Our house had no central heating, but it did have a Japanese room. This seemed normal to me, until I began to stay over at friends’ houses for sleepovers and found out that Japanese rooms were conspicuous by their absence in working-class Derry, and ours was part bohemian affectation and part genuine fascination on my parents’ behalf. They were hippies who’d gone off track, and I guess there was some kind of yearning for Zen, in the midst of the chaos and mundanity of then-and-there. Inside the room were lacquered boxes decorated with bamboo forests, fans with cherry-blossom harvests, a statuesque monk with a begging bowl with frozen mist rising and transforming into a dragon around him, eggshells in tiny glass cabinets, figures twisting like gnarled polished driftwood. They were cheap counterfeits, but I took them for precious relics that had made it from one edge of the world to another. There were woodblock prints of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, immaculate tearooms, samurai battles on bridges, and, above all, the rain falling on nocturnal Japanese streets in another century. I wondered if there was a word for feeling intensely nostalgic for a time and place in which you had never actually lived.
There was a Japanese mask that I knew to take very delicately off its hook (an earlier bone or ivory incense-holding Confucius had been knocked off the mantel and smashed when my sister and I had been playing, and we’d had to construct a house of cards of lies that soon collapsed). I’d wear it, facing the mirror. Looking upward, it seemed to smile. Downward, it seemed to frown. Comedy and tragedy depended on the angle. A perspective trick, a trick of light. It all depended where I was standing.
One day the teacher told us to bring in an object from our house to talk about. I made the mistake of bringing the mask. The other boys snatched it away and wrestled over it. Wrenching aside the tussling children, the teacher confiscated it, saying it was pagan and most likely satanic. Terrified all day that my parents would notice it missing, I went at the end of the school day, when the bells had rung and the other kids were jostling through the cloakroom and onto their buses, and tentatively approached the teacher to ask for it back. She handed it back, broken.
Mostly the children aped their elders, sometimes literally, posing as if smoking invisible cigarettes or adopting swaggers, claiming their fathers had had trials for Spurs or could lay waste to every other kid’s father. It was rare that my da picked me up at school, but I was always secretly proud when I burst out and he was standing at the gates. Usually it was Ma who picked me up, until I was old enough to walk home on my own.
I knew to keep the delinquent world of my friends away from my home and my school. Some worlds were best kept separate. They always seemed to be hatching plots: raids, cheevies, knick knack, the casual terrorizing of anyone different. You targeted others for fear of being targeted yourself. That was the logic. A reverse golden rule. Some of these targets were formidable, and you toyed with them at your peril. One such character seemed to have survived from a lost world. Wabbits was a scrapyard tinker, a rag-and-bone man, a poacher, a thief of copper and lead from church roofs (a not-unusual undertaking; my father remembered people prying lead from church rooftops to melt down and make tiny crosses for themselves). It was said that Wabbits kept no furniture in his house and slept on the floor. He always left his keys in the lock of his front door, yet no one would have dared to enter. One kid, seeking a chance to put himself at the top of the pecking order, stole the keys one day and dropped them down a drain. It was a costly decision.
We usually goaded Wabbits from a safe distance. He had a deceptively impish look, like a bedraggled gnome or a leprechaun. He would zip around at high speed on his bicycle, which had no brakes, never sitting but always standing on one pedal, and would freewheel to ludicrous speeds. We would laugh and mock, but the way he rode made it possible for him to suddenly accelerate off the bike at a full sprint, the bicycle carrying on beside him, as we would soon find out. All it took was a single call of his name and the chase was on. We didn’t fully realize what we were unleashing until one of us was caught. The beating was savage. The kid was thrown around like a rag doll as if in the jaws of a wild animal, and all the while Wabbits was smiling a deranged but unequivocally happy smile. We still couldn’t resist shouting his name after that. Sometimes he would chase us for what seemed like hours, until some of the weaker members of the group would start to cry and beg the others, “Why won’t he stop?” and some of the more conspiratorial of the group would try to trip up their friends as a sacrifice.
There were other people in our neighborhood who attracted unwanted attention. One was the Karate Woman, an American lady who wore a bandanna and would do martial-arts moves on unsuspecting passersby. What brought her to this part of the world was unknown, but someone claimed they saw her daughter visiting her once, which suddenly made her seem real to me and not a caricature. Then there was “Mad Elizabeth,” who wore jam-jar glasses and would throw her possessions out her window in great heaps, and we would sift through them, tentatively, like creeping into the lion’s den. We’d see her early in the morning, walking up the street, clenching a crowbar in one hand and a shopping bag in the other, as if it were perfectly normal. The Tories had shut down a lot of the psychiatric care and turned those with severe mental illness out onto the street, under the guise of “empowerment” and care in the community. We might have thought of these people as dangerous predators, but they were the prey. And although we were children, we were innocent only up to a point. To our victims, we were harpies.
Take the case of Danny Bird. The kids would stand outside his home, with his overgrown garden and plastic sun-bleached Virgin Mary on the windowsill, and we’d shout abuse and accusations, one of which was the unfounded rumor that he’d killed his own brother. We could never be sure when he’d come. The timing was always unexpected. We would taunt for hours and then, in an instant, as we walked away, he’d appear; at other times he’d burst out at our initial approach. He’d propel himself, arms and legs akimbo and flailing after us. Once, as we ran away from him, he caught up with us and, running parallel at the same speed, started looking backward, as if we were all running away collectively from someone or something else. I didn’t take part in the tormentings anymore after that. I felt a deep sense of shame and would feign boredom, trying to get the others to relent without losing face. It rarely worked.
The dares had become gradually more extreme, along with the peer pressure. It was no longer enough to bolt through box gardens. The mischief had turned to malevolence. I could see their hearts harden with time and experience. A couple of humiliating and threatening incidents with British soldiers, and all lightheartedness was gone from their interactions. We exchanged not only insults but also stones, no longer playing games but instead taking to our heels for dear life, pursued through the routes that only we knew—sometimes bursting at high speed through strangers’ homes, in the back door and out the front, as they sat openmouthed with their dinner on their laps. Coming up to Halloween, we’d get our hands on brightly colored boxes of Chinese fireworks and would construct spectacular explosive devices, tying them to aerosol cans, even firing them at each other or daring one another to hold on to Roman candles as long as we could (once I almost lost an eye when an aerosol sliced across my eyelid; my friend’s doting grandmother dabbed it with the heady sting of TCP). We’d make prank calls to random numbers from the phone book and then blow up the telephone booth, with Catherine wheels or air bombs ricocheting inside, trying to lock each other in the booth, gripping the door, laughing and screaming. Hanging out now, almost entirely on waste ground, behind fences, on rooftops, in derelict buildings, disused factories, and never-finished building sites, we would launch our firework-missiles at passing army patrols, then use flares and smoke bombs to disguise our escape, not quite realizing how close we came to getting killed. Given that the state had colluded in the murder of lawyers and the bombing of cities in the Republic, the death of an errant Fenian youth wouldn’t carry much weight or earn many headlines, especially on the “mainland.�
�
Kids younger and more innocent than us had their brains blown out, often for nothing except being in the wrong place at the wrong time—their heads fractured by the direct point-blank impact of a rubber bullet. The soldiers who did so were rarely punished. If it even went to trial, the judge would commend their unblemished character and speak of regrettable tragic accidents that should not blight an impeccable, promising career. In one case, the coroner declared that one such dead child had an abnormally thin skull, which the soldier could not have known, of course. In another case, a schoolboy in uniform was said to clearly be a terrorist. The newspapers concurred, and the unfortunate cases were quickly forgotten by anyone who mattered in the scheme of things.
There used to be a remarkable object that initially had no real name. It had been due to be part of the third nuclear bomb on Japan that was scheduled to be dropped, had the imperial administration not surrendered. It was a split orb of plutonium. The two halves were kept apart to prevent a nuclear reaction from taking place. A physicist called Harry Daghlian was experimenting with it one day when it slipped out of his hand, and in the brief instant when the pieces touched, it began to go critical; he received enough of a radiation dose to kill him within a few weeks. A year later another scientist, Louis Slotin, was playing around with the same object, holding the two halves apart with a pencil, when again there was a slip and the air briefly turned blue and he could taste the radiation before he started vomiting. After the two deaths, the object earned the name “the demon core.” Handling it was called “tickling the dragon’s tail.” I read about it in my books. We did not realize it then, but we, too, were tickling the dragon’s tail with something even more unpredictable than a chemical element: scared and psyched-up young men on patrol in a hostile environment. All it would take was a slip.
It was a time of watching. There were so few CCTV cameras that we would dance in front of them, amazed to see our own images moving in real time. I still watched the patrols from my parents’ window. They seemed black and white with a dash of dark jungle-green, smudged as newsprint, mixing in with the smog that hung over the city, smoke from the chimneys indistinguishable from the sky. Now, however, they slowly began to have electronic eyes looking back.
At the top of the hill on my map, looming over the Glen and the houses, was the watchtower. Built by the army, such towers were alien structures. Some of them looked industrial, almost like water towers or smokestacks, except they were located in the middle of residential areas, where people washed their cars, and kids went from door to door with sponsor sheets. The watchtowers dominated desolate mountaintops near the border, surrounded by a web of scaffolding. Tolkienesque. Others were squat and bunkerlike, nestling in protectively between houses. Some loomed, dark green and gray, over the streets like sentinels, like invaders that might suddenly start to walk, insectlike, across the city.
The Troubles were blazing then. There was always talk about how much the army could listen in on the locals and how much they could see. Women complained about voyeurs gazing into their bedrooms. Reaching above the houses as a kind of anti-lighthouse, the watchtower extended a reach over the streets and drew in emotion, speculation, ire. It also drew fire. Always a light sleeper, my mother would leap out of bed at the sound of nearby shots as gun battles at Rosemount Barracks echoed through the streets, followed by the sound of speeding cars and the inevitable helicopter response. When the bullets sounded especially close, she would throw the duvet on the floor, so the bed was in front of the window, and lay us down with her body between us and the window until the cacophony finally petered out. Even when they were distant, she’d take no chances. She’d read somewhere that a bullet could travel over a mile, and they could, and did, ricochet. Kids were shot in the cross fire when the IRA opened up on the army. A nine-year-old boy was shot in the back of his skull in his bedroom when the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, opened up indiscriminately on Divis Flats with a machine gun. People forgot about that incident; it was in the interest of many for people to forget, but she remembered.
My grandmother Needles, as she was nicknamed, had to walk in the shadow of the watchtower of Rosemount Barracks to come see us. I traced the route on my map, past the derelict shirt factory and the derelict little church, down the hill that served as our Cub Scout hall.
The army had its own maps. I saw the officers consulting them, even asking kids for directions or to show them where specific places were. Their patrols—and every day they’d make their presence felt—were well rehearsed. They would highlight safe areas, populated by unionists friendly to their presence, and antagonistic Catholic areas in different colors. They would pinpoint intersections like Bishop Street, flashpoints like “Aggro Corner” at the bottom of William Street, and ghettos like the Fountain, where my mother had worked in a nursery but had been forced out by loyalist paramilitaries, stepping over toys and waving goodbye to the infants as she left. Potential sniper positions would be pinpointed. Death zones for ambushes. Attacks could take place anywhere, though, with combatants blending back into the crowd from whence they came. Numerous soldiers were shot dead on the low-lying stretch along the waterfront at the Foyle Road by snipers up on the heights of the town. “One shot, one kill” was the rule, so the soldiers’ screaming colleagues could not get a bead on them. Watchtowers would have to climb higher then, as snipers looked for snipers above the heads of people coming and going to work, to shops, to school.
There was safety in numbers around the Brits. On my own, I learned to keep my head down and skirt past the soldiers, for fear of getting a thump or being seen as too friendly. When I first became aware of their presence, I’d approach them as if we were in a zoo, unclear on who was observer and who observed. My friends would follow them, in a continual to and fro. The bolshie Artful Dodger types among the group would throw banter back and forth with the soldiers, strutting with their hands in their pockets. “Give us a look through your sights.” And sometimes the soldiers would let them.
Once, Jamesy, always mouthing off, persuaded the soldiers to let him inside the armored Land Rover. A clatter of noise came from inside and he suddenly appeared out the top with a helmet on, laughing his head off. The soldiers were laughing too. “Stick the nee-naw on. Come on, drive, for fuck’s sake,” Jamesy was shouting, thumping the metal armor plates at the top. The laughter died down, but Jamesy kept going, pushing it. His head suddenly vanished. It reminded me of the opening scene of Jaws. Then the latch door reopened and he was bundled out, kicked onto the street and onto his face by a standard-issue boot. The Land Rover lurched abruptly and then took off and soon vanished into the streets. My friend, ordinarily the cock of the walk, suddenly appeared like the little boy he was, squealing for his mother and blinded with tears as he ran toward his house. Our group, minus our leader, nervously stood frozen in the porch of his house, unsure of what to do and somehow implicated, as muffled shouts came from inside. The porch had a mosaic floor. One of my friends asked, “What should we do?” I couldn’t look at him and began counting the tiles, stopping and beginning again repeatedly.
Later, when the moment had passed and Jamesy had regained his resolve, wiping his eyes with his sleeves, he and I found ourselves walking together. I thought it best not to say anything, but remembering my friend’s vulnerability, I turned and said, “I’m sorry about what happened to you earlier. How upset you g—” And I found myself immediately pinned up against the pebbledash wall, gripped hard at the throat. Jamesy’s face had changed completely. There was rage and pain in his eyes. “You mention that again, to anyone, and you’re fucked. Do you hear me?” I nodded and Jamesy let me go. We continued walking silently. I was out of step with him and gradually fell away to a halt as he kept walking, huffing and puffing to himself. Memory is a sketchy thing, especially chronology, but I can’t recall if I ever visited his house again, or vice versa.
The soldiers emitted authority, a clunking swagger, but they seemed skittish, too, when I looked closer.
They weren’t much older than I was, but half a decade was a lifetime at that age. They would make their way cautiously, almost geometrically, through the streets, winding at angles like a single creature, an arthropod. I joined the dots between them in my imagination. There was a tension between the wish to be seen, to assert their presence, and the urge to take cover. I watched them intently. They would cradle their rifles and adjust their posture, barrel-chested and baby-faced beneath the war paint. Some would shelter in porches, while others knelt at corners. They wore camouflage in the midst of brick, concrete, and tarmac. One would take point, a stalking horse, surveying windows and corners while the others followed. A signal would be exchanged from time to time in sign language, and I could see it filter through the unit and their tension ease, and they would adopt a slightly more informal march through the territory, between the corner shop and the bakery. “Tail-End Charlie”—that was the last guy on patrol. I heard them say it. I listened in, close enough to hear such phrases. It was dangerous to be first in the patrol, but even worst to be last, waiting to be picked off.
I heard other words too. Slang. It changed with each regiment. You could tell they were different by the color of their berets and badges, even before you heard their accents. They’d use words like numpty and scunner, and I’d try to place them as Geordie or Welsh or whatever. The first black people I ever saw in real life wore those uniforms. The soldiers walked through housing estates like the ones where they grew up in Manchester or Glasgow, but this place was different. Same dimensions, but somehow warped in their minds. The heavy firepower they brought said it all. To me, it was home, but to them it was hell. There were moments of stilted connection. A local girl would walk past and they’d wolf-whistle and make gestures I didn’t understand, and she’d say, “You wish!” and they’d shout, “Slapper!” And then a moment or two later, after the laughter, you’d see the concentration coming back, the fear rising again. They’d momentarily let their guard down and they knew it.
Inventory Page 6