Men do not freeze to death in modern times; they do not freeze to death in October; they do not freeze to death in disused toilet cubicles, where people wouldn’t even stop to piss, directly opposite supermarkets with bins filled every night with wasted food, and hotels with rows of empty rooms. Men do not die because there are no clouds forecast, just a night that falls into space and a blind moon, the color of ivory. Exposure is a thing of long ago. Drop-in centers do not close. Funding is never cut. There is never nowhere to go. Mothers do not mourn, nor are they sedated. Men do not become alcoholics, as they have no reasons for doing so; they do not alienate friends and family, alienate themselves; they do not sleep on the streets, and they do not fail to wake up. They are not dragged from their coffins by friends in the same mad fog of drink, saying in genuine confusion, “Budgie, stop messing around, get up tae fuck.” Shoppers do not walk past tutting—a grown man in a halo of blood outside a supermarket entrance, lying near enough to make the doors open and close. Strangers do not kick his teeth in, or set him on fire for a laugh, or piss on him while he sleeps.
The past is repealed. Men do not break into pensioners’ homes for drinking money and trash the place in a blind rage. Men do not place derisory coins in their relative’s hands while fobbing them off, embarrassed in front of their pals, then write about it in books. Men do not freeze to death in modern times; they do not freeze in October, not in the West, not here, and definitely not now.
I couldn’t entirely blame those who refused to believe that a man could freeze to death in a modern city in autumn. There were times when I was young and schoolmates would nudge me as they passed and say, “Budgie’s your uncle, isn’t he?” and I would disown him, three times before the cock crowed, feeling ashamed and somehow unmasked. Life was not easy for Budgie, and he was not easy with it. People drown on dry land. They are not easy to help. They are not saints. And neither, it turns out, is anyone else.
Pills
The freedom to be left alone was a precious one. Those teenage years were predicated on making ourselves invisible. It was a strange consequence of security areas in Derry, cut off by barbed wire and steel gates, that if trespassers got in, they became imperceptible, fenced off and forgotten about. On what the military and paramilitaries called “dead ground.” My friends and I spent our teenage years in such places. We’d long been on the peripheries, lurking on street corners with our hoods up, drinking in alleyways, always on the unsuccessful lookout for a “free house” where we could sink into the sofas and, high as kites, curse the first traitorous blue of morning and the tweeting of robotic birds through slivers in the curtains. We would sit on swings in moonlit playgrounds, playing ghetto blasters and double dropping E tabs, taking great interest in what color and design they were, from cartoon characters to corporate logos. Days later, but under cover of darkness, I would always creep back into the house, and no matter how quiet I was, my mother would wake up at my step on the stair and I’d have to feign nonchalance, with pupils like saucers and the walls melting around me; then a fevered night, unaware if I’d slept or not, with 1920s cartoons playing manically on the backs of my eyelids. I enjoyed the weekends beyond words.
The safest places were the most dangerous, in terms of getting caught with drugs or underage drinking. The RUC were absolute bastards, as were the scallies—“kappa kids,” we called them (in Belfast they were “spides”)—who’d pounce on anyone with the audacity to grow their hair long or have a same-sex lover or anything different really (yet they always had arbitrary tastes; I saw a pair threaten to stab a busker once because he didn’t know any Luther Vandross songs). We fought them frequently, though we rarely instigated it—our appearance was an affront. If you stood out, simply, they tried to knock you down. We gave as good as we got. It was worse the next day, when the aching in the ribs reached a peak, and the split lips and black eyes seemed ripe and wept continually, eyelashes sticky as a Venus flytrap. Once, I found myself having to account in class on a Monday for why my friend and I, sitting next to each other, had four black eyes between us from the weekend. There were no adequate explanations for adults. We never looked for trouble but, singled out as freaks, we never backed down from it, either; to do so would mean living as a shadow. I never liked fighting, even in those long years. One of my legs would always tremble with adrenaline and I’d have to hide it, but I knew there were worse things than a beating, and I counted, foolishly, that there’d always be someone around who would break up the fight when it got out of hand.
We would drink and smoke weed and take pills up on Derry’s medieval walls, which gave us a view of anyone coming and the advantage of higher ground. When too many people started gravitating there, we pushed farther along. It was discovered that you could bypass and breach the security perimeter on the walls, which had supposedly been fortified to stop terrorist attacks, if you dangled over a twenty-foot drop and shimmied around the razor wire. We were taking our lives in our hands, especially under the influence, when everything felt like marshmallows and you couldn’t tell how far away your own hands were; but once inside, we couldn’t be seen or touched and were free to do whatever we wanted, right under the authorities’ noses. The corner of the walls where we hung out was once called Coward’s Bastion during the Siege, because it was farthest away from bombardment. Having braved near-death to get in, we raised our cans to our ancestors, the cowards.
If we were near civilization, we had to make sure there was serious peril required to access a place, in order to give pursuers a disincentive to follow us or at least hold them up for a while. Rooftops were best. We got into rooms and attics through skylights and by shimmying across vertigo-inducing windowsills, climbing high barbed-wire fences and scaffolding. The rule was that there must be another way out, no dead ends to get trapped in; preferably concealed, like wired fences unwound in advance, then covered up with leaves, which we’d skid or scramble through on hands and knees. When places were abandoned and in ruins, some creative vandalism was required to create new pathways through holes, or to get beyond rusted locks and doors that hadn’t been opened in years. The activities came naturally to us. They were born of necessity. We took up residence as birds do in eaves or rats do in sewers. There was no performance involved. Our activities were expressly designed for invisibility.
Night was our real habitat. In the day we were exposed, but not when the sun set. People merely pass through the night as adults, and engagement is fleeting and purposeful, bolting from car to front door as if between airlocks in space. As teenagers, we fully inhabited the night. We were corner boys, moths in the glare of streetlights. We were of little harm to anyone but ourselves, but we did not realize the shadow we cast for those who passed. We drank in the borrowed light, on waste ground, broken glass shimmering in the moonlight, in the little lanes behind electric generators. All weathers. Taking shelter on the balconies of future offices. Hefting crates over fences. Chasing feral cats from buildings. Drinking when frost covered everything in sight, and the drink turned to swishing ice in the can. Sitting on docked boats. A tape player placed inside stacks of ventilation shafts, amplifying the sound of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Ritual de lo Habitual, Angel Dust. Back when people felt they owned music and guarded it, when it was hard to come by and identity ran through it all like a strangling vine. Cutting paths through shifting undergrowth or gathered in huddles in viaducts. As I was tall for my age, I was sent in to buy all the drink for the underage of the neighborhood, or would walk into venues and then open the fire exits to let the others in. We’d congregate around arcade-game cabinets, perpetually skint, watching the high-score listings and flashing “Insert Coin to Start” signs, then dart around with security guards in pursuit through the aquarium light. Fearless as only the ignorant are.
We often sought out attics in building sites, where you were doubly hidden and could climb out through the skylight onto the roof if anyone did come, or just merge into the shadows. Th
ere the challenge was not to move or laugh, riddled with nerves, hearing the watchmen right below us. We learned to stay away from windows, otherwise people would call the cops. Playing three-dimensional stealth games. In truth, unless we were stupid, we rarely were interrupted, but we slipped up now and then. Once, someone was foolish enough to sit a candle near a window in an abandoned caretaker’s house, and our shadows were projected onto the wall like malevolent ogres. Someone saw them and phone calls were made. Oblivious, we were all sitting around when the front door burst in and there was wild shouting and heavy boots thundering up the stairs and torches shining frantically in every direction. One of my friends kicked a hole in a plaster wall; another hung from and dropped down onto a lower level through a preexisting hole in the floor. The rest of us fled into a walk-in wardrobe to hide. I knew the game was up, though, and as we were dragged out, I held up my hands. Our eyes were still struggling with the light and the shouting hadn’t ceased. Eventually the guns and torches dropped, and we saw that they were cops. “Thank Christ, it’s just you,” my friend said.
We learned about space while being chased, running for dear life, and often in the painful aftermath. If we made great leaps across gaps, it was best to roll with the landing rather than trying to land statically. Scaling walls and wire fences with the police or army behind us, we’d leap onto them while running full pelt, using momentum to propel ourselves upward, scurrying through vertical space like cats. No hesitation or you’d lose your nerve. If you led the police into the leafy, wealthy part of town, you could shake them up by luring them into dead-end cul-de-sacs and then scrambling through hedges to emerge elsewhere. Other means of escape were to lose yourself in a crowd, to pull your top off, or to jump into a phone box and let on that you had been on a call; or, if your nerve held, to counterintuitively walk back nonchalantly toward your pursuer, if they hadn’t gotten a good look at you beforehand. It was all about nerve and the sense that the city should be ours at night. It was only with the arrival and ubiquity of CCTV that the odds stacked up, insurmountably, against us.
The main place we hung out was “down the bay,” with the monumental brutalist bridge high above us. There were no cameras there. It was on the rich side of town, where old ladies had squirted us with garden hoses as kids while crying, “Shoo, shoo!” as if we were vermin. Taking a detour—past oil and coal storage depots next to the river, past the derelict docks where we’d climb out onto the cranes over the river and vandalize the vast hangars with their multitude of pigeons in the rafters—we’d come to a point where the road stopped, meaning that the police could pursue us only as far as the bollards. Beyond that there was a Gypsy encampment, full of washing and car batteries; and beyond that again, a vast expanse, formerly the city dump, which still fermented below the grass. In other words, we could see trouble coming and shake off any pursuers. Make it to the Bay Road and we were safe, from anyone but ourselves, that is. We’d lose ourselves among the copses of trees or hiking up the massive concrete staircase to tuck ourselves right in under the bridge, where the walls were covered in a kaleidoscope of graffiti. The sound of the cars zooming overhead sounded like whooshing spaceships in our own version of Star Wars. We spent countless nights up there.
Now and then, while tripping, we’d come down onto terra firma and wander around. We were out of sight and out of our minds. I remember seeing multiple moons give birth to one another in the sky while we all laughed in slow motion. Once, I had intense feelings of shrinking and growing, effects straight out of Alice in Wonderland, and the headphones in my hands were spooling off to impossible lengths and I was getting all tangled up in them. The music that was playing in the headphones was insane. I could see it, for starters, despite the fact that the cassette was not playing. Another time, we were fooling around on the shoreline and suddenly a dazzling spotlight shone on us from the river, and I somehow heard the light crackling and fizzing past my ears, like a firework right next to me. “Jesus Christ, we’re under attack.” Gradually, as some semblance of coherence momentarily manifested, we realized it was the search-and-rescue boat, which patrolled the waters looking for missing persons and dissuading potential suicides.
“Are you fellas okay?” The voice came booming through a megaphone, rippling like a sidewinder across the water and then the shore.
My mate was either laughing or crying. I could no longer discern which.
“Aye, we’re grand. We’re just tripping.”
There was silence. The lapping of gentle waves.
“Okay. Carry on.”
And with that, they pulled the boat away and took off. Lights vanishing, multiplying as we fell to the ground in relief, and then examined the grass for tiny civilizations.
Drugs weren’t easy to get hold of, at that stage at least. At mushroom season, you’d see grown men walking the fields intently, looking down like large flightless birds. Dealers in synthetics had several barriers: the remoteness of the place (“the back arse of nowhere,” as the saying went), the police, and the Provos. They might avoid jail but end up learning how to walk again after the IRA had kneecapped them. Or they’d end up in the grave. It was a risky business, and so the entrepreneurial spirits involved in it were either idiots or madmen, whom we’d meet in remote industrial estates or in their flats as they violently demonstrated nunchucks bare-chested and elaborated on tinfoil-helmet conspiracy theories. I always let my friends do the talking, but I had one of those faces—curious and gormless in equal measure, perhaps staring a fraction too long—that seemed to naturally antagonize dealers. It was a relief to step outside and exhale and return to a night of your own making.
Box of Fireworks
Our generation was close enough to be witness to and impacted by the Troubles, but far away enough not to be fully immersed. Our involvements had a theatrical quality. I had seen cops busting people’s heads with batons, and I’d been swept up in riots. I’d dashed through rains of glass bottles and wrestled myself free from a soldier’s grasp once or twice. Even caused a few cheers. Yet I knew that I and my kind were spectators, extras, side characters. When visitors came from out of town, we could regale them with stories, taking them to see the action, walking past burned-out cars. Yet I generally stayed carefully on its periphery.
One morning I woke up abruptly to the sound of my mother weeping. She had a friend nicknamed Tonto, going back to her teenage years. He’d been walking home pissed and had staggered into a riot, when a Saracen tank had accelerated through a barricade and crushed him. His insides had spilled out on the street. People were batoned trying to assist him. I had been at the location earlier that evening, feeling a sense of building tension, palpable in the air. Fool that I was, at fourteen years of age, I found it exhilarating, thinking it was a game or a film. Something, though—something in the air that could be read—made me come home.
We had the space, the luxury, afforded by the suffering of others, to be as critical and complacent and ironic as we wanted about it all. We could rise above it, as many did, acting with a cosmopolitanism that bordered on the pantomime, or wash our hands of it if we wanted. My friends and I would piss ourselves laughing at loyalist websites, in the early days of the net, that played cheesy keyboard versions of “Simply the Best” when you clicked on them. Yet taximen were still being called out to pickups on the edges of estates where they’d be murdered; children making their way to school would still have pipe bombs lobbed in their direction by Orange mobs; pubs were still being shot up; shoppers would still be torn to pieces by shrapnel in malls.
As teenagers, we could live to our heart’s content in ramshackle worlds of our own creation. Boredom fueled abandon and invention. One occasion was Halloween, which became huge in Derry, as it was apolitical and afforded a brief opportunity to change our identities and have a break (if not escape) from the fixed ones we’d been born with. There was always a carnival atmosphere, with fireworks exploding above the river and wild hordes partying in the streets. Occasionally fights would br
eak out, and you’d see the wizard’s hat of one of your friends suddenly accelerating as they were thrown around within the crowd, and before you knew it, you were grappling with a vampire or the Incredible Hulk or Uncle Sam. Or you’d find them later in a crumpled heap, makeup and blood running down their faces, like a melted Pierrot, moaning, “They smashed me, lads. They smashed me to death.” It was bedlam, but—when it went well, and even sometimes when it didn’t—it felt like a release from a pressure that resided in the very air around you, as if we were somehow many leagues under the sea and hadn’t realized it and had suddenly, briefly resurfaced for a lungful of air.
Even at moments of unwinding, it still paid to be cautious. There was always that voice in the back of your mind. Coming back from a house party late one night, on the other side of town, I was sitting uneasily in the passenger seat of a taxi, trying to think of something—anything—to say that wasn’t “Are you busy tonight?” Paralyzed by the prospect of small talk, I shifted awkwardly in the deafening silence. Eventually, from the corner of my eye, I was relieved to see the taxi driver reach for the radio, but then he hesitated. I felt the car slow. “Put your seatbelt on, son,” he said sternly. I already had it on and looked at him, but his eyes were fixed straight ahead. There were lights on the otherwise desolate road before us. A checkpoint. One of the mobile ones, manned by the RUC and the army. “Hold on for a second, son,” he said and then hit the accelerator. We took off at high speed. I gripped the seat, thinking he’d lost his mind. It was only as we got closer that I could see it wasn’t an army checkpoint at all, but rather loyalist terrorists, who’d have pulled us in and no doubt inquired as to my identity and God knows what horrors would’ve unfolded. The taxi scattered them, but one of them booted the door as we passed, and I could see that they were armed. My heart was pounding. I can’t remember if I thanked the taximan, but I remember looking at his license, dangling from the rearview mirror and seeing that he had a Protestant name.
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