The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  We placed the clock in a tabernacle niche gouged out from the clay wall of the trench. There were other votive cavities, containing an array of minor icons, like bunches of defunct keys, candle-stumps, and empty snuff-tins. The clay of the trench wall was malleable as Plasticine, and from it we’d make brick cities – Lilliputs of Belfast – on the plain above, and bombard them with marbles or pebbles, for a condition of the city was its eventual destruction. Then men came with cross-staves and theodolites, and paced the landscape; shortly after, a giant yellow earth-moving machine moved in and tore a swathe across the war theatre; and our blitzed stage properties vanished forever under the chevroned caterpillar-tracks of Brobdingnag. The houses started to go up, attaining hitherto unknown levels. I used to watch the bricklayers ply their trade, as they deployed masonic tools of plumb-line, try-square and spirit-level, setting up taut parallels of pegs and string, before throwing down neatly gauged dollops of mortar, laying bricks in practised, quick monotony, chinking each into its matrix with skilled dints of the trowel. Had their basic modules been alphabet bricks, I could have seen them building lapidary sentences and paragraphs, as the storeyed houses became emboldened by their hyphenated, skyward narrative, and entered the ongoing, fractious epic that is Belfast.

  1 I am pleased that Chambers 20th Century Dictionary gives ‘tag’ as ‘the game of tig’; ‘tig’ is defined as a touch, a twitch, a game on which one who is ‘it’ attempts to touch another.

  THE ULSTER CINEMATOGRAPH THEATRES

  I have a tangled recurrent dream of the dense urban space of Arthur Square and its confluence of five streets – Corn Market, Ann Street, Castle Lane, William Street South and Arthur Street, each with its tributaries of arcades, alleyways and entries. It is a precinct crammed with shops, stores, offices, public houses, cafés, cinemas: here are Joseph Braddell & Son, Gunmakers, Fishing Rod and Tackle Manufacturers; Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds, Ltd., Iron & Steel, Bolt, Nut & Screw Manufacturers; Wm. Rodman & Co., Heraldic and General Stationers, Fancy Goods Warehouse, Print Sellers, Gilders, Picture Frame Makers, Photographic and Artists’ Materials Depot; M’Gee and Co. Ltd., Military, Naval and Ladies’ Tailors, Inventors of the Ulster Coat and Slieve Donard Coat; the X.L. Café and Restaurant; Gillis & M’Farlane, Mayfair School of Dancing; W.J. Kidd & Sons, Boot Upper Manufacturers and Leather Merchants; and The Ulster Cinematograph Theatres, Ltd., (Imperial Picture House & Café), where I saw my first film, Disney’s version of the Jules Verne classic, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, issued in 1954, and starring James Mason as the enigmatic Captain Nemo. The film diverges from the book in several instances, most notably at the end, where the Nautilus and Nemo’s island hideaway are blown up by an atomic bomb; in the book, Nemo drives his vessel into the maelstrom, where ‘at the tide, the pent-up waters between the islands of Ferroe and Loffenden rush with irresistible violence, forming a whirlpool from which no vessel ever escapes’, recalling Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’, passages of which put me in mind of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, which was, I think, the second film I ever saw:

  Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building-timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves …

  And the schoolhouse in Poe’s story ‘William Wilson’ (surely a precursor of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray), in its inscrutable internal dimensions, resembles my dreams of Belfast:

  But the house! – how quaint an old building was this! – to me how veritably a palace of enchantment! There was really no end to its windings – to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be. From each room to every other were sure to be found three or four steps in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable – inconceivable – and so returning in on themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered on infinity.

  Pleasurably lost, I wander through the palpable dream, touching its surfaces of brick and granite, sniffing the soot-flecked air; usually, it is night-time, but the shops are all lit up and open, forming bright inviting porticos. Sometimes, with a doppelgänger jolt, I recognize this is the real world, only slightly altered from when last I visited, or was invited, and I acknowledge my shadow. Finding myself in the sleep department of a vast emporium – I have just climbed its marble Versailles staircase – I resist the urge to bury myself in a double bed, since this is a lucid device for escaping the dream, should one wish to; instructed by an exit sign, I am led down some steps, and emerge in the upper lounge of the Morning Star in Pottinger’s Entry, inhaling its immediate smoky beery aura. The barman is none other than William Hartnell, who played the head barman in Carol Reed’s 1947 film, Odd Man Out, which starred James Mason as a fugitive revolutionary, Johnny McQueen, and I am reminded again of the similar roles of Nemo and McQueen, both highly dedicated criminal idealists. One attempts to rob the wages office of a linen mill to finance his operations; the other loots sunken galleons. Both are haunted by their past; both conspire against the Empire.

  The basic plot of Odd Man Out (taken from F.L. Green’s novel of the same name; Green collaborated on the screenplay) is simple: the robbery of the mill is botched, and McQueen,1 although we have been given to understand he abhors violence, accidentally shoots dead a wages clerk and wounds himself. The get-away driver panics, and McQueen is left to wander the city, pursued by the authorities and by his own men, who have arranged for him to escape by boat; en route, he encounters a number of characters who have various motives for helping him, or selling him. The weather gets progressively worse, as the almost-incessant rain turns to snow; at the end, McQueen and his girl partner are cornered at the harbour gates. She takes a gun and fires at the approaching officers; they return fire; she and McQueen are both shot dead.

  The city in which the film is set is not named, but is immediately identifiable from the opening aerial shot, which pans in from over Belfast Lough – literally, ‘across the water’ – showing us docks, factories, church spires, before focusing on the Albert Clock, which will become a repetitive icon in the unfolding drama, as we read its four faces from various narrative angles, and the toll of its bell reminds the participants and us of the passing of inexorable time. The city is a Daedalian construct, a precursor of Reed’s Vienna of The Third Man, in which even the street scenes, with their strong Caravaggio chiaroscuros, look like interiors, their darkness sporadically relieved by lighted pubs and corner shops; hearse-like cars glide through the gloom, or are parked resignedly at kerbs. As McQueen begins to suffer from bouts of delirium, his cul-de-sac series of places of refuge – an air-raid shelter, a derelict brick-kiln, a bath-tub in a junkyard, the baroque delapidation of an artist’s studio – come to resemblethe cells and chambers of the prison he has escaped from. Belfast is a prison; McQueen is an internal exile.

  One such famous scene takes place in a bar called the Four Winds, a meticulous reconstruction of the Crown Bar – reconstructed, I imagine, because the film technology of the time could not be accommodated within the actual space of the bar, particularly given Reed’s deployment of skewed Doctor Caligari camera angles. The Crown, like many old Belfast pubs, has a row of compartments – booths, or ‘boxes’, as they are known here, though Green calls them cribs – which can be snibbed from inside, thus ensuring privacy for whatever transactions occur within; there is a bell system for summoning a waiter: internal space within internal space. In one of these boxes within a box, McQueen, reluctantly abetted by William Hartnell, finds temporary respite from his pursuers. Many years later, Hartnell was to put his dapper authority to good use when he played the first Doctor Who, the pseudonymous protagonist of the eponymous BBC
TV science fiction serial. The Doctor is a Prospero or Nemo, a Time Lord exiled from his peers, flitting through the universe in his dimension-bending vehicle, the ‘Tardis’. The outward aspect of the ‘Tardis’ is that of a British police telephone box, but its inner surface area is many times greater, forming an intestine maze of chambers, ante-rooms and corridors. One of the serial gags of the plot is the Doctor’s hit-and-miss relationship with his craft (and surely the name is a joke, from the Latin tardus, slow); manipulating the sixties futuristic control-panel, checking all the calibrations, pulling out the Nemo organ stops, he plots a course to an intended destination; almost invariably, he weighs in at the wrong place and the wrong time, in the middle of a local revolution, or an alien invasion.

  The Crown Bar Box is a kind of time-machine, whose interior can accommodate the conversational buzz of about a dozen characters, each with tall anecdotes to tell, whose different times and places interpenetrate the fabric, making a noise like the atmospheric crackle of several short-wave radios yakking simultaneously, hardly interrupted by the giving of a complicated order to the bemused waiter. In these circumstances, time goes by with great rapidity, until ‘time’ is called, and grave white-aproned barmen move among the throng, clinking empty tumblers, glasses, bottles. Then you find yourself pitched out into the starry breeze of a night beyond the open door, already eager for the sobering vinegar tang of fish and chips.

  Meanwhile, back in the Odd Man Out set, Mason is entering a jail delirium again, freaked out by the thrum and buzz of social blather from the world beyond the crib; and we are reminded again of Reed’s elegant deployment of sound to hint at other, parallel dimensions. The sound-track pulses with the noise of the city, which is punctuated, at important desultory intervals, by the bass saxophone fog-note of the escape-vessel, and the aforementioned boom of the Albert Clock. Reed’s ear has picked up a cue from this passage in Green’s novel, and has amplified it, so that it becomes an aural map:

  The others were silent. They were listening to the passage of police cars in the neighbouring streets. The sounds were lifted by the rising wind and carried over the whole district. Occasionally a shriek ascended like the thin tip of a flame twisting and detaching itself to float away and expire or become obliterated by the noisy passing of a private car or lorry on the main road. From somewhere far distant, the sound of a tramcar speeding along a straight road was audible like the noise of life itself in all its indifference to the personal tragedy. A train’s whistle blew for several seconds, and this was followed by the clang of shunting-wagons in a marshalling-yard. And from the docks came the slow-majestic note of a ship’s siren. The three men standing irresolutely in the windswept, empty street heard it. Momentarily, it lifted their sordid lives to the contemplation of life beyond the streets which their own bitter purpose had made deadly. It proclaimed the ocean and wide lands, and rendered small and trivial by comparison the meagre territory and the unrelenting civil strife that were all that these three outlaws had known from earliest infancy.

  And last night, as I slept, my dreams were infiltrated by the atmospheric throb of a surveillant helicopter, vacillating high above the roof of the house like a rogue star; I heard the doppelgänger-doppler noise of ambulance and fire-appliance; I heard dogs howl disconsolately, as someone, not too far away, tinkered with the same wrong note of a blue, piano-keyed accordion. Just after dawn, I was wakened by the clinking of a milkman’s electric float, and remembered empty bottles being used for petrol bombs, fusillading against the incongruous drab-and-olive camouflage of armoured cars, as the riot-torn dark street flickered like an annex of an iron-foundry or inferno.

  The dream shifts again, and I am trapped in a grey force-field between the Shankill and the Falls. A magnetic storm has skewed the normal compass of the district, and the poles are all the wrong way round, repelling when they should attract. Directions are revised, as previously communicating streets are misaligned. The powerful anti-gravitational friction has caused tectonic faults to open up, from which emerge, like flotillas salvaged from the bottom of the North Atlantic, the regurgitated superstructures of defunct, Titanic industries: tilted, blackened spinning-mills; the loading-docks of great bakeries at dawn, illuminated by the smell of electricity and yeast; waterworks in convoluted ravines – dams, races, bridges, locks, conduits, sinks, culverts, sluices, ponds, and acqueducts; tentacles and cables of Leviathan, swarming to the surface from a buried ropewalk; catacomb-like brick-kilns.

  Some of these apparitions are more palpable than others, and may be walked around or in, and explored, once one has worked out how to reach them, for the streets turn into stairs or wynds when least expected. Some have a wobbly mirage tinge about their edges, their reality already decomposing on exposure to the semi-lucid air; when you brush against them, they collapse, and vanish with a sound like falling soot. Sometimes, their demise results in a new regime, and I find myself in a neat terraced street of two-up-one-down houses, their façades painted in blue and red hues, white half-moons scrubbed before the doors, and identical vases arranged with sweet william in all the windows.

  Children are playing. One has attached a rope to the neck of a lamp-post, and spins round it in a dwindle swing. One trundles the hoop of a bicycle-wheel rim with a bit of bent wire. Another bounces a ball between her legs against a wall. Two are burling a skipping-rope, as an endless loop of five trips in and out in syncopated time. Three hop on squares scotched on the granite pavement. Four are taking giant steps and baby steps in staggered sequences. Seven are playing hide-and-seek, but only one is visible. Six in a game of ground-tig have found four window-sill asylums. A minor troop of leather-belted boy scouts drills up and down the cobbled middle of the street, blowing a Lillibulero tune on tin kazoos. Unconsciously, I fall into step, until I suspect a trap. Only then do I remember the two chunks of dynamo-magnet in my pocket. I take them out, and push their North poles together, feeling them vibrate and hum. They touch; the street-scene shimmers briefly, and I step through its fog into home territory, rubbing my eyes, like an escapee from a film matinée, stumbling into daylight.

  I am standing before the door of my grandmother’s house at 3 O’Neill Street.

  1 Reed is generally faithful to Green’s text; but in the book, ‘the Chief of the militant Revolutionary Organisation … was Aloysius John Murtah … known throughout the land as Johnny.’ I had thought that McQueen might be a version of Quinn, from the Irish Ó Coinn, a descendant of Conn; appropriately, the ancient Irish hero Conn bears the epithet ‘of a hundred battles’. However, according to my quizmaster and singer friend, Brian Mullen, McQueen is generally recognized to be from Mac Shuibhne, son of Sweeney, also anglicized as Mawhinnney and McWeeney: and the mythical Sweeney is a King of Ulster who, driven mad by the events of the battle of Moira, imagines himself to be a bird pursued, flitting eternally through the trees, an outcast from society. Sweeney is one of the main protagonists of Flann O’Brien’s novel, At Swim Two Birds, which Reed might have read. One might also ponder the homosexual, or royal, implications of ‘McQueen’; and James Mason’s notoriously unstable ‘Oirish’ accent offers a further ambiguity, that of the nationalist leader who comes from elsewhere, like Hitler, Napoleon, or Seán Mac Stiofáin (John Stephenson), a commander of the IRA in the 1960s who disguised his English birth by adopting in a weird accent possibly influenced by Mason.

  O’NEILL STREET

  I see a lit coronet of gas hissing under a blue kettle, as it begins to whistle up a head of steam on the top of the ‘stove’, as we called this domestic appliance, whose overhead rack was habitually draped with drying socks and drawers; an almost-cool oven contained recently washed empty jars of various sizes for jam-making time, when a purple vat would simmer for hours, and blackberry aromas lingered around the kitchen in their aftermath. I loved the warmed, clean, glass jars, the long-handled aluminium ladle filling them with glop; the sacramental discs of waxed paper tamped on to the jam-skim; then a larger circumference of crimped-edged lid wo
uld be applied, and bound by a rubber band. I would be allowed to stick on the dated labels.

  I recognize I have just indulged in some kind of Transferred Memory Syndrome, whereby my mother’s kitchen in 3 Mooreland Drive gets blurred and shadowed, combining with the scullery of 3 O’Neill Street in the foxed mercury of a deteriorating mirror. I feel myself to be of baby-length, crawling between my granny’s slippers, sniffing their woolly bobbles and the dust-balls trembling on the cool linoleum. This had a trellis pattern, and my fingers could explore its avenues, alleyways and arbours for a small eternity of time. An enormous fractal space could be discerned within the microcosmic confines of O’Neill Street. Its ostensible plan – a ‘kitchen’ room and a meagre scullery downstairs, two box-bedrooms up – once examined, led to nook-and-cranny narrative regimes, whose focus was the hearth and its Dickensian component parts: the black, hob-accompanied cast-iron grate; the conjugated poker, tongs, brush and shovel; the dented brass fender, and its hinterland of tiles; fresh coals on the fire, beginning to pout and bubble and spit; the tiles flickering with the same effect; the miniature Grecian urns embroidered on the two plinths which support the mantelpiece; the mantelpiece agog with ornaments, of which two, at least, have survived the demolition of O’Neill Street some twenty years ago.