow averted. One unintended side effect was that we found ourselves in blind spots above the town. We would find an entire forgotten world on that rooftop layer, unseen by the street dwellers or even by those within the buildings, full of alcoves and huts and ramparts where we hung out for years. There was an unmapped world up there and it was ours for the taking.

  We were tempting fate, of course. Walking along tin rooftops or placing bending planks between buildings and over sheer drops, or leaping between them, running in an instinctual form of parkour long before a name for it existed. Health and safety was a rarity then, but the dangers were still obvious. In Brooke Park, Gwyn’s Institute had been an orphanage for the children of typhoid victims and had been taken over by the army before a fire incinerated it, causing its roof to fall in. Its shell was too tempting, however, and a kid scaling it fell amid collapsing masonry and was seriously injured. As we got older, injuries mounted among us too, most often inflicted during moments of complacency. One of my friends gouged his back open, like it was meat, on the metal hook of a clothesline after falling backward as we sat together. Another sliced his foot to ribbons while splashing around in the fountain in Brooke Park, where drunks threw their bottles. He was carried back in a mock pietà by our friends. I remember laughing with nerves, not for the last time, at the sight of trauma.

  When I tired of the dares, the relentless nicknames, the jibes, the prepubescent talk of each other’s mothers, I’d go off on my own. I would walk down to the Gander’s Neck, a curiously named stretch of road with Georgian housing, past the huddle of garages and furtively past the house of a voyeur who photographed and filmed (with a Super 8 video camera) any trespassing youngster, and whom we’d nicknamed “Candy Camera.” Then I’d slide in the back of a hedge, disappearing into the foliage, and wrest myself up into a tree and shimmy onto the low shoulder of the church. It seemed abandoned, but it was only dormant. They still had special services there once in a blue moon, but otherwise it had been left behind in the flight of Protestants from the west bank of the city. I would climb up there often and sit silently in the folds of the neo-Gothic architecture. Watch the sky change under every kind of weather. A place that was uniquely mine. Sometimes I would test myself and my vertigo by climbing upward, hanging off the edge. Mostly I would sit watching the world go by, hidden from view, impassive as the gargoyles nestled next to me. A line from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame would circle in my mind, like a fluttering bird: “Oh, why am I not of stone, like you?” and then it would fly off into the sky.

  Shovel

  Kids were merciless with each other at school. Any point of difference was seized upon, especially about each other’s parents. For years I’d been plagued by taunts of “Your parents are hippies,” especially given that Da had a beard and long hair, which were anathema to the other children and their militantly respectable parents. These were decent God-fearing Catholics, and the last thing a Catholic would respect is someone with a beard and long hair. For too long I listened to them and longed to grow up quickly so that I could rebel and have cropped hair and wear a big suit, like the one the singer from Talking Heads wore on The Chart Show. I’d eventually learn to shrug off the accusations that my parents were hippies, which there was no point contesting, as they were (Da had nailed a Green Man sculpture where the holy-water fonts would be in other people’s houses, next to the front door), but another recurring taunt was that my da was a gravedigger. I never understood why such a job was viewed so badly. It was something that almost every person would one day need, but the taunts still came. My father was a gardener-groundsman in the local cemetery that overlooked the town, high on the hill. He tended the graves and the trees, arranging the flowers for the grieving, keeping the lawns trimmed, and stopping the place from being swallowed up by nature.

  Occasionally Da would bring back objects he’d dug up, relics of earlier times. Occasionally he’d tell horror stories of having to euthanize rabbits that had myxomatosis, bleeding from their eyes, with his shovel—feeling the terrible weight of mercy. Occasionally he’d tell stories of paupers who lived so long that everyone they’d known had already died and the only people at their funeral were a priest and my father, leaning on a rake. He’d stood and watched lavish, well-attended funerals of people who’d been feared and hated in life. Another time he told the story of how, at the burial of a young IRA volunteer, the army and the police had turned up and fired on the mourners, and they’d had to run while carrying the coffin. The authorities often turned up at memorials, not just to intimidate but to film and photograph people in the crowd, and attempt to arrest the masked figures who would play the “Last Post” at the graveside and fir
e volleys of bullets over the coffin, draped in a tricolor.

  The cemetery suited my father’s stoicism. Da treated death as a great leveler. No castle or fortress could keep it out indefinitely. “The real tragedy is an unlived life,” he would say, half to himself. My father tended the plots of young and old alike. A moment’s contemplation and then back to digging, back to planting. I asked him once, “Was it ever scary working there, especially when it got so dark so early in the winter?”

  “There’s nothing to fear from the dead. It’s the living you have to worry about.”

  Once or twice I visited him at the cemetery, following him around as he worked, a tiny sidekick of greater hindrance than help. I would pick up single leaves, looking at the lines on them as if they were highways or tributaries, as my father slung huge sacks of compost over his shoulder. Sometimes curiosity got the better of me.

  “Don’t touch that, son. That’s giant hogweed. It’ll give you a nasty rash.”

  I pulled my hand back quickly.

  “Is that the difference between weeds and flowers?”

  “Sometimes. Most of the time they’re the same. One just gets bad press.”

  Being built on a steep hill overlooking the city and the river, the cemetery could be seen from various points in the streets, a memento mori on the horizon. It was also possible, however, to watch games of football in the Brandywell Stadium below, from the vantage point of the tombs. My friends and I went there as young men on sweltering early-summer days. My father would notice us and saunter over, cool as a cowboy. He’d stick around, have a chat with the bolshie boys. I would always get an acknowledgment as he left—“Your da’s sound”—and I’d nod. I didn’t disagree, but even then I’d given up trying to impress my father, with thoughts or things I’d found, like a cat bringing dead birds to the door. We used to sit on those tombs and watch the football, and when it was done, I used to turn round and, under my breath, thank whoever it was who rested beneath us, reading their names on the headstones—something he had taught me.