Recording Device
My father was in the living room, his feet up, having a drink, watching old footage of 1970s bands on a German television show. For some time he had been wobbling, struggling with his health—I don’t know. The fact that Da kept it all silent, stoical, except the times he no longer could, only made it more quietly terrifying. As he got older and he got aches and his tendons became frayed, he no longer had the distraction of jogging the bridges at night or hitting the gym. It seemed more than physical. He had enough time on his hands to realize there was more spent than left. I worried if there was something else at play, something early-onset. Or perhaps something late-onset. I remembered a quote from one of the art books I used to cut up, by the artist Otto Dix, referring to experiences in the war—one of the wars—about how trauma got harder with the years; how time didn’t heal old wounds, as people said, and things got worse or returned as the adrenaline rush and distractions of youth died away: “As a young man you don’t notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through.” As life settled, narrowing into routines and certainties, it just kept narrowing for some people, to the point of claustrophobia. The walls kept getting closer. And the sky with it.
Not long ago, talking about what happened in the Troubles might get you killed. And so people were silent or, when they spoke—consummate story- and joke-tellers that they are in the North—it was a way of not addressing subjects. It was a diversion. Silence, nevertheless, prevailed. Now people do not talk for fear of rocking the boat. Now they are silenced by the mantra that tourism and investment will cure all ills. There is no truth-and-reconciliation process. Collective amnesia is official policy. Journalists overhearing confessions from the “bad old days” are subject to having their homes raided by the police. We are told that this silence is different. This is a better form of silence. The schools remain segregated. The cities remain internally divided. The trauma is, against the lessons of psychiatry, buried. The peace process is disrupted and undermined, but it has always had a problem, for all the relief that the respite of violence has given. The North remains a patient in a medically induced coma.
My father had started drinking late in life. Previously he’d suffered from what I thought were cautionary hangovers, as if his body knew the inclinations in his genes and had an internal alarm system, given that he’d two alcoholic parents, and punished him as a deterrent. Then suddenly he started drinking heavily, regardless, in middle age. It didn’t seem to suit him, and I doubted what good it did, especially given the quantities he was downing. I recognized my own hypocrisy, given that I drank too much. I justified it by telling myself I had grown into drinking, while my father had plunged into it. I would sit up with him and we’d watch vintage music programs—The Old Grey Whistle Test, the German show Beat-Club, prog rock and blues revival bands, Tim Buckley and “Van the Man”—and we’d talk about old bands and all those records in boxes in the attic. It was one of the rare times we’d be animated together.
“Would you change it at all?” I asked him.
“What?”
“The past. If you could go back.”
He laughed. “You can’t, though, can you?”
We kept watching the music videos. There was no need to talk after a while. The passing of a bottle said more than language could. Eventually Da went out to the kitchen to get a drink, but then I heard him shuffling off upstairs to his bed. I sat there thinking, drinking. It was a while before I even realized the footage had stopped on the screen.
One night I decided to talk to him finally, properly.
And Da told me. He told me about growing up in the camp. About his da dying. About surviving, playing at the edge of a whirlpool. About shootouts and arrests and internment. His brother, a bricklayer, on the run. He remembered a stolen car with bullet holes in it screeching up to their house in the early hours of the morning, and how spectacularly blue the sky looked. He carried a scar on his leg that he’d told me long before was from climbing a fence, but which resembled a flesh wound from a bullet. How he was set up by an informer, chased into the Phoenix Bar, and captured. He was charged with explosives and membership. He was sixteen. He told me about interrogations. He told me of fear so deep and immediate it was like a person, a presence, a shadow in the room. He told me about helicopter journeys across the country. He told me of blindfolds and being thrown out at an indeterminate height. He told me about the dreaded Crum—Crumlin Road Gaol—where they went to town on suspects, and guilt or innocence was incidental. He told me of white noise and beatings, and stress positions and sleep deprivation. He told me of torture and the doctors they brought in to monitor it, and how they worked on you in shifts and went home to their homes to play happy families at the weekends, and came back and started over again; and the whole time they were away, you hadn’t slept for more than a second that you could grab standing up. He remembered their faces. He told me about Long Kesh, a former Allied aircraft base, and “the Cages.” He told me about prisoners sent from the prison hulk HMS Maidstone, moored in Belfast Lough. He told me about returning to live in the Nissen huts after only a few years in a brick house, from one kind of jail to another.
He told me of camaraderie between prisoners because of, and despite, having forty to eighty of them in each hut. He told me of how they personalized the partitions, how they read everything from Frantz Fanon to Brendan Behan, and gave classes and played football and hung their clothes on the wire. He told me of knowing the main players—“heads,” they were called, which meant a good guy, someone who knew the craic, in terms of music and culture—including Bobby Sands, who was just one of them; not a martyr or a saint or a villain, but a young fella whom he remembered played guitar and made-up songs. He told me of escape plans and of the guards digging water-filled ditches around them to prevent tunneling. He told me of carving woodwork to pass the time and of records being smuggled in (Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets came to mind—it wasn’t much to his taste). He told me of almost-admiring rumors that the loyalists once smuggled in a goldfish. He told me of messages being smuggled out. He told me how the huts had burned in ’74.
They moved them to the Maze, the brutalist concrete of the H-blocks. Their political status as POWs was removed and they were to be treated as criminals. They were placed in individual cells, and the screws were hostile from the beginning. He told me of the surveillance. He told me of burning away the hours of the one youth you’d ever have. He told me of tapping messages along the pipes to other cells. Shouts and messages passed via the doors. Continual noise. He told me of how the prison officers searched the prisoners, taking them to the circle, making them squat naked over a mirror and probing their behinds, then their mouths with the same glove. He told me that pain was not enough; shame was also required. He told me of how he and a cellmate had pushed their mattress up against their cell door as they listened to riot police come down the aisle, cell by cell, beating the occupants unconscious. Waiting their turn. Not much more than kids, they were. He told me about stress and how it is buried. He told me of the five years of protests and how, right as he was being released, it was all escalating toward the latter-day Catholic martyrdom of the hunger strikes; Bobby Sands writing on the first day of his dying, “I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world.” Bobby was not the only one.
Except none of this conversation happened. We just kept watching music. All the information I possessed came from unverified snippets from other people or was overheard in unguarded moments. They were likely true, and there were many more truths never expressed, but we could not begin to talk about any of it directly, because how or where do you begin?
Bird Feed
“How did he become involved? Was it Bloody Sunday?”
“You know your da—he’s the quiet man and just fobs the subject off. He was there and it had a big
impact on him. Your aunt told me that. He had been lucky to get back alive. All the young fellas were. He said he knew, from the sounds, something different was happening.”
My ma paused for a second or two before continuing.
“That wasn’t entirely it, though. His older brother had been interned. They were constantly getting grief from the army and police. The thing that did it, though, if you piece together the snippets, was this story about a wee boy who kept pigeons—”
“Pigeons?”
“Aye, some kid on his street kept them out the front of their house. He was a harmless critter apparently and was tending them one day, and an army patrol just came along, in one of the tanks they called a Pig. You remember those? They had Saracens, Saxons, and Pigs. And they just started shooting at that wee lad. They knew they could get away with it. One of them was laughing. Your dad watched it happen; he was distraught, said it wasn’t fair and resolved to do something. Everything changed at that moment.”
“Jesus. I thought Kes was grim.”
“They joined the young republicans, the Fianna, thinking it was like the Scouts. They didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. Pandora’s box had already opened.”
We tell ourselves stories about war. Of good guys and bad guys. Redemption and sacrifice. Yet the nature of conflict is such that when it is unleashed, it is almost impossible to remain good. Man, at such times, becomes wolf to man. Everything still was, and remains, a choice. It came down to moments, decisions. None inevitable. Either choosing to act, react, or choosing to walk away, to create rather than despoil. Easy things to write when the boot is not on your throat or the barrel pointed at you or your child.
Several days passed and I was called back overseas, back to my life. As I packed my things, my mother was hanging around, silently lamenting.
“I’m not leaving forever.”
“I know. It’s just not the same without you and your sister.”
“Ah, you’ll be grand. You don’t need my sorry arse around.”
I left a pile of books and asked her if she could drop them into a secondhand shop. I sifted through them for something worth taking on the plane.
“That thing I mentioned the other day…”
“What’s that?”
“The story about the boy with the pigeons.”
“What about it?”
“It was him. The kid was your dad. His sister told me. It wasn’t someone else. They shot at him and he was terrified. Barely made it inside the house. No way to live,” she concluded to herself.
I froze, books still in hand.
“She said they used to go down the docks into the old warehouses, grain stores, and climb up into the rafters or find pigeons colonizing cupboards and grab them, stick them inside their jumpers. They’d keep them in the shed for a week or so, and feed them and domesticate them. Then they’d fly them. He was looking after them. That was his obsession, and then the army pulled up one day.”
I shook my head. “That’s … quite a thing.”
Silence. I stared out my old bedroom window. Birds were sitting on the telegraph wire.
“I don’t think your da knew what was happening. How could he at that age? His da had been in the army, his uncles, his grandfather. Not long before that, he’d been a paperboy, delivering Belfast Telegraphs. He used to drop copies round to the soldiers in Brooke Park. They’d send him on errands, to pick up things from the corner shop. Maybe he even looked up to them. Wanted to be one of the lads. All those strange accents. He remembered one of them showing him a Polaroid of his girlfriend. And then they turned…”
Ideology is overrated. Few people are really that romantic or deranged. It’s emphasized because it distances as much as it gives the appearance of explanation. This is not to say there are not ideologues. Ideologues exist, but it’s best to pay attention to what they do rather than what they say, or what they say they do. Often there’s a dishonesty there, even to themselves. The ultra-righteous frequently have less-than-righteous motives, but it goes further than that, into the realms where you can see in the fanatic a profound disbelief in what they claim to espouse, an intense doubt and failing at the core of their supposed faith, and thus all the more need to shout and attack and convert.
You can only be absolutist with little or no experience. This is one reason the young are radical and the rich can be casually cruel. As you live and experience, you learn that people are complex, contradictory, nuanced. People do not fit where ideologues place them.
There are other much more compelling and truthful reasons for conflict, some noble, some cynical; not least, fear, revulsion, and a sense of injustice. Countless signed up after harassment. The Bloody Sunday and Ballymurphy massacres, when the British Parachute Regiment went on a killing spree of Catholic civilians, were huge recruitment drives for the IRA, showing the protest route of the Social Democratic and Labour Party to be woefully insufficient, earning them an unfair sobriquet in graffiti: the “Stoop Down Low Party.” It worked both ways. Many prominent loyalists became involved after seeing blood-soaked bundles, containing what had moments earlier been little children, being brought out of what had been the Balmoral Furniture Company and elsewhere.
Violence begets violence. Those immersed in it know it; those who profit from it at a distance know it even more. Not much is truly holy in this world, but precious is the person who does not pass on the pain and the desire for retribution, that self-sustaining spiral; who says, “No more,” not out of resignation or defeat, but out of something that might be called love, if it even needs a name.
It became clear to me now what my father had given me. He had broken the cycle.
“You remember Cedar Street?” my mother asked unexpectedly.
“Of course.”
“You remember your dad got his tattoo changed?”
“No.”
“You know he has my name on his arm. It didn’t always say that. It used to be something else. Three letters.”
Beginning with “I” and ending with “A.”
She continued, “That was a different world then. It might look the same, but it was different. He didn’t want you and your sister exposed to any of that. That was the most important thing for him. Family. Protection. It always was.”
Just then I had a sudden memory of my cousin Robert nudging my father as he demanded to see his new inking. “And they say romance is dead, eh?”
Flotsam and Jetsam
The city lights twinkled in the distance. Usually the glow of the city extinguished the stars above too, but I could see the constellations, like campfires or microscopic phosphorescence or distant burning civilizations. The lighthouse at Culmore no longer shone. Its light had lasted from the discovery of gold in California until the discovery of the Higgs boson particle below Switzerland. It did not shine, but I knew it was still there. Under the bridge I could see the white light of Ballynagard Lighthouse, pulsing every three seconds. There were no ships in sight but it kept on, the river mirroring its light.
I sat on the rocks, gazing but no longer searching. He had been found earlier that day. Close to the town. I’d been told by text. They had brought Andrew back home to his mother. I’d been too late, much too late. I found myself apologizing out loud at the riverside.
The frost was already creeping over the rocks, turning them to glass. I wondered what it would take to freeze the river again. These were the rocks where Needles had washed up. I gazed out at the other city, upside down in a mirror world, shimmering and reflecting on the water. It would be easy, too easy, to be elegiac. Suicide was too raw for that. It felt like both a tragedy and a wounding. My grandmother Phyllis had not chosen her fate, but the others had, in different ways. Needles had feared a slow, painful death and so she had chosen a quick one. She met it head-on, and as sad and as wasteful as it was, I was forced to trust her. Her life was hers to take, but she shouldn’t have felt the need to. Nobody should.
I was leaving in the morning. I stoo
ped and picked up a small piece of wood from the shore, sculpted by the water. I couldn’t tell what it had come from. Maybe it was nothing but dreck. Maybe flotsam. Maybe ballast. Times will change and people will come and say that certain things did not happen. The entire existence of some will be washed away. Yet there are stories within this junk, and souls within these stories. There was no ending to it. In a day or two, another young fella would be reported missing or seen going into the river. There is nothing to do but offer each other—those who are left, those still trapped within this miracle—the possibility of a life worth living, in defiance of “No Future.”
The darkness is coming. Let it wait.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to my family, friends, and loved ones for their remarkable support. Thanks to everyone I spoke with, concerning the subjects in this book and the vast quantities of material that did not or could not make it into these pages, for their bravery in opening up.
I am indebted to a number of texts, and writers, for guidance while writing Inventory and its lost predecessor, Tidewrack.
Chief among these is Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Mainstream Publishing, 2001), by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton, and David McVea. Documenting the killings of the conflict in which we grew up, it is dark and essential reading for anyone delving into this part of the world.
“The Spoil of Mariners” (Lapham’s Quarterly, September 25, 2013) is a beautifully written account, by the gifted writer Colin Dickey, on the theme of maritime scurvy, which I am indebted to as an introduction to the topic.
My deep gratitude to Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith for their kindness and support, particularly as a portion of the text herein appeared in their exquisite Winter Papers, albeit in a different form. Along with the likes of the mighty Susan Tomaselli, Lucy Caldwell, and Damian Smyth, they are a force for good for Irish writers, at home and in the diaspora, and for literature in general.
Inventory Page 32