A Son Called Gabriel

by Damian McNicholl

  “You sly dog.”

  I was relieved the first obstacle had been so easily overcome. I glanced about. “Ahm, Pani, what excuse should we use about your car when she hears it?”

  Its hideousness couldn’t be ignored, especially when Fiona had told me as casually as if she were talking about the weather that she was having both horses shipped to England when she went over to university. That’s how damned rich her father was, and now I was seeing his daughter home in a cacophonous deathtrap.

  “Don’t push it,” Pani said.

  “I didn’t think she’d accept a ride home on the first night.” His girl was now looking quizzically at us.

  “Come to think of it,” he said, “where does Fiona live, exactly?”

  “Castlebenem.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Pani turned away and looked over at the girl, mouthing he’d be right over and sealing his commitment with a honeyed smile. When he turned back to me, I got a bulge-eyed snarl. “We’ll have to go through a bad Protestant area to get there.” His voice had lowered precipitously when he uttered the word “Protestant,” on account of where we were. “It’s late. We could end up with cut throats if the UDA have set up an illegal checkpoint to try and snare Catholics.”

  “Don’t be silly.” I laughed to disguise my own sudden unease. “We won’t get snared.”

  While Fiona chatted to some friends after the social ended, Pani, my cousin, and I discussed the problem clandestinely. Martin sided with me and Pani eventually gave in.

  Outside, Fiona’s glance at the dented car door hinted strongly that I’d been right to be concerned. Its tooth-aching screech, notwithstanding Martin’s burst of fake coughs as he whipped it open, confirmed it. We roared our way across the car park to join the line of exiting cars.

  “Sorry about the noise,” I whispered. “Giles says the body shop did a horrible repair job on his exhaust.”

  “Sorry, Gabriel, I didn’t hear that,” she said. “What did you say?”

  Boys and girls gawked in as they crossed in front of the car or walked alongside it. The line moved slowly and then came to an eventual halt. Unable to fake it any longer, Martin said something about searching the dial to find Radio Luxembourg and lowered his head toward the radio.

  “You know damned well it’s pre-programmed,” Pani said.

  He pressed the button and the Radio Luxembourg jingle came on to accompany the metallic snort of his muffler, thus obliging Martin to continue staring ridiculously at the radio or lift his head and look out the window again. He chose to lift his head and look out. After what seemed like hours, the traffic started moving and the muffler’s whine grew to a roar as we sped toward Fiona’s home.

  As our liking was mutual, Fiona and I started dating, but I didn’t tell my parents about it. She was a Protestant and they wouldn’t accept her.

  To my surprise, Father bought a new car, a gorgeous fire-engine red Mercedes, and added me to the insurance policy so I could borrow it at night, despite Mammy’s high-pitched objections. I took Fiona to other Catholic school socials along with Pani and the girl he’d met at Granderson College that evening. Occasionally, we went to a disco by the seaside that was attended by both Catholics and Protestants.

  Caroline and Connor, the latter now dating a twenty-year-old bank teller, came as well. Sometimes Martin joined us, although not often, as he didn’t have a steady girlfriend. Unfortunately, the fruit of deceit being ultimate discovery, my sister forgot herself one evening in my mother’s presence and let it slip that Fiona came from Castlebenem. It didn’t matter to Mammy that Fiona was a pupil at exclusive Granderson College, that she owned two horses being shipped to England in the near future, or that her father owned every blade of grass around the village. All that mattered was that Fiona was of the wrong religion.

  “Harry, put your foot down and stop this craziness,” she said, as I was about to leave for a dance. “Take back the car keys.”

  “He’s only young once,” Father said, “and has more sense than to get serious with a Protestant lassie.”

  “These things get serious.” Shallow lines had formed recently above my mother’s eyes and mouth, and they deepened to fissures as she squinted and clamped her lips shut to a fraction just below the point of bloodlessness. She twisted her torso around sharply toward the television with not the slightest intention of watching it.

  “We’ll have no Protestant hussies about this house,” she said to the television. Then she whipped ’round to me again. “There’s more than enough of your own kind to date.”

  “I’m not bloody-well marrying her.”

  “I’m not allowing her to darken my doorstep.”

  “Her people’s very big,” Father said, “with pots of money.”

  “I don’t give two hoots of a tawny owl who or what her people are. She could be royalty, and she’s still not coming about here.”

  Father’s eyebrows arched and he peered over to indicate he sympathized with me.

  “I’m not giving her up,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re as pigheaded as Brendan,” she said. “The damned same as him. Every bit as determined to bring people trouble. Is that what you’re planning to do? To follow his example and disgrace yourself, and us, into the bargain?”

  “You’re overreacting, Eileen,” Daddy said.

  I smiled brightly at Father. Sometimes, he really surprised me.

  “You can just go to hell, Gabriel,” Mammy said. “I’m washing my hands of you.”

  As she left the room, she slammed the door so hard the windowpanes vibrated. I couldn’t believe she’d invoked Uncle Brendan’s name to suit her own selfish needs, especially since she’d been so understanding when he’d left the priesthood. It was infuriating. Didn’t she see that she was as bigoted as those women she’d challenged years ago at the bacon counter in the supermarket? Moreover, Fiona was fun. I wasn’t giving her up. Of course, Mammy didn’t—couldn’t—understand that Fiona was also proof I couldn’t be gay.

  For the first time, I felt hatred toward my mother. I resolved not to back down, no matter the cost. A moral stand had to be taken against her bigotry.

  I stopped talking to her. It lasted for weeks, becoming so bad, a room would literally grow tense as soon as one of us entered and saw the other was present. Only Father didn’t notice, or if he did, he did a good job pretending he didn’t. The silence was poisonous—but so was her intolerance.

  Matters came to a head during the seventh week, when she burst into tears at the supper table.

  “You’re destroying me,” she said. “You’ll drive me into a mental institution.”

  “I would like to speak to you,” I said, “but I can’t accept your attitude about Fiona.”

  My delivery was dry and awkward, as if my tongue needed oiling. She and I started talking again and she abandoned any further attempt to sanction me. I was permitted to see Fiona, on the condition I wouldn’t get serious and eventually marry her. This condition, together with a promise I would not bring her home, concluded the issue. My mother felt she, too, had won.

  Twenty-Nine

  Wake up, Gabriel.” A callused hand shook my shoulder briskly. Standing at the side of my bed, dressed in jeans and a sweater, Father stopped shaking me only after I lifted my head off the pillow.

  “What time is it?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

  “Four in the morning. I need you to come with me.”

  Five minutes later, we climbed into one of his dump trucks, with the logo, HARRY HARKIN, LTD, KNOCKBURN, and telephone number written on the passenger door. As we traveled along the road in the darkness, Father explained that the IRA planned to disrupt all traffic between Derry and Belfast as a protest against the internment of seven local men who’d been taken by the British Army the previous week. Accused of being in the IRA and participating in shootings and bombings, the men were being held at the Ballykelly police barracks without due process, interrogated under the Emergency Powers Act
that the British government used as a weapon against only the Catholic community. As the owner of a construction company and a Catholic, the IRA had approached Father—along with a few other construction company owners—and told him to drive to a quarry near Duncarlow, where his lorry would be loaded with gravel. He was then to drive to the bottom of the town and dump it across the main road leading from Derry to Belfast. I was his alibi, in case the police stopped him. They’d never believe a middle-aged father would take such a risk and break the law in the presence of his young son.

  Under the guard of two hooded men brandishing rifles, we waited as an excavator dumped gravel into the bed of the first dump truck, and then Father pulled up for his to be loaded. When we arrived in Duncarlow, three more men wearing dark green jackets and black balaclavas also stood guard, one armed with a Thompson machine gun. One of the IRA men watched me intently, a revolver handle peeking from his right jacket pocket. In a cacophony of squealing air brakes and roaring engines, each driver raised the beds of their trucks in turn. Gravel and stones spilled out to form mountains across the road. Now almost five o’clock, there was still no traffic on the road.

  Presently, the man with the revolver lit a cigarette and walked over to one of his colleagues. My heart stopped and then began racing. The man walked and smoked his cigarette like my cousin Connor.

  “Pity we can’t hang around to see the look on the police and soldiers’ faces when they see this mess,” said Father, and he laughed as we drove away. “They’ll have a lot of digging to clear this away and open the road for a bunch of angry people who’ll be late for work in Belfast.”

  My mind dumped information into my consciousness as fast as Father’s truck had dumped the gravel and I couldn’t form the words to reply. Surely the man could not have been Connor; many other smokers held their cigarettes with the burning end cupped inside their hand. I was imagining it. My cousin didn’t know how to fire guns. He was a respectable banker now.

  Now beginning my final year at Saint Malachy’s, I had a major decision to make. University applications had to be completed by early November. The process, administered from England, allowed five university choices in descending order of preference, and one was obligated to attend one’s first choice upon acceptance by that institution. I felt enormous pressure. Martin was now studying at a fashion institute in London and loving it, and Fiona and Pani (who was repeating because he’d only passed one exam and not even a mediocre institution would accept him) couldn’t wait to quit Ulster. They tried frequently to persuade me to leave, too. Fiona, knowing I hated Ulster politics just as much as she, couldn’t understand my hesitancy.

  But Belfast beckoned as a violent refuge. Going to university amid its bombs and shootings appeared to be my safest option. There weren’t homosexuals lurking on its street corners, like there were over in England, as that sort of activity was illegal in Ulster.

  At school, Father Rafferty made me head boy and I was in charge of the prefects, the dispensing of fairness and compassion now truly mine. The tiny apricot shield, that varnished symbol of power I’d first seen on Finbar’s lapel years ago, was now affixed to my blazer.

  During lunchtime, Pani and I drank frothy cappuccinos in a new café in town that welcomed students, or we drove around town in his car. Unfortunately, our jaunts in his old motor terminated abruptly one morning. As Father Rafferty recited the Angelus at assembly, an enormous bang rocked the gymnasium. Dust and plaster rained down upon us and windows shattered. Father Shaw, the vice-head, barged through one of the gymnasium doors, mounted the stage, and conferred with the headmaster.

  We were informed that a bomb had gone off in the council housing estate abutting the school’s west wing. The estate was a sore point with Father Rafferty; it challenged his priestly obligation to turn the other cheek. It had been hastily constructed by the Protestant-dominated borough with the sole purpose of preventing Saint Malachy’s from purchasing the land for expansion. Part of the estate’s surrounding lawn ran alongside the school’s driveway where Pani parked his car.

  After assembly ended, we ran to the driveway and saw that his vehicle was damaged beyond repair. Bedlam existed at the driveway entrance. It was akin to watching a war film: Pani wailed the loss of his car, policemen shoveled debris into trash bags, soldiers crouched pointing guns, and ambulances screamed their hurried approach. Later, I learned a part-time Protestant policeman (who was also our government-appointed truant officer), his Catholic wife, and their four-year-old child had been blown to pieces by the massive car bomb. It was body parts I’d seen the police shovel into the trash bags.

  This man may or may not have been bigoted. But he was married to a Catholic and had walked our corridors in the execution of his duty to monitor Catholic school truancy. The hideous reality of Ulster life confronted me starkly.

  I told Uncle Brendan about what I’d witnessed when he called the following weekend. There was a silence after I’d finished and I thought we’d been cut off.

  “No, I’m still here,” he said. “I was just thinking about all the horseshit young people have to put up with over there.”

  If the carnage hadn’t been so heavy on my heart, I would have laughed and teased him about using such a Yankee term.

  “Someone should take a stick to the politicians and beat them about the head until they agree to work together and reach a solution so everyone can live in peace over there,” he added.

  “That’s easy for you to say, Uncle Brendan. You’re gone from here.”

  “Get out of that cesspit. The only thing it’s good for is sucking the souls out of the youth. I don’t want to see that happen to you. You’ve got a good soul.” Uncle Brendan paused. “You’re dear to me, Gabriel.”

  Though it made me feel good, I didn’t know how to respond to his last statement. My parents never said things like this to me.

  “Go to university in England,” he continued. “Get away from this evil. You’ll eventually settle down with Fiona, or some other nice girl, and have those children you want.”

  Shocked by the bombing and influenced by what Uncle Brendan had said, I began giving more serious weight to going to an English university. However, his advice had been a double-edged sword, as his aside about my marrying and having children had stoked the flames of my anxieties further.

  Fiona and I had progressed to the petting stage, but it gave me no pleasure. The lusty urgency I’d experienced with Bridget in the living room of the Bundoran B&B had never repeated. Granted, I got erect, but it wilted quickly and I would not allow her to touch me. Luckily, Fiona didn’t appear eager to touch my thing, or to have me touch her. She spared me anguish in that regard when, feeling it my manly obligation to probe her body further, I slipped an unenthusiastic hand underneath her skirt one night.

  “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,” she said, clamping her hand around my wrist.

  We’d been cuddling in the car, following a night of celebrating the fact that she’d come second in a horse show, and I drew my face from her breasts and gazed at her in feigned annoyance.

  “That’s for committed relationships.” She bit her lip. “I hope you don’t think I’m prudish.”

  “I always thought Protestant girls were easier than Catholic girls.”

  Fiona didn’t laugh.

  “It’s a joke.”

  “You’re okay about us not . . . you know . . . going all the way?”

  “I respect you, Fiona.”

  Flashing strobe lights roamed like searchlights around the room. Along one side of the dance floor was the elevated disc jockey’s kiosk, where a young bearded man sifted through records. Fiona, Caroline, and I were at Tramp’s, a large seaside resort disco frequented by Protestants and Catholics. We’d met up with Connor, too, who was here with a new girlfriend whose name I didn’t bother to memorize. He discarded girls more often than underwear.

  The track ended and Middle of the Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” started playing.

&
nbsp; “Let’s get a drink,” I hollered to Fiona, peeling my damp shirt off my sweaty chest.

  “We’ve just arrived,” she said, and she turned in a circle holding her hands high in the air. “I want to dance. You go.”

  I walked off the floor and stood at the perimeter for a minute, watching her and Caroline dancing together. Threading my way through a dense forest of people, I reached the bar and ordered a beer. Tramp’s management turned a blind eye to underage drinking.

  “Hey there, mate.” A hand tapped my right shoulder. “Long time, no see.”

  A young man with cropped hair pushed into the tight space beside me. Dressed in a blue T-shirt and faded jeans, I recognized his intense blue eyes instantly, though I didn’t remember his name.

  “How’s your Granny doing?” he said.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Any more hens escape since?”

  The bartender placed a pint of beer before me on the counter. The soldier’s eyes flicked from mine to the beer.

  “I’ll pay for it . . . a pint for me, too.” As we waited for the bartender to return, the soldier must have spotted my confusion. “Richie,” he offered. “Gabriel, isn’t it?”

  “How’d you remember my name?”

  He flashed me a beautiful smile. My heart and belly lurched. As he leaned over to settle with the bartender, I couldn’t stop my eyes running up and down his strong chest and defined forearms that were the color of caramel. He clinked my glass and we sipped our beers.

  “Great place this, isn’t it?” he said.

  I nodded, knowing I had to leave but unable to command my feet to move.

  “I can enjoy a night out here without worrying about getting shot.” He grinned at my half-open mouth. “I’ve got a black sense of humor.”

  All the men in the place, including the male bar staff, wore their hair fashionably long and sported heavy sideburns. Richie stood out like a beacon. Afraid Connor would catch me talking to a soldier, I glanced hastily around the room.