For a minute, he saw all the blood that had been spilled in this tiny city, as though the dank walls and depressed streets were some mythical and priceless jewel that could restore a people to itself, if only the sacrifice were large enough.
The march started out much as he expected, the crowd, ragged about its edges, moving out from the large grassy area of Bishops Field which lay under the shadow of the vast Creggan housing estate. Banners flapped in the wind above hunched shoulders and ruffled hair—Civil Rights for All, Release all Internees and End Special Powers Act were just some among the many that furled and fluttered, giving the moving mass a festive air. Still the uneasy feeling grew stronger, spreading out through his stomach like slow moving ice water, as the crowd wended their way down toward Brandywell along the Lone Moor Road. Like some slow-moving beast eating all in its path, they gathered more marchers at every corner, the edges of the crowd shifting and absorbing the newcomers, while the stewards fought like collies on the fringes to keep the flock moving in a half-assed orderly fashion.
His eye was drawn to a little girl watching from the roadside as they passed. The January sunshine gilded her red hair with a watery glow. She raised a hand and waved to him, he waved back and she grinned, her gapped smile warm as fire, yet the ice in his belly resisted the thaw. He looked back once as they rounded the corner into Williams Street and saw that she was still up on tiptoe waving.
They were down the steep incline of the street now, and it was there that the first soldiers were seen. A large detachment on foot, flanked by Saracens. Pat sighed and moved forward. There was never a more certain sign of a society’s failure than the sight of soldiers and tanks in the streets. He looked up; the Guildhall Clock Tower was clearly visible. The time was three forty-five and the world was about to come open at the seams.
There were boys popping about like fleas on the rubble strewn barricades; ones who’d come out for trouble and the chance of knocking a soldier a good whack with a stone. Hands shoved in their pockets, high on the balls of their feet in anticipation of the uneven battle to come.
He scanned the area; the barricades that blocked Rossville Street, the main thoroughfare coming into the Bogside, putting the crowd’s back to the Free Derry sign where Catholic Derry began and British rule held no sway. The uneasy shiver in his spine had grown considerably as the crowd progressed up from the Bogside. He eyed the horizon that wrapped chill and gray around city stone and grassy slopes. He thought he saw a shadowy figure high on an abandoned building, but when he turned his head, the shadow was gone.
On the platform, Bernadette Devlin was speaking, assuring everyone that it was a perfectly legal meeting and there was no need to panic, when a volley of shots erupted from behind the crowd.
The growl of armored cars filled the air and the sudden thump of soldier’s feet as they poured out of the vehicles. There were at least twenty and they rushed forward, rifles up and cocked. Pat felt as though he were frozen in place while madness swirled around him. Then the air was rent in two with a series of sharp cracks. Christ—that wasn’t the sound of rubber bullets, Pat thought. The ice water in his stomach rushed through his whole body and his legs unlocked, moving of their own accord.
“Those are real bullets!” someone screamed.
“Disperse, disperse, disperse!” came over the loudspeakers, panicking the crowd further as everyone rush pell-mell in a thousand different directions under the report of rifles that were shooting to kill, not control.
Blocked by troops releasing choking clouds of CS gas, rubber bullets and dye at the end of Williams Street, the crowd surged back toward the open area near Free Derry Corner. Between was the waste ground of the Rossville Flats car park and the open area behind. A huge mass of unarmed humanity now out in the open, whose flesh was all too vulnerable to the bullets that were flying down from the walls.
Moving through the crowd, Pat risked a quick glance up at the clogged artery of Rossville Street. People were still bunched like panicked cattle trying to make their way through to some sort of safety. The panic was in the Paras’ favor, no one could tell where the shots were coming from, and so all were clear targets as they ran in complete panic. The only cover might come from the walls and rubble in the forecourt of the Rossville Flats. There were soldiers directly across in Glenfada Park, he’d seen them, rifles at the ready, eyes scoping the crowd, just waiting for an excuse.
He made his way across the street. It was like moving through a maelstrom of screaming, terrified souls who’d just discovered the gates of hell were opening beneath their feet. He made it, though, pushing as many as he could with him, yelling at them to find cover rather than running about in the open.
He yelled at a boy walking slowly across the open ground of the forecourt, in clear view of the rifles. He recognized him as one of the boys who’d been near the barricades, laughing as though they were on a grand lark.
“Come on man—move toward the wall!”
The boy turned, face a blank. “I think I’ve been hit, I—it hurts to breathe.”
The front of the lad’s sweater was soaked with blood; even now it dripped into the weave of his Sunday trousers. There was blood leaking from the corners of his mouth as well. Lung shot.
“Christ have mercy,” Pat breathed, and then took the boy by the arm and pulled him toward the dubious safety offered by the high walls of the Flats. The boy collapsed twice, and Pat finally hooked an arm across his chest and pulled him, half running, half crawling as bullets singed the air blue around him.
He saw Father Jim standing up from the side of an injured man and took the boy directly to him.
“He’s been hit in the chest,” Pat said, laying his burden down against the brick wall. “Can you help him?”
Father Jim was already kneeling, peeling back the boy’s sodden shirt. He shook his head. “I’ll do what I can,” the priest said grimly, “but he needs to get to hospital. I think the bullet’s gone through his lung.”
Pat knew the odds of getting the boy to the hospital in time weren’t in their favor. Right now it looked as though the soldiers were preventing any aid from coming into the area. So he would have to get out to relay information, and to find a way to bring help in. It was impossible to go back down towards Williams Street. Gas was still heavy in the air, slight whiffs of it floating up to sting eyes and throats. The only possibility seemed to lie with getting out past the Free Derry wall. He was gauging the distance and trying to decide if he should make a run for it when he saw a flutter of white across the forecourt. A man was walking out slowly, white handkerchief aloft, trying to reach a boy who was lying wounded near the middle of the open ground. Some primal instinct must have warned him that he was caught in the crosshairs of a soldier’s rifle, for he dropped to his knees and began to crawl, still heading for the wounded boy.
Movement at the corner of his peripheral vision caught Pat’s attention. He looked up and time stopped, poised itself on the fulcrum of a pin, and then exploded outward into history; the burn of cordite in the air, the motion of the sniper rising over the wall as the man crawled as close to the ground as he could manage and still keep moving. These things became memory and event even as they happened. Something surged in Pat—blind animal rage, the taste of it red in his mouth, the smell hot on the wind.
“Christ have mercy,” he breathed to himself before crawling out toward the man. The ground in front of him was instantly peppered with bullets, the dust blinding him as it kicked up into his face. Someone grabbed his ankle from behind jerking him back, scraping his knees in the process. He kicked his leg free and started forward again, blinking the grit from his eyes.
The man was still crawling, dazed, uncertain which direction might offer some safety. None did. The first bullet to hit him drove him to his chin, his mouth a round ‘O’ of shock. Still he pushed himself along, cheek scraping the ground, eyes unblinking with bewilderment. His body jerked one more time and then he fell full length against the cold stones.
Bullets sprayed the ground in front of Pat again, dust choking him, eyes streaming from the smoke. He tucked his face into the collar of his coat and pushed forward. A bullet grazed past his ear with a high-pitched whine, singeing his skin in passing. He moved again, was within feet of the man when the pavement exploded in his face. A burning pain sliced across the side of his head, flattening him to the ground instantly. His vision filled with a haze of smoke and fire, then went black.
When he came to he was lying flat, fingers just touching the scraped knuckles of the man he’d crawled out to save. A sudden silence had enveloped them, as though the chaos were very far away. Maybe, he thought dazedly, the bullets had temporarily deafened him. From somewhere a breeze blew across them, ruffling the man’s thin pale hair, animating that which was no longer alive. For it was too late. The look of profound surprise had changed into something far more permanent.
Pat closed his eyes, willing himself to stay still, despite the overwhelming instinct to run and hide. He knew if he moved he was dead, it was that simple. Now all he could do was pray that no one was crazy enough to try and come after him.
Someone did try, though.
He heard the footsteps, careful and slow. His rescuer was a middle-aged man, wearing an anorak and a pair of navy trousers that he’d likely worn to church that morning. His dark hair was thinning in front, and his narrow face was anxious as he approached Pat and the dead man, his arms held up high in a gesture of peace to the soldiers. Pat willed him back, his mouth forming the word ‘no’ in silent desperation.
“Tis alright son, we’ll get ye out of—”
The shot came from behind and spun the man around so that he faced the wall he’d left behind. The exit wound opened out into an arc of blood and bone as he fell to the side, his head only a few feet from where Pat lay. The blood was warm on Pat’s face, the smell of copper so strong that it took all he had not to retch onto the slick rectangles of pavement beneath his face. The taste of it was leaking into his mouth and he could feel tiny fragments of bone cutting into the back of his left hand.
Behind him a wail rose, high and thin on the chill air, a keening for an entire people, for a nation shot down while trying to get up off their knees. He thought that if one cared to look, one would see hope rising, ghost-like, on that wail, abandoning all those that were lying below.
How long he was there on the pavement, the chill of the stone leeching into his body, the lifeblood of another drying tight on his skin, he never knew. It felt like forever, as though the world might have passed through an age, progressed a thousand years or fallen back a thousand, before he heard the voice of redemption in his ear.
“Come on laddie, we’ve got to get you out of here.”
“Father Jim?”
“It’s me, alright. I’m goin’ to have a look at your head before we move you.”
“It’s only a graze,” Pat said, though the amount of blood that had flowed into his face since he’d been hit frightened him.
Father Jim probed around the wound, causing Pat to take a sharp breath.
“Does it hurt badly, then?”
“Stings like the devil. I’d be more worried if it didn’t hurt though.”
“You’re right, it’s a shallow graze, they always bleed the worst for some reason. We’ll get you a stretcher.
“No, I can walk,” Pat said, “I was only scared to move for fear they’d shoot again.”
“I think they’ve stopped,” Father Jim said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced that the carnage was over.
Pat pushed himself up onto legs that were the consistency of poorly set jelly. He stumbled over to a brick wall and leaned into it, dazed, the cut on the side of his head still trickling blood. He blinked, trying to take in what was before him, numb with incomprehension. A slight haze still hung over the courtyard, the wind unable to clear the bullet traceries out of the air. Around him, people kneeled, sat, stood dazed and horrified, some still half choking on the whiff of CS gas that had blown their way. From where he stood, he could see two bodies that were unmistakably dead, and more wounded. The young boy who’d been shot through the lung was now lying on a stretcher, with Father Jim praying over him.
Pat wiped a hand across his forehead, clearing the blood from his eyes, then limped over to the boy. He was on his back, a large dark pool of blood congealing beneath him. His eyes were a dark brown and stared sightlessly at the sky above. A fringe of brown hair, neatly trimmed, fell over his forehead. Christ, he was just a baby.
“Is he—”
Father Jim nodded, then drew a jacket up over the boy’s face. “Yes, he’s dead and about all of sixteen years if he was a day, God help us.”
The priest stood, face gray and exhausted with shock. “You’d best let me look at your head again, lad, it’s still bleeding.”
“I’ll do, there’s people need your help more than I.”
“Quit being such a stubborn bastard, and let me have a look.”
He winced slightly as Father Jim parted his hair to have another look at the wound. “It’s shallow enough that you won’t need stitches. You were damn lucky, another millimetre to the right and you’d be dead.”
Pat nodded numbly, wondering why he’d been spared. It had been that damn close, and he’d walked away with a cut in his scalp, nothing more. It made no sense, particularly not when he could still taste another man’s mortality on his own tongue.
“I think the Paras have left,” Father Jim said, eyeing the walls warily. “So we’d best get on with it.”
For the next hour they assessed the wounded, patched them as best as they could with cloth torn from shirts and jackets, and got them into ambulances. The ones suffering from shock and fear they set on the road home, knowing there was little they could do for them in any case.
Finally they had cleared everyone off, and Father Jim was conferring with the last set of medics to leave the scene, his good wool coat long gone to cover an injured boy, his black shirt now three quarters red, hands and face smeared with dried blood.
Pat leaned against a post, eyes still smarting from the gas, throat raw and head thumping. How could this have happened? And why? Did the British establishment really hate the Irish so much that it would issue a shoot to kill order on a bunch of unarmed civilians? How could it be declared illegal for a man to have rights in his own country? He was so damn tired of questions that had no answers. Tired of not having the right to be a man who was allowed to walk free in the streets of his own land. The rage was still there, crimson as the blood that stained the streets in this wee town, and it frightened him, for he no longer knew of what he might be capable.
“Pat lad, are ye comin’? We’ve done all we can here.”
Pat nodded and followed the blood-soaked form of the priest from the killing ground.
LATER, WHEN THE DEAD WERE TOTALLED, they numbered thirteen, all male, all unarmed, all Catholic. They ranged in age from seventeen to forty-one, and left behind mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, and wives and children that would never be able to make sense of that which had no reason. The wounded numbered eighteen and were, again, predominantly male, with the exception of Margaret Deery and Alana Burke, the lone women wounded that day. And then there were all the things seen by those who had escaped the bullets. A priest being led off at gunpoint, denied the right to give absolution to the dying. Boys with gun muzzles shoved to their foreheads, young men beaten to the ground and soldiers who stood by as people bled to death on the pavement.
As the news flowed out around the world, it became clear just how far apart the Irish and British were ideologically, politically and in basic understanding. This was apparent in the attitude, which manifested itself in one British military correspondent, who was in high spiri
ts after the news came in and was heard to say of the Paras “They shot well, didn’t they?”
For the Irish it was horror, a slaughter, a tragedy that was entirely senseless. For the British it was a regrettable mistake, but these things happened under pressure, civilians would just have to understand that. But what was portrayed as a technical disaster on British newscasts, flickering cheerily in British living rooms was, in Ireland, a crossing of the Rubicon from which there could be no turning back. The monster might hide behind smooth suits and plummy tones, gentlemen’s clubs and ancestral privilege, but its bloody teeth and claws had been felt and seen, and would not be forgotten.
In the House of Commons, Bernadette Devlin, the lone nationalist member in an alien Parliament, was denied the right to speak on Bloody Sunday, while wake was read over thirteen dead Irishmen by an Englishman who’d gone to the right schools, had the right accent and not a clue about the wee country across the water.
In England it was a minor event, unfortunate, but quickly swallowed by the business of crown and country. In Ireland, there were now few left who would say no to the men who preached physical force as the only medium that Britain could understand. And so the IRA flourished in the wake of a chill winter’s massacre, their numbers swelling through city and field and even over the border in the sleepy Republic.
Rage, both righteous and dissolute, had raised its head from slumber and the roar would be heard down through the corridors of history for decades to come.
Chapter Sixty-two
No Place for Love or Dream at All...
THE POSTMORTEMS WERE BEING HELD at Altnagelvin Hospital. Father Jim explained this to Pat over an untouched breakfast and tea that was tepid in their cups. Neither could summon an appetite, nor had either slept since the horrific events of the previous day.
Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2) Page 71