Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  The cold got in and grew, like the darkness but different. It had its own methods. It came in under the door and through the keyhole. It rattled the window. There was no heating in our house. On school mornings I’d dread crawling out from underneath the blankets. I would lie there as long as I could, watching my breath as mist in the air in front of me, imagining shapes forming from the plumes—ships with intricate rigging of vapor, which would then swirl and dissipate. I knew I could wait until my mother’s third call before hastily moving, skin bone-white, goose-bumped, and shivering as I pulled on my uniform and dashed down the stairs.

  There were no radiators in the house. Each bedroom had a fireplace, but they were unused and boarded up. Birds’ nests were in the chimneys and my mother was afraid of smoking them out. My parents had painted scenes from children’s picture books onto the wooden panels in my own and my sister’s rooms, alongside a life-size Morph turning off the light. Children waving outward from a window and into my room.

  When winter struck, it reminded us all abruptly how far north we were. It could have been much worse. I drew a line from Derry along the latitude on my atlas. It was adjacent to Moscow, the lands of the Siberian Cossacks and the Trans-Siberian Railway, Lake Baikal, the “land of fire and ice” Kamchatka Peninsula, the lands of the Aleut and the lands of the Inuit. The world outside my window should be barren and frozen. The rooftop I could see from my bed should have been covered in frost and snow, but we were saved, for the moment, by the Gulf Stream. It was not always so. Once, all this lay under a miles-deep glacier. And the land remembered, even when people forgot.

  The only sources of heat were hot-water bottles and, if there’d been a win on the parish draw, a gas heater in the kitchen. My mother would spark the gas alight and it would flow across the squared grid, igniting each cube, and I would stare into it as if it were the photosphere of an electronic sun. Otherwise there was the living room fire. I would rush down on Sunday evenings—bath night—having washed myself in my sister’s tepid water, and stand in front of the flames to dry, covering myself, embarrassed, when my mum’s friends were there, but needing to stay inside that glowing golden bubble of heat. The other rooms were blue with cold.

  The wind often howled down the chimney, so each time my father prepared the fire, it was like a military operation or, rather, a ritual. Lifting the brass fireguard out of the way, Da would remove the old ash from the night before, all the incinerated fossils and compressed forests that made up the coal, in great shovelfuls, filling the air with a strange taste. Through the gray, I could see the glint of gold from the grate, shaped like the portcullis of a castle. Then my father would send me out with a scuttle to the coal bunker in the backyard, and I’d fill it, blackening my hands. I took childish pride in the job, beaming at the responsibility, but would overload the bucket and have to shimmy back holding the handle tightly with both hands, my skinny arms trembling with the strain. My father had huge hands, skin like leather and tattooed, and would grasp the handle and swing the coal with almighty force into the hearth. Then he’d place kindling, crackling sticks, and firelighters strategically and tell me to bring the matches over. There was a ship on the box. He’d light a taper and a series of tiny fires would ignite. Da would reach for yesterday’s paper and construct an updraft, manipulating the winds. Invisible currents, as if the air were an ocean. “Drawing the air,” it was called. Soon it would provide a bellows for the fire, and once it caught, my father would scrunch up the paper and lob it into the flames.

  Something about the fire was hypnotic. The colors, the way it moved. The memory it had, or that people had of it, fire dancing in the eyes of all our ancestors, whose names we will never know. It seemed mysterious to me. If everything was solid, liquid, or gas, as I was told in school, what was this? An element? A process? A creature? Magic? The newspaper made it even more intriguing. The way the paper would shift, crinkle, and change color as the fire took hold, and only then erupt. The flames would nestle at first, then curl outward, traveling as if it were topography.

  The newspaper retained the type until the very last moment, and I would try to read the stories as the paper buckled and fizzled into glowing ash. Stories of unarmed Iranian boys walking to paradise through minefields, of students in Latin America being thrown from helicopters into the sea, of the ex-president of Afghanistan hanging from a lamppost. Football hooligans were on the loose. Mandela was condemned by the Tories. The Soviet Union had shot down a Korean airliner, killing everyone. Sarajevo was hosting the Winter Olympics. Off the coast of Ireland, an Indian flight had suddenly vanished off the radar. Over a small Scottish village, a bomb in a cassette player had rained down people still strapped in their seats, burning fuselage and Christmas presents. In Somalia the Isaaq people were being blown to pieces in their homes in Hargeisa: a “genocide that would surely never be forgotten.” Fiction began to lose its hold on me then. Outside, the drunks in the street shouted themselves hoarse like they were roaring to the summer to return.

  I never got used to the cold. It seeped into my bones. I would sit by the hearth as often as I could, drunk on the heat at times. They called such kids “ashy pets” in Derry—kids who were more inclined to stay indoors with their parents than to go out with their own kind (“Tell them I’m not in,” I’d often shout out to the hall). We should never have come here, I thought. Our ancestors, tracing them back in my mind to the Great Rift Valley of Africa. I wondered why they had bypassed the Silk Route, forsaking sunbathed islands and opal seas. Why they stayed here was easier to work out; they simply ran out of land. Some, like St. Brendan, went beyond and became myth, landing on a whale that he mistook for an island. My lineage had never fully acclimatized. Our genes remembered the kiss of the sun.

  I lay there on an archipelago at the hinterland of Europe, where the tides of rain from the ocean first make landfall. Hibernia, the land of winter, the Romans had called it; and they, at least, had left it alone. Perched at the edge of the flat earth. Not far over those rooftops, framed in my window and out to sea, ships were sailing off the rim into the abyss. And the cold that entered my room had blown through their sails to reach me.

  Blindfold

  In Victorian times, they used to think the murdered retained the memory of their killer on their retinas, photographed, and it could somehow be extracted. An optogram, they called it. They tried to create an optogram from the dead gaze of at least one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, twenty-five-year-old Mary Jane Kelly, formerly of Limerick, who was quiet and sang Irish songs and started fights when drunk, and called herself, touchingly, Marie Jeanette after the briefest spell in Paris. No image was ever found. What she had seen was gone forever.

  Those taken away by paramilitaries were often tied up, gagged, and hooded. The perpetrators didn’t want to be identified if the victim survived, but perhaps there was a lingering superstition there too. Perhaps they didn’t want to be cursed in this life or the next by the accusing gaze of their victims. Perhaps the eyes, as windows to the soul, would remind them of their victim’s humanity and of their own humanity, or lack thereof, and make it difficult for them to carry out the butchering. When the army executed people—deserters, for instance—they tied them to a post and blindfolded them, not so they wouldn’t have to see the firing squad, but so that the firing squad wouldn’t have to make eye contact with their target. It was an act of kindness for the perpetrators.

  In many cultures there are spells and remedies for the evil eye. Amulets can be worn to deflect it. Symbols are painted above doorways to keep it away from homes. I wondered if there were spells that could keep away the power of the innocent eye. Or all the shades of gray in between. It happened within organizations, when there were ideological splits or schisms, according to personal, financial, or territorial rivalries. Two young loyalists said the wrong thing at a house party and were led off, on the guise of continuing the party elsewhere, taking it up a notch, and were savagely beaten and then had their throats hacked open by fello
w loyalists of a marginally different stripe. One of the victims stared up at his assailant, who responded by slotting a knife deep into his eye. When the mother of a young exiled informer went to the IRA to beg forgiveness for him, they assured her that he would be free to come back to Derry, provided they could question and debrief him. He’d been naive, they suggested, but he was only a kid, and he was one of them and deserved a second chance. They questioned him all right. He was found blindfolded not long afterward, shot in the back of his head, with his eyes blown out.

  Those who were found in the blue light of morning by dog walkers or joggers received little sympathy. Their deeds, like those of drug dealers or sex offenders or informants, had led them there, many concluded. Yet they had been boys once, eyes opening for the first time, gazing on a new world, adjusting or failing to adjust to the light and shadow.

  Belt

  George Orwell once had a fascist in his sights, during the Spanish Civil War, and didn’t pull the trigger because the soldier was running along, trying to hold his trousers up. There was something innately human about the gesture that saved the man’s life, without him ever knowing. Again and again during the Troubles, in the midst of everyday life, intruders arrived and defiled what was human. A teenage Catholic girl is shot four times in the head, sleeping next to her Protestant boyfriend. A father of ten is shot five times in his kitchen while making bottles for his twin babies. People are shot watching soap operas or Top of the Pops, while having a drink or chewing food. Two brothers are shot dead at their sister’s eleventh birthday party. A man lifting his one-year-old nephew in the air is shot three times. A pregnant girl begs them not to shoot her boyfriend as they lie in bed, then begs him not to die. Wrapping Christmas presents. Babysitting four grandchildren. Fixing a washing machine. Reading the paper. Having an argument. A father comes home at 4:00 a.m. to find his seven-month-pregnant wife lying dead, surrounded by her four children. A wife thinks fireworks are going off outside as her husband is killed next to her; another that her husband is hammering in the next room. The television show continues as bloodstains spread on the carpet, sofa, wallpaper. A man lies dead in the back of a shop that he named after his wife. The sign on the door is still turned to “Open.”

  Cassette

  What were the noises at night across the land? The screech of the fox across fields, the splicing of the owl through the trees, the breathing of something unidentified in the undergrowth. I had heard tales of the púca, shapeshifters inhabiting the gray area between good and evil. The land we inhabited was the same. It was beautiful, enticing, but could turn at any moment. Rivers, slurry pits, traps, even the weather could change drastically in exposed places; even seasoned navigators became lost, people disappeared.

  Virtually every culture on earth has a bogeyman; the most common, existing in peoples who had never encountered one another and lived tens of thousands of miles apart, was the man with the black sack who would snatch children. These stories, and the creatures within them, kept children away from dangerous areas when the parents were not around. Fear was a guardian. There were times, however, when it was not enough.

  My mother continued to warn me, again and again, never to go to the Glen, and naturally I was irresistibly drawn there, regardless of how many imaginary bogeymen she placed there as sentries, and regardless of the actual bogeymen who roamed the place. Advertisements on the television supported her. Dark cautionary tales of foolish, arrogant children playing near whirlpools in flooded quarries or attempting to retrieve snagged kites from pylons. The Grim Reaper stalked these commercials for mortality, between adverts featuring the Michelin Man and the Jolly Green Giant.

  It did not stop me. I knew people dumped things there: junk that I could salvage. I asked for some money for the shop as a feint and then, after my mother had buttoned up my jacket and fixed my hair, headed in the opposite direction. The place was strewn with detritus. It was hard to believe this was once the “lovers’ glen,” given that it had an air of wild desolation. A smashed television. A charred mattress. Porno mags, which I didn’t really understand but was intrigued by, stuffed in bushes. There was a burned-out car that I and my friends had once pretended to drive but that was now too rusted to sit in. Certain words of my mother’s stayed with me—to never climb into an abandoned safe or fridge, to never swim anywhere, to never accompany any stranger. There was always a “wee boy in England” who came to a sticky end. I began thinking it was the same character to whom every misfortune was meted out, on a perpetual loop: a sort of modern version of the medieval Wound Man. None of the cautionary tales held me back, though. I was on an important mission: to find salvage. It was a vocation. Mainly I’d find electrical parts, circuit boards, the insides of machines, and bring them back and take them apart quietly, covertly, in my room. Then, when they’d exhausted my attentions, I’d paint them silver and play with them as if they were spaceships and satellites.

  I went to the Glen because it was dangerous, not in spite of that. Learning to lie in advance and on my return. Deception being the first sign of individuality. I avoided the nettles, hawthorn bushes, and great reams of hemlock, the devil’s bread—somehow knowing it was poisonous—unaware that those weeds grew where buildings once stood. It was different when I went there with my friends. We would lie on our backs on the damp grass; gaze at the changing shapes of the clouds and the slowly dissipating contrails of long-passed planes, the color altering with the sun; and talk, always about what we would do, who we’d become. It was not uncommon to see a rabbit or a fox, which would ignite us into rowdy chase, startled that they existed surrounded by buildings, but they’d always evade us in their concealed labyrinth of warrens.

  I had to be doubly careful on my own. Trebly careful. Making sure not to twist my ankle on the uneven ground. Stepping over the little winter-borne streams that dried out in the summer. Keeping my distance from any figure, and looking as if I were going somewhere in a hurry. Sometimes I’d bring my dog, Patch, the bad-tempered but unflinchingly loyal Jack Russell, who’d follow by my side everywhere, and who made for a noisy deterrent, snapping at ankles.

  I found the cassette tape unspooled in the trees, wrapped around and draped between the branches like the kiting of spider threads. Part of it had snapped free and was fluttering in the breeze. I wondered how it had ended up there. It looked like the scene of a Mass rock, where priests had secretly undertaken ceremonies in the times of the persecutions by Cromwell. Such places were now pilgrimage sites where people left relics and keepsakes, tied ribbons to trees, for good luck and blessings from a two-millennia-dead mother of a murdered child from the Levant.

  I followed the tape to the cassette. The writing on its label was too faded to read. It took me half an hour, shimmying up the trunk, to unknot its length and wind it round and round. I placed it in my pocket. I did not know what was on it, and thus it seemed magical. Something from the past was on this tape undoubtedly. Perhaps someone now long gone. It was nothing but a broken cassette, except for the time travel and perhaps clairvoyance of listening to it.

  Glass Eye

  More than thirty-five hundred people died in the Troubles. How many went down in one night on the Titanic? Half that. Fifty-five hundred Ulster loyalists died on the Somme. Twenty thousand Austrian troops drowned in one river at one time in the First World War. Numbers alone say little. Conflict, like suffering, exists not in blank numbers but in hours. The hours of incarceration, of anxiety for all involved; the hours of the sentries fearing attack at any second; the hours of the mother whose child is gone; the hours of a kneecapped youth crawling to be found; the hours of blindness and burns and rehabilitation and brain damage and paralysis—all the unlived hours. All conflicts are measured in hours, and only those outside it all think otherwise.

  My aunt worked as a nurse in a burns ward. She knew of the hours people spent in agony, long after the headlines had passed. Tubes in throats and veins. The hours of waiting for test results, 4:00 a.m. coffee from a machine, th
e squeak of shoes, howling down the radon-lit corridor. The shrinking hour as a dying RUC man, his voice destroyed, wrote messages to his wife and children. The time spent matching a glass eye to the color of the sightless eye that survived.

  People hung on for weeks in pain, seemed to get better, and then died of a flu that a well-wisher brought with their flowers. An individual suffering twenty years of paralysis, unable to talk beyond weeping, died from blood clots. Others survived, but trauma played on them as they aged. Phantom-limb syndrome from a nightclub bombing twenty years earlier. Being taken to the toilet as a forty-year-old man. All those unseen hours. The hours of the view of nothing from a hospital window.

  Toy Soldier

  At nine o’clock I would be shuffled off to bed and my sister would be read a story in the room across the landing. Once our mother had gone downstairs, deceived into believing we were asleep, we would wait the requisite ten minutes for our parents to settle in. It was curfew time, and our parents would play music and carouse with friends; neither were really drinkers, but it always sounded like a party. My sister and I would meet above the stairs, stepping lightly on the floorboards, squinting in the dark to see each other. Then we’d creep down, holding hands and urging each other to be quiet, all the while giggling giddily, to stand in the stolen light from a crack in the living room door. Then we would listen in to things we could not understand. We were trying to peer into the blinding light of adulthood at the gap in the door, but our senses could not acclimatize.