My ma, barely a teenager on her way to school, had been one of those girls. She had bolshily passed one such patrol. She overtook a young soldier crouched down at one of the telephone exchange boxes, a sight so common it no longer warranted more than a second glance. Suddenly she was thumped forward onto the pavement, and a fraction of a moment later she was enveloped by a sound so loud it shook the ground beneath her and she couldn’t tell which way was up. Then silence. She covered her face instinctively and turned, her hands and knees cut, to see dust everywhere, slowly dissipating. There was a crackling charred stump where the box had been. Debris was scattered outward, and in its midst, the soldier was scattered across the road. Ma could not remember if it was him who was screaming, if that was even possible anymore, or one of his mates, before she was shepherded into school. Other girls were trembling and blessing themselves. She sat there in shock at her desk. Her friend motioned to her face, and as my mother touched her cheek, she looked at her fingertips and saw they were covered in soot.
When the army passed through, most adults shied away, by force of habit as much as intention. A few left their homes, though, and went out and put on a show of defiance just by going about their business. It was a process of mutual demoralization. You’d get occasional exchanges of insults between the teenagers and soldiers, but from a safe distance, given that the teenagers were old enough to be fair game and risked getting nabbed into one of the Land Rovers by a snatch squad and carted off for a battering, a sleepless night, and a court summons, to be read through a throbbing, seeping welt of a black eye. The matriarchs of the area, who had ruled the roost in Derry since the shirt-factory days, would stand on their doorsteps with their arms brazenly crossed, their children or grandchildren pulling at their hems, occasionally snarling a caustic observation—“They say bullies are cowards, you know”—before turning to their kids and telling them to button their lips or she’d get the Brits, the bogeymen, to snatch them away.
Mostly the kids would be playing kick-about, and they’d pause their game as the patrol passed. Holding the ball. Staring in slow motion. Now and then one of the squaddies would try to show off his skills: “On the ’ead, mate.” You could hold the ball and refuse to pass it, if your nerve held. They hated that. Most of the time they passed by grudgingly, full of suspicions. I realized only later, with genuine surprise, that I and my kind were supposed to be the villains in this story.
The strange thing was that none of it seemed strange. Everywhere people think their life is the norm, the default. A childhood, however abnormal to others, is always normal to those living it. Knowing nothing different, you grow so used to bomb scares, armed checkpoints, turnstiles into town centers, eyes at metal slots when ordering taxis, cages and cameras at the entrances to pubs, that you no longer even really see them. Old ladies cursed paramilitaries for emptying their bus at gunpoint so that they could take it away and use it as a burning barricade: “I have an appointment, you know. You should be ashamed of yourselves. That mask doesn’t fool anyone—I know your grandmother.”
I would sit with my cousins on the low walls of their housing estate, a place nicknamed Bally-Bosnia, listening to them talking, deferential to them, as wise elder teenagers.
“You’d never catch me going to London. Or Dublin, for that matter. I heard muggers come up and threaten you with infected needles.”
“That’s nothing; I heard they throw rats in your car window at traffic lights, and when you jump out, they jump in and drive off.”
We all agreed that the big cities were mad, round about the time that a tank passed us in the background, driving through the housing estate.
Sweets
Time is relative. There are places, rooms even, where time moves slower or faster than elsewhere. Forced to go to Mass at school, I found that time stretched, while my hours with my friends accelerated. Halfway down our street was a sweetshop where time had not passed for fifty, maybe one hundred years. When you stepped into Auld Mick’s tiny but cavernous shop, a bell, attached by a string to the door, rang. He would shuffle out, impossibly ancient to us but probably barely sixty or seventy, an amiable old chap with bad hearing and a stoop, who’d take a lifetime, using a stepladder, to reach up to glass jars filled with flying saucers, bonbons, foam shrimps, and vats of sherbet. There were chocolate cigarettes on the counter and chewing gum with little comic-book cards inside. Two old gentlemen, with flat caps and pipes blazing, chatted to Auld Mick in a steady flow of unanswered observations and maxims. I heard them many times, but their philosophies go unrecorded. There was a shutter into the family’s house that would regularly open, and a head, usually one of Auld Mick’s legion of grandchildren, would pop through from their living room to demand “messages” from their grandfather.
We began to push our luck, even though Auld Mick had been nothing but courteous. We started ribbing each other to steal, asking the shopkeeper to get the farthest-away sweets and, when his back was turned, leaning over to ransack under the counter. I didn’t want to take part and said I would keep lookout outside, to no avail. I was dragged in as an accessory. My friend was reaching over one day when the shutter opened and one of the family saw what my friends were up to, and all of the gang were barred. I kept this a secret until my mother sent me down to the shop one day, to get a pint of milk, and I made up a list of unconvincing excuses—increasingly elaborate lies that I was soon entangled in—as to why I couldn’t, and she read my face like an open book.
I did not like keeping secrets. Shame had a weight that only grew when concealed. One day I had walked over to my friend’s house and was introduced to another boy our age. I had seen him before, on the periphery of our area. He had a different accent and his clothes were always grubby and he looked older than he should. Unkempt. Slightly feral. He had strange ways of doing things. Odd quirks to his language, the way he carried himself. I was intrigued, threatened, and attracted, I suppose, but I kept a distance. The other boys admired the new kid, as he had no bedtime and could freely roam the streets. He seemed afraid of nothing, but in a dazed kind of way.
One day I went to his house with a mutual friend to play on the new kid’s computer. It was in an old building down near the Glen, and the stairwell was full of rubbish and smelled musty. We played for a while, fighting over the joystick, but something seemed off and I wanted to leave almost the minute I arrived, counting time until I could make an adequate excuse. There was no mother around. It soon became apparent he didn’t have one. When the kid’s father arrived, he announced his presence with a bellow that jolted everyone in the room, bar the new kid. He was steaming drunk, and the son got into a row with him. I felt alarm bells going off in my head and said to my friend that we should leave, but he was wrapped up in the game and oblivious to any danger. The pressure in the room felt unbearable, so I asked to go to the toilet. I thought about fleeing, but the exit was in the other direction, back through the living room. As I came back along the landing, the father cornered me, crazed, violent. I was a deer in the headlights. I made it out, babbling excuses that seemed to potentially implicate me in something fearful that I did not understand.
The baleful encounters with strangers in childhood, the experiences of being cornered, and the shame that came from others finding out about this vulnerability only grew, until the places we hid shameful things we didn’t understand strained to the bursting point and endlessly ingenious methods would have had to be employed to keep them hidden. The lies would have to deepen. This was the slightest experience of shame in my youth but, in a sense, the most evocative, because it was so near the surface and thus more perilous and imperative to keep secret. Going through such experiences in childhood and learning the gravity of secrets was like discovering a tear in the very fabric of being, finding it there underneath my little bed and seeing it grow, horrifyingly, to become a black hole, sucking in matter, destroying things around it. I’d attempted to hide it, but it only grew, exponentially, the more I tried. It fed off its concealme
nt and the complexities of the subterfuge, damaging the reality around it, but always remaining unacknowledged until it was too big, too destructive, too imposing ever to reveal and explain to anyone else, even the adults who loved me. These are the weights that children bear that are not theirs to carry.
Doll’s Eyes
Every night in autumn and winter my father would have to listen to the weather reports on the news to find out if the temperature would sink below, or even approach, zero. If it threatened to, Da would have to get up at five in the morning to go salt the roads as part of his job for the council. He never complained, but it was harsh work, all the seasons showing on his skin (“weathered like an old oak table,” he would claim), and dangerous too: braving the treacherous black ice (“The worst ice is the ice you cannot see, and the worst mistake you can do is to steer against it,” he’d say) so that sleeping commuters, who’d earn more in an hour than he did in a day, could make it to work. I would go to school and listen to the posh kids tell me, “All poor people are just lazy,” mimicking the talk of their parents, whose fortunes rested, for example, on the impeccably moral entrepreneurship of simultaneously owning holy shops and gambling establishments.
That was part of my father’s job for decades—still is—out in the razor-cold pitch-black of winter mornings, when all the rest of us are still tucked in our beds. Just as there are people fixing pylons in storms or in the sewers beneath us. The unseen. “Working indoors would’ve killed a man like your father,” my mother would say. I wasn’t so sure, but who was I to know?
Salting one of the roads that ran along the borderlands, Da saw something spectral-white flit across the road like a sudden apparition. He swerved his Land Rover and braked sharply. He found the owl illuminated by the red taillights. It had been struck sometime earlier. It was already too late. He gathered it up into his arms and placed it in the back of the car. It died somewhere along the way, with the stars moving unnaturally above it. Ma went ballistic when he returned days later from the embalmers with the bird inside a heavy glass case. He put it up in the living room, perched over us, standing guard. My sister asked, “What if it escapes?” Da was fascinated by birds of prey. He knew their calls and the various ways they flew and hunted. I grew up thinking they were tender, noble creatures and not simply killers at the top of the avian food chain. Da paid no attention to talk of bad luck or superstition about the creatures: that they were emissaries of the underworld that survived from Celtic times and the Gaelic side of the country, where the owl translates as “the night hag” and “the screeching entity of the cemetery.” Da didn’t mind. He seemed more at home with the owl than with most human visitors.
At nighttime I would stare at it through the glare of my reflection, hoping and fearing it would crank its head. It did seem otherworldly, even though its marble eyes never moved. My mother’s issue was not so much with the owl as the place where it had been found. Bad luck in the past (rather than future) tense. Years earlier a British armored car—they called them Ferrets—had been driving there, with a soldier on lookout through a turret at the top. The roads were in a desperate condition (before the EU fixed them up), with potholes, flooding, bumps, dips, and blind spots. Pedestrians couldn’t walk the roads safely. They were essentially driftways for cattle, ineptly repurposed for the automobile age; too narrow for two vehicles to pass at the same time, so that one would always be forced toward the verge. The army vehicle was driving quickly, believing the coming car, driven by a local Orangeman, would defer, but he stood firm in what he saw as his right to drive unencumbered on the Queen’s highway. The armored vehicle swerved and slipped into the ditch and flipped over, instantly decapitating the soldier on the roof.
The road had irrevocably changed for my mother since then, as if the impact of what happened had warped the landscape permanently. That’s what ghosts were—memories of terrible things that had happened in a given location, and the disbelief that the landscape could carry on as if nothing had happened. Walking along that road always unnerved me, as I imagined I’d meet a ghost figure in fatigues and helmet, still in shock, asking in an English accent where he was, why he was still there.
I’d gaze at that owl, trapped in its glass case, its consciousness gone completely, or gone somewhere else. At night, the birds that crossed the skies in the daytime vanished into the trees, and these other creatures emerged, invisible in the daylight and profoundly unusual to the human eye, which rarely chances upon them. It was not difficult to understand why they seemed to be more than simply animals. Why they became harbingers, witnesses, emissaries of some other place. And that other place is all around us. The most silent, innocuous stretches of land contain memories of what once happened there, and we are sheltered from tragedy and brutality only by the thin ice that we call time.
Telephone
For a long time there was no telephone in our house, and it was blissfully quiet. It became even quieter on days when bill collectors came to the door (I learned to recognize the difference between the knocks of the milkman, the lemonade man, the coal man, the parish draw, and the bailiffs). Eventually my parents relented, and they came to install a line for incoming calls only, initially. The quiet was broken. Modernity seeping into a house unchanged in decades.
At first I did not appreciate the phone. It shrieked like a demanding child and continued even when ignored. I would regularly pull the cord out of the wall, to my mother’s frustration. “What’s the point of having a phone if no one can reach us?” When my parents had enough regular income to open the line to outgoing calls, I could ring my friends. You had to remember long lists of numbers in your head, especially for those who were not in the phone book. Their parents would answer, always with a degree of irritation, as if expecting someone else.
For a long time the line was plagued by odd clicks and phantom sounds, not voices necessarily, but glitches and malfunctions that sounded like a voice trying to be born. Perhaps a plane was passing high overhead, or a telegraph line was felled in some distant field, or wires were crossed in the babel of a telephone exchange. My mother noticed and cautioned me to watch what I said. Be careful. Someone might be listening in. “Who?” I wondered. “And why?”
Perhaps they listened in to everyone, but who were they? What was the right and wrong thing to say? It occurred to me that you could say something and mean an entirely different thing. Sometimes the right words did not come out. Sometimes people heard what they wanted to hear.
I would walk past the telephone and then pause and return, and I would lift up the receiver and listen, to detect if someone was listening. I would talk nonsense, babble, speak in tongues, mimic the languages I heard on the radio. I dropped the words like stones down into a bottomless well and listened for a sound to echo back.
I had no idea, at that age, of the role that telephones would play in the Troubles, which were unfolding right there and then. Knowing that the emergency services recorded their calls, paramilitaries would call up television stations, newspapers, and the Samaritans, authenticating themselves with their official passwords, and would warn of imminent bombs—fictional or otherwise—giving people in public places only minutes or seconds to get out, before they “initiated.” They would also claim ownership of attacks and murders, and give ideological justification for why a child might no longer have a parent or a parent might no longer have a child. There was one man who received the message, from someone he likely knew, saying, “Keep your head low,” not long before he was shot dead. There was the garbled message that led police to direct shoppers toward, rather than away from, the Omagh bomb, and the conspiracy theories around it. There were the bombers who couldn’t warn of the devices they’d planted that would blow little girls through windows and into ribbons in Claudy, or turn the members of the Irish Collie Club into blazing human candles in the La Mon Hotel, all because the phone boxes they’d gone to had been vandalized. The informer was discovered, tortured, and executed when one of his comrades pressed redial an
d rang a police inspector. There were the “legitimate targets,” selected via their names and addresses in the phone book. And there was the guy who’d bested an IRA volunteer in a bar brawl, who was then shot in the legs in front of his girlfriend and child, and she ran in a blind panic from door to door in her tower block after they’d ripped out her phone line, but no one opened the door, and he bled out, dying because of silence on the receiver.
Newspaper
I lay on my bed, on my side, watching the shadows shift on the floor, almost imperceptibly, as the sun moved across the sky. They began to grow and join and climb up the walls, and the room became enveloped in darkness.
I had a bad chest. One of my lungs had been damaged when I’d had whooping cough as a baby, and because the hospital had been overcrowded, I was kept at home and barely made it. It flared up now and then. I would listen to my own lungs, half amused, wheezing like a waterlogged accordion; feeling oddly detached, as if they were disconnected from me, just inanimate objects like the creaking springs of the army-surplus bed I lay upon. The damage left me prone to illnesses, bronchitis, asthma, but because of my childhood obsession with reading arcane books, most of which I couldn’t remotely understand, and my overactive imagination, I believed myself to be suffering from baroque fevers, the “rising of the lights,” inflictions from bad airs and the kind of medieval maladies one could get rid of only by touching the king’s garments. My main ailment, it seems, was hypochondria. I thought I could see illness in my face in the mirror, the perpetual bags beneath my eyes. It had made my mother even more protective.
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