Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  New faces in pubs are determined a threat. IEDs lurk in pipes under roads. Remote-control watchers operate from nearby hills and woods. Loyalist bombs in pubs are described as premature IRA ones. Family homes are taken over on operations. Code words are used to confirm real threats and crimes, as opposed to trolls. “Collaborating” women have their heads shaved, or are tarred and feathered and chained to railings. Ambushes are common. A man is shot playing darts in the pub. Bombs go off in moving vehicles. Cars are riddled with bullets. A soldier with a sniffer dog approaches a suspect milk churn; the dog survives. A sailor docked in the port, walking back from a party, is shot; they match him to his ship because his clothes have German labels. A group of men leave the scene laughing. A farmer and his wife are shot; their two-year-old son is shot four times but survives. A young man is bundled into the back of a car, while returning home from bingo with his fiancée. A man goes down to check on a noise in the night and staggers back into the bedroom. The pregnant wives of soldiers have to be sedated on hearing the news. The pregnant wives of soldiers’ victims, likewise. Debts and drunken fights are claimed as sectarian and then revenged.

  This is just a fraction of the opening years of our Troubles. If ghosts did exist, they’d be everywhere.

  PART TWO

  Da’s Folks

  Ink

  Everyone knows where they were when Kennedy was shot. My grandfather was drowning. I had heard the story or, rather, listened in on fragments of it. It was part of the secret mythologies that all families have. Joseph had staggered drunkenly off the docks and, despite being a strong swimmer, was weighed down by his clothes and the drink he’d taken and the shock of the cold. The rusting ladders of the docks remained just out of reach. An unidentified would-be rescuer threw him a life buoy, which struck Joseph on the head as he struggled and, knocked out, he disappeared into the depths, thrown from this world in a slapstick silent-movie farce. In Texas, Kennedy’s limousine was cruising down Dealey Plaza. “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” “No, you certainly can’t.” In California, a bedridden Aldous Huxley, on the edge of death, wrote one last message to his wife—“LSD, 100µg, intramuscular”—and she injected him accordingly and he exited via an internal exploding cosmos. In Oxford, C. S. Lewis was lying on his bedroom floor, shallow-breathing. It was November 22, 1963. Just another Friday.

  I would hear the story of my grandfather’s demise many times, but never directly. It was spoken of in the spaces between, in sighs and as asides within other conversations. Early on, I’d found the yellowing cover of the Derry Journal in an envelope in a drawer. At the bottom of a page emblazoned “PRESIDENT KENNEDY IS LAID TO REST” was the news of a Derry man having drowned in the river in a tragic accident. Knowing somehow that it was intensely personal, I hastily put it back, as children do when they have upset some covert equilibrium, naively even wiping it for fingerprints. I had no idea where precisely on the quay my grandfather had fallen in, or how they retrieved his body. I had no idea what Joseph was doing there in the first place. I had no idea who Joseph really was. For many years I did not even know his name and hesitated to ask, for fear of stirring up matters that were best left undisturbed. I had no idea why both of my da’s parents had drowned in that same place. All I had was a single photograph of my grandfather, proud in a British Army uniform.

  The auguries were bad for ’63, right from the beginning. The year was born in the coldest winter. The river froze. The sea froze elsewhere in Britain and Ireland. An earthquake in Libya. A volcano in Bali. A hurricane in the Caribbean. Mine explosions and train crashes in Japan. A theater fire in Senegal. The USS Thresher imploded at the bottom of the sea. An African American church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama. The Moors murders began.

  Even his loved ones did not recognize Odysseus when he returned home, so changed was he by his experiences of war and roaming. A hero fit only to slaughter the suitors he spied upon. Joseph was no Odysseus, if ever such a man existed, but my grandmother Needles used to say cryptically, “He had gone to war a total gentleman and come back, at his worst, an animal.” At the very least, Joseph returned a drunk—an alibi perhaps, which would lead him to his untimely end. Scanning old wartime photographs of Derry, Da discovered, with an electrical jolt of genetic recognition, his father in the background of a picture. Joseph was behind a Pied Piper recruiting sergeant, handsome and full of juvenile hubris, staring at the camera with the same exuberance that had taken men into the threshing machine before and since. There was no mistaking the face. Da had it and so, increasingly, did I.

  What happened after my grandfather signed up was much less clear. Joseph had enlisted well into the war and so had missed Dunkirk, which his two brothers had barely survived. He’d made it from Normandy to the collapsing Reich by the end of the war, but his path across Europe was obscured. I gazed over maps and wondered what he’d seen, been involved in. Operation Overlord? The liberation of Paris? Shadows moving in the Ardennes? The horror show of mortars and splintering trees in the Hürtgen Forest? Coming up against machine guns at the Siegfried Line? Or the boys and old men in what had once been Berlin? The Northern Irish had fought through the bocage, the woods and hedgerows that hid snipers, Panthers and Tigers. They’d liberated Caen after a prolonged bloody fight and had run up against the Germans’ last-ditch offensive, Operation Watch on the Rhine. What path did Joseph take, beyond simply surviving?

  When I was younger, I was morbidly fascinated by death masks, the last photos of doomed ship or air crews, photos of Franz and Sophie Ferdinand waving from their motorcade. Above all, I was fixated on pictures of the figures at Pompeii and Herculaneum frozen in death poses millennia earlier, some cowering or crouched, others as if they were sleeping, mothers cradling their children. I learned later that these were not the fossils of individuals, but actually the outlines. The searing pyroclastic flow of the eruption, superheated molten rock, had burned and buried them all with pumice and ash, which had solidified around them. The bodies inside were incinerated and were lost, but the silhouettes remained. They could identify the person from where they ended. I tried later to build up a picture of my grandfather through this method; trying to decipher substance from the outline of his absence. The negative space. But traces from other people blurred the point where he ended and fiction began, rendering it indistinct. Stories had been written and rewritten until they were only a palimpsest of text, and the facts were indecipherable from the conjecture that followed. How many times could a story be told, and by how many people, before it began to change? At what point did it lose resemblance to its origin? The one thing that all the stories shared was that Joseph had ended up in Berlin, at a time when that obliterated city was being rebuilt with secrets and lies, before returning home.

  My grandmother and grandfather had known each other before the war and after. I thought of Joseph writing to her from the continent, her weighing every word for significance or change, wondering what lay behind the black censored blocks of ink, but in truth I did not even know if they could read or write to any significant degree. She had waited for him, that much was certain, even after he died. In Buddhist countries they speak of hungry ghosts, but the restless dead still exist, even here, even now.

  Camera

  In the Doge’s Palace in Venice there are portraits all around a vast hall in which every footstep echoes on the polished floor. Visitors gaze at the myriad faces, bearded and bald but all festooned in magisterial purple, of the leaders of the Venetian Republic. Few, if any, names are remembered. Except one. Marino Faliero. He is the one people are drawn to. Precisely because he has no portrait. He is obscured by a black veil. Denied representation because he attempted to become dictator of Venice and, after a failed coup, was beheaded on the steps of the building. The sentence was death. The sentence after death was damnatio memoriae. To be damned from memory. It backfired, however. The effort to obliterate Faliero from existence—from having ever existed—only draws attention to him.


  Growing up, I had that single photo of my grandfather Joseph. It was treated definitively, totemically. He was there in a British Army uniform, handsome and proud, and that was all that needed to be said. I did not yet know that things could be concealed in clear sight, but I still had a feeling that all was not as it seemed. You could not—I thought then, as now—sum up a life in an image; there must be some degree of distorting and condensing at work to make that seem possible. You can hide things in symbols. And that single truthful and misleading photo hid a life more complicated and troubling than I’d ever imagined.

  Wedding Dress

  All the front doors were left open then. Only the porch doors separated homes from the street, and these were never locked. Looking back, elegiacally, it could be seen as some sense of community, now largely disappeared. Da would joke it was because no one had anything worth stealing. Perhaps solidarity flourished only when everyone had hardly anything, save a common adversary. Keeping the doors open also saved on a new lock and doorframe when the army showed up, looking for something or someone. My grandmother Needles’s home was raided continually then. Her floorboards ripped up. Doors wrenched from cupboards by boys young enough to be her sons. Needles kept a little stash of money in her mattress and under the lino for the omnipresent rainy days, and it would invariably go missing. Her girls were searched and manhandled. Her boys carted off in handcuffs. It always happened at dawn. Four or five in the morning, before the neighborhood awoke, but gradually the local families would congregate as the hours passed by. The raids were thorough. Eventually, through routine or briefing, the soldiers would come to know her by her first name of Margaret. They would tell her that her sons, with whom she had little contact, had hanged themselves, lying their balls off and sniggering like schoolboys as she went into hysterics. They’d pass on their derisory respects. “It did her nerves no good,” my mother noted.

  Once, the army raided the day before the wedding of her daughter, who was barely out of her teens. The troops forced the family into the living room. One of my da’s younger brothers, who was due to be best man, was lifted and taken away. The soldiers held up my young aunt’s wedding dress, dancing around with it, laughing and insulting them. Needles lost her temper. She pulled down the picture of her dead husband, in his British Army uniform, and smashed it on the floor, saying she was ashamed of it now. One of the soldiers immediately struck her in the face with his rifle butt.

  Da’s older brother was interned. His younger brother convicted. Another fled to London to escape it all. His sisters were dragged into it. One, aged seven, was caught throwing stones at the police, and was carried off over one of their shoulders. She remembered being sat in front of a blazing fire at the station and given a large bar of Dairy Milk to eat. The pleasantries did not last. As a teenager, she was arrested, kept awake for days and beaten, with open palms so as not to leave bruises. They dropped her off, without shoes, in the no-man’s-land of a full-scale riot, with bricks raining down around her.

  I thought of Needles again and her house, the one they’d finally been allocated by the council in Rosemount, with her and the children sleeping in the early hours and the front door suddenly bursting open, startling birds on the rooftops, and the army and police storming in. I wonder how lonely the world felt to her. She was alone through the war, and she returned to that state during the Troubles, waiting for Joseph to somehow, impossibly, come back and protect them.

  Ghosts are memory incarnate. And they are impossible desires. I used to wonder whether the dead remember the lives and people they’ve left behind. In Greek myth, the dead drink from the river of Lethe and forget their previous life, before going into the underworld. They drink of it, but the living do not, cannot, will not.

  Pen

  War happens simultaneously. It happens within days of the week and once-familiar places. It happens while shops are open. It happens on routes to school. It happens while people are in hospital, while others are falling in love. I wondered where Needles was, what she was doing, when Joseph walked off to sign up for the army. If it was a long-pondered-over decision or an impulsive moment, ill-thought-out and designed to startle and impress. The beginning of my grandfather’s involvement in the Second World War was unclear until that reprinted photograph from the local paper’s archives. He appears there as a figure in the crowd, heading off for an uncertain future. He must have known he would have a hard time of it. His brothers had barely made it back from Dunkirk a couple of years earlier, with their eardrums blown in by mortars and strafing Luftwaffe, wading into the water with their clothes on and weighed down by their equipment for some attempt at safety. They hauled themselves onto one of the flotilla boats in what was named—optimistically, for a desperate retreat—Operation Dynamo. It was a rare occasion when the English had borrowed the Irish penchant for glorious noble defeats. One of the uncles actually lived with Needles’s family. My da remembered him well. He dropped dead one day in Bishop Street in the 1960s, still nursing his injuries. His daughter had been sent off to live in England and was never heard of again. So the story went. Entire lives end up as the marginalia.

  In the photograph, Joseph is marching, almost strutting, in a proud column behind a commissioning officer, from the Labour Exchange on Bishop Street down through the city via Abercorn Road. One of the brave. No one knows the depths of their courage, the shallowness of their goodness until tested, until really tested. He’d passed billboards and signs for stout, Wonder Bread, Wings for Victory; reading “Give all you can to Mrs. Churchill’s Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund” and “Careless talk costs lives.” He walked across the bridge over the river. I wondered whether there were any doubts in his mind, if he could just have slipped off on a side road, almost willing him to. Instead he kept marching to Ebrington Barracks with its sign at the gate: “Warning: This area is patrolled by armed sentries and dogs. Halt when challenged.” Perhaps Joseph was sick of hustling for work, the shame of poverty and the performed gratitude involved, and saw something that, whatever the risk, had purpose, definition. Some kind of certainty. The ritualistic aspects of poverty weigh heavily, and perhaps a chance to disrupt them, even as destruction beckoned, seemed tempting. Shame and pride, in such conditions, seem the same thing.

  Joseph is one of the few men in the parade, by choice or necessity, not wearing a hat and is the only one staring directly at the camera. He is smiling a rakish grin, marching with an almost piss-taking enthusiasm. There were dangers no doubt, but he could handle himself. It would be an end to small-town boredom. Just like in the movies. He is guilty of the sin that had man thrown from Eden, as Kafka put it: impatience. Joseph is young, but it is no Children’s Crusade. He was a Jack the Lad. A young man who knew the way of the streets, who knew a scam or two, who could handle himself. Slippery and charming. You could tell in that photograph. The others look already hard-bitten, as people did then. My father recalled seeing Bernard McGuigan, father of six, killed on Bloody Sunday and thinking he was an old man. He was forty-one. Age was older then. Maybe it was fashion or diet or photography. Maybe youth is an illusion we have gotten better at maintaining. Joseph looked like he’d already won, like a soldier coming back victorious from war and not about to be thrown into one. The unlucky ones ended up failing the medicals, the physical and mental tests, or were deployed at home on antiaircraft batteries. My grandfather, the poor proud bastard, was lucky.

  Ink is made from carbon black or lamp black or furnace black, which emerges from the burning of coal tar, which comes from coal, which itself comes from ancient plants compressed into the earth. The carbon particles had traveled all that way, all that time, underground and above, to end up dispersed onto paper in different shapes, signatures. Some of the men could barely hold a pen, some could write only their names and nothing more, some scrawled an “X.” Some were too young to sign up, some too old, casting doubts onto their precise ages when they went to their deaths.

  Stamp

  There is a feeling, saudad
e, that does not exist as a single word in English. It expresses the yearning of someone who is apart from someone at sea. A mix of heartache, nostalgia, homesickness, and grief. I wondered if Needles had it. Maybe she was relieved, in Joseph’s absence. I thought of her, and many like her, living their lives, walking around town, in the absence of their men.

  The gray and red brick. The color of adverts. “You’re never alone with a Strand.” “Lovely day for a Guinness,” with a toucan on a weathervane. “Ask for Blues.” India Tyres. There were horse and carts and omnibuses on Shipquay Square. There were rusted iron rings embedded into the walls to tie the horses to—and not boats, as I had once thought. Bread carts. Sacks of coal. The RUC patrolled in long, woolen double-breasted coats. They looked shiny, smart, and black. It was a surprise to see them in photos with individual faces, even in photos when they were guarding de Valera’s visit or Spider Kelly’s boxing homecoming or stampeding into St. Patrick’s Day parades with their batons swinging. They’d always seemed a faceless, malevolent force to me, but of course they were individual men with names and birthdays and first loves and appetites.

  It might be thought that a solemnity would take over a city engaged, however remotely, in war, but Derry was a different sort of place. The dance halls boomed. Phone numbers on slips crossed palms in cloakrooms. Lights shone on the portion of halls not taken up by shuffling feet. The clubs had wallpaper. The cafés were filled afterward by desperadoes. In the daytime, nursing hangovers, regrets, or longings, the women would pass workmen excavating iron railings and gates to melt and redistribute over German cities and into German bodies. Perhaps Needles nursed an ache for Joseph through all this, imagining him, smoking under a streetlight, hair slicked, standing in a pawnshop suit due to be returned come Monday, the cock of the walk, forever that age, forever before.