I’d been in many scraps before, but this felt different. It felt like it would not stop. There had been no reason for it to begin and none for it to end. I struggled to get up, as if I was caught under waves that would not cease, struggling for air and dazed from the fall. There was blood in my eyes, and I found myself trying to talk to the assailants, although I had no idea what I was saying. They paused just long enough for me to turn and run—run until my chest felt like it would burst, hearing them right behind me, one of them laughing, trying to clip my heels at least once, like it was just a game, before they peeled off and I continued running, along the white line and down the alleyways, heaving myself over the wall and dropping into our backyard. I locked the back door and collapsed onto the sofa.
When the party landed back, I split upstairs, in danger of feeling like a freak-show exhibit. The walls felt like they were closing in. Every tooth in my head was throbbing. My jaw felt like it was on wrong. I opened the skylight and hauled myself out onto the slanted roof, three or four floors up. I clambered up to the chimney and sat next to the aerial, the chill of the air soothing on my face.
“Hope you’re not thinking of topping yourself.” A head poked through the skylight. “’Cause you’ll only break your back.” My friend Liam crawled up the tiles toward me. “Jumping off that is a safer bet.” He pointed at the tall building in the near distance. The library.
“They won’t let me in there anymore.”
“Probably for the best,” he said and laughed. “Here.” He handed me a beer bottle, using his lighter to open it.
“Thanks, man.”
“I used to come up here when the landlord came looking for the rent. I used to peer in and see him pacing around, pulling his hair out at the state of the place. Must’ve had twenty smokes waiting for him to leave.”
He paused.
“I’m glad you’re still alive.”
“Thanks.”
“Listen, man. You need to get the fuck out of here. I mean, all of this.”
I smiled and we clinked bottles. A line from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis came into my mind: “Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.”
I felt inordinately, inexplicably lucky. “I’ll write about this one day.”
“Write about what?”
“Nothing.”
I was smiling like a gleeful idiot through a mouth of bloodied teeth. Staring out at a city that lay like a sea of slate beneath a moon that knew all secrets, above the jeers and the songs and the howls and the laughter of the not-yet-damned.
Doorbell
Something changed then. I wasn’t quite sure what. Perhaps it was simply that I did not want to destroy myself anymore. That there was something to life that I could not defile. You could hate everyone and still see there was something miraculously precious about this miserable, beautiful life.
One evening, while we were drinking in a spit-and-sawdust bar, a would-be thug harassing some female friends of ours was invited outside by my mate. In the space of time that it took for me to grab my coat, the thug had been beaten unconscious and was lying prone in the car park, his face covered in blood. “Let him sleep it off,” my friends joked and went back into the bar, but I couldn’t leave him, scumbag or not, so I lifted him up and took him to the emergency room. It wasn’t about him. It was about being able to meet your own gaze in the mirror without looking away.
I knew none of this would go away, though. And I had no intention of beating myself to pieces against the sea, like some saint or hippie. I had to get out of town, go elsewhere—anywhere—where there might be space to breathe, but excuses were easy to find and the absence of money was one unavoidable issue. There was, however, an intervention from on high.
The knock came in the early hours. Then a furious ringing of the doorbell. I was not yet asleep but about to go to bed, and it threw me. I thought about letting on there was no one in, but I already had music playing, giving away my presence. I was also passing right beside the door when the knock came, meaning that I could barely breathe without making a noise on the floorboards. The door had no latch or peephole. It thudded harder the second time, echoing through the rooms, and an authoritative voice boomed, “Open up.” I looked around for something to grasp, but there was nothing. Eventually, when it was clear the visitors were going nowhere, I relented and, bracing myself, opened the door tentatively. Two police officers, male and female, were standing there. One had his walkie-talkie in his hand, and the smaller had her hand by her pistol. “Can we come in? There’s been a report of a disturbance.”
“Sorry, there must’ve been a mistake. I didn’t report—”
“Can we come in, sir?” The last word said through gritted teeth.
They pushed past me and told me to take a seat. There had been an armed robbery at the top of the street, and CCTV had captured the assailant heading for the door of my tenement. I was on the ground floor. “You also match the description,” they added.
I laughed, but they didn’t smile.
“Look, I haven’t been out in days.” I pointed to the mattress on the living room floor, the only room with heating, and to bottles and papers everywhere.
“We’ll just have a look round, if that’s all right?” They didn’t wait for an answer.
I assumed the gun-toting mugger lived in one of the flats above and perhaps was aware of the cops being here. Maybe he was listening in, ear pressed to the floorboards. It was not even enough just to stay inside and keep your head down. Even then you were not left to your own devices. I resolved at that moment to depart the city—for the siren call of other cities—and never return. I left the next week, without leaving a message, with thirty quid in my pocket.
PART FIVE
A Death in the Family
Bus Ticket
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” Flying home from Italy, fifteen years later, I’d bought a secondhand copy of Dante, carelessly assuming it would be in English. I flicked through it while waiting for the bus from the airport, in the vain hope it had translated itself.
Belfast was changing, booming. You heard it everywhere. The way people insist, a bit too much, that they are clean or better now. Belfast was European. You could tell because people air-kissed over Frappuccinos. A sign in the airport read: “Welcome to Westeros.” Taxi drivers did “Troubles tours.” Pints cost seven pounds. Hard drugs had seeped in, but the kneecappings now happened by appointment. This was progress. The shipyards—once the bastions of unionist employment, to the exclusion of foreign and papal elements—were dead, but the giant cranes Samson and Goliath were kept as symbols. Of what wasn’t certain. They’d named a quarter of the city after the Titanic: a ship they proudly built that took 1,500 souls to the bottom of the ocean. As I walked through the arcade full of empty shopping lots, the stalls were selling Game of Thrones calendars and flashing phone covers. I felt terribly tired.
The intercom sounded with a once-familiar litany: “Augher, Clogher, Fivemiletown.” I went to the vending booth. “A single to Derry, please.”
She didn’t look up. “Single to Londonderry it is,” then slid the ticket under the glass before an abrupt, “Next.”
I muttered, “Fuck sake,” under my breath.
I found a seat near the back of the bus, walking past rows of people avoiding eye contact, with their bags placed territorially on the seats next to them. I sat my bag next to me in turn and immediately feigned sleep, resting my head against the window. The bus hissed, shuddered, then took off, winding through the city. I still had my eyes closed, knowing every tree and every minute of the journey from Belfast to Derry, though it had been years, and wanting simply to evaporate the time between places. I heard the bus pull up at traffic lights as I nestled in for a nap. Suddenly there was a huge thud and what felt like a firm punch to the side of my face. I looked out to see a group of teenagers making obscene gestures and realized they had thrown a brick at the coach. As the bus drove on, I held my aching jaw. Everyone on
the bus was now looking at me as if I were somehow the source of the noise, given that it was my window they’d struck. I kept my head down until they turned away and ran my tongue along my teeth. I couldn’t taste any blood, but one of my fillings was loose.
“Motherfuckers!” I cursed, more audibly than intended.
The bus turned onto the West Link motorway, the escape out of Belfast. I glanced out the window, still nursing my jaw, and saw one last line of graffiti, painted with a brush in large white letters. “Fuck Off Back to Ireland,” it read.
Soon the motorway took us around the mountain and into the countryside. Seventy shades of green. I could no longer see the beauty of the place, even though I’d been away, and far and wide, for fifteen years. It was like being face-blind. I’d known it too well. Besides, I’d never stood—and never would set foot—in any of the fields I could see rolling by next to the traffic. Those lost spaces next to motorways were not an explorable landscape but rather a no-man’s-land. The view was like a film that played over and over again on the cinema screen of the window. The only thing that might change it, make it seem real, was if the hellish tumbrel that was the bus crashed. “Christ,” I thought, “I could do with a drink.”
The bus ascended onto Glenshane Pass, up into a mist-strewn landscape. I turned to gaze out the window. It was the only part of the journey that ever interested me. A wilderness. Down at sea level, in the cities, the fog surrealized familiar things. Here it suggested the edge of things, or even everything. The pine forests and the waterfalls fell away into nothing, the moorland dropped not into valleys, corries, eskers carved in the Ice Age, but into a gray-white abyss. There were trees all across this land once, turned into charcoal and barrels and ships. Unprotected, the land was left wind-scoured or sodden. Forests of evergreens were patchworked on the hills, in rectangular blocks, but it seemed an artificial substitute. In the foreground passed the gates of the stone quarry, the landscape of which had been torn out and reconfigured into the city that we grew up in. Waterfalls cascaded down the mountains as the bus sped past, coming back to life only after the rain. Entire rivers are ephemeral. They disappear in certain seasons, but the land remembers them.
At its peak was a truck-stop pub, the Ponderosa, named after the pines that grew at height in warmer climes. The building had tall aerials and a generator outside. I’d passed it many times, never stopping but always wondering who would drink there—haulers, no doubt, perhaps a curious tourist. It was a landscape so remote it seemed to have had only cursory dealings with the twentieth century, let alone with the Troubles. The hills were unforgiving in bad weather, and a person or a light might be spotted from miles away. So, too, however, would patrols, and there were hiding places for those who knew the lie of the land. It was a landscape of appearances and disappearances. A few months after the Bloody Sunday massacre, a Parachute Regiment Land Rover was driving along here when it was blown apart by a roadside bomb of explosives packed into milk churns, detonated by a hidden watchman. The army learned from the incident and placed their own snipers to guard the pass, which was the only convenient way by road into the northwest. It must have been intensely solitary in those wilderness hours, not an enviable posting, though perhaps some soldiers liked the quiet. Two figures were hiking, several years later, when a soldier emerged from the undergrowth and ordered them to halt. All three drew their weapons, and the soldier was not quick enough. I wondered, gazing at the landscape rising and falling as we sped through it, where he had lain, in the frozen dew with the sky and rain filling his unblinking eyes.
Men died in remote places like these. Alone and in groups. Places like South Armagh, where there were so many traps that the British Army took to traveling around in helicopters rather than by land. Blown up at television transmitters. Informers shot, ditched like rubbish by bins in alleyways, nudged by foxes. Pools of frozen blood. A booby trap tripped in a derelict building. Two brothers lying dead on a lane, having set off to meet their girlfriends. A body by the city’s waterworks. Bleeding to death in a bedsit. Quarry. Half Moon Lake. Forest. Lonely places to die and to be found, and for those frozen oceanic hours in between. Bye spots. Silent but for the creaking of branches in the wind.
The lights of the cars ahead were ships in a fog-bound port, monks walking in procession with red lanterns. They slowed down to a safe crawl. An indecipherable flag in the outlands, blown to a rag. When the weather got truly bad, Derry was cut off, even more so than usual. We passed through Dungiven, or Dunlivin, as it was tempting to call it, with its murals of dead hunger strikers, and then Drumahoe, the last village before the city, which proudly flew flags of loyalist terrorist organizations and the Parachute Regiment that had committed the Bloody Sunday atrocity. It wasn’t just the victims who never forgot. We passed Altnagelvin Hospital, where the bodies of those boys and men shot at that march had been autopsied, and where virtually everyone in Derry, after a certain date, was born. A giant illuminated star, now turned off, adorned the roof.
You live beyond the third act. Or you die at the end of the first. Life is inconvenient like that. In stories, the protagonist always leaves for good. They are not supposed to come back. I returned after a message from my mother: “Your cousin Robert is dying.” It was unexpected, for me at least. Robert had always been that handsome ladies’ man, quick-witted, a glint in his eye and a swagger, but he had suddenly gone off the rails. Falling dangerously in love with martyrdom, however justified, was a self-sustaining destructive reaction. It didn’t do well to nurse a grievance, to feed off it. His liver and kidneys were destroyed so quickly it seemed intentional. He’d ended up bloated and discolored in intensive care, unrecognizable. By the time I was able to arrange to come back, he had already died. I made it in time for the funeral. They had already gone through the wake with all its ceremony, making sure the body was not left alone, keeping a candle burning in the open window, covering all the mirrors so that the dead would not realize they were dead.
We all shuffled along, shaking hands with relatives we hadn’t seen in years, commenting on how we’d all weathered the passage of time. After a buffet in an ex-workingmen’s club, we ended up back at the house. Robert’s sisters were quietly distraught but seemed preoccupied, with friends around them, always nipping in and out of rooms. When I heard bursts of crying, it was through the walls. A cluster of people started drinking, shot through with adrenaline and a nervous energy that prevented drunkenness.
I was called over. “You know Robert’s son, Andrew?”
I shook his hand. “Aye, we’ve met before.”
Andrew looked improbably young, younger than his late-teenage years, dressed up in a suit as if he were going to his first job interview. When I’d met him before, he’d had his father’s edgy wit, at once charming and prickly. Now he seemed understandably lost. We ended up talking. Andrew was deep in despair and appeared unreachable. In the background, people were haggling over the CD player, what to play. To fill the silence closer to them, I leaned in and talked to Andrew. It seemed he was already elsewhere. Nothing he said appeared to connect, and I gradually began to feel words fail me; everything sounded contrived, a platitude. How easily people fall into cliché, whatever their intentions. Words were insufficient. Not only that, but they seemed an insult, part of the problem—a way of covering up, insinuating that the person should move on. We ended up just clinking glasses and saying, “Fuck it.” Andrew’s eyes were simultaneously glazed and intense. He’d no job, no future, no money, no hope, no father. I could offer him nothing in the end but silence.
The mantra these days is “talk about your feelings.” It sounds like good advice and perhaps it is. It is said, though, by those who can already speak freely. For others, there are consequences to talking, to admitting to colleagues, friends, family—many of whom are struggling too—that you are struggling. There are difficulties in even finding the words, and then in facing the distinct possibility of someone mumbling something awkward or dismissive in response, breaking ey
e contact. Words have a weight. Sometimes they are lead.
I spent most of my time back home frequenting what pubs remained from my youth. Coming back for Robert’s funeral made me realize I’d hit an impasse. The first pangs of middle age. Battered by too many years of too many nights, too many airports and projects and breakups and moves, and bereft of momentum in any other direction, I ended up home, through sheer gravity alone. If you’re lucky, that’s where you land, temporarily, on the way down. Home, of course, was not the same. It had virtually the same dimensions, bar a handful of changes. Certain gaps in terraces; estates where there had been fields. Buildings that had lain abandoned, empty save for their occasional clandestine intrusions, had been renovated behind darkened glass and keypad entries. Derelict buildings had signs of life decorated onto them. I felt homesick in the midst of home.
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