Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  For me, the universe deepened on meeting her. It became more fascinating and cinematic than I’d thought possible and made me believe that we could be more than mere bystanders. She lent me poetry books, and told me about the Beats, and brought me to see art-house films in a cinema where the lone projectionist looked three hundred years old and was probably a ghost and the dust in the projection light waltzed and swirled; and we fed our coins all day into jukeboxes and pitchers, and we shared our nights with each other like some immense and precious secret. The sun and moon felt new in the sky. She was the first to show me that you had to risk being laughed at to do anything worthwhile, that more people were undone by fear of derision, of vertigo masquerading as coolness, than by disaster. She was a moment of color in a monochrome film, movement in a series of stills.

  The dawn, however, always returns. Her parents disapproved of our relationship. I used to hope, every time calling at her house, that they would not answer (they probably wished the same). They didn’t like my background and judged my prospects to be insufficient for their beloved, but they largely held their tongues, given that she was due to go overseas to university, and the long-distance relationship we’d planned was laughably unrealistic to them, and reality. Traveling to Barcelona with my family at seventeen, my first time out of Britain, I asked her to come, but she said she couldn’t. I explored the city, becoming enraptured by it. Even by the small differences, like the fact that shops didn’t need to pull down shutters at night for fear of riots. One day I trekked for many miles along the Catalan coast. I’d never heard of land art, or Li Bai carving poems onto cliff faces, or Wordsworth writing poems on the walls on an island at Grasmere, but I thought if I created something in a remote cove, carved some kind of message, then something of the present would survive, even when I knew deep down it could not.

  We drank in life, deeply and joyously, but despite our efforts, we could not stop time. Nor was love enough. It was a simple story: we wanted the world, we got it, and so we lost each other. It was the first bittersweet taste of innumerable such experiences to follow.

  She left for university and the life that her books had promised her, and which she had promised her parents. I was quietly bereft. I did not speak of the storm in my head, but it seemed somehow to radiate out into the weather around me. We still wrote letters to each other, but words never seemed to survive the translation the distance, in time and space, brought. There were worlds of accumulating unsaid things. Letters were lost, phones with threads of messages broke down and were thrown into drawers, e-mails went unanswered. The late-night calls had growing silences. Her accent began to change. She would appear in my dreams, and my next day would then be haunted. She visited me one last time. I listened to her stories, insecurely countering them with my own, and she left the next morning. I stayed awake that entire night, knowing it would be our last, gazing out the window at stars that shone down on us and had burned out long before we’d even been born.

  ID Card

  The choice of moving to Belfast as a safe option was foolhardy. It was near enough to feel like I was in geostationary orbit around Derry, but it was still unstable. I knew the first day I’d made a mistake. I knew in the very first class of a law degree, which I’d been enthusiastically encouraged to take by my school and my family, that it was doomed. The weight of expectations—the first Anderson in my lineage to get to university—bore down like a leaden sky. Before she’d left, my girlfriend had warned me, saying I had to do what I really wanted to do, but I was dumb enough to know better. Before long, I was skipping classes on jurisprudence and torts and contracts just to sit in the courtyard of the university, reading secondhand books in a dangerously drifting daydream.

  I would phone home every day or two. My father would answer and instantly pass me on to my mother, as tradition demanded. The mention of the Maze prison on the news interested me. They were closing it. Sending the inmates elsewhere. There were calls to turn it into a culture center or a football stadium, or to bulldoze it entirely so it didn’t become a shrine to the “men of violence” (a sanctimonious phrase used by the politicians and religious leaders who profited from division so profoundly that they could rise above it, and absolve themselves from it). The name Maze fascinated me, with its images of labyrinths and Minotaurs.

  “You know your da was there?”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “The Maze. When he was inside.”

  I froze. I had heard murmurings—such talk was hidden in clear sight—but always had a sense not to pry, not to look through the keyhole into Bluebeard’s chamber.

  My mother wouldn’t talk in detail over the phone, but from resulting conversations I pieced together enough to know that my father had served time as a young man. He had been sentenced to eight years, for possession of explosives and conspiracy to murder. My father, the former terrorist. It sat uneasily in my mind.

  I thought of it a lot on night walks through the city, trying to understand this new information, given that it ran so counter to the man I knew, or thought I’d known, my whole life. At night the city center of Belfast still became a ghost town. Pub bombs and shootings had shut down certain areas, but even the main thoroughfares were haunted by the memory of death squads like the Shankill Butchers, roaming for Catholics and misidentified others, to drag in and carve up with butcher’s knives in the back of black taxis. The Butchers were such maniacs, the story went, that the leader, Lenny Murphy, was set up by his own loyalist allies, as he was making them all look psychotic. Another story went that he’d inadvertently killed a Protestant woman. Either way, his whereabouts were handed over to the IRA, which promptly ambushed him alongside a friend and riddled them with bullets. With a truly malignant degree of cynicism, those who’d set him up then avenged his death, in the typical tit-for-tat fashion, by killing more innocent Catholics.

  The peace process had begun by then. I was as relieved as anyone, especially after the atrocity at Omagh, but I could not share the feeling that things were suddenly much better. It seemed a delusion at best, perhaps necessary, temporarily at least, but one that could turn into a lie if we were not careful. Psychologically, it was a liberation to have the army taken off the streets. To have some semblance of normality. The sight of shop windows unshuttered at night was startling. For some time, though, I could not get to sleep, even when tired, and it only gradually dawned on me that it was because the nocturnal soundtrack of helicopters was no longer there. The silence of peace was deafening.

  Belfast still had a certain postapocalyptic quality then. People stuck to their own areas on the outskirts rather than be identified walking back from a communal place. It was tragic because you sensed that very few citizens of Belfast wanted it like that. It was a self-segregation. And it was dangerous moving through it. There were places, intersections, where it was possible to identify a person’s background, political allegiances, and religion from which direction and side of the street they were walking along.

  At first I had a sense of romance and would walk around the streets, listening to Astral Weeks on a Discman, with the CD rotating in my pocket. I soon realized the danger of attempting to visit areas because of the attractiveness of their names—Cyprus Avenue, Tiger’s Bay, Sandy Row. Belfast put the psycho in psychogeography: I’d quickly learned that it was ill suited to the flaneur. You took your life into your own hands, or rather you placed it in the hands of others. Northern Irish language was debased during the Troubles, with dreaded things like the “Nutting Squad” being veiled in innocuous, abnormally normal language. I’d read about “romper rooms,” named after the American kids’ television show—loyalist marching-band pubs where they’d have a man or woman, a Catholic or again a mistaken identity, tied up and tortured on stage as the revelers drank, before finally being dispatched in an alleyway out the back. I’d learned of how they taunted one of the victims, after finding out she was a singer, to “Give us a wee song,” before she was murdered and her body stuffed in a garbage
bin. In such places, with such histories, you did not go off course.

  On the surface was the appearance of calm, and some eagerness to make the fledgling peace process work, but a silencing came with it too. Underlying issues were unaddressed. “The face will grow to fit the mask,” went the reasoning, and so we all donned our masks.

  Nursing a hangover one day, and seeking the hair of the dog, I called in to see a barman friend for a pint. I’d propped up the bar for an hour, talking and joking around, when suddenly the barman nodded over to an old sod sitting with a pint of stout at a table. “See that guy?” I turned my head. “He was one of the Shankill Butchers. Got out early, with the Good Friday Agreement.”

  I stared over at him again. He was just some old prick. Nothing demonic about him. I stared back at the barman. He was cleaning glasses.

  “He’s all right actually,” he said, half to himself.

  “He’d have carved you and me up,” I replied.

  “That was then, this is now.”

  I drank up and left.

  At night I would go down to a pub around the corner from the Sean Graham bookies where a massacre had taken place. It was on the edge of an intersection, and the locals would be hemmed into their homes every year, violently if necessary, to let Orange bands march through the area. I’d rap on the metal latch and a face would appear, always rude, and I’d hand over money for a carryout before being informed, “Now fuck off.” The city was famous for its hospitality. Then I’d go sit by the river. These were the quiet nights, and I relished nothing more than the dance of the streetlights on the water.

  The peace was not to last, for me at least. For a while it seemed I was a magnet for trouble. Bad encounters in pubs and nightclubs, namely. I had an unfailing knack for being dragged into unwanted conflict. I initiated none of it, but couldn’t extricate myself. I was thrown down staircases and had bouncers open doors with my head. One had the audacity to bob and weave, before punching a tooth clean out of my jaw because of a “misunderstanding.”

  On one occasion I told a guy to stop touching a girl, and the gentleman in question tried to stick a glass in my throat, bruising my windpipe. As I caught my breath, the assailant vanished in the crowd, but I looked up to see his friend laughing and something in me snapped, and I struck him as hard as I could and he fell onto a table of drinks. In the resulting melee, I had several fingers broken by the bouncers, who took me out the back to rough me up. I talked my way out of it, but not before they’d found my student card and announced, “Ha-ha, you’re fucked.”

  I had a meeting with the university the next week. I went in nervous, wearing a borrowed suit and with my fingers in splints, only to find—to my surprise—that they’d decided to drop the case because my assailant was training to become a doctor and so it would be unfair to put his career at risk. I lost all hope in the place at that point, and with the added fact I was skint and on the wrong path, I walked apologetically out of class mid-tutorial shortly afterward, never to return. Maybe it was self-sabotage, but it was made all too easy.

  I didn’t tell my parents for as long as I could, and then only my mother, as she’d be more sympathetic. My father, when he found out, went quietly ballistic, though I saw none of it. I’d blown all the dreams they’d had riding on me. The great white hope had crashed to earth. My pretentious claims that I’d become an artist or a writer—that I always should have been that, because that’s who I was, whether I liked it or not—just threw petrol on the flames. I was hankering for an argument with them so that I could feel less guilty. To give a form to the formless. To give the chaos and fear a name. I knew, though, how it would play out. My father would seem deflated and would talk sense, and I would lose my temper and regard him as a hypocrite, given what I thought I’d learned about him, and he would quietly leave and go out to fix something in the backyard that didn’t need fixing, and I would feel lousy about it and want to apologize, but the words wouldn’t come out. So I resolved just to stay away more, and slowly phase out contact and rely on solitude.

  My father’s hostility to writing wasn’t just that he didn’t believe me or thought I was headed for the gutter. It went deeper. He loved books, as his father had, and as I did, but it gradually began to dawn on me that he was only partly literate. He could certainly read and did so continually, but he could barely write. He had been thrown out of school too early. And, as my sister was diagnosed as dyslexic, I realized that my father was too. Though they had worked hard in their careers, the diagnoses came too late for them both. Both had been hounded by teachers for being stupid at school; both had sought escape routes through misbehavior and absence; both had been failed. All that time, as I indulged myself with dreams of some absurd kind of sainthood of writing, I hadn’t noticed my father quietly handing my mother all the forms he ever needed to fill in, merely adding his signature at the end.

  By this stage I had already set off to become a writer, a laughably ridiculous venture even then. Money was always a problem. I’d kept hold of my now defunct and out-of-date student card, to flash my way into the library, where I’d spend my hours enveloped in imaginary projects. I could buy coffee and hot chocolate there with pennies in the vending machine, and huddle next to the radiators on the top floor with a view of all Belfast in 360 degrees. I’d pick floors with subjects that people rarely visited, and on occasion would catch some sleep there.

  My mind was filled with a million ideas and directions, bouncing off one another and continually inverting. I struggled to focus, and my writing showed it. I wrote Jacobean revenge plays set during the fall of the Spanish Republic. A cabaret on the Maginot Line. Novels about time travel, tour guides of imaginary planets, indestructible angels with dementia who’d lived through millennia of history. Poetry collections printed on tarot cards and slipped into random books, or placed as messages in bottles and thrown into rivers. Nonfiction studies of night and madness and the apocalypse. I gradually built a library of abandoned or unpublished books. I thought of writing as the eye of the storm, but in truth it helped to fuel the storm. I was prone to intrusive thoughts and sleepless nights, drinking by candlelight, living the life of the poet in the garret, a century after it was fashionable and to no discernible audience or readership. I lost track of the stacks of notes that filled every drawer.

  I ended up living in a flat with friends who were never there, were off staying with their partners, because the place was cold and in a dodgy area. The first couple of years it had been one for all and all for one, and everyone partook in the madness, but now it was dinner parties and easy listening, early-onset middle age. They were the kind who’d never been in a scrap—not out of virtue, but because they’d never needed to. They wouldn’t even break one up if it endangered their haircuts. Yet, in the long run, they were right and I was wrong. Rising above it all was an enviable position. Still, it left a bad taste. I’d seen people walk past domestic-abuse incidents or step around unconscious young fellas who’d been kicked up and down the street. Once, it had happened to me; having had my hoodie pulled over my head while being beaten by three assailants, I’d thrown one over my shoulder and inadvertently knocked myself out by head-butting the ground. I’d woken to find my attackers being dragged away; only the bravery of their girlfriends saving me from being stomped.

  My flatmates were decent but their holiday in the chaos was over. I had no way, perhaps no desire, of escaping it. I concentrated on escapism, writing copiously, fueled by speed and drink when I could afford it. My room was no longer a base but something between a hermitage and a scrapyard. I’d covered the walls and ceiling in collages. The images were mostly cut out of magazines and secondhand books. Strange figures from Bosch. Paintings by the Blue Rider group. Book covers for Hamsun, Kafka, Akutagawa, Lispector. Maps of islands and deserts. Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat,” Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, and Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques. I dreamt of being part of imaginary movements, writing manifestos and creating events that would cause r
iots and revolutions. In reality, I lived in a monastic cell. I would go out into the world and be as debauched as possible, and always return to what seemed a bubble of somewhere else in the city, a nutshell of boundless space, surrounded by prompts and pathways and iconography. A tiny place where there was space to dream. I told myself it was a way of escaping, but I was really delving further and further into drama.

  There was as little rest as there was clarity. I fell in with fellow reprobates, a different side of the city from the redneck discos and crate-digging dilettantes. We would go to illegal underground clubs in derelict buildings with dodgy bouncers, boarded-up windows, padlocked fire escapes, lit with candles; every room, every floor with different kinds of music, pulsing, losing ourselves for hours, dancing until sweat ran down the walls, then back to orgiastic displays where no one could tell who was who and where one person ended and another began, laughing the delirious laughter of the damned. “Where’s Jim?” I heard my friend ask. “You’re Jim,” came the reply.

  We’d burst through the nights, drinking and fucking and breathlessly dancing our souls away. For a long time I found myself propelled by the momentum of abject hedonism, taking every drug under the sun—amphetamines, opiates, downers, dissociatives, hallucinogens—and drink, always drink, as an anchor. For a long time it was all thrills, however manufactured. You could dance yourself out of your own body, or accidently burn a skinhead on the forehead with a cigarette on the dance floor, and you’d just end up hugging and declaring mutual love because everyone’s serotonin was stratospheric. Having grown up in an environment where people couldn’t put their arms round each other and family couldn’t say the words “I love you,” but had to gesture it through an improvised sign language, it was like a dam bursting. It would catch up with you, though, and soon you’d endure walks of shame home the next morning, or the next next morning, hypervigilant and paranoid, skittish as a ghost as real people passed on their way to work; or you’d come round mid-sentence to find you were delivering some conspiratorial speed-freak lecture, the contents of which you were not consciously party to—self-induced glossolalia—in front of a group of appalled strangers, high up in a tower block. Or forgetting you were in a tower block and trying to leave, and staggering out onto the balcony and almost over the railings, and the ground fifteen stories below rearing up with vertigo, as if suddenly transported into the sky. Or forgetting you were on a ship and, intending to stagger home, going out onto the deck to find the land, some indistinguishable land, gliding past. Or waking up from sleeping on a sofa in the window of a furniture store.