My parents and their friends never did small talk. It was always some esoteric topic (ancient Egypt, outer space, the Celts). From time to time, religion and politics would rear their ugly heads and the talk would turn dark, but voices were rarely raised. They were hippies, and though radical politically, they were pacifists, taking us on “Ban the Bomb” protests and campaigning to save the starving children of Biafra, much to the derisory amusement of kids at school and their parents. My sister and I listened in, trying to prematurely hack into the future, desperate to live it now before we were fully equipped, but the conversations were always too muffled, the music too loud, the laughter too lingering; and we’d grow incautious and make a mistake, a creak on the stair, and give our presence away and be chased off, laughing, up the stairs with feet as fast as cartoon feet, by one of our parents, trying to scold us through a smile. I would go to my room at the back of the house and sit in the dark until my eyes became accustomed again, and I’d form caves and mountains in the bedclothes and play at what I thought was life with plastic action figures. I wasn’t allowed toy soldiers, as they were figures of violence and oppression, but I’d secreted one from a sweet tin full of them at a friend’s house. It had a flat green base and its face looked melted. It had a rifle pointed out from its shoulder, shooting at something—anything—unseen, out there in the dark.
Skeleton Key
There was a persistent rumor that you could somehow go beneath the city into a system of tunnels and emerge in any area, in any house. It was one of those urban myths that came about in many places around the world, but it was lent credence in Derry because there had, supposedly, been underground tunnels and basements during the Siege days. My friends and I heard it from an older kid, who also claimed he had a skeleton key that would open any door. He had, as his credentials, an earring, a learner driver’s license, and a set of turntables. One day Gareth came running breathlessly up the street. Our gang had found a gateway, with rusted bars, as if leading to an infernal dungeon or the underworld. I had reservations, partly due to self-preservation, partly due to bookishness; terrible things were always down in the depths of those books. Fictions came back to haunt me, and, not for the last time, my mind conspired against itself. There were other, more practical concerns—tetanus, rats, mere drowning—but we pressed on, not for plunder but for the treasure of access and peer pressure. To go and to see.
It was dank and dark. The sound echoed in an unnatural way, like the angles were all wrong. Sounds too close and too distant. Each step was treacherous, the moss shifting underneath so that even standing still felt unstable. Stale water was dripping from the ceiling, and the dark contained the sound of torrents. It was difficult to see where it began in the murk ahead, and we pushed one another as we edged forward, becoming more enveloped in the dark and the sound until both were the same. The other kids were at the gate, lit blindingly from behind in the distance until all there was were silhouettes, threatening to lock us in, but we kept going, knowing that if we showed any fear, it would seal our fates. And there underneath the earth I found a river, moving unseen beneath the roads and houses. People above completely unaware. I would find out only later that this forgotten river was the one my father had played and swum in as a boy, driven underground, its name stolen away.
Gas Mask
My father would find buried things in the course of his gardening. He’d bring them back and wash away years of clay and silt under a cold tap in the yard as my sister and I stood waiting politely to see what would be revealed, like watching a photograph developing. Our father would always date the objects, without identifying them. “From the forties, I reckon.” We’d always have to ask what they were. Our mother would answer, “That’s a water pump,” or “That’s a clay bottle,” or “That’s a rubber bullet,” and add jokingly, “Derry women used to send their men out to catch them.” We didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. We’d fixate on the objects. Not just to play with but to inspect from every angle. We knew instinctively that all the objects found were invested, or had once been, with some kind of meaning. They were worthless, of course, at best the kind of bric-a-brac you see hanging from shelves in rustic pubs—sentimental value, as antique dealers would say—but there were within them, instilled by the passage of time, souls. Even the songs you hated seem more interesting in time. Even mundane places fascinate from exile. Left in attics, aura seeps into the bric-a-brac like damp.
My father had dug up the gas mask while planting, its insect eyes fixed with cracked, dry soil that crumbled at the touch. It looked evil. Satanic. Postapocalyptic. I was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed. “It’s from the war,” my father told me, handing over the gas mask. I wondered, “Which one?”
There were other Derrys, all of them marked with violence. I read about them, trying to place where each incident happened in a city of motorcars and billboards and supermarkets. On a day like this in 1213, Domhnall Ó Daimhín is assassinated at the door of the local monastery, near the pub where football fans congregate after the match. In 1567 English troops are occupying Templemore, the old church of Saint Columba, where there is now a sports center and pylons and parking spaces. The soldiers took it over with little respect for the hallowed ground, deconsecrating the church into a gunpowder store. A sentry holds up his burning torch at the gate, surveying the night. He throws the torch into the dark and walks back into the building. Unbeknownst to him, his trusty dog retrieves it and follows him in. The detonation destroys both of them instantly, and much of the settlement. In 1600 the English return in force and kill “man, woman, child, horse, beast, and whatsoever we found.” Twenty-one priests are killed during a Mass. In 1607 the Gaelic aristocrats flee. The following year the rebel O’Doherty exacts a terrible doomed revenge, putting the occupants “to fire and sword.” Then came the Plantation of Ulster. The famine. And the real trouble began. All here, in this unassuming town.
Sometimes I’d think that the view of progress is all wrong: the view that we sit at the top of the great scrap pile of history and survey all that has happened in the past from our vantage point. We might equally say that we’re actually beneath the great staggering scrap pile of history and we’re scrambling to get out from under it, to clear a breathing space, to get some clear perspective of where we are.
Either way, the past had not passed. We lived merely in the most current incarnation of Derry. Who knows what versions are to follow?
The long glow of an arc of fire in the night street remains when you close your eyes, like the mark on your skin after sleeping awkwardly on a train, or the sound of a nightclub in your head while lying in bed afterward. It has a half-life.
The old guard of the British Army, the ones who’d fought the Nazis, had largely been discharged by the early sixties. Instead there were grunts led by those who’d been in Kenya fighting against the Mau Mau uprising, where extrajudicial measures were commonplace (castration, rape, outright murder). They were ill prepared for peacekeeping on the streets of a—reluctantly—British city. Chasing rioters into a house in Derry, they made no distinction between those who had trespassed and those who lived there, bludgeoning the family within. The father, Samuel, stood up to stop them and had his face smashed in. His son had to prevent him from choking on his own blood and removed broken teeth from his mouth. He died three months later, and that was that. Nothing was the same again.
Having been too evenly matched in overalls and nightsticks, the security services tooled up with body armor and rifles and gas masks. It made them look inhuman, identity-less. Faces replaced with horse skulls. Flames reflecting in what appeared to be eyeless visors. As the balance of power turned against the rioting youths, they were forced to improvise. Milk floats were raided to provide the bottles for Molotov cocktails. They used the height of the new brutalist Rossville Flats to drop projectiles from. Grown men were photographed with slingshots and marbles. Teenagers recycled ancestral relics: the helmet their granddad survived the Somme in, the gas
masks their mother had clung to at the time of the Blitz—all used them as protection against the army that had issued them.
People didn’t need to choose to become explicitly involved. They already were, by geography, class, and genealogy. Tear gas entered living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms like miasma, the bad airs of a man-made plague.
There was rage on both sides but, if the truth be told, exhilaration too. It was a chance to appear heroic or just to appear: local boys would wear their finest treads, fix their hair, show off in front of the girls. Not everyone had a gas mask, and those who did found they were uncomfortable and restrictive, as I did trying it on, so handkerchiefs soaked in vinegar were used against the searing fog of tear gas. When civil rights marches were banned or attacked, crowds began to head down to the bottom of William Street, where the Bogside met the city center. This was Aggro Corner. Rubber bullets shot through the air were answered with arcing half bricks. From time to time a whistle would be blown so that girls or old people could walk through the melee, coming or going into town. Rioters would go home for dinner and to watch Doctor Who, returning, once satisfied, to wage war with their own imaginary Daleks and Cybermen. A note is left out for a milkman: “No milk, but leave 200 bottles.”
Tattoo
On his knuckles, on each hand, was the word love. On my father’s arms, a panther, a harp, a bearded Oriental figure like a Confucian philosopher or a samurai, and some letters.
I realized early on that my father was an enigma that language could not quite broach. There were other ways, of course, to read a person than mere words. I had always been fascinated by the tattoos covering his arms. He had them inked at a time when it was neither fashionable nor profitable to have marks on your skin. Jobs could be lost over them then, certainly at the interview stage. You kept them covered. They were the markings of outlaws and ne’er-do-wells, transient types, strangers, outsiders. Signs of villainy, underground codes, nautical languages. Other paths than the pious life. Religious folks said a tattoo was the mark placed on Cain, the first murderer.
They didn’t look like other tattoos, either; they had faded too early or were much less dark to begin with. They had a rough, unprofessional edge to them that made them seem even more mysterious. I never asked him what their meaning was, or where he got them and when. I never even really looked at them directly, but rather through side glances. They were more than cryptic. They were hieroglyphs that possessed some meaning I did not quite wish to disturb, but nevertheless needed to understand.
When I was old enough, I would look through books for clues and was drawn to tales of carny folk, Maori tribesmen, and Siberian prisoners, but none could illuminate these particular markings. In the Gulag, for instance, tattoos denoted attitude, past deeds, and hierarchy. A marking of a monastery or epaulettes on the shoulders meant a problem with authority; a rose on the chest meant they became a man behind bars; a ship on the sea meant escape, not just from prison but from everything. What they confirmed was that signs have meanings, resonances, contexts. They told stories to other inmates, to the guards, to themselves. I found myself again a translator without knowledge of the language.
My father was always distant, even when he was there physically. He never said hello or goodbye. It was like, in his mind, he was living somewhere else. I had a book titled Phenomena: A Book of Wonders that fascinated me. Spontaneous human combustion, will-o’-the-wisp, bleeding statues. Astral projection illustrated with Victorian women soaring over Victorian London. Sometimes it seemed my father was able to project himself elsewhere, away from us. He was physically present but somehow absent.
Cracks deepened between my parents. The loudness of my mother, always a formidable matriarch, would increase in proportion to my father’s quietude. Once, she lost her patience and threw him out of the house, hurling the dog out after him. The two of them stood across the street as my sister and I waved tearfully at them from the window. He walked away and returned an hour later with presents for us. It was like watching a silent movie. Eventually my mother relented and dragged him back in, looking frantically left and right, muttering, “Get inside before the bloody neighbors see you.”
Da didn’t go drinking or to the bookies all day, like other dads in the street, but he went jogging every night. Pounded the streets for two hours, like clockwork, then hit the weights, in a little gym set up in the corner of my parents’ bedroom. A bar across the door that he’d do pull-ups from. He circumnavigated the two bridges of Derry in a great arc while jogging. He drank the most infernal protein drinks—tuna and strawberry powder and raw eggs. He quit only when his Achilles tendons started to give up after years of vibrations against the tarmac. He became even more withdrawn after that. More … elsewhere.
Fool’s Gold
The bus hissed as I walked down the steps, my mother gripping my hand and my sister’s. We walked through the depot and the arcade out to the front of the Europa. “The most-bombed hotel in Europe,” taxi drivers would boast, with more than a hint of pride. We walked into the student area, past Queen’s University Belfast, up toward the Botanic Gardens. When we reached the gates, I was mesmerized by the sight of the museum, with its neoclassical facade merging into a brutalist extension. It seemed to be transforming before my eyes.
My mother let us play in the gift shop, running from shelf to shelf, thinking that was the museum. Something sparkling in a tiny glass case caught my eye. She glanced over my shoulder. “Would you like that?”
“What is it? Is it precious? Gold?”
“It’s fool’s gold.” She lifted the tiny case and read the message. “Iron pyrite. Millions of years old. It was used in firearms, flintlocks.”
She bought it for me. Handing over a couple of coins. I could not understand how it was even possible to buy such a thing. It glistened in my palm. It had existed for millions of years, traveling all that way to my hand. I examined every mark and indentation as if it were a tiny, newly discovered planet. I kept looking at it, almost the entire way around the museum, ignoring the exhibits, pausing to look up and nod only when my mother or sister pointed something out, then turned my attention back to it.
Only one exhibit caught my attention. My mother told me in advance, entering the room, “You’ll like this.” There was a long glass box, lying horizontal. It took a few moments to decipher, but when I did, I took several steps backward toward the door. Someone was inside the box. I approached slowly as my sister excitedly knocked on the glass, jumping on the spot. “It’s a mummy.” The mummy’s skin was black, leathery. I gazed very closely, enchanted, at her fingers, her eyelids, so incredibly real, compared with the painted figure on the wooden casket next to her. Her name was Takabuti and she had lived thousands of years ago. Another lady, Tjesmutperet, had also been discovered, but had disintegrated into dust when she was unwrapped. Possessions, grave goods, of Takabuti were placed beside her, for her to use in the afterlife. Jars of makeup. Food. Jewelry. A lantern.
I was still thinking of her, all through the mile-long walk back into town. We were stopped by soldiers at the doors of the CastleCourt shopping mall. Our bags, even the children’s, were customarily searched for explosives. I held the fool’s gold tightly in my fist. The soldier noticed. “What’s that you got there, mate?” He leered down at me, grasping my wrist. My mother, visibly nervous, burst out, “Leave the fuckin’ wee ’un alone,” and the soldier startled, glowered at her, but let us pass. I smiled up at her, but she kept looking forward, striding us along.
I kept the stone next to my bed for several years. Imagining it was a comet, imagining where it had come from, imagining what the earth had looked like when it was formed. One day I brought it into school, and it was passed around the playground and went missing, but I was too shy to tell anyone, and “snitches get stitches,” and its trajectory through time, having drawn parallel to mine for a while, spiraled away.
One day my father was cycling from our home up the hill toward Creggan, where you’d have to stand on the
pedals to get leverage against the gradient, when he was suddenly struck from behind by a car that accelerated and drove on. A hit-and-run, they called it. My father returned to the house like a wounded animal hobbling somewhere private and familiar, like a dog going somewhere to die, bashed up and badly grazed. The bicycle was unrecognizable and beyond repair, all tangled metal. His face was drained of blood. He looked nothing like his usual self—the bodybuilder who would mimic the Incredible Hulk (“You won’t like me when I’m angry”), to our shrieking delight. I opened the door to a premature ghost. It had not occurred to me, even in times when my little sister and I would playfully taunt our father, that he wasn’t invincible. It was the discovery of another element for me; the discovery of kryptonite.
Mass Leaflet
I hated Mondays with a fear that made me sick, metaphorically and literally, every Sunday night. I struggled to get to sleep and would arrive at school with bags under my eyes. The reason was that my teacher, a pious gorgon, would line up the children and question us about the weekend’s gospel to see who had, and who had not, gone to Mass. She could sense fear and would zoom in accordingly. My parents were agnostic at best; the story was that my father was expelled from school for proposing that God was a “spaceman.” He was a freethinker, without much fanfare or the smug pomposity of the phrase; and my mother, if she believed, did so quietly and individually, being extremely cautious of the Church. She’d prevented me from becoming an altar boy because she’d more than an inkling about what was going on in the Church. Indeed, what happens when power is conferred on institutions without transparency or accountability and with blind deference. She understood what went on behind locked doors, in rooms with names like “sacristy.”
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