Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  Without adequate sleep or routine, I had begun to lose my grip. I started getting nervous tics, like scratching frantically at times, which I tried to conceal. When I did pass out, I had recurring nightmares of being attacked and defending myself with obscene levels of violence—slicing eyes, throats—that left me profoundly disturbed upon waking. I kept having invasive morbid thoughts, when on trains or in cars, that tires would blow up and there’d be high-speed crashes if I jinxed the journeys with certain minor, unrelated actions. I had a worrying propensity for self-damage when I was under the influence. I had slices along my arms, inflicted for reasons not entirely known to me, and which I’d done in a daze, perhaps in order to focus myself. At times it felt like I was watching someone else. I’d had to start wearing long-sleeved shirts after the scars began showing up, to my mortification, under the ultraviolet lights of a nightclub. Yet I carried on the business of forgetting, casting all moderation aside, paying little attention to the meaning of our lives, because it didn’t feel like there was any. Where the self-destructive impulses came from, in the blood or in free will, was unclear. A lover said to me, “You sabotage everything good for yourself at the last minute.”

  I didn’t argue but just asked why.

  “Because you are afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of succeeding. Of ever permanently getting what you want.”

  We had seemed invincible then, friends and lovers and I, or were dumb enough to believe so. Come morning, the devil took what was his. There was always a brutal payback. Come morning, we’d burn up on reentry. “I’m all right” was a sign that nothing was all right. We clung to each other as co-conspirators. There was always a moment, though, in the cold merciless dawn, when even the birdsong sounds cursed, that you’d have to face reality alone. Partying for days and coming round, propping yourself up in some pub with a pool cue as a crutch. The brutality of the pitiless Monday morning, closing in. With my skull splitting and no whites in my eyes, stepping over bodies on the living room floor, trying to find a cup or plate in the kitchen that wasn’t overflowing with cigarettes. Tempted to stand on a few bodies on the way out to work in my crumpled uniform. One such session was so prolonged and hedonistic that a friend became a born-again Christian at the end of it and I never saw him again.

  I worked in warehouses, call centers, a factory line. Mostly I worked in a supermarket on the edge of a loyalist area. Before and after football games, fans would come in, literally marching up and down the aisles of biscuits and nappies, singing songs about being “up to their necks in Fenian blood.” The security guard, too scared to apprehend them, would stand around, shuffling his shoes or chatting to them on first-name terms. The workers had a message that would come over the intercom, “Could Mr. Smith please come to the basement?” There was no basement. It meant a bomb threat had been called in, and it instructed them to start covertly ushering shoppers out, without starting a panic. Stubborn older folk, who’d “seen it all before,” would often continue shopping, even when they’d turned the lights out, carrying on by the glow of the fridges as the bomb squad arrived. At the end of every day, as part of cashing up, I’d be sent with the guard’s colleagues to look under the shelves of the store for incendiary devices.

  “What is it exactly we’re looking for?”

  “I dunno. Wires and shit, I guess.”

  People got on well enough working together, but things turned frosty around the marching season and the Old Firm games between Celtic and Rangers. I’d feel a change in the air pressure, the temperature. Grunts on the stairs, messages pinned to the pinboard, hostile latrinalia written on toilet doors by workmates. Sometimes I’d be asked where my accent was from, as if it were separate from the rest of me. I would tell them different imaginary villages in the northwest. The name would change each time. The sectarian issues flared up and certain areas were still no-go. It paid to keep your wits about you, but I found myself settling into complacency, which was a dangerous luxury. Once or twice, people would show their true colors. When migrants were starting to get burned out of loyalist areas, there were glimpses (“They’re over here stealing our jobs and scrounging our benefits”). While many were congratulating themselves on how hatred and division were being overcome, they failed to recognize that it was simply shifting elsewhere. It was still needed by some. It was, perhaps, all they had.

  Stereo

  Whatever I went through, my sister went through far more crazed situations and was far more streetwise because of it, from seeing the aftermath of the assassination of a policeman on Shipquay Street to years of partying on the rave scene. She reminded me of the phrase about Ginger Rogers when anyone overly praised Fred Astaire and left her out: “Try doing it backwards and in heels.”

  As a child, my sister and her friends had navigated and reinvented the neighborhood space in their own ways, playing games that culminated in the creation of a death-defying place they called “the bars”: a rudimentary length of iron railing, which they’d turned into a gymnastics spectacle. They would spin around it upside down and at high speed, performing tricks, with their ponytails whipping across the concrete. Her later stories, many of them very recent, were hilarious and grim in equal measure, usually ending with, say, a friend losing a finger on the way to a rave but trying to carry on with the sesh regardless. My sister told me once of a party in Derry that had gotten out of hand, and the Provos pulled up in a car and burst in and smashed up the speakers and started wrecking the place, scaring the shit and the noise out of everyone. You could hear a pin drop afterward. Everyone started streaming out in all directions. The paramilitaries went back to their car with balaclavas still on, got in, and turned on the ignition. Suddenly there was a voice from the back seat. They turned and stared at two guys, off their faces on the seat, thinking it was a taxi. “Take us to the nearest off-license, mate. It’s all kicking off in there.”

  In places where the law had lost any legitimacy through internment or raids or harassment or straight-up killings, there was a vacuum. Where there is an absence of justice, it will be filled, and there will be little control over who fills it. Who will protect people from their protectors?

  At any hour, the rattling on the door was unwelcome. There was always hostility between the locals and fly-by-night students in the terraces of Belfast. One evening we were sitting having a drink and a smoke in a friend’s room when we noticed showers of sparks and smoke at the window and, rushing down to the front door, found that someone had built up piles of leaves and rubbish at the entrance and set it on fire. On another occasion a friend was, somewhat ironically, playing “Born in the USA” one lunchtime in her bedroom when a brick, from a passing critic, came through the window. Another friend, testing the tectonic range of his speakers, had opened his door to two IRA men, who bundled their way in. He ended up scuffling with them, almost getting the better of one and ripping the invader’s shirt open in the process. “Jesus, you maniac. You could’ve been killed,” I said to him.

  He paused for a minute. “You know … the thing that went through my mind at the time—the thing I couldn’t get out of my head—was the fact the guy had pierced nipples. It’s strange, the things you notice. Maybe they weren’t Provos. Impostors. The unreal IRA.”

  My friend had been playing with fire. Across town, another incident had occurred. An old lady had a heart condition, and the girl who had just moved in next door wouldn’t keep the noise down. Lots of people had complained. She had these parties. Bass thumping through the walls. So the lady’s husband made a complaint to the right people and the matter was dealt with. There wouldn’t be any more parties. That night the sound through the walls changed. Ten loyalist paramilitaries burst in. Beat four of the party badly, with pickaxe handles and baseball bats. All were hospitalized. The girl, a thirty-year-old mother, didn’t survive. The police charged only the old boy who’d made the call. The walls were silent after that.

  Skylight

  A room came up in another ho
use in Belfast with old friends, and I thought I’d move in and take some time to get my head together. We could sit around playing Mario Kart and smoking and telling stories, and I’d get back a sense of balance. Get back to zero. It was bedlam, however. They were hilarious but deranged. On my first night we had a celebration that ended with my friend falling through one of the windows, slicing the tendons in his wrists. I visited him at the hospital, bringing him spare clothes that were deliberately too small for him, which I’d picked up at a charity shop. We sat out on a balcony, smoking with patients who were wheeling around drips. And the fun took a further, darker turn. There were the same laughs with friends so fucked they’d try leaving rooms at the hinge side of the door or by stepping onto the wall, thinking the room had tilted. And another who’d passed out while taking a piss and fallen headfirst through the frosted-glass bathroom window, coming round staring down into the backyard.

  Our actions began to have dire consequences. Lost jobs, failed relationships, mental-health problems. What began as seize the day became obliterate it. One of my friends ended up in a coma after falling from a garage roof while drunk, even receiving the last rites before recovering. I couldn’t bring myself to see him when he was at death’s door, and never forgave myself for failing to do so. Other friends began to lose their minds. Some turned violent. Some suffered psychotic episodes and developed paranoia, reading conspiracies in subtitles and adverts. The illness mirrored the emerging era. Where once they’d have ranted about the KGB and aliens tapping into their thoughts, now it was the CIA and al-Qaeda. Others disappeared. You’d see them years later, changed through illness and medication, and they were not the same people you’d once loved, and perhaps you weren’t either.

  The house started falling apart. I’d wake to find holes punched in the walls, or threats about the noise, or the banisters kicked off, and no one would have any recollection who’d done it or why. My record collection gradually vanished and then my books. Eventually one of my friends was sitting on a radiator, having a smoke, and he knocked it onto the ground. He was so stoned he didn’t notice the water pumping out of it onto the floor and down into the floor below. He explained later that he thought the water, pumping from a reservoir high in the hills, would just “run out.” It wasn’t long before the floor/roof caved in, and we were filling a garbage bin with water every few minutes as we tried to find the stopcock and shut off the water supply. It seeped through everything. The place was fucked. There was now literally a room that no one could enter. We had to flee the house, knowing the landlord was involved in shady circles in Belfast and had a reputation for beating up tenants for merely missing a month’s rent. Once we’d fled, I remembered that I’d left some prize possessions in the attic, so I, my friend, and his girlfriend sneaked back to the wreck of the house. I kept busting their balls by saying, “There’s the landlord!” as we tiptoed around the place, gathering everything salvageable. We were still packing up when we heard the landlord’s key in the lock; they hesitated for a second until they saw the terror on my face, then we barreled out the back door. We ended up being chased down alleyways by the enraged landlord in his car, at one stage splitting up and then colliding into one another and bursting out laughing until our stomachs hurt, as the landlord circled around the streets at high speed.

  I moved on to sleeping on a friend’s couch. My aim was to dry out, find my bearings again, reconnect with the place. Fresh air and good thoughts. Long walks again. Time for thinking. One evening in the usually safe university area, on the corner of Malone Road and Chlorine Gardens, I was strolling along, recalling how I’d read that plague victims were buried around there, some pretentious flight of fancy, when I noticed a car slowing down to match my step. Three young men were inside, windows rolled down. The passenger in the front barked, “Hey! Boy!” I walked on, initially thinking mistaken identity and hoping they’d realize it. He kept shouting, more agitated this time. I was avoiding eye contact and already feeling as if the street beneath me was a lift descending. My stomach dropped. From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a sawed-off shotgun pointing right at my face from the back seat. I just kept walking, but instinctively cocked my head to one side, and they all burst out laughing and revved the engine and sped off. And I just stood there, my heart in my throat as the world continued on, oblivious, around me. I felt like the dumbest motherfucker who ever lived.

  By the time I made it to my mates’ house, I felt sick and was in need of a drink. I asked them if I should go to the police, having failed in the panic even to notice, let alone memorize, the model of car or its license plate, or enough detail to make a facial composite of its occupants. I felt humiliated, like an awkward child again. All I could remember was the sheen on the stunted barrels of the gun, like copper pipes. That stayed in my head involuntarily. And all I could see, regardless of what my friends said, was a look of disbelief behind their eyes. They didn’t believe me. These things didn’t happen anymore. They didn’t happen to the likes of us. That’s what hurt most bitterly. “We live,” Conrad put it, “as we dream—alone.”

  I went back to the river, never feeling more solitary or in greater despair. A deep depression grew in me. There were signs in the river warning of electrical wires beneath the surface. I gave myself many reasons not to jump in—what it would do to those left behind, to those who’d find me—but if truth be told, at that moment cowardice was all that stood in the way. And I ended up sitting there, the glowing sky hiding the stars, laughing to myself.

  Winter came and I found myself living in the attic of a freezing Georgian house. The students who populated the area had slouched home for the holidays. Street after unearthly street lay empty. Every rooftop and pavement was covered in snow two feet deep. I trudged a path through it, like the first steps on a new planet.

  The library was empty, bar a skeleton staff. I took the stairs and my familiar window seat on the top floor. The streets below were almost obliterated with snow, and I struggled to orient myself, eventually picking out landmarks around the cardinal points: the Botanic Gardens, the Holylands, and beyond them the winding River Lagan.

  As I made notes, the sky darkened and a snowstorm began to lash down biblically upon the city. I was high enough to feel the windows buffeted by wind and sleet, and I swore the lights momentarily flickered. The city was almost completely obscured through the glass.

  I gathered my notes and made my way home through the storm, barricading myself in against the elements for several days. When the weather cleared, emptying itself out or moving on to other lands, I returned to the library to continue my writing and research, only to be stopped at the front desk by the receptionist and a security guard. Only members of the university could use the facilities. I tried explaining, but I knew from her body language that it was a lost cause and she was delighted in catching an interloper, so there was no point. The halls were empty behind them. I left half-agitated, half-embarrassed.

  For the next week I couldn’t look at any writing. It started to occur to me that the continual commentary in my head, the intrusive thoughts as I lay awake at night, was also the voice that kept me writing, making plans for projects, dreaming up imaginary movements. It was not an innate or entirely positive thing. By the time my housemates arrived back, I had turned bearded and semiferal and was greeted with surprise. It had been a week since I had said a word to any living creature. We caught up, and they reminded me that a friend’s birthday was being celebrated that very night, so I cleaned myself up, downed some Dutch courage, and headed out to the club. The renewed vigor I felt didn’t survive the queue, and by the time we were in and jostling for drinks amid the deafening soundtrack, I was starting to wish catastrophe on the very earth. Having toasted my friend and shown the minimum social propriety, I found a corner to make a last stand and set about drinking myself into oblivion with what money I had left.

  “Yu. X. Es. Er.”

  “What?” I leaned forward, covering one ear.

  �
�Your ex is here.” My mate pointed over to a country girl I’d been seeing. “She knew you were coming. She’s brought a guy along. Don’t look over.”

  For the next two hours I sank the huddle of drinks I’d bought, then pulled on my coat and told my mates I was off to the gents.

  The cold air hit me as I stepped out of the fire exit into the alleyway. I wasn’t as drunk as I should have been and felt it bitterly. It wasn’t that far back home. I didn’t want to return and at the same time I couldn’t bear to remain. In the hope that a better idea would fall out of the sky, I walked vaguely in that direction, feeling more sober and shortchanged with every step.

  I had just started to cross the road at the intersection of Donegall Pass and the Lower Ormeau, in the shadow of the old gasworks, when I heard footsteps running behind me. Suddenly a figure jumped up on my back, almost affectionately. Before turning, I assumed one of my friends had followed me out of the club and was making sure I got home okay and was fooling around. My main concern was to get off the road in case we were knocked down, given that the area had its fair share of boy racers and joyriders, but then I turned and saw the leering face of a stranger. I backed off, but I was turned at an awkward angle and the stranger had momentum as he came toward me, trying to push me, almost playfully, off my feet. I staggered back onto the pavement at the other side of the road, realizing what was going to happen, and thought, in an instant, to hit him as hard as I could and then take to my heels toward the nearest pub. I swung a punch into his ribs and another into the side of his face as he lunged forward, but he already had me grappled and I felt a boot coming in hard against my side from a second person, whom I hadn’t even seen. I knew I was done for, wrestling with the first one, who was trying to drag my shirt over my head, but boots kept flying in and I could feel my strength starting to ebb. Somehow I got my leg around the first assailant and threw him onto the ground, but the momentum carried us both down and we went face-first onto the tarmac.